by Nora Gold
Gingerly she opens the bathroom door. Only a few people are in the hallway between the bathroom and the front vestibule. They’re chatting and laughing in twos and threes, and on a chair near the front door there is a big pile of coats that wasn’t there before, with hers near the top. Now is her chance. As casually as she can, she saunters to the chair, lifts her coat, and edges toward the door. Then she is outside in the cold silent night, on a street lined with snowbanks. I’m free, she thinks, slipping on her coat. I’ve escaped. Stealthily, like a thief in the night — as if she were actually guilty of some crime — she skulks down the block to her car, slides inside, and, hoping she is invisible in the darkness, drives away.
TAKING A STAND
— 1 —
The next morning Judith awakens with a fever. She caught a chill unloading the beer from Weick’s car, but still over the Christmas holiday she goes skiing with Bobby in Banff for two weeks in sub-zero temperatures, and afterwards they pop over to Vancouver for four days to see his sister. Marla is what Judith, if she ever used this expression, would call a “Jewish American Princess.” She usually avoids this term because it’s both misogynistic and antisemitic, but Marla is always dressed perfectly in the latest fashions and has earrings, bracelets, and makeup on, even at the breakfast table with little Melinda vomiting all over her. Marla’s nails are long, red, and shiny — as shiny as all the appliances in her shiny new house, which she shows off to Bobby and Judith with pride. She gives them the grand tour, and this house trumpets out all its newness and richness, but also its nouveau riche-ness. Then she shows off, with almost equal pride, her husband Gunther — whose name she pronounces like Grunter — a heavy-set man thirteen years older, stolidly bourgeois and deadly dull. An accountant, thinks Judith, but a man of no account.
She hasn’t seen Marla since college. They first met in high school when Judith and Bobby started going out. “Bobby’s little sister,” just two years younger than her, was at first admiring, fawning even. Later she became jealous of her, and then angry when she left Bobby to move to Israel. Now Marla is cool to her and condescending about her clothes and lack of makeup. She also seems miffed that Bobby still — despite everything — wants to marry Judith, and that Judith, once again, is not jumping at the chance. Marla takes this as a personal insult to her and the entire Kornblum clan.
So Marla, with her long, sharp nails, scratches away at Judith. One day they go downtown together for facials — “an outing for just us girls,” Marla says coyly to Bobby and Gunther over breakfast, and Judith plays along for Bobby’s sake. After they’ve had their facials, the beautician dabs some makeup on their faces. Marla looks at Judith appraisingly and says, “You know, Judith, you could be quite attractive with just a little work.”
I’m already attractive, you bitch, Judith thinks, but does not say. In fact, I’m beautiful, but you’re too stupid to see it. Just last night, Bobby stopped abruptly in the middle of making love and stared at her.
“Do you know how beautiful you are?” he asked. “You’re absolutely ravishing.”
Embarrassed, she shrugged. But then she grinned at him. “If I’m ravishing,” she said, “ravish me.”
Which he did. And remembering this now, she smiles at Marla without saying a word.
By the end of their four days in Vancouver, though, Judith and Bobby are at each other’s throats.
“Okay, so she’s a bit of a Princess,” says Bobby, “but she’s still my sister.”
“I can’t stand your family,” she says, “and everything they represent.”
Bobby’s family at this point consists only of Marla and Bobby’s brother Richard, and Richard is a racist, the one who believes Arabs have the moral understanding of dogs. Judith knows there is no real possibility of her marrying Bobby. But when occasionally she tries picturing her life if she did, she thinks of inheriting his whole family and, like a caged stallion, wants to make a break for it.
On the plane ride home, they sit in hostile silence, a silence broken only when one of them snaps at the other. She is visibly shivering and he seems to intentionally ignore this, not even offering her his green Air Canada blanket, even though he’s not using it. She hasn’t stopped shivering since Suzy’s party, and spending the last four days in Marla’s badly heated, uncarpeted house with its cold, imitation-marble floors has made her sicker. Now on the plane she feels cold in her bones, in their innermost marrow. Nothing she’s done since Suzy’s party to try and warm up has helped: not wearing gatkes under two other layers of clothes, swaddling herself in multiple blankets, or drinking quarts of hot lemon tea. Nothing helps in the slightest. She is freezing from within.
