by Alison Pick
“It’s not …” I falter. What can I say? “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? And you want to screw Eli?”
“I didn’t mean it,” I say. “I really, truly, didn’t mean it. I just …”
His jaw is clenched. “Then why did you say it?”
“I don’t know. It was stupid.”
“I don’t know if I can handle the class,” he says, his anger taking a turn.
Without the class I’m lost.
“That woman,” he says, referring to Harriet.
“I know. But we need to look at the bigger picture.”
“What bigger picture?” he challenges.
“The class is just another hoop to jump through.”
He’s silent. He has no desire to jump through any hoops and we both know it. I press my eyes shut. When I open them, he’s looking at me, his face softer.
“What makes me mad is that you should have been in there with the Jewish partners tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think you’re Jewish. Already. Now. You’re just realizing it for the first time.”
I nod and reach for his hand. An uneasy truce.
“I really am sorry,” I say.
When we get home, Degan shovels the walk while I get ready for bed. He crawls in beside me. We fall asleep, and wake in the middle of the night clinging to each other. We make love roughly, violently, trying to cover up the unanswered questions.
eight
CHARLOTTE DOES NOT SEEM SURPRISED to hear we’ve been fighting. “As a wedding approaches, the stakes in a relationship get higher,” she says.
“The funny thing is, Degan wasn’t as worried about Eli before, when he might have had cause to be. And now he’s worried for no reason.”
“Are you still thinking about Eli?”
“No. I’m not.” I weigh my words and find them to be true. The sentiment flakes a bit on the surface, but the core of it is genuine.
Charlotte says, “Perhaps it’s now safe for Degan to acknowledge his worry. Now that the real threat is gone.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I concede.
Charlotte crosses her ankles demurely. “So if Eli is out of the picture, who will be your Jewish guide?”
I pause. I can’t tell if she’s being rhetorical.
“I’ll be my own Jewish guide?” I say, in a little kid voice, shrugging and looking to her to see if this is the answer she’s after.
“Is that what you want?”
“I asked you first.”
She smiles. There’s a light layer of concealer caught in the creases around her mouth, but her words are pure, unadorned. She’s asking me what help I need.
“I’ve been trying to muscle through it,” I say. “Alone.”
“Because you want to do it alone or because you feel you have no other option?”
I shrug again. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, actually. It isn’t.”
“Who’s going to help me? My father certainly isn’t.”
“Should he?”
“Shouldn’t he? He’s the parent, right? Aren’t I supposed to be able to look to him?”
“You’re angry at him.”
“I’m not angry at him,” I snap.
She nods, her face placid. I have a flash of what it would be like to slap her. I puff out my cheeks and slowly let the air out. “Maybe I am angry,” I say. “But I don’t want to be. I get it. At least, intellectually. He didn’t grow up with it. He knows nothing about it. I know way more than he does.”
“Does that also make you angry?”
My eyes fill with tears.
“Helpless,” she suggests. “Sad.” It is unlike her to supply me with the words. I nod, biting my lower lip.
“Make room for the feeling,” she tells me.
I give in and let myself cry, hard and gasping, for several minutes, leaning over with my face in my palms. Then I look up and shake my head. I take a deep breath, glance around the room. “I feel better,” I say, and laugh. The heavy dread is gone. “That’s all it takes? To, uh, what did you say? Make room for the feeling?”
“Sometimes.”
I pull on my right earlobe. “I always feel that if I start to cry, I won’t be able to stop.” As I say this, I remember Granny Pick saying the same thing. My inheritance.
I look to Charlotte, my face scrubbed clean. “The thing about the Jewish guide,” I say. “What should I do?” Only very occasionally do I allow myself to ask her advice directly.
“You’d like to find someone—someone appropriate—to help you navigate the new cultural Judaism you’re discovering.”
I nod to confirm.
“Why don’t you ask for a guide?”
“Ask who?”
