Between Gods

by Alison Pick

  But she jumps in before he can finish. “The process is different for everyone,” she says. “Your final exam must be coming up?”

  I nod.

  She continues. “Some people convert right away after finishing the class. Some people wait years. Some have one or two things they want to brush up on.”

  The rain picks up, small hands tapping at the glass. The rabbi crosses the room, digs around in her filing cabinet. She passes us a sheet of paper, a list of ten questions to determine whether you’re ready for conversion.

  “I think the answer to these is supposed to be yes!” she jokes.

  We look over the questions silently. I’d answer yes to maybe half.

  Beside me, I hear Degan shift in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

  “You look so serious!” she says. “Don’t be. You’ll know when you’re ready. I promise.”

  I swallow, open my mouth. “What if,” I start to say, and then stop, regrouping, trying to find the right words. “I want this so much. I do know the policy, but what if I’m ready and Degan wants to wait?”

  Her smile slips a little. She turns to face Degan, raising her eyebrows to ask if what I’ve said is right. He nods his confirmation.

  “Degan,” she says solemnly, as though bestowing a blessing upon him. “You’re a thoughtful and introspective person. You’re really wrestling with conversion. You don’t want to make such a big decision without considering all the angles.”

  “That’s right.” He nods.

  “But there’s another perspective,” she says. “Which is that you don’t have to wait for a thunderbolt. In my experience, that doesn’t happen. Or happens rarely. You don’t have to wait until you’re the perfect Jew. None of us is the perfect Jew.”

  I look at Rabbi Klein closely. The warmth in her eyes. “There are lots of situations in a relationship where one of you waits for the other,” she continues. “You take care of each other that way. There’s nothing I can do to change the situation. But I do want to acknowledge that I understand it’s difficult.”

  Beside me, I feel Degan’s shoulders fall, his muscles soften.

  “Thank you,” he says. He rubs a palm over the stubble on his chin. “I know the tradition is for rabbis to push potential converts away with the right hand while welcoming them with the left …” He trails off.

  “You need a little more left hand,” Rachel says.

  “I would need some left hand. If I was going to consider it.”

  I sit up straighter.

  Rachel says, “You need a double dose of left hand, since neither of you grew up Jewish, so you don’t have a family to welcome you.”

  But I know this does not mean she’ll relent.

  From the parking lot we hear a woman’s voice: “Samuel, I said give it to your sister.”

  I try to steer the conversation back on course.

  “Can I go ahead?” I ask. “If Degan doesn’t want to?”

  I should know by now to leave the negotiating, the subtle communication, to Degan. At my blunt question, the rabbi’s jaw tightens. Now it’s her turn to find the right words. “I advise that you wait until you’re both ready,” she says finally. Her gaze is steady, but she worries the elastic that holds her dark braid, turning it around and around. “We don’t want to make Judaism a wedge in a relationship,” she says. The now-familiar line.

  I’m quiet, blinking. The silence stretches out like the bleak hours of dawn.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “How hard this is,” I say. “For us, the opposite is true. It puts pressure on our relationship to have to both make the same decision.”

  Rabbi Klein takes this in. “We had a meeting recently,” she says, “with the Board of Rabbis. We were talking about this exact problem.”

  I hope for a moment that she is about to say they agreed that something has to change, but instead she reiterates the existing point of view. “There was a rabbi who converted just one member of a couple,” she says, “and the marriage fell apart. And he never forgave himself.”

  Degan clenches and unclenches his hand in his lap.

  “And what are you thinking?” The rabbi turns to ask him.

  “That I’m angry,” he says. The words hang in the air for a second or two before he adds, “Not with you. But the policy is painful. I see what Alie’s going through. To me, she’s already Jewish. That she should be held back because I’m not ready—”

  He falters, but his opinion is clear.

