Helen Yglesias - The Girls

She hated to be called “lady” or “madam” or “ma’am,” or by her first name by strangers.

What, then, what in the world would she like to be called?

The cop, back in his kiddy-car, stuck his head out. “You get this nice lady where she’s going, you get her to her destination. Understand?”

“Yes yessir sure sure,” Clipboard agreed, and once in the bus relieved himself in a long string of Spanish.

Nice lady. Worse, worse. Time to charm the driver and Clipboard. Should she talk to them in Spanish? That might be the last straw. A pushy Jewish old lady talking to Caribbeans in her stilted Castilian Spanish. She chose English.

“I can’t thank you enough for your help,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“She’s a regular Virgin of Cavadonga,” Clipboard said in Spanish. The driver laughed. Encouraged, Clipboard mimicked, “Thank you, thank you,” in falsetto Spanish again, and then, in his own deep voice, “Enough with the thank yous, please, just permit us to get our fucking job done, thank you, please, thank you.”

“Cuidado,” the driver said. “She might understand.”

“Nothing,” Clipboard said. “This kind understands nothing. I have the greatest reverence for old age, you who know me like a brother above all know that I revere the aged, but these old Jewish farts disgust me. They don’t know how to grow old, they are totally without dignity. Pushing in ahead of others.” He shifted to English. “We’re full up on that run, where we going to find the space?”

“All right, okay,” the driver responded in English, switching to Spanish for “Shut up already, you get started you never know when to stop,” then back to English. “The lady’s got a reservation, check it out.”

“Check it out, check it out,” Clipboard repeated in despair, and added in Spanish, “I’m lucky if I have time to check out my own shit.”

“Cuidado,” the driver said again. “I can see by her eyes she knows what you’re saying.”

“What eyes? They don’t have eyes. Our women have eyes, even the old ones can kill you with a flash of their eyes. All these old farts have is eyeglasses.”

“Jesus,” the driver prayed, “shut this guy up, will you, before I go completely crazy.”

“Amen,” Jenny said, but to herself.

Settled at last in a different air-conditioned bus, comfortable in the high leather seat directly behind the driver, she told herself to pay no further attention to the continuing muddle of the SuperShuttle schedule. She never should have listened to her sister Flora about taking the shuttle. Penny-saving Flora, who certainly had more money than Jenny did. What she wouldn’t give to have been met by a limo. She astounded herself by falling asleep for a split second, and was instantly awakened by the sound of her own snorting breath. Another indignity. She never used to snore.

There were apparently only three other riders for Miami Beach: a sloppy teenaged girl backpacking a tremendous load, wearing ripped jeans and a tiny scarlet top ending just above her navel, seemingly sick, yawning violently every few minutes, filling the bus with the nauseating stench of what was probably trench mouth; a very tall blond young man in expensive baggy leisure clothes who placed himself and his pile of soft leather luggage on the farthest back seat to avoid the dirty teenager — and probably to avoid Jenny as well; and a nattily dressed white-haired man who asked permission to sit up front next to the attractive black woman driver and immediately began telling her jokes in Brooklynese.

“A rabbi, a priest, and a dentist went to a bar …” Jenny screened out the rest, and they took off as the driver announced her name to the bus: Angelica.

Angelica screamed with laughter at each punch line, her body heaving, the bus careening. In between the dapper fellow’s jokes she inserted intimacies of her married life. Her husband didn’t like her to work. He thought she should stay at home taking care of their three children. She disagreed strenuously, as if he were right there in the bus arguing. “Listen, they’re not babies anymore, the youngest is seven, they’re all in school. They take good care of themselves. I always wanted to drive these shuttles. I’m a good driver, one of the best, but it took time to get me where I am, took plenty of time, lots of hard work, all those lousy runs, now I’m doing it, now I got what I worked so hard for, I’m not giving it up for nobody.” More jokes, followed by more intimacies. Angelica loved driving the shuttle, loved people, loved Miami thruways, loved the waterways, loved the heat and the air conditioning, loved talking and listening to her passengers. “It sure beats Chicago,” she said. “I don’t know why anybody stays in those northern cities.” The old gent punctuated her revelations—“Great!” “Good for you!” “You’re terrific!” “Attagirl!”—and went on with his next joke. Angelica laughed as the top-heavy bus swung sharply to left and right.

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.