When I showed up at the Shalom conference room that night, a rose was waiting for me at my place at the head of the table. It was a gift from Mr. Goldman, the lone man in my class. A short man with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, Abe Goldman has a flaming crush on me, a fact that he doesn’t bother to hide. He’s always bringing me little tokens of his affection—an apple, a stick of sugarless gum, a free sample of cereal that came with his morning paper. Tonight, it was a rose.
“For you, cookie,” he said with a wink. At least I thought it was a wink. Mr. Goldman has a chronic tic so I can never quite tell when he’s winking or blinking.
“How nice, Mr. Goldman. Thank you.”
Mrs. Pechter, a powdery woman with bosoms the size of throw pillows, shot him a look of utter disdain.
“He picked it off a funeral wreath,” she said.
“Oh?” I quickly put the rose back down on the table.
“Poor Esther Sobol died,” Mrs. Rubin said. “We went to the funeral today.”
Mrs. Rubin was a tiny birdlike woman. Although they had their share of quarrels, she and Mrs. Pechter were best friends. I always thought of Mrs. Rubin as Laurel to Mrs. Pechter’s Hardy.
“Can you believe it?” Mrs. Pechter shot a look at Mr. Goldman. “He picked a flower from a funeral wreath.”
“So what?” Mr. Goldman shrugged. “You think Esther’s gonna notice?”
“Maybe Esther won’t, but God will.”
“Oh, please,” Mr. Goldman snorted. “With all the crazy things going on in the world, you think God cares whether or not I picked a rose from Esther Sobol’s funeral wreath?”
He had a point there.
“Well, class,” I said quickly, eager to avert a verbal slugfest, “who wants to read first?”
Every week, my students bring something they’ve written to be read aloud to the rest of the class. Most of the time it’s fairly pedestrian. My Grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. My Trip to Disney World. My Grandson’s Bar Mitzvah in Disney World. Every once in a while I get a gem of a memory that makes the whole thing worthwhile. And even on the nights when all I hear about was My Son, The Orthodontist, I get a kick out of these people. After eighty years on the planet, they still have the energy to put their lives down on paper. Not an easy feat, at any age.
“So who wants to read?”
Mr. Goldman’s hand shot up like a piston. A retired carpet salesman, Mr. Goldman was always ready to share the latest chapter of his life’s adventures. Tonight’s was a stirring saga called My Dinner with Jerry Lewis, about the time he wound up sitting next to the comic at a Beverly Hills coffee shop. (Jerry is a big tipper, in case you were wondering.)
He finished to a round of polite applause, and then Mrs. Pechter raised her hand.
“Mrs. Pechter,” I nodded. “What’ve you got?”
She cleared her throat, and read the title of her piece:
“Once Around the Lake, Morris.”
It was one of the gems. A touching story about her husband Morris, and their summer vacations in the Catskill Mountains. Every night after dinner in the hotel dining room, Mrs. Pechter would turn to her husband and ask, “Once around the lake, Morris?” “My pleasure, Rose,” Mr. Pechter would reply. And the two of them would walk around the lake. Holding hands under the stars, they’d talk. About their day. About their kids. About their lives. “I never felt closer to him than on those walks,” she read. “They were the best part of my marriage.” Then one night after just such a walk, they went back to their cabin where Mr. Pechter sat down in an Adirondack chair and died.
“I thought I’d never get over it,” she read, her voice wavering with emotion, “but eventually, I did. Maybe not completely, but enough to keep going.” Two months later, her daughter gave birth to a little boy. And they named him Morris. He grew up, Mrs. Pechter confided, to be her favorite grandson. “A wonderful boy,” she said, “who takes me out for dinner every week. And after dinner, I turn to him and say, ‘Once around the lake, Morris?’ And he says, ‘My pleasure, Grandma.’ Of course, there’s never a lake outside the restaurant. But we walk around the block, holding hands. And wherever my Morris is, I know he’s smiling.”
When she was through, I had tears in my eyes. It was just so damn touching. What a contrast to SueEllen’s blather. Would I ever, I wondered, meet a Morris of my own?
As if in answer to my question, Mrs. Pechter took me aside after class and said, “You know my grandson Morris? The one I wrote about? He’s an accountant. Very comfortable.”
She smiled proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
“And single.”
“Oh?”
“I thought maybe he could call you up for a date.”
My smile froze. Whoa, Nelly. Yes, I know I said I wanted to meet a Morris of my own, but I didn’t mean an actual guy named Morris. Call me shallow, but my dream man is not an accountant named Morris. He’s an artist named Zane, or a chef named Sergio.
“Gee, that’s awfully sweet of you, Mrs. Pechter, but—”
But what? What the heck was I going to say to her? I don’t date accountants named Morris?
“—but I’m seeing someone.”
“You have a boyfriend?” She seemed surprised, a fact which I found vaguely insulting.
“Yes, I do.”
“What does he do, this boyfriend of yours?”
“Uh, he’s an actor.”
It was the first thing that popped into my mind. I remembered the termite impersonator Kandi wanted to fix me up with, so I used him as my phantom boyfriend.
“An actor? Have I seen him in anything?”
“Actually, he plays a termite on a cartoon show.”
“Oy,” was her eloquent response. “You’re dating a termite?”
What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I have said I was dating a doctor?
“Hey, you forgot your flower.”
Mr. Goldman was at my side, holding out the rose from Mrs. Sobol’s funeral wreath.
“Oh, right,” I said, taking it gingerly.
“So how about it, cookie?” he winked/blinked. “You want to come to the movies with me on Saturday?”
Saturday night was movie night at Shalom.
“They’re playing Sleeping in Seattle.”
“Sleepless in Seattle, Abe,” Mrs. Pechter corrected. “Not sleeping.”
“Sleepless, sleeping. Who cares? You wanna come with me, cookie?”
“She can’t, Abe. She’s already got a boyfriend.”
“She does?”
Why was everybody so damned surprised?
“In that case,” he said, “I want my flower back.”
He took his rose and stomped off. Mr. Goldman always gets angry at me when I turn him down for dates. But sooner or later, much to my regret, he cools off and starts hitting