She Is Me by Cathleen Schine

would hope.
    “You won’t be able to keep this from your mother forever,” Tony said.
    “Watch me.” Why should her mother spend her last months worrying about Greta’s last months?
    He made a sound that fell somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
    “I have to interview the new companion,” she said. “Then I’ll come right home.” She had noticed that she was required to justify her behavior these days; every outing, every move. As if she were a child. People tried to make things easier, she knew. But they were not very good at it. Yet. Perhaps they would improve with practice.
    Her mother was probably thinking exactly the same thing.
    “I hope to God this one works out,” she said. “She’s a little older, anyway. Someone Mother can talk to. In English.”
    Tony folded the paper, took a breath. She waited for the lecture: take it easy; don’t be so hard on yourself; it’s okay to be scared. “Just don’t . . .”
    “Overdo it?”
    “Sorry again.” Tony took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked annoyed.
    “I won’t,” Greta said, to comfort him.
    Dr. Charles Bovary . . . Dr. Charles Bovaine . . . Dr. Chuck Bovaine . . .
    Chuck? Good God. She might as well call Charles Bovary “Brett.”
    Poor Chuck. Fasten your seat belt, Chuck. Emma’s comin’ round the mountain, Chuck. She’s comin’ to git you. She’s comin’ to marry you, Chuck, she’s comin’ to destroy you. You best be gettin’ outta town, I’m thinkin’, Chuck.
    Poor stupid, clumsy Chuck doesn’t see what’s coming, doesn’t see what’s in front of his nose. Chuck has no imagination. Emma has only imagination. Emma doesn’t see what’s in front of her either.
    If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don’t have—imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness—is an imagination a good thing? Emma Bovary imagined herself into two affairs, ruinous debt, and an appalling, agonizing, bile-soaked suicide. Elizabeth thought with longing of that other Emma, bossy but decent, self-deluded but not self-involved. Jane Austen’s Emma, clean and witty and dry. But Emma Bovary? Extravagant, desperate, humid Emma Bovary?
    See them clouds, Chuck? Storm’s a brewin’.
    Elizabeth played around with the screenwriting program. It had so many features. It was the program that had suggested the name Chuck. All you had to do was type in a few letters and it offered alternatives. Chip. Chester. Charlemagne.
    She left the attic office and passed a tranquil, napping Harry in his bed. Brett was glued to his computer in their bedroom. He had worked at home for the last two years. After graduate school, he taught for a year, hated it, and started a consulting firm that followed and evaluated the impact of every law passed in every state, every regulation in every agency, that might affect the various nonprofit organizations who became his clients. Brett was the whole firm. He had an impressive business address at Rockefeller Center, though anyone arriving there would find only a mailbox.
    “Piecework,” Lotte said once, when Brett’s business was explained to her. “My Morris’s mother took in piecework.”
    Elizabeth liked having him around all the time, especially now. They had more room than they’d had in New York, and she could leave Harry at a moment’s notice if she had to. But mostly she just liked knowing he was there. They had lunch together, they brought each other cups of coffee.
    “Coffee?” Elizabeth asked him.
    He shook his head no and waved, a combination “hello, thank-you, stop-talking-to-me-I’m-thinking, go-away” wave, without turning from the screen.
    In the kitchen, Elizabeth spooned out coffee for herself, lost for a moment in its scent. Coffee and ginger ale were all Greta could drink now. Elizabeth went with her to the chemotherapy sessions. They were less frightening than either of them had imagined. For one thing, they took place in the doctor’s office, not