Authors: Helen Yglesias
“We’ll be okay,” Flora said. “I stock all that canned soup and baked beans and tuna fish and gefilte fish, and there’s plenty of vegetables in the crisper and frozen juice and frozen fruit in the freezer, and all that Italian stuff, pizzas and lasagna and linguine alfredo, I really love linguine alfredo, and I’ve got powdered milk and evaporated and even condensed because you never know, that’s why I’m always stocking up, because you never know when God will decide to hit Miami Beach with everything he’s got. Hey!” She was triumphant. “I just found a whole package of Hebrew National hotdogs at the back of the freezer.”
Then, collapsing into laughter, “Do you remember,” she said, “during the war with all the shortages, when Lionel’s wife Lillian was living with us and Lionel was in the service and Jonah was a little boy, she stuffed the closet in her bedroom with bananas because she was afraid they’d get scarce like sugar and coffee and be put on the ration books? Do you remember the stink, the awful stink of the rotting bananas and how embarrassed she was? She thought something terrible would happen to Jonah if he didn’t have his mashed banana a day. She was such an idiot, God rest her soul. How in the world our brothers managed to all marry idiots is beyond me.”
“What’s beyond me,” Jenny said, “is how that unattractive, retarded-looking, drooling baby turned into the man who’s the dean of faculty at the University of Illinois, or wherever he is, and the distinguished author of half a dozen books on Freud, Jung, and Rank.”
“I think it’s Indiana, University of Indiana—or is that Eva’s son? Who’s Rank anyway? You’re always coming up with these names—and the way you pronounce them. Rahnk, Rahnk,” she said, mimicking the open vowel. “I’m exhausted. I have to lie down now. Could we have no more conversation for a while? Please?”
That left Jenny free to call Eva, who was napping right through the storm, according to a friend who was sitting with her in case she was scared. “And she had a real good bowel movement before she fell asleep,” the friend reported.
So Eva was okay.
It was Naomi who was petrified. Naomi hadn’t slept, she was in pain from the latest surgery, she couldn’t find her pain pills, she hadn’t been able to move her bowels, she couldn’t understand why God would choose to wipe them all out here in Miami Beach on a morning when she was having trouble with her bowels.
“There’s nothing, nothing but a little sand between us and the ocean. It’s going to rise up in its wrath and overwhelm us. What does God think he’s doing? And there’s nothing we can do. Can you come here and stay with me, Jenny? Please, I’m so frightened.”
Jenny, trying to remember if it was Chateaubriand who had recorded his daily bowel movements in his journals in his old age, and wondering if perhaps it was an obsession of the old generally that would overtake her any day now, heard Naomi answering herself.
“No, no, of course not, darling, it’s too dangerous, don’t you dare go out of the building, though God alone knows if you’ll be safe in there. I can’t help it. I can’t help feeling that if we’re all together we’re safer, if only we were all together in one place. It’s been so long since we were all together in one place, safe.”
Something like seventy-five years since they had all been together in one place, in the sense Naomi meant. Living together. Not partying together at weddings, bar mitzvas, big birthdays, or mourning together at funerals, and even then someone always missing, dead or ill or too busy, but
living
together. Safe? When had it been safe? Never. Too many of them, too little space in those four-room apartments, not enough bedrooms, not enough beds, too little money, too many clashing hopes, too much need, Mama overworked and torn to pieces between them, Papa centered on his sons, his sons, since the best his daughters might do was marry into prosperity, while his sons would make something of themselves, give his wasted life meaning, take care of his old age, say
Kaddish
when he died.
Daughters weren’t supposed to make something of themselves, just as Mama had never made anything of herself. But what did that mean? Mama’s life amounted to nothing? Of course she had made something of herself, she had made
them,
out of the calcium of her brittle bones. She had borne and raised that family whose sons Papa claimed as assets and the daughters as liabilities until they married into prosperity. Mama had worked, worked, worked. She was one of the world’s great producers. She had made an extraordinary product, a human being, seven times. George Bernard Shaw believed a woman should be paid twenty thousand pounds for each child she bore, or some such sum. That would have supplied Mama with a nice little nest egg for her old age, the pension society had never granted her.
