Fields of Exile

by Nora Gold

  “Yes, but which one?” asks Weick, and before Judith knows what’s happening, he reaches out and snatches away the book. She stands there empty-handed, feeling naked somehow, while he peers at the cover and then leafs through the pages. He’s reading the words she was just reading, and she feels almost like he is leafing through her. “It’s on cognitive therapy,” she says lamely.

  “So I see,” he says, still reading. Then he thrusts the book back at her, and contemplates her with open curiosity. She feels herself blush and looks down. He says, “You’re here rather late for the first day of class. I thought everyone buggered off as soon as they possibly could. You must be a keener.”

  “I was talking to someone,” she says uncomfortably.

  “Were you now?” Weick cranes his head theatrically in all directions, looking around the empty hallway. Judith notices for the first time that it’s very ill-lit. Ill-lit, she thinks, and illicit. Just one letter different (c). “I don’t see anyone here,” Weick says, bringing his face quite close to hers, his breath smelling of liquor. She wants to pull away, but can’t. She’s frozen. But she manages to choke out a sentence: “I was talking to Suzy.”

  “I see,” he says, drawing back. As if Suzy’s name were a magic charm that brought instant safety, like a cross held up to the devil. “Is she still in her office?”

  “Probably. I just left her a minute ago,” says Judith, comforted by the thought of Suzy still relatively nearby. Maybe just a shout away.

  “Oh, good, I have something to ask her.” Now Weick squints at Judith. “You’re in one of my classes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m in ‘Knowledge and Values.’”

  “That’s right, I thought you looked familiar. What’s your name again?”

  “Judith Gallanter.”

  “Oh, yes. Teenagers in Conflict, wasn’t that you?”

  Judith smiles in spite of herself. She’s surprised he was even listening during the student go-around and flattered he remembered her. But also it’s comical the way he said “Teenagers in Conflict.” Like a headline from one of those sensationalist tabloids: Man Beats Wife To Death With Boiled Cauliflower.

  “Yes,” she says, “that’s me.”

  Weick’s eyes narrow. “Very interesting. I must hear more about that sometime. Well, nice ‘running into’ you, Judith. See you in class.”

  “Sure.” She turns and watches his back as he strides toward Suzy’s office.

  In the parking lot, Judith sees Cindy carrying a wobbling armful of books toward a green van. She hurries over and helps her unload them onto the back seat, already cluttered with a carseat, baby toys, and a huge bag of diapers. Cindy’s been in the library since Suzy’s class ended, and she shows Judith all the books she’s signed out, offering to pass them on to her when she’s finished with them. Judith thanks her and shows her Suzy’s book, making the same offer. Then Judith tells Cindy about her little run-in with Weick. Cindy snickers, rolling her eyes.

  “Typical,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s just say …” Cindy says hesitantly, “he has a reputation for getting a little too friendly with some of his female students.”

  “Really?! How do you know this?”

  Cindy shrugs. “You’re from Toronto, but I live here. In a place the size of Dunhill, word gets around. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. He had this very nice wife, apparently. A social worker at the school board, but she left him for someone else — five, maybe six years ago. It all started then. But don’t tell anyone I told you.”

  “Of course not. I would never.”

  Cindy nods. Then she says, “Be careful, Judith. He’s not just a teacher; he’s also the Director of the school.”

  “I know,” Judith says glumly. Then she brightens up a bit. “Well, at least I have just this one course with him. After that I’ll hardly have to see him.”

  “I hope you’re right. Anyway, I gotta go. I have to get Mikey by five.”

  “Right. Of course. Thanks, Cindy.”

  “No problem. See you next week.”

  Cindy climbs into her van and drives off, and as soon as she’s out of sight, Judith lifts Suzy’s book to her face and smells it. She loves the smell of new books, and this one is fresh from the publishing house, its binding not yet cracked. Deeply she inhales this book, as if, like a dog sniffing a human, she can determine from this alone whether or not it is good. This book, after sitting for a week on Suzy’s desk, smells like her: slightly perfumed with a musk-type scent and at the same time academic. A musky-musty smell, she thinks, and gives the book a kiss.