  There’s more strained silence, the rain thickening to sleet at the window, announcing that winter is coming again, and soon. Finally Rabbi Klein says, “I don’t want this to be a stumbling block. Let’s park it for a while. Keep doing what we’re doing. What you’re doing. There’s still time left before you finish the class.”

  This won’t solve anything, but I’m glad for the cue to stand up and gather my things. At least it’s all out in the open. She knows where we stand. We know where she stands. The conversation shifts to Degan’s thoughts on a book that Rachel has lent him. He is taken with the idea of an intangible, unseeable God preparing the Jews for a life of abstraction in thinking. There is no Christ equivalent, no messiah we can picture. Are Jews drawn to the world of the intellect because they must use their minds to see God?

  The pile of typed pages that is Far to Go grows. I’ve planned to go away to the cabin for a final push before giving it to my agent, but there is a mix-up and the family we share the cabin with already has it booked. Shayna emails to say I am welcome to join her in Prince Edward County, where she is going for the week, to the home of an old friend.

  I write back, “So long as there is a desk. I need to work.”

  It’s settled. We’ll head off early Tuesday afternoon.

  When the day comes, though, we stay in the city for several extra hours, each of us in our respective homes, glued to the radio coverage of the American election. A few polls are already closing, with Obama in the lead. We eventually load up the car and start driving, listening along the busy 401, then down the dark country highway, the announcer’s voice crackling in and out of range. We arrive to the trees, and the silence of the lake, and race inside to turn on the radio and listen there, as well.

  John McCain’s concession speech is surprisingly genuine. He calls Barack Obama “his president.” Obama himself takes no time to revel in victory. There’s a hard road ahead. The economy is the worst it’s been for over a century. But a black man is the President of the United States of America. People are cheering in the squares in Chicago, on the streets of New York City. Raising their fists, foisting signs. The TV shows an elderly black woman, down on her knees, sobbing. She never thought she would see the day. It is the start of a new era. The world is rejoicing.

  The only country that isn’t happy is Israel.

  The Sabbath sun has already set on Friday by the time I get back to the city. Degan comes to the door in torn jeans and my Amnesty International T-shirt advertising a concert that happened twenty years ago. “Should we say the blessings?” I ask. “Light the candles?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t want to.”

  I look at him slantwise but decide not to push. “Okay,” I say. “How about pizza?” We walk along St. Clair to our favourite Italian joint, talking about our weeks. Degan says he cried when Obama won.

  The following day we loaf around the apartment, reading the newspaper. In the afternoon we lie down for a Shabbatnap. We fall deeply asleep, the kind of sleep where you wake up with drool on your pillow and it takes you a minute to remember where you are. We’re supposed to go over to a friend’s house to play Mafia, but at the last minute we decide to stay home and rent a movie. I’m in a rom-com kind of mood, but Degan wants Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments. “I’m upset about our talk with Rabbi Klein,” he says. “I want to watch something that will make me feel connected to Judaism.”

  The movie is an epic saga that begins with Moses abandoned in the bulrushes and e
nds with him leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. In other words, the story of Passover. It was filmed in the fifties—I imagine that the scene where God parts the Red Sea must have been very high-tech at the time.

  On Sunday morning I go down to the contact jam. I lie on my back and listen to the sounds of physical release all around me, dancers stretching their hamstrings and calves, cracking their necks, the little grunts and moans. A few flakes of snow drift lazily past the studio window. I dance with Ariel, with Shayna, with Michael. The Jews. After the closing circle, Michael invites me to the Ontario jam, which I gather to be an even bigger rendezvous of rolling and hugging hippies.

  “It’s around Easter, right?” I ask him.

  “I guess.”

  “I mean Passover.”

  He smiles. “Easter is adjusted for Passover, though.”

  I look at him blankly.

  “Also,” he says, “there are eight days between Christmas and New Year’s. Between Christ’s birth and the New Year. Why do you think there are eight days between a birth and a bris?”

  “A bris?”

  “A circumcision.”

