She Is Me by Cathleen Schine Page A

so thick and bent these days it seemed to her to have gotten on her hand by mistake. Finally, the channel changed. Bastard of a television. News. And all of it bad. Morris, she thought, you should not have left me alone in this world. Anger rose in her breast. Morris! I can’t live without you! Look what you did!
    She pushed the remote control some more until she found a channel she liked, then dialed Greta’s number.
    “The skating!” she said to the answering machine. “Like ballerinas!”
    Sometimes Elizabeth and Harry stayed for dinner with Greta and Tony and Josh, particularly when Brett was out of town. He flew to Washington every few weeks, and Elizabeth had at first looked forward to eating with her parents. There had been a time when dinner at her mother’s had been a treat, a break from her own boring, moderately successful, low-fat, jarringly spiced cooking to her mother’s soothing, tasty stews and roasts. Now she stayed out of loyalty, for her mother insisted on cooking but had no appetite. Greta found the aroma of food offensive and nauseating. Boiled potatoes or white rice were acceptable. Sometimes a poached chicken breast. Elizabeth made milk shakes and smoothies and Greta tried to drink them, just to be agreeable. She never got very far, but Elizabeth would watch every sip with a kind of hysterical satisfaction.
    “Good!” she would say. “That’s so good! Thank you.”
    And her mother would smile weakly back at her. “Good,” she would answer, putting the glass down with obvious relief, pushing it, still almost full, away from her. “Thank you.”
    To Catch a Thief. The King and I. The Philadelphia Story. The Killers.
Whatever was on. Elizabeth knew much of the dialogue by heart. She would sit in her parents’ den after dinner and wait eagerly for certain scenes, anticipating each gesture leading up to them. But often she would be distracted by something she had never noticed. In the small-town sheriff’s office, when Edmond O’Brien, the insurance inspector, asks about Burt Lancaster’s suicide, he stands in front of a window. Outside the window, several men are washing a fire truck. Elizabeth stared at the fire truck and the men and the rags they rubbed across it. She had never seen the fire truck there before. How could that be? How could movies be infinite?
    Her father was out of the house even more than usual, using work as an excuse, but when he was home, he sat with her and watched movies. He looked grim and strained and smiled inappropriately, his hands heavy in his lap, his eyes soft-focused on some private scene. Elizabeth remembered how, when she was very small, she used to think the Sick was an exotic person of great importance and stature, like the czar. But now that Greta was the Sick, where was Tony’s hearty reverence, his loyal comrade-in-arms energy? Instead, he held his own hands, as if he were his own patient.
    He doesn’t
really
know, she told herself. Worry is not knowing.
    Lotte asked, “Where’s Greta?”
    She motioned Elizabeth to the refrigerator, in which there was a plate covered with plastic wrap that held a slice of white bread, the crusts removed, topped with a thin slice of porcelain pale turkey. Lotte had prepared it ahead of time for Elizabeth.
    “I miss my Greta,” Lotte said. Her voice became increasingly petulant, childish. “Where is my Gretala today?”
    Gretala is home puking, Elizabeth wanted to say. She’s getting chemotherapy because she, too, has cancer, but she doesn’t want to worry you because she is generous and brave, Grandma, so get off her back.
    “Mom’s got the flu,” she said, instead. “Remember? She doesn’t want you to catch it.”
    “The flu? Again? My God, my God . . .”
    “Well, really just a cold. Mom has a cold. She’s fine. She’s resting today, that’s all.
I’m
here.”
    “You, you’re a wonderful, wonderful girl. Why aren’t you home with your family?”
    “I am with my family. You.”
    “Your mother