Helen Yglesias - The Girls

“That’s not true. You love one another. You know you do.”

“Of course we love one another. We’re sisters. That’s why it’s okay to be in the same nursing home. Even if it turns out bad, which I sincerely hope it won’t.”

“Eva, isn’t it funny how we each think like that?”

“Like what?”

“That our sisters don’t think much of us, that our family, you know, doesn’t appreciate us, doesn’t recognize, you know, our reality, the persons we really are …”

“I think the world of you, Jenny, you know that.”

“Yes, but you know what I mean, what we’re always saying about one another …”

“That’s the way sisters are,” Eva said. “We each want to be perfect, and we want all of us to be perfect. And we all want to be the favorite. Of everybody. We’ve all hurt one another. We’ve all messed up one way or another. But it doesn’t matter anymore, Jenny, we’re too old for that nonsense, who loves who the most, who’s better, who’s best, you, me, Flora, Naomi. We’re all good enough.”

“Good enough?” Flora was outraged by Jenny’s flawed attempt later to convey the conversation with Eva. “I’m the best, none of this second-rate ‘good enough.’ If Eva thinks she’s good enough, that’s her privilege, but I’m the best and so are you and so is Naomi in her way. I resent that. I really resent that. Trying to bring us all down to her level. She wallows in being normal. It’s disgusting.”

Jenny blamed herself for the outburst. She never should have opened up this can of worms for Flora’s interpretation, especially since they faced an enormous task that would take as much diplomacy as the two of them could muster. With all the arrangements set, it was Jenny and Flora’s job to see their sisters through the actual move.

More Jenny’s job than Flora’s, as it turned out. Flora had altered, as if she had stepped into another room by passing through her eighty-sixth birthday a few weeks earlier. Stepped into a permanent bedroom. Now she spent most of the day lying down, watching TV, dozing off, getting up to pee, roaming the living room, wandering into the kitchen, gazing into the refrigerator, eating a little snack, pacing the bedroom, lying down again, watching TV, dozing off, waking to pee … Jenny would force Flora to dress, then walk her, as she leaned heavily on Jenny’s arm, to the places she loved, McDonald’s for their packaged apple pie and coffee in the afternoon, Wendy’s for a chicken sandwich for supper.

Jenny made Flora attend a cookout on the broad terrace of her condominium, where she pushed and shoved alongside the other anxious Jewish and Latino residents to get her legitimate share of hotdogs with sauerkraut, cold cuts and coleslaw, and thick wedges of strawberry shortcake. A small but heated culture war was raging in the condominium. The Latinos wanted their food, and had victoriously achieved a separate smaller area where chicken and rice, black beans and plátanos were being served, to much whispered grumbling from the Jewish section. Jenny tried a little of each, alienating all sides.

In this controversy Flora came alive.

“What’s wrong with people? Why can’t they live and let live? Everybody pay their five dollars apiece and eat whatever they like. Hotdogs, fried bananas, who cares? Pay your five dollars and get your share. Their music, our music, who cares? Music’s music.”

Flora’s position was an astonishment to Jenny. Impossible to predict her point of view on any subject.

“I paid my five dollars just like everybody else,” Flora went on. “So did you. See that you get your share. You want fried bananas, why not? Everybody to her own taste. I hate fried bananas. There’s chocolate macaroons on the dessert table too. Left over from Passover, I bet, but they can stay pretty fresh. Bring me a couple of those when you get us coffee.”

For an hour and a half on the broad, warring, multilingual multicultural deck, Flora was her old onstage self, singing “Ruzinkas mit Mandlin” and “Amapola” without prejudice and to much applause before she collapsed into bed and stayed there, fixed before the TV, dozing, rising only to pee, pace the living room, stare into the refrigerator …

Jenny had taken a sublet in Flora’s condominium, on another floor but near enough to be on call. Although it was more spacious and comfortable than the shabby beach hotel, Jenny found it harder to live in this intimate space the owners had created. Souvenirs made of shells. Shmeary abstract paintings. A complete maple bedroom set. Photographs of relatives on every surface. She tiptoed around, an unwelcome alien, creating a spot for herself before the oversized TV, where she took her hurried meals on a small folding table and quickly erased all signs of her intruder presence when she was finished.

She spent most of her time with her sisters, trying to keep Flora active, preparing Eva and Naomi for their moves to the nursing home. Eva’s children had located the place by long distance, but it had been left to Jenny and Flora to inspect it. Flora begged off and sent Jenny on her own to “case the joint,” as Flora put it.

“You’ve got to do it, Jenny. I’m no good anymore. I’m losing my marbles. Those places scare me so much I don’t know shit from shinola. I wouldn’t even know what questions to ask, and if I did I’d promptly forget the answers.”

The home was a nondenominational Catholic nursing facility far from the beach but on an inland waterway dotted with boats and birds of infinite variety, a brilliant blue road bordered by flowering plants, playfully shaped skyscraper apartment houses and luxury hotels, the looming, looping white structures of the thruway in the distance, the whole lit in greens, blues, soft reds, like a stage set. The building itself was a dull square of red brick, but the grounds were lavish with patios festooned in striped awnings, round tables with matching striped umbrellas, and canvas chairs set out on tiled oases surrounded by greenery and blossoms.

Inside, the home made a failing effort to be homey. It was too big for that, too much like a hospital, the halls too long, too smelling of disinfectant, the tones too determinedly cheerful and loud, on the assumption that the patients were deaf and childish, as many were. There were nuns in slacks and dresses — no habits visible — and patients of all colors and backgrounds. Women, as usual, predominated. A rabbi and a priest were available for the religious, and there were regular services. Staff included a Jewish social worker, an Irish cashier, a Jewish handicapped man at the main desk, black nurses, attendants, aides, technicians, kitchen and cleaning help, men and women, Caribbeans and Latinos. The doctors were mainly white, as was administration, with an occasional black and Asian.

Eva’s children had chosen a private room for her, sight unseen. Jenny was shown not the room Eva would occupy but one just like it. It was large, airy, located on the preferred second floor overlooking one of the gardens, big closet, private bath, armchair, TV mounted on one wall, crucifix on the other. (Good thing Flora hadn’t come after all.) Cost? Realistically, between six and seven thousand a month.

“What happens when her money’s all gone?”

Eva’s children were in charge of Eva’s money, but Jenny was managing Naomi’s.

“The patient is shifted to a Medicaid bed in a double room, the same as the room I’m about to show you for your other sister.”

The young woman escorting Jenny was pretty, nicely put together in a black silk pantsuit lightened by a long string of gray-and-white beads made of some kind of tropical seed. She was essentially a saleswoman, but her spiel was heavily shmaltzed with compassionate phrasing: caring, loving, close, family. Her light blue eyes remained dead.