Reassuring Naomi, promising to get to Naomi just as soon as she could, she felt herself the child she had been in the midst of her family—little girl Jenny in a dream of dissimulation, doing the right thing, being good, skipping along the sidewalk on her skinny legs, skipping along in school from grade to grade without effort, caught in a monstrous enchantment of being the good little helpful unobtrusive girl to whom everything happened if not against her will then certainly without it.
My life in my family is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,
she paraphrased. And warned herself to stop dramatizing.
The storm veered north, offshore, lessening in power, landing without much damage on the tip of the Carolinas, dropping heavy rains along the way and leaving Miami Beach washed brilliantly clean and user-friendly, so that it became possible once again to plan Eva and Naomi’s move to the nursing home.
First, manicures and pedicures had to be arranged. It started with Flora, still invigorated by the storm. She wanted to play a full part in the coming move, but first she must have a pedicure.
“And while I’m at it, I may as well have a manicure,” she said.
Naomi, quite independently, said she must have a manicure and a pedicure before she went into
that place.
And Eva, of course, had to have a pedicure and manicure too.
And while they were at it, Eva and Naomi might as well have their hair done.
For Jenny, who had never had a pedicure, and a manicure only once, when she was seventeen, for brother Max’s formal wedding at Essex House on Central Park South because his wife-to-be was rich and her folks were paying and Naomi insisted that her little sister wasn’t going to shame the family by attending a fancy wedding without a hair set and manicure, the whole gestalt of
manicure, pedicure
was part of the mystery of childhood, right up there with underwear and sex. Romantic sex. A permanent picture existed in her consciousness of herself as a baby, entranced by the sight and sweet smell of grown-up glamorous Eva dressed in a pink brocade gown, sitting at the window of the family’s crowded Brooklyn flat, polishing her nails with a long silver-handled shammy buffer. Eva was waiting for the arrival of the man she was to become engaged to that night. He would take her out to dinner in a swanky restaurant (Italian), where he would formally propose and present her with a diamond engagement ring (small). Jenny learned all this later from Flora, who was talented at ferreting out family secrets. But hidden in the romance of the pink brocade and the shining nails was something else, something dark to do with expensive silken underwear and partial violent nakedness, something shuddery to do with the tall, handsome, forbidding man in a tuxedo who was the manager of the office where soft-skinned, soft-eyed big sister Eva worked as a bookkeeper and had nabbed this good catch that Papa was so pleased with. And hidden in her older sister’s hope was thick, dispiriting dread, so pervasive that Jenny smelled it on Eva’s skin. Eva was not quite eighteen years old.
Eventually the diamond ring would be pawned and lost in one of Eva’s husband’s recurring disastrous slides into financial failure during their long marriage. The silver-handled buffer survived the ring, tarnishing a bit along with its matching hand mirror and comb and brush that sat on a silver tray on Eva’s dresser wherever Eva’s dresser turned up throughout the economic vagaries of her marriage, until the old-fashioned set finally disappeared out of Eva’s life.
And the painted nails survived, the shining painted fingernails of her sisters as they grew up ahead of her. The smell of the nail polish and the remover over the smell of their perfume was embedded in Jenny’s memories like the smell of dill in Mama’s Friday night chicken soup, but while Mama’s dill insured love and safety, nail polish sent a different message, of soft hidden flesh in the silky underwear they bought even when they couldn’t afford it, for the naked struggles with the men they did or didn’t catch, to equal disaster. Eva caught her office manager and stayed married all her life. Naomi lost out on her first love—gave herself to him like a fool, as she always put it, and then lost him—finally caught a husband, found him tasteless, let the marriage be annulled, went on to other lovers, found a final husband who had the good grace to die soon, went on with her varied secret love life. And then there was Flora.
There wasn’t enough distance between herself and Flora for glamour to enter. Flora was only five years older, and even when she started to paint her nails, there was no mystery about underwear. She wore the same kind of cotton bloomers Jenny did—a little larger—and it never occurred to Jenny that Flora might wear her bloomers with a difference until she was enlightened by a mutual friend up the block in the Bronx. The friend was older than Jenny, a little younger than twelve-year-old Flora. The friend’s name was Friend, Dorothy Friend, and she shared a room with her only brother, Bernie Friend, who was six years older.
