The Girls (9 page)

Flora. Flora after all. Jenny reached out and took the check. She folded it in half and put it in the zipper compartment of her small Coach bag.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Use it in good health,” Naomi mumbled.

“Thank you,” Jenny said again, and amazed herself by busily figuring what proportion of Naomi’s money she had just received and how much was still controlled by Flora. Forty thousand? At the most. Naomi didn’t have much.

She amazed herself by her resolution, too. If there was going to be a tug of war for Naomi’s money, she wasn’t going to let Flora win. Flora had plenty of money. Flora didn’t need any more money. Jenny had a lot less money than Flora. Oh, she had enough, but enough for what? What if she lived as long as Eva? Or as long as Naomi? Ten years, fifteen years more? Wouldn’t she need more money?

She didn’t give a damn about comparative need. She was determined to win. She didn’t care how awful she was being. She would win this family fight no matter what. She wasn’t going to let Flora win this one.

A
FAMILY PARTY TOOK
place for Eva’s ninety-fifth birthday, which had actually gone by two weeks earlier without celebration. Jenny, in the midst of the business of settling Naomi’s accounts so that they were firmly under her thumb, found herself oddly looking forward to it.

Eva’s daughter was in charge, a generally loved and admired relative in the family. A large, handsome woman in her early seventies, she was a gifted diplomat, so that even the four sisters felt equally stroked and comforted, and with her good managerial skills she directed the details of the dinner unobtrusively. It was held at Eva’s retirement residence in a private dining room just beyond the ornate main one. The guest list was small, considering the size of the family. There were eighteen people at a long table, nicely laid with flower baskets and candles, everybody dressed up, celebratory. Even Flora was almost appropriate in a silk shift of sedate banded colors, though glittered up with gold shoes and thigh-high gilt stockings that tended to slip down her legs. She wore a long string of fake oversize pearls that bounced about when she moved, and she moved constantly. The black blackness of her hair was startling.

There was a minimum of wheelchairs at the table—Eva’s, Naomi’s, and one for a friend of Eva’s from the residence—and only two walkers, also for the use of Eva’s friends, and a couple of canes. But the seating of Eva became a hassle. She refused the head of the table, where she had first been wheeled.

“I won’t be able to hear what anybody is saying except the persons on my left and right. I want to hear what everybody is saying. It’s my party, and I want to hear what’s going on.”

Finally fixed in the middle of the long table, she became engrossed in the question of seating others, and in the quality of the menu.

“This must be costing a fortune,” she said in a loud whisper to her daughter. “It better not show up on my bill, that’s all I have to say.” And said it a number of times.

She wore a handsome black-and-white pantsuit, but it was slung on her wasted body as if on a wire hanger, and with her moon face even her careful hairdo and makeup could not erase the deformation. She repeatedly questioned her daughter in a whisper everyone heard.

“Who invited
him?”

Nieces and nephews she seldom saw were a special target.

“Who invited
her?
I guess she came for the food. She’s not fooling me, not one bit. I know why she came. They come if it’s convenient,” she ventured between wine toasts to her continuing years. “They live nearby, so they come. For the food. Look how they’re eating. Otherwise you wouldn’t see them.”

Relatives who lived in Florida had been urged to appear to make the occasion sufficiently gala. Only Eva’s children and a couple of her grandchildren had come from distant points, her son and daughter for reasons other than the party, the son from Philadelphia, the daughter from Colorado, to settle questions of health care, of the sale of Eva’s holdings, of what to do next about doctors, medication, permanent care until death. Eva’s grandson had come from Albuquerque. He was a middle-aged man, almost bald, tall and muscular, handsome, loving and attentive to Grandma’s slightest wish, an obvious favorite. The granddaughter was a Botticelli in a flowered dress that flowed from her lovely bosom down to her feet, big in long black flats. Her fair hair, loose around her classically beautiful face, was pushed behind her ears to cascade down her graceful back. She looked in her twenties, though Jenny knew she was in her late thirties, the mother of three of Eva’s great-grandchildren, and a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I wear my hair up in a bun in class, Aunt Jenny,” she said when Jenny teased about students trying to date her.

