Greta watched the clouds gather over Elizabeth’s mood.
“. . . which I suppose I have to admit I am.”
And Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. Then she sighed. Then she put her head down on the table. Then she picked her head up and looked at the ceiling.
“Elizabeth . . .”
“Oh, you don’t understand.”
Greta looked at her daughter’s neck, the curve of it as Elizabeth gazed miserably at the ceiling, her whole posture a relic, perfectly preserved, of long ago, before every spelling test, every paper or exam. Elizabeth had been an absurdly earnest and conscientious student. My poor baby, Greta thought, and, she couldn’t help it, she smiled.
Elizabeth caught the smile from the corner of her eye and her scowl focused on Greta.
“It’s not that big a deal, Mom, okay?”
“Don’t be such an ass,” Greta said.
“He said it was his pet project,” Elizabeth said. “People abandon pets. He’ll send his limo to dump me and Madame Bovary by the side of the road. Or have his assistant drown us in a burlap bag. Then he’ll buy himself some goldfish.” She stood up and opened the refrigerator.
“Just enjoy the moment, darling,” Greta said.
Elizabeth gave her a savage look. “Lots of brilliant people come to Hollywood and fail.” She took an apple from the fridge and riffled through a newspaper that lay on the counter. The phone rang beside Elizabeth’s elbow, but she seemed not to notice. “Like, say, Bertolt Brecht,” she said.
“Goldfish,” Greta said. “God, that reminds me. I have to get koi for that Ripley woman’s fish pond.” She reached past Elizabeth, picked up the phone, and heard her mother’s voice, irate, no “hello.”
“I can’t get this screwy machine to work,”
Lotte said.
“Brilliant people,” Elizabeth was saying, ducking under the curling telephone cord, throwing herself down on a kitchen chair and biting her nails. “And I’m not brilliant . . .”
“Goddamnit, everything is so complicated, they used to give you a switch. One switch. It went up, it went down . . .”
“Mama,” Greta said into the phone, “what machine?”
“It went on, it went off . . .”
“The TV? The dishwasher?”
“. . . or coming to Hollywood,” Elizabeth said.
“Fine,” Greta said, turning to Elizabeth. “Fail from New York! Who cares? . . . What machine?” she said again into the phone.
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me,”
Lotte said.
“I may be old, but I’m still your mother . . .”
“You’re so supportive,” Elizabeth said, pacing up and down the kitchen.
“Stop regressing!” Greta yelled at Elizabeth’s back. “And don’t you start with me,” she added, into the phone.
Lotte began to cry. It was a terrible sound, high and unearthly and somehow unclean and unnatural, too, the howl of the wind on a moonless night, a bird of prey plummeting to its death, a wolf caught, squeezed without mercy by its bloodthirsty throat. Greta had heard it all her life, and she had never gotten used to it. It frightened and enraged her. It turned her stomach with terror and murderous rage. She dreaded that weeping, as exaggerated as Lucy Ricardo’s, as loud as thunder, as eery as lightning.
“Mother, please, don’t . . .”
“All the machines, the buttons . . .”
Lotte was wailing.
“My own flesh and blood . . . It’s inhuman, Hitler should have had to push so many buttons . . .”
“What machine?” Greta said again, very calmly, very slowly, as she watched Elizabeth sit down again. Your mother is very old, she told herself. Very very old. Pretend she is a child. Just like your child, your highly competent, adult, big horse of a child sitting at the kitchen table biting her fingernails and spitting them on the floor. “Stop that!” she said to Elizabeth. No, no. Patient. Be patient with your child, as if she were a child. Be patient with your mother, as if she were a child. “Which machine is bothering you, Mama?”
“What?”
Lotte said, the crying over, her voice back to normal.
“For God’s sake, darling
. I’ve
got it. I’m not senile.”
Elizabeth went with her mother that afternoon to pick up Lotte for another doctor’s appointment. In the face of death, she thought as they waited with Lotte in the examining room, what difference did it make if you wrote a screenplay? If a tenure was on track or not? If your three-year-old slept in your bed and you really didn’t mind?
“Ultimately everything is meaningless,” Elizabeth said.
“Don’t be maudlin,” her mother said.
“What?” said Lotte. “What did she say?”
“Nothing,” said Elizabeth.
