The Girls (13 page)

She ate a few bites. Delicious. But hard to swallow. The noise in the great crowded room had a life of its own, a low roaring presence. Among interns, nurses, technicians, clerks, patients, visitors, children running, crying, moody and silent, she sat alone at a corner of a long, fully occupied table, her eyes unwillingly concentrated on the sad silent children, worrying for them, for their tenderness and their toughness, for their survival, while torturing her brain to remember the name of the white vegetable. It had been steamed, then lightly sprinkled with olive oil and delicate slivers of garlic. Delicious. Just the way Abuela cooked it.

Yucca.
Or
malanga.
Happiness, victory, success suffused her being. She had recalled a name. Two names, actually. Well, close enough.

She emptied her almost full tray in the trash container. A meal. The city of Sarajevo could feed for a day on the amount of food circulated in this cafeteria. A sudden smell of fresh dill brought back her own mother alive in her kitchen. Dill in the Friday night chicken soup. “Eat, eat, think of the starving Armenians.” The mothers, the dead mothers, once alive in their kitchens, a generation of mothers—gone for good.
Yes,
she thought,
for good. The old ways are dead and gone. Forget them. There is only the dangerous present, where we have to figure out some way to live together and die together.

She concentrated on finding her way back through the wilderness of buildings to the dull brown and gold room where she waited and waited and waited for Naomi’s handsome surgeon to come and lie to her about how long and in what shape Naomi would live until she died.

“Don’t you dare let her come here to entertain,” Eva said.

“Me?” Jenny raised her eyebrows. “I have nothing to do with it. She’s on this entertainment roster that services senior centers, retirement centers, nursing homes. That’s what she told me. I’ve never seen her perform, have you?”

“Yes, God help me. I’ll be embarrassed to death if she shows up here. Though there are always people who think she’s terrific—the kind of people who think Howard Stern is terrific. Well, like the other night. You saw how some of them thought she was so wonderful. Isn’t that incredible? Wasn’t that something? My poor granddaughter, she was embarrassed to death. She is such an angel, she didn’t fuss about it at all. She just laughed.” And Eva laughed, a gay young laugh, as if in imitation.

They were seated in the shade of the awnings outside the dining room at Eva’s residence, close to the swimming pool, empty at this early morning hour. Eva was neatly put together, as usual, though her hair looked a little funny. The hairdresser had left a hole with pink scalp showing through the thin white strands. Eva had been taken off the steroid that ballooned her face, which in this new incarnation was so thin that nose and ears looked enormous. Jenny remembered an item in de Beauvoir’s
The Coming of Age.
It seemed that the ears continued to grow as long as one lived. Perhaps even in the grave, like hair and nails?

“Maybe it’s because we’re sisters and can’t really appreciate one another,” Jenny said, thinking more about herself than about Flora. “Because she’s different, we …”

“I’ll say she’s different. God spare me. Wait till you hear that poem of hers she reads about the sexy grandma. She throws in all those words, clitoris, penis, orgasm. She doesn’t care what she says.” Eva shook her head in disbelief. “And the audience eats it up.” She looked hard at Jenny and took her hand in the still-strong grip of her long, elegantly manicured fingers. Jenny noted that she had covered her liver spots with makeup.

“No, not at all, Jenny. We appreciate you. We know that what you do isn’t a trick. She’s all tricks. You’re genuine. We’re all proud of you. Even Flora, even though she’s jealous, she can’t help being proud, you should hear how she talks you up to other people when you’re not around. But that’s enough about Flora anyway. What about you? What are you doing now? How are things going? What are you working on? I loved that article you did in the
New York Times
about Emerson being Jewish—not really Jewish, you know what I mean, the way you linked him up with the Talmud, that was terrific. But how is everything, how are you getting along? Do you need money? Are you managing okay? I’m sure your children are always a comfort. How are they? How are they all? I’m so glad you came down, it was so good for Naomi to have you there with her, it’s so good to see you. It’s so hard, with Mama and Papa gone, and the boys, the boys all gone, it’s so good that you’re here, little Jenny, little sister Jenny. Whatever your accomplishments, you’re always my baby sister, God bless you, it’s wonderful to be with you.”

And wonderful for Jenny to be with an Eva restored to her usual self. A kind of peaceful content Jenny rarely experienced loosened her guarded speech. She talked about herself; she babbled; she didn’t worry about what she was saying or how she was saying it; she relaxed in the warm bath of Eva’s love and emerged ready for the ordeal of Flora’s show that afternoon.

