Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  Shortly after, I received a call from Isaac’s school while I was at work. I was to come get him immediately, the staff director informed me, as he was causing a major disturbance. After having been sent to the principal’s office to be disciplined after an altercation, she informed me, he had climbed under her desk, curled into a ball, and refused to respond to anyone.

  “Have you considered the fact,” she asked me in her haughty tone of voice, “that your son might have psychological problems?” Within that sentence was the inevitable accusation, packaged neatly and conveniently: Had I considered the fact that I was damaging my son by forcing all these changes upon him, by imposing my vulnerability as a young and impoverished single mother without support, in such a way as to be irreparable?

  After this sentence I did not hear much. By the time I hung up I could feel my carotid pulsing, hear its throbbing in my ears. I rushed across town with my heart in my throat, the whole of me reduced to my lioness instincts, ready to swoop in and rescue my cub from the enemy. This is the only way I can describe myself on that day. My experience of being alive was reduced to that of an animal, blood rushing through the places in me where thoughts and emotions normally competed for space, my brain a pulsing white heat sending electric charges through my limbs. When I arrived at the school building I did not stop to speak to anyone. I charged into the staff director’s office without so much as a hello, reached under her desk to scoop up the rigid, unresponsive body of my son, and swept out of the building as quickly as I had come, the calls of staff hurrying behind me falling on deaf ears.

  Once outside, I headed straight to Bellevue Hospital, Isaac still in my arms, his hands clasped around my neck, his head buried in my shoulder. He clung to me so hard I could feel his nails digging into my skin. I was going to Bellevue because I knew they had an emergency child psychiatric department of superb repute, and I needed to call the school’s bluff. It was the only way to make sure the school understood that they weren’t dealing with an easily intimidated, helpless young single mother, but with a woman who would stop at nothing, come hell or high water, to protect her child.

  On that particular afternoon the waiting room at the child psychiatric emergency unit was relatively empty, and the receptionist looked curiously at my son as I filled out the intake forms, seemingly wondering what we were doing there, as at that point Isaac had calmed down and was sitting quietly next to me. Moments later, a doctor came to see us, and after I explained the situation briefly, he indicated that he would like to see my son privately before continuing the discussion. He went with Isaac into a special intake room, which had a door with a window so that I could see inside as Isaac sat on the rug and tentatively explored the toys that lay strewn about, but I could not hear them talking. I sat outside and waited, and while I did so the animal instincts that had taken over earlier began to recede. Now the feelings of outrage and helplessness and frustration began to surge in, and suddenly I doubted my actions as rather rash and extreme.

  Thirty minutes later the doctor emerged with Isaac, and both seemed surprisingly cheerful. Isaac was smiling and he seemed to have completely forgotten the events of the day. The doctor shook my hand warmly, saying he thought I was doing a wonderful job raising him and that I should be very proud of myself.

  “So he’s okay?” I asked uncertainly.

  “More than okay!” he answered boisterously. “A perfectly healthy child, obviously very intelligent, doing exactly the right thing in a bad situation.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised to actually hear my suspicions being confirmed, realizing that until that moment, although my instincts had been powerful, I had still doubted them.

  “Would you mind waiting here a few more minutes?” the doctor asked kindly. “I would like to call your son’s school.”

  I nodded wordlessly, burning with curiosity. I watched him walk into his office and close the door behind him. Isaac sat down on the rug to investigate the toys that lay in the middle of the room. As I waited, I thought about the times when I was bullied as a child and punished for it, because it was always easier to punish the child with no parents or family members who would stand up for her or make a fuss on her behalf, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least in this department Isaac was not lacking. Vulnerable and disadvantaged as I might be, I had never failed to show up for him, I had always been there when he needed me, and perhaps that doctor had a point after all; perhaps I wasn’t doing as badly as I feared at this motherhood business, because after all it wasn’t about money or social position, but about priorities.

  The doctor returned once more. This time Isaac didn’t even look up from the Lego city he was building.

  “So, I spoke to the staff director,” he said, “and I don’t think your son will be having any trouble in school anymore.” He smiled easily as he said this.

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked, wondering at his ability to make such broad guarantees. “What did you say to her?”

  “Oh, just that I would be notifying the board of education the next time I got a whiff of their practices, and that the way they are running their school could get them shut down.”

  I was baffled as to what practices exactly he was referring to. Was it an empty threat, done as a kindness to me, or was he referring to something specific? Most of all, I wondered what Isaac had told him in that room. As we walked out into the late afternoon sunshine bouncing off the glass panels of the surrounding buildings, I noticed Isaac’s unmistakably jaunty gait. His body language was carefree, and whatever he had told the doctor must have relieved him in a way I couldn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to burden me with the full truth, as if sensing I couldn’t handle it, but had felt that the doctor was the right person to turn to.

