Readied by the firm scrubbing of her face with the apricot exfoliant and the furious flossing of her teeth, Wendy reentered the living room and sat on the couch to dial the series of numbers on the calling card she had from her parents’ phone company. The multiple digits she needed to input and the mechanistic feeling that pressing the correct numbers in the correct order gave her calmed her rapidly beating heart. Anyway, she told herself, at least it was Connie she got to talk to, a person who was so kind that, even if it were bad news, she would have a reassuring voice and a nice way of telling her. Connie always brought personal touches to the department office to cheer others—hot apple cider on a warming tray in the fall, lemonade in the summer, candy corn for Halloween—and took time to ask students how it was going and whether she could help them. When former students came back to visit, they sometimes spent more time visiting Connie than their former professors because she was so likable and approachable. The number of Christmas cards she got at the office from former students was astounding.
“Department of Religion.” Wendy heard a familiar voice over the phone.
“Is this Connie?”
“It is. Wendy?”
“I’m glad I caught you; it’s so hard to coordinate with the time difference.”
“How are you, Wendy? Every time I hear something about Israel on the news I say to myself, I hope Wendy is okay. You’ve had some brushes with danger this year, haven’t you?”
Wendy smiled to herself, thinking that she had come a long way and wasn’t afraid of things she might have feared in the past. “Israel is an interesting place, the good and the bad. Yes, I was near a bus that exploded, and someone from my Fulbright group was killed. But oddly enough, I can’t say that my overall feeling about this year is that it’s been tough or unhappy; I don’t know why. Not that these things aren’t upsetting but . . . I don’t know, I just really like being here.”
“Stay safe, that’s all. So, Wendy, I called just to let you know about the deadlines you need. I’m sure you know that to register as a fifth-year student you have some forms to hand in?”
“Okay, what?”
“Well, the declaration to graduate form, which you’ll want for next May, says that you need your literature review approved by your committee before they can sign off for you to have fifth-year status.”
“I’ve been working on it; it’s almost done,” Wendy lied. She hadn’t neglected it—just thought it was better to concentrate on the interviews and collecting and transcribing the material she would need for the rest of the manuscript while in Israel, and knew she could finish by the end of the year or over the summer, no big deal.
Connie could be heard typing in the background, “Oh good, honey. I’m just entering that in my new graduation tracking software. Wait, I’ll put you on speaker,” she said, the typing growing louder now. “There are only thirty-five or so students in our department at any time, and I think I’ve done this job pretty decently on my own for almost twenty years, but the university just got this new software for all the departmental administrators. We had to do a three-day training—it’s the same technology used by Boeing for when they have multiple teams working on an aircraft. There is a checklist for each team and then the final person, that is me, who makes sure all the parts are where they are supposed to be.”
“This sounds complicated. You could have written the program yourself, I’m sure, Connie!” Wendy joked.
“You know I could!” Connie laughed. “I did fine without it, but there are other departments where things fall through the cracks sometimes if you know what I mean—people don’t do their jobs right. So instead of finding better people or training the ones they have, they get this software. Hang on a sec, dear. Okay, are you the Religion Ethics and Politics track or Religion in the Americas?”
“Religion in the Americas,” Wendy responded.
“That’s right, of course you are, working with Cliff. Now, are you ready?” She typed more. “The deadline for those forms is May 20, the last day of finals. Can you mail a copy or should we try e-mail? Big files sometimes create problems though.”
“May 20? Are you serious? That’s in, like, two weeks. I . . . can I get an extension?”
Wendy wasn’t sure if she should say that she was thinking of staying in Israel next year if she got the Lady Touro, so maybe they could just list her as on leave before she re-registered the next fall. But she didn’t know if it would upset them to have her stay, and there was no sense bringing it up unless she actually got the fellowship.
Connie typed. “Let’s see, I don’t think so; it looks like that is a pretty firm deadline if you want to walk in May 1998.”
“Oh, well, yes, I mean I want to go on the job market in the fall, but . . .” Oh shit, how can I do this? Wendy was thinking, and I really need a polished chapter if I’m going on the market. And some more articles. I haven’t gone to any conferences and schmoozed any senior scholars in the field; this is hopeless unless I get this Lady Touro. I am not far enough along at all right now. Shit, shit, shit.
“Hold on, Wendy. You know the chair can sometimes override these things, particularly given that you’ve been abroad. I can ask, but you know we’ve just brought this new chair from Vanderbilt, and he doesn’t really know the ins and outs of everything here yet.”
“But if May 20 is the last day of finals, there is still a grading period. Can’t I have till the end of the grading period?”
“I wish it were up to me, Wendy. I’m just the messenger. Do me a favor; just do what you can on it and I’ll see if I can get you an extension, alright?”
“Thanks for keeping this on track, Connie. I do appreciate it, even if I’m feeling stressed out right this minute.”
“Oh, Wendy, you’ll do fine. You told me yourself you were almost done. Don’t be a perfectionist; remember: better something turned in and not perfect than something perfect that misses the deadline. Believe me, I am telling the truth here!”