Flora called the show “MEMOIR PERFORMANCE!!!” With three exclamation marks. She had had flyers xeroxed, and with Jenny’s help she had tacked them up in the lobby of the Hebrew Home for the Aged, Miami Beach’s oldest Jewish nursing home, in South Beach. It was not in the heart of the trendy new international hot spot, “where the action is,” but Ocean Drive was near enough.

The residents arrived in the lounge full of lunch and mostly sleepy (with a few obstreperous exceptions), men and women in varying stages of infirmity, massed in wavering rows of folding chairs interspersed with wheelchairs, gurneys, walkers, canes. Women predominated, ten to one. There was an overexcited buzz in the room, a chaotic hum of meaningless noise, as in Bellevue, where Jenny had once visited a friend, and Sing Sing, where she had taught a literature course in the sixties.

Flora was decked out in gold-toned purple for the occasion: purple skirt, gold lamé tailored shirt, gold-lapelled purple jacket, lamé baseball cap on shoe-black curly hair, gold lamé stockings, gold kid pumps, big gold calf bag, purple eyeshadow, coal-black eyeliner. There was no stage, just a little podium, a mike, and a piano off to the side. A harsh spotlight shone directly on Flora’s face, though the room was bright with sun. Heavy makeup and explosive energy made her seem younger than her eighty-five years; she might have passed for early seventies, late sixties.

To prolonged applause, Flora was introduced by the aged, lively male director of activities in a marked New York Jewish singsong. Flora had apparently decided to enhance her glamour by having him mention Jenny, whom he described as “the well-known professional writer sister of the star of the occasion, a woman with so many accomplishments it would take me half a day to recite them, a professor, a lecturer, a writer …” At the close of his remarks, when he asked Jenny to rise, she nodded her head, gesturing toward Flora as the
one
star of the occasion, and sat down quickly, ignoring the continuing applause. The audience liked to clap hands. It gave them something to do.

A man seated nearby was thrilled by Jenny’s presence, going on about his son, “a noted professor at the University of Illinois. Surely you know Professor Meyer Asher? Very well known, very well thought of.” She nodded, smiled, frowned, put her finger to her lips, pointed meaningfully at Flora, who was struggling to be heard over the general din. A woman whose entirely wrinkled face was lit up with delight approached slowly with the help of her three-footed walker, clearly eager to talk to Jenny, but the activities director intervened, determinedly seated her, and commanded the audience to quiet down. The excited rustling subsided somewhat.

Flora began with a joke. Jenny was so tense, so convinced that Flora was headed for total disaster, that she understood nothing of the content. The activities director led the laughter and applause, and the audience joined in enthusiastically, those who were still awake. The room was hot and airless, and there was a low hum of rasping breath. Here and there someone snored.

Flora proceeded with her multimedia memoir: the story of her life through anecdote, poetry, a display of blown-up family photographs, a couple of songs, a little waltzy parody dancing, and some piano playing, random bits of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Satie. Slowly Jenny calmed down enough to hear. The fact was that Flora was dazzling in an egocentric, crazy, contemporary way. If Flora weren’t her sister, if the performance were a stranger’s, it would have started buzz words rolling around in Jenny’s head: deconstructionist, postmodernist, feminist. But Flora
was
her sister, and it was all Jenny could do to keep herself from fleeing the room. She stayed. She stayed with her heart pounding, recoiling when she wasn’t laughing, hating what she heard when she wasn’t lost in admiration of its daring.

She was jarred into recognition of a direct quote, without attribution, of a complete sentence from a memoir she herself had published. And another, from Elinor Wylie, also without attribution. Were there other borrowings she hadn’t caught? Was it all simply stolen? Then she found herself laughing aloud as Flora told a story about failing the Papp Test—when her act was rejected by the Public Theater’s founder. That joke was original, or if it wasn’t, Jenny had never heard it before.

Imperceptibly, as the one-hour show continued, the fretful hum in the room rose, and when Flora segued from a poem she had written about Mama into the singing of “My Yiddishe Mama,” a woman square in the middle of the audience stood and joined her, caterwauling in a high moan, keeping a sort of time with Flora, jerking her arthritic body back and forth and side to side to the rhythm—
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm
—while other voices took up the
hmmm, hmmm
in a demented backup chorus.

