The Girls (5 page)

Hitler would not have agreed with Flora’s distinctions, of course, but she was not about to bring up Hitler, God help her, not in the present setting of lively Jews happily jogging, strolling, sitting, chatting, laughing on the charming boardwalk under the sculptured blue-skied white-clouded dome of heaven over blessedly sunny Miami Beach.

How did these children of the holocaust breathe this holiday air while it stuck in her throat? What magic did they work to dispel memory? Especially the old. Unthinkable to think of the old and their memories. And the young, suckled on bitterness. The pretty young mothers and formal young fathers steering their broods, the little girls in their expensive custom-made matching gowns and hats and the little boys in their dark suits and fedoras. And as if in a Spanish
paseo,
the march of the muscular single young men and the lovely young women, eyeing one another, longing to be absorbed into one another and into the life they had resuscitated with such energy, and yes, faith. Where did they find faith, of all impossibilities,
faith,
in this faithless, faithless world.

She breathed deeply. French fries. As if she had actually eaten some, a painful heartburn seized her chest. She fumbled for a Tums in her bag, but the bag dropped from her fingers, scattering change, cosmetics, a comb, her senior citizen card in its little leather case, a pen, and a mess of pills. A clutch of athletic fellows instantly came to her aid, bending to pick up the mix of small things, their yarmulkes ringed in a choreographed effect at her feet, as if in a scene from
Fiddler.
She thanked them.

And then Flora was at her side, Flora in her tacky khaki and orange outfit, tearful, pulling at Jenny’s arm.

“Jenny, Jenny, how can we be fighting at such a time? Oh, Jenny, let’s not fight, I can’t bear it.” Her wild black eyes melodramatized the plea.

The truth was that Jenny couldn’t bear it either.

“Okay, okay, forget it, let’s forget it. The whole thing.” Again her voice didn’t sound like her own. She was miscast, all around, in this drama not of her making.

Flora said, “You want me to apologize? I apologize, I apologize. Though God alone knows for what. But we have to have peace between us. There’s too much we have to do. We have to get through this somehow, Jenny, please, please.”

“Yes,” Jenny said. “No, no.” And then, after another deep breath of hotdog (kosher) sea air, she managed to say, “It’s okay, Flora, I’m just upset, give me a couple of minutes, I’ve got this awful heartburn, just forget the whole thing, I can’t do it, we’ll work something else out, okay?”

“Oh, thank God, thank God we’re not arguing anymore. There are other ways. The hospice people are wonderful, someone told me. We could look into hospice.” Flora once again energetically in charge.

“Yes,” Jenny said. “In a minute. Right now I need a couple of Tums.”

“You need something a lot stronger than Tums,” Flora said. “Your doctor is giving you Tums? Have you tried Xanac? Maybe you need to see another doctor. Or is it Xanax? I’m always mixing those two up.”

“In a minute,” Jenny said. “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

And pleaded in silence for no more talk.

N
AOMI’S RESIDENCE WAS CLOSE
to the Fontainebleau. It had been built in the twenties, and became a gathering place for jazz musicians. A little of that period remained in the splendid glass-splintered chandelier of the lobby. Otherwise it was seedy, though the broad terrace overlooking the wide beach and the sea sported a decorative circular bar under a palm-thatched roof. Nearby was a pitifully tiny mango-shaped pool in which three swimmers would have been a crowd. No danger. One resident in her eighties paddled around at the shallow end every morning before breakfast in a ruffled flowered suit and water wings. And a misshapen skinny man of indeterminate old old age swam an astonishingly perfect crawl every afternoon before dinner.

“Show-offs,” was Naomi’s dismissive judgment. “Ridiculous show-offs.” She also didn’t like the fact that the woman who swam dared to wear red high-heeled shoes when she dressed for dinner. She certainly skittered around the dining-room floor dangerously, but then, it was a tiled floor.

Naomi was still pretty, in spite of ninety years, in spite of cancer of the breast metastasized and spreading throughout her body. She was elegantly costumed, in a full skirt mixing flower patterns with bold geometrics that should have clashed but didn’t because of the rich meld of colors, a white satin blouse with a cunningly crossed collar that sheltered her ruined neck, and a silk jacket that picked up on the vibrant subtleties of the skirt. Her hair was still black, cut short in a twenties kind of bob (to match the twenties kind of residence?). Her brows were naturally black too, and beautifully arched, without the crazy outcroppings many old people sprout. With the late afternoon sun directly on her pale face, her hazel eyes shone almost clear green. She wore little makeup, a bit of face powder and a light lipstick where the offending spot, which according to Flora periodically spouted blood, showed slightly darker on the upper lip of her charming mouth. Her happiness at Jenny’s arrival was pure and childlike. She reached up from her wheelchair and pulled Jenny’s face close to hers.

