She Is Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “What are we going to do?” Elizabeth said, tears coming to her eyes. “I feel so helpless.” She reached across the table and took her mother’s hand.
    Such an unlikely combination, Greta thought. The misanthropic sentimentalist. Skeptical of the world at large, Elizabeth could nevertheless be foolishly, innocently, and thoroughly zealous toward the world up close. It struck Greta, not for the first time, that Elizabeth was a sort of inside-out version of her father. Tony was an exceptionally kind person, though it was necessary that the objects of his kindness be generalized, categorized, and named as part of some group, like “the Elderly” rather than his parents, or “Empty Nester” instead of his wife, or even “Awkward Adolescent” when