Authors: Helen Yglesias
Jenny glanced behind her. The sick girl was asleep, her skinny body rolling about. From his haven in the last row, the handsome young man sprawled pleasantly, legs spread, arms resting on the back of the seat in front of him. Jenny smiled; he responded, rolling his large blue eyes in the direction of the front seat’s ongoing skit, fluttering his fingers for the erratic driving style.
Was he gay? Headed for South Beach? An actor? Filmmaker? No. Filmmakers rode in limos. Not only gays rolled their eyes. Her own thoroughly heterosexual son rolled his eyes, also large and blue. Stupid ruminations on her part. No offense. No judgments, just observations.
She forcibly turned her attention to the landscape.
Landscape.
No longer a word descriptive of Miami Beach. What had been original to pristine Florida was now entirely paved, restructured, and redesigned. Nature, Darwin, God himself (or herself) had been flummoxed.
Flummoxed.
Nobody said “flummoxed” anymore. Landscape. Seascape. Land and sea, rivers and woods, scrub and sand, flowers and blossoming fruit trees, sharks in the ocean, crocodiles in the swamps, animals and snakes in the jungly matted undergrowth, birds, birds, birds in the strange silvery gray trees, birds, birds, birds strutting, preening, and skittering on the endless stretches of beach, still other birds sheltering in the tall gracefully bending grasses. Once Florida had been an astonishing seascape and landscape. Now it was astonishing, period.
She had expected to hate Miami Beach on her first visit in the late forties, after the Second World War, when Mama and Papa retired to Eighth Street near Washington on their son Max’s money. The overnight train trip on the Silver Meteor had been hard. The coach car was jammed. The whole country seemed on the move along with the returning servicemen. Jenny was leaving her first husband, the father of her two children. The children were with her. Guilt made her fuss too much over their four- and two-year-old comfort, their entertainment, their food and sleep. She read to them, sang songs, played games, held them on her lap in turn, settled and resettled them in the uncomfortable coach seats, took them to the unsatisfactory expensive dining car, to the smelly lavatory, to the messy drinking fountain, kept them happy, prayed to God to keep them happy while she went about her selfish business of doing them irreparable harm, tearing up their safe little lives by divorcing their father.
She and the children had left New York in a snowstorm. After an evening, a long night, and a long next day in the crowded car, heavy with the smells of their wintry start, it was astonishing to step out of the debris of the train into hot moist air, burning sun, lush green, vivid vulgar flowering. She had never experienced that sensation before—from harsh winter to instant semitropics.
The children fell in love with Theirami: fabulous wide white sand beach, blue-green violet white-edged water warm and gentle as a bath, palm trees everywhere heavy with coconuts, real coconuts they took home to Grandpa to open and demonstrate how to eat, real coconuts lying around the walkways of Miami Beach like garbage on New York City streets.
Jenny was a city product, born in Brooklyn, reared in every borough except the wilds of Staten Island. Her natural habitat was sidewalks, city parks, museums, public beaches, ferries, a fifth-floor walkup, her father’s neighborhood grocery store, the apartment house stoop, public school playgrounds, public libraries, city colleges, corporation offices, bank cages, department stores, five-and-tens, automats. Nature was a brave little blade of grass growing in a chink of pavement, the spire of a building cutting into a sky dramatic with clouds and sunset. The height of nature was the open upper deck of a two-tiered Fifth Avenue bus on a soft summer night. Music of the spheres? Beethoven’s Pastoral had poured into her, bouncing off the stone benches of Lewisohn Stadium, entrance fee a quarter, or was it fifty cents? She had gleaned the nothing she knew of the natural world then from books, movies, plays. Who dreamt of sharks in Coney Island waters, or snakes, poisonous or otherwise, in any grass of her acquaintance? Did wild animals exist outside the safe borders of the Bronx Zoo?
