Free The Girls by Helen Yglesias

a palm-thatched bar and dance floor with live band. A central staircase rose to the bedrooms, whose rounded windows romantically faced the ocean. Now the outer walls let the wind and rain in, the dance floor was warped, the bar and band were no more. The Round of Pleasure had been a dream place for Paul in his adolescence. It was a gas to come to it in their middle age.
    How she enjoyed him, his effervescent talk, his brilliant laughter, the angry, funny play of his mind, his long, lean, strong form, his full cushioned lips, his tongue, his electric hands, the silky hair covering his body, the more wonderful silk of his penis. And his feet. His beautiful feet.
    Yes. And not to forget the violent temper, the sulky childishness, the ego, the lust for recognition of his work— my work, my work —the restlessness, the incessant demand that he be Numero Uno, the deliberately inflicted hurts when he imagined she had humiliated him. She hadn’t forgotten. She wasn’t romanticizing her life with Paul. She had loved him with her eyes wide open for the man that he was, not some dreamboat she invented after he was dead.
    They had had a good time together. A good life. She never wanted it to end. Why couldn’t it have gone on forever?
    He’s dead, she told herself, and felt her body lifeless. He died at age seventy-eight of prostate cancer. Your mother and father are dead. All your brothers are dead. And Naomi is on her way, and Eva, and Flora is eighty-five and you’re eighty. Nobody lives forever. Don’t be a child. Get on with what you have to do.
    What do I have to do? Hopelessly awake, she thought again of Naomi’s whispered on-and-off request. She clicked off tomorrow’s chores: calls to her children to tell them she was fine, calls to doctors, a phone conference with Eva’s children, a visit to Naomi’s bank, more quarrels with Flora.
    Eva’s bloated, hairy face appeared. What were they doing to her? What were they medicating her with? Elegant, grown-up Eva. Already married when Jenny was six years old, settled into a life complete with husband, children, and even a girl from Ireland to help with the housework. Her comfortable apartment was a refuge for adolescent sulks as Jenny grew up in turn. Eva helped her find her way in the world. She even gave Jenny money for extravagances, gave her a dollar fifty to see the first live play she had ever seen, Cyrano de Bergerac, with a terrible ham actor whose name she had forgotten. Long-lived Eva. Had her husband of fifty-six years been the love of her life? Impossible to tell. Eva never talked intimacies. She listened. What a comfort to talk to Eva, who knew how to listen. Carrying on her steady, responsible life, always there for Jenny when Jenny needed her. She had two children as solid in their lives as Eva had been, and from the two, a bumper crop of eight grandchildren, fourteen great-grandchildren, all doing what they were expected to do. Eva talked of them, but not too much. Eva, correct in all her ways.
    And what of Flora? Flora’s love life? Four marriages—five, technically. She had been married twice to one husband. Three divorces, one annulment. Two husbands now dead. Two floating around, one a good old friend, but infirm, the other lost somewhere. Four children, three grandchildren. She had had other men in her bed, too many to keep track of. Flora used the word “love” a lot. “He fell in love with me.” “I’m in love with him.” “We’re in love.” Along with the down-to-earth talk. “He can’t get it up. He’s the original limp-penis guy.” “He wouldn’t know a clitoris from a clementine, he thinks nipples are strictly for babies, he’s a two-minute-flat guy.” Often about the same man. “He’s passionately in love with me, but the poor thing can’t get it up, no matter what I do to help.” “He used to be good a couple of years ago, real good, but medication or something did him in, he can’t do a thing anymore. It would be sad if