She Is Me (4 page)

“What are we going to do?” Elizabeth said, tears coming to her eyes. “I feel so helpless.” She reached across the table and took her mother’s hand.

Such an unlikely combination, Greta thought. The misanthropic sentimentalist. Skeptical of the world at large, Elizabeth could nevertheless be foolishly, innocently, and thoroughly zealous toward the world up close. It struck Greta, not for the first time, that Elizabeth was a sort of inside-out version of her father. Tony was an exceptionally kind person, though it was necessary that the objects of his kindness be generalized, categorized, and named as part of some group, like “the Elderly” rather than his parents, or “Empty Nester” instead of his wife, or even “Awkward Adolescent” when that term fit Elizabeth and Josh. Groups of complete strangers were, of course, ideal. Tony had briefly succumbed to the lure of Mao in college, and he still retained a great compassion for and interest in the needs of the People. It was a shame, Greta thought, that he was so vague about any person in particular. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was as loyal as a dog to her friends and family, as wary as a dog toward the rest of the world.

“You’re just like Daddy,” Greta said, and Elizabeth looked so pleased that she did not have the heart to add, “in reverse.”

For the next six months, Elizabeth flew back and forth to Los Angeles in a frantic shuttle that accomplished nothing, never did anyone any good, and still seemed vital. She met once with a young agent who was the nephew of one of her mother’s clients and willing to sign up just about anybody, but most of the monthly visits were a simple attempt to help her mother out.

Now, sitting in her own living room, a long, dark rectangle with windows facing an air shaft, she dialed her grandmother’s number, sure that Greta would be there as well. She always was. It was a bright, sunny day outside, but the room was so dark that Elizabeth could barely see the toys mounded like the banks of a river along the walls. Her mother answered Grandma Lotte’s phone.

“Grandma’s pretty good today,” Greta said. “I just gave her a shower.”

“A blessing,”
Elizabeth heard Lotte say in the background.

“What about you, Mom?” Elizabeth said. “You’re exhausted.”

“How’s Harry?”

“You can’t keep running over there every five minutes, sleeping on Grandma’s couch, cooking for her and for Dad . . . And you’re working, too . . .”

“What am I supposed to do?” Greta said. “Grandma has to eat, she needs to shower . . .” Then her tone changed abruptly from a tense and defensive rumble to a tight, higher-pitched sound of controlled, straining rage. “Mother, I told you before,” she was saying to Lotte, “the pills are lined up on the dining-room table. In order. Look. See? You check off the box on the pad when you’ve taken it. . . . No, you will not die of liver disease because you took your Tylenol twenty minutes early . . . Yes, I will fix your lunch as soon as I’m off the phone with Elizabeth . . .”

“Mom? Hire someone?” Elizabeth said, as she always did.

“Easier said than done,” Greta said, as she always did.

“I want Jell-O,”
Grandma said.

“It’s like having a two-year-old,” Greta said into the phone to Elizabeth.

“I’m three,” Harry said. He had picked up the extension in the bedroom.

“Yes. You’re Grandma’s big, good boy.”

Elizabeth was glad she could bestow solace in the form of Harry, because her mother would accept little else. Whenever Elizabeth went out there, she of course took Harry with her. Greta was so happy to see him that she seemed to cling to him, pressing her cheek against his head the way she still did with Elizabeth sometimes, so perhaps the trips really were restorative in some way. Her mother was not feeling well, rushing to the bathroom every minute with nervous diarrhea, but when Elizabeth offered to take Grandma to the doctor or to spend a night with her or to cook her a special dinner, or even to heat up a can of soup for her, Greta would agree gratefully, then insist on coming along and doing it all herself.

“Poor Elizabeth,” she would say, doing all the work Elizabeth was supposed to take off her shoulders. “You’ve got Harry to look after.”

“What about Brett?” Elizabeth said on one occasion when Brett had come with them.

“Yes, you’ve got him to look after, too.”

“Mom, that’s not what I meant.”

two

I
t was late February, and Elizabeth stared at the Christmas tree in the living room, which was somehow still standing in the corner, a sad, desiccated betrayal of her ancestors as well as a fire hazard. The phone startled her.

