by Alison Pick
“That’s too bad,” he says. “I was hoping you could come.”
He turns and looks me in the eye. “I’m happy to see you,” he says.
The heat rises to my cheeks. I want to meet his acknowledgement with my own, to tell him I am happy to see him, too, but all I can manage is “Likewise.”
“Really,” he says. “I’ve been thinking of you.”
It’s hard to hold his eye. I want him to continue at the same time as wanting him to stop. The impulses push up against each other inside me, competing like sisters.
The sun is setting: for a second time I’ve found myself here at the beginning of the Sabbath. Eli leans over and touches my cheek.
My palms are sweating. I can feel my pulse at my neck, so close to where his hand is resting. I force myself to pull back.
“I should go,” I say.
He smiles and sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “You probably should.”
He lowers his hand to his lap. I immediately regret what I’ve said.
“Do you want me to go?” I ask.
He smiles again, a rueful smile. “You probably should.”
I walk down the Danforth with my hands in my pockets. The lights from the storefronts cannot touch me. I think of Lucy’s confidence: The only way to really get it back would be to marry a Jew. My chance is gone. My one chance lost. I can’t see another.
On Sunday I go for a massage. The masseuse, Yona, is a Jew married to a Gentile. The first thing she told him when they got together was that their future children (I picture his eyebrows rising) would be brought up as Jews.
I take off my clothes and lie face down on the massage table. Yona doesn’t ask how I am. I don’t tell her. I lie like a corpse while she digs her fingers into my shoulders, my back, pulling and prying the secrets from my cells. Tears roll down my face and splash on the floor. It’s the opposite of a burial. It’s an unearthing.
After, I go out onto the street, my loose, pummelled muscles tensing against the cold. On impulse, I fumble in my pocket for my cell. There’s a message waiting from Dad: “Call me right away,” he says. “It’s urgent.”
I stand on the freezing sidewalk panicking, pressing the wrong buttons through my gloves. I breathe deeply, force myself to slow down. When Dad finally answers, I don’t bother with hello. “Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Sure!” he booms. “It’s fine! I just wanted to tell you something I learned about Gumper’s mother.”
I let my breath out slowly. A cloud appears in the cold air in front of my face.
“Sweetie? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say.
The dog barks in the background. “The thing I learned is about Gumper’s mother, Ruzenka. It’s about her last name,” Dad says.
“Bondy?”
“Yes. It’s from the Sephardic name Bondia.”
“Oh?”
“And from Bon dia in Catalan.”
“Which means?”
“In English, ‘Good day.’ In Hebrew, ‘Yom tov.’ ”
A smile comes over my face. I stomp my feet to warm them.
“So our name is a celebration. A happy day.”
fourteen
OUR CLASS MEETS AGAIN, two weeks early, because people will be going away over the “winter holiday”—which is code, I realize, for Christmas. I arrange to meet Rabbi Glickman before the class, to level with her. To tell her how hard it is that the other women in our class will be “allowed” to convert, but I won’t, despite being half Jewish already. Not “allowed” because I plan to marry a Gentile.
“That’s too bad,” she says blandly when I explain.
We find a table at the small café in the foyer of the community centre. She sits and motions for me to do the same.
“The other women,” I say. “I don’t think they are really interested in Judaism. They’re only interested in getting married.”
“And isn’t that a noble cause?”
I’m silent.
“Isn’t it?” she asks. Her piercing gaze reminds me that Degan and I still haven’t set a date for our wedding.
The waitress arrives and the rabbi and I both order lattes.
“So,” the rabbi says evenly. “You’re faced with a difficult decision.”
“Whether to convert?”
“Whether to get married.”
I pinch my earlobe between my thumb and forefinger.
She eyes me. “Intermarriage is frowned upon,” she says. “You do know that, right?”
I blink. Blink again. They want me to ditch my fiancé? I forced myself to walk away from Eli, from that beautiful scene in the glossy magazine—in other words, I’ve done the right thing—and this is the result?