“
Great
-aunt Jenny,” her brother corrected, and lifted his glass in a salute. He loved the idea of family, of greats and great-greats. Jenny had visited his house, complete with old family pictures carefully framed and hung. “And of course the kids try to date her,” he added.

The service was slow, but there was already much on the table. They drank wine, mineral water, ginger ale; ate bread, challa, and butter; amused themselves with pickles, coleslaw, sauerkraut, applesauce, black and green olives, sticks of celery and carrots, and a tasty corn mixture.

“We’ll be full before they serve dinner,” Flora said, and proposed another toast to Eva, this one to the artist in Eva, in every woman, in every man, in all life, the artistry with which mankind and womankind lived their lives “as Eva has done, as Eva is doing right now, living out her days as a work of art. May she live till one hundred years.”

“What did she say?” Eva said. “What was Flora mumbling about? If she isn’t the center of attention she’s not happy. So let her be happy, whatever she said. What did she say?”

But the fruit cup arrived and claimed Eva’s full concentration. Chicken soup with matzo balls followed quickly, and then there was another long pause. Naomi filled this one. She had written a poem in praise of Eva, her theme the great distances people had traveled to be present. Some of it rhymed, some didn’t.

Everybody is dressed nicely,

All the food is good and spicy.

Nephew Samuel came all the way from Atlanta,

Great-niece Carol called on the phone,

For it was too far from Montana.

Maine was Jenny’s starting place,

A year ago it could have been Spain.

A long poem, made longer by Naomi’s halting reading and the audience’s interruptions of appreciation. Some of it was unintelligible to Jenny, but the ending came through clearly.

We all love Eva,

Long may she wave

O’er the Miami land of the free

And the Miami home of the brave.

Under cover of the applause and laughter someone said, “Isn’t that a football team?” And Jenny heard Eva complaining, “I couldn’t hear a word, not a word. What did she say? She looks beautiful, I’ll say that for her.”

Naomi did indeed look beautiful, in dress, hat, manner, serene face and carriage. She had been silent before reading the poem and was silent afterwards, turning from speaker to speaker with her large, intelligent eyes fixed on their faces, smiling, smiling, smiling—at Eva, at the relatives, at the waiters, at her own reflection in a compact mirror, at Jenny across the table, and again at her own reflection.

Following the chicken, potatoes, mixed vegetables, salad, and compote came the birthday cake, complete with the blowing out of the candles after the “Happy Birthday” song, in which the staff and waiters joined. Then coffee and tea (decaffeinated) and a round of champagne.

Jenny felt Eva’s exhaustion even as Eva forced herself to rise to the occasion. For a few minutes, with a great effort of will and memory, Eva became the woman she had always been in social situations—alert, elegant, and gracious. In a clear, strong voice, she thanked everybody for coming, for their gifts of flowers and their good wishes, and in turn wished them “all the good things of life” and a very, very good night, before inexplicably reverting to irritability when her daughter announced that the party was shifting to “the ballroom.”

“I’m too tired. And what about the flowers? Take, take, everyone, we don’t want them to go to waste, and I can’t use all these flowers. Come on, come on, come on, I’m tired, let’s get this over with.”

Shepherded by Eva’s daughter, everyone moved in a clumsy body, by wheelchairs, walkers, canes, and legs, to a large room off the central lobby where live music was being supplied by a group of half-live musicians. There was a good-sized waxed floor, with some surprisingly athletic old couples dancing. It was the Villa Rosa’s regular Saturday night dance, decorated with miniature silver top hats, confetti, balloons, and ivory cigarette holders dangling from the ceiling.

“They try to make it feel like the twenties when we were all young. Some try.” Eva, dripping scorn.

There were prizes and refreshments at a long table, a special area for wheelchairs and walkers, and a small platform for the decrepit five-man band. The saxophonist was deathly white. Each intake of breath might be his last, and the drummer, his heavy body swaying and yearning toward the floor, made Jenny nervous.

“They make fools of themselves here every Saturday night,” Eva said, “but what the hell, I come and watch them anyway.”