She sweeps her hand through the air above her head and raises her eyebrows.
“You mean, like, ask the universe?” I giggle. “Like, put it out there?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or however you’d like to think about it.”
I nod. Why not. How could it hurt?
At home in bed I fold my hands discreetly under my pillow. To be seen—by Degan, by myself—in a real prayer position, on my knees (which is the Christian prayer position anyway, I realize), would be too much. But I close my eyes, and this time when I try to picture God, the image that comes is a country sky, dark and full of stars. “I would like a friend,” I whisper. “Dear God, please bring me a Jewish friend.”
On Sunday morning I gather up my water bottle and my knee pads and walk through the slush to the contact jam. I wave at Michael from across the room and warm up with a woman with spiky red hair and a purple body suit. We tumble around a little, crack each other’s backs. The relief of physical communication below the busy level of my head.
Toronto is a big city, but, like any place, circles overlap. The writers and musicians, the painters, the dancers. I’m not surprised to see Shayna, Eli’s friend with the beautiful voice, stretching out her long legs against the banister.
She sees me, too, and gives a little half wave. “Alison, right?”
I walk the few metres to where she’s standing.
“Do you come to the jam?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“Not always. Often. But we know each other from—”
“I remember,” she says.
This time the pause is comfortable. We lean against the wall, watching as dancers begin to assemble their bodies into complex puzzles. Ariel flounces past in dinosaur pyjama pants, waggling his fingers in my direction. Shayna takes up her stretching again, unfolding her long limbs the way a grasshopper might. “How’s it all going?” she asks, holding her heel in her hand, extending her leg while bracing herself against the wall.
“Good,” I say. I scrunch up my face. “I can’t remember what I told you last time, but I’m studying for conversion. My fiancé and I.”
She lowers her leg and looks at me properly for the first time. “You’re converting?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Is your fiancé Jewish?”
“No.”
“Wow,” she says. “That’s brave.”
“Thank you?”
She laughs.
“No, I’m serious,” she says. She looks me in the eye to make sure I hear what she’s saying. “Most people who convert are marrying someone Jewish.”
I feel the blood rush to my face, feel that exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that comes from being seen when you’re vulnerable.
“It’s a problem that he’s not,” I say. “The beit din doesn’t want to create an intermarriage.”
“What do you mean?”
“If they convert me and I then marry a Gentile …”
She squints. “They know your dad is Jewish?”
I nod unhappily. Shayna sighs. “We have a history of turning people away.”
We rest our eyes on the dance floor in front of us, the mass of moving bodies. Someone grunts with pleasure
or exertion; someone’s bare foot squeaks across the floorboards. I hear something that sounds suspiciously like a fart, but nobody comments or apologizes.
“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Shayna says.
Up close, I see the space on her forehead where her eyebrows have been plucked.
I nod, and she qualifies her offer: “I mean, I’m pretty busy. But I’d like to help you. If you need anything.”
I do, I think. I need a friend like you.
I picture her speaking her mind with Eli. I picture her onstage, letting loose her brilliant spool of song.
“I grew up very …” She pauses. “I grew up very Jewish. There weren’t many Jews in Peterborough, so my parents really emphasized it. School, summer camp, family life.”
There’s another silence, then she asks, “Do you have somewhere to go for Pesach?”
I blink.
“Passover,” she says.
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t really—we haven’t really—”
A man with dark dreadlocks approaches and taps her on the shoulder. “Dance?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.
“Sure.” She turns back to me and smiles. “Stay in touch, Alison,” she says.
Something about the conversation with Shayna, the simple fact of her, encourages me. A prayer directly answered, as though God has waved a magic wand and granted me the perfect answer to my wish. I suggest to Degan that we start to practice Shabbat in earnest. “Sure,” he says.
“That was easy.”
