Jenny stroked her sister’s smooth, rounded brow, noble under the silky hair swept away from the innocent part. The sweet parting of the hairs of their heads, Dr. Maypole’s and Naomi’s. Jenny was supposed to kill this darling sister?
Suddenly Naomi pulled away to vent her annoyance that Flora was off talking to the other residents. “She acts like a social worker. So false. What does she do for them? Nothing. It’s all talk. Anyway, she’s here to see me. Why is she talking to them?”
It would serve no purpose to point out to Naomi that it was she who had introduced her sisters to almost everybody in the residence, down to the busboys in the dining room. What was there to do then but be polite and make conversation?
As if she had read Jenny’s mind, Naomi said, “Why shouldn’t I introduce you? I’m proud of you. I’m proud of my sisters. Who wouldn’t be? I want to show you off. Especially you, Jenny. I was telling this man who recently moved in that you wrote for the New York Review of Books. He’s a retired professor of philosophy, something like that, and he was very much impressed.” She paused. “Though if the truth be told, he’s an idiot. Underneath those degrees he’s nothing but an idiot. Never heard of Eugene Onegin. Would you believe it? By Tchaikovsky, I tell him. Beautiful, ravishing. Never heard of Onegin. Idiot. He’s crazy about me, but I just brush him off. Please, control yourself, I tell him, and he calms down.”
What the retired professor of philosophy heard during conversations was anybody’s guess. A neat little man, ninety-seven and still handsome in a dashing Russian-Jewish mold, smelling of talcum and aftershave, well groomed in carefully color-matched outfits — cotton slacks, jacket, tie, dress shirt, fresh flower in the lapel — he was indeed crazy about Naomi, kissing her hand in greeting and leave-taking, but he was so deaf any kind of progressive communication was impossible. He smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, and once in a while shouted an unhinged response into a disconnected void.
“If a man isn’t handsome I can’t look at him,” Naomi informed Jenny, as she often had in the past. “Or if he smells bad. They have to smell nice. My husband was beautiful and he smelled beautiful. Of course, Shimon isn’t that beautiful, but don’t you think he looks like John Gilbert, sort of that type? Sam was more the Ramon Navarro type.”
Naomi’s husband, dead for fourteen years, had indeed been a handsome man even into his late nineties. And yes, if one squinted, Shimon, the retired professor, did look a bit like John Gilbert.
“Poor squeaky-voiced John Gilbert. Couldn’t survive the talkies,” Jenny said.
“What?” Naomi said, and continued as if Jenny hadn’t spoken. “We all had handsome husbands. Except Flora. But Flora has no taste. Especially in men. All they have to be is men, in pants, and in her estimation they’re great, as long as they fill their pants, if you know what I mean.” She lowered her voice. “Flora told me you two had a fight and you’re leaving.”
For a split second Jenny caught Naomi’s deep-set hazel eyes suffused with suffering and unspoken longing before their sculpted lids hid the emotion.
“Please don’t go, Jenny. I’m so frightened. Another operation. You know I have to have another operation. This time in my — you know, near the groin. With the one on my shin not even healed yet. And I had two, you know, on my breasts. One on each breast. But of course you know, you came to be with me. Bless you, darling, bless you for that, but please don’t leave me before the operation. Stay with me again.” She had delivered this speech to her own lap, never looking at Jenny after the first agonized glance. And without transition, holding her mouth rigid, she said, “Why can’t I just die quietly, smiling, why can’t I just die in my sleep or sitting in a chair, why must I be so tormented and make the people around me suffer? I wanted to go out smiling, not this big bother to everybody. Is that too much to ask?”
Jenny leaned over to hug her. “No, no, you’re not, I love you, I’m not leaving. No, no, yes, of course I’m staying.”
Naomi looked up. “I’m sorry, Jenny, I don’t have the strength anymore. I can’t. Who’s right, who’s wrong. I just want peace around me. Forgive me, but I can’t. I can’t take sides, I need whatever help I can get, I need her. I need Flora, I need you, whoever’s right, whoever’s wrong. It’s too late for right or wrong, right or wrong is too hard for me now.”
“It’s okay,” Jenny said. “I’m not leaving Miami. I’ll be here, don’t worry. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be with you, I promise.”
She had never before considered the phrase “Her heart sank.” It wasn’t her kind of phrase, but it was happening to her at this moment standing beside Naomi’s wheelchair, her heart sinking through her body down down into her trembling thighs and legs and feet, down through the dreary green carpet of the chandeliered 1920s lobby in the run-down residence, her heart sinking slowly heavily yearningly beneath the floor through the cement foundation through the pipes and messy obstructions to the earth, the real earth that her heart longed to be buried in, never to rise to feel more loss.
Flora was slowly approaching with a companion pushing a walker, a woman all roundnesses: smiling face, red fluffy hair, bosom and buttocks under soft blue clinging pantsuit. Lift, push, drag, step. Lift, push, drag, step. They inched forward.
“Dolly’s son gets the New York Review of Books,” Flora threw out in advance of their progress. “She’s dying to meet you, Jenny.”
Dolly’s son was apparently one of those forever graduate students, in his late thirties, working on his thesis. Dolly said he regularly read the New York Review of Books but on second thought perhaps it was the New Yorker, she might be mixing them up.
“That’s okay. Jenny’s written for both.” Flora, filled with pride. “She’s a published writer, books too, you know.”
It was a toss-up for Jenny which was worse, Flora’s intimate scorn or Flora’s public praise filled with errors. She had never written for the New York Review of Books.
“The Women’s Review of …” Jenny stopped herself.
Dolly, reluctant to abandon the topic of her graduate student son, who was, it appeared, also writing a book, asked if it cost Jenny a lot to get her books published.
“No,” Jenny said. “They pay me, not a great deal, but I don’t pay them.”
“I have a cousin,” Dolly said, leaning her round bosom against the front of the three-sided walker and returning the smile to her round face, “a very educated man, he paid to have a book published. They turned out a beautiful job, all in blue with a little red trim.”
Naomi threw back her head and closed her eyes. “Why haven’t they opened the dining room? I’m starving.”
Dolly turned to Naomi. “You have to be patient. It doesn’t open until four o’clock on the dot, not a minute earlier. They’re having fish tonight. I don’t like their fish, but what can you do?”
“Dinner’s served at four o’clock? I thought it was five,” Flora said.
“I changed my seating,” Naomi said. “Took the earliest seating. I couldn’t wait.”
“You have to learn to be patient.” Dolly inched her walker to the side of Naomi’s wheelchair. “How many times have I told you, Naomi darling, you have to be patient. Your sister is a wonderful person, but she has to learn to be patient.” The last directed to Flora and Jenny.