The Street (11 page)
Authors: Mordecai Richler
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Short Stories (Single Author)
One day instead of going home around five in the afternoon, Benny went upstairs with Bella. Myerson, who was watching, smiled. He turned to Shub and said: “If I had a boy of my own, I couldn’t wish for a better one than Benny.”
“Look who’s counting chickens,” Shub replied.
Benny’s vacation dragged on for several weeks and every morning he sat down at the counter in Pop’s Cigar & Soda and every evening he went upstairs with Bella, pretending not to hear the wise-cracks made by the card players as they passed. Until one afternoon Bella summoned Myerson upstairs in the middle of a deal. “We have decided to get married,” she said.
“In that case,” Myerson said, “you have my permission.”
“Aren’t you even going to say luck or something?” Bella asked.
“It’s your life,” Myerson said.
They had a very simple wedding without speeches in a small synagogue and after the ceremony was over Abe
whacked his younger brother on the back and said, “Atta boy, Benny. Atta boy.”
“Can I come back to work?”
“Sure you can. You’re the old Benny again. I can see that.”
But his father, Benny noticed, was not too pleased with the match. Each time one of Garber’s cronies congratulated him, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Shapiro’s boy married into the Segals.”
“Shapiro’s boy,” Mrs. Garber said.
Benny went back to the garage, but this time he settled down to work hard and that pleased Abe enormously. “That’s my kid brother Benny,” Abe took to telling the taxi drivers, “married six weeks and he’s already got one in the oven. A quick worker, I’ll tell you.”
Benny not only settled down to work hard, but he even laughed a little, and, with Bella’s help, began to plan for the future. But every now and then, usually when there was a slack period at the garage, Benny would shut up tight and sit in a chair in a dark corner. He had only been back at work for three, maybe four, months when Bella went to speak to Abe. She returned to their flat on St. Urbain her face flushed and triumphant. “I’ve got news for you,” she said to Benny. “Abe is going to open another garage on Mount Royal and you’re going to manage it.”
“But I don’t want to, I wouldn’t know how.”
“We’re going to be partners in the new garage.”
“I’d rather stay with Abe.”
Bella explained that they had to plan for their child’s future. Their son, she swore, would not be brought up over a cigar & soda, without so much as a shower in the flat. She wanted a fridge. If they saved, they could afford a car. Next year, she said, after the baby was born, she hoped there would be sufficient money saved so that she could go to a clinic in the United States to have an operation on her foot. “I was to
Dr. Shapiro yesterday and he assured me there is a clinic in Boston where they perform miracles daily.”
“He examined you?” Benny asked.
“He was very, very nice. Not a snob, if you know what I mean.”
“Did he remember that he was at school with me?”
“No,” Bella said.
Bella woke at three in the morning to find Benny huddled on the floor in a dark corner with his head buried in his knees, trembling. “It’s raining,” he said. “There’s thunder.”
“A man who fought in the war can’t be scared of a little rain.”
“Oh, Bella. Bella, Bella.”
She attempted to stroke his head but he drew sharply away from her.
“Should I send for a doctor?”
“Shapiro’s boy maybe?” he asked, giggling.
“Why not?”
“Bella,” he said. “Bella, Bella.”
“I’m going next door to the Idelsohns to phone for the doctor. Don’t move. Relax.”
But when she returned to the bedroom he had gone.
Myerson came round at eight in the morning. Mr. and Mrs. Garber were with him.
“Is he dead?” Bella asked.
“Shapiro’s boy, the doctor, said it was quick.”
“Shapiro’s boy,” Mrs. Garber said.
“It wasn’t the driver’s fault,” Myerson said.
“I know,” Bella said.
Making It with the Chicks
I
WASN’T QUITE
eight years old when I first got into trouble over a girl. Her name was Charna, she lived upstairs from me, and we had played together without incident for years. Then, one spring afternoon, it seemed to me that I’d had enough of marbles and one-two-three
-RED LIGHT!
“I’ve got it. We’re going to play hospital. I’m the doctor, see, and you’re the patient. Is anybody home at your place?”
“No. Why?”
“It’s more of an indoors game, like. Come on.”
