Oscar didn’t answer.

“Right?”

“Right, right. You don’t have to talk Yiddish to me. I know English.”

“You were talking Yiddish to me.”

“A bissel fleisch isn’t Yiddish.”

“Oh. Then what language is it?”

“It’s…an expression.”

“An expression in Yiddish.”

“It’s…English. Bissel is English.”

“Only if you’re selling carpet shampooers.”

They were sitting in the rest home’s common dining room. Eighty Jewish people over eighty years of age, the vast majority of them women. Some of them could have been beauties in their youth—the features were even and placed geometrically on the face—but the passage of time had dumped them into the category of “elderly.” Which carried with it a certain amount of relief. Certainly for women the pressure was off. They didn’t have to worry about that extra piece of cake. If they ate and kept their weight up, that was a sign of good health. Not surprising, there was a wide variation in personal appearance. Some women were dolled up with makeup and jewelry, but others, and not necessarily the older ones, were content in housecoats and mules.

This is me in fifty years, Rina thought, if I’m lucky. No matter how important the present appeared, it soon turned to the past, and that was the eternal cycle. The perpetuity of life made her smile. Rina had witnessed too much untimely death to be depressed about aging.

Rina smoothed her red cotton skirt and hiked up the sleeves of her white blouse to her elbows. There was some air blowing, but it felt tepid. Too much of a cold breeze wouldn’t do well in the crowd with weak bones and swollen joints. So Rina tolerated the heat with understanding, happy that she was one of those lucky people who didn’t sweat much. Twenty tables were scattered about the room awash in fluorescent light. A couple of window shades were open, allowing Rina to catch a glimpse of the moon and stars. The checkered linoleum floor was discolored but clean; the walls had been recently papered with a rose-on-a-vine pattern. White-uniformed Hispanic women wheeled carts in between tables and doled out the soup of the day: chicken noodle.

This created a problem.

At first, the kitchen refused to allow Rina to serve her soup to Oscar, not due to health reasons—she had purposely made it without salt—but because the dietitian was afraid that Rina’s potage—thick and meaty—would start a rebellion among the residents. So Rina offered to serve it to Oscar up in his room. But that wasn’t acceptable, either. What if Oscar choked? (Apparently Oscar gagged a lot.) So then Rina offered to sit with Oscar out on the facility’s patio. Again she was refused.

After twenty minutes of begging and cajoling, the dietitian finally relented. Oscar could consume the soup in full view of the other diners.