The Girls (14 page)

Jenny said, “Water’s fine for me now. I’ll have a glass of red wine with lunch,” quickly adding, “I’m the first to admit I know very little about poetry, Flora, but I love Allen Ginsberg, and if he said …”

“Well, that’s a relief, hearing you admit you’re wrong about something.” Flora drained half of her oversized glass.

Jenny sipped at her water, mentally withdrew from what was a no-win conversation, and immersed herself in her surroundings and the constant parade on the sidewalk. The restaurants that lined Ocean Drive were housed in restored 1920s Art Deco hotels. Here camp was king. Queen, Jenny corrected herself. Their facades were embellished in unusual hues—pinks, greens, all shades of Flora’s purples—along with the more usual gray, white, and black. Some were as lavish in design and color as oriental palaces. From the ocean, some distance beyond the stretch of avenue and then of park, of coconut palms and wide sandy beach, the sea breeze battled with emissions from the expensive cars cruising by and the food smells from the posh restaurants. Parked at the curb, an antique Rolls-Royce, exquisitely maintained, brought passersby to a halt to admire its splendid brass fixtures, but most quickly moved on. Strollers on Ocean Drive were not there to see but to be seen.

And they were something to see. Hair of all natural and unnatural colors and cuts, no hair at all or hair all over the place, eyes sunglassed, naked of makeup, or wildly made up, bared asses bosoms belly-buttons, bare backs, bare middles, bare legs legs legs, bare feet arms underarms crotches. High-fashion bare, though in a pinch bare alone would do it. Thonged bare asses in abundance, men’s and women’s, painted bodies and pierced parts, tiny underwear dresses, long clinging shifts with nothing underneath, soft soft pants displaying the penis and the mound, many no-tops and microscopic bras. If cover-up clothes were worn, they were expensive baggy raggedy limp, with their wearers carrying backpacks or sporty duffels slamming around their sloppy pants legs. The film crowd.

“Fantastic,” Jenny said, hoping for a change of subject. She waved in the direction of a middle-aged hunk, naked except for tall cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a brilliant red scarf wrapped around his groin. Bright golden hair covered his body. Dyed? “Look at that one.”

Flora barely glanced up. “Gay,” she said. “That’s the trouble. Hard to find a real man these days. But you probably wouldn’t know what to do with him if you found one,” she added, and without a pause, “I don’t know what to order. Could we share some baked clams oreganato with our drinks? You know, I think I forgot to take my medication this morning. Now it’s too late. It’s a no-no with liquor.”

“Sure,” Jenny said, and flagged down a waiter. “Are you ready to order your main dish? What do you take? And what’s it for?”

Flora waved away the question as the waiter arrived. “You see,” she said after ordering another Bloody Mary, spaghetti with red clam sauce, and a green salad, “what you don’t understand is how important the senior scene is down here in South Beach. You think that a senior event in South Beach is of no importance.” Jenny heard the words italicized.
Senior scene. A senior event.

“No, no,” she said. “South Beach is very chic, everybody knows that. It’s one of the chic places of the world. Right up there with the Via Veneto.”

“Glad to hear it from your mouth,” Flora said, and suggested that a half-carafe of red wine would be nice with their entrees.

When their orders arrived, Flora became more disheveled with every sip. She had pulled her skirt up high on her thighs, her white cotton brassiere showed above the opened lamé shirt, and she lolled on the chair as if the bones in her body had melted; there was a lot of rolling flesh exposed. The loud rock music had been changed to a Sinatra tape. She sang along: “If you are among the very young at heart.”

A passing group of strollers called out, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Grandma!”

“Grandma, yourself,” Flora yelled, and gave them the middle finger.

They enjoyed that even more. An extraordinarily tall young woman in thick platform shoes that increased her height, with a thriving mane of black black hair, her perfect ass in a thong and her inflated breasts in a tiny lace bra revealing pale ivory skin, as if wind and sun never existed, detached herself from the group. With a deep bow and a dazzling smile, she laid a long-stemmed red rose on Flora’s exposed pink thighs.

“Go, go, go,” she intoned in a blessing.

“See?” Flora said. “You have to admit it,
schvester,
I’m a smash in South Beach.”