Back in Toronto on Sunday morning, she and Bobby go home separately from the airport. Her house, as she enters it, is ice cold. She raises the thermostat, drags herself upstairs, crawls into bed under two quilts, pulls one of them over her head, and doesn’t come out for the rest of the day. She knows it is hopeless with her and Bobby. They’re just too different. He has much more in common with his brother and sister than with her. Never mind marriage; she doesn’t want to stay with him even until she goes back to Israel. She wants him out of her life, and the sooner the better.
At 4:30, just as the sun is setting, she falls asleep, but several hours later she awakens feeling sick. Her head is heavy and full of sharp, shooting pains, her limbs ache and move slowly as if she’s been drugged, and even though she is lying under two down quilts, she is cold. Then hot. Then cold again. She lurches out of bed and staggers to the bathroom. In seconds she has filled the toilet with smelly brown water. Then she vomits into it, too. For the rest of that night and all the next day, she runs to and from the toilet. She’s feverish and confused and in and out of sleep. In the midst of all this, there is a sense of urgency: I have to speak to Suzy. We have to work things out. With school resuming tomorrow, everything that happened at the Christmas party has come flooding back to her with the force of a tidal wave. She can’t believe how Suzy treated her that night, turning on her when she hadn’t done anything wrong. She feels hurt and angry now, yet also willing to forgive. After all, Suzy was under a lot of stress that night. She was hostessing a party for seventy people, she couldn’t get her son to bed, and she was terribly embarrassed by Dennis’s behaviour. Also she is worried about getting her contract renewed, so obviously she has to stay on Weick’s good side. None of this, of course, justifies how she acted. But still, until that night, Suzy was very good to her. That counts for something. Furthermore, this term Suzy is going to give her an RA’ship. So she has to make up with her. She needs things to be all right between them.
But the next day she is still sick. There is no way she can return to school and resolve things with Suzy. The following Monday she is still vomiting, feverish, dizzy, and drenching her bedclothes with sweat. It’s just a flu, she tells herself repeatedly. She tells this also to Bobby, who is becoming increasingly impatient with her for not seeing a doctor.
But when she has been like this for eight days, and has missed not only the first class this term in all her new subjects, but the second one, too, she begins to worry about her schoolwork. Cindy has been great, phoning her every few days and keeping all her teachers informed about her illness. Cindy has also been collecting extra copies of the course outlines and handouts for her. But now Judith is starting to panic. She can’t afford to miss the third class in all these courses. There are only twelve classes in all, and she is afraid of falling behind and maybe even losing the whole semester.
So on the Tuesday morning before the third Monday of the term, she consults Bernie Braunstein, an old schoolmate of her father’s who, despite his age, still sees patients in his modest office. She hasn’t seen Bernie since her father’s shiva and he greets her with a kiss on the cheek. After hearing about her symptoms, examining her, and sending her for some tests across the hall, he reassures her it’s probably nothing serious.
“It looks to me,” he says, “like one of those nasty new flu v
iruses that are going around that we don’t yet know much about. The tests you just did will come back in a couple of days and maybe they’ll show something surprising. But if this is what I think it is, a virus, it’ll just have to run its course.”
“How long will that take?” she cries. “I’ve already missed the first two weeks of school and soon it’ll be the third. I can’t keep missing week after week.”
Bernie smiles down at the piece of paper where he’s jotting some notes. “How refreshing,” he says, “to see someone eager to return to her studies. Usually people are asking me to get them out of school or work, not back into it.” Then he looks at her over his glasses. “If this were something bacterial, I could give you antibiotics which would speed up your recovery. But for a virus there is nothing to give you. It has to just work its way through your system. Whether this will take two more days or two more weeks — or even three or four — I cannot say. But there’s no point trying to rush it, Judith. If you return to school even one day earlier than your body is ready to, you’re just going to relapse and extend your illness. So what’s the point? Go home, Judith, rest, drink plenty of fluids — we don’t want you getting dehydrated — and forget about school and everything else until you’re 100 percent well.”
