She Is Me by Cathleen Schine Page B

should take better care of herself.”
    Elizabeth nodded. She tried to eat the turkey sandwich. Her grandmother was very proud of her turkey sandwiches.
    “No crusts,” Lotte said. “Pretty snazzy.” She motioned for Elizabeth to drink her tea. “The flu . . .” She shook her head, her forehead wrinkled with concern. “It’s a sad thing,” she said. “Frightening . . .”
    “She’s okay, Grandma. Really.”
    “. . . a sad thing, Elizabeth, to be so dependent,” Grandma Lotte continued. Her voice slid into a wail. “To
count
on your daughter the way I do . . .”
    Elizabeth stared at Lotte, speechless.
    “You cannot rely on anyone,” Lotte said, shaking her head sadly.
    As Lotte muttered and clucked her tongue and ran through the errands she could entrust only to Greta, Elizabeth pulled herself together, nodded occasionally, and stopped listening. She wondered if the Flu was a lie or a white lie. It was Lotte who had originally introduced her to the concept of a white lie. One afternoon when Elizabeth was a little girl, she had been home with Lotte at her grandparents’ house in St. Louis. The phone rang.
    “You get that for Grandma,” Lotte said. “Good Tizzie. If it’s Renie Blum, tell her Grandma’s in bed with a migraine headache . . .”
    “But —”
    “. . . and she can’t play cards tonight.”
    “But you’re not,” Elizabeth said, as the phone rang, jangling, louder and louder, it seemed, threatening her moral standing with each new peal.
    “I
could
be,” Lotte said. She pushed Elizabeth to the kitchen wall where the phone was mounted.
    It
was
Renie Blum. Elizabeth held the receiver, hesitated, watched her grandmother gesturing for her to get on with it.
    “She’s lying down. In bed,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t particularly like Renie Blum, who smelled of cigarette smoke. “Grandma has a headache.” And Elizabeth thought playing cards was a waste of time, having heard as much from her mother many times over the years.
    “Oy! A migraine?”
    “Yeah. Grandma has a migraine headache and she’s lying down in bed and she can’t go out tonight.”
    Renie made worried sounds.
    “She said to say she’s very sorry,” Elizabeth added.
    Grandma Lotte sighed with relief as she hung the phone up for Elizabeth, who could not reach the cradle.
    “But it was a
lie,
” Elizabeth said. “You made me tell a lie.” And she began to cry. She had lied before. What child hasn’t? But since this was not her idea and did her no good, it seemed a wasted lie, a sin squandered, throwing good money, or in this case bad money, after bad.
    “I lied!” She wailed and sobbed, and Grandma Lotte, looking confused and rather annoyed, held her in her arms and explained that it was a white lie.
    “Grandpa and I were invited to the club. So I can’t see Renie tonight, can I? Should I hurt her feelings and explain that to her? Renie might think I was insulting her, you see? You don’t want me to hurt her feelings, do you?”
    Elizabeth sat on Lotte’s lap, her eyes swollen, her nose stuffed. “I lied,” she said. But she was tired of crying, tired of Lotte’s powdery scent, her iron-strong arms with their soft, paper-white skin.
    “You told a
white
lie,” Lotte said. “A white lie is a lie you tell to protect someone else’s feelings.”
    Lotte offered Elizabeth the coveted red Life Saver. “It’s a
nice
lie,” she said, patting her granddaughter.
    “The dirty goddamned bitch of a flu,” Lotte said now. “
Your mother
should know better.”
    She crossed her arms.
    “Hitler should feel the way I feel . . .
with
a daughter with the flu, that gangster.”
    She glared at Elizabeth.
    “
Adolf
Hitler,” she said.
    Elizabeth was now the one who usually took her grandmother for radiation treatments. The first time that Greta called and said she didn’t think she could manage to do it, Elizabeth told herself how pleased she was that Greta was able to ask for a little help. But she was also