The Girls (15 page)

Eva’s children had chosen a private room for her, sight unseen. Jenny was shown not
the
room Eva would occupy but one just like it. It was large, airy, located on the preferred second floor overlooking one of the gardens, big closet, private bath, armchair, TV mounted on one wall, crucifix on the other. (Good thing Flora hadn’t come after all.) Cost? Realistically, between six and seven thousand a month.

“What happens when her money’s all gone?”

Eva’s children were in charge of Eva’s money, but Jenny was managing Naomi’s.

“The patient is shifted to a Medicaid bed in a double room, the same as the room I’m about to show you for your other sister.”

The young woman escorting Jenny was pretty, nicely put together in a black silk pantsuit lightened by a long string of gray-and-white beads made of some kind of tropical seed. She was essentially a saleswoman, but her spiel was heavily shmaltzed with compassionate phrasing:
caring, loving, close, family.
Her light blue eyes remained dead.

Naomi’s room would be the same size on the same preferred floor, but with two beds separated by rings of curtain, two dressers, two armchairs, two big closets, two TVs, one bathroom, one large window overlooking a parking lot, one mounted crucifix. Cost? Four to five thousand. The bed, Jenny was assured, was assigned to Medicaid, no need to move the patient when her money gave out. Naomi’s roommate-to-be was already a Medicaid patient, a sweet-faced blond woman who sat fully dressed in her armchair in the darkest corner of the room, staring and smiling. Though she looked younger, she was ninety-four. She opened her arms to Jenny and broadened her vague smile.

“She thinks you’re her visitor. She never gets any, poor thing.”

Jenny blew her a kiss to no response and hurried after the young woman, who was now showing her the special rooms: for being bathed (terrifyingly deep metal tubs like torture chambers), for being exercised (machines and pads, less scary), and a sort of classroom (one bookcase, a scattering of books, pamphlets, and xeroxed sheets, a blackboard, a TV, a computer).

Jenny had already visited the central lobby, featuring exotic birds in a large glass enclosure with a small flowering tree. Shut-in birds for shut-in patients. A lunchroom off the lobby served ambulant residents: tablecloths, cloth napkins, fresh flowers in skinny vases, cafeteria aroma of clashing foods. Naomi liked eating at a table set with cloth and flowers. She’d hate the smell.

“But what if she can’t manage a tray?”

“She can be waited on, or helped in any other way. We have some wonderful volunteers.”

Then on to a lounge where the ambulant on their own frail legs gathered with those using wheelchairs, recliners, crutches, walkers, and canes. A heavy woman, garishly made up and obviously wigged, decked out in a sequined pantsuit, was performing a concert of golden oldies with a scratchy recording for backup. “Borsht Belt has-been,” Flora called the type. Exhausted and out of breath, Has-been was winding up with “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” Ice cream and cookies next, the real draw of the performance. Jenny was offered a dish, and not knowing how to refuse her escort without insult, she tried a mouthful. It was real ice cream, none of that low-fat yogurt stuff. She ate it greedily.

Eager to leave her, the saleswoman smiled, asked if Jenny had any other questions, pointed to the exit, and urged Jenny to visit the patio on her way out. Suddenly alive in all her body, she shook hands vigorously, assured Jenny that her sisters would be very happy at Serenity Villa, and bolted from the disheveled room of dying bodies.

Jenny sat for a minute. Across what passed for an aisle in that mess of furniture for the sick and dying, a slim, handsome man with a full head of white hair and a deeply tanned face had finished his ice cream. He was propped up in an elaborately fitted upholstered recliner on wheels, carefully dressed in expensive chinos and a Brooks Brothers striped dress shirt, the collar open and the long sleeves dashingly folded back below his elbows. One of the volunteers, a soft young woman in a long flowered dress, was trying to collect the refuse of his snack. He relinquished his paper plate but held on to his paper napkin. He seemed to have had a stroke. He couldn’t speak. His dramatic dark eyes were eloquent. The young woman pressed him to drop the napkin into the black plastic garbage bag she carried, but he clutched it tighter the more she insisted.

“Would you like more ice cream, Mr. Kaplan? Is that it?”

He couldn’t respond. His eyes glowed with a mysterious message. The young woman tugged at the napkin. He tightened his grip, she tugged, he gripped harder. The young woman gave up with a little shrug of incomprehension.

