2021 TIFERET CONTEST WINNER - FICTION Old Times Robert Sachs Every year they go to an auction to benefit the poor of Belize. As this year’s auction is wrapping up, the supple leather fielder’s glove—with leather laces and lining—beckons to Barry. He bids fifty. Another man, also in his eighties, bids seventy- five. Back and forth it goes. Barry understands, if Helen doesn’t, that it’s more than just a fielder’s glove. His bid of four hundred is good enough to win what both men know can be purchased for closer to fifty. It is silly; what would either of them do with it? There is gentle ribbing on the way home from the benefit, which he takes in good humor. “It’s for charity,” he says. “It’s not the mitt; I wanted to support the cause.” Helen smiles. Barry puts the glove on the shelf in his office next to the antique globe held in place by a pewter stand. He’ll sit at his desk looking at the monitor, surfing the net perhaps, writing perhaps, looking at the glove. He’ll pick it up, slip his left hand inside and slap the pocket with the side of his right fist. He stares at the catcher to get the sign. He shakes off the curve, nods to the slider. Man on first, two out. Three and two on the batter. Barry stretches without a windup, pauses with his glove at belt level, checks the runner and throws a strike, chest high, catching the outside corner. The crowd goes wild. Barry raises both hands in a sign of victory and goes back to searching for a geriatrician on his computer. Barry turned eighty in April and the thought of it is consuming him. The entreaties by Helen that it’s only a number don’t satisfy him. He worries over every pain, every missed appointment, every lost word. He feels guilty continually asking What? His mail is filled with ads for senior housing, men’s diapers, and free hearing aid tests, as if they know something he only fears. He tells himself to stop dwelling on it. Don’t live your life thinking every minute about your age. But that’s what he does. He’s read that an eighty year old male has a life expectancy of 8.34 years. In other words, he tells Helen, he’s not expected to live past eighty-eight. “I’ll put it on the calendar,” she says, not looking up from the romance novel she’s reading. He plans a special weekend in Chicago with his old high school buddies. There are ten of them, all born in 1940. Barry and three others started kindergarten together in 1945. The rest signed on in high school. He sends the invitations via e-mail. “We’re eighty. Get over it,” he says, hoping to convince himself. “Let’s get together in Chicago.” He proposes the first weekend in November and, to his surprise, everyone says yes. “What are the odds,” Barry asks Helen, “of all of us still alive and kicking? And of all of us willing and able to share a weekend together in Chicago?” “Fifty-fifty?” she guesses. He’s thinking much less. They were in the same club. They shared stories about the girls they dated. They played touch football on Sunday, ate Italian sausage sandwiches at three in the morning. They spent long summer days at the beach; went to each other’s weddings. Yes, they drifted apart over the years, with some, like him, moving out of town; the cardiologist and the car salesman having less and less in common. There are a couple of West Coasters and one in Boston. Barry and Helen now live in Indianapolis. “We’ll eat, we’ll talk, I’ll even show you where I grew up,” he says when she asks what they’ll do for three days. “You’ve got to meet the guys.” The week before, he missed a regular monthly lunch with a group of retired friends. “You’ve got a cell phone,” Helen preached. “It has a calendar program. Put your appointments in it and you won’t forget. You can set alarms.” He nodded, but he wasn’t ready for it. An electronic calendar would be a capitulation. She assured him it’s not Alzheimer’s. “Everyone forgets things, Barry. Even me. Who’s the vice-president of the United States? Count backward from twenty, or whatever.” “Okay, okay” he said. “So I haven’t lost that much of my cognition. Yet.” While preparing for their trip to Chicago, he is reminded of Maggie, the woman he dated during his last year of law school and for a couple of years thereafter. She was a beauty back then. Thin, with dark brown hair down to her waist, held in a pony tail most of the time and let loose during love making. He remembers how enthusiastic and daring she was during those intimate times. He also remembers how quickly in the fall of 1966 she broke it off. They were eating dinner at a French restaurant in the Loop. It was an un- seasonably warm November night. During a dessert of pears Belle Helene she said, “This isn’t working, Barry. I have feelings for you, but something’s missing.” And just like that it was over. He goes online now looking for her. He types in “Margaret Weinsap,” but Google produces nothing. It is as if she never existed. Probably uses a married name, he thinks. Maybe one of the Chicago guys will know how to find her. Barry isn’t sure what he wants to find. Is she fat and ugly? Would that make him feel better? Skinny and wrinkled? Alive? He tells himself he’s just curious to see how she turned out. He wonders if she remembers him, Googles him. The four out-of-town couples stay at a hotel central to where most of the locals live. On Friday evening, everyone shows up early at the restaurant. They have a private room with tables arranged in a square, facilitating conversation. Barry