Read Online She Is Me by Cathleen Schine - Free Book Online Page A

His hands moved up inside her T-shirt. She felt them on her breasts, then pulling the shirt up over her head. She stiffened for a minute. What if Harry . . .
    “He’s with your father, remember?” Brett said, not even bothering to ask what was the matter, and pushed her down on the couch.
    “Baby, I love you,” she whispered afterward. “How could I forget you?”
    “Even before I was on the circuit,
with
my mother as chaperone,” Lotte said, “there was Talented Children of America . . .”
    Greta sat across from her mother at Lotte’s little dining-room table. Josh sat beside her, anxiously touching Greta’s arm now and then, as if to make sure there was still flesh and bone beneath the sleeve of her sweater. He had urged her to stay home, to rest or retch or whatever the chemo dictated. But she had washed her face with icy water, dressed as nicely as she could manage, and he had driven her over to visit Lotte, who was, as usual, without help. Lotte fired anyone they hired to help take care of her. Her reasons shimmered with the extravagant implausibility and inevitability of Greek myth. “She watches me, day and night, watching, watching . . . how can I trust a woman who watches?”; “She sleeps, like a lump. For this I’m paying?”; “She prays. It frightens me, a religious fanatic in my living room.”
    On a plate in front of her, little sandwiches were neatly stacked, Lotte’s specialty, each with a single slice of slimy turkey breast. Greta felt ill. She prayed that Lotte would not now describe how she had become a Talented Child of America.
    “You know how they were in those days?” Lotte said. “Don’t ask. Off to the doctor! Four years old! The doctor with his red face. And that nose of his . . .” She paused. “Bulbous.” Then, leaning toward them, confidentially, she whispered, “He drank.” Then she resumed. “The doctor says, ‘Constipation?’” She paused, again. “Dancing lessons! The doctor prescribed dancing lessons.”
    “A star was born,” Greta said. She tried to smile.
    Lotte was no longer clear, if she ever had been, what sort of an organization Talented Children of America was. What she remembered were thirty or forty children, every Sunday, dressed in their Sunday best, exhibiting their talents.
    “Anyway, who cares?” she said, slumping, suddenly tired.
    Greta forced herself to get up. She got a glass of water for her mother.
    “I care,” she heard Josh say.
    I don’t, Greta thought, surprised at the thought and the bitterness behind it. But her mother’s stories had become too familiar to hold any mystery, any promise. And Lotte’s theatrical pretensions were still, even now that Greta was a grown woman who was the mother herself of a grown woman, a source of embarrassment to her.
    She brought the water back to the table and absentmindedly took a sip of it herself, then gagged until her eyes watered.
    “That drunk,” Lotte was saying, handing Greta a tissue, “with his dirty rotten red nose . . .”
    Los Angeles had no center, as Larry Volfmann had said. But what did? Not life, that was for sure. Life was a queasy twisting path, circling back on itself, but circles did not mean centers. To Elizabeth, a circle usually meant she was lost, and she was frequently lost in L.A. But today Brett was driving. She could daydream and squint at the bright sun without worrying about missing a turn. Being in a car was so relaxing, so private. When she did drive, she particularly liked to be caught in traffic. In traffic, there was plenty of time to consult the map and the compass. You listened to the radio. To CDs. The sky was blue. The air conditioner was on. The cars moved at a gentle pace. No honking.
    “Just shooting,” Brett responded when she tried out this theory on him. “Maybe we should get married in the fall,” he added.
    “Shh,” Elizabeth said. She pointed at Harry, asleep in his car seat behind them. “And then when you’re late,” she continued,