“That’s okay, Mr. Kaplan. We’ll get it later.”

The urgency in his eyes changed when the volunteer left. Jenny watched him concentrate on the napkin, fixing it with an evident emotion as strong as lust or love, until the fingers loosened and dropped it in his lap, revealing two squashed cookies which he labored to bring up to his mouth to chew with slow, victorious satisfaction. When he had swallowed the last crumb, he put back his head and closed the lids on his lustrous eyes.

On her way out through the patio, she passed a black family visiting a paralyzed old man in another recliner on wheels. She sat down on a bench in the shade and watched. They were a large family, one very old couple, many middle-aged and young people, children, babies, and a big golden-haired dog who kept his long-nosed noble head in the old man’s lap. They laughed and talked, horsed around, chased down the wandering babies. They ate and drank sodas, fruits, nuts, chocolates, ice cream, and hunks of birthday cake, the bigger kids racing around the damp paths of the recently watered garden, a daughter son grandson granddaughter taking turns at the side of the recliner, patting the dog’s head to keep him put, smoothing the old man’s round wrinkled forehead and his thin white hair, kissing hugging holding up the babies for him to see, urging the playing children to stop by for a minute to say hello to Grandpa, Great-grandpa, stroking stroking smiling smiling smiling into the old man’s eyes hazed over with immobilized love and pain and happiness.

She had neglected to call a cab from the desk of the nursing home. Stuck in an area where taxis didn’t cruise, she headed for the bus stop but halted some way from its shaded bench. A homeless man had made it his library/office. Instead of a shopping cart full of rags, his was packed with books, pads, manuscripts. There was a suitcase strapped to the side of the cart, probably holding his clothing. He was neatly dressed, washed and combed, though very hairy: long full beard, a huge halo of hair tied into a ponytail with a shoelace, hairy arms and feathery hairs on the backs of his hands and fingers down to the nails.

She wanted to talk to him, ask what he was working on, but he was too intent to disturb. He was writing in a script so tiny it was barely legible, though she strained hard to read the words flowing on long lined sheets of yellow paper held by a clipboard—a method of working so like her own it startled her. He was even using one of her favorite pens, a heavy silver Waterman. He had a lean, worn face. His concentration in this public corner of the covered bus stop was exemplary, a lesson in ignoring the nonessential. He was oblivious to Jenny’s hungry curiosity and to the presence of the other waiting passengers, who gave him a wide berth. He worked as if he were entirely alone. He searched out a book from the shopping cart, whirled pages, found what he needed, wrote rapidly in the tiny script. Heat, breeze, insects were nothing to him, nor the ceaseless traffic whizzing by, nor the incongruity of a poster behind his head of four young women in wet-lipped hilarity cavorting in scanty costumes and selling—what? Makeup, hair dye, underwear, sportswear, bathing suits, evening gowns, shoes? Impossible to say if one didn’t recognize the logo, as she did not.

She envied him. What was wrong with her? She was actually envying a homeless, crazy bum. Because he was working.

She couldn’t work in Miami. There was nothing of substance left in her head after visiting Naomi and Eva at their separate retirement residences. Or before, for that matter, when she was on call for Flora’s moods. A book assigned for review by a literary quarterly lay at her bedside in the alien bedroom next to a pad attached to a clipboard, with a starting sentence on its yellow lined page. That was as much as she had managed. One sentence. Why was she sacrificing the little time left her to work? She was eighty years old, for God’s sake. Was she doing it for love? Sisterhood? Was she doing it for Naomi’s measly amount of money, which she was spending like water, like it grew on trees, for Naomi’s good, not her own? Her own good lay north, in her house in Maine, in her life in New York with her children and grandchildren, with her friends, with her work. Would she never, ever be free of her family?

Instead of working, she swam. Miami was for swimming.

In the greeny blue of the pool on the broad terrace, out under the sky and the sun, the water heavy with chlorine, the breeze larded with the smell of fried seafood, she swam. Her body entered the water and she was sane again, agile, calmed, cured, her head clear of everything but the pleasure of free movement. She swam twice a day, avoiding the times when the pool was crowded with old Jewish men and women standing waist-high in the water chatting, or with Latino kids splashing and screaming. She swam at odd hours, alone, herself and the healing waters, one on one. In the pool she thought of a second sentence to write on the yellow lined paper, and a third, a whole paragraph. In the water’s perfect embrace she was able to think.

