A Job Works Every Time

“Lou moved into his new condo yesterday.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, we took the kids out and later I went over.”
“You went there?”
“And I stayed for breakfast the next morning! So there’s Lou and I having breakfast, and his girlfriend comes in and he says, ‘I brought Edie over to show her the apartment and I invited her to join us for breakfast.’”
“You got weird relationship, Edie. So is she pretty?”
“Na. She’s kind of plain, but young. It would have been our twenty-ninth today. We’ve got a history behind us. Twenty-seven years and two kids. I didn’t ask for money, so we’re friends. We feel relaxed together, you know what I mean? Like we go to a movie and he farts. Whose husband doesn’t fart in front of her? And you know what he says? ‘You know, Edie, you’re still the only one I fart in front of.’”

Edie pours water from the bucket on to the coals even though the sign says “Please don’t throw water on the coals. This is a dry sauna.” She tucks the corner of her white gym towel under her armpit. Her legs are a map of veins, the dark blue lines blurring under the sepia wash of her Miami tan. It’s scorching hot on the third bench, but I lie flat on my frayed green bath towel and slide my memory’s doors open. They’re like those self-closing doors that keep out cold and heat, and I have to consciously keep them propped open. I’m thinking Jewish yentas would flesh out my book and I can't wait to tell Abie, so I swoop down on the sauna dialogue.

“So Myra, you coming to Vegas with the girls?”
“Who’s to know? I didn’t talk to Saul about it yet.”
“What you mean, talk to Saul? You’re a big girl, Myra. Look at that behind you got. Never mind, never mind─you need Saul’s blessing before you wipe yourself?”
“And who’s going to pay for the hotel and shopping? So I'll bring it up after supper and he'll says ‘sure if you really want’ and then I'll look at his face.”
“What’s all this looking meshugas?”
“It’s like this─Saul unbuckles his belt after dinner and he goes into the family room to watch the news, I finish off the dishes, have a cup of tea, maybe a little nosh, and when I go up, he’s in bed reading the newspaper, with his pillow and mine behind him─a man needs two pillows he says, a woman can use her own head, it’s so soft. When he said that I started adding extra schmaltz in his food whenever he complains about his weight. Nothing too fatty, you know, just a little extra olive oil.”

I gasp because I do that too. In Abie’s salad’s. The women look up at me. “The heat,” I say, leaning back and covering my face with a wet washcloth. Maybe if I can’t see them and my face is covered, they’ll continue. When Abie suggested I go to this women’s gym, he didn’t know the joint would be full of dialogue.

“Myra,” Edie turns to squarely face her friend. “Do like I do, give him a job . . . a job, you yutz, offer him a job.”
“Gonif! You do that?”
“Every time. I want something real bad, I offer Mort a job. Depends what I want. A dress─one job. A dress and shoes. Two.”
They’re laughing and nudging each other like two crazed schoolgirls.
“How much for a trip to Vegas?” Myra asks.
“Tell him a year and then schedule a lot of dentist appointments.”

Cunt and Cock Wars

After our six years living together, with my tears and recriminations on both sides, I wanted to tell Garth that I missed his cock wrecking havoc with my insides, his smooth forehead I loved to trace, and his big hands lying flat gently on my skin. Does he remember me with any fondness? He is one who recalls some of the good and certainly the bad.

Oh Garth, do you remember when you first said “Get on all fours,” and the pain, honey, how you pressed your cock against my cunt, pressed and slammed and still you couldn’t squeeze your way in. “Get on all fours,” you said, covering the span of my hips with your hands. Did you come into this world just to hold me so softly with those immense hands of yours? “Hold still, sh, sh,” you said, “that’s it, easy, easy now.” It hurt, really it did. And when you were in, bashing away and knocking at the end of my cunt which is my heart, you said, “You love this don’t you?” and I was thinking no, I don’t, but the thing is I loved you — so I placed my forehead on the bed, bit the pillow and my forearms, sucked in air and whooshed it out. Love hurts. It sears. Opens. So that love, in the name of Garth, or any name, any name will do, may enter. That’s the best time, when love leans against your cunt, doesn’t even ring beforehand, just plain out opens the door and enters. And looking back, I think Garth was right─love does win, but still, it’s one hell of a battle.

Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Maudit Juif

I sift through layers of a muddy lake until I settle at the bottom. There are no bubbles floating up to offer me hope. My heart slows down. I cross my legs and sit and sit. Sometimes I stretch my legs out. The water surrounding reminds me of my childhood room, that stream of light coursing from a ceiling corner to a pinpoint on my skin, except this water presses down on each pore, soaking me through and through. I wait. I am always waiting: for Caroline to wake up; for Caroline’s lids to become heavy with sleep; to walk through the house when hush is a sound; to be alone; not to be alone.

I love gladiolas. Also ferns. Wild flowers. Every week I order gladiolas for each of our main rooms, even the ones without furniture. Young Brothers delivers all the fruit and vegetables and replaces flowers and plants that die from drowning or drought. Last week I added up the grocery tab, including the butcher, and it came to three hundred and fifty a week.

“My banker says we’re overdrawn by one thousand every month,” Abie says and I say “oh” and “I’ll try to do better.” He’s a head hunter now and I think it suits him since he’s always talking about hunters and farmers. “Not everyone can be a hunter,” he says. When we go to those fast food places he says “Repeat” and “Is there someone here who speaks English?” I don’t stand in line with him anymore. Usually I wait in the car and refuse to go in. “You forget where you came from,” I say. “You spoke Yiddish on the farm until you moved to the city.” He reminds me that my grandparents were Russian peasants and my father is the son of a shoemaker. “Exactly,” I say.

I know my roots. Challah bread and the wind-up menorah, Sunday dinners and weekly visits to my grandmothers, kasha knishes and garlic bread, the Voice of Women and Tommy Douglas, dressmakers and Acapulco, the Bolshoi and the Soviet Army Chorus, Angelina in her blue and white striped uniform receiving the day’s instructions from my mother, Borden’s milkman in his brown uniform, my mother ordering meat from NDG butchers, the bald vegetable man, the gardener bringing flats of burgundy leaves and posies in primary colours for my mother to choose from, deliveries from Steinberg’s, our green station wagon for those rare trips to the supermarket.

Abie was born in a DP camp outside Munich. After the war his mother, dressed as a nun, travelled from Poland to Siberia in search of her husband whom she had just married before he was sent away, and she, along with thirty-six others hid in the cave. One thousand days underground. Abie says he’s going to rewrite the Baba’s book. He says that after seders and weddings. In Canada, three brothers, one sister, and their respective families lived in a four-room farmhouse in Chateguay─each family to one room. At mealtimes the children would sit at the big table in the kitchen and grab food from platters of steaming potatoes, corn, and cabbage.

When I tell Abie he has no manners, he tells me another farm story. He also tells me how his mother used to scream out in her sleep every night, and when his family moved to the duplex on De La Peltie, how he and Mendel were chased by chain-wielding gangs yelling “Maudit Juif,” how they’d ambush the nuns, pelting them with snowballs, and how he’d stand, even in winter, on his back balcony so he could hear Oscar Peterson play piano. And then his family moved to the bungalow on Robinson Avenue while the uncles had their split-level custom houses in Hampstead. We both like money─Abie because he never had enough and I because we always had more than enough.

Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Jordon's

http://www.myairshoes.com/category/air-jordans

I'm not a shopper, except where men are concerned, but these are cool-looking running shoes. The site's owner also posts a list of sites she appreciates. I figured anyone who digs my writing must be commended, so I checked out her shoe site. And anyhow, Jimmy Bob whom I loved had this thing about feet. He even sucked on my toes and I have gnarled feet with bunions inherited from my grandmother Ruchel, who wore laced-up orthopaedic oxfords with heels. My toenails are double thickness and turn up at the tip like a plant growing toward the sun. Maybe the greenhouse effect has caused them to evolve within the span of one lifetime. On two occasions at a popular North York hotel, which Jimmy Bob swore was his home away from home, he placed my big toe and the one next to it in his mouth. "Mmmm," he said and I burst out laughing. He stopped sucking on my toes. He also stopped driving from Detroit to Windsor to take the train to Toronto. I figure my feet might do better in the shoes on http://www.myairshoes.com/category/air-jordans, and I might relax knowing these shoes would certainly last longer than the man who used to be my Jimmy Bob.