“Can I have some sugar here?” the rabbi asks the waitress. She turns back toward me reluctantly. “Do you know about gilgul nefashot?”
I shake my head: no. My eyes are wide.
“Gilgul nefashot translates to ‘rolling souls.’ It’s a concept that applies to bringing Jewish souls back to Judaism. There are lost Jewish souls. They attach to someone who will eventually find a Jew to marry.”
“So it’s all predetermined?”
But the rabbi won’t bite. She repeats, “When you convert, you are bringing a soul back to Judaism.”
I wonder if she’s been listening to anything I’ve said. “I’m not allowed to convert,” I remind her. “Unless Degan does, too.”
A look of mild annoyance crosses her face, as though I have interrupted some well-polished speech. “In your case, you’d be bringing two souls back.”
“But Degan doesn’t want to convert.”
She shrugs. That part isn’t her problem.
We walk in silence back up to the room where our class takes place. Rabbi Glickman greets the rest of the students and then asks if anyone knows what month comes after Kislev. People have been studying up: several hands wave in the air, Debra’s included, but the rabbi chooses to answer her own question. “Tevet,” she says. “The month of goodness and bodily heat.” She pauses. “Judaism has a notable lack of emphasis on sin. With regard to sexuality especially.” She pauses again. “Unlike certain other religions.”
I lower my head to my notebook, brow furrowed.
Debra, the minister’s daughter, refuses to be shamed. She raises her hand again. “For example?”
“Well,” says the rabbi, “for one, making love is considered a good thing. A sanctified part of Shabbat. In Judaism, the pleasures of the body are celebrated.”
I feel again the heat of Eli’s hand on my cheek, the pulse of my skin under his touch.
“Between married partners,” she adds.
I flush.
“In Tevet,” the rabbi says, “we ask ourselves how we can bring the goodness of the sexual impulse into our homes.”
I wait for the answer, but she doesn’t supply one. She peers at us over her glasses. She is a woman with almost no extra body fat. Her close-cropped hair gives her the look of a bird.
“In the Torah,” she says, “we are told about a human being’s two inclinations: toward good and toward bad. These are not states but tendencies.”
“The yetzer harah?” one of the baseball caps asks.
“The yetzer harah is the impuse toward bad. And who knows the good impulse? The yetzer—?”
I remember my conversation with Dad. Bondy.
Bonas dia.
Good day.
Yom TOV.
“Yetzer tov?” I ask.
The rabbi nods, acknowledging me. We hold eyes for an extra moment, as though she is seeing me for the first time, reevaluating her earlier opinion.
I think: My name shares something with the good impulse. With goodness itself.
“Yes. Tov means ‘good.’ ”
Someone clears their throat.
Rabbi Glickman says to the whole class, “Please put down your pens. What I’m going to tell you now is important.”
We do as told.
“In Judaism we
are held responsible for the inner wrestling match between the two impulses. At any moment we can turn back toward good.”
“How so?” Debra asks.
“We are never condemned,” the rabbi answers. “For example, if my daughter is naughty, I tell her that her yetzer harah got the better of her. And send her to her room until her yetzer tov is ready to come out.”
Giggles from my classmates.
“But really,” the rabbi says, unsmiling. “Think of what this means. There’s always the chance to redeem ourselves. Always.”
I approach Degan in the kitchen, where he is dipping strips of marinated tofu in a bowl of nutritional yeast.
“I wanted to tell you. I had drinks. With a man.”
“That writer? Whose book you read?”
“How did you know?”
He shrugs. “I’m not stupid.”
He jiggles the bowl of yeast to distribute it evenly. “What’s his name again? Eli Bloom?”
“Bloomberg.”
I fiddle with Granny’s ring, spinning it on my finger. “I just wanted to say …”
I pause. What did I want to say?
“Never mind. Forget it.”
“Are you sure?”
