Saving Elijah

Mitzi. I wondered again if she heard anything at all when it was spoken in a normal voice.
    "So. Who wants to begin?"
    Pearl Ott. She cleared her voice, rustled her papers, began to read: "My sister was a very jealous woman, angry all the time, very wrapped up in herself. Her name was Rebecca ..."
    Whatever the original cause of the break between them, it was so serious that when her sister died the two had not spoken to each other for fifteen years. That wasn't what Pearl regretted, though. Her great regret was having kept the birthday gift Rebecca sent at one point during the silence between them. "I wore that scarf and I hated wearing it," Pearl read from her essay. "What I should have done was send it back."
    I was feeling a twinge of remorse, thinking about Julie, my long separation from her. I resolved I would call her, this time for real.
    Mitzi Hertzl went next. I settled into my chair, expecting to hear about her first lover.
    "It was June of 1928, and I was ten years old, when the sheriff told my mother and sister and brother and me that we had to leave our home. It wasn't much of a home, just three small rooms over our tiny candy store, but it was all we knew. I hadn't seen my father in over a year. He had a disease no one wanted to talk about while he was still alive.
    "The first time I heard the word 'tuberculosis' was when he died in a sanitarium somewhere out west. I didn't know the name of the sanitarium. All I knew was that there were bills due. That was what my mother kept saying. And now this man was here to make us leave our home. We had spent the last two days packing our meager belongings, and the bags and boxes were stacked by the door, right in front of all the bins where we kept the candies..."
    Mitzi read to us from her handwritten yellow pages in a strong, clear voice. What did she regret, even after all those years? The sheriff ("a huge man who took up most of the doorway") had patted her on the head and said, "I'm sorry, girlie." She'd wanted to stomp on his foot, and didn't.
    "That was wonderful, Mitzi," I said when she finished.
    "Thank you."
    "Maybe you can add a few details."
    "Like what?"
    I asked her what kind of candies they sold in the store.
    She smiled. "Oh. Well. Jelly beans, all different colors, like a rainbow, and licorice whips and little sucking candies. The licorice was always my favorite."
    "Me too," I said. "What did they smell like?"
    She smiled. "They smelled like home."
    Of course they did.
    I talked about point of view for a little while, then suggested that for next week they might try writing something from another person's perspective.
    "If you're a man," I said, "maybe try something from a woman's point of view."
    "Impossible!" Abe Modell said. "Who could understand a woman's point of view?"
    "Very funny, Abe," Pearl Ott said. Then, to me, "But I don't get it, either."
    "For example, you could try the essay you read to us today about your disagreement with your sister from her point of view."
    "My sister's dead." Her jaw was loose, her expression flat.
    "Of course she's dead, Pearl," Lucy said. "Dinah wants you to do it as if she's alive."
    Pearl shook her head and started packing up her things. "Nah. Not for me."
    "Why not?" Carl said. "I like the idea. Be a good sport, Pearl."
    "I've never been a bad sport in my life! What do you know? You have no idea how my sister hurt me—"
    "It's all right, Pearl," I said. "It's a suggestion, not an assignment. You don't have to do it." I looked out over the class. "I have another idea, some of you may like it better. Try writing up the funniest experience you've ever had."
    Even Ellen Shoenberg tried that one. The following week she shocked me by coming in with a short, hilarious piece about her granddaughter's Bat Mitzvah. At least my own sense of humor seemed to have returned. The baker delivered a cake that said, "Happy 80th Birthday, Sadie," the cantor tripped on the bimah, and when they did the candle lighting ceremony at the reception, the tablecloth caught fire.
    I wondered, not for the first time, why it had taken her so long to participate.
    "Sounds like a fun time," Carl Moskovitz said. "I'll go next."
    My best writer did not disappoint me:
    "At three o'clock in the afternoon of March 1,1979, three baboons got together and ate the vinyl roof of my brand-new Grand Prix with the sunroof and the power windows."
    Carl and his wife had ridden through one of those wild animal parks in Florida, uneventfully until they