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up.
She put a hand over her throat as if she were in agony.
    "See what you're doing to her," one of his
daughters said, holding her mother's free hand.
    "She's only acting," Velvil said. "Can't
they see that?"
    "They know it," Genendel said. She stood up.
    "Where are you going, Mother?" Genendel's daughter
shouted.
    "That bitch. That whore," Mimi shouted.
    "Who are you calling a whore, you fat pig?"
Genendel's daughter said.
    "They're mockies," one of Velvil's daughters
shouted.
    "A whore..." Mimi cried, forgetting about her
assumed frailty, pointing her finger at Genendel, then at her husband.
"Rot in hell. Both of you."
    "My conscience is clear," Genendel said quietly.
    "We can still make the Cycling Club, Genendel,"
Velvil said quietly.
    "A wonderful idea," Genendel responded. She moved
toward him, reaching for his arm. They stood now together at the end of the
table, looking at the faces of their families.
    "Please," Larry persisted. "If you will all
sit down..." But neither of them was listening.
    "Who are these people?" Velvil asked, as they
turned and proceeded toward the door, arm-in-arm.
    "Nobody I ever knew," Genendel said as they
walked out of the room.

Itch
    It annoyed Isaac Kramer exceedingly when anyone called him
Isaac. His real name, in his mind, was Itch. He had been known as Itch for
sixty of his seventy-two years, ever since his grandfather, in his broken
Yiddish-English got up from his nap in a bad mood after Itch had put a baseball
through his bedroom window.
    "Dot Izzy gibt mir an Itch."
    Someone had heard the remark, probably his sister Fanny, and
from then on, in that mysterious way that nicknames are born, he had become
Itch. Since he had lived in only two neighborhoods during his entire lifetime,
not counting the shtetl in Kozin, Poland, or the hold of the USS St. Louis ,
he had had no trouble in establishing his real name. In Brownsville, where he
had spent forty years of his life, and in Brighton Beach, where he had spent
the last thirty-one, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to have
addressed him by any other name but Itch.
    Now that he had moved to Sunset Village and was getting his
mail addressed to Isaac Kramer, everybody seemed to be calling him Isaac. It
was as if the yentas had peeked into the cellophane panel of his envelopes and
spread the word to the four corners of Sunset Village. His wife of fifty years,
Sadie, a round, jolly, good-natured woman, sympathized with his problem.
    "How could they know you're Itch? On the records in
the office it says Isaac. In the bulletin announcement it says Isaac and on the
door-plate they gave us it says Isaac."
    "I'll send in a retraction and get a new plate
made," he said morosely. He was having trouble enough adjusting to his
selling the cleaning store without such an identity crisis.
    "I hate Florida," he would say to Sadie.
"There was no need to sell the store."
    "You wanted to drop dead in that store, in the heat
from that cleaning machine and the presser? You remember how my legs would
swell up in the summer?"
    "I wasn't ready."
    "The doctor said you were ready."
    "What did he know?"
    Sadie did have one friend who had left for Sunset Village
the year before, but it turned out that, not being a working woman, her friend
had become an expert game player, mah-jongg, canasta, hearts: Sadie, on the
other hand, who had worked all her life in a cleaning store helping Itch, was
just learning to play the games. Every afternoon she would go to the clubhouse
for lessons while he sat by the pool or took the car across Lake View Drive to
the shopping center, where he stood around and looked in the windows and watched
the strange people do their shopping. Outside of Sunset Village, where everyone
was Jewish except for the help, who were either "schwartzes or shiksas or
scootchim," the world was very strange-looking indeed, the world of goyim.
    "Where did you go, Itch?"
    "I took the car to the shopping center."
    "Again?"
    "I like to watch the