“Nothing,” said Greta.
Lotte sat on the examining table. Elizabeth was leaning against the door. She felt it push against her and she stood back to let the doctor in. This was the third doctor they’d tried since she’d been in L.A.
“Well! Mrs. Franke!” said the doctor, yet another broad, tanned, unsmiling specialist with his headlight strapped to his forehead and a pair of reading glasses balanced on his nose.
Her grandmother looked white and bony beneath the blue paper gown. It crinkled noisily as she held out her arms, then surrendered to the metallic burst of Lotte’s bracelets. “You’re handsome,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “for a butcher!”
The doctor smiled a thin smile. He began to examine the red spot by her left nostril.
“Does this hurt?”
“Hitler should have my pain.”
He poked some more.
“The gangster,” she said.
“Never even had a pimple,” she added.
“Who? Hitler?”
“That dirty son of a bitch,” she said.
“Me,” she said finally when the doctor made no further response. “Me. I never had a pimple in my life. Not one. Look at this skin.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Mrs. Franke.”
“Call me Lotte,” Lotte said.
“Loosen up, Doc,” Lotte said.
“Cheer up, what are you, Dr. Karoglian?” she said.
“Kevorkian,” Elizabeth said.
The doctor, who had studiously been ignoring everything but his patient’s tumor, turned to Greta and said, “Your mother is a pistol.”
“Aha!” Lotte said. She smiled triumphantly. “You, Dr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, said a mouthful.”
It was almost six by the time they got home. Elizabeth clumped up the stone steps into her parents’ house, a three-bears, wood-shingled sort of place nestled into a hill in the Rustic Canyon section of Santa Monica. Greta’s elaborately designed garden billowed around Elizabeth as she climbed the steps and navigated the mossy path that led to the front door. Her mother designed gardens for a living, and her own garden, changing styles every few years, was now a carefully planned jumble of roses and heather and lavender.
“Through the moors and highlands, fells and dales, the downs, the heaths, the copses . . .” Elizabeth said.
“
Such
a vocabulary,” said Grandma Lotte proudly.
Elizabeth left them and went out to the patio in the back. There were more steps, leading up the almost vertical hillside to the pool, and she heard Brett and Harry splashing and playing up there. Daffodils swayed in the breeze, hundreds of them. She was a little homesick for New York, there at Santa-Monica-on-Thames. The daffodils reminded her of springtime in Sands Point, Long Island, where she had grown up. But the smells were off. It still smelled so strange to her at her parents’ California house, even though they’d lived there for more than ten years. Like an exotic desert spice cabinet, in spite of every British blossom her mother planted. The smell of one particular flower—she hadn’t been able to locate the culprit yet—intruded now and then, a nauseous scent, like dog shit, wet dog shit, waiting to jump her when she least expected it.
She heard Brett coming down the stairs, singing “Yankee Doodle” to Harry.
“I’m a foreigner here,” she said. “Even though I grew up here.” She was sitting with her back to the stairs. She didn’t get up or turn around. She liked that moment of uncertainty, not knowing exactly where they were, but knowing they were there.
“You didn’t grow up here,” Brett said. He was right behind her now. “Your parents moved here when you were in college.”
Elizabeth felt his hand, cold and wet from the pool, on her neck. She reached back and held it. Something began tugging on her hair and Brett walked into view, holding Harry, whose hair was slicked to his head, his face shining, his wet eyelashes even darker and longer than usual. His fist was clamped around a lock of her hair, pulling it loose from the clip.
“Let go, Harry,” Brett said. “I feel like a foreigner, too, sometimes.”
“You are a foreigner.”
Brett had grown up in South Africa. His father was an outspoken liberal there, a cancer researcher and university professor in Cape Town, and they had been forced to leave when Brett was eight. The family moved to Rochester, a cultural and climatic change that was reflected in Brett’s accent, which shifted from the soft, sweetly off-kilter British accent of English-speaking South Africa to the flat, nasal tones of upstate New York, depending on which word he had learned in which place.