“You always do, Connie; you always do. Thanks for my chain. I will be glued to my desk and computer for the next two weeks.”
“But you’ll be on track to graduate.”
“Yes, I will; that I will.”
Wendy hung up in a panic. What am I going to do? I will lose my fellowship if I can’t register for next year. Even if I stayed in Israel with the Lady Touro, I probably wouldn’t be eligible if I’m not an officially registered student at Princeton. Cliff Conrad did keep e-mailing me that he wanted the lit review, that the other students my year—Matt, Veronique, Granby, and Asuka—had all turned their stuff in. Only me.
Stay calm, she repeated to herself. It will work itself out. I will finish or I will get an extension—something. I’ve come this far. I can do this. But how can I get it done?
Wendy paced around, opened her fridge, didn’t find much to her liking there, thought about whether any food store would be open now—only restaurants, and she felt way too guilty about not having gotten done what she was long ago supposed to have done to allow her to treat herself like that. No—no food now either. Then what? A walk to clear her head? Maybe, but would it help?
I need to talk to someone, a person who can help me think this through. Not Orly; she will just be a clucking Jewish mother: “I told you so; I knew you needed to get that done; what have you been waiting for? Of course it was going to come back to bite you.” No, someone sympathetic. Todd? He could be, but he too, much as he was able to joke about some things, was absolutely serious about his commitment to his career and deadlines. He wouldn’t understand that she hadn’t been able to finish the chapter because she wanted so much to impress her professors, wanted it to be so good.
Uri. She would call him. Part of her was nervous to let him see her at less than her best, anxious and flipped-out, whether this would drive him away and make him want to disappear from her life. But part of her wanted to see whether he’d try to help her through this . . . salvage mission. That is what she needed—someone to come in,
do search and rescue, see whether this situation can be helped, paper finished in a monumentally short time?
Wendy hoped he was home because his roommate never seemed to deliver messages. “Hullo?” The reassurance of his jovial British accent reverberated over the phone lines.
“Oh Uri, oh my God, I’m so glad you’re home. I need help.” She didn’t know how to put it except to state the obvious.
“What’s wrong? What can I do?’
“First, listen; then we’ll figure out if you can help.”
“Easy peasy; I always fancy our chats.”
“Well, you’ll think I’m a total idiot after this, which I completely am.”
“Stop it; you’re not some kind of gormless whinger. I am fully sure that you’re not an idiot, rest assured.”
Wendy took a deep breath and started telling him about Connie’s call, trying to keep her tears from loosening themselves from her eyes and coming out, and trying to keep the sound of the impending tears out of her voice. “Okay, so I am in my fourth year of graduate school. In order to advance to my fifth year, I need to hand in my literature review.”
“What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that I’ve known all year that I had to do it, and now, the secretary just told me, if I don’t hand it in by May 20, I won’t be able to register as a fifth-year student, I’ll forfeit my scholarship, I’ll have to withdraw, and I’ll have wasted these last four years.” The sobs broke through now.
“Wendy, would you rather I came over? I’m off tomorrow. I can get a cab and come right now. I hate to hear you so upset.”
“Really Uri? You’d do that. Yes, okay, come.”
While she waited for him, she decided to print out what she had so far and assess it. Well, the books had all been read—that was good; nothing to do in that department. There were sort of groupings of books, not exactly as she wanted; the organization was out of whack. She needed some kind of organizing principle, some way to get things on the page in a sensible way. It would come; it had to. There were definitely books that, though she’d read them and taken notes on them—her note files on her computer were extensive—still needed more explication, a selection from them to show what they did and how they related to her work. Oh, it broke her head just thinking about it, so many decisions to be made . . .
The bell rang and she went downstairs to let Uri in. His physical presence, his enfolding hug, was cheering already. She felt so much better by the time they had returned to her apartment from the main door.
“Shall I make you a spot of tea?” he asked.
She smiled, wanting to be taken care of. “Please.”
He went to her kitchen and plugged in her electric hot water heater. As the temperature of the water rose to a boil, he found two mugs in her cabinet and put a few different teas, lemon ginger, green Moroccan mint tea, and chamomile, on a plate. He opened her cabinets and found an unopened bag of veggie crisps that she had forgotten was even there in the recesses of the shelf, and opened the fridge and freezer to see what was available. He found some brownies that she and Orly had made before Pesach and wedged in the back of the freezer, also forgotten.
Thus equipped with tea and food, he gently moved Wendy’s laptop over from her desk to the dining room table and cleared a space for the two of them to sit at the table.
As she sipped, he stoked her hair gently, as one would do with a child, and let her breathe gently. “So you’ve been faffing around about writing this chapter, eh? What will it take to get it done?”
She looked at him, “It’s so nice of you to come help me. This whole thing is my own fault, and only my own; that’s what makes me such an idiot. I knew it had to be done and I kept finding excuses not to. I had interviews, wanted to do things that could only be done here . . .”
