The Girls (4 page)

They were in the gilded, padded hallway, waiting for the elevator. This flood could only be dammed by a compliment.

“That outfit’s terrific, Flora, absolutely terrific,” Jenny said.

At last Flora was pleased. “Hey, thanks.”

Protocol to be fulfilled, Flora added, “You look pretty good yourself, Jenny.” But could not leave it at that. “Though I don’t know why you insist on keeping gray hair. It makes you look much older. Of course, I have to think about appearance more than you because of my performances. You’ve never seen me, have you? I do a terrific one-woman show, little theaters, senior centers. It’s gotten raves. This one’s at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, right in the heart of South Beach. Where the action is.”

They entered the glitzy elevator. A boring,
grimpling
music muttered. Jenny smiled.
Grimpling
had been Mama’s word for undistinguished performance. Jenny hadn’t thought of it for ages.

“Remember what Mama called that kind of playing—
grimpling?”
she said.

What Flora had no memory of, Flora insisted had never happened. She eyed Jenny blankly. “What kind of playing? You mean the Muzak? I never pay any attention to the Muzak, and anyway Mama never said that. Now, what were we talking about? Oh yes,” and continued with her earlier thought, “but hey, you like gray, gray’s fine. To each his own, that’s my motto, live and let live. I don’t tell anyone how to live, what to do. You like gray, gray it is, but you could look a lot younger, Jenny, believe me, but that’s up to you, your choice, your choice, gray’s fine if that’s what you want.”

In the lobby a gathering of the infirm in wheelchairs and the mobile in leisure dress waited for the mailman to finish the distribution. Flora pushed Jenny out the lobby door into the intense heat of the Miami afternoon.

“I’ll introduce you later,” she said. “Plenty of time later to meet this old crowd,” as if she and Jenny were immune to age, were still young.

“What about Naomi and Eva?” Jenny said, driving her body against the hot wind, the gritty air, the debris on the uneven sidewalk under the unrelenting sun. “When will we see them?”

“All in good time,” Flora said, taking Jenny’s arm and half dragging, half pushing her along. “That’s tonight. We haven’t gotten up to tonight yet. First we have a date with my adviser.”

Flora’s description of her adviser had led Jenny to expect a charming charlatan.

“He’s wonderful, so calm, so understanding, so gentle, so knowledgeable. You’ll love him on sight. He’s a world-famous surgeon, brain, I think, or maybe heart or lungs, retired now and entirely dedicated to easing death for the terminally ill. You’ll love him.” Flora, between bites of the not so awful Wendy’s chicken sandwich after all.

But Dr. Maypole proved to be quite solid, the perfect Wasp—Brooks Brothers jacket, striped dress shirt, striped tie, chinos, topsiders—in his early eighties, she had been told, but smooth-faced, younger-seeming, tall, slim, with an inward-leaning manner of listening that was endearing and inspired trust. The creepy part was that he was set up in a Best Western motel room for his consultations. He was businesslike, and when Flora became loquacious and embarrassingly emotional about the doctor’s services, he was adept at turning her off.

“Your sister has filled me in on the situation of your two older relatives, their illnesses and impending deaths.” He leaned forward reassuringly. “Let me repeat what I told her. Because your dying sisters are still free of hospital supervision, you’re in a good position to ease their suffering. I’ve already explained the procedure to your sister, but perhaps it would be in order to go over it once again. This is what you must do.”

A faint, commiserating grimace accompanied the consoling manner that worked so well.

“Set them up in your home as comfortably as possible. Hospital beds can be rented if needed, or wheelchairs. Hire a nurse by all means, and any other help that will ease things for you. The entire procedure should not take much more than a week, ten days at most.”

His manner became more brisk, matter-of-fact.

“Essentially what you will be doing is withholding food and water while administering medication to ease the discomfort. There will be, at most, one to two days of discomfort, particularly during liquid deprivation, but bathing the lips with a washcloth or paper napkin dipped in cold water eases that.”

Was Dr. Maypole aware of the fiery horror he was kindling?

Flora was crying noisily. The doctor lowered the lids of his pleasant blue eyes for the space of a blink, waved a hand in the slightest gesture of irritation, then leaned toward Jenny.

“You must keep foremost the intent to ease suffering, which is what your sisters are requesting.”

Jenny was desperately attempting to maintain one of her public faces, a book-jacket face, perhaps her lecturing face—dinner-party face? Incongruous, inappropriate. What face, then?