  Regardless of the exact details, things were indeed very different in school after that, just as the doctor had promised. Isaac no longer came home with marks or poor moods. The staff director spoke to me with a new and unparalleled deference, constantly inquiring about how Isaac was doing, as if needing validation that he was indeed content and thriving in the classroom. And still I couldn’t make sense of what had happened exactly, of what had transpired in that fateful phone call between her and the psychiatric fellow, until about six weeks later, on the last day of the school year, when I had arrived to pick up Isaac’s things. I was about to leave when his teacher called to me from the school entrance.

  “Ms. Feldman,” she said, “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for what happened with Isaac this year. I hope you know how bad I felt, being in that position. I never thought, when I was studying to be a teacher, that I would ever have to go against everything that I was taught, against every instinct . . .”

  My gut tightened. “What do you mean by that?” I asked carefully.

  She seemed to pull back slightly, her eyes searching mine as if to test the limits of my knowledge. “Well, you know about the other child in question, the one Isaac was having problems with . . .”

  “What do I know?”

  Her gaze seemed to register that in fact I did not know.

  “I just hope you can forgive me, Ms. Feldman. I was only trying to keep my job and make everybody happy. I would never want to hurt a wonderful child like your son. He really is a good soul.”

  “What would I need to forgive you for?” I asked, sharply this time.

  Her eyes teared up slightly, and her voice turned to a whisper. “It wasn’t me, you know. It’s the administration. We’re a private school, you know; we run on donations . . . If I’d alienated the school’s biggest donor, it would have cost more than just my job. Who knows?” she continued. “The school could have collapsed.”

  And there was the explanation, the one I had failed to fully intuit, but one that a Manhattan doctor familiar with the landscape of children’s schools in this city would have quickly grasped, after years of experience at a hospital like Bellevue. In th
is city, it was normal and common that children who were bullied by the sons and daughters of generous donors were punished instead of their tormentors. In this city parents who paid for their children were more valuable than parents who loved them.

  * * *

  —

  Already in June, the starting point of summer vacation for private schools, the city began to empty, first just on weekends, but after the Fourth of July the lethargy was palpable. As the asphalt streets baked under the relentless sun, the air moved in sluggish whirls, pushed along only by traffic. The secretions of air-conditioning units dripped relentlessly onto the sidewalks, which were trod on not by purposeful urbanites but rather by disoriented summer interns and small-town tourists who could only afford to visit Manhattan during this season, when most apartments were sublet while their inhabitants escaped to cooler, calmer locales.

  Isaac would have three months of summer vacation, and his father and I had agreed to split that time equally. Isaac and I whiled away the early weeks in the still bearable weather exploring the parks and playgrounds, escaping into the cool air of museums when the afternoon sun reached its apex. In my first year at college, a Sarah Lawrence professor had taught me the trick of offering to donate instead of paying the standard admission. As soon as I said, “I’d like to donate,” there was immediate recognition in the eyes of the ticket seller, and I was surprised by how little embarrassment I felt at plunking down two nickels for our tickets. After all, the purpose of the law was so that New Yorkers could regularly visit the facilities in their own city; what was the point of living here, after all, if everything the city had to offer was closed off to the less fortunate? Mayor Bloomberg would attempt to eliminate the policy a few years later, to the chagrin of many.

  But then we were still allowed to make our way multiple times through all the exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as the Museum of Natural History, and it was gratifying to see how Isaac never tired of exploring those rooms, asking questions and positing his own theories about the artists and their techniques. He was becoming someone quite interesting, I realized as I observed him, and it pained me how difficult it was to see past the fog of my desperation to the personhood he was developing.

  In mid-July I would have to hand him over to his dad, and then what? Would I still have the strength to wake up every morning and pretend that my life had value if he wasn’t there to remind me of it? I was afraid I would lose the only thread tying me to some kind of narrative: that of mother.

  During those weeks I eventually came to the decision that I too would leave Manhattan for the period in which Isaac was to stay with his father in cooler, greener upstate New York. Not necessarily because I had somewhere better to go, nor to escape the city itself, although I had certainly been yearning to do so since I had arrived, but because of a very practical reason that had occurred to me as I had observed the seasonal changes the city was undergoing: namely, financial opportunity. Since there was nothing keeping me bound here for the next few months, and I had finished my manuscript and only the copyediting remained, why not rent out my apartment for two or three times the rent I was paying, like everyone else was doing, and go somewhere, anywhere, cheaper? Then I could use the money I earned in those six weeks to stretch out my budget so that it covered me until late fall instead of summer’s end. It was clear that no other miracles were about to happen to ensure my extended survival, so perhaps a trip to some foreign destination would provide the right setting for a wonder I had not given up hoping for, in the depths of my heart, since that evening at the window when I had discharged that final prayer.

