Free She Is Me by Cathleen Schine Page B

doors.
    “Oh, calm down.” Volfmann sat, leaned back in his chair. “Don’t go delicate on me, for God’s sake. You think screenwriting is beneath you so you write beneath you. You think it’s formulaic hackwork so you write formulaic hackwork. You think it’s easy, so you write shit. Big fucking deal. It happens.”
    Suddenly, he leaped to his feet, his face dark red.
    “But I don’t want shit!” he screamed.
    Elizabeth stared at Larry Volfmann, who was right about her, but had also pounded his desk and stamped both his feet.
    “I see you are very upset,” Elizabeth said, softly but firmly, using the method she’d learned in a women’s magazine for dealing with three-year-old temper tantrums. What an asshole, she thought, meaning Volfmann and then, on second thought, herself. “You are very angry at me. You feel I have let you down.” Acknowledge the child’s feelings. Okay. Done. Now, she was supposed to suggest they have a snack. “Would you like a bottle of water, Larry? I think I would.”
    Volfmann nodded his head without looking at her, just as Harry would have, although there was no visible pouting and no sniffled up tears. He pulled two bottles of water from a small hidden refrigerator.
    “You know, some writers have a gift,” he said.
    Elizabeth smiled, waiting for the healing compliment. “A gift,” Volfmann continued, “for putting in every scene that shouldn’t be there, and leaving out every scene that should. Don’t do that to me, Elizabeth. Don’t make a fucking fool of me. Okay?”
    Elizabeth drank from her bottle of water and thought this over. She noticed a loose thread on his expensive jacket.
    “Yeah,” she said finally. “Okay.”

INT. SUBURBAN BEDROOM—NIGHT
    CHUCK BOVAINE, a mild-looking young guy, sits on the edge of his wife, GAIL’s, bed. She is a little older, vegetarian gaunt, her face marked by perpetual anger. Her arms are entwined around his neck, but less lovingly than like a poisonous vine.
    GAIL
    Z-z-z . . .
    CHUCK
    Xanax?
    Elizabeth had been working at her parents’ all morning. She had listened with envy to the sound of Harry and Josh splashing in the pool. At lunchtime, Harry had been so tired he fell asleep beneath the kitchen table beside the cat. Harry usually preferred the coffee table in the living room, but Elizabeth left him where he was. She went into the living room and sat down next to Josh on the couch. Josh had a finger hooked in a tear in his T-shirt. His hairy legs and big feet were stretched on the coffee table. He was staring into space.
    “You okay?” she said.
    “It’s ridiculous,” he said.
    He sounded sad in the same way he had sounded sad when he was a child. That Josh was a man with hairy legs still surprised Elizabeth. She tried to imagine how her mother felt looking at Josh, how Elizabeth would feel when Harry was a man.
    “Who wants an orange?” Greta said, appearing from the kitchen.
    “Don’t wait on us,” Elizabeth said.
    “Me,” Josh said at the same moment.
    Greta handed him a plate of oranges cut in quarters.
    “The smell seems to soothe my stomach,” she said. “This week, anyway.”
    “
I
am generous enough to give you the pleasure of waiting on me, your only son,” Josh said.
    They sat on the couch for a while, the three of them in a row. No one spoke. Elizabeth listened to the sound of her brother eating. The orange scent was fresh and energetic. She closed her eyes. She was angry at her mother. She was angry at her brother. Didn’t they get what was going on? Elizabeth was conscious of a tangled sense of superiority and exclusion. She felt a hand on hers and opened her eyes. Josh clutched her hand. Her mother’s eyes were closed and she seemed to be sleeping. Josh’s face was contorted and red. He was crying, without making a sound.
    When the doorbell rang, Greta opened her eyes but did not even attempt to get up. Josh, the plate of orange peels balanced on his stomach, wiped his eyes with his fists