by Rita Lakin
Evvie starts her own warm-ups. She always says the same thing every morning, calling out to me over the tops of the cars parked between our buildings. “Glad, how did you sleep?”
“Pretty good,” I call back.
“I only had to get up three times last night,” she says.
“Don’t complain. Five times for me!” This from Ida Franz, our whirling dervish, who pops out of apartment 319 in my building and fairly leaps into pace with me. Ida is seventy-one, with a body that’s compact and wiry. Her salt-and-pepper hair is always in a tight bun which threatens to pull her face off her head. Her back is ramrod straight, which Evvie says is so she won’t drop the chip on each shoulder. “And the last time was at three A.M. It didn’t pay to go back to bed after that.”
“So what did you do?” Evvie calls out from across the way, knowing full well what Ida will say.
“I called my son in L.A. He’s still up at midnight.”
Evvie makes a familiar disgusted gesture, flapping her arms. We are all used to Ida trying to make her children love her, a lost cause. She’s the one who calls them; they never call her. And because her children make her crazy, Ida makes us crazy.
I hear what I hear every morning: Sophie, calling from her kitchen window. “Yoo-hoo, I’m coming. I’m coming. Wait for me!” Trust me. She’ll be last one out.
Routine is very important to us. Ida, the perpetual wet blanket, says it’s because we’re all in our second childhood. Except for Sophie, who she insists never grew out of her first one.
Now the door to apartment 216 opens across the way in Evvie’s building. Bella Fox, who is eighty-three, gingerly steps out.
“Good morning,” she whispers.
The girls call Bella “the shadow” because she’s forever trailing one step behind us. We are always afraid of losing her, because she is so forgettable. She’s tiny, not even five feet, and she wears pale colors that add to her seeming invisibility. But I’m on to Bella. She may seem shy, but in her own timid little way she’s not afraid to speak her piece. She says what she wants and she gets what she wants. “Hi, gang! Your personal trainer is here! Everybody ready?” This is from Francie Charles, calling up to us as she rounds the corner from her building.
Her arrival is the signal for all of us to go downstairs and meet on the ground floor. Then we walk together along a shady path that winds around the building.
Francie, who will be seventy-eight tomorrow, was a real beauty when she was young. Tall, elegant, and classy, a model in her younger New York days, she is still beautiful. She’s our real athlete, the one who got us all started in this somewhat anemic form of exercise. “Something is better than nothing,” she is always telling us. She is also our health nut, lecturing on the right way to eat, although no one really can, or wants to, change the bad habits of a lifetime. Francie’s only weakness is advertised by her favorite sweatshirt, “Death by Chocolate,” given to her by her adoring grandchildren. She is wearing it today.
“How is everyone?” she chirps. “Isn’t it a glorious day? Aren’t we all glad to be alive!” As grumpy as Ida is, that’s how cheerful Francie is. The perpetual optimist. She makes every day a gift. If it wasn’t for Francie, I’d have left Florida years ago.
Bella begins taking slow, mincing steps—her version of exercise—along the path, apologizing every time anyone passes her.
“Stop apologizing for living,” Evvie is constantly telling her. But Bella, who is fairly deaf, either doesn’t hear or chooses not to. We all love her, but she doesn’t believe it.
We walk and talk. With plenty to say, as if we don’t see one another every single day and night. Not to mention phoning one another a dozen or more times a day.
Our half-hour workout is just about over when Sophie Meyerbeer, our roly-poly eighty-year-old, finally steps out of the elevator, bandbox-perfect in her pink, color-coordinated, extra-tight jogging ensemble. Pink sweats, pink sneakers with matching pom-poms, and a pink flowered sun hat. I might mention that this month’s hairdo is also pink. Champagne Pink.
When she finally catches up to us, Ida mock-applauds her arrival. “So happy you could make it, Princess.”
Clueless, Sophie takes her sarcasm as a compliment. Being incapable of spontaneity, Sophie has to get all dressed up, including makeup (fahputzed, Evvie calls it), before she’ll walk out her door. Her third husband, Stanley, who made a fortune in notions and novelties, spoiled her rotten. He babied her, never let her lift a finger. Insisted she dress like a Kewpie doll for him. (Boy, did we speculate on their sex life!) He left her well-off and impossible.
