by Nora Gold
Pam shrugs. “I’m not saying she will or she won’t. It’s up to her. But she’s not happy here. She’s also not feeling well, which always affects —”
“What about you?” asks Judith. She can barely picture Pam without Aliza. “Are you thinking of quitting, too?” She asks this heartily, in a half-joking tone, hoping Pam will laugh. But she doesn’t.
“No,” says Pam. “But I’m also pretty fed up with this program. I’m sick of having to listen to morons like Weick and Greg. I mean Greg’s a nice guy, but his analysis is very superficial. He doesn’t know Marx except from secondary sources. He wouldn’t last five minutes in labour studies. Maybe I’d be better off in the Policy stream.”
Judith stares at Pam. If she switches into Policy, she’ll never see her. And if Aliza quits… She can’t imagine being here without Pamanaliza. Of course, she’d still have Cindy, but it wouldn’t be the same. Dazed, she turns toward Cindy. Et tu, Cindé? is on her lips, but she knows Cindy wouldn’t catch this reference. So instead she asks, “And you, Cindy? Are you considering leaving, too?”
Cindy laughs. “Me?! Where would I go? No, I’m here for the whole ride. For better or worse.”
“Probably for worse,” Pam says jovially.
But Judith doesn’t laugh. She looks troubled.
“I didn’t say Aliza or I for sure were quitting,” Pam says to her. “You just saw me pick my courses for next term. I only said we’re both asking some questions.”
“Maybe it’s just the winter blues,” Cindy says hopefully.
Pam shrugs. “I don’t know. Anyway, it’s time to head back now.”
They ride the elevator to the fourth floor in silence and walk into Suzy’s class just as she’s about to start her lecture. There are very few seats left and they end up sitting separately, each one alone. The class is quite interesting, as usual, but for much of it Judith is studying Suzy’s nonverbals, trolling for weirdness of any kind, in case Suzy is angry at her, or even slightly cooler than usual because of their encounter two weeks ago. Last week Suzy had to rush off to a meeting right after class, so they haven’t spoken since then. So Judith has been fretting. I can’t believe I told Suzy about my fantasies with Moshe, she thinks now. Sometimes I do the stupidest things. But Suzy today seems the same as always, so Judith is reassured.
— 5 —
The next two weeks, the last of the term, are very busy. Judith is working so hard on her schoolwork that, to save shopping time, she just eats whatever is in her pantry. Mostly canned food — beans, spaghetti — but she doesn’t mind. When she’s in this state of intense focus, sometimes she tends to forget about her own body altogether. Other than on Mondays, she doesn’t shower or get dressed unless Bobby is coming over or she can’t stand her own smell. Occasionally she even forgets to eat.
At school, too, things are different during these final two weeks. Everyone is haggard-looking and tense, and the photocopier line is so long that last week she waited forty-five minutes to copy one book chapter, which she could probably have read in less time. This followed an almost physical struggle with another student to get the book. Some people, it seemed, would practically kill their own mothers for a library book. Everyone looks stressed, but none more than Aliza. These past weeks she’s been showing up at class only for an hour here, an hour there, and each week she’s been thinner, paler, and more fragile. On the last Monday of the term, Judith can’t restrain herself anymore, and asks Aliza if she’s been to see a doctor.
“Stop it,” snaps Aliza, “you sound like my mother. I know how to take care of myself.”
They’re walking down the hallway a few paces ahead of Pam and Cindy, and now they all reach the elevators. They’ve just finished Greg’s class, and Judith suggests Le Petit Café for lunch.
Pam makes a face. “I’m sick of their tuna sandwiches. We’ve been there three weeks in a row. Let’s go to Libertad.”
“No,” says Judith. “I’m not going there.”
“Why?” asks Aliza.
Cindy says, “Because of that poster, right?”
Judith looks at her.
“Come on,” Pam says to Judith. “You can’t let that stuff run your life.”
“I’m not eating there,” Judith says. “I’m not kidding. You go ahead if you want, but I’m not coming.”
“It’s not that important,” says Cindy. “Let’s go to Le Petit Café. Tuna fish here we come.”
This tone is unusual for Cindy, and Judith peers at her closely. Cindy has bags under her eyes: She told Judith she’s been up for two nights with Mikey, who has stomach flu. And Tom’s been laid off again, so she’s worried about money, including for Christmas presents.
