The Girls (7 page)

“Eva, for God’s sake, what are you doing out without a jacket?” Flora, in her hectoring manner. “You need to protect yourself from this hot sun.” She dismissed the attendant with a brisk “Thank you, we’ll take care of her now.”

The black man handed over a cotton jacket, a small shopping bag, and a large plastic bag of heavy stuff.

“What is all this?” Jenny said.

“She likes to take her things with her.” He spoke with a West Indian accent. “The women take much with them all the time. They like that.” He had a wonderfully large white-toothed smile. “No harm done.” He leaned over Eva affectionately. “Poor girl has had a hard day, but now she happy. Goodbye, Eva darling, have a wonderful time with your sisters. Take care now,” and sprinted out of the heat into the cool building.

“Charles is very angry with you,” Eva blubbered. “Because you were so late. I’ve been waiting for you all day. I’ve had a horrible, horrible day, Jenny, I didn’t know what happened to you after you came here this morning and said you were walking to Jenny’s, I mean Flora’s. Jenny, why did you walk to Flora’s, or Naomi’s, or wherever you went with all those thruways and traffic, you could have been killed, what’s wrong with you, and with all your luggage. You could have left your luggage with me, I never stole from you yet, I never thought you could be so foolish, I begged you to stay with me.”

Flora said, “What are you talking about, what in the world are you talking about? What is she talking about?”

Jenny was ready to say anything to calm Eva. “I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry I upset you. I thought you knew we weren’t coming until tonight.”

“Of course she knew we weren’t coming until tonight,” Flora said. “I spoke to you myself, Eva. After supper, I told you plainly—Jenny and I are coming after supper, after we see Naomi.”

“But why did you visit me this morning, Jenny, and tell me you were going to walk to Flora’s? Or Naomi’s?” She broke into bitter weeping. “And you were so cold and mean, so unlike yourself. With all that traffic on the thruways, Jenny, I thought you’d be killed, I thought I’d never see you again.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Jenny whispered to Flora during the long tirade. “What have they put her on that she looks this way? She must have dreamt all that stuff, or she’s hallucinating. Is anybody checking her medication?”

She didn’t say,
This is unbearable. I want my sister Eva back, I don’t want this mad stranger.

“Her kids aren’t paying enough attention,” Flora whispered.

“Do they know? Shouldn’t we let them know?”

“Listen, I don’t interfere. Live and let live. Their business is their business. I don’t mix into other people’s family business.”

“But she
is
our family. She’s our sister. And they’re wonderful kids. Maybe they don’t know, they all live so far away, maybe they have no idea. She sounds fine on the telephone.”

“You’re not listening to me, Jenny.” Eva pulled at her. “You have to promise me, promise me.”

The unrecognizable woman was slowly taking on some resemblance to the sister Jenny knew. Underneath the moon face, the hair, and the squinty eyes, Eva was emerging.

“I am, I will,” Jenny said, and burst into tears. “I promise. I’m sorry we worried you, I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again.”

“Am I going crazy, or what?” Flora said, and turned her full attention to Eva. “Now calm down, Eva. Jenny wasn’t on the thruway. Jenny wasn’t here this morning. We aren’t late. We came exactly when we said we would. Nobody was walking on the thruway—”

In the normal voice Jenny remembered, Eva said, “Don’t you tell me to calm down, little sister. Keep in mind that I was diapering you before you could say Mama.” And turning once again to Jenny, she beckoned in a wide embrace and Jenny was in the arms of the Eva she loved, sane, accepting, generous Eva.

“Oh, Jenny darling, it’s so wonderful to see you, so wonderful of you to come. I can’t believe it’s really you.”

“Well, am I
de trop
or something around here?” Flora, sulky. “Shall I make myself scarce? Would you two like to be alone?”

But Flora’s sisters weren’t listening to her.

Jenny seized on the fleeting argument with Flora to check into a run-down place a few blocks north of Flora’s condominium. She was lucky. A couple had unexpectedly moved out of an efficiency apartment on the second floor overlooking the ocean. One room, big bed, a couch, an armchair, all in matching dim stripes, a mongrel bedside piece, a dresser, a table and two chairs, a kitchen, so to speak, a little foyer, then a bathroom. Terrible lighting, some overhead, some lamps. Two doors: entrance from an inner court balcony with a view of some dismal shrubbery, two small, odd-shaped swimming pools, and a funky bar-restaurant with a couple of indoor and outdoor tables; the other door out to a tiny balcony that gave on the sea, a compensation so large it made the rest acceptable.