In her dashes from mike to piano to floor to mike, Flora had torn off her lamé cap and the purple jacket, but she was still very flushed, a film of sweat on her throat, her curly black hair gone lank. Yet her eyes glowed and her voice stayed true and strong even as the audience accompaniment threatened to swamp the act.

Jenny was appalled. She wanted to rescue Flora, pull her from her self-imposed punishment at the podium. Flora needed no rescuing. She challenged her overstimulated hearers like a winning boxer, hands on hips, head thrown back, joy in all her bearing.

“Well, my friends, would you care to come up here and share my mike with me, or could you give me the courtesy of some silence and some attention? Well, do I hear an answer? I’m not continuing until I have silence.”

The director helped her again. In his deepest tones he demanded “respect for the artiste entertainer of the day. Come on now, you know better, you know how to behave, let’s show our respect for our most unusual artiste entertainer.” He was walking toward the giddy leader of this ego insurrection, shushing and shaking his finger at her, pushing her into a chair, when yet another disturbance erupted. A woman with a broken leg trussed up in an elevated cast was being hastily wheeled out by her nurse. The face of the patient was a strange blue color, and her breathing was noisy. The room quieted.

Flora elaborately thanked the audience, then worked the woman on the gurney into her act, throwing out her arms, pleading in an Al Jolson parody. “Mamele, Mamele, my little Mamele, don’t go, stay with me, I’m good, I’m good, and at my worst I’m not that bad, am I, friends?” The director once again led the laughter and applause, which he tried to steer into an end to the presentation, but Flora outwitted him and sang one last song in a mix of English and Yiddish, bringing her show to a smash conclusion.

Getting out of the home was an impeded advance through infirm admirers, Jenny trailing Flora as she graciously accepted compliments. Once outside, they walked slowly through the heat to Flora’s favorite Italian restaurant, a few blocks away on what Flora always called Fabulous Ocean Drive, as if the adjective were part of its formal name. There had been no time for them to lunch beforehand. Anyway, Flora preferred to perform on an empty stomach. “We actors never eat before a show.”

They were seated outdoors in an area spottily shaded by a beautiful tree Jenny couldn’t identify, at a big round table all of whose extra chairs Flora swallowed up. She placed her jacket and lamé cap on one and her oversized gold bag on another, kicking off her gold pumps to put her feet up on the only chair left. Then she peeled off her lamé stockings, undid the top three buttons of her shirt, closed her eyes, opened her mouth wide, and breathed deeply.

“I’m exhausted. I must have a drink. And I don’t mean water.” She laughed her boisterous laugh.

A busboy had set up menus, flatware, cloth napkins, large stemmed glasses of ice water topped with a slice of lime.

“Where’s our waiter?” Flora’s voice was still the large voice of the actress. “I want a Bloody Mary with a big stick of celery. They do that great here, with a smitch of horseradish.”

“This is on me,” Jenny said. “After-performance celebration.”

“In that case I’ll have another Bloody Mary when I’ve finished the first one.”

“The sky’s the limit.”

“Not that you’ve said a word about my performance. Not that I care. I had enough admirers all over me to satisfy anybody.”

She had indeed been showered with extravagant praise after her show. Did it matter to her that adoration had dribbled out of the mouths of stuttering stroke victims advancing through a thicket of canes, crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs? Was it the crippled source that left her dissatisfied? Or was there never enough praise of any kind? Jenny’s quick kiss and murmur of “wonderful, wonderful” obviously hadn’t satisfied.

“It was amazing,” Jenny said. “Just wonderful.”

“You hated it.” Flora turned aside to stop a waiter and order her drink. “The trouble with you,” she resumed, “is that you’re thoroughly corrupted by the New York scene. You think New York is all that matters, Broadway is all that matters. You have no conception of the breadth of senior events, wherever they take place. I’ve done dozens of them, and believe me, a senior event is just as important as an off-off-Broadway show. Did you know I won first place here in Miami in a worst poetry contest? In your book,” she said, talking through the arrival of her Bloody Mary, stirring vigorously with the full-leafed celery stalk, taking a long drink, half choking as she swallowed, “in your book that would be a disgrace, in my book it’s a triumph. Did you ever hear of Allen Ginsberg? That man is a
poet,
not the kind of dried-up academic poet you’re always quoting and raving about. You don’t know anything about poetry. He said I was a terrific poet. Where’s your drink? Aren’t you having anything?”