Helen Yglesias - The Girls

Naomi’s room would be the same size on the same preferred floor, but with two beds separated by rings of curtain, two dressers, two armchairs, two big closets, two TVs, one bathroom, one large window overlooking a parking lot, one mounted crucifix. Cost? Four to five thousand. The bed, Jenny was assured, was assigned to Medicaid, no need to move the patient when her money gave out. Naomi’s roommate-to-be was already a Medicaid patient, a sweet-faced blond woman who sat fully dressed in her armchair in the darkest corner of the room, staring and smiling. Though she looked younger, she was ninety-four. She opened her arms to Jenny and broadened her vague smile.

“She thinks you’re her visitor. She never gets any, poor thing.”

Jenny blew her a kiss to no response and hurried after the young woman, who was now showing her the special rooms: for being bathed (terrifyingly deep metal tubs like torture chambers), for being exercised (machines and pads, less scary), and a sort of classroom (one bookcase, a scattering of books, pamphlets, and xeroxed sheets, a blackboard, a TV, a computer).

Jenny had already visited the central lobby, featuring exotic birds in a large glass enclosure with a small flowering tree. Shut-in birds for shut-in patients. A lunchroom off the lobby served ambulant residents: tablecloths, cloth napkins, fresh flowers in skinny vases, cafeteria aroma of clashing foods. Naomi liked eating at a table set with cloth and flowers. She’d hate the smell.

“But what if she can’t manage a tray?”

“She can be waited on, or helped in any other way. We have some wonderful volunteers.”

Then on to a lounge where the ambulant on their own frail legs gathered with those using wheelchairs, recliners, crutches, walkers, and canes. A heavy woman, garishly made up and obviously wigged, decked out in a sequined pantsuit, was performing a concert of golden oldies with a scratchy recording for backup. “Borsht Belt has-been,” Flora called the type. Exhausted and out of breath, Has-been was winding up with “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” Ice cream and cookies next, the real draw of the performance. Jenny was offered a dish, and not knowing how to refuse her escort without insult, she tried a mouthful. It was real ice cream, none of that low-fat yogurt stuff. She ate it greedily.

Eager to leave her, the saleswoman smiled, asked if Jenny had any other questions, pointed to the exit, and urged Jenny to visit the patio on her way out. Suddenly alive in all her body, she shook hands vigorously, assured Jenny that her sisters would be very happy at Serenity Villa, and bolted from the disheveled room of dying bodies.

Jenny sat for a minute. Across what passed for an aisle in that mess of furniture for the sick and dying, a slim, handsome man with a full head of white hair and a deeply tanned face had finished his ice cream. He was propped up in an elaborately fitted upholstered recliner on wheels, carefully dressed in expensive chinos and a Brooks Brothers striped dress shirt, the collar open and the long sleeves dashingly folded back below his elbows. One of the volunteers, a soft young woman in a long flowered dress, was trying to collect the refuse of his snack. He relinquished his paper plate but held on to his paper napkin. He seemed to have had a stroke. He couldn’t speak. His dramatic dark eyes were eloquent. The young woman pressed him to drop the napkin into the black plastic garbage bag she carried, but he clutched it tighter the more she insisted.

“Would you like more ice cream, Mr. Kaplan? Is that it?”

He couldn’t respond. His eyes glowed with a mysterious message. The young woman tugged at the napkin. He tightened his grip, she tugged, he gripped harder. The young woman gave up with a little shrug of incomprehension.

“That’s okay, Mr. Kaplan. We’ll get it later.”

The urgency in his eyes changed when the volunteer left. Jenny watched him concentrate on the napkin, fixing it with an evident emotion as strong as lust or love, until the fingers loosened and dropped it in his lap, revealing two squashed cookies which he labored to bring up to his mouth to chew with slow, victorious satisfaction. When he had swallowed the last crumb, he put back his head and closed the lids on his lustrous eyes.

On her way out through the patio, she passed a black family visiting a paralyzed old man in another recliner on wheels. She sat down on a bench in the shade and watched. They were a large family, one very old couple, many middle-aged and young people, children, babies, and a big golden-haired dog who kept his long-nosed noble head in the old man’s lap. They laughed and talked, horsed around, chased down the wandering babies. They ate and drank sodas, fruits, nuts, chocolates, ice cream, and hunks of birthday cake, the bigger kids racing around the damp paths of the recently watered garden, a daughter son grandson granddaughter taking turns at the side of the recliner, patting the dog’s head to keep him put, smoothing the old man’s round wrinkled forehead and his thin white hair, kissing hugging holding up the babies for him to see, urging the playing children to stop by for a minute to say hello to Grandpa, Great-grandpa, stroking stroking smiling smiling smiling into the old man’s eyes hazed over with immobilized love and pain and happiness.

She had neglected to call a cab from the desk of the nursing home. Stuck in an area where taxis didn’t cruise, she headed for the bus stop but halted some way from its shaded bench. A homeless man had made it his library/office. Instead of a shopping cart full of rags, his was packed with books, pads, manuscripts. There was a suitcase strapped to the side of the cart, probably holding his clothing. He was neatly dressed, washed and combed, though very hairy: long full beard, a huge halo of hair tied into a ponytail with a shoelace, hairy arms and feathery hairs on the backs of his hands and fingers down to the nails.

She wanted to talk to him, ask what he was working on, but he was too intent to disturb. He was writing in a script so tiny it was barely legible, though she strained hard to read the words flowing on long lined sheets of yellow paper held by a clipboard — a method of working so like her own it startled her. He was even using one of her favorite pens, a heavy silver Waterman. He had a lean, worn face. His concentration in this public corner of the covered bus stop was exemplary, a lesson in ignoring the nonessential. He was oblivious to Jenny’s hungry curiosity and to the presence of the other waiting passengers, who gave him a wide berth. He worked as if he were entirely alone. He searched out a book from the shopping cart, whirled pages, found what he needed, wrote rapidly in the tiny script. Heat, breeze, insects were nothing to him, nor the ceaseless traffic whizzing by, nor the incongruity of a poster behind his head of four young women in wet-lipped hilarity cavorting in scanty costumes and selling — what? Makeup, hair dye, underwear, sportswear, bathing suits, evening gowns, shoes? Impossible to say if one didn’t recognize the logo, as she did not.

She envied him. What was wrong with her? She was actually envying a homeless, crazy bum. Because he was working.

She couldn’t work in Miami. There was nothing of substance left in her head after visiting Naomi and Eva at their separate retirement residences. Or before, for that matter, when she was on call for Flora’s moods. A book assigned for review by a literary quarterly lay at her bedside in the alien bedroom next to a pad attached to a clipboard, with a starting sentence on its yellow lined page. That was as much as she had managed. One sentence. Why was she sacrificing the little time left her to work? She was eighty years old, for God’s sake. Was she doing it for love? Sisterhood? Was she doing it for Naomi’s measly amount of money, which she was spending like water, like it grew on trees, for Naomi’s good, not her own? Her own good lay north, in her house in Maine, in her life in New York with her children and grandchildren, with her friends, with her work. Would she never, ever be free of her family?