“We’re just about finished,” says Ida, cooling down by walking slower.
“Oh,” Sophie says, pouting girlishly. “Well, I couldn’t help it. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I had such a terrible nightmare.”
Bella stops, glad for any excuse not to move. “Ooh, tell us.” She sits down on a bench, fanning herself.
Sophie shudders. “I dreamed I had a heart attack!”
Bella gasps, fluttering her hands nervously. “Oy . . . just like Selma.”
“Change the subject,” Ida snaps. She is never comfortable talking about death.
“No, it’s my dream,” Sophie insists.
“Just because Selma had a heart attack doesn’t mean you will,” Francie says gently as she continues her stretches.
Evvie adds judgmentally, “Besides, she was overweight and never exercised.”
“Yeah,” Ida adds with a satisfied smirk, “she and her pal Tessie were both thrown out of Weight Watchers.”
“Maybe something caused that heart attack,” I say. “For example, you know how Selma waxed those floors?”
“Yeah,” Sophie chirps, “you coulda gone ice skating on them.”
“Maybe she slipped and fell. Or maybe something frightened her . . .” I continue.
“She was so scared of spiders,” Bella chimes in, happy to be able to contribute. “Remember that time she fainted when a teensie one crawled on her chair . . . ?”
Ida puts her hands on her hips defiantly and glares at me. “So? Dead is dead. What difference does it make?”
“The point is nobody bothered to investigate,” I say. “Nobody cared to find out what really happened. Maybe if she hadn’t been alone, maybe if Tessie hadn’t had company that weekend, maybe she wouldn’t have died.”
This gives everyone pause.
Ida’s had enough, and starts for the elevator. “Well, I’m going to get my bathing suit on.”
“Good idea,” I say, sorry I even brought it up. What’s the point in depressing them?
Francie puts a reassuring arm around me. “Hey, Ida called it.” Mimicking her: “Dead is dead.” She giggles and I join in.
The group disbands, each to her own building, to get ready for part two of the morning routine—the pool.
3
Swimming
Just as I’m ready to walk out the door and head for the pool, I look at the phone, count to three, and—it rings. I pick it up and say, “Yes, Sophie.”
“Are we going to the pool?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Can I walk down with you?”
“Only if you’re ready.”
“Well . . . I’ll just be a minute.”
Knowing Sophie’s minute, I tell her as I always do, “I’ll start down. You can catch up to me.”
I hang up, but stay by the phone. I know my customers. It rings again. My daily double. “Yes, Bella,” I say as I pick up.
“Are we going to Publix today?” she asks.
“We usually go shopping on Friday.”
“Is it Friday?”
“Yes, dear. Now go knock on Evvie’s door and she’ll walk you down to the pool. Don’t forget your towel.”
“All right.”
The phones. Umbilical cords. Lifelines. To keep connected. To counteract loneliness. God bless Bell South.
I walk down the three flights instead of taking the elevator, another small a
ttempt to keep fit, and join the parade heading for the pool. Everyone’s in bathing suits, sun hats, and thongs (not the kind worn by the young girls at Miami Beach, but the ones which adorn wrinkled feet) and carrying towels and small beach bags. Swimming time is also early in the morning—before it gets too hot to sit around the pool.
Francie is in the parking area chatting with Denny Ryan as he rakes up fallen palm fronds. He is a big six-footer, in his early forties, but you’d hardly know it. Perhaps being slightly slow-witted has kept him childlike. His mother, Maureen, died suddenly about seven years ago. Maybe it’s cruel to say it, but he’s better off. Even though she was his sole support and caretaker, she was a harridan. But there is a real sweetness to Denny, and we try to add to his small allowance from Social Security by giving him odd jobs around our apartments. He can and does fix everything.
It was poor Denny, just doing his job, who came up to Selma’s apartment to fix a plumbing leak. He was the one who found her dead body, and he still hasn’t gotten over it.
