How to Get Along with Women Read Free Page B

one shoulder and a toolbox in the other hand. He was wearing a Run DMC t-shirt and a yarmulke and his jeans were hemmed up high so his bony ankles stuck out. His father was the Vending Machine King of Lawrence West.
    What do all these alte Kakes need with condoms? my grandmother said. We had just come in from Open Window bakery and she had a shopping cart with a caraway rye and nothing else in it. I spent all my Saturdays with her, grocery shopping and sitting around at her place while she gave voice lessons to adults who had regular jobs during the week.
    It’s for the laundry room, Asher said, and I pictured all my grandmother’s old Jewish neighbours standing around in their underwear and girdles, helpless with boredom in front of the dryers. Location location location, Asher said.
    My grandmother was probably the only gentile in that building. She was married to a Viennese Jew thirty years her senior and nailed a Mezuzah to her threshold so that no one would ask questions. Outside the condo she had an aggressive anxiety about being mistaken for a Jew that was left over from her days as a Hungarian refugee. Once when she was sitting on the Bathurst bus an old man pushed up his shirt sleeve and flashed her his Auschwitz tattoo.
    Where is your number? the man said. She took this for a come-on and called him an old cocksucker.
    I couldn’t see a lot of difference between my grandmother and the other old ladies in that building: she baked the same cookies and spoke the same Yiddish-inflected German. She played mah-jongg on Wednesday afternoons. Inside the apartment there were only a few religious icons. On the shelf she had a velvet-covered pocket bible that had belonged to her mother and there was a rosary in her jewellery drawer. In the bathroom she had an electrified portrait of the Virgin Mary. Mary was peeling the flesh back from her ribcage like a cardigan. Inside glowed a tiny red lamp: her bleeding heart.
    Because we were both kids and that building was adults-only, Asher and I fell in together almost defensively. He’d been working the machines since he was seven and made his rounds every Saturday like other kids with their paper routes. I don’t remember anyone introducing us. The day we met, we all stood outside the elevators with both arrows, up and down, shining orange. When the doors opened, my grandmother went upstairs with a red-haired woman named Marijke Smirins and I followed Asher down to the laundry room. I stood under the machine and braced it with my shoulder while he used a plug-in drill to screw it to the wall.
    Asher was a Latvian Jew. I knew about Latvians because my public school downtown hosted Heritage Language. Every Saturday and all summer long, the teacher parking lot filled up with beaten-down old Volvos and VWs and Pontiacs bearing the SVEIKS bumper sticker. Latvians, my father said low in his throat whenever we saw one of these cars driving down Bayview Avenue, his voice a mix of disapproval and disbelief. He looked upon nationality as a matter of character. How could anyone could choose their heritage so poorly?
    SVEIKS always looked to me like the kind of word that should be painted across the side of a Viking ship. It looks Swedish.
    It means Latvia, my mother told me.
    It means Hello, Asher said, tightening a bolt on the machine. Jesus. He was good at swearing in the way experience has shown me all Eastern Europeans are. He liked to bring the Messiah into it when he could. I thought it sounded dirty and ravenous coming from him. The way Asher smiled I could tell he would do it just to please me.
    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