The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (14 page)

I
T HAPPENED AFTER MY
1985
APPOINTMENT WITH
D
R
. C
ERLETTI
.

“You see that there are really no effects,” he said, pleasantly, adjusting his half-rimmed glasses, “except a recharging of the spirit.”

Again the nurse smiled down at me in her blue eye shadow and permed hairdo, and again the late-century noises of New York made themselves known from outside: the honks and shouts and boom-box beats of my life. Surely some traveler from another era would come here and find it all as quaint and backward as I had found my other worlds. As strange as I now found my own.

I said no, no effects at all. In fact, I added, I might miss our little meetings. Who else got to be struck by lightning, not twice, but twenty-five times? I saw his brow crease in concern and I left quickly.

Back in my apartment, I went through my record collection looking for something to calm my mind. Dylan, and Pink Floyd, and Blondie, and Velvet Underground until at last I found it. I started the turntable, lifted the lever that picked the needle up, and placed it in the groove.

C’mon and hear! C’mon and hear! Alexander’s Ragtime Band . . .

That night, I went to sleep, as always, thinking about the life I would return to. Young Leo awaiting me in that world. Nathan in another. I smiled at the strangeness of it all. Was this the woman I dreamed of becoming?

I closed my eyes and watched as a little will-o’-the-wisp in blue ascended, winking, dividing into two and four and eight, a web began to form, a net, to haul me out of my world and back to 1918 . . .

But I did not awaken in 1918.

H
ELLO,
G
RETA.
I
T’
S
N
ATHAN.

Began the voice on the answering machine.

Three weeks had passed since my night with Leo, and I had suffered a strange glitch before finding that message in 1985. How clearly I could picture Nathan: sitting in his red armchair, in his brown sweater, smelling of pipe smoke, stroking his beard before getting up the nerve to call me.
It was nice to hear your voice the other day, I’m glad you’re doing well. I’d love to meet for lunch but I’m afraid I have to do battle with Washington. Off to war! I’ll give you a call when I get back. It’s nice to be in touch again. Bye now
.

I stood there in my hallway, staring at the device with its blinking light. Another Greta had been tampering with my life while I was away. It was no more, of course, than I had done with each of theirs. How I longed for things to be back the way they were.

Let me back up to that first morning when I realized something had gone wrong.

I
HAD AWAKENED,
three weeks before, to find something amiss. The day before had been Dr. Cerletti, peering down at me in 1985. The next: “Good morning, darling, how are you feeling?” Nathan again. Smiling, beside me again. My arm heavy in its cast, 1941 instead of 1918.

“I’m in the wrong . . . ,” I began, but of course could not say the rest.

He frowned and asked, “What’s wrong? Is it the procedure?”

Let’s go away. My father has a farm up north
. She had gone there with Leo, and Cerletti’s jar sat unused.

What would happen if one of us missed a procedure? Well, here was the answer: That door would close. Our journey was like a subway line in a circle, and if one of us missed a procedure—if one station was under repair—well, the train just zipped on by. That Greta had stepped out. And so we, the other two, could only switch places until she returned. I could not explain to Nathan that the Gretas were out of sync, out of sequence: three beads misstrung on a strand.

“Nothing, darling, I’m fine. Sounds like Fee is up.”

“S
HE SKIPPED CERLETTI,
” I told Ruth the next day, when I awakened once more in 1985. “I can only go here and to nineteen forty-one until she’s back.”

“Tell me about your son.”

My travels were an endless source of fascination to my aunt. And so I told her about Fee and how he licked his finger and would dip it in the sugar bowl when we weren’t looking, leaving little divots, the Invisibility Powder that Uncle X had given him, which he still tried to use on himself, though it was long spent. “And Nathan must look funny without his beard,” she said, laughing. But I have a sense, though she never asked, that, like any of us, she was really looking for clues about herself. I tactfully avoided the topic, and went on about Mrs. Green striding around the house like the housemaid in a gothic tale.

“It sounds,” she said, “like you miss both worlds.”

And so back and forth I went—the Wednesday procedure sending me the next morning to 1941, the Thursday procedure returning me to 1985—making a meal for my husband and son, making a path through that other lonely life, each time awakening and wondering when she would come back, when we would all return to the pattern. I did not know I would miss it so much. I did not expect I would be so envious of her life.