I had only begun my preliminary examination when Charna’s mother came home. My punishment was twofold. I had to go to bed without my supper and my mouth was washed out with soap. “You’d better speak to him,” my mother said. “It’s a lot worse when they pick up that kind of knowledge on the streets.”
“It looks like he’s very well-informed already,” my father said.
If I wasn’t, it was clearly my mother’s fault. Some years earlier she had assured me that babies came from Eaton’s, and whenever she wanted to terrify me into better behaviour she would pick up the phone and say, “I’m going to call Eaton’s right this minute and have you exchanged for a girl.”
My sister would compulsively add to my discomfort. “Maybe Eaton’s won’t take him back. This isn’t bargain basement week, you know.”
“I’ll send him to Morgan’s, then.”
“Morgan’s,” my father would say, looking up from his evening paper, “doesn’t hire Jews.”
Duddy Kravitz cured me of the department store myth. He was very knowing about how to make babies. “You do it with a seed. You plant it, see.”
“Where, but?”
“Where?
Jesus H. Christ!”
Duddy was also a shrewd one for making it with the girls. When we were both twelve, just starting to go out on dates, he asked me, “When you go to a social, what do you do first?”
“Ask the prettiest girl for a dance.”
“Prick.”
Duddy explained that everybody went to the dance with the same notion. The thing to do, he said, was to make a big play for the
third
prettiest girl while all the others were hovering around number one. To further my education, he sold me a copy of
The Art Of Kissing
for a dollar. “When you’re through with it,” he said, “and if it’s still in good condition, you bring it back, and for another fifty cents I’ll lend you a copy of
How to Make Love
. Okay?”
The first chapter I turned to in
The Art of Kissing was
called
HOW TO APPROACH A GIRL
.
In kissing a girl whose experience with osculation is limited, it is a good thing to work up to the kissing of the lips. Only an arrant fool seizes hold of such a girl, when they are comfortably seated on the sofa, and suddenly shoves his face into hers and smacks her lips. Naturally, the first thing he should do is arrange it so that the girl is seated
against the arm of the sofa while he is seated at her side. In this way, she cannot edge away from him when he becomes serious in his attentions.
“Hey,” my sister yelled, “how long are you going to be in there?”
“Hay is for horses.”
“I’ve got to take a bath. I’m late.”
If she flinches, don’t worry. If she flinches and makes an outcry, don’t worry. If she flinches, makes an outcry and tries to get up from the sofa, don’t worry. Hold her, gently but firmly, and allay her fears with reassuring words.
“When you come out of there I’m going to break your neck.”
“You, and what army?”
… then your next step is to flatter her in some way. All women like to be flattered. They like to be told they are beautiful even when the mirror throws the lie right back in their ugly faces.
Flatter her!
Ahead of you lies that which had been promised in your dreams, the tender, luscious lips of the girl you love. But don’t sit idly by and watch her lips quiver.
Act!
“Why did you stuff the keyhole?”
“Because I’ve heard of snoopers like you before.”
“Oh,
now
I get it. Now I know what you’re doing in there. Why you filthy little thing, you’ll stop growing.”
… there has been raised quite a fuss in regard to whether one should close one’s eyes while kissing or while being kissed. Personally, I disagree with those who advise closed eyes. To me, there is an additional thrill in seeing, before my eyes, the drama of bliss and pleasure as it is played on the face of my beloved.
“Awright,” I said, opening the door, “it’s all your’n.”
Our parties were usually held at a girl’s house and it was the done thing to bring along the latest hit parade record. Favourites at the time were
Besame Mucho, Dance Ballerina, Dance
, and
Tico-Tico
. We would boogie for a while and gradually insist on more and more slow numbers, fox trots, until Duddy would leap up, clear his throat, and say, “Hey, isn’t the light in here hurting your eyes?”
Next, another boy would try a joke for size.
“Hear what happened to Barbara Stanwyck? Robert Taylor.”
“Wha’?”
“Robert Tayl’der, you jerk.”
“Yeah, and what about Helena Rubinstein?”
“So?”
“Max Factor.”
