How to Get Along with Women (3 page)

I asked him if he went to Heritage Language and he didn't even look up. I'm a Jew, he said. I don't go to Russian school. I go to Hebrew school.

You mean after school?

No, that's my school. Hebrew school.

My own family was ethnically Catholic at best. My parents ran their lives on very practical terms. Ours was a secular existence for the most part and I had only recently begun to understand that there were whole worlds outside of “Catholic” and “Jewish,” the only two categories I'd ever had contact with. My Girl Guide troop met in the basement of Bethel Baptist church; once a year we paraded in on a Sunday morning to commemorate Lady Baden-Powell's birthday. After the service we ate tiny white-bread sandwiches with all the congregation ladies and one of the other girls told me she was United.

Is that Catholic? I asked. She frowned and bit into a deviled egg.

Asher's account of Glencairn Chabad was news to me: a religious school that replaced regular school.

Is it like French immersion?

The machine was on the wall now and Asher grabbed a corner of it and shook, to make sure it was fastened nice and tight.

No, he said.

But you learn Hebrew.

Yes.

And pray and stuff?

Yes.

So is it like Sunday school?

No.

Do you still have to do math?

Asher dropped his wrench back into the toolbox and snapped the lid.

It's like French immersion, he said.

I had gone to Hungarian school just once, at the Magyar Ház on St. Clair West. It was a dark room filled with rows of desks; in the desks, children traced stencils of the Hungarian alphabet. You had to follow the dotted lines to form the letters. That makes it sound as though the Hungarian alphabet is somehow its own thing, like Cyrillic or Kanji, but it's no different from the Latin alphabet I had already mastered in public school. What the dotted lines were really teaching was the kind of stylized, uniform cursive that every Hungarian kid is expected to learn: penmanship, Soviet-style. My mother, seeing herself as progressive, was horrified at the thought of confining me to a dark room and the mindless drudgery of stencils.

We have so little good weather in this country! she said to my father. It was her way of saying that kids should be allowed to play outside after school. As a result my Hungarian cultural training was restricted to the banter and dirty language of Uncle Bug-Eye István, who came for lunch every second Sunday, and the occasional evening out at the Csárda, a supper club for Hungarians where my parents liked to go and listen to Transylvanian gypsies.

The Latvian school kids were not so lucky. From the ages of four to twelve, their Saturdays were consigned to Latvian Heritage—and its Language. It disturbed me to think of another child sitting at my public school desk, perhaps using my coloured pencils, perhaps even thinking of it as his own desk, while I took advantage of the precious little sun and fresh air that a country like Canada offered. While I rode my bicycle around and around our paved-over front yard, I was always half thinking about that Latvian kid sitting in my desk and what he might be up to. In grade three I made a koala bear out of papier mâché and got so worked up over its safety, vis-à-vis the Latvians, that my mother had to drive me to school on a Saturday morning to retrieve it.

She stood in the door holding my coat, while I walked across the classroom to the art table. The Latvian teacher stood there, too, with her arms at her sides. In my desk there was boy about three years younger than me. He was tracing a stencil. The art table was jammed with papier mâché animals. I grabbed my koala and hugged it against my hip. The Latvians looked at me. They didn't seem surprised to see a public school kid on a craft rescue mission. A girl in the front row sucked on the tip of her blond braid.

In the car I looked down at the koala in my lap. It was about a foot-and-a-half long with a blotchy red mouth. I had spent days building it up with paste and newspaper, also spreading the paste over my arms and hands. When it dried, it made my skin look wrinkled, like I was old.

I wedged my fingernail up underneath the buttons and picked off the koala's eyes.

Russians, my mother said from the front seat.

From what Asher said, Glencairn Chabad sounded like those schools they made movies about in the 60s, like the Summerhill school or Waldorf, except instead of blonde hair and English accents the kids were all brunette and wore Star of David necklaces. I liked how everyone shared a common identity: the big white and blue flag, the special holidays, the packed-lunch sandwiches that all looked the same. In my own east-end neighbourhood, everybody had names like Fitzgerald or Mackenzie or Halliday or Jones, and they lived in brick houses with hamsters and guinea pigs or a wall of pet birds in cages. At my public school downtown, my best friend My Le was a Vietnamese girl who had lived the startling and delicious experience of watching a man's dangling legs get sliced off when her own refugee boat scraped up against another boat in the Saigon harbour.

