The imposing condominium where Flora had bought an apartment years before stood serene in this general wreckage. Flora got it for a song, as she always said, at a time when the developers hoped the area would boom. But the Rochester Arms remained an isolated bastion on the street, and though the value of the apartments had more than doubled, the surroundings had steadily deteriorated.
Because the driver was not allowed to help with Jenny’s bags—“Lady, it’s the rule. I can’t leave the vehicle unattended”—Handsome jumped out and offered his services. The messy teenager slept on. Jenny paid her eleven-dollar fare, gathered together her smaller bags, coat, and shawl, and followed the young man as quickly as she could. As he hauled her heavy luggage through the littered gardens leading to the door, walking well in advance of her, she noted a cunningly worked embroidered yarmulke pinned to the back of his silky straight blond hair.
Flora had gotten the time of Jenny’s arrival wrong. Jenny could hear her shrieks at the other end of the intercom when security called from the desk to say that she was on the way up.
Jenny expected Flora outside the elevator on the sixteenth floor, but the silent, heavily carpeted hallway was empty. She dragged her stuff to Flora’s half-open door, decorated with a huge purple paper rose. Flora was hiding behind the door, naked, except for a dark purple towel wound around her head, from which black goo oozed down the pearly pink flesh of her neck into another purple towel draped around her shoulders. The flesh of her body, the well-shaped breasts and legs, denied eighty-five years of wear, but her heavily lined face claimed them.
“It’s cigarettes,” Eva, the oldest sister, always said. “Flora smoked since she was fifteen — earlier even, she was a devil from the day she was born. She did everything, you name it. Smoking was nothing, you don’t know the half of it. It gave her those terrible wrinkles. It’s a well-known fact that smoking creates wrinkles. Look at the rest of us — hardly a line on us, not a line. She did it to herself with the smoking. Sure, we all smoked, but not the way Flora smoked. She lived it and breathed it. And now she’s paying the price.”
Excessive. Flora had always been excessive: the wrinkled skin, the prominent beaked nose dotted with darkened pores, the wonderfully alive black eyes flashing under the heavy black eyebrows. At the moment of greeting she always struck Jenny as an exaggeration of herself, a wicked caricature — particularly now, naked, with the black goo and purple towels. Purple was Flora’s color of the decade. In the apartment everything was color-coordinated: light lilac walls, violet and plum for the upholstered furniture, violet again for the cushions and wall-to-wall carpeting, dark and light purple for the throw rugs, the lamps, the window blinds, the pots holding artificial plants, down to the towels, washcloths, bath mats, and purple toilet seats in the two bathrooms. There was even a small upright purple piano.
Jenny embraced, kissed, squealed in response to her sister’s welcome, until Flora’s joyful noises turned to sobs. Jenny didn’t follow down that path. She had always held herself aloof from the operatic drama of Flora’s swings of emotion.
“I can’t take it, I can’t take it,” Flora moaned. “She’s dying, Jenny, Naomi’s dying. It’s too much. Thank God you’ve come, I can’t do this alone. And Eva, she’s fading, she’s going. It’s too much. I can’t, I can’t. Our sisters are dying, Jenny, they’re dying.”
“Okay, okay,” Jenny soothed. She loved Flora, she did, but this invasion of needy flesh slightly nauseated her, the heaving bare breasts pressing, the oozing goo of the hair dye. Too liquid. She was too dry, too tired. She forced herself to hug and kiss, patting the naked solid female body of her sister, repeating, “Okay, okay, it’s okay, Flora. I’m here. We’ll do this together.”
And wished she were elsewhere.
Flora must have felt Jenny’s inner withdrawal, for she in turn withdrew to the farthest of the two purple bathrooms, where she blew her nose loudly and thoroughly. She reappeared in a moment, wearing a wraparound purple terry robe, and struck a pose, arms up, one bare leg extended, laughing immoderately.
“Ta-da! For your eyes only. The one and only Flora at her toilette! No more crying. ‘April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter; then, the moment after, weep thy girlish tears.’” And matter-of-factly, “This gunk has to stay on for a few more minutes. Bear with me. I know you don’t approve. You don’t have to say a word. You go with gray. Fine. I’m dyeing till the day I die.” Flora revved herself up into laughter again. “We die a little every day, don’t we, schvester? Well, while I’m dying, I’m dyeing. I’m living and looking good right up to the minute they put me in my coffin. Think I’m going to go like Eva and Naomi? Not me. I’m dying with my boots on. With my hair black.”
Jenny laughed. “You’re looking great, Flora.” And added, though she knew she shouldn’t, “Naomi’s hair was still black last time I saw her. Without dyeing. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” And quickly made amends. “You’re really looking great.”
“What? Even with this?” She pointed at her head. “You weren’t supposed to come until I was finished.” And then, with a tinge of resentment, “You’re the one who’s looking great. Weren’t you very sick? Gout or something? That’s what Eva told me. You know Eva, with her ‘poor Jenny’ litany. ‘Poor Jenny can’t even walk, she has such bad gout.’ You know Eva, I don’t have to tell you.”
“My gout’s under control. Allopurinol, bless it. I tore a ligament. Fell on a patch of slippery grass. Sheer hell. Most painful thing I ever lived through. Worse than gout.”
“You kidding? Worse than childbirth? Nothing worse than labor pains.”
“Oh well,” Jenny said, “it’s all relative.”
“It’s all relatives!” Flora shrieked. “Sisters, sons, that’s all that’s left, relatives. You know I haven’t got a friend in the world? All gone. Dead. Men, women, friends, lovers, husbands, all gone. Only relatives. My sisters and my sons. My sons can’t be bothered and my sisters are dying.”
“How is Naomi?” Jenny said. “Is she in a lot of pain?”
“No pain. Don’t talk about pain. I don’t want you tsitsering over Naomi, that won’t do her any good. The doctors assure me she’s in no pain. Whatever she says.”
“What does she say?”
“Listen, she’s a complainer. Naomi was always a complainer. A quitter. I’m no quitter, no complainer. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not the way I’m going to die. Listen, I have to wash this stuff out now. Nice ‘n Easy. Sure, sure. That’s what they call it. It’s a mess, but I do it in the shower. I cleaned out a drawer for you and made a little space in the closet. Right here. Settle in. I’ll be out in two seconds. If you need hangers, there’s a bunch on the closet shelf. I figured you wouldn’t have much stuff, only here for a week, right?”
That was wrong, but Jenny said nothing. Time, time, plenty of time to arrange the matter of staying as long as Naomi needed her. Or maybe no time. How long, how long for Naomi, or for Eva, who might go any night, in her sleep if it pleased God or whomever, how long for any of them, Flora or herself, they were all old enough to go. Eighty, eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five. Patients in God’s waiting room. Oh God, let there be time for me to get out of Miami Beach, time to get back to New York or New England.
Kicking off the shoes that pinched, she padded over the soft purple carpeting of the bedroom to the wide purple-draped windows, drew up the heavy purple shade, and bared the view of glorious seascape. Well, not entirely glorious. The sea side of Collins presented a mix of styles. Street sleaziness had infiltrated its pretensions.