He had been Elizabeth’s student, which was how she met him. Brett stood out from the other students not only because of his height but because he was so obviously older, a couple of years older than Elizabeth. His hair flopped down from a middle part and he kept jerking his head to the side, like a teenage girl, trying to get it out of his eyes. He’d had a goatee then, too, and had looked wonderfully poetic to Elizabeth. Even so, there was no reason for him to be attending a seminar called The Poetics of Adultery. He’d already gone through law school and worked for a year at a firm in New York when he decided to go back to school to get a graduate degree in philosophy. Elizabeth met him outside her classroom, where he sat on the floor, a disturbed look on his face, listening to a squawky news broadcast on a small radio.
“My father’s uranium has been stolen!” he said, pointing at the radio.
Brett was not like anyone she’d ever met. His career was upside down. His accent was motley. His father’s uranium had been stolen. He wore a gray checked shirt and a pale-blue plaid tie. He had a long face and a narrow, prominent nose. His eyes were narrow, too, and dark. But his mouth, which was wide, and two deep dimples softened the sharpness and gave him a demeanor of distracted gentleness. Elizabeth fell instantly in love.
“Why are you taking my class, anyway?” she asked him some months into the relationship. “It’s not required. It’s not related to what you’re doing. It’s not even a graduate course.”
She realized as she asked the question that she hoped he would say he had seen her, admired her from afar, and registered for the course in order to get to know her.
“Well, it’s so early in the morning, your class. So it seemed prudent, didn’t it?”
“It did?” Elizabeth said.
“In a getting-oneself-out-of-bed sort of way.”
“But now you’ve got yourself into bed,” Elizabeth said, indicating the rumpled sheets and pillows around them.
“Yes,” Brett said. “It all came out right in the end.”
Elizabeth remembered that day so well. Brett had suggested they get married. He had often suggested it since. And just as often she had suggested they wait.
“Let go, lightey,” Brett said now to Harry. “You’ll hurt Mommy.”
Harry was shaking his head no. How did Harry know that what sounded like “lit go” when Brett said it had the same meaning as “let go” when Elizabeth said it? How the hell did he know what “lightey” meant? Children were very intelligent. He was three, skinny for a toddler, which she liked, though before he was born she admired only stocky, sturdy toddlers. She reached for him and stood him on her lap, wondering at the almost desperate surge of love, as if they had been apart for forty years rather than forty minutes.
“Brett,” she said, pronouncing it “Brit.”
Brett hated his name. “Shut up, won’t you?” he said.
Elizabeth asked Harry if he needed to pee. He glared at her.
“Should we call Daddy ‘Bob’?” she said.
Harry shook his head. He smiled from behind his pacifier. He pulled the pacifier out with a pop.
“No,” he said. He plugged himself up again.
Elizabeth put her face against his cool forehead. She rather liked “Brett.” A cowboy name. Harry’s hair stuck to her lips. She drew in the damp scent of his little body, felt his curled hand pushed against her breast. She listened to him breathe.
She closed her eyes. She heard the birds, the dogs barking next door. She felt the cool air. God, she thought. There is a God after all.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” said a small voice.
Elizabeth opened her eyes.
“Sad?” he said. He offered her his pacifier.
“No, no.” She wiped her eyes. “Mommy’s having an epiphany.”
When Greta came out and saw little Harry curled in Elizabeth’s lap sucking on his pacifier, she thought how cute he looked, his cheek creased against his mother, his wet hair stuck to his forehead. His swim diaper was swollen with pool water. She suddenly remembered the soggy weight of Elizabeth’s postnap diaper and the threatening furrow of her brow, like a dark storm cloud on the horizon.
Greta kissed Elizabeth on top of her head and pulled playfully at Harry’s pacifier, as if it were the plug in the bathtub.
“It
doesn’t
hurt their teeth,” Elizabeth said.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“Good. Don’t.”
“Look at you, Elizabeth! You’re curling your lip the way you used to when you were little,” Greta said. She smiled at the memory, which for some reason comforted her. “I think pacifiers are cute, if you really want to know,” she said. “Like Maggie Simpson.”
“That’s hardly the point,” Elizabeth said.
“No, that’s hardly the point.” Greta sat across from Elizabeth and Harry. Harry reached out for her, then crawled wordlessly across the low wooden table between them and settled in Greta’s lap. Greta held him and remembered Elizabeth as a child so clearly it was confusing. Elizabeth’s curly brown hair, her mouth round and talking at full speed or silent and extended in a determined pout, her manner ridiculously arrogant, her cheeks pink and vulnerable.