“I have explained to your sister that I myself eased the deaths of my beloved mother and my beloved older brother. My mother died in her nineties, my brother was in his early seventies, fatally ill with cancer. It was what they both wished for.” He paused. “I understand that your sisters, in their nineties, are of the same mind.”

“I don’t know,” Jenny said. Her voice sounded odd to her, as if someone else in the room had spoken, a stranger, from a lectern possibly. “I haven’t talked to them yet.”

Dr. Maypole’s pleasant pale-blue eyes clouded. “I’m afraid I’ve misunderstood the situation,” he said with the faintest intonation of disapproval. He glanced at Flora.

“I could never do it,” Flora said. “Jenny’s the one. She’s not so emotional. She’s colder. And she’s not religious. That’s why I need her. I could never do it alone. I’ll help, but Jenny has to do it, Dr. Maypole, that’s why I brought her for this consultation. Tell her exactly how to do it. She can do it. She has that coldness. I’m too emotional.”

Flora broke up into weeping again, breathing through wide-open dark-red lips. Dr. Maypole lowered his head. He had all his grayish-brown hair, parted sweetly in a short, neat cut that had been popular in the thirties. He and Naomi would have looked nice dancing together. Jenny concentrated on that image as if it might save her.

She heard herself ask the doctor, in that voice she didn’t recognize, who would supply the medication that would soothe.

“We do that,” he said, and fumbled through the papers on his desk for a leaflet. “I thought you had been given this material, I thought you would be familiar with—”

“Oh, I forgot,” Flora said, “I forgot about that stuff. But she knows all that anyway. She thinks Dr. Kevorkian is okay, don’t you, Jenny?”

Flora had stopped crying. She was smiling, actually. “Jenny?” she prompted. And then, nervously, “Jenny, what’s the matter with you?”

It would have been impossible for Jenny to explain. She was being transported. Anger was transporting her. She was metamorphosing into a dangerous, alien substance, a column of icy steel that burned white, an icy column of white light, a rod of steel to kill Flora outright, to drive through Flora’s flesh at that moment, that instant, and then she would walk away from this scene as if it had never happened.

Jenny forced herself to speak. “I’m sorry, Dr. Maypole. I have to think about all this. I wasn’t prepared for this.”

“But, but—” Flora, indignant. “You certainly were. We talked about Kevorkian. I thought you understood. You agreed with me. You said you’d do it. I’ll help, but I can’t do it. You said. You said, Jenny, you as good as promised.”

“I don’t think I took in what you were actually talking about.” Jenny kept her face turned toward Dr. Maypole. “And Eva. Eva has children—and grandchildren, great-grandchildren. We have no business in such a decision. Her children …”

“I understood that these sisters were without family,” Dr. Maypole said. “The family must be consulted. You must have their agreement.”

Flora said, “No, no, she’s mixing everything up. Our sister Naomi doesn’t have a soul. Not a soul. No children. Her husband’s dead. She has no one but us. Nobody but her loving sisters.” Flora was crying again, Flora’s noisy, juicy crying.

Dr. Maypole signed off, stood up. “May I suggest that you come back to us when you’ve resolved the problems? It’s not an easy decision, but if I may say so, you must keep your eye on the main thing. The easing of the pain of your loved ones, the easing of this painful passage.”

“Thank you.” Jenny managed to shake his offered hand, walking out before Flora had finished her effusive farewell speech.

“Isn’t he a wonder, isn’t he a jewel?” Flora began as they left the motel. Then, “What’s the matter with you? The air is so thick with anger I could cut it with a knife.”

“If you don’t know, I wouldn’t know how to tell you,” Jenny muttered. “And please let’s not talk for a while. Let’s just get to Naomi’s place, okay? I’d like to take the boardwalk if it’s all right with you.”

And they were in the middle of a terrible sisterly fight.

“Oh please, spare me your high-and-mighty good manners, Jenny. You don’t want to talk to me, fine, just spare me the fake elegance. I’d like to know what my sin consists of, that’s all, but of course if you’re on your high horse I know what that means, God knows I’ve been exposed to it often enough. One thing, though, do you mind telling me how long you’re planning to honor me by accepting my hospitality? And another thing, it’s
my
boardwalk, I’m the one who lives on the beach, so stop talking as if you invented or discovered the boardwalk.”

Jenny heard her own voice, loud and ugly. “Ah, here we go on the let’s-throw-Jenny-out-of-the-house routine. What a laugh.
Your
boardwalk. I’ll be delighted to leave tonight after I see Eva and Naomi. Short enough stay for you? And might I please have the luxury of silence until then? Could I please just walk along your blasted boardwalk in silence? Please?”