Francie and Denny have something in common: their love of gardening. Denny is very proud of the patch of ground the condo board gave him to raise flowers and vegetables. You should have seen the look of wonder on his face the first time a small shoot came up from a seed he planted.
“Good morning, Denny,” I say.
“Hi, Mrs. Gold. Guess what Miss Francie gave me? A new plant.” Denny will never address us by our first names. He feels it is impolite. Except for Francie, who is special to him. He squints down at the little identification tag, struggling with the Latin words. “Ge-nus of tu . . . tu . . . berous . . . herba . . .”
Francie and I exchange concerned glances. Her kind gesture is meant to help him get over his shock. “Forget the big words,” she tells him. “Just call it dahlia.”
“Dahlia,” he says, smiling, committing it to memory. “Dahlia . . .”
“That’s really pretty,” I say.
Francie gets in step with me, and arm in arm we continue down the brick-tiled path toward the pool. In front of us, Ida is cursing our resident ducks as usual. They deposit their droppings right smack on our paths and it sends Ida into a tizzy.
The regulars are already at the pool. The seating arrangement is a tableau. Everyone has his or her designated place. And no one ever varies from it. Or there would be war.
At the farthest end of the pool, completely alone, sits Enya Slovak on a chaise longue. At eighty-four, she is a fragile remainder of a woman who was once very beautiful. She wears a big, floppy sun hat, but it’s less to hide from the sun than from the rest of us. While her husband, Jacov, was still alive, he made her attend the various events we have in the clubhouse. The holidays were vitally important to him. Especially the group Passover dinner. Enya merely endured those celebrations. Now that he is gone, she has reverted to how she really wants to be. Alone. I say hello. She nods, then her head swivels back down to the book in her lap. Enya met her husband after they were released from Dachau at the end of the war. They had both lost their entire families. When I look into Enya’s haunted eyes, I get the feeling she never fully left the camps.
Directly across the pool from Enya sits a small group who always congregate together. They are the snowbirds—the Canadians—renters and owners who fly in every winter to get away from the bitter weather up north. They’re friendly but generally stick to themselves.
Moving clockwise from the snowbirds is another story and a half. Harriet Feder and her mother, Esther. Poor Harriet. Sometimes it sounds like it’s already become part of her name: “Poor-Harriet.” When Esther went into the wheelchair, Harriet gave up her Miami apartment and moved in with her. It’s already four years. I swear that Esther, who looks like a sparrow and can out-eat anyone, is in better health than the whole bunch of us. But meanwhile, her daughter, Harriet, is stuck at age forty-four without much of a life. She’s not bad looking, if she’d only use some makeup, maybe do a little something with her hair. . . . She’s such a nice girl. Unfortunately for her, she grew up big-boned like her late father. And going to the gym every day . . . all those muscles . . . it doesn’t help. Esther boasts that no one on her side of the family died before the age of ninety-five. And she is only seventy-seven. It’s not that Esther is a bad person, she’s just so demanding. Get me this, get me that. . . . Poor Harriet. See what I mean?
In the shallow end of the pool, by themselves, holding hands and bobbing up and down like two rosy apples in a barrel are “the Bobbsey twins” as we call them behind their backs, Hyman and Lola Binder—aka Hy and Lo, when we are playing cards, but more about that later. Lola would be all right away from Hy, but that’s the point. She is never away from his side. They’ve been married for sixty-five years and she hasn’t had a thought in her head that he hasn’t put there. They are still in love if you call obsession love. Hy is short and chunky; Lola is taller and much thinner. We decided that the happiest day in Hy’s life was when the children grew up and moved away. I once commented to Irving Weiss that he and Hy were the only men left in our phase. Irving, a man of very few words, shook his head and said, “Then I’m alone.”
I glance toward dear Irving, sitting next to his Millie in the shade outside of the pool perimeter. His life is hell these days, but he never utters a complaint. Millie’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse, but do not mention putting her into a hospital to Irving. Not a chance. There she sits, totally unaware of all her friends around her. She stares down at her sundress, picking at a thread, muttering to herself. We all take turns helping Irving dress her and bathe her and do the shopping and it is breaking our hearts to see what has become of the funny, warm-hearted Millie we once knew.