At Le Petit Café, Judith, Cindy, and Pam order tuna sandwiches, and Cindy also has her hallmark maple donut. But Aliza eats nothing, just taking the occasional dainty sip from her Diet Coke. Lately she’s been looking for a cheap second-hand car, and Cindy says she heard of one in Dunhill. Searching in her purse for the seller’s number, she says his name’s Clifford. Aliza writes Clifford on her hand.
“What if your hand sweats?” asks Judith.
Cindy reads out Clifford’s phone number. Aliza writes it on her arm.
“On your arm?” asks Pam.
“Arm, hand, what’s the difference?” says Aliza. “They’re both good for remembering. Every part of the body has memory. Especially feet for a dancer.” She shows them her arm. On it is a series of seven numbers. Holocaust numbers, thinks Judith: the ID number of a branded cattle-person. She wants to say, “That’s not funny,” but she can’t get a word out. She stares at Aliza’s arm.
“If I lost just a little more weight,” Aliza says dreamily, “if I stopped eating altogether for a while, I’d look just like my Bubba, my mother’s mother, when she was in Maidanek.”
Judith looks from Aliza’s arm to her dreamy face. She didn’t know Aliza’s grandmother was a survivor. Somehow this explains something about Aliza, although she couldn’t articulate exactly what. Now Aliza, laughing her bell-like, ringing laugh, dips her pinky into her Diet Coke, reminding Judith of when you dip your pinky into wine, to count the ten plagues at the Passover Seder. Then Aliza, with her wet pinky, rubs off all the numbers she just wrote.
“Coke removes everything,” she explains. “It’s pure acid. My grandfather used it during World War II to clean the buttons on his uniform. Did you know that if you drop a brass button into a glass of Coke, after twenty-four hours there will be nothing left of it? It’s true. Not a single trace. It’ll be completely eroded. That’s how powerful Coke is. It eats things alive.” Aliza says all this cheerfully, as chatty as a child. Judith wonders: If you drank enough Coke, could it actually erode your insides? Could it enter your mind and erode all the bad thoughts and memories there? That would be nice.
Later, on the long drive home, she thinks about Aliza. She’s worried about her. But once at home, there’s no more time to worry: she goes straight to her desk and gets in another seven hours’ work before bed. Classes are already over, but several assignments are due a week from now, so there’s still a lot of work to do. “I’m not good at handling stress,” Aliza volunteered one day at the beginning of the year, and now, as Judith takes a five-minute break to eat some cold spaghetti out of a can, she thinks this appears to be true. But who is good at handling stress? Sure, she’s not missing classes and she is getting her papers done. But she is having bad dreams at night. Lately about her mother and father. The horror of their being gone. Of their being eroded, dissolved into nothingness, like two brass buttons in Coke. Being, and — then, with no warning — Nothingness. She forces her attention back to her schoolwork. She works and works until she can’t keep her eyes open for even one minute longer.
— 6 —
Four days after the last class, there’s another SWAC meeting, the last one in 2002. It is also the last day of the photo exhibit in the atrium. Judith purses her lips and walks through it the same way she has for the past two and a half
weeks — with lowered eyes. Her eyes lowered in protest against the lie at the core of this exhibit: that the Palestinians are nothing but pure, innocent victims in this conflict. But they’re lowered, too, in shame at what she knows to be true: the violence of the occupation and the excessive force sometimes used by the Israeli army. She cannot bear either the truth or the lie. Trying to see nothing as she walks, she glances only once to her right. Someone with a huge name tag saying Abdul is eagerly — with big, bright eyes — explaining something to several students. She hears him say, “The occupation,” and keeps walking. Approaching the end of the exhibit, she hears a cheerful voice: “These pictures are hard to look at, aren’t they?”
She looks up, startled. But the guy who said this — blond hair, blue eyes, red kaffiyeh around his neck — isn’t talking to her. He is addressing three female students, young and innocent-looking, who, studying the photos, scowl.
“Looking at pictures, though, is nothing compared to living inside them,” continues the guy with the kaffiyeh. “You and I can close our eyes if we want, or turn our faces away. But little Mohammed here” — he points to the far end of the table, to the first picture in the exhibit — “doesn’t have this option.”