“I do it with my brother. Bernie does it to me all the time,” Dorothy Friend said, and watched Jenny closely to observe the effect. Disappointed at seeing none she could decipher on the carefully blank face, she tried again. “And Flora and your brother do it all the time too.”
Jenny was standing next to Dorothy in the bedroom Dorothy and Bernie Friend had shared all their lives. To Jenny, used to the makeshift sleeping arrangements of not enough rooms and too many brothers and sisters, its furnishings were impressive: a regular bedroom set—twin beds, double dresser, night tables, matching spreads—school diplomas on the wall, family photographs, a framed embroidered square announcing “God Lives in Our Hearts.” Not even Mama and Papa had a real bedroom like this one.
Jenny thought,
Which bed do they do it in? What is “it,” anyway, and where in our hopelessly crowded apartment are Flora and Max doing “it”?
She desperately needed to flee that bedroom and Dorothy Friend’s greedy eyes, waiting to lap up her shock. She wasn’t going to grant Dorothy that victory.
“I know all about it,” she said airily. “I have to go home now.” And ran.
Did she believe Dorothy Friend? Yes. Back at her own tenement stoop, her heart beating painfully, she admitted that she knew it was true. She had blocked all Flora’s hints, pretended that she had dreamed her favorite brother’s night roamings naked under a draped sheet, pretended that she didn’t know what Flora and Max were doing in Mama and Papa’s tiny back bedroom with the door closed when only the three of them were in the apartment on those nights when Mama and Papa worked late at the store and nobody else was home. Was she horrified? No, she was jealous. Not that she really wanted to be in the room with Flora and Max, but she didn’t want to be shut out either. She didn’t know what she wanted. She hated Flora’s special position, she hated Flora washing her bloomers in the bathroom basin, gasping, scrubbing, yelling at Jenny as tears fell into the soapy water. “Get out of here. You’re just a baby. You don’t know anything. Stop watching me. Babies can’t watch.”
What Jenny remembers, shuddering at herself, is that she blamed Flora, not brother Max. It was all Flora’s fault—she shouldn’t have let Max into her bloomers, and she shouldn’t have called Jenny a baby. If she had been a loyal sister she would have insisted on including Jenny in whatever went on in the back bedroom. Then none of “it” would have happened.
And now? Now she wants to beg Flora’s forgiveness for not being on Flora’s side all the way. “I
was
a baby,” she wants to say to Flora, “what could I have done?”
What she did was to follow her sisters’ leads more or less blindly, though without the nail polish. She constructed her own version of manicures and pedicures, her own rules of bloomers, panties, silk underwear and nakedness and the twining of arms and legs culminating in the glorious spasms of transcendent warmth right down to her unpainted toes. But she owed her sisters. They had given her a lot. She owed her sisters’ lives, her mother’s life, for preparing her, badly, for the field of battle she would enter behind them. Remember, remember, she had told herself over and over again, don’t make their mistakes, make your own, create a different battlefield, and if you fail you’ll have fallen in a war where others may succeed, daughters and granddaughters, nieces and great-nieces, the women who come after.
And of course she had failed, failed to put together love heart soul mind sex friendship equality family community—arid, stupid words for the search that had governed her life. A good search, take it all in all, failure or not. Did the search itself add up to a good life? She had done her best, had flexed her tiny muscle and fought the good fight. Had she won anything? It felt as if she had. Was this the way everyone felt at the end, that they had won something valuable and enduring, in spite, in spite of the defeats?
She made the arrangements for the manicures and pedicures, Flora’s at the corner beauty parlor run by Russian Jews newly arrived from Moscow and Leningrad, known once again as St. Petersburg; Eva’s at her residence, where a manicurist/pedicurist regularly took care of the women; and Naomi’s by arrangement with the Russian émigré from Flora’s beauty parlor, who was willing to make the trip for forty-five dollars plus cab fare.
Flora argued that it was ridiculous to pay all that money. “Naomi can make it to the beauty parlor if she tries,” she said. “You’ll save at least fifteen dollars if she gets to the beauty parlor, and she can do it if she really tries. Look at me, I’m still in there fighting, and I can’t tell you how weak I feel, horribly horribly weak. I don’t know how I manage to keep moving, I don’t know how I keep going, but I do, and so could Naomi if only she wouldn’t give up.”