  I give him a bland half smile and wander away to retrieve my water bottle. I have no idea if he’s kidding or if he’s serious.

  ten

  I’M EXPECTING MY PERIOD ON SUNDAY, but it doesn’t come. I still don’t have it by the JIC class on Tuesday, which is about Hanukkah. Again! Already! I make a note to buy jelly doughnuts: two years in a row makes a tradition.

  On Wednesday I print out a final draft of my novel. The pages have a heft to them, a thrilling, weighty presence. I touch the pile softly with my fingers and then, checking that no one is watching through the window, with my lips. I fire off an email to my agent, telling her I’m finished. In celebration, I eat six Mr. Christie Pirate cookies. I’m craving carbs.

  By Friday at noon my period still hasn’t arrived. When Degan calls from work, I feel brave enough to say I might be pregnant. Might be. But he is still doubled over with a week of hard clients and a cold—he wants to wait until the morning to take the test.

  On Saturday, Degan sleeps late. When he finally wakes, he calls up to me at my desk. “Did you take it?”

  “I was waiting for you,” I call back down.

  We go into the bathroom together. I crouch over the toilet and aim into a cup, to make sure there’s enough pee for the test to come out accurately. I unwrap the foil and dip the stick in. A line creeps across the screen, a single line. The familiar punch to the gut: I will never get pregnant again.

  “It’s negative,” I say.

  And then we both see a second line emerging, perpendicular to the first, forming a plus sign. Plus, for positive.

  We peer at the plus sign like senior citizens peering at the small print of a crossword puzzle. “I can’t really believe it,” I say.

  We whoop and hug, but there’s a hollowness to the celebrations. Degan wants to make love, but I curl my body away. He crawls over the bed toward me, puts his stubbly face next to my belly. “Hello, little one.”

  He looks up at me, his blue eyes wide. “Oh! I just remembered! I had a dream last night that we had a little boy. He couldn’t speak, and then all at once he came out with a full sentence.”

  I smile. “A boy.”

  “Not a boy yet.”

  “No,” I agree. “Just a little blastocyst.”

  But “blastocyst” is what we called the first baby, and we both fall silent, remembering.

  We rest in the afternoon, and cook paneer and chickpea curry. Then we go out for ice cream. “My tummy hurts,” I say on the drive home.

  “I’m feeling sick, too. My cold.”

  Degan sniffs, pulls out his hanky.

  “Should we make Havdalah when we get home?”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  His face is hard, and I recognize the look he gets when he’s triggered, when difficult things from his childhood have been, as Charlotte would say, “re-stimulated.”

  “I keep thinking about our talk with Rabbi Klein,” Degan says suddenly. “I feel bullied into making a decision. Especially now.”

  “I don’t think she was trying to—”

  But Degan interrupts. “If there was ever a thought of me converting, it’s gone.”

  “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

  “Last week, when you were away, Harriet got me in trouble—like a child—for being ten minutes late to class.”

  “I know,” I say. “I just think this isn’t a great time to get into it.”

  But getting into it is exactly what Degan wants to do. He veers out into the passing lane. I flinch as a station wagon barrels past us.

  “I can drive,” he says.

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just with the baby …”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “To drive?”

  “To do anything.”

  I’m silent. I know he’s lashing out because I’m here.

  Later, we sit on the couch, studying for the final exam for the JIC. Half the things on the checklist we received, things we are supposed to have learned over the year, have never even been mentioned by Harriet in class. We flip through our books, looking for the answers to fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice. “This is bullshit,” Degan says.

  “You seem pretty down about Judaism,” I say, thinking how quickly he has swung from one extreme to the other.

  He grunts.

  I say, “I’m worried you won’t want to celebrate Hanukkah.”

  He agrees. He might not want to.

  For the first time it occurs to me that Rabbi Klein might be right. That it’s better to have both people committed.