Denny Ryan walks up the path carrying a rose from his garden. He reaches Millie and gives it to her. He whispers to her and she seems to answer him.
Francie and I walk over to give her a kiss on the cheek. She stares up at us, vacantly. “Good morning, Millie,” we say.
“Do you see them?” she says shrilly. Irving stiffens. Here she goes again. “Do you see the children? There! There, sitting on the fence. No! No! Don’t let them see you looking! Don’t make them mad!”
Francie and I are distraught by her hallucinations, but Denny, God bless him, joins in her fantasies. “Yes,” he says, “I see ghosts, too.”
“Do they scare you, Denny?” She always knows him, although she hardly recognizes the rest of us.
“Oh, yes,” he says, “they scare me, too.”
Millie shudders. “They’re out to get us.”
Irving puts his arms around her. “I’ll protect you.” She pulls away angrily, shouting. “No, you can’t, they’re too strong!” Everyone’s watching, responding in their own private ways. Some with sadness, compassion, fear, and even terror. All with the unstated There, but for the grace of God . . . Irving helps her up from the bench. “We better go back in,” he says.
Irving leads Millie away, Denny following behind, as if to shield them. There is silence, but the mood lifts. We have been living with Millie’s deterioration for a long time.
Swimming is a euphemism for what we do in the pool. Except for Francie who really swims, the rest of us walk. Back and forth across the width of the pool, walking and talking.
Now Hy Binder slogs through the water toward us. “Look out,” my sister Evvie whispers. “He’s got a new joke.”
I groan.
“Hey, Gladdy.” I try to move out of his path, but I’m not fast enough. He punches my arm. He always punches my arm. He makes me black and blue. “Didja hear this one? Didja? I got it off the Internet on my e-mail. Six old guys”—they’re always about old guys—“are sitting around the old folks home, smoking stogies and drinking schnapps when Sexy Sadie comes by batting her eyelashes at them. She holds up her pocketbook and says, ‘If you guess what’s in the purse you get free sex tonight.’ One old guy says, ‘Ya gotta elephant in there?’ She bats her eyes again. ‘Close enough.’”
Hy screams with laughter at his joke. “Didj
a get it, didja?” It’s in incredibly bad taste. But then, so is Hy. I paddle away and he heads back to Lola, delighted with himself.
Evvie shakes her head. “Meshuggener. That man is an idiot.”
I sigh. “But he’s our idiot.”
Francie points. “And here comes the other one.”
“Hell-o, here I am.” In yet another of her hundred color-coordinated garments—lemon yellow this time with a matching parasol to ward off that nasty sun—wiggles our beloved Sophie. Just in time for the rest of us to get out of the pool and head for the showers. . . .
Years ago, when a group of us were sitting around and kvetching about our troubles, wise old Irving said, “Go ahead, everyone put your pains on the table and pick up somebody else’s. Believe me, you’ll take back what belongs to you.” When I look around at the denizens of our phase—Enya from the concentration camps; Millie with Alzheimer’s, and Irving’s anguish; Esther in a wheelchair; Harriet, lonely; and all the women, now widows, left to cope as best they can—Irving was right.
Little did we know the troubles soon to come would be shared by all of us.
4
The Designated Driver
I am in my apartment, showered and dressed and waiting for the others to get ready to go out for our typical late morning errands. And the phone rings.
“It’s a matter of life and death. I have to get to Publix. I’m out of everything.” This in a panicky whisper from Bella, she who has enough food in her pantry to feed all of Miami.
I reassure her, yet again that, yes, we will stop at Publix. I barely get the phone back on the hook when the next country is heard from.
Sophie, the fashion maven, sighs when I pick up. “Oy,” she says, dropping one of her many philosophical malapropisms, “when did my wild oats turn to kasha?” I wait. She reveals that she has to drop off thirty or so garments at the cleaners. Of course I’m exaggerating. But only slightly.