Dejectedly she rises, and on her way out Bernie pinches her cheek.
When she gets home, she’s exhausted. She crawls into bed and stays there woodenly, like a doll passively remaining wherever it’s been placed. She is too weak and dizzy to do anything at all, even watch TV, but she is also too nauseated to sleep. So she just lies in bed and the day goes by. The rest of the week passes like this, too. Bobby pops in once each day and tries to get her to eat something, but she usually shakes her head and turns away. On Sunday, though, she sits up in bed and hungrily eats a scrambled egg Bobby has made for her, along with a slice of toast spread with grape jelly. Then she swallows a tall, cold glass of orange juice.
“You’re looking better,” he says, watching her. “If this keeps up, soon you’ll be back on your feet.”
“I’m almost recovered now,” she says between bites. “Tomorrow I’m going back to school.”
“What!” He stares at her, aghast. “Are you crazy?”
“I have to go back. If I miss any more classes, I might as well drop out of the program.”
“Judith, look in the mirror,” he pleads. “Two hours ago you couldn’t even sit up in bed. How will you get through a full day of classes tomorrow? Much less survive that long drive.”
“I’ll be fine. Anyway, I have to go. I have no choice.”
“No choice?” His eyes light up with his argumentative litigation-lawyer gleam. “What do you mean you have no choice? If you’re sick, you’re sick. Your profs will understand that.”
She doesn’t answer. She is feeling another wave of nausea and doesn’t have the strength for a fight with Bobby. She gazes at him, thinking, You don’t understand. I have to make up with Suzy. Then, feeling dizzy, she pushes away the bed tray, slides into a prone position, and within seconds is asleep.
— 2 —
The next day she awakens at 2:10 p.m. She has now missed all of her classes for the third week in a row. And maybe it’s something about the number three — the rabbis consider the third incidence of anything significant — but she’s starting to feel distant and disconnected from Dunhill. The routine, the rhythm, has been broken. It’s gone. Whenever she returns, she’ll feel lost and out of step. For the rest of this term, she’ll be discovering that she’s missing small, but important, pieces of the puzzle laid down during these crucial first weeks. She’ll be disoriented. So it’s a relief, almost a reprieve, to be able to stay in bed, and not face all that yet.
And also not to have to face Kerry, Chris, Lola, and all the other people at school who hate Israel. Soineh-Yisroel, her father would have called them in Yiddish. She’s happy to not have to cope yet with them. Or with Suzy. She and Suzy still haven’t had any contact this term. She thought of emailing her, but what for? Suzy already knows from Cindy that Judith’s sick at home, and the discussion they need to have about what happened at the Christmas party (which hurts every time she remembers it) is not for email. That will have to wait until they meet in person. Hopefully next week when she’s back in school — then everything will get straightened out. In the words of Isaiah, All that is crooked shall be made straight.
Downstairs, she eats a sandwich and checks her email. She’s only checked it once since getting sick, so now she has eighty-nine emails waiting for her. She sits at the dining room table wearing gatkes, a nightgown, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks, and slippers, because the house is still cold. It has an archaic and expensive heating system, and she can’t afford to set the thermostat any higher than sixty-eight. She reads an email from Bruria, who apologizes for not having written much over the past six weeks. She’s been very busy with Noah, who is out of solitary now and has a good lawyer. Then she responds to the email that Judith wrote her six weeks ago after Suzy’s party.
Judith!! You wore your red dress to a school party???!!! What were you thinking?!
