The Girls (3 page)

“Okay, okay,” Jenny soothed. She loved Flora, she did, but this invasion of needy flesh slightly nauseated her, the heaving bare breasts pressing, the oozing goo of the hair dye. Too liquid. She was too dry, too tired. She forced herself to hug and kiss, patting the naked solid female body of her sister, repeating, “Okay, okay, it’s okay, Flora. I’m here. We’ll do this together.”

And wished she were elsewhere.

Flora must have felt Jenny’s inner withdrawal, for she in turn withdrew to the farthest of the two purple bathrooms, where she blew her nose loudly and thoroughly. She reappeared in a moment, wearing a wraparound purple terry robe, and struck a pose, arms up, one bare leg extended, laughing immoderately.

“Ta-da! For your eyes only. The one and only Flora at her toilette! No more crying. ‘April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter; then, the moment after, weep thy girlish tears.’” And matter-of-factly, “This gunk has to stay on for a few more minutes. Bear with me. I know you don’t approve. You don’t have to say a word. You go with gray. Fine. I’m dyeing till the day I die.” Flora revved herself up into laughter again. “We die a little every day, don’t we,
schvester?
Well, while I’m dying, I’m dyeing. I’m living and looking good right up to the minute they put me in my coffin. Think I’m going to go like Eva and Naomi? Not me. I’m dying with my boots on. With my hair black.”

Jenny laughed. “You’re looking great, Flora.” And added, though she knew she shouldn’t, “Naomi’s hair was still black last time I saw her. Without dyeing. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” And quickly made amends. “You’re really looking great.”

“What? Even with this?” She pointed at her head. “You weren’t supposed to come until I was finished.” And then, with a tinge of resentment, “You’re the one who’s looking great. Weren’t you very sick? Gout or something? That’s what Eva told me. You know Eva, with her ‘poor Jenny’ litany. ‘Poor Jenny can’t even walk, she has such bad gout.’ You know Eva, I don’t have to tell you.”

“My gout’s under control. Allopurinol, bless it. I tore a ligament. Fell on a patch of slippery grass. Sheer hell. Most painful thing I ever lived through. Worse than gout.”

“You kidding? Worse than childbirth? Nothing worse than labor pains.”

“Oh well,” Jenny said, “it’s all relative.”

“It’s all relatives!” Flora shrieked. “Sisters, sons, that’s all that’s left, relatives. You know I haven’t got a friend in the world? All gone. Dead. Men, women, friends, lovers, husbands, all gone. Only relatives. My sisters and my sons. My sons can’t be bothered and my sisters are dying.”

“How is Naomi?” Jenny said. “Is she in a lot of pain?”

“No pain. Don’t talk about pain. I don’t want you
tsitsering
over Naomi, that won’t do her any good. The doctors assure me she’s in no pain. Whatever she says.”

“What does she say?”

“Listen, she’s a complainer. Naomi was always a complainer. A quitter. I’m no quitter, no complainer. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not the way I’m going to die. Listen, I have to wash this stuff out now. Nice ‘n Easy. Sure, sure. That’s what they call it. It’s a mess, but I do it in the shower. I cleaned out a drawer for you and made a little space in the closet. Right here. Settle in. I’ll be out in two seconds. If you need hangers, there’s a bunch on the closet shelf. I figured you wouldn’t have much stuff, only here for a week, right?”

That was wrong, but Jenny said nothing. Time, time, plenty of time to arrange the matter of staying as long as Naomi needed her. Or maybe no time. How long, how long for Naomi, or for Eva, who might go any night, in her sleep if it pleased God or whomever, how long for any of them, Flora or herself, they were all old enough to go. Eighty, eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five. Patients in God’s waiting room.
Oh God, let there be time for me to get out of Miami Beach, time to get back to New York or New England.

Kicking off the shoes that pinched, she padded over the soft purple carpeting of the bedroom to the wide purple-draped windows, drew up the heavy purple shade, and bared the view of glorious seascape. Well, not entirely glorious. The sea side of Collins presented a mix of styles. Street sleaziness had infiltrated its pretensions.

Directly below, the broad deck of the condominium was irreproachably paved, swept, and washed down, properly railed and locked against assailants, its Olympic-size swimming pool filled with clear blue-green water, luminous in the blazing sunlight, its deck chairs plentiful, symmetrically lined up and gaily covered with striped mats that matched the umbrellas opened over occasional round stone tables and benches, its shuffleboard pattern immaculate in matching white and green boxes and stripes, its flowered plantings a mix of rich greenery and the multicolored blossoms of impatiens. There were no living beings on the deck. Wrong time, too hot, height of the afternoon.

