Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva by Gerry Albarelli

Author:Gerry Albarelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva
ISBN: 9781937854454
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2000-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Snow

“What’s new? Huh?” the landlady asks me from behind her lunch counter.

She dumps the end of a pot of coffee and then refills the pot with water at the sink behind the counter. “When’s Hanukkah?” She’s frowning. She shuffles down to the other end and picks up a dollar left on the counter. She seems to be sunk to the waist in the lunch counter, this lunch counter with no name except for the word luncheonette. She’s there in all weather. She looks up now when the bells on the door ring and Louie from the car service across the street walks in.

“Hanukkah is next week,” I tell her. “I know it’s coming up,” she says. “How ya doing, Louie?” Then she’s stabbing a hot dog and putting it on a roll, sauerkraut dripping from the fork in her hand.

The landlady is in the window so often, she’s like a window herself. The neighborhood imprints itself on her face.

My apartment above the luncheonette looks out on the back yard. Sometimes I see the landlady back there, putting Wonder Bread boxes in the trash, hanging a mop head on the clothesline. Laundry hangs here in this yard and in the next.

The lunch counter is decorated for the holidays: red blinking lights around the cigarette rack, a plastic Santa Claus head on the wall, artificial snow on the windows.

The customers at the counter are dressed in heavy winter coats. A couple have bags with Christmas packages by their feet.

The landlady says, “Cold out there, huh? Oh yeah!”

An old man, a Puerto Rican, with his ten-year-old grandson sits at the counter. The boy has a toy truck that he keeps running over the counter, around the pink sugar bowl. He’s making the sound of a truck. The landlady doesn’t like it. She wipes the counter with a wet rag near the sugar bowl. The old man pretends to want to fight with the boy. He gives the boy’s shoulder a shove. “Hey, hey! Come on!” says the old man, ducking and putting up two fists. “Come on.” He ducks again. The grandson doesn’t respond. Then the grandson says, “Stop it, man! What you doing! You crazy. He’s crazy,” the grandson says to me.

The landlady asks me what Hanukkah is about.

Hashem—God—I explain, made a miracle. The temple oil enough to burn for one day went on burning for eight. “That’s a miracle?” says Louie. “Hey, I tell you,” he says to another customer, “my number come out again? I play my birthday. I says, Holy shit, I can’t believe my birthday’s still paying off! That’s a miracle,” he says to me. A bus driver, a big man in an MTA uniform, orders four hot dogs. The skinny Puerto Rican boy watches him as he starts to put them into his mouth. He’s finished with one before the landlady has put mustard on the second. The bus driver is so big and lumpy in his jacket he seems to be made of hot dogs.

The door to the street opens.

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