It's not all the same, Asher said. There's orthodox kids and immigrants and Israelis, he said. There's fights at lunch. Some people live in Forest Hill.

I didn't know where Israel was so he hauled out a book of maps to show me. I told him how when we were driving up Bathurst Street, my Uncle Bug-Eye István liked to lean out the car window and yell, The Arabs are coming! The Arabs are coming! whenever he thought an old lady was driving too slow.

Asher wasn't more than an inch or two taller than me and he still had his little-boy skinniness, all ribcage and big teeth at odd angles, but he approached grown-ups with a balanced irreverence. Where I was normally never allowed to go even as far as the smelly garbage chute in the hallway by myself, somehow if I was with Asher, my grandmother was only too pleased to wash her hands of me. The two of us roamed the neighbourhood for hours, checking stock in Asher's machines and buying cheese danishes at Open Window. I liked to go to Lawrence Plaza and try on high heel shoes and make him sit and watch me hobble up and down the aisles at Shoe Company. He threw his legs over the side of the armchair and held his head in his hands. I'm so Christ-fucking bored, he said.

It was the closest we came to flirtation. We'd leave the plaza and walk down the street, kicking each other viciously. Because my grandmother's apartment was an opera studio on the weekends, we usually ended up back in Asher's basement.

Asher's house reminded me a little of mine. It was clean, without all the stuff lying around I saw in other people's houses. His parents liked antiques and, aside from the basement, there was no wall-to-wall carpeting, just rugs on a wood floor. In the kitchen there were some plates hanging on the walls, and in the living room a lot of black and white photographs of aunts and uncles and great-grandparents back in Russia. There was a dining room with a big table and a blue tablecloth and a menorah on the window ledge. I'd been to a Jewish wedding once and sat at the kids' table and remembered that the bride had worn a pink dress and been carried around on a chair. Asher moaned about Friday suppers but to me it sounded really nice. God and Asher's family seemed like a tight-knit bunch. When we went to church on Sundays, my father closed his eyes during the homily and took a little nap.

His family had something else mine didn't: a clarity, a cut-and-dried vision of who they were versus everyone else. We all left Europe after the war, his people and mine, but there was a subtle difference in what happened next. Asher had escaped something. Not all the Hungarians tried to get out; we even knew some Hungarians in Toronto who decided to go back. When my uncle outside Budapest proudly showed off his Czech-built Skoda, a car he'd spent seven years on a waiting list to own, even I knew that he was a participant in the system.

I told Asher how my mother and grandmother had crossed the forest in the middle of the night to escape Hungary before the Revolution—nothing like escaping the Nazis. He shook his head and agreed.

One day Asher and I were sitting in my grandmother's kitchen eating plum dumplings rolled in sugar. My grandfather was sitting in a big chair in the living room listening to Wagner. He was actually my step-grandfather; my real grandfather had been a maniac and my grandmother divorced him when she got to Canada.

My grandmother was standing by the stove. She nodded toward the living room, where her husband was relaxing with his eyes closed.

Without Wagner, she said, he would have been a dead duck!

She said he had been interviewed by a Wagner-loving SS officer in Vienna in 1938. What were the chances of an opera-loving Jew and an opera-loving Nazi falling into the same interview room together? My grandfather had a little notebook where he recorded every opera he'd ever seen; he and the SS agent had a really good talk. At the end of the interview, there was a loudspeaker announcement. Anyone holding a Polenpaß had to proceed to the train. Polen means Poland in German. A Polenpaß is a ticket to Auschwitz. The SS officer looked at my grandfather, who was holding his ticket. He handed him a second pass, a ticket for a boat to Shanghai.

My grandmother pulled two more dumplings out of the pot. When we were living in High Park, she said, he disappeared one night. She gestured to my grandfather with her spoon. Early in the morning I found him lying out on a park bench. He'd taken a lot of pills, you see.