“Mommy has to go in for a test,” her father said. He rarely called Greta “Mommy” to the children anymore, though Elizabeth and Josh called their mother “Mommy” far more often than one might have expected from two adults.

“You do?” Elizabeth said. She assumed her mother was on another extension. Elizabeth tried to call them only when she thought one or the other might be out, though there was nothing she could do when they were the callers. She hated it when both of them were on the phone. It was like talking to neither one. Her words were projected into uncertainty, into thin air.

“I do,” Greta replied from the ether.

Elizabeth had no idea what they were talking about. Was her mother becoming a real-estate agent or something? Did she need to renew her driver’s license?

“Don’t worry,” Tony said.

“It’s nothing,” Greta said. “I told him we didn’t have to call you. I told you not to call, Tony.”

“She has a right to know.”

“There’s nothing to know,” Greta said in a sharp voice. “That’s why they do a test. If we knew, we wouldn’t have to do a test, would we?” Then she began to cry.

“Right, yes, that’s right,” Tony said. His voice was soft, soothing. “To rule it out,” he said. “Just to rule it out.”

Gradually, Elizabeth was able to ascertain that her mother had a lump. Elizabeth listened to them discuss the lump (in her colon), the test (to rule things out), and the timing (as soon as possible). Their voices, joined together in their customary telephone duet, seemed even farther away than usual—one strange, garbled, disconsolate articulation.

The night before she was to fly out to be there for the biopsy, Brett held Elizabeth as she fell asleep, her cheek sweaty and crumpled against his chest.

“Imagine hearing that your mother might have cancer and responding with an overwhelming sense of crankiness,” she said. She was ashamed.

He kissed her forehead. “You’re not cranky,” he murmured. “You’re angry. And why not?”

She felt his lips, still pressed lightly against her skin, shift into the faintest of smiles, a smile she knew well—his modest (for he was modest) but honest (for he was that, too) appreciation of his own easy temperament, his good humor. Elizabeth knew she gave him too many opportunities to display his patience. Perhaps it was one of the things he liked about her. She hoped so, hoped his amused forbearance would not wear out before she could morph into a more balanced, even-tempered sort of person, something she was always aspiring and planning and attempting to do.

“Thank you,” she said. She held on to him. He was wearing pajamas, one of his quaint customs. She had never known a man who wore pajamas, not even her father, who wore boxer shorts to bed. She buried her face in the clean, starchy smell of the pajamas.

“I love you and your pajamas,” she said.

“I love you and yours,” he said, stroking her naked body beneath the sheet.

Elizabeth welcomed the surge of desire, an enormous wave of physical emotion. She smiled at the image of a wave, imagining a tidal wave with pickup trucks and mobile homes and shacks on its foaming crest.

“Thank you,” she said again, pulling him against her.

He kissed her throat. “You’re very, very welcome,” he said, his voice soft and husky and muffled.

Later, rolling away from him, she said, “You’re making me sweat,” though he was already asleep. She listened to his breathing. She heard the familiar gurgling with each exhale. It sounded almost like speech. She tried to synchronize her own shallow, rabbity breaths to his.

She flew out to L.A. the next morning and took a taxi to the hospital. She sat for hours with her father waiting for the verdict, sure that the tumor would be benign and certain that it would not. Her father was wearing his white lab coat with his name stitched across the left breast pocket, like a bowler or a gas-station attendant or a security guard. Or a doctor. His ID was clipped to his lapel.
DR. ANTHONY BERNARD.

Elizabeth wondered disloyally why Dr. Anthony Bernard had not noticed the lump on Mrs. Dr. Anthony Bernard, had not wondered about the stomach cramps and the diarrhea. Of course, he rarely saw patients anymore. He had left the bedside to become an impassioned and brilliant fund-raiser for his hospital. Admirable, Elizabeth thought. But a lump is a lump.

“She’ll be all right,” she said, as if that would relieve him of the guilt she had just assigned him, or relieve her of the guilt of assigning it. “Don’t worry, Daddy.”

He took her hand and kissed it. His lips were chapped. She dug in her bag for lip balm and handed it to him. In his white coat, he looked particularly helpless to her, as if the coat, labeled in black stitched script, were the real Dr. Anthony Bernard.

