You Are Not What We Expected

by Sidura Ludwig

  You Are

  Not What We

  Expected

  Also by Sidura Ludwig

  Holding My Breath

  You Are

  Not What We

  Expected

  Sidura Ludwig

  Copyright © 2020 Sidura Ludwig

  Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: You are not what we expected / Sidura Ludwig.

  Names: Ludwig, Sidura, author.

  Description: Short stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190169338 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190169370

  ISBN 9781487007348 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487007355 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487007362 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8623.U29 Y68 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Cover design: Jennifer Lum

  Text design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  For Jason

  Contents

  The Flag

  Pufferman

  You Are Not What We Expected

  The Elaine Levine Club

  Escape Routes

  Joy of Vicks

  Like Landing the Gimli Glider

  Loose Change

  The Greatest Love Story Never Told

  The Album

  Keeping Ghosts Warm

  The Last Man Standing

  The Happiest Man on Sunset Strip

  Acknowledgements

  The Flag

  Isaac would like people to understand that the world has rules, and that these rules should not be ignored. You should not kill another human being. You should not steal. You should make an effort to look after your community and help it to flourish. And you should never, not under any circumstances, fly one country’s flag underneath another’s.

  “It’s degrading!” he is yelling at the man with the black velvet skullcap. “It’s disrespectful! I can’t even stand to look at what you’ve done. You want to honour Israel, but you’ve done just the opposite!”

  The man, the principal of the very school Isaac has barged into, is nodding his head politely — albeit with his arms crossed in front of his chest, his back very straight, feet shoulder-width apart. As Isaac berates him, the principal wonders if now is the right time to organize proper security at the school. Don’t ask how Isaac (elderly, short, inconspicuous) managed to just walk right into this building. Other schools in this predominately Jewish neighbourhood just north of Toronto have elaborate security checks, offices positioned right by the front door, secretaries with panic buttons, security guards out front. But Isaac was just out on his morning walk. He was just taking the route he always takes, past the brownstone townhouses, past the strip mall filled with kosher shops, a bakery, a pizza parlour. Past the Lubavitch community centre and then past the houses on the boulevard, which are starting to look tired from all the children who live in them. Tired the way a favourite T-shirt gets frayed and faded on someone who, over the years, has put on ten pounds. He walks past all the bicycles and scooters, the double strollers parked on the narrow front lawns, and then passes this school, of which he never took notice. Until today. On the flagpole there are two flags instead of one. And the Israeli flag is flying below the Canadian.

  The principal takes a breath when Isaac appears to have paused. “Every year, the week of Israel’s birthday, we fly the Israeli flag in its honour,” he says. “Many of our graduates go on to make aliyah. We proudly support Eretz Yisroel.”

  “So invest in another flagpole!” Isaac yells.

  “We’ll take your suggestion under consideration.” The principal places his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, leading him to the front door.

  “No you won’t! You’re going to ignore me. You know, there are 193 flagpoles at the United Nations. This is about international law!”

  One of the teachers, a young woman in a knit beret and an ankle-length denim skirt, has stopped to watch the commotion.

  “Rabbi,” she says, her voice quiet but shaking, “should I call security?”

  The principal shakes his head. They both know there is no security. They would have to call the police. And Isaac, while certainly irate, is hardly threatening. “The gentleman was just leaving.”

  “I’m still waiting for an answer!” Isaac bellows. Before today he never knew the strength of his own voice, understood the power of his words. He feels like an opera singer, a baritone reaching his climax, his mouth wide open, his hand outstretched and then clenched as he comes to his resounding conclusion. And yet he doesn’t want to finish. He could argue like this all day.

  “You’re a caring man,” the principal says, opening the door, pushing Isaac firmly but gently through the doorway to the spring air, cool against his hot face. “Really, I appreciate you bringing this to our attention.”

  And then, before Isaac can say any more, the door is shut. The principal locks it, making a note to send a memo to all staff that the front door must be locked at all times until further notice.

  Isaac stands facing the door for a long time. Long enough to watch the principal walk back down the hall and up the stairs to his office, where Isaac knows he will ignore everything that happened during the last fifteen minutes. Isaac is standing in the shadow of the two flags. He steps away from it to be in the sun. He looks up and wonders if he couldn’t just take the flag down himself. But he is in clear view of some men from the synagogue next door taking a cigarette break. And there are all the children in the classrooms. Isaac walks away panting, his heart beating so wildly the blood pounds against his ears and he feels as if his whole face is pulsating.

  That night he has supper with his landlady, Mona, a Russian seamstress who uses her living room as her workshop. They eat in front of the television. There are swatches of material draped over folding chairs, cascading down from bookshelves.

  “These girls, they don’t know,” she is complaining. “They want to be sexy bridesmaids. But they bring me this crap material and it’s going to hang on them like crap. And you know what? They will be shitty bridesmaids. And I don’t want no one telling no one they came to see me.”

  They are eating cabbage soup and pumpernickel bread. Isaac is already on his second bowl. He dumps the bread into the soup, laps up the broth, and loves Mona for saving him from a Stouffer’s microwave meal. They are watching Jeopardy! The topic is Chinese Geography for $500.