She was exhausted. She collapsed on a deck chair, wrapped in the moist hot wind, in the mystery of dark heaving water and the whiteness of the breaking waves on the shoreline. She fell into one of those quick naps peculiar to the old and awoke to painful discomfort and a wild disorientation. Where in the world was she?

In Theirami. She was up to her neck in Theirami. That came clear to her after a few moments. She got up, left the sea behind her, drew the blinds against the courtyard lights, turned off the air conditioning, and opened a window. She unpacked. She hadn’t unpacked at Flora’s. She turned away from the reality of their swift quarrel. Of course Flora would have made up, but Jenny had held tight to the quarrel, using it as an excuse to come to this seedy refuge to be alone. No sin. No harm done. She forgave herself. Take a lesson from Charles forgiving the dotty old ladies for carrying their belongings around with them.

She set her traveling clock on the night-stand/bookcase/desk next to her bed. It was only eight-thirty. She turned on the TV, surfed until she found a
Seinfeld
repeat. Just what the doctor ordered. She watched and laughed, and laughed again. Then laughed at herself unpacking her green carryall. Medications. CDs. All her good jewelry. As dotty as the rest of them. Why hadn’t she left her jewelry home? And the CDs? Not safe. Or in her bank deposit box? Too much trouble. Easier to carry them around. Dotty old woman.

Good thing she hadn’t undressed, because she should put the jewelry in the office safe. Where it would be safe? One had to believe in something.

The room was now too hot. She closed the window and turned the air back on before she went out. The office-lounge was spooky quiet, with only one dour man in charge, but the patio was lively: very loud rock from the bar; a bunch of German-speaking kids in the bigger swimming pool, in the care of a large male tossing them around in the water like beach balls; at the tables, foreign tourists, down-at-heel locals, one Middle American tourist couple, a handsome Latino sitting alone talking into a cellular phone. There was no sign of Miami Beach’s affluent Jewish crowd.

The two-man restaurant staff was straight out of central casting: the waiter fat, the cook skinny; the cook hairless, the waiter nothing but hair, head, face, chest, legs, and arms; the cook totally silent, the waiter garrulous, about himself, where he came from, where he hoped to be going, the food (which smelled unexpectedly good), the weather, the state of the sea, the full moon that had come shining up out of nowhere. Cook and waiter were both half naked to stand the kitchen heat: shorts, sort of underwear vests wet-sticking to the skin, the waiter’s long hair in a ponytail tied with a long red ribbon, the cook’s bald head partially bound in what looked like a used handkerchief.

Jenny inquired politely of the lone Latino if she might sit with him. He inclined his head in a yes, never leaving off the phone conversation. From the friendly, talkative, fat, hairy waiter she ordered a salad called Tropic Fantasy. It cost $6.35, and when it came was quite beautiful and deliciously fresh, fruits and nuts on a bed of mixed greens.

The Latino put through call after call, some in English, some in Spanish, about a deal so complicated she could not follow in either language. He was Cuban, dropping vowels and consonants freely in both languages. “Nahyea,” he kept cautioning. “Don tell noboda. Nahyea.”
Not yet,
probably. As she was finishing her salad, a deeply tanned blond American young woman in a dress that barely covered her slim, bosomy torso joined the Cuban. She had an infant on her flat hip, a little girl as dark as her father. Lovingly, he took the child on his lap while repeating the message, “Don tell noboda. Nahyea.” He must have made twenty such calls before Jenny settled her bill and left.

The bed surprised. It was comfortable. She kept the windows closed and the air on, trading one discomfort for another. It was a hot night. Heat made her horny. Cold made her horny. Memory made her horny. Music made her horny. Eighty-year-old women weren’t supposed to feel horny. They were supposed to be serene, wise, resigned. But here she was, raging in bed, for love, for lost love. At eighty. Grieving. For the loss of her husband of forty years. Nobody believed in that. One love. The love of one’s life. She felt a fool talking to anybody about her love for him. Anyway, he was dead and gone. The man she had left her first husband for; the man she had endangered the safe lives of her first two children for; the stepfather they resented, admired, loved, and sometimes hated; the father their shared son loved, admired, resented, and sometimes hated; the man she had lived with, worked with, laughed with, quarreled with, shared every penny with, his or hers; the man she shared bed and board with, day and night, mind and body. Could you call missing all that being horny?