“My baby sister,” Naomi said, and kissed her. Her breath held a faint sour odor that Jenny forced herself to meet smilingly. “Do you remember,” Naomi went on, caressing Jenny’s hair, “do you remember how I always gave you shampoos when you were little? Do you remember? When poor Mama was so busy helping Papa in the store she had no time for you?” She rested her cheek against Jenny’s in a silence filled with shared losses.

Jenny stroked her sister’s smooth, rounded brow, noble under the silky hair swept away from the innocent part. The sweet parting of the hairs of their heads, Dr. Maypole’s and Naomi’s. Jenny was supposed to kill this darling sister?

Suddenly Naomi pulled away to vent her annoyance that Flora was off talking to the other residents. “She acts like a social worker. So false. What does she do for them? Nothing. It’s all talk. Anyway, she’s here to see
me.
Why is she talking to
them?”

It would serve no purpose to point out to Naomi that it was she who had introduced her sisters to almost everybody in the residence, down to the busboys in the dining room. What was there to do then but be polite and make conversation?

As if she had read Jenny’s mind, Naomi said, “Why shouldn’t I introduce you? I’m proud of you. I’m proud of my sisters. Who wouldn’t be? I want to show you off. Especially you, Jenny. I was telling this man who recently moved in that you wrote for the
New York Review of Books.
He’s a retired professor of philosophy, something like that, and he was very much impressed.” She paused. “Though if the truth be told, he’s an idiot. Underneath those degrees he’s nothing but an idiot. Never heard of
Eugene Onegin.
Would you believe it? By Tchaikovsky, I tell him. Beautiful, ravishing. Never heard of
Onegin.
Idiot. He’s crazy about me, but I just brush him off. Please, control yourself, I tell him, and he calms down.”

What the retired professor of philosophy heard during conversations was anybody’s guess. A neat little man, ninety-seven and still handsome in a dashing Russian-Jewish mold, smelling of talcum and aftershave, well groomed in carefully color-matched outfits—cotton slacks, jacket, tie, dress shirt, fresh flower in the lapel—he was indeed crazy about Naomi, kissing her hand in greeting and leave-taking, but he was so deaf any kind of progressive communication was impossible. He smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, and once in a while shouted an unhinged response into a disconnected void.

“If a man isn’t handsome I can’t look at him,” Naomi informed Jenny, as she often had in the past. “Or if he smells bad. They have to smell nice. My husband was beautiful and he smelled beautiful. Of course, Shimon isn’t that beautiful, but don’t you think he looks like John Gilbert, sort of that type? Sam was more the Ramon Navarro type.”

Naomi’s husband, dead for fourteen years, had indeed been a handsome man even into his late nineties. And yes, if one squinted, Shimon, the retired professor, did look a bit like John Gilbert.

“Poor squeaky-voiced John Gilbert. Couldn’t survive the talkies,” Jenny said.

“What?” Naomi said, and continued as if Jenny hadn’t spoken. “We all had handsome husbands. Except Flora. But Flora has no taste. Especially in men. All they have to be is men, in pants, and in her estimation they’re great, as long as they fill their pants, if you know what I mean.” She lowered her voice. “Flora told me you two had a fight and you’re leaving.”

For a split second Jenny caught Naomi’s deep-set hazel eyes suffused with suffering and unspoken longing before their sculpted lids hid the emotion.

“Please don’t go, Jenny. I’m so frightened. Another operation. You know I have to have another operation. This time in my—you know, near the groin. With the one on my shin not even healed yet. And I had two, you know, on my breasts. One on each breast. But of course you know, you came to be with me. Bless you, darling, bless you for that, but please don’t leave me before the operation. Stay with me again.” She had delivered this speech to her own lap, never looking at Jenny after the first agonized glance. And without transition, holding her mouth rigid, she said, “Why can’t I just die quietly, smiling, why can’t I just die in my sleep or sitting in a chair, why must I be so tormented and make the people around me suffer? I wanted to go out smiling, not this big bother to everybody. Is that too much to ask?”

Jenny leaned over to hug her. “No, no, you’re not, I love you, I’m not leaving. No, no, yes, of course I’m staying.”

