Free She Is Me by Cathleen Schine

full of flowers, which fell to the cement floor, spilling and shattering. Harry began to cry. He began to scream. Elizabeth picked him up. His face was sticky with tears and mucus. Volfmann hovered apologetically above them. Brett hovered apologetically beside them. Elizabeth, calming Harry, both mortified and defiant on his behalf, glanced up at Daisy. Daisy was still watching Elizabeth with her strange expression of contented scrutiny.
    “You can dress us up . . .” Elizabeth said.
    “Harry, want to look for whales in the telescope?” Volfmann said. Elizabeth gratefully watched him carry a happy Harry away to the telescope set up at the window. She wondered if he had children. How old would they be? How old was he? Older than Brett, younger than her father, an age that was not part of her world.
    Elizabeth cleaned up the mess with paper towels she found in the kitchen.
    “You missed a piece,” Daisy said. She pointed at a sliver. She had not moved from the big chair. For someone so jumpy, she seemed oddly lethargic.
    Brett kneeled beside Elizabeth with a wet paper towel, getting the smallest slivers. It was a routine they knew well, were good at after so much practice. He leaned across the gray, soggy paper towels in their hands and gave her a kiss. He smiled, unperturbed. She envied him. Her face was burning with embarrassment, with a sense of personal responsibility and despair for the broken vase, the spilled water, the flowers strewn across the floor.
    “I guess they should live in Milwaukee,” Daisy said.
    Elizabeth looked up from the floor. “Who?”
    “The Bovaries,” Daisy said, lighting a cigarette.
    “Os!” Harry said. He was back, staring with a fascinated admiration at Daisy’s lazy, drifting rings of smoke.

three
    I t was four A.M., earlier than even Greta liked to get up. But she sat in her garden, surrounded by roses dripping with fog. She sat on the wet ground, the damp seeping through her robe. She had woken up, stifling, sure she was choking. Quietly, careful not to wake Tony, with whom at that moment she felt she could not bear to exchange even one explanatory word, Greta crept from her warm, soft bed to the cool, sodden garden. The cold felt good: the freshness of the hour and its damp perfume.
    I have cancer, she thought.
    What she craved, what all this talk of cancer had reminded her of, was a cigarette.
    “Oh, come off it,” Elizabeth had said when Greta confided this craving to her daughter. Greta heard the fear and tension and boredom. She recognized that tone. Elizabeth sounded the way Greta sounded with her own mother. Impatient, desperate, disgusted. “You’re totally perverse. You haven’t smoked in twenty-five years.”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    “But, okay, now you’ve confessed,” Elizabeth said, her voice softening. “You can relax and put it out of your mind.”
    Greta wanted to explain that she had not confessed. She did not feel guilty, did not need to unburden herself about cigarettes. She had simply wanted Elizabeth to know what she knew, if only for a moment, for the moment that she wanted a cigarette: She wanted Elizabeth to know that she was still alive. She wanted Elizabeth to know that she still had the wherewithal, still had the power, to do as she pleased, even if she pleased to start smoking again.
    But I don’t really have power, Greta thought. I am a slave of this illness. It tells me what I can eat and when. It tells me that I can sleep, that I must sleep, or that I must not. It tells me that if I smoked even one cigarette, I would vomit.
    At least I have my hair, she thought. She tucked a strand behind her ear. Maybe the chemo would turn it from the indistinct light brown it was now back to her childhood blond. She had so many treatments to go. There was still plenty of time.
    Plenty of time. She repeated it to herself. She heard a mockingbird sing. She heard her own breath.
    What would Lotte say if Greta did lose her hair? Would her mother shake her head