B
Y MID-SPRING SOME DECISIONS
had been reached. Eva and Naomi were headed for the same nursing home, expensive, reputedly very good—so long as the two stayed well enough and sane enough to avoid assignation to the dreaded third floor, where the dying messy crazies were housed. There had been endless conferences on the matter.

Flora was opposed, not to the place, which no one had seen yet, but to the concept of Eva and Naomi under the same roof.

“They don’t get along, they’ve never gotten along. Naomi can’t even stand Eva’s wardrobe, she’s always complaining that all Eva wears is pants. How can they see each other every day? What if they have to share the same closet? It’s impossible.”

Eva’s children were in favor. They felt their mother would have more company and their burden would be eased. And they thought it would be nice if there were only one place for the family to visit.

“Killing two birds with one stone,” Naomi had said, letting her bitterness show.

“Don’t you like the idea?” Jenny said.

“What’s to like?” She waved a hand, wiping it all away. “Doesn’t matter, it’s a big place, and it’s not as if we’re sharing a room. I guess it’s a good idea. It will save all of you a lot of trouble.”

“Don’t worry about us. Think of yourself, what you want.”

Naomi laughed. “Ah, what I want.” She closed her eyes against further discussion. “Let it be, it’s fine, it’s fine.”

Did Naomi understand that she was dying? The surgeon had recommended still another operation on the groin; the oncologist urged chemo, in addition or instead, to extend her life. How long? Hard to say, perhaps some months.

Naomi refused. “I just want to be left alone. No more tinkering. Just make sure they keep me out of pain, Jenny.”

Jenny had asked the doctors how long Naomi might live without medical intervention. Again they found it hard to say. “Three months, with luck six or seven, difficult to predict,” and as an afterthought, “or she could go any day.”

Nobody was predicting the date of Eva’s death. With the change of medication she seemed to be feeling very well. She was looking well too, and not so fretful, and she was content with the idea of the nursing home. Naomi’s presence was an irrelevance since they wouldn’t be right on top of one another. It couldn’t be too bad, and if it turned out to be good, so much the better.

“We were never really close,” Eva told Jenny. “You know that. All those old rivalries. Papa loved me best. Mama loved her best. I wanted it the other way around, and so did she. She was always prettier. I was jealous of that. And she was jealous of me—God knows why, I don’t. Maybe because of my children and my grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. She messed up her life, and she has nobody but herself to blame. I’m sorry for her. She has nobody.”

She has me,
Jenny thought.

“She has you, thank God, she’s lucky there, and she thinks the world of you, so she’ll listen to you. She doesn’t think much of me, but that’s okay, I don’t think much of her, and she’d never listen to anything I suggest. She listens to Flora, though, who can be depended on to steer her wrong.”

“That’s not true. You love one another. You know you do.”

“Of course we love one another. We’re sisters. That’s why it’s okay to be in the same nursing home. Even if it turns out bad, which I sincerely hope it won’t.”

“Eva, isn’t it funny how we each think like that?”

“Like what?”

“That our sisters don’t think much of us, that our family, you know, doesn’t appreciate us, doesn’t recognize, you know, our reality, the persons we really are …”

“I think the world of you, Jenny, you know that.”

“Yes, but you know what I mean, what we’re always saying about one another …”

“That’s the way sisters are,” Eva said. “We each want to be perfect, and we want all of us to be perfect. And we all want to be the favorite. Of everybody. We’ve all hurt one another. We’ve all messed up one way or another. But it doesn’t matter anymore, Jenny, we’re too old for that nonsense, who loves who the most, who’s better, who’s best, you, me, Flora, Naomi. We’re all good enough.”

“Good enough?” Flora was outraged by Jenny’s flawed attempt later to convey the conversation with Eva. “I’m the best, none of this second-rate ‘good enough.’ If Eva thinks she’s good enough, that’s her privilege, but I’m the best and so are you and so is Naomi in her way. I resent that. I really resent that. Trying to bring us all down to her level. She wallows in being normal. It’s disgusting.”

Jenny blamed herself for the outburst. She never should have opened up this can of worms for Flora’s interpretation, especially since they faced an enormous task that would take as much diplomacy as the two of them could muster. With all the arrangements set, it was Jenny and Flora’s job to see their sisters through the actual move.