Writing and Erotica

There are no pictures of mountains or fields on my wall calendar. I tear off the months as they pass, crumble and throw them in the metal trash can under my desk. Each month I hope to discover a book in my fingertips─I rotate my hands so my palms face up, close my eyes, and rub the soft edges of my fingers. Then I place my hands on my Smith Corona the way a musician’s hands light on piano keys. Some musicians set their hands in place and music just flows. Not me. With Mme. Deslandres I practised right hand, left hand, sang notes, bar by bar. I write the same way. I’m hungry all the time. Words gnaw at me. I want I want I want. More than sex, more than love. When I was twenty, I was obsessed with acting and fame. Now when Abie calls me to watch a play on TV, he brings chips in a bowl for himself and a box of Kleenex for me. I walked out on the love of my life and I’ve never recovered.

The day before my wedding, I threw out all my pre-Abie writing─laboured poems, diaries chronicling love and hate and nothing in between, letters written to boyfriends and never mailed─I figured I should start fresh. These days I write erotic poetry inspired by midnight solitary sessions on a cold bathroom floor and sometimes I write about Abie when I’m angry at him and even when I’m not (mostly I am). I read both to him. “Write a Harlequin,” he says, “how hard can it be?” But you see, there are good writers and nice writers although I can never remember which is which. Erotic poems are just an easy lay, and like me, my short stories are all dressed up and raring to go with no idea of where they’re headed. And besides, I’m not good at making up stories. Lying is one thing; fiction is another.



My mother keeps her clothes in three walk-in closets. She inserts shoes trees and tissue paper in the toes of her shoes to keep their shape. Her stockings are rolled into clear plastic bags, striped hat boxes arranged in a row on the shelf above her quilted garment bags. Everything is labelled. Every time she looks at her writing, she makes plans to take a course in calligraphy, and she really means it. But then she gets depressed, sometimes for four months on end and then one morning CBC FM streams from her room on the top floor as she sets aside clothes for different seasons, sifts through her cedar chest, places mothballs in the feet of old nylon stockings─she works and pauses, each article reminding her of a certain time or episode or lost wish. And that’s how I am with my writing, some handwritten on papers lined and unlined, typed on sheets, scribbled in notepads. They’re my photo albums, I guess.

“I like to write erotica,” I say one morning while Abie’s cooking up our Saturday breakfast of bacon and eggs, and I’m buttering four slices of my homemade rye.
“It’s no wonder. You were raised on a diet of communist propaganda and pornography.”
“See, but I want it to be more. Like my writing about our life. I want to write about Clearwater and marriage and chasing Pluto through the cornfield. And how you love to eat,” I say as he turns over the bacon and reaches over for another slice of bread.
“I am a sensualist,” he says. “You have to eat to live, might as well enjoy. If you knew the meaning of geschmuck─”
I say “I know what it means,” and he challenges me. “Oh yeah?” he says. “It means tasty. Like enjoy your geschmucked breakfast,” I say and leave the room.
“That’s it,” he calls after me. “Walk away.”

I sit crouched and waiting in the turquoise armchair by the picture window. He walks over to me with a plate full of eggs and bacon, two slices of bread, and an unpeeled navel orange.
“Here,” he says. “Have some geschmucked food.”
“Thank you,” I say and take the plate from him.
“See?” he says and wipes my eyes with his t-shirt.”
“You don’t take me seriously,” I say.
“Don’t be silly, of course I take you seriously.”
“You do?”
“You’re going to be a great writer. Up there with Anais Nin.”
“Sure sure,” I say, “but do you think it’ll be interesting?”
“I find it interesting.”
“But you’re my husband. I want to know whether it’ll sell.”
“Sex always sells.”
“And how will I work in dialogue? There has to be dialogue,” I say.
“Don’t worry so much. You’ll find a way.”
“And it has to be meaningful.”
“Sounds like sex. Come on, I’ll give you some content.”
“But will it be geschmucked? See, that’s it. That’s what I want. I want my writing to be geschmucked. I want to write words that will be relished.”
He puts my plate on the coffee table and pulls me up to him.
“So you really think I’m a writer?” I say.