So what was she talking about anyway? Even now, living in Maine, next door to a wilderness, gathering her half-assed knowledge of trees, plants, and flowers, of barn owls, Canada geese, and pileated woodpeckers, listening to the big noises of the sea and the little noises of life in the woods—field mice and chipmunks, squirrels, voles, ferrets, chickadees, evening grosbeaks, ducks, owls, bats, seagulls and cormorants, foxes and raccoons, skunks and porcupines—and on to the larger animal life, deer, moose, eagles, ospreys, the darling seals, the whales, and the bears, the unbelievable bears. Did this late-gained knowledge give her leave to mourn the natural world of Florida, gone to concrete? When it came down to nature she was a voyeur—and a wimp. She killed any bug that entered her house in Maine, and trapped any mouse. Nature was outside. Her house was inside. Not to be confused. Last year, when she visited her oldest sister, Eva, in posh Aventura, a very large brilliantly green fly had menaced her for most of a morning on the beach, seriously interfering with her reading of Patrick White and necessitating much waving of the arms and flinging about of a towel to keep the insect at bay. And as she swam her labored laps in the chlorinated waters of the condominium’s pool, she had been flabbergasted by the visit of a high-stepping heron sipping a drink, its beak alarmingly bleached at the tip.
Flabbergasted,
she thought, admiring the effect out her window of a mass of brilliantly white high-rises edging the darkened waters on either side of the densely trafficked causeway. Nobody said “flabbergasted” anymore. Something about Miami put time into reverse. Something about returning to the bosom of her family.
Bosom.
Nobody said “bosom” anymore, either.
“A man goes to the rabbi of an Orthodox congregation and asks him to say a
brucha
over his Maserati.”
The dapper old gent on a new joke.
Angelica wasn’t listening. She was lining up destinations. They had swung onto crowded Collins Avenue, and she was all driver, busy with Miami Beach traffic.
“We’ll drop you first, Mr. Winer.” He had become Mr. Winer somewhere along the route when Jenny wasn’t listening.
“Then the lady, and then you.” Angelica nodded to the young man by way of the rearview mirror. “She’s last, way out above Bal Harbour,” about the youngster still asleep.
“‘What’s a Maserati?’ the Orthodox rabbi says, so the man goes to the Conservative shul and asks the same question.” The joke relentlessly proceeding.
“Fountainblue, right, Mr. Winer?” Angelica pronounced the name of the hotel in pure American, interrupting without apology.
“Right, right, nothing but the best. For me, nothing but the best,” and without transition, “and gets the same answer, ‘What’s a Maserati?’ So the man goes to the rabbi of the Reform congregation and tries again. ‘Please would you say a
brucha
over my new Maserati?’” Mr. Winer paused to enhance the effect of the punch line. “And the Reform rabbi says to him, ‘What’s a
brucha?’”
The blond, blue-eyed, handsome, possibly gay man Jenny had assumed to be non-Jewish joined her in a burst of laughter. Well, well. Jewish after all? Mr. Winer was delighted with the unexpected response from an audience he had long given up on. He turned around to beam at them. Angelica didn’t laugh. She either didn’t know that
brucha
meant a blessing, didn’t appreciate the intricate schisms among the Jewish faithful, or was too preoccupied with rounding the sharp curve on Collins Avenue before the entranceway to the Fontainebleau Hotel.
Directly in front of them, an enormous
trompe l’oeil
Fontainebleau rose over the avenue, a phantom Fontainebleau superimposed on the real one, its gates commanded by pastel-painted Grecian godlike figures guarding the opening to an Eden permanently held within a perfect, unchanging skyscape.
“Ahh!” Jenny said aloud.
Though she had seen this vulgar wonder on earlier visits, it continued to amaze, trip after trip.
“The city made them do it,” the young man in the back seat informed her. “To cover up the parking lot, delivery trucks, garbage bins, all the sh—” He checked himself in deference to her white hair. “All the messy stuff, you know. Quite an effect, isn’t it?”
Jenny agreed it was quite an effect.
Mr. Winer said, “Gorgeous, gorgeous.”
Angelica’s strong arms had maneuvered the bus through a snarl of traffic into the crescent beyond the showy fountain and the mass of flowers and greenery. She was all dedicated business inching for a space close to the marbled staircase that led to the hotel’s gilded, glowing interior.
Almost all the people pouring out of the mess of vehicles were Orthodox Jews, not the poor European shtetl variety, but new affluent Americans, dressed to the nines, their heads covered. The older women wore fashionable wigs, nothing like the ones Mama’s generation stuck on their heads—
sheitels
—and the young women wore charming flower-decorated hats over their glossy wigs. The men covered their hair with little round yarmulkes, silk, embroidered, knitted. “Custom-made” was clearly the rule for their clothing, as was “Money is no object.” Whole families were dressed alike, from the mother down to the littlest girl, in long flowered dresses and pretty hats pulled low over luxuriant hair and dark eyes. Often the young mother, leading a brood of four, five, six children, was again proudly pregnant. The tiniest boys wore formal dark suits, the whitest of white shirts, dark ties, and yarmulkes or little fedora hats, like their older brothers and their young fathers. Some of the elderly men were sweltering under traditional long black wool coats and wide-brimmed beaver hats. There were beards, beards, beards and a sprinkling of sidecurls and the dangling strings of snowy white traditional undergarments. It was Passover week. The Orthodox were gathering for the holiday.