  A single tear rolls down my cheek. Degan softens, holds my hand. He says, “I’m angry at everything right now. It’s hard for me to speak at all from this place.”

  I nod.

  He says, “I want to go through the Jewish calendar systematically and learn about every holiday.”

  I refrain from saying that this is what we were supposed to be doing during the class.

  Rubbing my eyes, I push myself up off the couch and close the textbook. In the bathroom, I splash my face with water. When I sit on the toilet, my underwear is full of bright red blood.

  The sack of cells has heard our fighting. It thinks it isn’t welcome.

  Come back, little plus. Please come back.

  I bleed all day in a numb kind of stupor. Degan sits beside me in bed, an arm around my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he keeps repeating. “I’ll be better.”

  He, too, thinks our fighting has scared the baby away.

  Shabbat is waning, but we don’t make Havdalah. We don’t say the Shehechiyanu, the prayer for firsts; we don’t get the textbook back out to read the prayer for conception, or the one for losing a child. I’m in between, in an awful place of limbo. Part of me wishes to wake up soaked through with blood. If this is what is happening, I’d rather get it over with.

  Instead, the pale dawn brings more of the same. The blood in my underwear is still fresh and red—which the Internet unilaterally declares to be a bad sign—but still only splattered delicately across the cotton. The crimson drops are oddly beautiful, like a fresh kill on crisp white snow. Out on the street there’s the sound of a car door slamming, then a man’s muffled yelling. I make decaf coffee, take a few notes at my desk. Eat a breakfast of oat bran and organic yogourt. Bargaining for what I’ve already lost. Degan will be gone at work all day; I’ll be here alone, losing our second child.

  I sit down to answer emails but find myself unable to concentrate. The spotting continues. Mid-morning I get up from my desk and speed-walk over to the drop-in clinic on Dufferin as though possessed. In the waiting room, I flip through greying fashion magazines and read the doctor’s framed degrees on the wall. One is in Hebrew; Sokol is a Jewish name.

  When I finally see the doctor, a balding man with wiry eyebrows that peak above his horn-rimmed glasses, he is preoccupied and brief
. He says that an ultrasound won’t show anything at this point, but he will check my beta levels. Then we can see if they rise over the next several days.

  Back in the apartment, I change my pad, which looks like the second day of my period. More blood, still bright red. Degan comes home from work and runs me a bath, makes me a cup of hazelnut tea. Later, we drive up to the synagogue for our last class with the JIC.

  When we get there, another student stands at the front of the room. “Harriet has been a wonderful teacher,” she says.

  The rest of us sneak sideways looks at each other. Beside me, Debra snickers.

  “I’d like to present her with a gift.”

  Harriet flushes, and undoes the paper. The gift is a framed copy of Eshet Chayil—“a woman of valour”—the hymn sung in the home on Shabbat in which a man thanks his wife for all she has done over the week. A woman of valour is energetic, righteous, capable.

  “You guys are so sweet!” Harriet says sheepishly. But she looks like she cannot believe anyone would think her worthy of being called valorous.

  As promised, the exam questions are exactly as they appeared in the study guide. We whip through the multiple choice, short answer and fill-in-the-blanks. People start handing in their tests fifteen minutes after they’ve been distributed. A half-hour later, everyone is outside in the hall, saying goodbye, keep in touch, Chag Sameach.

  “Merry Christmas!” Debra shouts.

  Gales of laughter. The laughter of pent-up release.

  And then we leave, in groups of twos and threes. The class is over, just like that. We float out into the snowy darkness, into our different stories, our various versions of what-happens-next.

  eleven

  ON TUESDAY MORNING the clinic waiting room is full, but Dr. Sokol calls me up to the front of the line. There’s a big pile of files on his desk, and one of those happy-face squeeze balls to help relieve stress. “Can I ask why you’ve come here, instead of going to your family doctor?”

  “We just live a few streets over. It’s easier to get here.”