Bruria knows this dress. Judith wore it for the first time to the housewarming party for Bruria and Pinchas’s new house about eight months before she left for Toronto. Bruria loved it: “Vavavavoom!” she said, and Judith knew then that this dress was powerful. Its deep ruby velvet was almost the same colour as oxblood, a substance drunk by ancient tribes to enhance their virility. But over time she got used to this dress, as if it had gradually faded in the wash, muting its sensual and erotic power, and making it less magical, more ordinary and respectable with each wearing. Now, reading Bruria’s email, she flushes almost the colour of her dress. What a stupid mistake it was to wear this to Suzy’s party. Not that Bruria is suggesting it was Judith’s fault what happened that night with Dennis and Weick — both of whom Bruria calls “assholes” in her email. Unlike Suzy, thinks Judith, Bruria knows my wearing that dress wasn’t an act of seduction — just an honest mistake.
Now Judith checks Ha’aretz. No terrorist attacks today, thank God. Nothing more terrible going on there this afternoon than any other time. She quickly skims today’s top three stories:
A revolt is brewing against Sharon from within his own party, the Likud.
A West Bank rabbi has ruled it is not only permissible, but one’s religious obligation, to murder anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who gives or sells to an Arab even one dunam of land.
Child poverty in Israel has just reached its highest rate since the founding of the state: one Israeli child in three goes to bed hungry at night.
Heavy-hearted, Judith leaves Ha’aretz, and returns to her email. There’s an email from Suzy buried in her junk mail for some reason. She opens it with fear and hope. Maybe Suzy is wishing her a speedy recovery. Maybe she’s also apologizing, or saying something reassuring, about what happened at the party. To her disappointment, it’s just an official note Suzy sent to everyone on SWAC:
Firstly, thanks to all of you who attended last night’s meeting. It was very productive and we got a lot done.
Judith checks the date of this email: it was sent ten days ago. She not only missed all her classes that week, but also a SWAC meeting. How could she have forgotten that? But in the blur of illness, she had.
Our next meeting will be two weeks from last night, at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 23.
That’s this Thursday.
Please make every effort to be there, and also RSVP your attendance as soon as possible. We’re almost at mid-January, Anti-oppression Day is just one month after that, and there’s lots still left to do!
In spite of her mixed feelings toward Suzy now, Judith is touched by the exclamation mark at the end. How like Suzy to conclude what would otherwise have been a mundane bureaucratic email with this “Let’s go, team!” sort of spirit. I should be well enough by this Thursday, she thinks, to attend this meeting. And perhaps if Suzy is free beforehand, we can have our talk then.
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She clicks on Reply and begins to RSVP to Suzy, but then stops. She can’t be sure she’ll be okay three days from now. And it’s worse to say yes and then not come, than to just not reply. So she turns off her computer and goes upstairs. There she gets dressed, thinking that she couldn’t drive to Dunhill now, but she could drive to the local mall just five minutes away. Dressing, she feels in the shadows of the room Bobby’s disapproval, but she ignores him. The day after tomorrow is his birthday and she wants to get him a gift. So she sets out for the mall. By now it’s four-thirty, already dark and freezing cold. But once at the mall she strolls with pleasure through the long indoor avenues. There are boxes inlaid with ivory, pens made of Venetian glass, a newly invented kind of corkscrew, fancy bed linens and draperies, musical instruments from all around the world, and soap in the shape of apples and pears. Nothing, though, is quite right for Bobby. So she goes to the Men’s Department at The Bay. Nothing special there, either, it turns out: it’s all the same sort of merchandise they displayed the last time she was here, shopping for what she knew in her heart of hearts would be her last Father’s Day gift. Saddened now, she examines the standard male gifts: ties, pipes, shaving kits, fleece-lined slippers. None of these suit Bobby.
“May I help you?” asks a saleswoman, but Judith shakes her head. Out of nowhere she’s feeling dizzy and nauseated, and staggers to a bench at the edge of the store. She plunks herself onto it and shuts her eyes. She hopes she doesn’t vomit here in public, all over the woman sitting beside her. Gradually the nausea starts subsiding. But still she is light-headed and weak.