His mother went to Auschwitz, my grandmother said. He never forgave himself.

She looked at Asher: They all have to try it once.

Where I went to school downtown, there were no other Hungarian girls at all and only two Hungarian boys, Gábor and Kálmán. Like all the full-grown Hungarian men I knew, their conversation started and stopped with opening a woman's legs.

I swore I'd never marry a Hungarian, my mother said as she arranged tomatoes and peppers on a plate for Sunday lunch.

My father of course was not just Hungarian; he was Transylvanian. This made him superior on many levels. The Transylvanians, he said, were the true Hungarians, Mongols left by Genghis Khan to colonize the Carpathian Mountains. These Mongol ancestors had left us with a language that bore no resemblance to those of our Slavic neighbours, an affinity for the training and riding of horses, and eyes so shallowly set that many of my aunts and uncles looked Asian—a fact I proudly pointed out to my friend My Le. My great-great-grandfather's likeness was embossed on the side of the biggest cathedral in Budapest. Strong as ten men, my father said, showing me a picture of the brass relief: a man in a rowboat, single-handedly saving the city from a flood.

I wanted to believe all these stories. The problem was that Hungary wouldn't cooperate. I didn't understand the politics but I knew that having money and buying things was good. When we went to Eastern Europe we had to line up at the border and bring used clothes for my cousins to wear. The biggest sin of communism was poverty.

At school I hid my ethnicity, sneaking the spicy salami out of my sandwich and eating plain rye bread and butter for lunch. When kids on the playground sang their own versions of popular songs—I was Born in the USSR! So I moved to the USA!—I felt implicated. We'd taken a trip back to Hungary the previous summer. In the small towns my relatives lived in identical, state-constructed apartment buildings and we walked from one aunt's house to the next, the old ladies lurching from side to side in their housedresses, gnarled feet in identical plastic sandals. On Saturday mornings they got up early to stand in line for bread and potatoes and sugar at the grocery store. We drove from village to village. When I got tired of looking at stork nests and sunflowers, I lay down in the back seat and listened to Bruce Springsteen and Laura Branigan on my Walkman.

In the country, things got a little more stark: Eat your soup! my mother hissed as I sat staring at dinner, a single chicken's claw groping out of a bowl of hot water.

When my grandmother's next student arrived, she put the rest of the dumplings on a piece of wax paper and Asher and I walked over to the plaza and back. It was only about two in the afternoon. Neither of us had any money and we sat around in the soft-carpeted basement of Asher's backsplit on Fairholme Avenue. Aside from all the regular basement stuff—television, card table folded against the wall, a few naugahyde chairs including a red La-Z-Boy out of which I had just flipped backward onto my head—there was a separate area that functioned as a storage space for the vending business. Little cartons of laundry soap and dryer sheets, plastic bottles of cheap perfume and stacks of packaged candy lined a crawl space that was only separated from the rec room by a low-slung saloon door.

Asher was sitting cross-legged in a beanbag chair. He flipped the remote. We were watching “When Doves Cry” on MuchMusic: Prince is in this steaming bathtub and then he gets up and you're supposed to think he's naked, but really he's got something around his waist that the camera wasn't meant to catch. MuchMusic was a brand new thing. There weren't any shows, just videos. Outside it was raining.

I am bored as shit, I said.

I looked over at the swinging saloon door and the stockpile of goods behind it. I always wanted to play store, or at least chew the gum and poke pinholes in the condoms, but Asher took his lower-management position to heart. He pulled a ledger out of the storeroom and tried to show me how he kept track of sales.

You're killing me, I said. I dropped off the La-Z-Boy onto the ground and lay there with my tongue hanging out sideways. I died. Your boringness made me die.

I'm not playing stupid House, Asher said. He was a little irritated that his bookkeeping had failed to impress me.

I didn't say House! I sat up and leaned back on my hands. Who said House? Who was talking House?

We should play Escape, I said. We should play Houdini.

Asher looked thoughtful.

We can play Lock-Up, he said. He said he had some rope left over from an old Hallowe'en costume: maybe that would come in handy.