Edith Goldstein watched her neighbor, Helen, swim in circles for hours. Her small, round pool was caged in black iron to keep out the wayward urban alligators. Helen would kick and kick, and then when she needed a rest, clutch a floating bubblegum pink beach ball, upon which she rested her sunburned cheek. 

To Edith’s knowledge, every house on the block was home to either a widow or a wife waiting for her husband to die. Morbidity lost all meaning here. Weekly mahjong groups regularly traded players when one died; blue-haired ladies took up the charge when duty called. Local cemeteries tucked advertisements into mailboxes when new burial plots became available. Sometimes when Edith stayed in the house for too long, her neighbor across the street would check in and make sure she was still alive. When she went outside on Sundays to water her postage stamp of lawn they made eye contact, often, neither one flinching away. This was Boca Raton, there was nothing left to do but watch and wait.


Summers meant heat and grandchildren. Helen lounged in the sun. Her skin was already a playground for melanoma. She stopped coloring her hair a few years ago, around the same time she’d invested in a set of lawn flamingos. Across the street, Helen laid out on a plastic lawn chair reading her magazine; bare-breasted and glazed with pool water with only a towel covering her legs. Edith hoped that by the time her son and her two grandchildren arrived she would put on some clothes.

Edith knew nobody actually wanted to visit her. Her son fell prey to the misconception that people over the age of eighty were unable to tell when they were bad company. Aaron must have considered himself a good son, and on paper he was. He paid the maintenance fees for the semi-legal assisted living community and always remembered her birthday. Edith knew from afar he was trying to live up to, and surpass, his father. Her grandchildren, whom she did love—though they were spoiled and without religion—she also loathed, as it was clear they saw her entire existence as a mere preface to their own. 


They came like a hurricane. One boy pushed the other out of the car. Aaron yelled at both of them. His second wife sucked the end of a cigarette. She was thirteen years younger than his first wife, the boys’ mother. His second wife’s breasts were a formidable rack of silicon. Edith looked back at Helen who still lay basking serenely and crisping in the high Floridian sun. Her deflated bosom wilted without any artificial scaffolding, and for some inexplicable reason, this comparison made Edith smile. The doorbell rang out through the small rectangular house where all sounds seemed to ricochet endlessly off the linoleum floor and the plaster walls. The boys barreled in. Each sported ridiculous haircuts and reluctantly presented themselves to Edith, who saw through their apprehension to their disgust.

Aaron had grown to look more like his father, with ample dark brows and the beginnings of saddlebag jowls. He even took on his father’s typical expression which was an inscrutable mixture of weariness and relaxation. Her late husband was kind and generous until the end. He was one of those men who didn’t become old until he retired. He fought in Korea and came home to work the same job for the next 39 years. Their marriage was consistent in its monotony. Throughout their 61 years together his body was an alien thing. She thought him sexless and he thought her frigid but neither of them ever made any motion to remedy the situation. In those days, that was the way of the world.

The boys sat in front of the blank television screen and ignored the fruit Edith had set out. She asked them each questions about school and sports to which they replied with one-word answers. The new wife looked at Edith like a puppy with four broken legs. She played with the ends of her bleached hair and spoke to Edith in a loud, slow voice. 

“You live here all by yourself? That’s phenomenal.” The second wife said with a bright white smile. Edith nodded. One of the boys asked if she had a computer and sulked at the answer. Aaron asked only about her health, which was the same as it always was. He went out to check his messages on the carphone and Edith saw him pace on the sidewalk without any urgency before finally getting in the car. The second wife kept talking but all Edith could watch were the hard, plastic breasts that strained the buttons of her leopard-print blouse. She had the urge to get up and squeeze one. Mostly, she missed the way her breasts felt when she was younger. 

“We’re ordering sandwiches,” she told Edith and made sure to sound out each syllable. Edith had no trouble hearing, but at that moment she wished she did. Aaron stepped back in and looked at his watch.

“Can we go to the beach?” The younger boy asked. The older one was snooping in the kitchen. Aaron kept looking behind like someone was coming to rescue him. He suggested his mother take a nap. What Edith knew he really meant was “go die.” Her husband was the glue that held her and Aaron together. After his unexpected death, she no longer held any importance for her son. Edith was forced to accept that her life now was to be examined in retrospect. At times she felt like she was walking backwards into her own grave. 

“There’s a topless old lady out there,” The older one yelled, his voice filling the house and escaping through the open window. She was thankful that most everybody in the neighborhood had some degree of hearing loss. Edith leaped up with a speed that garnered praise from the second wife. She pushed the older boy away from the sink. His brazen scrutiny corrupted Helen’s body, reducing her to the narrow perception of a petulant child.  

Edith felt a flicker of ownership over her. The glances and silent “hellos” had built a small yet solid connection. Lunch came and the boys fought through most of it. The younger one threw a slice of brisket that no one could find. Aaron talked about his job, which Edith then understood was the largest part of his life. He paid no attention to everyone’s ignorance regarding municipal bonds and discussed them until the food was finished. The boys changed into their bathing suits and asked to sit in the car. Edith supposed that even in the baking heat, the hot car was a better place than visiting with their grandmother. 


