Helen Yglesias - The Girls

Instead of working, she swam. Miami was for swimming.

In the greeny blue of the pool on the broad terrace, out under the sky and the sun, the water heavy with chlorine, the breeze larded with the smell of fried seafood, she swam. Her body entered the water and she was sane again, agile, calmed, cured, her head clear of everything but the pleasure of free movement. She swam twice a day, avoiding the times when the pool was crowded with old Jewish men and women standing waist-high in the water chatting, or with Latino kids splashing and screaming. She swam at odd hours, alone, herself and the healing waters, one on one. In the pool she thought of a second sentence to write on the yellow lined paper, and a third, a whole paragraph. In the water’s perfect embrace she was able to think.

Flora thought her mad for swimming in the pool—“That chlorine will kill you, why don’t you swim in the ocean, the ocean’s pure!”—when she wasn’t accusing Jenny of showing off by swimming at all: “You’re too old to be swimming by yourself in a pool full of chlorine. I stopped when I was eighty.” It became one of their recurring struggles. She explained to Flora that she too preferred the ocean. But. There was the matter of the ridge — a couple of feet of trench filled with sharp rocks and smashed shells in a swirling undertow that unbalanced her. She would have to pass through that danger to reach swimmable waters. Couldn’t Flora understand that it would be a disaster if she fell and broke a hip? She was in Miami to help, not to compound the problems. She would love to be led in and out of the dangerous trench if she could find the angel who would do that and leave her alone in between, herself and the ocean, one on one, receiving the miracle cure of the healing waters, but failing that, she would swim in the pool, reveling in the illusion of perfect mobility by way of the imperfect crawl she had been taught in high school. It was good enough. It was great. It wiped out age. For an hour or so.

The week of the scheduled move to the nursing home, Miami Beach was revving itself up for the promise of a first-class storm. The weathermen were in heaven. Their moment of glory. The word “awesome” had taken over the airwaves. Before the expected full impact, there was the menace of the blackened roiling sea beyond the condo windows, the power and the incessant noise of the astonishing wind, the sand between the teeth with every breath, on the lids and in the eyes with every blink.

Jenny had begun by pooh-poohing it all. “If you’ve been through a nor’easter, you’ve been through the worst,” she said, and actually left the building, through the garage door on the side street, to buy a newspaper and prove the storm inferior.

She had exited at a moment of comparative quiet, but after a few steps, at the corner, it was impossible to stand. She sat right down on the brick path and waited for a lull, scared out of her mind, desperately clinging to the wrought-iron fence surrounding a flower bed. She watched as the entrance canopy of a seedy hotel across the street was ripped from its moorings and sent flying, a mad object of canvas and metal supports banging away at windows and the sides of buildings in a terrifying display until it touched down in front of the three-for-ten-dollars T-shirt store, knocking over the racks of sale garments perennially on sidewalk display and coming to rest wedged under a Miami Herald vending machine chained to a lamppost.

She crawled back into the building during the next lull and took Flora’s barrage without a word of reply.

“Are you crazy? Are you crazy? What are you— crazy? This is a Miami Beach storm. You have no idea what we’re in for. You don’t tangle with a Miami Beach storm, schvester, not if you’re in your right mind.”

The danger had revived Flora. Bed no longer claimed her. She was fully dressed first thing in the morning in a bright blue Dutch boy outfit, with a middy top and pants bulging at the hips, narrowing to the ankles. She had wound around her head and throat a gossamer blue scarf, which from time to time she pulled entirely over her face, to keep the sand out, she said.

Sand was blowing into the apartment, blowing in through the tiniest exposed cracks of seams around the sills and decorative bricks, propelled by the wildly whistling wind roaring and screaming without stop. Flora was busy securing the premises, stuffing windows with cloths, piling towels on sills and on the floor along the walls facing the sea, filling pots with water, filling kettles, pitchers, jars with water, filling the refrigerator with bottles of water, filling the bathtub with water, the sinks, filling pails to place in the bathrooms in case all the other water got used up.

Though it was not yet the season, the weathermen were talking hurricane, talking hurricane-strength winds, potentially a hundred miles per hour, talking high pressure, low pressure, talking weather patterns, talking niño, talking direction in which the storm was moving, talking evacuation, talking eye of the storm while pointing to swirling graphics of a terrorizing nature, talking talking talking.

Flora turned on both TVs and every radio in the apartment, in case one or the other gave out. She darted around checking the refrigerator, the freezer, the cupboards. She mourned that it was too late to go to the supermarket and stock up further. She called stores that might deliver come hell or high water, found a couple, ordered two Cuban meals from one because they delivered though she didn’t like Cuban food, ordered two kosher meals, chicken soup with matzo balls and noodles, roast chicken, potato kugel, kasha varnishkes, half a challa and half a rye bread, coleslaw and a couple of dill pickles, even a small sponge cake, because they delivered.

“We’ll be okay,” Flora said. “I stock all that canned soup and baked beans and tuna fish and gefilte fish, and there’s plenty of vegetables in the crisper and frozen juice and frozen fruit in the freezer, and all that Italian stuff, pizzas and lasagna and linguine alfredo, I really love linguine alfredo, and I’ve got powdered milk and evaporated and even condensed because you never know, that’s why I’m always stocking up, because you never know when God will decide to hit Miami Beach with everything he’s got. Hey!” She was triumphant. “I just found a whole package of Hebrew National hotdogs at the back of the freezer.”

Then, collapsing into laughter, “Do you remember,” she said, “during the war with all the shortages, when Lionel’s wife Lillian was living with us and Lionel was in the service and Jonah was a little boy, she stuffed the closet in her bedroom with bananas because she was afraid they’d get scarce like sugar and coffee and be put on the ration books? Do you remember the stink, the awful stink of the rotting bananas and how embarrassed she was? She thought something terrible would happen to Jonah if he didn’t have his mashed banana a day. She was such an idiot, God rest her soul. How in the world our brothers managed to all marry idiots is beyond me.”

“What’s beyond me,” Jenny said, “is how that unattractive, retarded-looking, drooling baby turned into the man who’s the dean of faculty at the University of Illinois, or wherever he is, and the distinguished author of half a dozen books on Freud, Jung, and Rank.”

“I think it’s Indiana, University of Indiana — or is that Eva’s son? Who’s Rank anyway? You’re always coming up with these names — and the way you pronounce them. Rahnk, Rahnk,” she said, mimicking the open vowel. “I’m exhausted. I have to lie down now. Could we have no more conversation for a while? Please?”

That left Jenny free to call Eva, who was napping right through the storm, according to a friend who was sitting with her in case she was scared. “And she had a real good bowel movement before she fell asleep,” the friend reported.