The Girls (10 page)

“Oh,” Jenny said, at a loss. And went back to the beginning. “Putting your name on her accounts doesn’t make them yours, Flora. You understand? They’ll still come after Naomi to pay her bills, or they’ll come after you if your name is on the accounts. If the money’s there, you have to pay.”

“They can’t make a sister responsible.” Flora, triumphant. “I checked that. It’s the law.”

“But it’s
her
money. They’re
her
accounts, Naomi’s accounts. They can’t make you use your money, but they can make us use hers.”

“You don’t know a thing about money, Jenny. You never did and you never will. All I was trying to do was save Naomi some money, which God knows is hard enough. You know what she did last week? Ordered an eighty-dollar nightgown from Lord and Taylor. Ever hear of such a thing? And promptly had a hemorrhage from that wound on her leg from the last operation that never healed. That nightgown’s ruined. Eighty-five dollars thrown in the garbage.”

“You said eighty,” Jenny interrupted before she could stop herself.

“Eighty, eighty-five. I’m just trying to save that foolish woman some money.”

“What for, if she’s dying?”

“Are you crazy? Why should her money go down the drain? Why should it go to the nursing home if she could stay there free? Everybody else does it that way. Give away the money to children, sisters, whatever, and go in for free.”

“But it’s too late. It would be a hassle now. They’d search her accounts. They’d go after the money she has.”

“You don’t know a thing about money, Jenny, but if you don’t want to listen to someone who does, that’s fine. I don’t care. I don’t care what you do. You and Naomi between you do whatever you like. You want to do everything wrong, go ahead, you don’t have to listen to me. Make all the mistakes you want to, throw her money in the garbage if that’s what you want.”

“All I want is to do things the way Naomi wants them done. And to have the money to do them with. Which Naomi has if we just leave her money alone.”

“Whatever, whatever, whatever,” Flora said. “You want to throw good money after bad, go right ahead, be my guest. Now do you mind, I’m exhausted, I have to take a nap.”

It was two in the afternoon. Flora had been undressing during the sisters’ conversation. She had always slept naked, Jenny remembered. Flesh-pink naked now, she walked from bureau to closet, dressing again, in a long nightshirt, socks, a scarf at her throat, and a little crocheted hat for her head. “I get very cold sleeping lately.” She pulled down the dark purple blinds against the sun blazing off the sea and opened one of the windows slightly, letting in a warm whistling wind.

“Isn’t that breeze delicious?” she said.

Actually, it was smelly, but Jenny couldn’t tell of what. A faintly garbagy odor, mixed with barbecuing meat and sea mist.

Flora said, pulling back the bedcover, “Could you turn off the air conditioning on your way out? I put it on just for you. I know you like it cold. And slam the door, it locks automatically Thanks.” She closed her eyes and turned her back, snuggling under the fluffy lilac blanket.

At the apartment door Jenny stopped when Flora called out, “Listen, I forgot. I have a date tonight. Fascinating man. Used to own a very smart jewelry store on Lincoln Road, when Lincoln Road was Lincoln Road. Picked me up there, actually, a couple of days ago. He’s desperately in love with me. I only hope he can get it up. Anyway, I’m busy tonight, and I figured you’d have supper with Naomi. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jenny said. “Have fun. And be careful.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t be careful,” Flora yelled as Jenny closed the door. “I’ll be damned if I’ll be careful. Be careful, be careful, be careful. The hell with that. That’s all I ever hear from you. Be careful, be good, be careful. The hell with it.”

In the hushed, carpeted corridor, a young Latina with a sleeping child in a collapsible stroller was letting herself into the apartment opposite Flora’s. She smiled, shrugged, gestured in a marvelously eloquent statement of understanding, and disappeared behind her own door. But what the whole pantomime meant was hard for Jenny to decipher. Flora was a nut? She, Jenny, was the nut, to be placated with smiles, shrugs, and hand motions? The performance had nothing to do with content but was an expression of Latino delicacy, a bonding, an acceptance of yelling as a natural part of family life? Whatever it all meant, it was soothing.

Outside, walking rapidly in the direction of her drab room, she tried to think through the whole mess. First, she had been wrong about Flora’s motive in changing the accounts. There wasn’t any motive, just Flora being officious and know-it-all, trying to save a buck. Handling Naomi’s money wisely, saving Naomi’s money. To what end?