  “Dongguan,” Mona calls out, the correct answer.

  “You’d have a lot of money by now,” Isaac tells her. He knows the bridesmaids are not good about paying. They’ve been late with their deposits. They’ve been trying to bargain.

  “I want you to make me a shirt,” he says, suddenly.

  Her wide-set eyes go soft. Isaac counts the wrinkles by the tops of her cheeks as she smiles.

  “Oh, I could make you a nice shirt,” she tells him. “Such a nice one for your broad shoulders.”

  Isaac lives in a basement apartment, with his own separate entrance at the side of the house. It is the darkest basement he has ever had in his seventy-two years. When he is home, he leaves the small wide-scr
een TV on. His younger sister, Elaine, gave the TV to him after he agreed to move back here.

  “You need to get out and meet people,” she said when she delivered the TV, as though the gift came with a caveat. “It’s not healthy for you to stay in here all day. You’re forgetting how to be with people.”

  Isaac leaves the TV on TSN during the afternoon and pretends he is wandering through the PGA tournament, shaking hand with Tiger Woods. The colours from the TV reflect off the floor tiles and Isaac even turns up the brightness on the screen. If it’s a sunny day on the course, he will put his face to the TV and feel the heat from the electricity, like the California sun, burning his nose. Isaac has lived many places — seven countries out of the 193 whose flags each occupy a pole at the United Nations. Of all of them, Israel was the most beautiful. There he was on kibbutz in 1969, turning the desert into fertile farmland. His arms were a Sabra brown. His forehead blistered from the heat. When he showered at the end of the day, the water ran brown off his body, as brown as the roads they were paving in Tel Aviv. Brown, he once thought, was the true colour of renewal, the beginning of a seed, the colour of potential. All of Israel was brown then, and he could fade happily into the landscape.

  But now here? In Thornhill, north of Toronto? Isaac sees a lot of white. Even when it isn’t winter, he sees clean white pavement, white stucco houses, pale white people translucent in the spring as they emerge from their hibernation. Forget multiculturalism; Canada is the whitest country he has ever known, as if nothing ever changes.

  Isaac leaves his home only after it has gone dark outside. He sees Mona through the living room window. She is sleeping in front of the news, which is reporting the Canadian Armed Forces have lost another soldier in Kandahar. Her mouth hangs open while a woman, about her age, weeps on the TV screen for her son who died. The ticker at the bottom describes her as “grieving mother.”

  “There’s a man who would know better than to hang a country’s flag below another,” Isaac mutters. There’s a man who knows about respecting world freedom.

  In the night, the neighbourhood glows beneath the street lamps, white light streaming onto the pavement. There is a lilac bush near the curb that sparkles beneath this spotlight. Other people are out too. They wear spring jackets and look down as they walk. Isaac passes a religious woman and wishes her a good evening, but she doesn’t look up. He is not wearing a jacket and he does not feel the cold. When he tries to greet someone else who passes him and is once again ignored, Isaac thinks, Yes, I am invisible.

  The two flags are still up. He stands beneath the pole and pins a skullcap to his head, black velvet, the one he keeps in his sock drawer to take with him whenever he visits the religious couple two blocks over for a Friday night meal. He met them once at the kosher Sobeys, standing in the checkout line. They want to move to Israel someday. They could hardly believe he left it. They will like this story, he thinks as he reaches up for the cords and pulls. They would do the same thing if they would just look up and notice.

  Nobody stops him as he stands there on private school grounds, lowering the flags and unhooking the Israeli one from its rope. Maybe that’s the trick to thievery, to make the act into an illusion. Isaac pretends he is a caretaker removing the flag as has been requested of him. He stands the way a caretaker might stand at the end of a long day, his shoulders a bit stooped. He even takes a break to arch his back, which is not at all aching. Once he removes the flag, Isaac folds it up and carries it back home like a gift, a blue-and-white-striped gift he will present to his landlady and say, Here. Make me a shirt with this. Let me pay you double.

  Now this is material, Mona might respond. You are a man with good taste.

  “It’s nylon!” she exclaims the next morning. “How am I supposed to sew with this?”

  “I don’t know,” he tells her. “With a needle and thread?”

  “You trying to be Israeli? You think you are a Sabra?”

  “I think that this will make a good shirt.”

  She looks at him through her squint. She says, “You pay me double.”

  The shirt hangs heavily on Isaac’s shoulders. He sweats as he walks in it. The cuffs feel like weights around his wrists. But the people who pass see him now, the blazing Star of David on his back. In this neighbourhood they give him the thumbs-up. Two religious teenaged boys with knit kippahs yell, “Am Yisrael Chai!” from across the street. Isaac waves to everyone. “Mona made this,” he tells them, though no one knows or cares who Mona is.

