And yet, one night a few months back, Sandra, tipsy on too many gin and tonics, had leaned over to Jake and whispered that she had heard that Jewish men made the best husbands. It had shocked Jake to discover that she was thinking of things he was not. He had no desire to marry again. Why should he? Marriage was for young people who wanted kids; marriage was for men willing to put up with a lot to get regular sex and a nice home to come back to at the end of the day. Marriage was not for a seventy-seven year old man who just wanted someone to go out to dinner with and see a movie with occasionally; it was not for a man who could essentially take care of himself. He was lonely, yes, he admitted that, but not lonely in any way that Sandra could assuage. Marrying her, moving into her small neat home would do nothing for the loneliness that had plagued him since Ida died.
The day Jake Asher realized he was the last Jew in Loweville, he ate Sunday lunch with his girlfriend Sandra at the Do Wok In, which served only passable Chinese food and whose fortune cookie dough was nearly as stale as its fortunes. His said: You will find true love someday. Sandra’s fortune said You will go on a long trip. That figured, Jake thought. The only fortune cookie that had ever made sense to him was one he had gotten years ago, on a trip down to Georgia; it said Ignore all previous fortunes. He was sure it had been a mistake or was someone’s idea of a joke, but he carried it in his wallet to this day. It seemed good advice to live by.
Sandra squealed with delight at the message in hers, even though she intensely disliked traveling; she hated going anywhere really, except to the small mall outside town or to church or out to eat a couple of times a week.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” she said cheerfully.
“You hate to travel,” Jake said, his mouth full of stale cookie. Why did he insist on eating those things?
“Well,” she giggled gracefully, “you’re right, but people can change, can’t they?”
“Nope,” Jake said, “they can’t.”
Jake believed that with all his heart. Nothing changed. Not people, not places, not what people wanted, and not what made them happy.
He leaned over and took Sandra’s fortune from her. “I think you got mine and I got yours,” he said. “You’re due some true love and I’m about to travel.”
“What on earth!”
Jake leaned back in his seat and picked his teeth with the wooden toothpick that had held the orange slices to the pineapple slices that had both come with the fortune cookies.
“I gotta go,” he said suddenly.” I gotta go.”
“Okay, honey, let me wave at the waitress for the check.”
“No, Sandra, you don’t understand. I gotta go. I gotta leave Loweville. It’s time. Hell, it’s past time.”
Sandra’s pretty face drew down in a puzzled frown the way it always did when something was just beyond her comprehension.
“Jake, honey, if you want to take a trip, we can. Honest. I won’t hold you back. We can go anywhere you want. Florida, Hawaii, you name it. I promise. I’ll go with you. You’re right. I have been a stick in the mud. It’s just that I never really saw any good reason to leave Loweville, even though, Lord knows, the kids have been bugging me for years about taking a cruise or something. . .”
Jake interrupted her. “Sandra,” he said, gently. “I don’t mean to travel. I mean to go. I gotta go somewhere where a minyan is the ten Jewish guys in front of me at the post office. I gotta go somewhere where when I die, there’s someone to sit shivah for me.”
“Jake, I don’t understand half of what you just said.”
“I know,” Jake said. “That’s just my point.”
The day Jake Asher realized he was the last Jew in Loweville he knew he would break a woman’s heart but that she would get over it. He knew that he would probably not be missed in Loweville nor welcomed back with open arms in New Hyde Park. But he knew that he had outstayed his welcome in Loweville–what little welcome there had actually been, what welcome he had, perhaps, just imagined. He knew for a fact that it was past time for him to go.
Jake knew that there was no way he could make up for what he had put his children and Ida through. He certainly couldn’t make up for any of what he had done just by moving back north and hanging around his grandkids. He couldn’t make up for what he had done even if he went to shul every Saturday morning for the rest of his days. He couldn’t erase the past no matter how hard he prayed.
But if Jake could not wipe out his sins, he could try for atonement. He could beg for a sort of forgiveness. To begin, he could visit Ida’s grave more than once a year. And on each visit he could lay pebble upon stone upon rock on top of the copper marker that held her name so that perhaps, just perhaps, Ida would finally feel the weight of him and know that Jake was back home.
Very touching, and touching the very heart of the experience of so many Jews around the world.
A nice reminder just before Yom Kippur that it’s never too late, it’s just that we tell ourselves it is.
Until we don’t.
Life is about the comprimises that we make,whether we know that we make them or not. And they always seem like good ideas at the time…what we do sometimes to accept being Jewish in a non-Jewish world, and we, who don’t live in a place in which there are many Jews do to make our Jewishness acceptable to the non-Jews around us.
Nice job.
This is a moving story that has me thinking about the ways that I comprimise my Jewish self sometimes. Thanks for sending it for me to read.