There’s a challenge in his voice, a crimped edge of fear running around his studied calm. I recognize the fused desire to both know and not know. I remind myself there’s nothing for him to know. And check myself. Is there? There isn’t. “I’m sure,” I say. “Yes. Don’t worry.”
Degan looks up and holds my eye. “Okay,” he says evenly. “I won’t.”
The alarm goes off and Degan stumbles out of bed; he has four clients to see before the first in a series of seminars on diversity he has organized. A homeless man is coming to speak about his experience with the federal health care system. The students, I know, will be blown away. Degan is doing something concrete with his life, something practical. Tikkun olam—“repairing the world.” Whereas I sit at my desk every day, mired in self-focus and indulgence.
On the first morning of Hanukkah, I email Eli. “Chag Sameach,” I write, pleased that I know the salutation. But as soon as I press Send, I realize my mistake: the Jewish day begins at sunset. Hanukkah doesn’t start until this evening.
Eli doesn’t reply.
I get up from my desk and wander around the apartment. I stand in the kitchen and look out the window at the schoolyard behind us. It’s only December, but already the running track lies buried under two feet of snow. A man in a fluorescent green vest, some kind of city worker, huddles in the lee of a portable, trying to light a cigarette. Shielding it with his cupped palm, flicking the lighter again and again.
I’m overcome with dread at the thought of Hanukkah. I have a little bag of chocolate coins and four wooden dreidels that I bought in anticipation of the season. They are in a plastic bag under the sink. I have no idea what to do with them.
When Degan arrives home, though, he wishes me “Chag Sameach.” I tell him about my despair, that I don’t know how to celebrate the holiday. He’s been cold since my revelation a few evenings ago, but still he comes to the rescue. “We’ll figure it out,” he says. “It can’t be that hard.”
We Google “Hanukkah” and read about the Maccabees’ battle to practise their faith; about the miracle of oil enough for only one day lasting for eight days in a row.
A miracle. That’d be good.
We Google “The Blessing for Hanukkah” and listen to a bright-voiced woman who sounds like Barbie recite the words. After several listenings, we are able to sing along with her. We light the first candle. It is a mitzvah to publicize the miracle, to place the menorah in the front window for everyone to see. But something in me freezes as Degan pulls back the drapes. I swallow and swallow. My palms are damp.
“Are you okay?” Degan asks. He puts an arm around my shoulder. “No one is going to hurt you.”
I swallow. “I know,” I say, my voice wobbly.
“Here,” he says. “Look. We’ll put the menorah a few inches back from the window. People will see the light, but not what it is.”
But in the face of this compromise, I change my mind. “No,” I say. “Let’s put it right up front. Where it belongs.”
We step back. It looks beautiful.
After the small pond of St. John’s, big-city Toronto affords every possibility, every food you could ever want to eat, every class you might consider taking. On Wednesday evening, I go to the weekly contact improvisation jam. The practice is a kind of improvisational modern dance involving touch. You let your body follow its impulses, using the other dancers’ bodies as support. There is no talk involved: someone sidles up, leans a shoulder into your back, and soon you are entirely entangled, a physical manifestation of the psychic encounter. I dance with a man whose name I don’t know. I guess that he’s Jewish by his looks.
Is this wrong?
Would he guess the same of me?
At the end of the evening, everyone stands around wishing each other a Merry Christmas. My dance partner introduces himself as Michael. “Chag Sameach!” he says.
It is so thrilling to be taken as a Jew. I am paralyzed with gratitude and fear.
He says, “Chag Sameach—right?”
But I can’t quite accept it.
“At least you’ve got the shirt,” he says.
I look down. I’d forgotten what I was wearing. It’s a T-shirt my childhood friend Jordan, the one who first called me out on the Pick Secret, brought me back from a trip to Israel as a teenager. MACCABEE BEER: THE BEER THE CHOSEN PEOPLE CHOOSE.