Aaron was never good at goodbyes. He acknowledged that he would try to see her more often but left every promise open-ended. He struggled to find the right way to say that he wouldn’t actually return for another year. He dug into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his wallet which overflowed with receipts and exclusive membership credit cards. He gave her thirty-four dollars for no apparent reason and said a hollow “I love you,” which when said without affection sounded like another language to Edith. She walked him out to his luxury station-wagon. The boys waved from the open windows of the back seat. The second wife hugged Edith and she finally felt her engorged speed-bump of a chest. Aaron and his family pulled away and sped around the corner leaving a trail of gray exhaust as the only proof they had been there at all. Edith looked down her block and squinted. The color of the houses was an assault on her senses. The stucco bungalows were painted alternating bright pink and blue, like some ludicrous baby shower had erupted. She never saw herself living in a pink house and so she lived in a blue one. Under nearly every one of these roofs lived an old woman like Edith, who as a young woman had set loose their progeny upon the world and now was forced to live in this technicolor purgatory, in all likelihood, by the very person they created. 

Back in the house, Edith spotted the lost slice of brisket under the sink. She gripped the edge of the counter to get her bearings as she stooped down and stood up again. She dropped the limp meat into the wastebasket by the door. Beyond the trapped mosquitos in the screen door, she saw a still-naked Helen sitting upright and seeming to look straight at her. Edith pushed open the rusty door and walked in a straight line over her little cement patio to the edge of what had become her world. Helen replaced her entire backyard lawn with plastic grass drilled into the ground. The hyper-pigmented artificial turf was an impossible green against Edith’s own yellowing patch of earth. The toes of her taupe orthopedic shoes touched the verdant border of their two universes. 

Helen waved her over and smiled, but her eyes were a mystery behind thick black sunglasses that swallowed her face. Edith stepped over lawn flamingos that were the same shade of pink as the house. Helen unlocked the metal cage around the patio and took slow, shaky steps towards the little pool. A little red pepper hung on the door, which Edith remembered from her seventy years living in the Bronx among the other immigrant families. The Italians always had a cornicello hanging on the rearview mirror to ward off the evil eye. The minute Helen opened her mouth it sounded like home.

“You’re telling me your grandson’s never seen a pair of tits before?” Helen asked. She bobbed up and down in the crystal water with a jocular expression. Edith nodded and sat on the edge of the lawn chair where Helen was sunbathing. She took off her massive black sunglasses revealing freckles from decades of sun damage and a large scar on the left side of her nose where some scalpel-happy dermatologist had cut deep into the tissue. The scar alluded to what her skin might have looked like when it was younger. It was a solitary island of taut, creamy rose among the leathery folds of her face. Edith hiked her linen pants up to her knees to cool herself. It was the only part of her body she could bear to see.     

“No one coming to see me. I never had any babies.” Helen declared with a hint of pride. Edith fanned herself with a magazine. The rotating fan did nothing more than push around the heat. Her son and his family would be at the beach by now probably setting up folding chairs and burning themselves on the sand. Even though their visit had been the one she had been waiting for all year, sitting with Helen made Edith the happiest she could remember. Despite the fact that both of them were to live out their years in the same peninsular, tropical limbo, Helen seemed not merely at peace but hopeful. Edith forgot what hope felt like.  

“Come join me,” Helen said. Edith looked down at her bare calves. She couldn’t remember being naked in front of anyone other than her doctors and her late husband. She could have stepped across both of their lawns and tried to find something to swim in, but a part of her felt like if she left Helen’s yard she would never return. Edith was on the threshold of something other than death and she didn’t dare look back. 

She peeled off her ill-fitting blouse and pulled it over her head. She let her elastic pants fall to her ankles. She unhooked the bent underwire brassiere which poked into her ribs and let her chest expand with breath. Edith looked down at herself and saw the myriad ways gravity had rearranged her form. She stood in the light in front of Helen with nothing between them, her spirit more naked than her body. Helen saw her and didn’t look away. Edith could see that Helen did not share in the repulsion the world had with their bodies. They could stand in each other’s presence without the diffidence corporeal hatred seemed to demand. 

The water was tepid. It reminded Edith of when her mother took her to the public baths when she was a little girl. She felt the weight shift off of her swollen joints. Helen paddled towards her until Edith felt the radiant warmth of her body. She reached out and held both of Edith’s hands. They both had thick, green veins rope over tendons and sit below paper-thin skin. Looking into Helen’s eyes, she felt released from the omnipresent sense of imminence that plagued her every waking moment. She forgot her son, his second wife, his spoiled children, and her late husband. Helen inched closer until their thin lips collided with each other, clumsily at first, and then with an innate tenderness that Edith scarcely knew she possessed. Eighty years of memories could not match this single moment of desire, Edith thought. They wrapped their arms around each other and let their bodies touch. She wished she had crossed over the astroturf years ago. Since she had arrived in Boca, Edith had been expected to die but in Helen’s arms, she was just as alive as she was at any age. There was no liminality in death. All those married years of chronic disinterest made sense at last. She was incontrovertibly free from every expectation, not a single person was left to care. At a stage in her life when no one listened, Edith realized she answered to nobody. After a lifetime without passion, here was her introduction. 

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