Below the broad, high deck the sleaze began. Humanity blossomed—regular-issue, across-the-board humanity. The beach below the condominium was clearly a public one. The wide, wide expanse accommodated crowds of sunbathers—singles, couples, whole picnicking families heavy with kids and paraphernalia: coolers, umbrellas, chairs, beach towels, water skis, water wings, wet suits, beach balls. Bathers came in all colors—gray, pink, white, brown, black. The sand was not the fine white stuff of South Beach but a gritty black-tinted gray. It would have looked uninviting in its natural state. Littered, it was ugly, dotted with large overflowing wastebaskets and messed by the blackened tracks of the garbage trucks. Even the residue of the sea at the shoreline, rocks, stones, shells, carcasses of marine life, formed into an untidy heap on a ridge caused by a steep dip in the ocean floor.

The back of the beach, closer to the terrace, deteriorated even further. The remains of an attempt to beautify left a straggling row of browned vegetation as a line of defense against the sea’s relentless wash. There were high wooden staircases for public bathers to cross where the street intersected. Underneath the nearest overpass a homeless pair had built a nest: mattress, blankets hung for walls, scattered pillows, piles of plastic bags, a tiny stove, cartons, and a homey clothesline of undergarments, his and hers. There was a public water faucet and open-air shower at the foot of the stairs. Jenny could see a young woman fussing with her wet hair, combing and fluffing before a small mirror placed on an upright carton. Her guy was out in the sun drying his hair, toweling vigorously. They called back and forth to one another, a couple conversing in their apartment, the clear high voice of the young woman yelling something about a car. A car? The homeless had cars?

Possible. There were some beat-up old cars parked against the drooping vegetation, in an area prominently marked No Parking.

And yet. And yet. Beyond the disappointment of the littered beachfront lay the sea, the jaunty vacationland Miami Beach sea, a spread of happiness stretching from the endless deep blue horizon to the waves breaking on its long shore, the water streaked in a greeny-white opalescence tinged with gold and with Flora’s beloved purple, like a stage set, an illumination of joyous life. The scene built slowly. In the foreground the shell gatherers, the strollers, the runners and walkers in their costumey beach garb, savoring the good feel of their naked feet on the hard sand of the water’s edge. Then the bathers in the shallows, roped-off areas of old people on their unsteady withered legs, deliriously active children in the churning surf, an occasional dog. In the middle distance beyond the greeny-white breakers swam a few of the brave, and some surfers rode the high waves. Beyond that were the pleasure craft, small fishing boats, the racers and gliders in the golden waters, before the deep blue waters were claimed by the huge commercial fishing ships, the tankers, and the enormous cruise liners on the far horizon. A scene of incomparably gorgeous gaiety.

“Fantastic,” Jenny said. “Sensational. I forgot how great this view is.”

“I hate it,” Flora said. She laughed, mouth wide open and head thrown back. She was drying off with still another purple towel. The newly dyed hair gleamed black as shoe polish.

She had been quick. She was dressed, quietly for her, in a rumpled cotton khaki pantsuit with a checked orange shirt, at her throat a huge bandanna in not quite matching orange streaked with clashing colors, and at the ready a little peaked cap in brilliant orange with a matching oversized leather shoulder bag.

“I’m taking you to lunch, I don’t care how tired you are. Wendy’s has a terrific four ninety-five special that you’ll love, everything included. I’ve got plenty of stuff in the refrigerator, but I don’t feel like fussing, and I have to leave time to go over my material for a performance I’m giving in South Beach. You’re going to love South Beach. That’s where the action is. Anyway, I’m sure you’re dying to get out into this wonderful Miami air. You want to change? You should change. Did you unpack? Want help? I hate to be helped, I don’t like people in my belongings.”

“Yes, yes,” Jenny said. “No, no. I was admiring your view. Fantastic. I’ll just slip into something and unpack later.”

There was no logical explanation for her compliance. She was exhausted; she hated Wendy’s; she hated the thick, hot air outside. She wanted to flop into a chair and have a cool drink. Flora was still putting on her cockamamie performances? Not that Jenny had ever seen one. Was she expected to attend? Of course. Flora was in Jenny’s life to be obeyed. That’s the way it had been, and that’s the way it would always be. Flora was bossy and older, and there was the long history dating from their childhood of her ability to frighten Jenny into submission.

“How can you hate it?” Jenny said, waving at the view. “It’s such fun.”

