Eventually the diamond ring would be pawned and lost in one of Eva’s husband’s recurring disastrous slides into financial failure during their long marriage. The silver-handled buffer survived the ring, tarnishing a bit along with its matching hand mirror and comb and brush that sat on a silver tray on Eva’s dresser wherever Eva’s dresser turned up throughout the economic vagaries of her marriage, until the old-fashioned set finally disappeared out of Eva’s life.
And the painted nails survived, the shining painted fingernails of her sisters as they grew up ahead of her. The smell of the nail polish and the remover over the smell of their perfume was embedded in Jenny’s memories like the smell of dill in Mama’s Friday night chicken soup, but while Mama’s dill insured love and safety, nail polish sent a different message, of soft hidden flesh in the silky underwear they bought even when they couldn’t afford it, for the naked struggles with the men they did or didn’t catch, to equal disaster. Eva caught her office manager and stayed married all her life. Naomi lost out on her first love — gave herself to him like a fool, as she always put it, and then lost him — finally caught a husband, found him tasteless, let the marriage be annulled, went on to other lovers, found a final husband who had the good grace to die soon, went on with her varied secret love life. And then there was Flora.
There wasn’t enough distance between herself and Flora for glamour to enter. Flora was only five years older, and even when she started to paint her nails, there was no mystery about underwear. She wore the same kind of cotton bloomers Jenny did — a little larger — and it never occurred to Jenny that Flora might wear her bloomers with a difference until she was enlightened by a mutual friend up the block in the Bronx. The friend was older than Jenny, a little younger than twelve-year-old Flora. The friend’s name was Friend, Dorothy Friend, and she shared a room with her only brother, Bernie Friend, who was six years older.
“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.