“Officially, Linette edged out the other candidates,” Doris said. In fact, it had been a landslide. “I’ll dispose of the votes at home.”
She suspected that Cassandra was quite capable of going through the trash behind the building to find them.
Linette blushed, looking both embarrassed and pleased. “I’ve never been elected to anything before. Ever. I used to hate class elections in school.” She turned to Doris. “I mean to copy the way you run the meetings.”
As Doris left, she was aware that she should be pleased. She’d gone out on a good note—Linette had sounded sincere. Most had loved the flódni. Her new project was off to an excellent start. But she still felt tired, achy. Ou
t of sorts, like nothing quite fit.
She’d only become aware of that feeling after Joey left. While he’d been there, she’d felt fine. Better than fine—she’d felt great.
The first person she saw at the synagogue the next morning was her mother.
“Doris, liebling? I love that pink dress of yours. So. Have you met Nicola’s latest yet? A gold-digger! She’s been dodging me all week.”
“Mom, not here. We’re not supposed to be thinking negative things on the Sabbath.”
“Negative things,” her mother repeated, throwing up her hands and doing an eye roll toward heaven that would have made a melodrama actress in the silent films look tame by comparison. “She says, negative things. What is wrong with thinking about family, is what I ask?”
Doris’s dad knew a rhetorical question when he heard it. He leaned forward to kiss Doris, and muttered, “Come to dinner. Let me have one night of hearing about something besides Nicola’s new love interest, Brad the Schnook, and his two demon children.”
Doris smothered a laugh, then turned to her mother. “I need to talk to you about Great-Aunt Sophia’s knish recipe. You always promised to write it down for me, but you never have.”
“That’s because it’s impossible to write it down. It’s not a simple dumpling recipe. I cook it the way she did, a little of this, a dab of that, and if you’re short on meat—and they were, always—another handful of groats, plus the garlic, a sniff and a stir . . . it’s like her ghost is at my elbow, and let me tell you, that’s no easy thing. She was a wonderful cook, but oh, could that woman talk!”
Doris breathed a sigh of relief at having successfully changed the subject.
She ended up promising to go ‘home’ for dinner, and her reward was successfully diverting her mother from speculation about Nicola’s new boyfriend as she watched Mom make Great-Aunt Sophia’s knishes.
Her mother sent her home with a bag of fried knishes, and the admonishment ringing in her ears, “Remember, if you put that recipe in that book, it can’t be under just ‘knish.’ It has to be Aunt Sophia’s Knish Recipe. No ‘Great’—she wouldn’t like you to make her sound too old.”
Duty done, and a new recipe to try on the group, Doris sank into her car, sighing with relief. She’d just started the engine when her phone rang with birdsong—the ringtone for Bird.
“Doris? I was hoping you might be free for lunch tomorrow,” Bird said. “Mikhail invited his friend Joey Hu, who told that wonderful Chinese myth at the workshop Friday. And I happened to remember that he collects recipes from the country villages in China. In fact, he’s got a whole setup at his house, where he cooks the way they did for centuries. You might be able to get a couple of recipes from him. Please say you’ll come.”
Doris hesitated. Why? It was inevitable they were going to meet, unless Doris became a total hermit. He’d barely spoken to her at the meeting—exactly the way she wanted, of course. She’d get over the whatever-it-was she kept feeling when she saw him.
“I’ll bring knishes,” she said. “Fresh-made just this afternoon.”
“Yum,” was Bird’s happy response. “I’ll have the oven preheated when you get here, so we can crisp them up again.”
The next morning, Doris stood in her bedroom in bra and panties, looking around the moat of clothes. Nothing was quite right.
This whole situation wasn’t right. She was used to thinking of herself as a brain floating in the air, her body a mere method of propulsion. Her clothing was chosen to be sturdy, practical, proper for her age. And that was that.
But it wasn’t just that, or why would her heart thunder in her ears at the mere idea of sitting at Bird’s table with Joey Hu? This was so much worse than the Phil the Philanderer fiasco.
She forced herself to look at that humiliating memory straight on: herself, pushing sixty, and deciding that it was time to find out what all the songs and poetry were about. Phil had been reasonably good-looking. Dressed well. She’d met him at the upscale wedding of a faculty colleague and he’d been full of compliments.
They’d gone out to dinner and the theater, and the compliments he showered on her were as pretty as the flowers he brought. So she’d decided to be brave and liberated, and invite him to be her plus one on a trip to Cancun that she’d been given as a prize after her high school theater class won a regional award. She hoped that in a romantic setting she’d finally be able to discover what romance was all about.
Two days before the trip, she went to pick up a donation of left-behind clothes from a beachside motel, to be dropped at the homeless shelter sponsored by her synagogue. And there in the motel parking lot she saw Phil, who was supposed to be consulting at a local firm, entering a room with his arm around another woman.
It left her with two equally depressing realizations: either romance was mere hype and shared delusion, or she had some vital part missing that everybody else in the world seemed to possess without even thinking about it.
She looked straight at her reflection and said, “I am a single woman on the verge of retirement. This is just a lunch with friends.”
She picked up the sensible gray slacks she wore for student field trips, and put on a sturdy top in a muted cream color. Ignoring her jewelry box, she chose a comfortable pair of walking shoes.