realizes how much he loves seeing his old friends. There are hugs and kisses. He’s near tears, but he holds it in. He introduces Helen to the gang. There are the mandatory comments about how Helen was able to tame their once wild friend, etc. Throwaway comments that mean nothing more than welcome to the group. Everyone looks great, considering. And Barry finds himself considering, watching each of his friends for signs. Are they talking? Do they have trouble sitting down? Standing up? Have any of them fallen asleep? Does their skin look healthy? Do they continually say What? Who’s got hair and who doesn’t? He judges silently where he fits among the ten of them. Probable financial assets based on jobs: he thinks he’s third, maybe fourth. Probable health situation based on his visual assessment: maybe fifth. One is a serious hiker. Another a bicycle rider. A third seems to live at his health club. A fourth worked with his hands all his life and looks fit. Fifth, at best. Maybe sixth. He feels a kick under the table. “Relax,” Helen whispers. He orders a cheeseburger with grilled onion rings and a beer. Just the other day, the pulmonologist said he couldn’t believe Barry was eighty. “You’re aging gracefully, Barry.” And then he added, “It does look like you’ve developed asthma. Not a major issue at your age. We’ll put you on an inhaler you can use from now on.” He said from now on, but Barry heard, for the rest of your pitifully short life. He takes seven pills in the morning and eight at night. Now the inhaler. He’ll be lucky, he thinks, to make it to eighty-eight. After dinner, the four out of town couples go back to the motel and sit in the lobby talking about kids and grandkids, about how none of them miss Chicago, about how they keep busy after retirement. Around midnight, one wife yawns and says she’s going up to the room. “Need my beauty sleep,” she says, kissing the top of her husband’s head. In short order, the remaining wives follow. “Remember Irys Kessler?” Ronny says as soon as the elevator door closes on the last wife. “Blonde, big knockers,” Danny says “I saw her obituary the other day.” “She was at the fiftieth, wasn’t she? Looked healthy enough back then. Still a stunner.” “Barry, speaking of stunners, what about Maggie? Ever hear from her?” “Not a word,” Barry says quietly, wondering if they somehow sensed she was on his mind. But there is a turn in their smiles that makes him feel they know something he doesn’t. “What?” he asks. “Apparently, the news doesn’t travel as far south as Indianapolis,” one says. “She’s married, Barry—to a woman.” “Talk about dodging a bullet,” Ronny says. Barry forces a smile and shrugs his shoulders. It is hard for him to conceive of Maggie with a woman. What had he missed? How could she have been more heterosexual? “Times change,” he says to his friends. “And you know, guys, after me, no man is adequate. Simple as that.” They laugh on cue and move on to the benefits of long term health insurance. But Barry can’t get Maggie out of his mind. Maybe she wasn’t sure of her gender preference and her wild sexuality was just part of her exploration of where she fit in. Was he nothing more than a willing guinea pig? He hopes she’s found what she’s looking for and is happy. Saturday morning, a caravan of cars makes its way into the city. The old neighborhood looks familiar and yet unfamiliar to Barry. The drug store has become a pharmacia, the grocery a bodega. Some churches are now mosques or Korean temples. The Terminal Theater, along with the entire block on Lawrence Avenue, has been razed, replaced by a thrift store and a parking lot. Barry would be in the balcony of that theater every Friday night during his high school years, watching a movie or making out with one of his girlfriends. He had lived in three different apartments growing up, all within a four block area. And within that area he attended both elementary and high school. He realizes his entire life until he was thirty was circumscribed by a relatively few square blocks, with excursions on the elevated for college, law school and downtown shopping. Because he grew up in Chicago, his friends in Indianapolis think of him as a big city dude. But in truth he lived in a very small town that happened to be part of a large city. He wondered if that was true of everyone. They stand in front of the two-flat apartment building where Barry was born. It looks much the same, except it now has a high fence around it. As he stands looking at this tiny apartment with two bedrooms and one bath for the six of them, he notices the warped window sill, the peeling paint, simple shades replacing the Venetian blinds. Their second apartment was on a busy street, above a grocery store. It’s still there, somewhat worse for wear. A locked gate is now at the entrance to the narrow walkway leading past the store to the apartments. And their third apartment—the one he lived in with his parents until he was thirty—is now an administrative building for a small local college. It looks as if they had put some money in it to match the overall feeling of the school. Standing across the street from this three-flat apartment building, Barry realizes from this vantage point, he sees his elementary school to his left and his high school to his right. They go in turn to the boyhood homes of the other guys. Only one had lived in an actual house. Looking at it now, he sees it’s modesty, but when he was in high