Flora thought her mad for swimming in the pool—“That chlorine will kill you, why don’t you swim in the ocean, the ocean’s pure!”—when she wasn’t accusing Jenny of showing off by swimming at all: “You’re too old to be swimming by yourself in a pool full of chlorine. I stopped when I was eighty.” It became one of their recurring struggles. She explained to Flora that she too preferred the ocean. But. There was the matter of the ridge—a couple of feet of trench filled with sharp rocks and smashed shells in a swirling undertow that unbalanced her. She would have to pass through that danger to reach swimmable waters. Couldn’t Flora understand that it would be a disaster if she fell and broke a hip? She was in Miami to help, not to compound the problems. She would love to be led in and out of the dangerous trench if she could find the angel who would do that and leave her alone in between, herself and the ocean, one on one, receiving the miracle cure of the healing waters, but failing that, she would swim in the pool, reveling in the illusion of perfect mobility by way of the imperfect crawl she had been taught in high school. It was good enough. It was great. It wiped out age. For an hour or so.

The week of the scheduled move to the nursing home, Miami Beach was revving itself up for the promise of a first-class storm. The weathermen were in heaven. Their moment of glory. The word “awesome” had taken over the airwaves. Before the expected full impact, there was the menace of the blackened roiling sea beyond the condo windows, the power and the incessant noise of the astonishing wind, the sand between the teeth with every breath, on the lids and in the eyes with every blink.

Jenny had begun by pooh-poohing it all. “If you’ve been through a nor’easter, you’ve been through the worst,” she said, and actually left the building, through the garage door on the side street, to buy a newspaper and prove the storm inferior.

She had exited at a moment of comparative quiet, but after a few steps, at the corner, it was impossible to stand. She sat right down on the brick path and waited for a lull, scared out of her mind, desperately clinging to the wrought-iron fence surrounding a flower bed. She watched as the entrance canopy of a seedy hotel across the street was ripped from its moorings and sent flying, a mad object of canvas and metal supports banging away at windows and the sides of buildings in a terrifying display until it touched down in front of the three-for-ten-dollars T-shirt store, knocking over the racks of sale garments perennially on sidewalk display and coming to rest wedged under a
Miami Herald
vending machine chained to a lamppost.

She crawled back into the building during the next lull and took Flora’s barrage without a word of reply.

“Are you crazy? Are you crazy? What are you—
crazy?
This is a Miami Beach storm. You have no idea what we’re in for. You don’t tangle with a Miami Beach storm,
schvester,
not if you’re in your right mind.”

The danger had revived Flora. Bed no longer claimed her. She was fully dressed first thing in the morning in a bright blue Dutch boy outfit, with a middy top and pants bulging at the hips, narrowing to the ankles. She had wound around her head and throat a gossamer blue scarf, which from time to time she pulled entirely over her face, to keep the sand out, she said.

Sand was blowing into the apartment, blowing in through the tiniest exposed cracks of seams around the sills and decorative bricks, propelled by the wildly whistling wind roaring and screaming without stop. Flora was busy securing the premises, stuffing windows with cloths, piling towels on sills and on the floor along the walls facing the sea, filling pots with water, filling kettles, pitchers, jars with water, filling the refrigerator with bottles of water, filling the bathtub with water, the sinks, filling pails to place in the bathrooms in case all the other water got used up.

Though it was not yet the season, the weathermen were talking hurricane, talking hurricane-strength winds, potentially a hundred miles per hour, talking high pressure, low pressure, talking weather patterns, talking
niño,
talking direction in which the storm was moving, talking evacuation, talking eye of the storm while pointing to swirling graphics of a terrorizing nature, talking talking talking.

Flora turned on both TVs and every radio in the apartment, in case one or the other gave out. She darted around checking the refrigerator, the freezer, the cupboards. She mourned that it was too late to go to the supermarket and stock up further. She called stores that might deliver come hell or high water, found a couple, ordered two Cuban meals from one because they delivered though she didn’t like Cuban food, ordered two kosher meals, chicken soup with matzo balls and noodles, roast chicken, potato kugel, kasha varnishkes, half a challa and half a rye bread, coleslaw and a couple of dill pickles, even a small sponge cake, because they delivered.