I
HAVE READ
the diary Greta left of that time spent apart from us. I have seen the train tickets, the baggage receipts between the pages. And this is how I picture it, that time she spent with Leo, whom she loved:

They took a train to Boston, the wartime signs advising against unnecessary travel still posted everywhere, then at Boston waited four hours for another train, during which they wandered into the snowy city and bought him a cheap gold ring at a pawnshop, to forestall questions later on. When they arrived at last at the station, they disembarked to a gravel yard and small shed that contained only a woodstove for the railroad workers, who stared at them begrudgingly. He blew on her cold hands and smiled until, at last, a sleigh came into view pulled by an old gray horse, like a vision from a Russian novel. Across the snow they went, bundled together, sipping coffee, feeling for each other’s hands hidden in the furs and coats and gloves. The sky was gray as flannel, the trees passed in an endless etching. There were no animals. There were no houses, or people.

It was a little stone house with nothing but a stove, a fireplace, and a bed piled with cushions to make it a sofa. The house merged into a long stone wall, made from rocks farmers had been cursing for centuries, and across which could be seen another little house, with a shuttered window, in which gaped the white head of a sheepdog, staring down the road away from them. “What is he looking for?” she wondered aloud, and the driver broke his silence to answer: “His master. He cares for no one else.” And then he nodded and shut them into the house. By the door was a sack of provisions he must have left earlier in the day; Leo went to it immediately and brought out a sausage he began to munch merrily. They could hear the horse stamping in the snow. She watched the quiet scene of winter. As soon as she turned around, Leo was kissing her.

She wrote in her diary that they lived, for that small period of time, in a lovers’ paradise. There was nothing to do but build a fire, and stoke the stove and cook on it, and fold the little table down from the wall, and fill the soft down bed. Above the bed, one long window let in the blue meager light of winter, and as her young man lay sleeping, Greta could prop herself on her elbow and look out at the sheepdog, itself looking down the road.

“I like your eyes,” he said once in a foolish moment. “I like the lines around them.”

She laughed. “I’m not sure that’s the best thing to say.”

“Why not? I do love them.”

“They’re just a sign of how old I am.”

“Well, what about the signs of how young I am? Don’t tell me you don’t love them,” he said, smiling mischievously and drawing her to him.

They talked nonsense, and she allowed him to speak of impossible things, because something about their isolation, and the snow, and the fire meant even impossible things could be mentioned. For instance, moving to Brooklyn together, to a house, with the kind of dog he liked. He said this lying on the floor before the fire, staring at the beams of the ceiling. “And a garden for you, with a path through it, and a little stage at the end for our friends to sing when they’re drunk.” There was no wine, but there was clear moonshine, and he was sipping it; she could not, because it gave her a headache. “We’ll have an Italian charwoman and she’ll steal from us! But we’ll love her,” he said, still staring up. She looked at his smooth face, his small lean body wrapped in a blanket, tipped in two worn black socks. “Electric light, an electric stove, and a nanny for . . . well, a charwoman at first.” She looked out the window at the dog, and she could feel his glance on her naked back. Perhaps he had said a word too many.

T
HOUGH I VISITED
two worlds in those weeks, I saw only one version of the people I knew. One Nathan, tying his tie before the mirror. One Ruth, chasing the canary around the apartment. One Felix, leaving me in a taxi for a dinner with Alan. How strange—how ordinary—to flatten my worlds this way. A lunch with Felix stands out: at a German restaurant, and I was late. Felix was already seated at a stained tablecloth, chatting up the fat, happy waitress, hair braided like a glossy strudel. At other tables, men were hunkered down over their steins protectively, as if they knew that Pearl Harbor was only two weeks away, and some would be taken away for questioning. Just for being born on the wrong side. But of course they did not know. Only I knew.

Felix complained he never saw me, so busy with Fee and with Nathan. “Felix,” I said, startling him. “Felix, I need you to tell me something right now, before we say anything else.”

He leaned against his hand.

“I’m not here to talk about me. It’s you I’m worried about. Do you love him?” I asked.

“Greta!” he said, then looked at his plate. I told him I had always known about him, and that I didn’t care. It made no difference to me.

He looked up at me. “Greta, stop it,” he whispered harshly. “I didn’t come to hear this. I came—”

“Don’t be afraid with me. Be yourself. Please, Felix. I’ve been through too much to lose you.”