Even as she continued the fight Jenny knew that family quarrels had their own underground momentum and this one would run its inevitable course. Still she injected her own venom, and Flora picked up her cue.

“If you think I don’t understand the implication of that comment, you’re wrong, Sister Jenny. My blasted boardwalk! I know your sentiments. You’re no Jew, and we all know it. No, no, no, I’m not talking about not marrying a Jew, you never were a Jew, you were born a hypocrite and you’ll die a hypocrite. It has nothing to do with you didn’t marry a Jew and didn’t raise your kids Jewish. You’re not going to pin that on me. You’re a self-hating Jew, that’s all. You just can’t stand to see my fellow Jews together here on the boardwalk. That’s what’s eating you. You’re an anti-Semite to the bone.”

“Damn you, Flora, I’m a Jew and my kids are Jews, even according to your beloved State of Israel. And shut up, I don’t want to talk anymore, I just want to walk in silence. You’re so crazy I can’t even figure out what the subject of this conversation is, I swear.”

“I’m crazy? You’re the crazy one. ‘Subject of this conversation.’ You think this is one of your classes? Don’t confuse me with one of your adoring students, sister. I’m onto you. I know you from the day you were born, don’t forget that.
My
beloved State of Israel. There you have it in a nutshell. Anti-Semitic to the core.”

Flora was screaming. Jenny was screaming too, but she couldn’t hear herself as she heard Flora. Nobody paid much attention. There were a few interested glances from passing couples. Jews yelled at one another, nothing unusual in that. On the upside, Flora had turned her back on Jenny, stalking off rapidly. Jenny could see her orange peaked hat bobbing through the crowd ahead.

Only with members of her family did Jenny become this ugly kid, and particularly with Flora. At age eighty. She despised herself yet let the mood invade her, unable to resist the impulse to be as bad a girl as possible.
In my family I’ll stay the outsider until the day I die, so I may as well live up to my reputation.

She drew in deep breaths of what should have been bracing salt air, but swallowed an impurity of odors—fried shrimp, popcorn, pizza, coffee, beer. She was on a two-mile stretch of boardwalk, a nicely put-together addition to the playground of sand and water, a walkway actually built of wood boards, with rounded wooden railings, stairways, and little shaded resting places, like toy thatched houses, lined with benches. The sea extended to the horizon on the left, the big hotels rose on the right, foliage and flowers everywhere, the arching blue sky and fakey huge clouds placed just so, all the colors bright and dazzling, a scene suffused with the search for pleasure. Hotels reached out beyond the barriers of their extravagant plantings to pit their pools, their music, their cafes and bars against the lure of ocean swimming and sunbathing. Walkers, bikers, runners, joggers, strollers, and the old infirm sitters on the benches faced the indifferently happy, glowing, multicolored sea dotted with a surface play of boats. In this holiday crowd everyone did indeed seem to be Jewish. The broadest, tallest, blondest, most athletic-looking Aryan male turned his back and inevitably displayed a decorative little yarmulke bobby-pinned to his salon-styled hair.

Intent now on climbing out of the hole she had helped dig for herself, Jenny plunged into the gaiety of the scene. She began a game with herself. Pick out the male most unlikely to be Jewish, check out the back of his head. Yarmulke. Was she glad? Sorry? Did she give a damn who was or wasn’t militantly Jewish? Which blessed Jew would pass Flora’s eligibility test? Was pure enough? Including herself?

Including herself. Married a Jew the first time. Had two Jewish children. Married the love of her life the second time, a second-generation American of Spanish-Cuban derivation. Nonreligious, as she was. Had her third child. Also Jewish by Israeli standards, son of a Jewish mother. All three children did seders, did Christmas, did Chanukah. Did it all, loved it all. Why not? The more mixed the better. Mush up everybody in the world, all races, all religions.

What did her sister want of her anyway? What did she want of her sister? Why was she fighting with poor old Flora? Habit of a lifetime. Anguish at being cast as the outcast, Sister Jenny as
Shabbes goy,
the unbelieving lout called in to do the menial work forbidden to the faithful, an unfeeling hunk of ice who could kill her sisters, conscientiously following Dr. Maypole’s astonishingly cool prescription. All because she had learned to govern her emotions, because she had worked to earn a Ph.D., because she taught literature and read criticism and wrote reviews and books, all because she had married her beloved Paul, because she had learned to wear mostly black and to speak in cadences no longer tied to the Bronx, because she had chosen to live in a wider world than Flora or Eva or Naomi.