We abandon “24 Hours Unplugged” like a too-small T-shirt: tossed in the corner and forgotten. On Friday afternoon I check my email for the last time. My cousin Lucy writes that she has been invited to teach in Israel. Would I think of joining her for a visit? I’m not ready for Israel, but I thank her for the offer.
In response to my question, she hesitates, but she agrees to hold a corner of our wedding chuppah. If we have one.
She signs her email “Shabbat Shalom! (for tomorrow).”
In my Inbox, as well, are six other emails from my publicist, an urgent message from my website provider and a new sluice of requests for writerly help. I shut the whole system down.
There ought to be an expression for the precise kind of relief that accompanies turning off the computer for a full day. Shabbat would be worth it for this alone.
I do as our textbook says and “prepare the environment,” which means I wash the dishes and wipe the kitchen counters for the first time in days. I make my new favourite curried chickpea soup from the Rebar cookbook. Then I go to the gym and run hard on the treadmill for forty-five minutes. I come home and shower; the calm in the apartment is palpable. The sun is setting. The new day beginning.
Degan gets back from a hard day with clients. “Shabbat Shalom,” he says.
I’m ravenous after my workout, but when I suggest skipping the change box devoted to charity and going straight to the meal, Degan says, “No! Tzedakah is the most important part.”
We bless the light, the bread, the wine. We eat slowly and talk about our wedding, about our future children and about ritual. A child who grows up with Shabbat will know comfort and stillness, will know at least one way to God. We make a game out of practising our Hebrew, and brainstorm who might hold the other poles of our chuppah. We make love without protection. A baby. It feels not only possible but fated.
Bashert.
Later, before bed, I remember to check the mail. I stand on the porch in my slippers, moonlight in my hair. A manila envelope is sticking out of the mailbox. The return address is McClelland & Stewart publishers. The first copy of my new poetry book, The Dream World. The culmination of years of work has arrived in an envelope so light that it might contain nothing. A chapter ends, a new one begins. I hold its thin weight in my hand.
nine
MUSIC NIGHT IS A TRADITION Degan and I started in St. John’s—one night a month when our writer friends come bearing instruments and we abandon the books we are writing in favour of song. On Thursday, the doorbell rings at nine. It’s a fellow poet, a guitar case strung over his shoulder. Other poets and novelists fill the porch behind him. The harmonicas and mandolins pile up. We drink, and sing Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and early Neil Young. The din escalates; the ashtrays fill up on the back porch. The music turns current: the Decemberists, AA Bondy. More guitars arrive, and Degan pulls out his keyboard.
The evening peaks around two in the morning when, for a brief moment, there are forty writers stamping their feet and hollering out Bruce Springsteen: “I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book!” The floorboards vibrate; a bookshelf collapses. Several people take this as a cue and pack up their instruments. There are last cigarettes on the back porch while cop cars drift by below us in the street.
At four in the morning there are five of us left.
“Look what I’ve got.” Someone pulls out a handful of white pills.
“Advil?” I ask.
The friend grins. “Ecstasy.”
To say I’m not a drug person is an understatement. One drag of a joint makes me curl up like a grub from paranoia. But our friend says, “This is so different from pot. So much better. So clean. Just trust me.”
“Ecstasy,” Degan says. “Is it, like, sexy?”
“Sorry, pal,” says the friend. “It’s totally not. If it’s cut with speed, it might feel sexy. But this, the pure stuff …” She shakes the pills in her palm like dice. “This ecstasy is purely existential.”
Maybe because of how hard the winter has been, or because of how relieved I am that it’s finally over, I obey without question. I swallow my pill. Degan swallows his. Around the room, others follow suit. We slump on the sofas, waiting for the drug to hit.
“I don’t feel anything,” I complain. I pause. “But my teeth are kind of tickly.”