True, thinks Judith. But she is annoyed by how he’s pronounced Mohammed: like Moe-hammock, except with a d at the end instead of a ck. That’s not the correct way. She mutters Mohammed to herself the way an Arab would, with the proper vowel sounds — not an English o and a — and with the right guttural Arabic sound instead of an h. This guy is posing as an expert on the Middle East, she thinks, and he can’t even pronounce Mohammed properly. Disgusted, she rides the elevator upstairs to check her mailbox before meeting Suzy for dinner.
They meet, as usual, in Le Petit Café. In their first ten minutes they dispense with the business of reviewing the agenda for tonight’s meeting, which is simple and straightforward. Then they talk. Things between them seem fine. Over the past three weeks, Judith has been only once in Suzy’s office, but that one time felt as close and comfortable as always. She was careful not to mention Moshe again. But aside from this subject, she still feels she can tell Suzy anything, and apparently Suzy still likes telling her things, too. Tonight over soup and salad, Suzy describes the Sunday dinner this past weekend at Dennis’s parents’ house. Natalie, picking up on the undercurrent of tension between the adults, ran around her grandparents’ dining room table fifteen times like a whirling dervish; then she expanded her territory, tearing through the entire house, flushed, grunting, and glowing with an almost erotic excitement, sometimes screeching or laughing hysterically. Suzy describes this in a way that invites laughter, and Judith obligingly laughs. But simultaneously she hears the pain behind these words, and she can tell that Suzy knows she does. Now Suzy says, still laughingly, that the one time she as a girl went at all crazy — meaning silly, wild, and out of control — her father slapped her across the face, and the next day he left.
“Left?” asks Judith.
“Left,” says Suzy. “As in left home and never came back.”
“Wow,” says Judith, unable to think of anything to say.
Suzy shrugs. She says that over the years she has “come to terms with it.” But she hasn’t spoken to her father since, and she never will. He’ll probably die soon, says Suzy. But that’s that. She’s done with him. “After what he did, he’s toast.”
Judith, listening, feels a flash of fear. This is a side of Suzy she’s never seen before. And she doesn’t ever want to be “toast” to Suzy. A burnt, blackened slice of bread. But then Suzy smiles at her and Judith feels calmer. Nothing like this could ever happen between her and Suzy. Only abandonment or betrayal could trigger such a wrathful reaction in Suzy, and she will never abandon or betray her. Now she wants to say something comforting, like, “Don’t worry, Suzy — I’ll never leave you.” But she can’t. That would be too heavy — it would openly acknowledge all that naked pain — and Suzy’s smirk forbids this. It insists on lightness, despite the sadness in her eyes, and makes any real reply impossible. So Judith mimics her smirk. And their two smirks lock together, as if they were two wounded, smart, smart-alecky kids from West Side Story: two jaunty, jocular Jets, each acting tough for the other.
“Anyway,” says Suzy. The way she says this word is like a red light. It stops all further conversation on this topic. Now she asks, “What’s up with you?”
Judith, still keeping the tone set by Suzy, tells her with humour about her latest fight with Bobby. But soon her bravado drops away and she is confiding in Suzy her ambivalence about marriage, about Bobby, and about marriage to Bobby. Suzy, whom she imagines as very happily married, is more sympathetic to her critique of marriage than she expected.
“It’s a strange institution,” says Suzy. “It may be the best we’ve come up with so far, but it’s still very far from perfect, and it’s especially challenging, even problematic, for women. A woman has to think very carefully before taking this on.”
Judith nods, absorbing this. They talk a bit more. Then Judith brings up Brier’s lecture on Anti-oppression Day. She was very upset, she says, when she first learned about the rally against Israel that took place three and a half weeks ago at Dunhill. According to the student newspaper that came out a week later, it drew over 250 people, and she wouldn’t want Anti-oppression Day to turn into something like that.
Suzy frowns. “Me, either,” she says. “But it’s a delicate situation.”
“Yes, but there must be something we can do.”
