Free She Is Me by Cathleen Schine Page A

in bemused disappointment, the way she did when Greta turned up in her gardening clothes? Lotte was tall, particularly for a woman of her generation. She had loomed, a giantess of a mother, in Greta’s life. Greta suddenly remembered walking along the sidewalk in the St. Louis suburb she’d grown up in. She had reached up for her mother’s hand and Lotte had smiled down at her as if from a mountain. What a funny little memory. So ordinary. A girl reaching for her mother’s hand. Greta could hear the leaves swishing beneath her feet, swirling around her ankles. Autumn leaves. Her mother had towered, out of reach, as high as the trees, her beautiful blond hair so comfortable, so at home among the golden leaves. Lotte had not been a bad mother, just an eccentric one, taking Greta out of school sometimes when she wanted company at a movie matinee, refusing to allow Greta to ride a bicycle, fainting noisily whenever Greta scraped her knee or got a bee sting. Greta had learned not to tell her mother when she fell, to wash the cut or extract the stinger herself, to steal bicycles out of neighbors’ garages for an afternoon, then put them back before anyone noticed. And she had seen a lot of movies. Her father had been the tender, affectionate parent, her favorite when she was a child. But she had come to appreciate Lotte over the years. Eccentricity has its value. Lotte loved her, and she was, if nothing else, amusing. Amusement was something Greta valued more and more.
    She wondered if Elizabeth thought of her the way she thought of Lotte. With annoyance, pleasure, contempt. With awe. With good-natured condescension and longing. With such need that it frightened her. With dread. What a horrible idea. Yet wasn’t that all just another way of saying Greta loved her mother?
    Lotte was the palest person Greta had ever met. She saw, for a moment, her mother’s large, pale feet. Did they really tag toes at the morgue? Did everyone go to the morgue? She didn’t want her mother to die. She didn’t want to die. She dug her own bare toes into the dark soil. The sprinklers went on and she let the spray wash over her.
    Larry Volfmann was appalled by Elizabeth’s initial attempts at screenwriting.
    “What the fuck have I done?” he said, shaking the one measly page of dialogue at her, as he had earlier shaken the issue of
Tikkun.
“What is this? Only one page and I’m already bored? What’s with the first wife? She’s history, she’s nobody,
she’s
not the Madame Bovary we’re interested in. You’ve got one hundred pages to tell your story, you understand? One hundred fifteen tops . . .”
    “Well, but it’s not an action picture, it’s —”
    “I know what it is. And it’s not
this.
” He looked sadly at the sheet of paper. “I was sure that here was someone I could count on not to be literal minded . . .”
    “I’m not even a screenwriter . . .”
    “You wrote this. You wrote it under contract. You’re a screenwriter, all right. A
bad
screenwriter.”
    She was so angry that for a second she had nothing to say. She wondered why she didn’t just walk out. Oh, yes, she reminded herself. This is what comes of being a whore.
    “You’re scaring me,” Volfmann said. “How can you write like a hack the first page out? It’s like your screenwriting program did this.”
    Elizabeth thought of her screenwriting program, so polite, so attentive, so quiet. She wished it was sitting on the soft sofa beside her. Better yet, instead of her. It would have just the right response.
    “You don’t know anything yet—how can you have absorbed so much banality so fast?” Volfmann began pacing around on his thick carpet. “I hire a virgin, I get a . . .” He stopped himself.
    “Whore?” Elizabeth said.
    “
I
didn’t say it.”
    Elizabeth stood up, grabbed the paper from his hand, crumpled it, and threw it in the wastebasket. “I don’t know you well enough for you to be this rude,” she said. She headed for the silver