What did Naomi want? Peace, quiet. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She didn’t want to go to the hospital for another operation, she didn’t want to move to a convalescent center where she would never get any better, only worse, and end up in a pissy nursing-home dying ward in a pissy Medicaid bed. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted to stay in her 1920s run-down residence and pretend she was a guest in an elegant hotel, dressing in her charming outfits, graciously tipping the help, picking up her mail at the desk, calling for a taxi, sitting in the lobby, dining at her reserved table, taking the air on the terrace, gently aloof and superior to all the other guests, pulling her cotton print hat down to shade her hazel eyes, drawing her flowered shawl around her shoulders, keeping intact her idea of herself. Naomi Rybinski, woman of the world.

She wanted to die smiling.

Naomi had given Flora twenty thousand dollars. Jenny had learned that much from Naomi’s bankbook and her frightened explanations. She had responded to a kind of blackmail on Flora’s part:
Do as I say or I won’t have anything more to do with you.
She paid the money to keep Flora near her. She put Flora on her accounts to keep Flora at her side. She gave Flora twenty thousand dollars as insurance against being left to die alone. Jenny hadn’t been on the scene, so Naomi had dumped her. She had replaced Jenny’s name with Flora’s. If that was what Flora wanted, then yes yes yes, anything, anything not to be left to die alone.

Well then, what about the twenty thousand Naomi had given Jenny? Jenny was back, Jenny had returned, as promised. Whose promises were safer? Maybe keeping her money floating in the reach of both sisters was the safest thing to do, like corporations contributing to both the Democratic and Republican parties. Insurance.

How much money was left?

Could Jenny convince Flora that both of them should put their twenty-thousand-dollar gifts back in Naomi’s account?

That was the thing to do, so that the money would be available as needed. Preferably with Jenny’s name on the accounts. Of course with her name on the accounts. Wasn’t it she who had always been there for Naomi? She would blackmail Naomi as cruelly as Flora had:
Do as I say or else
—

Between us we’ll murder her,
she thought.
Flora with her cockamamie ideas about the proper use of money. And you? What’s your interest? Not the money, not the money, not the money,
she hoped. Yes, the money, who was she kidding, but money for Naomi first, money for Naomi’s comfort and care, for her use in any damn way she chose. Half a dozen Lord and Taylor nightgowns if that was what Naomi wanted. And if something was left over, some of the money left after Naomi was gone, wouldn’t Jenny deserve it? Well, wouldn’t she? If she did everything right through to the end?

She was tired. She had walked eight or ten blocks into an area of small stores, beauty parlors, laundries and dry cleaners, money changers, restaurants, American, Cuban, Italian, kosher, Indian, Chinese, seafood, fast food, health food, alongside a heavily trafficked road. A roofed bus stop offered refuge from the sun and a no-back bench missing one of its slats. She sat, breathed deeply, enjoyed the wind and the shade. There was the usual mix of people waiting for the bus, all colors, classes, sexes, styles. They all took the first bus that came along.

Jenny sat on alone. In the sickly shrubbery bordering the bus stop, trash bloomed: pissed-on newspapers, plastic bags, food packaging, remains of pizzas, chicken, hotdogs, unidentifiable messes, soda cans, beer bottles, wine and liquor bottles. Toward the curb, around a standing refuse bin, garbage was rampant. She sat on, hypnotized, dazed. New bus riders collected: a small, round Latina with a child in her arms and two more trailing, all in clean white University of Nebraska T-shirts, eating candy, tossing the wrappers under the bench; another tense, skinny middle-aged man on his way to the track, or home from it without a cent, alongside a totally silent woman with a fixed smile suggesting that she might be with him, though it was hard to tell; a highly coiffed woman in a maize pantsuit, carrying a large Victoria’s Secret shopping bag and dropping crumpled tissues behind the bench; a fat young woman eating a pizza, in torn cutoffs and what looked like a plain white five-and-dime brassiere; a neat blond nurse unwrapping a stick of gum; an old black man in washed and pressed cotton pants and short-sleeved shirt, singing to himself in Spanish, tossing his newspaper on the bench.

Cut,
Jenny thought.
Enough. I’m ready for a new video. I’m tired of this scene and this action. I’m not watching the neat nurse surreptitiously drop the gum wrapper in the shrubbery. And the pizza eater? Will she use the trash can? I don’t want to see her dump her crusts under the bench. I want the end to this endless video.