Naomi looked up. “I’m sorry, Jenny, I don’t have the strength anymore. I can’t. Who’s right, who’s wrong. I just want peace around me. Forgive me, but I can’t. I can’t take sides, I need whatever help I can get, I need her. I need Flora, I need you, whoever’s right, whoever’s wrong. It’s too late for right or wrong, right or wrong is too hard for me now.”

“It’s okay,” Jenny said. “I’m not leaving Miami. I’ll be here, don’t worry. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be with you, I promise.”

She had never before considered the phrase “Her heart sank.” It wasn’t her kind of phrase, but it was happening to her at this moment standing beside Naomi’s wheelchair, her heart sinking through her body down down into her trembling thighs and legs and feet, down through the dreary green carpet of the chandeliered 1920s lobby in the run-down residence, her heart sinking slowly heavily yearningly beneath the floor through the cement foundation through the pipes and messy obstructions to the earth, the real earth that her heart longed to be buried in, never to rise to feel more loss.

Flora was slowly approaching with a companion pushing a walker, a woman all roundnesses: smiling face, red fluffy hair, bosom and buttocks under soft blue clinging pantsuit. Lift, push, drag, step. Lift, push, drag, step. They inched forward.

“Dolly’s son gets the
New York Review of Books,”
Flora threw out in advance of their progress. “She’s dying to meet you, Jenny.”

Dolly’s son was apparently one of those forever graduate students, in his late thirties, working on his thesis. Dolly said he regularly read the
New York Review of Books
but on second thought perhaps it was the
New Yorker,
she might be mixing them up.

“That’s okay. Jenny’s written for both.” Flora, filled with pride. “She’s a published writer, books too, you know.”

It was a toss-up for Jenny which was worse, Flora’s intimate scorn or Flora’s public praise filled with errors. She had never written for the
New York Review of Books.

“The
Women’s Review of …
” Jenny stopped herself.

Dolly, reluctant to abandon the topic of her graduate student son, who was, it appeared, also writing a book, asked if it cost Jenny a lot to get her books published.

“No,” Jenny said. “They pay me, not a great deal, but I don’t pay them.”

“I have a cousin,” Dolly said, leaning her round bosom against the front of the three-sided walker and returning the smile to her round face, “a very educated man, he paid to have a book published. They turned out a beautiful job, all in blue with a little red trim.”

Naomi threw back her head and closed her eyes. “Why haven’t they opened the dining room? I’m starving.”

Dolly turned to Naomi. “You have to be patient. It doesn’t open until four o’clock on the dot, not a minute earlier. They’re having fish tonight. I don’t like their fish, but what can you do?”

“Dinner’s served at four o’clock? I thought it was five,” Flora said.

“I changed my seating,” Naomi said. “Took the earliest seating. I couldn’t wait.”

“You have to learn to be patient.” Dolly inched her walker to the side of Naomi’s wheelchair. “How many times have I told you, Naomi darling, you have to be patient. Your sister is a wonderful person, but she has to learn to be patient.” The last directed to Flora and Jenny.

“Too many,” Naomi said, her eyes closed, “too many times. Anyway, it’s late for patience. Patience is for the young to learn.” She searched through her carryall to find a brimmed cotton hat that she pulled down over her forehead, an enchanting addition to her outfit. “No more talk. It’s too exhausting.” And under her breath, “Too boring.”

“Are you cold?” Jenny asked. “Shall I get your shawl?”

“No, the light hurts my eyes.”

“Sunglasses,” Flora said. “Why do you insist on not wearing your sunglasses?”

“I like hats better. Hats cut the light. And they’re pretty.”

“
And
sunglasses,” Flora emphasized. “I wear both.”

“You go out in the noonday sun with the mad dogs and Englishmen,” Naomi said. “I stay out of the sun.”

“The sun’s good for you,” Flora shot back. “And please spare me your so-called wit. The sun would do you good.”

“So you say.” Naomi pulled her hat down lower and muttered, “Welcome to our jolly gathering of the lame, the halt, and the blind.”

The lobby had jerkily filled with the oldest and most infirm of the residents waiting for the doors to open on the first seating of the evening meal. A few walked on their own, but most relied on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, or one another for help. They were predominantly women, made up, hair done, nails polished, narrow slacks straining over big bottoms, fancy tops, embroidered, sequinned, hand-painted, printed, tight across full slack bosoms and dowager humps. Some of the few men present wore jackets, dress shirts, ties; some were in incongruously snappy leisure suits.