She was suffused with the memory of a night in Florida, in a sleazy place in Clearwater much like this one. She couldn’t remember why they were so lucky as to be there alone. No kids—not the two older ones or even their younger one. Probably all left in the care of Grandmother, Abuela, in the larger sleazy place up the beach they had rented for the whole family and a cousin. The Cuban side of Paul’s family was jammed with cousins.

One night, one lovely undisturbed night with the love of her life. They had shrimp for dinner at a restaurant on the bay. Then a leisurely walk to the beach, jabbering away. They were both big talkers. Paul had reserved a room in an odd round structure originally conceived as a tropical paradise resort. Built in the twenties, it had bedrooms overlooking a circular court that boasted a palm-thatched bar and dance floor with live band. A central staircase rose to the bedrooms, whose rounded windows romantically faced the ocean. Now the outer walls let the wind and rain in, the dance floor was warped, the bar and band were no more. The Round of Pleasure had been a dream place for Paul in his adolescence. It was a gas to come to it in their middle age.

How she enjoyed him, his effervescent talk, his brilliant laughter, the angry, funny play of his mind, his long, lean, strong form, his full cushioned lips, his tongue, his electric hands, the silky hair covering his body, the more wonderful silk of his penis. And his feet. His beautiful feet.

Yes. And not to forget the violent temper, the sulky childishness, the ego, the lust for recognition of his work—
my work, my work
—the restlessness, the incessant demand that he be Numero Uno, the deliberately inflicted hurts when he imagined she had humiliated him. She hadn’t forgotten. She wasn’t romanticizing her life with Paul. She had loved him with her eyes wide open for the man that he was, not some dreamboat she invented after he was dead.

They had had a good time together. A good life. She never wanted it to end. Why couldn’t it have gone on forever?

He’s dead,
she told herself, and felt her body lifeless.
He died at age seventy-eight of prostate cancer. Your mother and father are dead. All your brothers are dead. And Naomi is on her way, and Eva, and Flora is eighty-five and you’re eighty. Nobody lives forever. Don’t be a child. Get on with what you have to do.

What do I have to do?
Hopelessly awake, she thought again of Naomi’s whispered on-and-off request. She clicked off tomorrow’s chores: calls to her children to tell them she was fine, calls to doctors, a phone conference with Eva’s children, a visit to Naomi’s bank, more quarrels with Flora.

Eva’s bloated, hairy face appeared. What were they doing to her? What were they medicating her with? Elegant, grown-up Eva. Already married when Jenny was six years old, settled into a life complete with husband, children, and even a girl from Ireland to help with the housework. Her comfortable apartment was a refuge for adolescent sulks as Jenny grew up in turn. Eva helped her find her way in the world. She even gave Jenny money for extravagances, gave her a dollar fifty to see the first live play she had ever seen,
Cyrano de Bergerac,
with a terrible ham actor whose name she had forgotten. Long-lived Eva. Had her husband of fifty-six years been the love of her life? Impossible to tell. Eva never talked intimacies. She listened. What a comfort to talk to Eva, who knew how to listen. Carrying on her steady, responsible life, always there for Jenny when Jenny needed her. She had two children as solid in their lives as Eva had been, and from the two, a bumper crop of eight grandchildren, fourteen great-grandchildren, all doing what they were expected to do. Eva talked of them, but not too much. Eva, correct in all her ways.

And what of Flora? Flora’s love life? Four marriages—five, technically. She had been married twice to one husband. Three divorces, one annulment. Two husbands now dead. Two floating around, one a good old friend, but infirm, the other lost somewhere. Four children, three grandchildren. She had had other men in her bed, too many to keep track of. Flora used the word “love” a lot. “He fell in love with me.” “I’m in love with him.” “We’re in love.” Along with the down-to-earth talk. “He can’t get it up. He’s the original limp-penis guy.” “He wouldn’t know a clitoris from a clementine, he thinks nipples are strictly for babies, he’s a two-minute-flat guy.” Often about the same man. “He’s passionately in love with me, but the poor thing can’t get it up, no matter what I do to help.” “He used to be good a couple of years ago, real good, but medication or something did him in, he can’t do a thing anymore. It would be sad if it weren’t funny, because he’s desperately in love with me.”