school, Barry thought of it as a mansion. He tells Helen it was the first single family dwelling he had ever been in. Barry and his kindergarten friends decide to walk over to their elementary school. They’ll catch up with the others at lunch. Despite a modern addition, the school looks much the way it did when they were young. “Boy’s Entrance” remains carved in the concrete entablature above the east entrance, while “Girl’s Entrance” graces the west. A glance at his friends acknowledges they are remembering the bumblebee incident that, for a few years, had made Barry a hero. During recess one fall morning, he was chewing a wad of bubble gum. Just as he pushed part of it out of his mouth to blow a bubble, a large bumblebee landed on it. Barry stood stock still as the bee moved around the wad, millimeters from his face. The entire class stopped in their tracks to watch. Very slowly, using his tongue, he pushed more and more of the gum out of his mouth. With each push, the bumblebee adjusted its stance. Everyone was holding their breath. His teacher stood at the doorway to the school, her hand to her mouth. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, Barry let the gum drop from his lips to the ground. The bee circled his head a couple of times as if to challenge him to pick up the sticky pink glob, and then flitted off. His courageous handling of the situation brought adulation from his classmates and an admonition from his teacher about chewing gum during school hours. Barry realizes the way these friends relate to him now—seventy years later—is, in part, a product of that bumblebee incident. “Remember Roy and the bumblebee incident?” Kenny says. “Thought for sure he’d lose it, spook the bee and get stung on his tongue.” Roy, who retired from the Chicago Police Force after forty years, laughs. “I was never more scared. Nothing during my career as a cop was as nerve wracking as that.” Barry wants to yell out, “Wait, that was me!” And he almost does, but he stops when he realizes they must be right. They must be right. Somehow this had gotten mixed up in his memory. “I’m not losing my memory, I’m losing my mind,” he says to himself. “Thank God Helen isn’t here to see this.” He’s told the bumblebee story a million times down in Indy. No more. “You were a real hero, Roy,” he says. “It’s a great story.” At dinner on Saturday the talk turns to their high school teachers. The difficult geometry teacher who was on the draft board, the clueless Spanish teacher. Each had a favorite. Barry finds he remembers relatively few names compared to the others. “Who was the guy who couldn’t stop looking at Carolyn What’s-her-name’s legs?” “Mr. Jenkins,” the others shout.
Barry glances at his wife. “Right,” he says, “I thought it was Jenkins.” Danny Schechter and his wife host the dinner on Saturday night. In high school, he was the most serious student of the group, so no one was surprised when he became a doctor. A cardiologist. After dinner, Danny sets up a slide projector and a table-top screen. And there they all are at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. There were later photos too, from college and beyond. “Who is that?” Helen asks about a photo of a lithe beauty sitting on the lap of a grinning Barry in someone’s wood paneled basement. “Maggie Weinsap,” Danny answers. “She and Barry were an item.” The other guys join in. What a beauty. A sex pot. We were all jealous of Barry back then. One of the guys keeps repeating, “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm,” as if words were not adequate to describe Maggie. “Didn’t she marry a...”
Barry cuts off his friend. “An Italian,” he says. “Yeah, a long time ago.” Helen smiles, but says nothing. She notices in the photograph that Maggie is looking not at Barry, but toward the door, as if she was expecting someone. There is a click and the slide is replaced with one of the group playing poker at the Foster Avenue beach. The image of Maggie as a twenty-something remains in Barry’s head. Leave it at that, he tells himself: She was mine then. A lifetime ago. If she’s a different person now, so be it. Aren’t we all? he thinks. On the drive back to Indianapolis, Helen presses for more information. “Who is this woman all your friends are gaga over? And why have you never mentioned her?” “Maggie? We had a thing going and then it was over. Ancient history.” “According to your guys, it was a big thing. Were you engaged?”
“No, but I’d have to say it was a serious affair.”
“Have you talked with her since?” “Since I met you? No. I wasn’t even invited to her wedding.” Barry is not about to tell Helen what he had found out about Maggie, but he’s pleased she is jealous about this old love affair. He hopes after this weekend among his oldest friends, she might see him in a different light: a man with friends, a man with a past. That night, while Helen washes, he takes the mitt off the shelf, slips it on and pounds it twice before replacing it and going to their bedroom. He knocks the dirt from his cleats and steps in the batter’s box. First and third, bottom of the nineth, two outs. He takes a fast ball knee high for a strike. He swings and misses a curve ball, low and outside. But then he hits a high slider deep into the left field bleachers and trots around the bases, his arms held high, accepting the reverberating cheers of the crowd. He puts his slippers next to his bed, slips under the covers and is asleep in seconds.