She Is Me
By Cathleen Schine
Little, Brown, 262 pages, $23.95
“Motherless children have a hard time, but what about the rest of us? . . . Motherless children have a hard time, when your mother is dead,” sings Elizabeth Bernard at the opening of Cathleen Schine’s sixth novel, “She Is Me.” At 29, Elizabeth is not motherless; on the contrary, Elizabeth believes she has always shared a symbiotic relationship with her gentle, loving, 53-year-old mother, Greta. But headstrong Elizabeth is feeling unmoored, and not because she holds an untenured position as an assistant professor of literature, or lives with Brett, a sweet man she loves but refuses to marry, even as they raise their 3-year-old son together.
Elizabeth is losing her footing because some twists of fate have demanded that she reconsider her ardent ways, and she is not confident that she can navigate through so much uncertainty. She is commissioned to write a screenplay about Emma Bovary in the modern world (reimagined by her as Barbie Bovaine) after big-time Hollywood producer Larry Volfmann reads her academic essay on Flaubert’s madame in the age of Ikea in Tikkun magazine. But the combination of Volfmann’s blind faith, the huge sum of money and her inexperience in creating ” `cutting-edge banality’ ” is enough to stifle Elizabeth’s imagination.
And that’s the least of her problems. Her feisty, widowed grandmother, Lotte Franke, a vaudeville veteran as prone to breaking into song as sputtering into a Tourette’s-like rant or coquettish flirtation, has developed a ferocious bout of skin cancer that is eating away at her once-gorgeous face. No sooner does Elizabeth relocate from New York to Los Angeles to be near her family and work on the film script than her mother is diagnosed with stage C colon cancer. Suddenly Elizabeth has to come to grips with the possibility of losing Greta and simultaneously assume her mother’s daughterly duties in caring for Lotte. Even the transition of moving to a city where “[e]veryone kept a map in the car, even people who had lived their entire lives in the place” proves uneasy. Los Angeles is, for Elizabeth, a “strange land” where “a compass was useless.”
“She Is Me” is a droll and profound meditation on the fluid relationship between motherhood and daughterhood, the bonds alternately strengthened and strained by illness and issues of trust. As ever, Schine entertains as she enlightens, demonstrating her enviable talent for balancing humor with emotional heft, as three generations of women battle death and domestic claustrophobia. The title refers to Flaubert’s proclamation, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Elizabeth, in her capacity as a panicked fledgling screenwriter, takes this to heart, convincing herself that every movie features Emma Bovary, and every bourgeois woman is capable of being the adulterous, ennui-ridden madame, herself included. But “She Is Me” also suggests the fear (and ambivalent hope) daughters have of becoming their mothers. Schine alternates perspectives between the three generations of women–Lotte Franke, Greta Bernard and Elizabeth Bernard–each one a mother needing a break from her competing responsibilities as parent and daughter.
And like Madame Bovary, all three bourgeois women also harbor adulterous fantasies to varying degrees. Lotte, who has just had a chunk of her nose surgically removed because of a malignant tumor (” `Hitler should have my pain’ ” is among her favorite refrains on the subject), desperately longs for attention–from her handsome doctor, her daughter, or anyone who can allay her fear and loneliness. Greta, a landscape designer as richly nurturing as a parent as she is a gardener, slides into the maternal role effortlessly, except during the weeks of her own chemotherapy treatments, which she keeps from Lotte so as not to worry her. Elizabeth insists on looking after Greta, but her offers to help are redirected toward Lotte, who has fired a slew of nurses until finally settling on Kougi, a Japanese man Zen enough to endure her craziness and kind enough to indulge her dreams of their running away to Japan together.
Greta yearns to be soothed, too, but she can’t bring herself to be mothered by her daughter, and doesn’t expect much from her adoring if ineffectual husband, Dr. Anthony Bernard:
“He had never been very good with sick people. Broken bones, yes. The Sick with a capital S, yes. But the terrified patient, desperate and clutching–that need had always frightened him.”
Greta is embarrassed to realize that she longs for care from the one person who can’t provide it. “I want my mother. . . . I am still my mother’s child.” She finds snippets of comfort in waiting on her spoiled son, Joshua, or waking up very early, sitting on her steps in front of the house, drinking her coffee alone. “This hour in semi-darkness was the only time . . . she liked for herself. These were surplus hours, the hours no one else wanted. She could claim them in good conscience, knowing she wasn’t depriving anyone of anything.”
Does a life-threatening diagnosis give Greta license to claim more than just unwanted crumbs in good conscience? It’s not a thought Greta even considers until she awakens from a nap one afternoon to find relief blooming at her feet in the form of Daisy Piperno, the lesbian film director working with Elizabeth. She is immediately drawn to this unflinching, intuitive woman, and if Greta can put her worries about everyone else to rest, she might be able to get something for herself from this relationship, not least of which, pleasure.
Elizabeth, too, finds herself contemplating infidelity, fantasizing about having affairs with Volfmann and her brother’s best friend, Tim. “Would adultery . . . make me feel guilty about my unfinished screenplay about adultery?” And would the fact that she’s not married to Brett make these infidelities count as adultery, she wonders? Semantics might allow her to rationalize her way into at least one horizontal situation, but her experience doesn’t sensitize her to her mother’s indiscretion.
Elizabeth would seem to be possessive of the role of Madame Bovary, dreaming of her two potential suitors, keeping her kindly spouse-equivalent at arm’s length even as she dotes on her little boy. She’s not worried about succumbing to Madame Bovary’s fate, but she is concerned about her mother’s. Greta’s extramarital relationship is, of course, a betrayal of her father, but it also disrupts their mother-daughter symbiosis:
“How could her mother be having an affair without Elizabeth knowing? With a woman no less? Her mother, with whom she had joined forces to present a united front to lie to Grandma Lotte, had lied to Elizabeth.”
The fact of her dishonesty makes Elizabeth feel as if she has lost her key ally and is left to juggle all this life and death alone. If Elizabeth can’t come to terms with Greta, she risks the unhappy discovery that motherless children have an even harder time when their mothers are alive.
