Saving Elijah
supportive, right from the beginning, and it had been pretty obvious almost immediately that Elijah had a lot of problems. He didn't roll over until he was almost seven months old, didn't sit up until he was ten months old, then sat there unmoving like a little frustrated Buddha for months, screaming. He never crawled, didn't walk until two and a half. Now he was five, and although he could walk and run, if a little awkwardly, his vocabulary was limited, and it was unclear just how much he could learn, how far he would go, and whether he'd need supervision and support the rest of his life. The future was a great big question mark.
"What the world needs is more cuties like Elijah," Becky said. "And fewer rocket scientists."
I smiled. "Thanks, Beck. Would you please inform my mother?"
After lunch we walked back over to Henry Lehr. The dress was a slip of a thing, with spaghetti straps.
"You could carry it off with those long legs," I said.
"How much could it be?" she said. "Three hundred?"
"You wish."
"Dinah?"
I turned. Ellen Shoenfeld was standing there, wearing her tweed coat. Underneath she probably had on one of her tweed suits, too; she always dressed formally, with stockings and heels.
"How are you, Mrs. Shoenfeld?"
"Very fine." She snapped the words; her accent is heavy, German.
"This is my friend Becky Sullivan. Ellen Shoenfeld. Mrs. Shoenfeld is in my writing class at the Jewish Community Center." She was the only person in the class I didn't call by a first name. I'd just gotten the feeling when I met her that she wasn't comfortable with American familiarity. She didn't correct me, even though I introduced myself as Dinah.
They both nodded and said hello. Becky asked if she liked the class.
"WHAT?" Ellen was always asking you to repeat things. She had two daughters who lived nearby. Why one of them didn't get her a hearing aid, I had no idea.
"Do you like the class?" Becky said, speaking slowly now, loudly.
"Oh, yes, yes. Very much. Thank you."
"Your hair is so beautiful," Becky said.
It was hard not to notice Ellen's hair, which was pure, perfect white, the color of snow. You could see the pink scalp beneath it. She wore it in a loosely braided chignon. It must have been very long, as if she hadn't cut it for many years. Maybe never.
Ellen nodded her head at Becky. "Thank you, and so is yours, my dear."
Becky thanked her. I looked at their two heads, enjoying the dramatic contrast.
Ellen turned to me. "So then. I must go. My daughter is picking me up in a little while. I will see you Thursday, Dinah. Yes?" Ellen's face is deeply lined, her nose beaked, but despite her age and the bow of her back, she still manages to carry herself with a stately dignity, even elegance.
"Wouldn't miss it." I loved that class. Partly because I've always liked hearing people's stories, that's what psychologists do, partly because I loved them.
And what stories I heard from those septuagenarians and octogenarians! Frieda Brodsky had been a mail-order bride. Abe Modell was a retired dentist who called his autobiography-always-in-progress From the Ukraine to Novocaine. When he was nine and his brother Max eleven, Cossacks rampaged through their town near Minsk, killing their mother. The boys were put in steerage on a boat bound for America and a distant relative, who was to collect them at Ellis Island but never showed up.
Some of them were excellent writers, too. Especially Carl Moskovitz, part of a core group who'd been coming since I first started teaching the class seven years ago. Ellen had only the past September joined the class for the first time. At the beginning of every new session, I always had everyone introduce themselves again, for the benefit of the new people. This they all did at length, telling birthplace, age, number of children and grandchildren, and singing the praises of a spouse, dead and alive. Ellen said, "I'm Mrs. Max Shoenfeld. Ellen is my forename. I'm eighty years old and I come from Munich, in Germany. My husband of thirty-six years died ten years ago. He was a fine man, and I miss him every day. I have six grandbabies. Esther, Rebecca, David, Nathan, Allisa. And Jennifer."
Carl always introduced himself by saying, "Carl Moskovitz. Accountant. Retired." A man of few words. He wrote just like he talked. Deadpan, and mordantly funny, whether depicting his brother-in-law's boorish behavior at Carl's wife's funeral, or the time in 1947 when he lost his pants in a bet and had to
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