The Girls (17 page)

“Yes, but with the wheelchair and taxis I’ll spend fifteen dollars getting her to the salon, so it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” Jenny said.

“Where’d you pick that up, ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’?”

“It’s a common expression. Everybody uses it, or they used to.”

But Flora continued to gaze at Jenny angrily. Once again she had infuriated Flora without knowing why.

In the end, strapped into their wheelchairs in the medical van, Eva and Naomi looked fine, their pretty hair nicely done, Eva’s short and slightly mannish, Naomi’s with its sweet part and simple arrangement, Naomi charming in a printed flowing skirt and matching top, a dark wool throw over her shoulders because she was always cold, and a straw topper in her hand if needed against the glare of the sun, Eva elegant in an all-black pantsuit with a beautifully pleated white silk blouse, black patent sandals, and a matching purse, their fingernails gleaming red on the pocketbooks clutched in their laps, their painted toenails shining red through their open-toed sandals.

Jenny had arranged for the van to arrive first at Naomi’s residence and then travel north along the beach to Eva’s residence, and from there south again over causeways toward the city of Miami and to the nursing home. Jenny and Flora were to get to Naomi’s on their own, Jenny naturally thinking of a cab but Flora insisting on a bus ride. Jenny was too worn out and preoccupied to argue.

Flora had outfitted herself in a casual purple linen pantsuit, her hair curling out of a little purple cap worn far back on her head, a purple scarf at her throat, an oversized purple bag slung on her shoulder. She listed sideways with its weight, leaning heavily on Jenny for support, shuffling along in her purple sandals, the bright red toenails shining.

“Too much, too much.” Once seated in the bus Flora heaved great deep sighs, intoning, “Too much, too much, too much to bear.” She threw back her head and gasped for air, stretching her remarkably shapely limbs ending in the purple sandals into the aisle of the bus. Other passengers looked at her with pitying sympathy and eyed Jenny coldly for just sitting there, not paying sufficient attention to her ailing sister.

The bus left them close to Naomi’s residence. They could see the medical van already parked in the circular driveway, and Naomi in her wheelchair at the door with a group of fellow residents gathered around her.

“Don’t tell them anything,” Naomi whispered desperately. “They think I’m going to the hospital for some tests. Don’t tell them, don’t tell them anything.”

Everybody knew the truth, of course, down to the tiniest detail. They had seen Naomi’s packed suitcases leaving the residence in the beat-up station wagon that Luis the Cuban night clerk used for odd jobs he picked up now and then, and of course Luis told everybody everything he knew. And the residents gossiped among themselves: they knew where Naomi was going, everybody knew that her dying sister Eva was going into the home too, everybody knew that it was the last place for both, everybody knew it was the end of the line for Naomi. They kissed and hugged her, murmuring vague loving wishes. “I hope everything goes well for you, I’ll never forget you, it’s been wonderful knowing you, God be with you, God bless, God bless.” They turned away with tears in their eyes, for Naomi and for themselves, for their own last journey.

Shimon, the retired professor, kissed Naomi’s hand over and over again, holding out a small orchid corsage “just for nothing, just for your loveliness, just for the great pleasure of knowing you.” Jenny pinned it to the shoulder of Naomi’s dark wool throw because Shimon was too deaf to hear Naomi suggesting that he do so. Naomi held her head up, her humped back as straight as she could make it, her eyes smiling, her manner gracious, pretending that the true event that was happening wasn’t happening at all.

Flora stayed inside, chatting with the residents, filling them in on further details about the home, keeping them out of the way while the complicated drama of moving Naomi into the vehicle staged itself. Outside in the sun, the heat struck with violence. As if handling an unwieldy package, two very large glum white men carried Naomi and the wheelchair down the short flight of stairs at the entrance. Naomi had put on the little straw topper, its gay tilt incongruous in the circumstances.

The men parked Naomi in the driveway while they lowered a platform on the vehicle, a maneuver accompanied by an alarming muttering grinding noise. When they placed Naomi on the platform in her wheelchair, she reached out in terror for Jenny’s hand. Shaking, Jenny scrambled up beside Naomi, stroking her, making stupid jokes. The platform rose, muttering and grinding, to the level of the vehicle’s floor. Naomi closed her eyes, dark and clouded now in the yellowish white of her skin. The men wrestled the chair to the far end of the large, gloomy van, where to Jenny’s horror she saw that Eva had already been locked in.

“Jenny,” Eva said, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. “Damn it, where have you been? Why did my kids leave this all to you? I told them, I told them I can’t depend on my sisters.”

“You were supposed to pick her up last, after this pickup. After. After!” Jenny was yelling, almost crying herself, furious that her carefully plotted scenario had been ruined.

The men paid no attention, busy with leather straps and chains to immobilize the wheelchair safely. They slammed doors, shot bolts, a sound of prison clatter. Eva cried. Naomi moaned and covered her eyes with a trembling long-fingered manicured hand.

“Oh please, no fights, let’s not fight, please,” she whispered.

“There you are, all set,” the bigger man said. And to outraged Jenny, “Sorry, didn’t make sense to go north, then south, then north again. They changed the route, it made more sense.” He left to secure the back doors from the outside.