More Jenny’s job than Flora’s, as it turned out. Flora had altered, as if she had stepped into another room by passing through her eighty-sixth birthday a few weeks earlier. Stepped into a permanent bedroom. Now she spent most of the day lying down, watching TV, dozing off, getting up to pee, roaming the living room, wandering into the kitchen, gazing into the refrigerator, eating a little snack, pacing the bedroom, lying down again, watching TV, dozing off, waking to pee … Jenny would force Flora to dress, then walk her, as she leaned heavily on Jenny’s arm, to the places she loved, McDonald’s for their packaged apple pie and coffee in the afternoon, Wendy’s for a chicken sandwich for supper.

Jenny made Flora attend a cookout on the broad terrace of her condominium, where she pushed and shoved alongside the other anxious Jewish and Latino residents to get her legitimate share of hotdogs with sauerkraut, cold cuts and coleslaw, and thick wedges of strawberry shortcake. A small but heated culture war was raging in the condominium. The Latinos wanted their food, and had victoriously achieved a separate smaller area where chicken and rice, black beans and
plátanos
were being served, to much whispered grumbling from the Jewish section. Jenny tried a little of each, alienating all sides.

In this controversy Flora came alive.

“What’s wrong with people? Why can’t they live and let live? Everybody pay their five dollars apiece and eat whatever they like. Hotdogs, fried bananas, who cares? Pay your five dollars and get your share. Their music, our music, who cares? Music’s music.”

Flora’s position was an astonishment to Jenny. Impossible to predict her point of view on any subject.

“I paid my five dollars just like everybody else,” Flora went on. “So did you. See that you get your share. You want fried bananas, why not? Everybody to her own taste. I hate fried bananas. There’s chocolate macaroons on the dessert table too. Left over from Passover, I bet, but they can stay pretty fresh. Bring me a couple of those when you get us coffee.”

For an hour and a half on the broad, warring, multilingual multicultural deck, Flora was her old onstage self, singing “Ruzinkas mit Mandlin” and “Amapola” without prejudice and to much applause before she collapsed into bed and stayed there, fixed before the TV, dozing, rising only to pee, pace the living room, stare into the refrigerator …

Jenny had taken a sublet in Flora’s condominium, on another floor but near enough to be on call. Although it was more spacious and comfortable than the shabby beach hotel, Jenny found it harder to live in this intimate space the owners had created. Souvenirs made of shells. Shmeary abstract paintings. A complete maple bedroom set. Photographs of relatives on every surface. She tiptoed around, an unwelcome alien, creating a spot for herself before the oversized TV, where she took her hurried meals on a small folding table and quickly erased all signs of her intruder presence when she was finished.

She spent most of her time with her sisters, trying to keep Flora active, preparing Eva and Naomi for their moves to the nursing home. Eva’s children had located the place by long distance, but it had been left to Jenny and Flora to inspect it. Flora begged off and sent Jenny on her own to “case the joint,” as Flora put it.

“You’ve got to do it, Jenny. I’m no good anymore. I’m losing my marbles. Those places scare me so much I don’t know shit from shinola. I wouldn’t even know what questions to ask, and if I did I’d promptly forget the answers.”

The home was a nondenominational Catholic nursing facility far from the beach but on an inland waterway dotted with boats and birds of infinite variety, a brilliant blue road bordered by flowering plants, playfully shaped skyscraper apartment houses and luxury hotels, the looming, looping white structures of the thruway in the distance, the whole lit in greens, blues, soft reds, like a stage set. The building itself was a dull square of red brick, but the grounds were lavish with patios festooned in striped awnings, round tables with matching striped umbrellas, and canvas chairs set out on tiled oases surrounded by greenery and blossoms.

Inside, the home made a failing effort to be homey. It was too big for that, too much like a hospital, the halls too long, too smelling of disinfectant, the tones too determinedly cheerful and loud, on the assumption that the patients were deaf and childish, as many were. There were nuns in slacks and dresses—no habits visible—and patients of all colors and backgrounds. Women, as usual, predominated. A rabbi and a priest were available for the religious, and there were regular services. Staff included a Jewish social worker, an Irish cashier, a Jewish handicapped man at the main desk, black nurses, attendants, aides, technicians, kitchen and cleaning help, men and women, Caribbeans and Latinos. The doctors were mainly white, as was administration, with an occasional black and Asian.