The Girls

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IT HAD BEEN THE little kids in the family who heard Miami as Theirami — Grandma and Grandpa’s Ami, Aunt Naomi’s Ami, Aunt Eva’s Ami, Uncle Max’s Ami, all the way down the Witkovsky family line. That was fine with Jenny. Their Ami, not hers. Jenny had never wanted any part of Anybody’s Ami. She was glad that her own children had never claimed the place.

They had been a large family, seven brothers and sisters plus Mama and Papa: four girls, as they were still called into their nineties, “the girls,” and three boys, “the boys” into their eighties. The males died younger, died, in Miami, one after the other, though Mama went first; then Lionel, out of the family order, a middle brother; then Papa; then the eldest brother, Stanley; and recently powerful Max, dead of prostate cancer as if he were any old body and not the head of a huge moneymaking industry — clothing factories, retail stores, real estate, investment banking. Philanthropy, of course. Dead anyway, before his two older sisters and his two younger, leaving only Mama and Papa’s four daughters still to go, with Jenny the last of the last, the youngest, arrived in Miami International Airport, arrived at the doorway of God’s waiting room, as the old joke had it. Not to die herself, but to help her two oldest sisters die, Eva and Naomi, hovering, endlessly horribly hovering on the brink. Eva was ninety-five, Naomi was ninety, Flora eighty-five, and she, Jenny, was eighty. Neat arrangement, the five-year intervals. “Every five years makes a generation,” Gertrude Stein had written somewhere, and was right, at least about these four sisters.

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