They called Josh in Alaska when they got back to the house, and surprisingly he was at the base camp. He was four years younger than Elizabeth. He loved rocks and was so happy among them that Elizabeth suspected they loved him back.

“It’s malignant,” she said. “It’s stage C.”

There was silence on the other end.

“It’s encapsulated, though,” she said. She repeated it. “Encapsulated.” Encapsulated was good.

Her father was pacing up and down the house. He kept bumping his shin on the same sharp point of the coffee table. “Shit,” he said, each time, back and forth. “Shit.”

Elizabeth couldn’t breathe. Her father had said “shit.” Her throat had grown smaller and smaller. Her father never said words like “shit.” Funny. How could a throat shrink? How could her father say “shit”? She realized that now that her throat was shrinking, she could not swallow through such a narrow passageway. And how was the air to get from her nose to her lungs, her lungs to her mouth?

“I’ll be down tomorrow,” Josh was saying. “Tomorrow morning. As soon as I can get there.” Elizabeth had forgotten she was on the phone. She handed it to her father.

“Z-z-z . . .” she said.

“What?” her father said. “Jesus, you’re white.”

“Z-z-a-a . . .” she tried again. She pointed to her throat. She felt her eyes widening until they hurt. “Z-z! Z-z!”

“Josh? Call you back. I think Elizabeth wants a Xanax.”

It was afternoon by the time Josh arrived at the house the next day. Elizabeth sat at the top of the steps waiting for him. Harry had fallen asleep under the coffee table in the living room and she just left him there. She kept the front door open and sat on the top step and crushed lavender between her fingers and breathed in the sickeningly powerful perfume and waited for Josh. Then, there he was, getting out of a cab, and she wondered why she hadn’t gone to the airport to get him. She waved and stood up and watched him make his way up the stone garden path past the fat, blowsy roses. His skin was dark with sun and wind and, for all she knew, dirt. He had shaved his head before heading out into the field, and now, three months’ grown out, his hair stuck up in shaggy tufts. He caught sight of her and ran easily up the steps, grabbed her around the waist, put his face against hers, and burst into tears.

They wept, holding each other, for so long . . . or was it? How long? Half an hour? Three minutes? Elizabeth had no idea. She held on to Josh. He was sturdy and had the big, comfortable hands and feet of a puppy. He was the only one who could understand. The only other one. Greta was their mother. No one else’s. Josh called Elizabeth by her childhood nickname, Tizzie, and he patted her back as she patted his.

“Poor Mommy,” Josh said. “Poor Mom.”

“Poor Mommy,” Elizabeth repeated. They meant it. But what they both also meant, and knew they meant, was: Poor us. Poor Josh, poor Elizabeth.

“She’ll be okay,” Elizabeth said.

“I know,” Josh said. “Of course she will.”

And they believed this, too. Because, Elizabeth realized, it was inconceivable that she would not.

In the early morning, the fog hovered as low as the rosebushes. It was Greta’s happiest time. The raggedy city had disappeared into a softened, silver light. She could sit on her steps in front of the door and drink her coffee in peace. Greta liked to be alone. It was only when she was alone that she forgot to be lonely. Everything around her, the dewy flowers, the grit beneath her feet, seemed perfectly articulated and beautifully balanced, with her own body as one more balanced, articulated part of the morning. This hour in semidarkness was the only time she had for herself. Or maybe it was the only time she liked for herself. These were surplus hours, the hours no one else wanted. She could claim them in good conscience, knowing she wasn’t depriving anyone of anything.

Tony was still asleep. Josh had moved back into his old room, and he was sleeping, too. Elizabeth had gone back to New York with little Harry, and even they, in a time zone that put them three hours later, might still be in bed. Lotte certainly would be asleep now. She had always been a late sleeper, claiming the habit as a casualty of her days in the theater. Greta remembered sitting on the threshold of her parents’ room watching her mother sleep, her face distorted, smashed into the mattress, her arm hanging off the bed like the arm of a dead person. Greta would stare and stare at the motionless body until she had convinced herself that her mother was dead. Then she would start to cry, to wail, and Lotte would awaken from death with a start and comfort her hysterical daughter.