Mr. Winer had disembarked, mingling with his fellow Jews and supervising the movement of his luggage. Now that he was safely among his kind, he fixed a yarmulke to the back of his head with a bobby pin as Angelica took off.
Typical of Miami Beach, the neighborhood changed every few blocks. The stretch of Collins where Flora lived was seedy: small old shopping malls, food and drug supermarkets, liquor stores; the usual huddle of worn-out McDonald’s Burger King Wendy’s Denny’s IHP pizza joints Cuban takeout Italian kosher; a collection of hole-in-the-wall stores selling jewelry, T-shirts, bathing suits, shoes, sneakers, lottery tickets, body building and self-defense, eyeglasses, foot care, haircuts, fake nails, psychic readings, tours, money, newspapers, and cruddy groceries. The narrow sidewalks were awash in trash—paper and plastic, food and the debris of its packaging, leaves, sand blown in from the broad beach one block away.
The imposing condominium where Flora had bought an apartment years before stood serene in this general wreckage. Flora got it for a song, as she always said, at a time when the developers hoped the area would boom. But the Rochester Arms remained an isolated bastion on the street, and though the value of the apartments had more than doubled, the surroundings had steadily deteriorated.
Because the driver was not allowed to help with Jenny’s bags—“Lady, it’s the rule. I can’t leave the vehicle unattended”—Handsome jumped out and offered his services. The messy teenager slept on. Jenny paid her eleven-dollar fare, gathered together her smaller bags, coat, and shawl, and followed the young man as quickly as she could. As he hauled her heavy luggage through the littered gardens leading to the door, walking well in advance of her, she noted a cunningly worked embroidered yarmulke pinned to the back of his silky straight blond hair.
Flora had gotten the time of Jenny’s arrival wrong. Jenny could hear her shrieks at the other end of the intercom when security called from the desk to say that she was on the way up.
Jenny expected Flora outside the elevator on the sixteenth floor, but the silent, heavily carpeted hallway was empty. She dragged her stuff to Flora’s half-open door, decorated with a huge purple paper rose. Flora was hiding behind the door, naked, except for a dark purple towel wound around her head, from which black goo oozed down the pearly pink flesh of her neck into another purple towel draped around her shoulders. The flesh of her body, the well-shaped breasts and legs, denied eighty-five years of wear, but her heavily lined face claimed them.
“It’s cigarettes,” Eva, the oldest sister, always said. “Flora smoked since she was fifteen—earlier even, she was a devil from the day she was born. She did everything, you name it. Smoking was nothing, you don’t know the half of it. It gave her those terrible wrinkles. It’s a well-known fact that smoking creates wrinkles. Look at the rest of us—hardly a line on us, not a line. She did it to herself with the smoking. Sure, we all smoked, but not the way Flora smoked. She lived it and breathed it. And now she’s paying the price.”
Excessive. Flora had always been excessive: the wrinkled skin, the prominent beaked nose dotted with darkened pores, the wonderfully alive black eyes flashing under the heavy black eyebrows. At the moment of greeting she always struck Jenny as an exaggeration of herself, a wicked caricature—particularly now, naked, with the black goo and purple towels. Purple was Flora’s color of the decade. In the apartment everything was color-coordinated: light lilac walls, violet and plum for the upholstered furniture, violet again for the cushions and wall-to-wall carpeting, dark and light purple for the throw rugs, the lamps, the window blinds, the pots holding artificial plants, down to the towels, washcloths, bath mats, and purple toilet seats in the two bathrooms. There was even a small upright purple piano.
Jenny embraced, kissed, squealed in response to her sister’s welcome, until Flora’s joyful noises turned to sobs. Jenny didn’t follow down that path. She had always held herself aloof from the operatic drama of Flora’s swings of emotion.
“I can’t take it, I can’t take it,” Flora moaned. “She’s dying, Jenny, Naomi’s dying. It’s too much. Thank God you’ve come, I can’t do this alone. And Eva, she’s fading, she’s going. It’s too much. I can’t, I can’t. Our sisters are dying, Jenny, they’re dying.”