But with the coming of the party-going stage complications set in for me, anyway. Suddenly, my face was encrusted with pimples. I was also small and puny for my age. And, according to the author of
The Art of Kissing
, it was essential for the man to be taller than the woman.
He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones. And,
all of these are impossible when the woman is taller than he is. For when the situation is reversed the kiss becomes a ludicrous banality, the physical mastery is gone, everything is gone, but the fact that two lips are touching two other lips. Nothing can be more disappointing.
I had difficulty getting a second date with the same girl and usually the boys had to provide for me. Duddy would get on the phone, hustling some unsuspecting girl, saying, “There’s this friend of mine in from Detroit. Would you like to go to a dance with him on Saturday night?”
Grudgingly, the girl would acquiesce, but afterwards she would complain “Why didn’t you tell me he was such a runt?”
So Duddy took me aside. “Why don’t you try bodybuilding or something?”
I wrote to Joe Weider, the Trainer of Champions, and he promptly sent me a magazine called
How To Build
A STRONG MUSCULAR BODY
with
WEIDER
as Your Leader
.
“Be
MASCULINE!
Be
DESIRED!
Look in the mirror –
ARE YOU
really attractive to
LOVE?
What does the mirror reveal? A sickly, pimply string-bean of a fellow –
OR –
a
VIBRANT
, masculine looking, romance attracting
WEIDER MAN
? If
YOU
were a vivacious, lovely, young woman, which would
YOU
choose? the tired, listless, drab chap, or the strong, energetic, forceful
MAN –
able to protect his sweetheart and give her the best things in life?”
Alas, I couldn’t afford the price of making Weider my leader. I tried boxing at the “Y” instead and was knocked out
my second time in the gym ring. I would have persevered, however, if not for the fact that my usual sparring partner, one Herkey Samuels, had a nasty trick of blowing his nose on his glove immediately before he punched me. Besides, I wasn’t getting any taller. I wasn’t exactly stunted, but a number of the other boys had already begun to shave. The girls had started to use lipstick and high heels, not to mention brassieres.
Arty, Stan, Hershey, Gas, and I were drifting through high school at the time, and there we got a jolt. All at once the neighbourhood girls, whom we had been pursuing loyally for years, dropped us for older boys. Boys with jobs, McGill boys -anybody – so long as he was eighteen and had the use of a car.
“They think it’s such a big deal,” Arty said, “because suddenly they’ve begun to sprout tits.”
“Did you see the guy who came to pick up Helen? The world’s number one
shmock.”
“What about Libby’s date?”
Disconsolate, we would squat on the outside steps on Saturday nights and watch the girls come tripping out in their party dresses, always to settle into a stranger’s car, and swim off into the night without even a wave for us. Obviously, a double-feature at the Rialto, a toasted tomato sandwich and a Coke afterwards, no longer constituted a bona fide date. That, one of the girls scathingly allowed, was okay “for children” like us, but nowadays they went to fraternity dances or nightclubs and, to hear them tell it, sipped Singapore Slings endlessly.
“Let them have their lousy little fling,” Arty advised. “Soon they’ll come back crawling for a date. You wait.”
We waited and waited until, disheartened, we shunned girls altogether for a period. Instead, we took to playing blackjack on Saturday nights.
“Boy, when I think of all the
mezuma
I blew on Gitel.”
“Skip it. I’d rather lose money to a friend, a real friend,” Duddy said, scooping up another pot, “than spend it on a girl any time.”
“They’re getting lousy reps, those whores, running around with strange guys in cars. You know what they do? They park in country lanes …”
“I beg your hard-on?”
“I’d just hate to see a sweet kid like Libby getting into trouble. If you know what I mean?”
Duddy told us about Japanese girls and how they jiggled themselves in swinging hammocks. Nobody believed him.
“I’ve got the book it’s written in,” he insisted, “and I’m willing to rent it out.”
“Hey,” Stan said, “you know why Jewish girls have to wear two-piece bathing suits?”
Nobody knew.
“Mustn’t mix the milk with the meat.”
“Very funny,” Duddy said. “Now deal the cards.”
“I’ll tell you something that’s a fact,” Arty said. “Monks never go out with dames. For all their lives –”