Larry’s sick with a cold. We were invited to Sukkot dinner at Leon’s for the second year. Leon was an accountant. Several years ago Larry’s mother got him to help us with a loan. But he doesn’t do that anymore. Now he’s a partner in a door business. Except he still does some accounting work for Jenny, Larry’s mother. Also Larry played hockey at a pick up hockey game Leon was running on Sunday nights for a while. Then Larry made waves by standing up to some of the bad actors at Leon’s game.
Larry took a Sudafed. Even though we got there late we were still sitting on a cushy sofa waiting for the last couple to show up. Leon’s wife, Denise was upstairs getting dressed or something still. It was the same couple who was there last year. The husband was a real estate agent and an expert on the Beatles. The wife was Australian. The ten year old daughter had hair so blonde it was practically white. The twelve year old son was going to be a lawyer one day. He was game and they’d all been working on that eventuality together pretty much since he was born.
Larry made jokes to Leon about telling his mother beforehand he was sick and uncertain he should attend the function and her insistent response that he still had several hours to make himself better so get to work already.
Jenny looked regal. She had her hair done up and her eyebrows shaped up too. She sat in an upright position on the sofa in a cream dress with a stylish fifties look to it, as we listened to Denise’s nephew describe in a sharp yet commanding voice a lot of details about the rural high school he teaches at. He was very short and had big blue eyes.
Leon's is a house with mezuzahs, which are religious parchments put inside sometimes fancy containers, at probably every doorway not just entering, as prescribed by Jewish law, but inside the house too. I could see the one at the entrance of the room we were in and got the impression from my vantage point at its far end that it had pink flowers on it.
I thought about getting a word in edgewise but as hard as I thought it didn't come to me what that word would be. The sofa I was sitting and listening on was so soft I was afraid I might sink into its cushioned layers like a firefly into a molten marshmallow.
2 comments:
Those comfy couches are used to put ambivalent guests like us in a more sedated posture, to seduce our kindness out to play. You never notice the hosts sitting in them. They're on high alert, watching the visiting bugs get mellowed.
Ohhhh. That explains it. See, there was something about the colour of those couches I was wondering about.
A splotchy beige colour. Those beige bits must be evidence of all the bugs getting permanently sucked in to couch oblivion.
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