Helen Yglesias - The Girls

“I never had an abortion. I had three births, deliberate, planned.”

“Neither did I. I’m very proud of never having an abortion. Life is sacred. I hold life sacred. That’s one thing. I never had an abortion.”

“Come off it, Flora,” Jenny said. She felt better, almost normal, and was answering Flora’s arguments as she would anybody’s. “Abortion is a lot better than an unwanted child. Talk about ‘true love shit.’ ‘Life is sacred’ is the real shit. How about war? How about the death penalty? Starvation and poverty?”

“No real woman with love in her heart could ever have an abortion. Don’t argue oranges and lemons.”

“How about Eva and Naomi? Eva had one abortion and Naomi had two. They’re not real women with love in their hearts? They should have had seven children like Mama?”

“They never did,” Flora shouted. “You’re lying. You’d lie about anything to win an argument. And you dare to say Naomi had two abortions. Maybe, maybe, maybe she had one when she was having that affair with that insufferable shoe salesman. After all, she was only nineteen and didn’t know any better. And then when she got pregnant he wouldn’t marry her. But she never had two. Never.”

“She did. She had two. After my first marriage, before I had kids, she came to stay with me after her second abortion, and I gave her a bacon and tomato sandwich and some good pea soup I had cooked up. Though I could hardly cook at all then. She told Mama she had caught a bad cold and would spend the weekend with me getting over it. It was between her two marriages, when she was screwing around with that painter she met at Lewisohn Stadium. He was very dark, and she suspected he was part black. So even though he wanted to marry her, she didn’t want to, and who knows whether he really would have.”

“Naomi was in love with that guy, and he wasn’t part black, you just made that up to excuse her.”

“I don’t need to make up anything to excuse Eva and Naomi. I don’t consider they committed any crime. And I didn’t mean that part about him being black the way you took it.”

“It’s a crime. Abortion’s a crime. Rabbi Shulman said so.”

“Well, let Rabbi Shulman try having a baby at a terrible time in his life when he can’t cope. Let him try it.”

“Rabbi Shulman is a wonderful man nearly ninety years old, Jenny, so show some respect. And you’re telling me that Eva, safely married — because she had to be if you were old enough to know about it — that Eva chose to have an abortion instead of a baby?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Jenny said, worn out but dragging herself through the proof. “She left the kids for the weekend, and it turned out that what Eva said was poison ivy was really the measles the kids were sick with, but she couldn’t tell Mama the truth, and we took care of them for her. We played checkers, slap the jack, and go fish till we were ready to drop. You remember. She came to pick them up looking so white and sick I was terrified for her. Mama said, ‘What kind of weekend at the beach you come back paler than you went?’ and Eva told her some cockamamie story about it raining the whole time. I thought they messed up some way, those awful doctors. Back then, they botched up horribly. I was sure she had been harmed. She looked awful.”

Flora burst into tears. “All you remember are the bad things.”

“Dammit, don’t start crying again. That wasn’t bad,” Jenny pleaded. “We helped. We loved them. We worried. It was dangerous, they had to have guts to do it, and we were good to them, both of us. We understood. You helped as much as I did.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” Flora said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jenny said. She was very tired.

“It does matter. You twist everything around. Now suddenly you’re the broad-minded worldly person who knows all about sex, when you’ve always been a goody-good puritan disapproving of everything I did, jealous of all the men I had and acting superior about everything.” Flora was working herself into a fury. “And another thing. You never had a man I didn’t get for you. I introduced you to both your husbands. Without me you never even would have had a man.” Then, fiercely, “When was the last time you had sex anyway?”

Jenny thought, Why am I answering her? “A long time ago. The year before Paul died. He was too sick that whole year before he died.”

“For God’s sake, Jenny, that was almost five years ago. You mean you haven’t had sex in five years? And you dare to act as if I’m some kind of backward ignoramus and you’re the liberated enlightened—”

Now it was Jenny who burst into tears and Flora who took Jenny in her arms and rocked her back and forth, soothing and smoothing, pledging over and over that she would never hurt Jenny again, saying, “Sorry sorry sorry,” and then, “But what did I do, what did I say, I didn’t mean anything, if I did do something wrong I didn’t mean to, I love you, you came as soon as I called, I’ll never forget that. There are only the two of us left now, let’s help one another, Eva and Naomi are on the downslide, it’s only a matter of time with them, soon there will only be us left, no one else to depend on but us, let’s lean on one another.”

“It’s okay, I didn’t mean to cry,” Jenny answered. “I’m tired, I’m upset, we’ll do better tomorrow. Time to go to bed now, call it a day. Let’s call it a day.”

THE EVENING OF THE day of Naomi’s operation, Jenny made the mistake of taking a bath instead of a shower. She had always loved baths, running the hot water until it foamed with good-smelling oily bubbles, resting there for a solid hour if it pleased her. And it did please her, even in the stained, too-small tub of her oceanfront room, until it came time to get up and out and she couldn’t. Get up or get out. She couldn’t. She couldn’t haul her body up and out of the tub, which, as if cursed, had been transformed into a loathsome tomb holding her fast.

Grabbing the sides of the tub and pulling herself erect didn’t work. Her body, the tub, the water were all too well oiled. She twisted, tried getting on one knee. She slipped and slid, hurting her back. She tried other positions, straining every muscle. Nothing worked. She would die in Miami after all, trapped in a bubble bath. She lay back, gathering strength, quieting her racing heart, forcing herself to think.

If she emptied the bath water, ran fresh water over herself and the tub? Worth a try. Removing all traces of the oil took a long time. Impatient, she made several attempts to pull herself up during the process, but couldn’t. She laughed at the ridiculousness of her predicament, saw the scene as from the outside, then cried, sorry for this poor old body stuck in a bathtub. In a tremendous last-ditch effort she managed to kneel, and with another great effort stand up and miraculously step out of the tub. She felt as if she had won the lottery. Shaking, crying, laughing, she toweled, powdered, put on a gown, and got into bed, more exhausted than she had ever been in her life.

The day had been a mess. She had been alone in the mess, Flora busy with arrangements for her upcoming performance. Jenny had hired a medical van to get Naomi to the hospital, and once there, she had wheeled Naomi from station to station, filling out forms, endlessly waiting. The forms and the formalities completed, she wheeled her sister to a section of the hospital where Naomi was prepared for the operation by way of a long, mysterious process that took more than two hours, from which Jenny was excluded. Naomi described it to her later as mostly more waiting, though there had been some measuring, some X-raying, some marking of the groin.