Suzy sighs. “We obviously can’t take on the whole school. Plus there is democratic process — we have to respect that. And maybe just as important, look like we are respecting it. I can’t come across as a professor who is throwing her weight around, abusing her power. Especially” — she laughs shortly — “since my job, as you know, is precarious now. I’m up for renewal in just ten weeks, and as it happens, Chris and Lola are the two student reps on the Faculty Hiring Committee.”
Judith’s stomach fearfully curdles, like milk turning sour. What is Suzy saying to her? Is she planning to cave in on this issue? Is she going to sell her out? She can’t believe that. But what if all along she’s been overestimating Suzy? Tonight she’s certainly seen more vulnerability in her than ever before.
But now Suzy says, “Don’t get me wrong, Judith. I’m going to do my best on this. I’m just saying I don’t know how effective I can be. But I’ll try. Tonight I’ll say something at the meeting.”
Judith nods, her fears allayed. This is the Suzy she knows and trusts: solid, principled, and having a plan. “Trust not in princes,” it says in Psalms, but it doesn’t tell you not to trust in your profs. Of course Suzy is to be trusted. They’re smiling at each other now, the smile not just of colleagues or friends, but of co-conspirators. Partners in a plot.
With twenty minutes left till the meeting, they get more coffee and a large raisin cookie to share, and discuss the end-of-term party at Suzy’s house next week.
“‘End-of-term’ party, not ‘Christmas’ party, please note,” Suzy says. She adds, though, that they’ll have their Christmas tree up that night. But if Judith likes she can bring a Chanukah symbol. Judith, blushing, says no thanks, though she appreciates the thought. But maybe she’ll bring her specialty, her pièce de résistance, a dense, intense chocolate mousse.
“That would be great!” says Suzy. “So far we don’t have anything chocolatey.”
“This is so chocolatey it’ll stand your hair on end.” Suzy laughs. Then Judith offers to come early to help set up.
“What a terrific idea,” says Suzy. “You could meet Natalie, Dennis, and the rest of my family. They’ve heard so much about you.”
Judith, flattered by this, can see herself becoming friendly with Suzy’s family. Maybe becoming a friend of the family. She is filled with a warm glow. “I’d love that,” she says.
“That’s settled, then,” says Suzy, briefly touching Judith’s arm. Judith feels the warmth from S
uzy’s hand seeping into her skin. Then they walk to the meeting.
— 7 —
They are meeting in a different room tonight. Their usual room was vandalized last week. The couch was slashed open, its fluffy white insides spilt all over the floor, the two long tables had their legs cut off, and the only chairs that weren’t stolen were smashed to smithereens. No one knows who the perpetrators were, and no one is even under suspicion — which means, in a way, that everyone is. Tonight’s meeting room contains only a round table with ten chairs squeezed around it. Judith puts her purse on the table, and is pleased when Suzy drops her purse at the adjacent seat before going to welcome the committee members. Sitting, she watches Suzy hobnob, greeting people in her cheerful, friendly way and chatting briefly with everybody, either one-on-one or in groups of two or three. She is now with Elizabeth, a first-year student in the Policy stream who is here today for her first SWAC meeting. Watching them, Judith recollects Suzy saying a while back that she wanted to invite Elizabeth on in mid-year, and Judith agreed. Elizabeth’s perfect, straight, long blond hair swings as she laughs with Suzy, and Judith recalls hearing somewhere that Elizabeth and Suzy attend the same Dunhill church.
Soon the meeting begins. There’s a report from Brenda on the Teacher Evaluation Subcommittee; then the rest of the meeting focuses on Anti-oppression Day. Judith can barely look at Chris or Lola when, as co-chairs of Publicity, they give their detailed update. After Publicity, the committee deals with the lunch plan, parking arrangements, and who will introduce and thank Michael Brier. Then Suzy says, “I know how much we’re all looking forward to having Michael Brier here, and hearing what he has to say. But as we go forward with this event, I’d like to remind us all that the underlying premise of Anti-oppression Day, indeed of this very committee, is respect for all individuals and groups.” She looks around the table, ending with Chris, who barely restrains a smirk. Suzy continues, “Specifically, given the subject of Brier’s keynote, it’s important that we all keep in mind the sensibilities of our Jewish students and faculty.” Several people glance at Judith; she lowers her eyes. “Obviously we’re not talking about silencing anybody. Just ensuring that all discussions take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and professional collegiality.”