Eva’s Botticelli granddaughter electrified the room and was seized on by a thin, stooped old man who had been dancing around the floor alone. She begged off, he persisted passionately and won. He didn’t try to embrace her in a traditional lead, but danced in the current style, without touching, facing her. In a black pinstripe suit too big for his wasted body, his tie loosened, his white hair fluttering, his limbs as if screwed in at the wrong angle, his feet dragging, his back bent almost double, no longer able to convey rhythm with his wreck of a body, he used whatever he had left, kept time with a raised index finger, greeted the draggy music with an eloquent dip of his drooping head, marked the beat with a defining stamp of one aching foot, his face ecstatic, his shoulders rolling, a dancer to the end, which might seize him at any instant. Meanwhile, he treasured his turn with his enchanting springtime youth in her long flowered dress and flowing hair, stumbling about in her large flat-heeled shoes, embarrassed as hell.

Jealous, Flora cut in during the pause between dance numbers, dismissing Eva’s granddaughter and steering the momentarily bewildered old man into a fast step.

“You’re leading me,” he hollered, trying to escape Flora’s grip. She was holding him by both arms, moving him around expertly. Flora was still a terrific dancer. “Stop it, stop it. I’m the leader. The man is the leader. Let go of me. I want my partner, my real partner.”

He broke free, located his Botticelli, and without touching her lured her back to the floor. Once again youth and age danced. Flora, outraged by a public rejection, began circling the couple in a frenzy of rapid steps and high kicks, slapping her hand to the inside of her elbow and raising her arm in alternation with fluttering hand-to-nose signals accompanied by crooning cries of “Fuck you, old man” in tune with the music. Her silk dress had fallen over one shoulder, exposing her bra strap, her hair was a soot-black mess, her slip showed its lacy edge, and her gilt thigh-highs were sliding into her gilded shoes.

“She’s wonderful!” Jenny heard a woman exclaim. “She’s as good as Twyla Tharp.”

Even those in the residence who wanted to hate it loved it: the family of correct, sedate Eva Resnick making a show of themselves.
Scandale.
Entrancing. Better than a show, better than a musical. “If you paid sixty-five dollars a ticket like on Broadway, it couldn’t be better,” one woman said. Jenny heard others take up the refrain like a mantra and repeat it again and again.

“I’m very tired,” Naomi said. “This is exhausting.”

It was Eva who broke the spell. “Enough is enough.
Fini la comédie.
Naomi’s tired. So am I. Time for bed. Let’s say these festivities are at an end. Definitively.” And gestured for someone to move her wheelchair in the right direction. Out of that ballroom. Out.

“I don’t want her money,” Flora said. “But why should a nursing home get it? You secure it, I don’t care, I just don’t want the nursing home to get it. You know what they charge? Five, six, seven thousand a month, depending on the billing, depending on what they can stick you with, aspirin, X-rays, the nurses’ gloves, for God’s sake. Seventeen dollars a box and they bill you for gloves every few days. I know the ropes. I have plenty of friends in nursing homes.”

“We can’t secure the money if you mean hide it,” Jenny said. “You mean Medicaid, putting her on Medicaid? They do a three-year back search. Through all holdings, all accounts, all financial transactions. It’s too late to hide her money.”

“I know all about the three-year back search. You get around it. Everybody does. You think people are paying those terrible amounts of money? Nobody’s paying. They all go on Medicaid.”

“I don’t see how,” Jenny said. “Naomi told me that she doesn’t even want to go to a convalescent home after the operation next week. I had a long talk with her. She says she’ll only stay in the hospital overnight, and then back to the residence. I think she’d die in five minutes in a Medicaid space in an old age home.”

“A nursing home,” Flora corrected. “It’s not a question of what Naomi wants, it’s a question of the right thing to do. How does she expect to go back to the residence? She can’t go down to meals. They’ve been carrying her meals up to her room. Five dollars a clip, she insists on giving them five dollars a clip. She can’t manage by herself now, how is she going to manage after the operation? She’s not going to get better, you know. She’s dying, Jenny. The doctor said six months, if that. And she’s making a mess of it. She spent seventy-five hundred on her funeral expenses. Okay, so everything’s arranged, casket, shipment to New York, the whole bit, but she didn’t have to spend more than four thousand. I gave her the best information, no, she had to go to the place she wanted, she knew better, she had to go to the place she wanted just so she could be overcharged.”