  And then Isaac reaches the school. It’s 10 a.m. and the preschool children are out for recess. Isaac stands by a chain-link fence, hands on his hips, the two blue stripes of the flag stretching across his chest, wavy over his shoulders, over the bump of his protruding belly. He turns around so that the back of the shirt is facing the playground and he feels the wind gusting down the back of his neck, blowing the shirt outwards from his body like a balloon — no, a sail on a Zionistic ship leading the proud boat to the shores of Haifa. He hears a child behind him running to the fence, the clanging of the metal like the bells on that ship, and then the horn as it docks.

  “You’re wearing a flag!” the boy says. Isaac has not turned back around. He’s waiting for the sound of others coming, the pounding of feet against the pavement when they all turn to see. If he were really a boat, the shrieks of wonder at his arrival.

  “My auntie lives in Israel.” The boy keeps talking. “I have a flag in my room. And a stuffed camel with a flag for the saddle.”

  There is screeching, but it’s not directed at Isaac. Just the sounds of kids playing tag, of four-year-olds arguing over whose turn it is to go down the slide. Giggles from hide-and-seek inside a wide plastic tunnel. And then he hears a woman calling, “Yaakov! Don’t stand by the fence! Come over here to play!”

  The fence dings again. Isaac turns around and the boy is running away, the tassels from his tzitzit hanging out from under his shirt and flapping in the wind. Isaac remembers the men and the boys who wore those in Israel, those anti-State, freeloading, they-don’t-even-pay-taxes-but-they-use-the-state-of-the-art-hospitals-for-the-births-of-their-thirteen-children, no-good religious Jews. Isaac is now holding on to the fence. He’s now shaking the metal links with all his strength. He’s spitting while he yells, “That’s right! Run away! All of you! Run from what really matters!”

  And now heads are turning. Now the teacher who called away little Yaakov is holding the boy as if Isaac might come crashing through that fence any minute. She’s the same teacher who asked the principal about calling security when Isaac was last in the building. Today she’s wearing runners beneath her denim skirt, but the skirt is so long she would trip if she had to run at full speed, if she had to gather all these children and race them inside to protect their pious heads.

  Isaac is about to yell something at her. Something about the baselessness of God, the stupidity of Jews like her who teach children to save the world by holing themselves up in dingy classrooms and studying ancient texts that are no more than fairy tales! And then he sees the front door of the school swing open, as easily as it opened the other day when he barged inside. Out comes the principal, his black velvet kippah askew from moving so quickly. He probably ran down the stairs from the staff room when he heard the commotion. He probably wished he could fly out the window when he heard Isaac was back.

  “Hey!” the principal calls, as Isaac turns his back again and starts running. Isaac spreads his arms out as he leaves the property, running up the street toward the Lubavitch centre, the kosher strip mall. He feels the wind again, streaming down his back, and this time he really is that ship, the flag puffed out as a sail pushing his aging frame faster, farther than he thought he could go. He hears the principal’s footsteps pounding closer and he laughs. Right now he feels like he will never stop.

  Pufferman

  Puffer’s mother buys caramel-flavoured rice cakes. She’s told Dayle,
the nanny, that Puffer can have as many rice cakes as he wants. But Dayle buys Lay’s salt and vinegar chips at the Mac’s Milk on the corner of Bathurst and Atkinson. She keeps them in a plastic storage bin under her bed in her room in the basement. She lets Puffer sit on her bed with his pack of untouched rice cakes and they eat the chips together watching Days of Our Lives. Days finishes ten minutes before Puffer’s mum comes home from the gym. It’s enough time for Puffer to wash his face and hands, brush his teeth, and then eat two of the caramel rice cakes so that when she kisses him, that’s what she smells. He even crumbles one in his hand and then runs his fingers through his hair so that she will smell the salted caramel as soon as she hugs him. He does this in Dayle’s bathroom, shaking the crumbs out of his hair over her sink. She says it’s alright. This way he won’t tell on her for watching Days. Dayle rinses out the sink while Puffer runs up the stairs to say hi to his mum, who has never asked about why the water is always running when she comes home.

  Puffer’s dad does not want to pay for Dayle anymore, but Puffer’s mum insists that Dayle is non-negotiable now that she has to raise two boys on her own. So the lawyers have argued over Dayle for weeks. In the meantime, Puffer floats in his backyard pool, his bloated stomach, his puffed-out arms like a floaty toy thrown into the water and forgotten. Puffer’s mother talks on the phone in the kitchen with the window open. Puffer can hear her. She’s saying she will have to look for work. Something in marketing. His tart. Like he wanted to get caught. I have a business degree, you know.

  Dayle sits on the green woven recliner, but she is not reclining. Dayle is hunched over her phone. The rice cakes and water are on the white plastic side table. Under the chair, in the shade, hidden from Puffer’s mum, who will come out soon to say she’s heading out, there is a pink Tupperware bowl full of Cheezies. When Puffer comes out of the pool, he will sit on the other side of the table, on the matching recliner, and he will eat those Cheezies until his fingers glow orange, coating his lips. He will stick out his bright tongue to get Dayle’s attention. Orange like a disease. He’ll say, “It’s da plague! Ahhh!” Or leprosy. Or something new like Puffer Face. He’ll say, “Dayle, I’m contagious!”