  I will admit, I had an idea of where I would be going already. A month earlier I had stumbled across Jean Baudrillard’s America, and although I was yet unaware of the great tradition started by de Tocqueville, that of the European tour of the New World, I already identified as a refugee in the country of my birth, and I felt a compelling need, after a lifetime in the shtetl, to experience the full expanse of the United States up close the way Baudrillard and many others had done. I needed to “discover” America.

  My grandmother had always said that America was simply the next place to which we had come, a stop on the winding diaspora route. One day it would be replaced by the next point of refuge, she was sure. In this country I was simultaneously citizen and immigrant; this dichotomy was reflected in the relationship between my individual and communal identities. The community I had been raised in was one of exiles, and since I had been exiled from them, did that mean the double negative could cancel out my alienation? Could I become an American?

  One day, I needed to believe, my divorce would come through, and I would no longer be forced to live in Manhattan. I needed to plan for this eventuality of a future elsewhere. Perhaps this plan would give me strength to continue; perhaps by choosing my goal I could give myself something concrete to work toward and hope for.

  * * *

  • • •

  Where was this unknown place in which my happiness could sprout? Baudrillard had started in California, so I would start there as well. I placed an ad on Craigslist offering to rent my car out to anyone looking to drive from New York to San Francisco, figuring that with the money I would drum up as a result I could cover the cost of a plane ticket out as well as the gas, tolls, and expenses that would accrue once I was ready to hit the road and make my winding way back to the East Coast.

  A young man answered the ad and came to inspect the car. I made a copy of his driver’s license and passport, took down all his information, and added him to my insurance, and we agreed on a date for pickup in the Bay Area. It would take him around five to seven days, he estimated. He would take a relatively direct route but I should still expect him to put around four thousand miles on the car. For this he paid me 750 dollars in cash, in advance, plus security deposit. Around the same time, having placed an advertisement for my apartment as well, I chose two MIT grads from the hundreds of people who had answered the ad; they had summer internships at Goldman Sachs and were offering to pay almost four times the rent on my apartment even though they would barely be there because of the working hours involved.

  I was nervous about leaving the only refuge to which I could retreat. It was unnerving for me to know that for the next six weeks, I would have no home, no steady address. But I was also impressed by how quickly I had managed to make the best of my situation, marveling at my own resourcefulness. I had raised enough money not only to cover my costs now, but to support myself for an additional three months.

  * * *

  —

  On the day I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge the weather was a perfect summer dream, but the bridge itself was suspended in a cloud of thick fog, and I was immediately reminded of the biblical cloud pillar that had served as a guide for the Jewish people in their forty-year exodus through the desert. It was a shock to emerge suddenly into the bright sunlight again, but I pulled over on the side of the exit ramp and turned to look back at the strange cloud formation enveloping the bridge’s statuesque limbs like an elegant shawl. I thought about how in order to receive guidance, one had to have the conditions in which such guidance would be at least noticeable. The slaves of Egypt had taken a risk, had wandered into the unknown. Then had come the pillars of cloud and fire and, at the end of their journey, the promised home. In my own small way, I was hoping that the risks I was taking would pay off similarly, that a path would be shown before me, inch by inch, mile by mile, as long as I kept faith.

  I had already arranged, through old Sarah Lawrence contacts, to meet a woman named Justine for drinks and dinner at the pier; an acquaintance in New York had written ahead and informed her of my arrival, as I had asked literally everyone I even vaguely knew to connect me with as many people along my route as possible. I hoped this would provide me with some sort of buffer against loneliness.

  At precisely seven p.m. I entered the restaurant and was promptly shown to a round
table covered in thick white damask, with a candelabra casting a yellow aura in the dimly lit but cavernous room. Justine came in somewhat breathless ten minutes later, her short, brightly dyed purple hair all tousled, her long, flowing skirt fluttering around her leather-sandaled ankles. She sat down and turned to me, her eyes wide and warm behind green-framed glasses, and her smile so big it was as if she’d known me for years and tonight was a reunion of sorts. As waiters poured us glass after glass of wine I found myself telling her my life story, and it was almost frightening to see with how much sympathy she was responding. I felt guilty, as if telling her about my situation was a kind of burden from which no one could retreat, and that by doing so I was somehow roping people in against their will. But Justine’s sympathy came from personal experience; although she had grown up in the Midwest, her own life story could be said to resemble my own, with its themes of flight and self-reinvention. But she was in her sixties and had long since found her peace. “You will too,” she promised, “not because that’s the way it always goes, but because you’re strong, and you won’t give up until you’ve found it. I can recognize that in you.”