Jenny knelt between her sisters, murmuring, kissing, making more stupid jokes, begging Eva’s forgiveness, explaining how it was not supposed to have gone as it did. This damned mix-up had turned her into a child again.

“It’s like going to the guillotine or the electric chair, for God’s sake,” Naomi said. “You have to stay with us in this ambulance, Jenny, or whatever it is, this tumbrel. Don’t let them make you leave us.” Characteristically, she made this plea with her head down and to the side, as if she herself had nothing to do with this other gibbering being.

Eva brought her tears to a gargling stop. “Forgive me,” she said. “I don’t want to act like a baby, but when they treat you like a goddamn baby … Let’s just get this over with as quickly as possible.” Suddenly she was oldest sister Eva dispensing marks for good conduct. “Jenny, you look lovely, dear, that cream-colored silk is beautiful.” And then, again in a horrified child’s panic, “Are you leaving us?”

“Just for a minute, I’m just going out for a minute to get Flora,” Jenny said. “I’ll be right back, Eva, Naomi, right right back.”

She charged up to the drivers, who were standing on the steps of the residence filling in papers on a clipboard. She could see Flora sitting inside, gesticulating broadly, talking, talking.

“Excuse me, but on the phone with your dispatcher I told him quite clearly that we would be staying with our sisters throughout.” Jenny made her demand sound briskly inevitable. “It’s bad enough that you picked up my older sister first. That wasn’t the plan.”

“No problem,” the balder of the two men answered. “You can ride up front near us.”

The bigger man added, “Just make it quick, okay? We don’t want to spend all day on one pickup.”

They were both dressed in dark blue guards’ uniforms complete with medical insignia, but Jenny recognized regular truckers underneath.

Then the big one spoke again. “They’re okay, your sisters are okay, they all get a little scared ‘cause of the safety lockup, but they get used to it. Could you hurry it up, lady, we’ve got another call on our books.”

Jenny waved frantically to Flora. “Come on, we have to go!”

It was the more kindly driver who strapped Jenny and Flora into the passenger seat, a narrow wooden bench under a small window behind the front seat, but the restraints were merely elaborate safety belts—no rattling chains, no bolts, no metal tracks.

“Y’know, we’re liable if anybody gets hurt in our vehicle, so we have to be careful,” he said, and pulled the heavy side door shut.

In the dark cool of the air conditioning, with eerie streaks of light arching from the little window separating them from the drivers, Jenny heard more prison clatter of bolts fastened, a door being opened and slammed shut, garbled conversation between the two men, the motor starting up. They were in motion, on their way to the last destination for Eva and Naomi, proceeding slowly in the heavy traffic on Collins. They were all silent. Flora seemed to be praying, her head lolling on her chest, her legs outstretched. Eva sat rigidly, her eyes fixed on nothing. Naomi covered her face with her hands, her painted nails shining in the half darkness.

My sisters, my self,
Jenny thought.
I love you as myself.
What could she do to protect them from this unspeakable reality? And herself?

Flora began a chanting poem. “‘My love came up from Barnegat with thunder in his eyes, my love came up from Barnegat telling terrible lies …’”

“No, no,” Eva objected. “No poetry, please.”

“Let’s sing,” Jenny said, “let’s sing,” and in a quavering whisper began, “‘Good night, Irene, good night, Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams …’”

“Too tame,” Flora said, interrupting in her strong, true voice. “‘And when the saints go marching in, and when the saints go marching in …’”

“Isn’t it ‘come marching in’?” Naomi corrected, and joined Flora, her voice strengthening with each note.

Eva’s addition was more of a croak, but she clapped her hands and swung her feet as if she were marching. And when Jenny threw her voice into the mix, Flora took off on a harmonizing riff, banging the flat of her hand against the wooden bench, keeping the beat strong for the others.

Still singing, Jenny turned to peer out the front window through a little aperture in the partition. They were approaching the Fontainebleau. Above them the huge
trompe l’oeil
loomed and beckoned, a Fontainebleau where nothing ever changed, where they would live forever in splendid rooms, elegantly dressed, hair done, nails polished on hands and feet, wrapped in music, surrounded by boutiques, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, in an Eden of benign ocean and wide beach, outdoor pool and indoor gym, of gardens in lush bloom, and overarching all, the unchanging brilliant blue sky. If only the awful vehicle could rise, effortlessly sail upward and deposit them all in the perfection of the painted Fontainebleau: a trick of the eye magically transforming the sisters’ shared, searching, stumbling steps into a triumphant escape from the real horrors to come. But the van, grounded to the pavement, steadily took the curve that would carry them to Eva and Naomi’s final home, and in time, Flora’s, and in one way or another, Jenny’s too.

F
OR THEIR HELP
, I want to thank my friends Doris Grumbach and Vivian Gornick; my agents, Frances Goldin and Sydelle Kramer; my publishers, Cecile Engel and Lori Milken; and my editor, Joy Johannessen, for her meticulous care of the text.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1999 by Helen Yglesias

cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4532-5581-0

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