“We all make mistakes; it’s part of life,” he said. He kissed her forehead. “I don’t care for you any less because you shived your responsibilities a bit. Our flaws showcase our humanity. Let’s see what you can do to solve this.”
“How can you help? It’s not like you know anything about Religion in the Americas.” She named her departmental track in a mocking tone of self-important jest while putting up quotation marks with her fingers when she intoned its name.
“True enough; but I know about writing and papers and organization. Do you want me to read it? Or read your outline and see how the piece conforms to your outline? I’m happy to do that.”
“Really? You would? That would help a lot. You know in Princeton, we always shared work among each other, but even though the Fulbright group is supposed to be that, it really hasn’t been because our fields are all so different. I learn from everyone’s presentations—don’t get me wrong—but it just doesn’t help me to share my work with someone doing modernist poetry in Hebrew or images of Enoch in the Dead Sea Scrolls and apocryphal literature.”
“So let me see it.”
“Now?”
“Why not now?”
“I don’t know; its late; we should go to sleep.”
“How’s this? Why don’t you describe your main points to me? I will write them down and we’ll see if we can work up an outline. Then I’ll read it over in the morning.”
She smiled at him and took his hand in her own. “I’ve always wanted a boyfriend who would encourage me, who didn’t see what I do as taking away from him and time with him, but as central to me and who I am and want to be.”
Uri passed her a piece of frozen brownie, and she opened her mouth. He placed the first edge of it in her mouth, and stroked her cheek lightly with his hand, as though it were a delicate object, fragile and precious. “You know what will help you now? We’ve got to make you fall in love with the craft of writing. If you immerse yourself in the beauty of language and are excited about having command of your self-expression, you’ll be more motivated to write. We’ll read poetry together and take pleasure in the words.”
She started becoming emotional, but knew she had to finish what she needed to tell him. “Have you seen the movie Babette’s Feast?”
He nodded no, “Don’t think so. What is it?’
“It’s based on a story by Isak Dinesen, a Danish writer. The movie came out in the late eighties and it was just here in the fall at this Food on Film festival at the Cinematheque. Anyway, it is about Babette, a woman who is a great cook, exiled from her native France because of a regime change. She arrives penniless in Jutland, in the middle of nowhere in Denmark, and works as a servant for two sisters, daughters of the founder of a religious sect. One day, Babette wins the French lottery and asks the sisters if she can use some of her earnings to make a special meal in honor of the hundredth date of the birth of their father. She goes to the main city to make preparations and order supplies. The week of the feast, wheelbarrows of supplies begin to roll up to the house, and the sisters are shocked, particularly when a live tortoise arrives.”
Uri laughed, appreciative.
“It was funny. Anyway, the sisters tell their father’s followers that whatever kind of witches’ Sabbath the papist Babette is preparing they will eat, but not enjoy or taste the things of the senses, preserving themselves for higher things. The day of the banquet, the followers all arrive, including the nephew of one of them who has dined at the finest restaurants of Paris and is by coincidence visiting his aged aunt. He can’t believe what he is eating because it tastes like the food cooked by the female chef at the Café Anglais, Paris’s most famed restaurant. Each course astounds him more than the last. Finally at the end it is revealed that the simple servant Babette is that great chef. She tells her mistresses that she has spent all the money from her lottery ticket. They can’t understand—why would she do such a thing? She explains that she is a great artist and that as a great artist she did this both for her diners, to make her diners perfectly happy, and for herself, because a great artist needs to do her utmost. And then at the end, when she and one of the sisters realize that Babette will never cook a meal like
this again, and her mistress, a talented singer, will never have a large audience, her mistress tells her, “In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be.”
Wendy looked at Uri. “Not that I’m a great artist, but I’d like to be a great scholar. I want to do my utmost always. I’m not like Babette and her mistress, who are able to forego the rewards of having a large audience and the right tools to work with. I’m not going to wait for heaven; I want my life here, both as a scholar and a person. I want to have a career and a life, and I just”—here she did start crying—“I never thought I’d find someone like you, that you even existed, so caring, and considerate, wanting to help me”—she looked up at him and smiled through her tears—“and cute, of course, that goes without saying. I just . . . I’m so blessed that you are in my life, Uri.” Wendy was fully bawling now, and he took a napkin from the napkin holder on the table to dry her tears, and then, when he used that up, took his shirttails and awkwardly pulled at them to rub her tears away. She smiled, pleased with his gesture.
“So I’ll go over what I want to say and you write it down. Then in the morning you can read what I have and help me with an outline.” She looked at him and smiled, tears beginning to dry. “I don’t think it will really be so hard once I have the outline. I can get it done if I just keep myself focused and write it one book at a time, one section, one idea. It’s not that it is difficult; it just requires making decisions and putting things in place. I’m making the whole process harder than it needs to be because I want it to be so good.” She breathed out. “You brought your tefillin?”
“Have toothbrush and tefillin, will travel,” he replied gravely.
“Okay, I have to wash my face get these tears off. Let me wash up first, then you.”
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