The New Year creeps up like a cat. I drive up to Israel’s, the Judaica store on Eglinton Avenue, to look for a 2008 day planner. I want one that will anchor my daily life in Judaism, but when I see the rack of stationery and calendars, I realize my mistake: the secular New Year starts in January, but the Jewish one starts in the fall, with Rosh Hashana.
I get back in the car and drive to the big-box business store, where I buy a secular calendar. At home, I set about the task of making it Jewish. I write “Shabbat” on every square marked “Friday” and “Rosh Chodesh” on every new moon. I boldly cross out 2008 and replace it with the Jewish year, 5768. Jews are still counting up from zero because their messiah has not yet arrived.
Their messiah? Our messiah?
It is a season of inordinate snow. We shovel all evening in the street lamp’s cone of light, then wake in the morning with aching backs to find the small path we’d cleared gone. The big light of Christmas is everywhere, as Rabbi Glickman has warned, but up on St. Clair, a chalkboard in front of a café advertises jelly doughnuts for Hanukkah. I sit down for a latte and hear a musician telling his friend about his set list. “Klezmer music,” he says. “They want Klezmer music.” And on my way home, I pass two women in Sorrel boots tromping down the snowy sidewalk. “How did I not know your mother was a survivor?” one demands of the other.
At the gym I run on the treadmill beneath fluorescent lights, sweating and straining and making no geographic progress, and then I walk the streets for hours, trying to keep my endorphins pumping, to extend the small reprieve my workout has allowed me. The entire population of Toronto treads along Bathurst Street, their faces turned down like shutters against the sleet. Everyone pushing past one another in a big race to the end of the day.
At a time of spiritual crisis, it is best to do nothing. To float. To rest. To ask for guidance. But when I finally make it home and collapse into bed, I find myself unable to pray. I am between Gods, as others are between relationships or careers.
fifteen
I DREAM THAT DEGAN AND I are taking the JIC; that I am—we are—happily engaged in meaningful learning about Judaism. When I wake up, Degan is lying on his side in his blue plaid pyjamas, head propped up in his palm, looking at me.
“I had the best dream,” I say.
His face lights up. “Oh?”
“Not that kind of dream.” I squint, rub my eyes. “I dreamed we were taking the JIC.”
“The what?”
“The class. The Jewish class.”
He sighs. “That’s what a ‘good dream’ means to you now?”
I run my tongue over my teeth.
“Can’t you take it yourself?” he says. “The class?”
“I’ll ask,” I say. But I remember what Rabbi Klein told me, that the partners of all potential converts are required to sign up, as well. I think of the crowd of baseball caps and their gaggle of fiancées.
“For some reason I can’t stop thinking about it,” I say. “It feels like the next task the world is presenting me.”
From down on the street we hear the beep, beep of a snowplow reversing.
Degan rolls onto his back, exhaling heavily. “It’s one night a week?”
I hesitate. “And a few extra weekends.”
I tell him about another couple Rabbi Klein mentioned, Tom and Diane. Diane is Jewish, so their baby is, also. Tom is considering conversion. “He’s wrestling with the big questions, too,” Rabbi Klein told me.
“Why don’t we get in touch?” I ask Degan.
He nods, noncommittal, yet I know the prospect of another man with the same quandary is appealing. But when an email comes back from Tom, he sounds confident that he will convert, like it’s a done deal. “Why don’t we meet up at kiddush next Shabbat and talk?” he writes.
Isn’t kiddush the blessing over the wine? Or the prayer for the dead?
Tom emails back, suggesting gently that it is a luncheon after the Saturday service.
I freeze, insecure in the face of his certainty. I don’t reply.
On the third day of Hanukkah, Degan approaches me from behind at my desk. He puts his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m working,” I say.
He backs away, his arms in the air as though he’s in a stickup at a bank. “Okay, okay. I just wanted to tell you I’ll take the class with you.”
I swivel my chair to face him. “Which class?”
“Which class do you think?”
“Really? You’ll take it?” I pause. “For me?”
His brow furrows. “Not for you,” he says. “Well, partially for you. But I’m also interested in it for my own reasons.”
