Helen Yglesias - The Girls

The children fell in love with Theirami: fabulous wide white sand beach, blue-green violet white-edged water warm and gentle as a bath, palm trees everywhere heavy with coconuts, real coconuts they took home to Grandpa to open and demonstrate how to eat, real coconuts lying around the walkways of Miami Beach like garbage on New York City streets.

Jenny was a city product, born in Brooklyn, reared in every borough except the wilds of Staten Island. Her natural habitat was sidewalks, city parks, museums, public beaches, ferries, a fifth-floor walkup, her father’s neighborhood grocery store, the apartment house stoop, public school playgrounds, public libraries, city colleges, corporation offices, bank cages, department stores, five-and-tens, automats. Nature was a brave little blade of grass growing in a chink of pavement, the spire of a building cutting into a sky dramatic with clouds and sunset. The height of nature was the open upper deck of a two-tiered Fifth Avenue bus on a soft summer night. Music of the spheres? Beethoven’s Pastoral had poured into her, bouncing off the stone benches of Lewisohn Stadium, entrance fee a quarter, or was it fifty cents? She had gleaned the nothing she knew of the natural world then from books, movies, plays. Who dreamt of sharks in Coney Island waters, or snakes, poisonous or otherwise, in any grass of her acquaintance? Did wild animals exist outside the safe borders of the Bronx Zoo?

So what was she talking about anyway? Even now, living in Maine, next door to a wilderness, gathering her half-assed knowledge of trees, plants, and flowers, of barn owls, Canada geese, and pileated woodpeckers, listening to the big noises of the sea and the little noises of life in the woods — field mice and chipmunks, squirrels, voles, ferrets, chickadees, evening grosbeaks, ducks, owls, bats, seagulls and cormorants, foxes and raccoons, skunks and porcupines — and on to the larger animal life, deer, moose, eagles, ospreys, the darling seals, the whales, and the bears, the unbelievable bears. Did this late-gained knowledge give her leave to mourn the natural world of Florida, gone to concrete? When it came down to nature she was a voyeur — and a wimp. She killed any bug that entered her house in Maine, and trapped any mouse. Nature was outside. Her house was inside. Not to be confused. Last year, when she visited her oldest sister, Eva, in posh Aventura, a very large brilliantly green fly had menaced her for most of a morning on the beach, seriously interfering with her reading of Patrick White and necessitating much waving of the arms and flinging about of a towel to keep the insect at bay. And as she swam her labored laps in the chlorinated waters of the condominium’s pool, she had been flabbergasted by the visit of a high-stepping heron sipping a drink, its beak alarmingly bleached at the tip.

Flabbergasted, she thought, admiring the effect out her window of a mass of brilliantly white high-rises edging the darkened waters on either side of the densely trafficked causeway. Nobody said “flabbergasted” anymore. Something about Miami put time into reverse. Something about returning to the bosom of her family. Bosom. Nobody said “bosom” anymore, either.

“A man goes to the rabbi of an Orthodox congregation and asks him to say a brucha over his Maserati.”

The dapper old gent on a new joke.

Angelica wasn’t listening. She was lining up destinations. They had swung onto crowded Collins Avenue, and she was all driver, busy with Miami Beach traffic.

“We’ll drop you first, Mr. Winer.” He had become Mr. Winer somewhere along the route when Jenny wasn’t listening.

“Then the lady, and then you.” Angelica nodded to the young man by way of the rearview mirror. “She’s last, way out above Bal Harbour,” about the youngster still asleep.

“‘What’s a Maserati?’ the Orthodox rabbi says, so the man goes to the Conservative shul and asks the same question.” The joke relentlessly proceeding.

“Fountainblue, right, Mr. Winer?” Angelica pronounced the name of the hotel in pure American, interrupting without apology.

“Right, right, nothing but the best. For me, nothing but the best,” and without transition, “and gets the same answer, ‘What’s a Maserati?’ So the man goes to the rabbi of the Reform congregation and tries again. ‘Please would you say a brucha over my new Maserati?’” Mr. Winer paused to enhance the effect of the punch line. “And the Reform rabbi says to him, ‘What’s a brucha?’”

The blond, blue-eyed, handsome, possibly gay man Jenny had assumed to be non-Jewish joined her in a burst of laughter. Well, well. Jewish after all? Mr. Winer was delighted with the unexpected response from an audience he had long given up on. He turned around to beam at them. Angelica didn’t laugh. She either didn’t know that brucha meant a blessing, didn’t appreciate the intricate schisms among the Jewish faithful, or was too preoccupied with rounding the sharp curve on Collins Avenue before the entranceway to the Fontainebleau Hotel.

Directly in front of them, an enormous trompe l’oeil Fontainebleau rose over the avenue, a phantom Fontainebleau superimposed on the real one, its gates commanded by pastel-painted Grecian godlike figures guarding the opening to an Eden permanently held within a perfect, unchanging skyscape.

“Ahh!” Jenny said aloud.

Though she had seen this vulgar wonder on earlier visits, it continued to amaze, trip after trip.

“The city made them do it,” the young man in the back seat informed her. “To cover up the parking lot, delivery trucks, garbage bins, all the sh—” He checked himself in deference to her white hair. “All the messy stuff, you know. Quite an effect, isn’t it?”

Jenny agreed it was quite an effect.

Mr. Winer said, “Gorgeous, gorgeous.”

Angelica’s strong arms had maneuvered the bus through a snarl of traffic into the crescent beyond the showy fountain and the mass of flowers and greenery. She was all dedicated business inching for a space close to the marbled staircase that led to the hotel’s gilded, glowing interior.

Almost all the people pouring out of the mess of vehicles were Orthodox Jews, not the poor European shtetl variety, but new affluent Americans, dressed to the nines, their heads covered. The older women wore fashionable wigs, nothing like the ones Mama’s generation stuck on their heads— sheitels —and the young women wore charming flower-decorated hats over their glossy wigs. The men covered their hair with little round yarmulkes, silk, embroidered, knitted. “Custom-made” was clearly the rule for their clothing, as was “Money is no object.” Whole families were dressed alike, from the mother down to the littlest girl, in long flowered dresses and pretty hats pulled low over luxuriant hair and dark eyes. Often the young mother, leading a brood of four, five, six children, was again proudly pregnant. The tiniest boys wore formal dark suits, the whitest of white shirts, dark ties, and yarmulkes or little fedora hats, like their older brothers and their young fathers. Some of the elderly men were sweltering under traditional long black wool coats and wide-brimmed beaver hats. There were beards, beards, beards and a sprinkling of sidecurls and the dangling strings of snowy white traditional undergarments. It was Passover week. The Orthodox were gathering for the holiday.

Mr. Winer had disembarked, mingling with his fellow Jews and supervising the movement of his luggage. Now that he was safely among his kind, he fixed a yarmulke to the back of his head with a bobby pin as Angelica took off.

Typical of Miami Beach, the neighborhood changed every few blocks. The stretch of Collins where Flora lived was seedy: small old shopping malls, food and drug supermarkets, liquor stores; the usual huddle of worn-out McDonald’s Burger King Wendy’s Denny’s IHP pizza joints Cuban takeout Italian kosher; a collection of hole-in-the-wall stores selling jewelry, T-shirts, bathing suits, shoes, sneakers, lottery tickets, body building and self-defense, eyeglasses, foot care, haircuts, fake nails, psychic readings, tours, money, newspapers, and cruddy groceries. The narrow sidewalks were awash in trash — paper and plastic, food and the debris of its packaging, leaves, sand blown in from the broad beach one block away.