But that probably won’t work this time, Greta thought. For either of us.

Back in New York, Elizabeth taught her classes and worried. She put Larry Volfmann and the movie version of
Madame Bovary
out of her head, partly because the distant drama of her mother’s and grandmother’s struggles, the day-to-day pleasures of Harry and Brett, and even the demands, delights, and frustrations of her students took up whatever room there was. But also because, after her visit with Volfmann and Elliot King, after finding the young agent who was the nephew of one of her mother’s clients and willing to sign up just about anybody, she’d heard nothing more about it for months.

Then one day in April, as the daffodils were blooming in the park, Elizabeth got a call from her new, young, undiscriminating agent saying, with unconcealed surprise, that Larry Volfmann really did want to sign her up to write a screenplay and had offered a reasonable amount of money, which to Elizabeth sounded like a completely unreasonable amount of money, coming to three times her salary as an assistant professor.

“What should we do?” she asked Brett.

“I think we should celebrate with a bottle of champagne,” Brett said.

They put Harry to bed and ordered in sushi and broke out a bottle of Veuve Clicquot ’95 that Brett had been given as a thirtieth birthday present. It had been in the refrigerator for three years. They sat on the couch and ate off of trays, as if they were watching television, but they didn’t put the television on. Elizabeth was glad to be next to Brett, to feel his thigh against hers.

“Does champagne really go with sushi?” she said.

“I think we should talk about moving out there, Elizabeth,” Brett said. “At least temporarily.”

“I guess champagne goes with everything.”

“You love movies and you hate teaching,” he said. “What does this suggest to you? And it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Everyone loves movies.”

“Then perhaps everyone should shake the chalk dust from their shoes and head west.” Brett kissed her cheek. “And I can work from home there as easily as I can work from home here. At least you won’t be flying back and forth every minute.”

How could he suggest such a thing? Just pack up and leave their home? Their overcrowded, overheated, overpriced apartment? Their friends? The ones she neglected now that Harry was around, those friends?

“You know I’m right about this,” he said.

“Just tie the mattress to the roof and drive west?” She wondered what it was like to be so calm and so generous. Was it glorious? Or was it a monstrous burden?

“And we can get married,” Brett said.

Elizabeth did not comment. They had had this conversation before. She supposed they would have it again. Her friends, who always said they wanted to get married and yet never did, could not understand her reticence. Neither could she.

“You don’t have a child yet,” she would say to them, as if that explained it.

“To you,” Brett said, raising his glass. “To Elizabeth in Hollywood, long may she reign.”

They polished off the bottle quickly. But Elizabeth found it difficult to eat anything at all.

“Can I have your salmon?” Brett said. His chopsticks were poised over her plate.

“I would be close to my family,” she said. “They need me.”

But the idea, at that moment, sickened her. She could almost smell her grandmother’s cold cream, taste the lipstick her mother left behind on the rim of a glass of ice tea. Her father’s feet, one toenail longer than the others, rose, enormous, in her imagination. To all this would be added bedpans, phlegm, sweat-soaked sheets, stiff limbs from which pale, wrinkled, dry flesh hung uncertainly. One oughtn’t be one’s brother’s keeper. Or one’s mother’s. Certainly not one’s grandmother’s. Surely that was what the Bible meant.

“My mother,” she said. My mother might die. What would Elizabeth do without her mother? What does anyone do? It was unimaginable. She felt suddenly greedy for her mother, a desperate acquisitive need for Greta. She could hear Greta’s laugh, a loud caw, and she could see her gold inlays sparkling in the California sun as Greta tilted her head back, her mouth open, and laughed and laughed.

They moved to Los Angeles as soon as the term ended in May.

“I hope you’re not doing this for me,” Greta said when Elizabeth called to tell them. “I don’t want you to make that sacrifice.”

“God forbid anyone should make a sacrifice for you, Mom. No, I’m not doing this for you. Relax. This is for work.”

Of course I’m doing it for you, you idiot.

“It’s for her work,” said Elizabeth’s father, on another extension as usual. He was emphatic.