  — 5 —

  The next morning she goes food shopping and makes tuna salad and canned tomato soup for lunch. Then she does laundry and goes to the University of Toronto Library, just a seven-minute drive from her house. To her delight there’s an inter-university agreement allowing her to use it. Still, hunting down the readings she needs for school makes for a long and tedious afternoon. Eventually she finds and photocopies fifteen journal articles and four book chapters, over two hundred pages in all. She gets home gratified to have almost all the readings she needs, but totally exhausted. She has another bowl of soup, lies down for a brief rest, instantly falls asleep, and at eight-thirty gets up to meet Bobby at the restaurant near his office for a bite. Afterwards they stop by a jazz club and catch the second set of a trio from New Orleans.

  The next day, Wednesday, she starts reading her stack of photocopied articles. Or anyway, she tries. It’s harder now to concentrate on studying than when she did her B.S.W. She keeps catching herself rereading a sentence for the third or fourth time and still not absorbing what it means. On Thursday, though, it goes much better. Her mind is clearer, and by five-thirty she’s finished the six most important readings — the two required ones for each course — and treats herself to pizza for supper. Bobby’s working late tonight, same as every Thursday, so she spends the evening watching Seinfeld and catching up on email. Tonight she has eight messages waiting from friends in Israel, and she answers them all, cutting and pasting certain general paragraphs — like the one about her first day of school — but for the rest of each email, writing back long, personalized, detailed letters.

  Then while she gets ready for bed, she pictures each of these friends reading the letter she just sent. The clock says it’s five after ten now, so back home in Israel it’s about five in the morning, and everyone is still sleeping. But in a couple of hours they’ll all be awake, and soon afterwards they’ll check their email and find her letter. In Israel it will be Friday morning, and her words will be mixed in with their busy preparations for Shabbat, like the sweet raisins in a chalah. She knows the exact take-out place on Bethlehem Road where in a few hours they’ll all buy their hummus, carrot salad, and stuffed vine leaves, and also the hot side dishes for Friday night dinner that they don’t have time to make: spicy roast potatoes, ratatouille, fragrant rice with currants. Afterwards, they’ll go next door to the bald guy’s bakery and buy their chalah, rugelach, and cream cakes. While doing their shopping, her friends will all bump into each other, and briefly chat and laugh and wish one another “Shabbat shalom” before rushing off to the next errand. Later in the day, around one-thirty or two, just before the stores close, husbands, at their wives’ bidding, will run out for some final purchases: flowers, more wine, or extra take-out side dishes and desserts to plump up the meal for last-minute unexpected guests. There will be frantic house-cleaning and cooking and pressing of clothes. It’s in the midst of all this that they will receive and read her emails, and in that way she will be there together with them as they get ready for Shabbat. She goes to sleep, dreaming of Jerusalem.

  The next morning it is Friday in Canada, and while studying at the kitchen table, she keeps one eye on her bubbling chicken soup. All day long she cooks and studies. That night, Bobby comes over. They light Shabbat candles, do the blessings over the wine and chalah, and leisurely eat the meal she’s prepar
ed: chicken soup, roast chicken, salad with dressing, and sweet potatoes, and for dessert, a home-made apple cake and tea. They sing zmirot, the special songs for Friday night. Afterwards, feeling full — full of food, music, and happiness — they make love. On Shabbat morning (as always) they sleep in, eat breakfast at noon, and for the next few hours just lie around the house reading newspapers and books, playing cards or Scrabble, and snuggling in bed. It’s lazy and lovely till mid to late afternoon; then, as usual, they both start getting edgy, and quibble over nonsense, like who’s going to do the dishes. Their arguments typically are tinged with politics, such as gender roles and household labour, and sometimes this escalates into a big fight. Today, though, they make up by making love. Sex being their favourite peace-pipe.

  Afterwards Judith says, “Too bad Arafat and Sharon can’t solve their problems, as we do, by just getting into bed together and fucking.”

