Helen Yglesias - The Girls

“I do it with my brother. Bernie does it to me all the time,” Dorothy Friend said, and watched Jenny closely to observe the effect. Disappointed at seeing none she could decipher on the carefully blank face, she tried again. “And Flora and your brother do it all the time too.”

Jenny was standing next to Dorothy in the bedroom Dorothy and Bernie Friend had shared all their lives. To Jenny, used to the makeshift sleeping arrangements of not enough rooms and too many brothers and sisters, its furnishings were impressive: a regular bedroom set — twin beds, double dresser, night tables, matching spreads — school diplomas on the wall, family photographs, a framed embroidered square announcing “God Lives in Our Hearts.” Not even Mama and Papa had a real bedroom like this one.

Jenny thought, Which bed do they do it in? What is “it,” anyway, and where in our hopelessly crowded apartment are Flora and Max doing “it”? She desperately needed to flee that bedroom and Dorothy Friend’s greedy eyes, waiting to lap up her shock. She wasn’t going to grant Dorothy that victory.

“I know all about it,” she said airily. “I have to go home now.” And ran.

Did she believe Dorothy Friend? Yes. Back at her own tenement stoop, her heart beating painfully, she admitted that she knew it was true. She had blocked all Flora’s hints, pretended that she had dreamed her favorite brother’s night roamings naked under a draped sheet, pretended that she didn’t know what Flora and Max were doing in Mama and Papa’s tiny back bedroom with the door closed when only the three of them were in the apartment on those nights when Mama and Papa worked late at the store and nobody else was home. Was she horrified? No, she was jealous. Not that she really wanted to be in the room with Flora and Max, but she didn’t want to be shut out either. She didn’t know what she wanted. She hated Flora’s special position, she hated Flora washing her bloomers in the bathroom basin, gasping, scrubbing, yelling at Jenny as tears fell into the soapy water. “Get out of here. You’re just a baby. You don’t know anything. Stop watching me. Babies can’t watch.”

What Jenny remembers, shuddering at herself, is that she blamed Flora, not brother Max. It was all Flora’s fault — she shouldn’t have let Max into her bloomers, and she shouldn’t have called Jenny a baby. If she had been a loyal sister she would have insisted on including Jenny in whatever went on in the back bedroom. Then none of “it” would have happened.

And now? Now she wants to beg Flora’s forgiveness for not being on Flora’s side all the way. “I was a baby,” she wants to say to Flora, “what could I have done?”

What she did was to follow her sisters’ leads more or less blindly, though without the nail polish. She constructed her own version of manicures and pedicures, her own rules of bloomers, panties, silk underwear and nakedness and the twining of arms and legs culminating in the glorious spasms of transcendent warmth right down to her unpainted toes. But she owed her sisters. They had given her a lot. She owed her sisters’ lives, her mother’s life, for preparing her, badly, for the field of battle she would enter behind them. Remember, remember, she had told herself over and over again, don’t make their mistakes, make your own, create a different battlefield, and if you fail you’ll have fallen in a war where others may succeed, daughters and granddaughters, nieces and great-nieces, the women who come after.

And of course she had failed, failed to put together love heart soul mind sex friendship equality family community — arid, stupid words for the search that had governed her life. A good search, take it all in all, failure or not. Did the search itself add up to a good life? She had done her best, had flexed her tiny muscle and fought the good fight. Had she won anything? It felt as if she had. Was this the way everyone felt at the end, that they had won something valuable and enduring, in spite, in spite of the defeats?

She made the arrangements for the manicures and pedicures, Flora’s at the corner beauty parlor run by Russian Jews newly arrived from Moscow and Leningrad, known once again as St. Petersburg; Eva’s at her residence, where a manicurist/pedicurist regularly took care of the women; and Naomi’s by arrangement with the Russian émigré from Flora’s beauty parlor, who was willing to make the trip for forty-five dollars plus cab fare.

Flora argued that it was ridiculous to pay all that money. “Naomi can make it to the beauty parlor if she tries,” she said. “You’ll save at least fifteen dollars if she gets to the beauty parlor, and she can do it if she really tries. Look at me, I’m still in there fighting, and I can’t tell you how weak I feel, horribly horribly weak. I don’t know how I manage to keep moving, I don’t know how I keep going, but I do, and so could Naomi if only she wouldn’t give up.”

“Yes, but with the wheelchair and taxis I’ll spend fifteen dollars getting her to the salon, so it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” Jenny said.

“Where’d you pick that up, ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’?”

“It’s a common expression. Everybody uses it, or they used to.”

But Flora continued to gaze at Jenny angrily. Once again she had infuriated Flora without knowing why.

In the end, strapped into their wheelchairs in the medical van, Eva and Naomi looked fine, their pretty hair nicely done, Eva’s short and slightly mannish, Naomi’s with its sweet part and simple arrangement, Naomi charming in a printed flowing skirt and matching top, a dark wool throw over her shoulders because she was always cold, and a straw topper in her hand if needed against the glare of the sun, Eva elegant in an all-black pantsuit with a beautifully pleated white silk blouse, black patent sandals, and a matching purse, their fingernails gleaming red on the pocketbooks clutched in their laps, their painted toenails shining red through their open-toed sandals.

Jenny had arranged for the van to arrive first at Naomi’s residence and then travel north along the beach to Eva’s residence, and from there south again over causeways toward the city of Miami and to the nursing home. Jenny and Flora were to get to Naomi’s on their own, Jenny naturally thinking of a cab but Flora insisting on a bus ride. Jenny was too worn out and preoccupied to argue.

Flora had outfitted herself in a casual purple linen pantsuit, her hair curling out of a little purple cap worn far back on her head, a purple scarf at her throat, an oversized purple bag slung on her shoulder. She listed sideways with its weight, leaning heavily on Jenny for support, shuffling along in her purple sandals, the bright red toenails shining.

“Too much, too much.” Once seated in the bus Flora heaved great deep sighs, intoning, “Too much, too much, too much to bear.” She threw back her head and gasped for air, stretching her remarkably shapely limbs ending in the purple sandals into the aisle of the bus. Other passengers looked at her with pitying sympathy and eyed Jenny coldly for just sitting there, not paying sufficient attention to her ailing sister.

The bus left them close to Naomi’s residence. They could see the medical van already parked in the circular driveway, and Naomi in her wheelchair at the door with a group of fellow residents gathered around her.

“Don’t tell them anything,” Naomi whispered desperately. “They think I’m going to the hospital for some tests. Don’t tell them, don’t tell them anything.”

Everybody knew the truth, of course, down to the tiniest detail. They had seen Naomi’s packed suitcases leaving the residence in the beat-up station wagon that Luis the Cuban night clerk used for odd jobs he picked up now and then, and of course Luis told everybody everything he knew. And the residents gossiped among themselves: they knew where Naomi was going, everybody knew that her dying sister Eva was going into the home too, everybody knew that it was the last place for both, everybody knew it was the end of the line for Naomi. They kissed and hugged her, murmuring vague loving wishes. “I hope everything goes well for you, I’ll never forget you, it’s been wonderful knowing you, God be with you, God bless, God bless.” They turned away with tears in their eyes, for Naomi and for themselves, for their own last journey.