Degan picks up his guitar, plays a few bars of “California Dreamin’.” The words are so beautiful: a windswept street, brown leaves blowing down it at dawn. Tears stream down my face. Then, just as quickly, they dry up. The flip side of grief is a blazing, blistering gratitude for being alive. We lie around grinning at one another. An hour passes. Someone scratches their leg. Two more hours pass. The little voice in my head that constantly narrates my life (better change my hair appointment, I’m not looking alert enough, I wonder what Julian thought about what I just said) stops. Entirely. It is replaced with a cavernous, cool emptiness, a calm that drifts slowly across my field of vision like snowflakes seen through huge, distant windows.
The warehouse of my self has been ransacked, but there’s no need to do anything about it, no useless searching for the culprit.
“They did a study,” someone says.
An hour passes.
“They did a study where they gave Zen monks pure ecstasy. The monks said you would practise for years to get even a taste of this.”
The minor feuds between writers in the room, the jealousies, are abandoned. We dance, then forget our feet and fall back onto the couches, smiling. Visible darts of light beam from the corners of our eyes. Technically, I know, it’s just an inhibition of serotonin uptake. But after the darkness of these long winter months, I want always to live in this light.
The next day I wake up and grope around on my bedside table for my watch: 5:25. How can it be so early? We just went to sleep. Then I realize it’s 5:25 in the afternoon.
I roll over onto my back and cover my eyes with my forearm. It takes me several minutes to force myself up out of the bed. My T-shirt is plastered to my back with sweat. I get in the shower: the drops feel like sparks on my skin, each one distinct, each alive. The water is simultaneously boiling hot and freezing cold. I towel off; in the mirror my eyes are wild and my pupils enormous.
I’ve made a date. When my old school friend Jordan heard what I was going through, he suggested someone I might contact, a cousin of his father’s named Aaron, who lives in Toronto and has a big interest in Judaism and the Holocaust. Their family is Cze
ch, the same as mine. Aaron’s number had sat crumpled in my pants pocket for weeks; when I finally fished it out, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I called and we set up a date for Shabbat dinner. Tonight the date has arrived.
I dress hurriedly and scrawl a note for Degan, who is still passed out on the sofa. A taxi whisks me uptown to Forest Hill. The houses here have big lawns, and Saabs parked in the driveways, and pillars like Southern plantations. An uneasy silence buffers the neighbourhood; not even Toronto’s omnipresent ambulance sirens permeate the insulated atmosphere.
Aaron, a balding man in his fifties wearing a shirt and tie, greets me at the door. “Shabbat Shalom,” he says.
I wait to take his cue about shaking hands in greeting; he doesn’t reach out to touch me.
“Isn’t your fiancé coming?” he asks.
I flush. “He had to go out of town,” I fib, picturing Degan prone on the couch.
Aaron hesitates for half a second, then says, “Okay! Next time!”
I take off my shoes and enter the front hall, my feet sinking into inches of plush carpet. A huge crystal chandelier beams light in every direction, like the rays of a child’s crudely drawn sun. I blink rapidly, trying to regulate the brilliance flooding my eyes. Aaron shows me into a dining room. There’s a long table covered in a white linen cloth, around which fifteen people are seated. I had been under the impression this was just a small dinner. “Everyone, this is Alison,” says Aaron.
Everyone murmurs hello.
It’s clear that they’ve been waiting for me, sitting around the table for God knows how long, unable to begin until I arrived.
I have not eaten anything other than potato chips in twenty-four hours and the smell of chicken soup wafting in from the kitchen is almost unbearable. Saliva pools in my mouth. My jaw aches from hours of clenching my teeth. Jaw clenching, I suddenly realize, is the reason ravers chew soothers. I’d never clued in before.
I’m introduced to Aaron’s wife, Sylvie, who I mistake for his daughter at first and who wishes us a Good Shabbos in a fabulously thick New York accent. The other guests include the owner of a huge hamburger chain and the head of a big Liberal think tank. I don’t catch anyone’s name. I am unable to turn my head to match faces with labels. It is stuck facing forward on my neck, as though with Krazy Glue.