  “What a nauseating image,” says Bobby. “Though they do, on a regular basis, fuck each other over. Or up. Or around.”

  On Sunday morning (as always) they get up around nine, shower, eat, and go straight to work — Bobby at his office, Judith at her home — just as if they lived in Israel, where Sunday is a regular workday. On Sunday night they each sleep alone at home. Then on Monday the work week starts all over again, with Judith in her car at 8:00 a.m., driving to Dunhill.

  This same week repeats itself over and over: it is the routine of her new life as an M.S.W. student, and she enters more quickly and easily than she anticipated into its rhythm. Or as her father would say, “into the shvung.” Shvung conjuring a little girl on a swing being pushed from behind by her father, back and forth, back and forth. There’s something deeply satisfying about this rhythm of her new life — something comforting about having an external schedule, as steady and predictable as a metronome, after the year she’s just been through. A year of broken rhythms, syncopations, and skipped beats. Her father’s heart was skipping beats, the doctors discovered. In addition to his malignant tumour, there was an irregular beating of his heart, and they diagnosed him with arrhythmia. That whole year was arrhythmic.

  So it reassures her now, grounds her, to have to be at school every Monday morning at nine o’clock for Weick’s lecture, and to know that, boring as it is, she can count on this happening at the same time, and the same place, week after week after week (Weick after Weick after Weick). It’s gratifying, too, knowing she is expected there, and if she doesn’t show up, there are people who will notice and miss her and wonder where she is. On each of the past two Monday mornings, whenever she walked into Weick’s class, she’s been greeted with smiles and waves and “Hi, Judith”s by Cindy, Pam, and Aliza, her new little gang. They’ve pointed to the chair they saved for her (like all the others at Dunhill, a peculiar chair, with an armrest growing out of it on the right — like a tumour, she thinks every time she sits). Or the one time Cindy, Pam, and Aliza all got to class too late to save her a seat, they were sitting on the bench at the back when she arrived and moved their bums over to make room for her. They’re all in the Practice stream of the M.S.W., and therefore in all the same courses. They sit in class together, take their breaks together, and go out together for lunch. They have also, at Aliza’s initiative — inspired, she said, by her grandfather, a Communist and union leader — formed a collective to save themselves both time and labour. Each of them finds and photocopies just one-quarter of the readings, then makes copies for everyone else.

  “Now we’re not just a social support system,” Pam says on the third Monday of the term. They’re sitting in the cafeteria, exchanging for the second time the articles they’ve photocopied for each other. “We’re an economic system, too.”

  Judith looks at her admiringly. Pam is smart in areas she isn’t, like economics and politics. Aliza is smart, too, but in a different way. Judith always thinks of the two of them together, “Pamanaliza,” because they’re inseparable, and also because they stand out at this school for having done interesting things with their lives so far — not just coming to the M.S.W. straight from a B.S.W. or a social work job, like most of the other students. Until three years ago, when one of Aliza’s knees went bad and she had to quit, she danced in a jazz troupe. Aliza looks like a dancer: slender and lithe, delicate yet dramatic, with sleek long black hair and skin as white as paper. Pam, on the other hand, is plain: a bushy-haired redhead with thick lips and eyelids who never wears make-up. She came to social work with a first-class honours degree in political science and economics, and also an impressive-sounding part-time job at the CBC.

  Now Judith looks to her left at Cindy, seated in profile at the square table, twisting her hair. There’s nothing particularly interesting or impressive about Cindy. She’s a blonde, good-hearted, small-town girl who has lived all her life in Dunhill, and is clearly not as bright or sophisticated as the other three of them: all verbal, intense Torontonians, and Jewish at least to some degree. Aliza, like Judith, has two Jewish parents, but Pam is only one-quarter Jewish — through her mother’s father — and she also went at one point to a Catholic girls’ school, so she isn’t truly Jewish. But still she feels Jewish to Judith. Cindy continues to daydream and twist her hair, and Judith thinks: A heart of gold this person has. Definitely a person of the heart rather than the mind — someone wonderfully kind and caring — and the first one Judith calls whenever she has a question about homework.