“Look at it. Always there. Who wants to look at that beauty day after day, night after night, the rosy sunrises, the golden sunsets, worst of all the moon on the water. Not me. Not alone. All that romantic shit. That moon could make you crazy, looking at it all alone. Whatever I’m going through, mental, physical, emotional, there it is, doesn’t give a shit about me. And the sea, noisy as hell, always making its sound, if I’m awake or asleep, doesn’t give a damn, there it is shrieking away, singing its song. Wait till you hear it in a storm, the wind and the sea, God help the innocent bystander. God help the woman alone. Alone, alone, alone with that damn sea outside the window and the beach and the couples and the families. It’s a curse to be alone, a terrible curse. That’s how we all end up, isn’t it? Look at Naomi. You couldn’t be more alone than Naomi. Another way we’re cursed. We’re long-lived. God help the long-lived woman alone. And still she wants to live. Naomi wants to live, can you imagine? Ninety years old, riddled with cancer, she wants to live.”

Jenny could easily imagine. In fact she was as fiercely opposed to any of her sisters dying as they were. Why shouldn’t they all live forever?

“Listen, we can’t live forever,” Flora said.

Jenny was struggling out of her winter suit into a black silk pantsuit, choosing from a group of tops in her opened bag a short-sleeved striped silk. Flora talked on while making up her face at a magnifying mirror framed in purple painted wood. She drew wavering black lines around her wonderfully young eyes, and another wavering black line in the middle of each eyelid, which somehow managed to look good. Then she blackened her graying eyebrows and applied too much too red rouge and too much lipstick. She had beautifully even white teeth, bonded at a cost of thousands of dollars when she was eighty. But the final effect of the makeup job was clownlike.

“Okay, here’s the thing. We have to help our sisters die,” Flora was saying. “Naomi’s dying of cancer. She has to die of something, doesn’t she? So it’s cancer, the big C. She’s lucky. She’s ninety years old. Okay, so she had a couple of strokes. She recovered completely. She’s got all her marbles. No heart condition, no high blood pressure, no diabetes, no arthritis, no major affliction. Just the big C. It’s different with Eva. Eva’s dying of old age. Nothing wrong with her but old age. It could take years. She’s ninety-five. She could live till a hundred, hanging on, doing nothing. With all her marbles. Intact. We have to help them die.”

“Is that what they want? Is that what they told you?”

“No, they want to live. They actually want to live. Can you imagine?” Flora said again.

“To live? Yes, everybody wants to live forever. You too.”

“I knew you’d give me a hard time on this,” Flora said bitterly. “I knew it. And spare me your philosophy, please. You only bring philosophy in to hurt me anyway.”

Jenny muttered, “I’m sorry. I just meant that there’s a will to live. In everybody. In our genes.”

“What for?” Flora shouted. “Our sisters don’t do anything. They eat, they sleep, they complain. That’s no life. Naomi’s still as vain as ever, worrying about her clothes, running to the dry cleaners every
montag und donshtik.
She’s got this thing on her lip, it spouts blood like a faucet, does she do anything about it? No, all she does is run with the bloodstained clothes to the cleaners. All she thinks about is her looks.”

“Run?” Jenny said, more or less pulled together in the silk outfit. She claimed the mirror from Flora to comb her hair and put on a little more lipstick.

Flora moved away, struck a pose, clearly impatient. “Hurry up, Jenny, I’m starving. Aren’t you starving?” She placed the peaked orange cap at a jaunty angle on her moist jet-black hair.

“Run?” Jenny repeated. She hadn’t seen Naomi for a year. “Is she beautiful as ever?”

Jenny wanted Naomi beautiful as ever.

“I don’t know about beautiful. What can I tell you, Naomi’s Naomi. She’s got her own way of doing things, nobody can tell her anything. She doesn’t eat right, she’s too heavy, her own fault, she can’t walk, she won’t exercise, she ruined her feet with the wrong shoes. Looks were always what mattered, the pointy shoes, the pointy-toed boots, she ruined her feet, her own fault, nobody to blame but herself. She can’t see, she never took proper care of her eyes, she insists she has something called macular degeneration, deterioration of the brain if you ask me, the wrong glasses is all it is, too busy having her hair and her nails done to take care of her health. All she talks about are her bowel movements, she just won’t listen about bran, roughage, you have to be constipated the way she eats, never eats a salad which is a crime on their part, the residence, they only serve salad if you ask for it, now is that a crime or not? What kind of a retirement residence doesn’t automatically serve salad, and how about their cottage cheese and fruit plate, not a piece of fresh fruit on it, only canned, what does canned fruit do for the digestive system? Nothing, nothing. But you can’t talk sense to Naomi. Naomi just won’t listen to sensible advice.”