Helen Yglesias - The Girls

So Eva was okay.

It was Naomi who was petrified. Naomi hadn’t slept, she was in pain from the latest surgery, she couldn’t find her pain pills, she hadn’t been able to move her bowels, she couldn’t understand why God would choose to wipe them all out here in Miami Beach on a morning when she was having trouble with her bowels.

“There’s nothing, nothing but a little sand between us and the ocean. It’s going to rise up in its wrath and overwhelm us. What does God think he’s doing? And there’s nothing we can do. Can you come here and stay with me, Jenny? Please, I’m so frightened.”

Jenny, trying to remember if it was Chateaubriand who had recorded his daily bowel movements in his journals in his old age, and wondering if perhaps it was an obsession of the old generally that would overtake her any day now, heard Naomi answering herself.

“No, no, of course not, darling, it’s too dangerous, don’t you dare go out of the building, though God alone knows if you’ll be safe in there. I can’t help it. I can’t help feeling that if we’re all together we’re safer, if only we were all together in one place. It’s been so long since we were all together in one place, safe.”

Something like seventy-five years since they had all been together in one place, in the sense Naomi meant. Living together. Not partying together at weddings, bar mitzvas, big birthdays, or mourning together at funerals, and even then someone always missing, dead or ill or too busy, but living together. Safe? When had it been safe? Never. Too many of them, too little space in those four-room apartments, not enough bedrooms, not enough beds, too little money, too many clashing hopes, too much need, Mama overworked and torn to pieces between them, Papa centered on his sons, his sons, since the best his daughters might do was marry into prosperity, while his sons would make something of themselves, give his wasted life meaning, take care of his old age, say Kaddish when he died.

Daughters weren’t supposed to make something of themselves, just as Mama had never made anything of herself. But what did that mean? Mama’s life amounted to nothing? Of course she had made something of herself, she had made them, out of the calcium of her brittle bones. She had borne and raised that family whose sons Papa claimed as assets and the daughters as liabilities until they married into prosperity. Mama had worked, worked, worked. She was one of the world’s great producers. She had made an extraordinary product, a human being, seven times. George Bernard Shaw believed a woman should be paid twenty thousand pounds for each child she bore, or some such sum. That would have supplied Mama with a nice little nest egg for her old age, the pension society had never granted her.

Reassuring Naomi, promising to get to Naomi just as soon as she could, she felt herself the child she had been in the midst of her family — little girl Jenny in a dream of dissimulation, doing the right thing, being good, skipping along the sidewalk on her skinny legs, skipping along in school from grade to grade without effort, caught in a monstrous enchantment of being the good little helpful unobtrusive girl to whom everything happened if not against her will then certainly without it.

My life in my family is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake, she paraphrased. And warned herself to stop dramatizing.

The storm veered north, offshore, lessening in power, landing without much damage on the tip of the Carolinas, dropping heavy rains along the way and leaving Miami Beach washed brilliantly clean and user-friendly, so that it became possible once again to plan Eva and Naomi’s move to the nursing home.

First, manicures and pedicures had to be arranged. It started with Flora, still invigorated by the storm. She wanted to play a full part in the coming move, but first she must have a pedicure.

“And while I’m at it, I may as well have a manicure,” she said.

Naomi, quite independently, said she must have a manicure and a pedicure before she went into that place.

And Eva, of course, had to have a pedicure and manicure too.

And while they were at it, Eva and Naomi might as well have their hair done.

For Jenny, who had never had a pedicure, and a manicure only once, when she was seventeen, for brother Max’s formal wedding at Essex House on Central Park South because his wife-to-be was rich and her folks were paying and Naomi insisted that her little sister wasn’t going to shame the family by attending a fancy wedding without a hair set and manicure, the whole gestalt of manicure, pedicure was part of the mystery of childhood, right up there with underwear and sex. Romantic sex. A permanent picture existed in her consciousness of herself as a baby, entranced by the sight and sweet smell of grown-up glamorous Eva dressed in a pink brocade gown, sitting at the window of the family’s crowded Brooklyn flat, polishing her nails with a long silver-handled shammy buffer. Eva was waiting for the arrival of the man she was to become engaged to that night. He would take her out to dinner in a swanky restaurant (Italian), where he would formally propose and present her with a diamond engagement ring (small). Jenny learned all this later from Flora, who was talented at ferreting out family secrets. But hidden in the romance of the pink brocade and the shining nails was something else, something dark to do with expensive silken underwear and partial violent nakedness, something shuddery to do with the tall, handsome, forbidding man in a tuxedo who was the manager of the office where soft-skinned, soft-eyed big sister Eva worked as a bookkeeper and had nabbed this good catch that Papa was so pleased with. And hidden in her older sister’s hope was thick, dispiriting dread, so pervasive that Jenny smelled it on Eva’s skin. Eva was not quite eighteen years old.

Eventually the diamond ring would be pawned and lost in one of Eva’s husband’s recurring disastrous slides into financial failure during their long marriage. The silver-handled buffer survived the ring, tarnishing a bit along with its matching hand mirror and comb and brush that sat on a silver tray on Eva’s dresser wherever Eva’s dresser turned up throughout the economic vagaries of her marriage, until the old-fashioned set finally disappeared out of Eva’s life.

And the painted nails survived, the shining painted fingernails of her sisters as they grew up ahead of her. The smell of the nail polish and the remover over the smell of their perfume was embedded in Jenny’s memories like the smell of dill in Mama’s Friday night chicken soup, but while Mama’s dill insured love and safety, nail polish sent a different message, of soft hidden flesh in the silky underwear they bought even when they couldn’t afford it, for the naked struggles with the men they did or didn’t catch, to equal disaster. Eva caught her office manager and stayed married all her life. Naomi lost out on her first love — gave herself to him like a fool, as she always put it, and then lost him — finally caught a husband, found him tasteless, let the marriage be annulled, went on to other lovers, found a final husband who had the good grace to die soon, went on with her varied secret love life. And then there was Flora.

There wasn’t enough distance between herself and Flora for glamour to enter. Flora was only five years older, and even when she started to paint her nails, there was no mystery about underwear. She wore the same kind of cotton bloomers Jenny did — a little larger — and it never occurred to Jenny that Flora might wear her bloomers with a difference until she was enlightened by a mutual friend up the block in the Bronx. The friend was older than Jenny, a little younger than twelve-year-old Flora. The friend’s name was Friend, Dorothy Friend, and she shared a room with her only brother, Bernie Friend, who was six years older.