And then found herself thinking, with excitement,
If I protected my hands with those Wash’n Dri’s I carry around in my bag, I could clean up this garbage.

It presented itself as a reasonable, manageable job. She could actually do it, clean up this unnecessary street mess. It would be fun. As if in a dream of work, she set to it. Protecting her hands was not so easy. Even with a couple of rubber bands she found stashed away in her handbag, which she twisted around the little wet napkins tucked in at her wrists, it was hard to keep her makeshift gloves in place. Maybe she could walk into a nursing home and steal a pair of rubber gloves? Never mind. The important thing was not to touch the filth. She changed tactics, using the Wash’n Dri’s as though she were mopping up gravy with two pieces of bread, shoveling the stuff up from the sidewalk into the almost empty trash can. It was amazing how quickly the state of the sidewalk was improving. Just one person making all this difference. All by herself she was cleaning up. Suddenly stiff from bending, she straightened to rest her back, and as she was admiring her own handiwork, she was stilled by a consciousness of peculiar silence. A crowd had gathered. Not only the people waiting for the bus, but others, out for a walk, doing errands, shopping. Quite a number had stopped in their tracks to watch.

“Crazy. Poor thing’s crazy,” a woman said.

“Meshuga ahf toit”
said another.

You could help,
she yelled, unable to comprehend what these strangers were doing in her dream. And then,
Yes, Yes. I am, I am, I’m meshuga ahf toit.

Exactly. Crazed to death.

She ran from the bus stop. Back in her room, she showered vigorously, washing, washing, washing away craziness and filth. She was planning to visit Eva in her residence, and later Naomi in hers. What if she carried exotic germs to infect them? Well, what if she did? Wouldn’t it be a mitzva? Wasn’t it everybody’s unspoken hope that her sisters would die quickly and quietly, and as inexpensively as possible?

She took two aspirin, then dressed in a carefully chosen cream silk outfit, adding dark kid shoes, a multicolored scarf, and the Coach bag. Obliterate that madwoman cleaning up the street. The mirror returned an image of a well-dressed, self-contained, modestly made-up elderly woman with a good haircut.

Her daughter called from Vermont, loving and anxious. Jenny had become sufficiently herself to chat reassuringly, though her daughter was not convinced.

“You don’t sound right, Mom. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, darling, I’m fine. It’s hard. Four sisters make for a slippery slope, but I’m fine. How are you and Dan and the children?”

“Everybody’s great. Kids are great. Dan’s busy busy busy, and so am I. I’m worried about you, Mom. Don’t overdo, remember you can’t save the world. You couldn’t do it when you were young, hard as you tried. No chance now when everything is worse. Promise me you’ll go home if it becomes unbearable.”

“I can’t leave your aunt Naomi. I can’t leave her alone.”

“I know. I wish I could help, but I’m so busy on that new project I told you about. Today is a day from hell. I love it, though, I couldn’t possibly pull out right now. And your sons aren’t even around. They’re both in Australia, but not together. Isn’t that wild?”

“Why is it wild?” There were times when Jenny hardly understood the tack her children’s conversation took. “Is something going on I don’t know about?”

“No, no, it’s just an expression. I meant the coincidence, you know, that they should both be in Australia of all places at the same time in connection with their work.” And without a pause, “Shit, there’s another call, and I’m late for a meeting. I better go now. I’ll call again tomorrow and check on things. Are my cousins down there helping? Eva’s kids? I’m sure Aunt Flora’s a handful all by herself. Any of her kids around, or aren’t they speaking this week? Were all those male cousins of mine clever enough to stay away? Mom, please take care of yourself, don’t let them—hell, I know you’re the youngest, and I know you’re in great shape, but don’t forget you’re eighty. I’m sorry, but I better take that other call. Bye, Mom, speak to you soon. Feel good.”

Jenny hung up. She could see her daughter as clearly as if the phone contained a screen: dear animated face, supple body in black pants, little white shirt or sweater, black jacket, black tights boots gloves, long slim coat, big bag, big hair, big earrings, big gold chain, big blue eyes, quick bright speech, on the run on the run on the run, to work, to work, back home to children and husband, to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the office, on the phone on the phone on the phone, for business, for friends, for her brothers and for her mother, running running running her heart out, walking walking walking in her fashionable high-heeled black boots, coat flying behind, pushing pushing pushing, on the march to find herself, to be herself, in all the manifestations she was called on to be. A soldier in a great army in a great long battle.