  There is silence around the table now: Aliza is sipping coffee, and Cindy and Judith are just waiting while Pam, scribbling on a napkin, does the math on what they owe each other. What we owe each other, thinks Judith, staring out the window at the rain. Until they started divvying up the articles a few minutes ago, they’d been having a discussion, prompted by a comment someone made in Greg’s class, about “privilege” and oppression: What constitutes real privilege or oppression, and what are the relative weights of different types of oppression? For example, this person asked, is it “worse” to be black than gay? Is it worse to be poor than disabled? Obviously, as Greg was quick to point out, one can be more than one thing — one can be poor, disabled, and gay — and anyway there shouldn’t be a “hierarchy of oppressions.” But it seems to Judith there probably is a hierarchy of oppressions, and a hierarchy of privilege, too.

  Watching the rain lash against the windows now, she feels peaceful and contented. She can hardly believe it’s only been three weeks since school began — three weeks ago she didn’t even know any of these people. Yet now they’ve become, for this year at school at least, this year in galut, her home base, almost a substitute family. It is strange in one way, but in another way marvellous. Miraculous, even. All she did was enroll in the Dunhill School of Social Work, and now, presto! she has a life. An instant life: just add water and stir. People to be with. Things to do. A whole world she’s a part of. Temporarily, of course. This is not her real life; that is in Israel. But still, this is amazing. It’s as if she came home one day and found on her doorstep a big gift-wrapped box with a huge gold bow on the top.

  Judith speaks, and her voice, raspy with emotion, breaks the silence. “I don’t know about being ‘privileged,’” she says to her gang. “But I feel very, very lucky.”

  Ten minutes later, after swapping bills and coins and putting on their coats, they hurry in two pairs across the street, heads down against the rain, dodging the puddles and the racing river of mud near the curb. Aliza stops to prance in it joyfully in her tall red boots while Cindy and Judith reach the other side of the street, and as they run toward FRANK, Cindy mutters, “I wish we could just go home now.”

  “Well, at least it’s Suzy and not Weick,” Judith answers.

  Cindy doesn’t say anything. Judith has the impression now, and not for the first time, that Cindy is not as big a fan of Suzy as she is. Maybe she’s even a bit jealous that Judith likes Suzy so much. Together they run up the stairs, duck into the building, and stand there panting, waiting for the others. Aliza and Pam soon follow.

 
“You’re out of your mind,” Pam’s saying to Aliza, and Aliza is laughing, showing perfect white teeth, her long hair dripping. “You’re nuts, I mean it.”

  The elevator comes and they ride to the fourth floor. “Nuts,” says Pam, as they walk into Suzy’s class.

  Suzy sees them and smiles. Judith feels instantly happy and at the same time an inner ache. A part of her has been waiting all week for this class. But not, in fact, for this class; for Suzy. She has been wanting to see Suzy again.

  Everyone takes a seat, Suzy begins to speak, and Judith feels, as she always does in her class, a fine, almost invisible thread, like a spider’s, stretching between them. Suzy looks at her often when she lectures, more so than at anyone else, and whenever she asks the class a question, she turns first toward her, as if appealing to her silently in some way. It’s as if Judith, on Suzy’s compass, is north, and the needle keeps flying there. Sometimes Judith answers Suzy’s questions (almost always correctly), but lately she’s started looking down or away, not wanting to be seen by her classmates as a suck. Either way, this class feels like a dialogue between her and Suzy, with everyone else mere spectators. She’s asked herself if she was just imagining all this, but apparently it’s noticeable also to others.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Cindy said to her on the second Monday of school, during the break in Suzy’s class. They were walking to the cafeteria, with Pam and Aliza not far behind. Suzy had just been teaching them about paralinguistics, a form of nonverbal behaviour that includes, among other things, people’s tone of voice, and can tell you a lot about how a person really feels. So before answering, Judith replayed Cindy’s comment in her head, listening for envy or meanness in her paralinguistics, but there didn’t seem to be any. It sounded like Cindy was just saying what she saw.