Helen Yglesias - The Girls

The ladies’ room was fine, clean and properly stocked, but the cafeteria was overwhelming, an enormous space, entered through the serving area, redolent with warring food smells. Overflowing bread baskets, overflowing salad bar, fresh fruit bar, freshly made sandwich section, hot food — Cuban, Chinese, Southern fried chicken, vegetarian, pasta with varied sauces — low-fat low-salt health stuff, refrigerated cases of desserts, juices, sodas, tables of hot coffee and tea, regular, decaffeinated, and herbal. In a nostalgic rush of longing for her dead husband, Jenny joined the Cuban line, waiting her turn to order a meal she couldn’t finish, could hardly begin on, actually, when after negotiating the long lines of receiving and paying and beverage getting she finally seated herself in the huge dining area and studied her plate: Cuban thin steak covered with wilted onions on a bed of shredded lettuce, white rice and black beans, side of plátanos maduras, and the white melon-textured vegetable whose name she had forgotten but had requested from the server by pointing. The food conjures up her husband, young, grinning at her, teasing. “You’re going to eat all that? Never.” A young Jenny smiles too. “Don’t rush me. Pig. You’ll get the leftovers when I finish.”

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.