“I’ll be honest, I’m selfish,” her father, David, said, in his jokey, half-ironic way. He was a professor of literature, who had at the time recently completed a highly praised translation of The Canterbury Tales. “I don’t want to lose my favorite person in the world a year early.”
“We don’t need to frame it that way, David,” her mother, Hannah, corrected him. She was a prizewinning poet and novelist and an artist-in-residence-cum-professor at the same college where Judith’s father taught. “Sweetheart,” Judith’s mother said to her, “you can have our advice if you want it, but ultimately this is your decision. And we’ll support you regardless. But,” she added delicately, “I think it’s important to remember, you have your whole life to be an adult.”
“Very true,” her father assented quickly, winkingly.
“Your days as a child are fleeting,” her mother said, and snapped in the air—a flourish typical of her mother.
The three of them discussed the issue at length—weighed the advantages and disadvantages with regard to college applications; considered the possibility of a gap year and how it might be spent; speculated on the social implications of starting college at seventeen. And, in the end, Judith decided she would not graduate high school early, but would instead spend her senior year compiling AP credits that could be used to graduate from college early. Her logic—for which David and Hannah commended her—was that she could still put herself a year ahead in her education, but without sacrificing her last year of high school with her friends and without having to enter college as the youngest person on her freshman floor. Plus, it was the financially prudent decision: a fourth year at her private high school, Gustav Girls’ Academy, though not cheap, would be cheaper than a fourth year at whatever private college she ended up attending. Of course, her parents told her that financial considerations shouldn’t matter to her. But really, none of the logic mattered to Judith at all. She made her decision because she agreed with her father: She didn’t want to lose a year with her favorite people, either. She didn’t want to miss any family meetings.
It was not as if Judith was in any hurry to be done with the work of high school, either. True, she was often stressed, nearly always sleep-deprived. But these were not conditions she minded. In fact, she took a certain pride in her fatigue—as though it were a state to be aspired to. From this perspective, she could appreciate better the notions of athletics: When she and her teammates were sweating and staggering up the hill on Triangle Street, she felt a particular form of communion with them—the same she felt walking into the library at Gustav Girls’ Academy on a Saturday to see it crowded with her classmates, her mammoth backpack heavy on her shoulders with books and binders.
Later in her life—when she would occupy long hours at galleries and auctions, staring at works of art she might buy to decorate the walls of the Colonel’s casinos—she wondered quite what had impelled young Judith to work quite so hard. She had been, if anyone was, a child of the leisure class. Why, then, had there been so little leisure?
Some of it, she understood, was just the twists of her DNA—“who she was.” She had classmates at Gustav’s who smoked pot between classes, went to Ani DiFranco shows on the weekends. But the majority—even the vast majority—had been little terrors of self-discipline, like her. The differences between most of her classmates and her were the differences in degrees between fervor and fanaticism.
The work, Judith came to believe, was somehow intrinsic to the proposition of being a daughter of the upper middle class. On the most basic level, Judith and most of those she went to school with were raised to believe that the key to success in life was hard work: to have the life and career you wanted, you had to go to a good college; to get into a good college, you had to do well in high school and in everything else; and to do well in everything required hard work. It was the fundamental proposition—the promise—of American achievement. Yet the intensity of the effort, she understood later, was out of proportion to this logic. The 5:00 A.M. wake-ups, the summers at SAT-prep camps, the time spent studying in class, outside class, in the car on the way to National Honor Society meetings: It was as if they felt they owed it to themselves, to their parents, to the big bedrooms in which they slept and to the new cars in which they were driven and to the backyard pools in which they swam. It was as if the work, finally, made them not rich, but deserving.
There was also for Judith—as for many of them—another element to her diligence, though it was one she tended not to dwell on in her adult life: She was Jewish. Her family was not observant in the Orthodox sense of the word—they didn’t keep kosher, didn’t refrain from watching television or handling money on Friday night. But Judaism was important to them. They belonged to a Reform synagogue, went once a month for Shabbat and on many of the (major) holidays. They participated in any food drives the synagogue held and made regular donations to MAZON and to the ADL, understanding such giving to be as much a practice of their religion as eating matzo on Passover. There was Judaic artwork throughout the house, a mezuzah on the front door. Hannah, whose own mother was a survivor of Buchenwald, always set her novels among the highly Jewish milieu in Philadelphia in which she’d been raised; she won a Brochstein Medal for her translations of Yiddish poetry. And perhaps most powerfully—there was among the family a collective reverence for thought, for academics, for scholarship. For Judith, the obligation to study had been inextricable from her idea of what it meant to be a Jew. The Jews, she was taught, were the Chosen People—and this was not a guarantee of exceptionalism but instead an obligation to carry on a tradition that included the articulation of monotheism, the founding of many of the world’s great philosophies, the invention of psychotherapy, and the discovery of relative physics. Her most profound moments of religious feeling came not in temple, but rather when she would be in her bedroom working on a paper or problem set, and hear her father typing away in his study; hear her mother gently, quietly reciting verse. Then Judith would feel—would feel she knew—that God was real, imminently real, and they were all a part of something much larger than themselves.
But again, as an adult, Judith didn’t think much about such memories—and if she did, her attention soon returned to the Hirst or Koons she had been charged with buying at auction; she would maybe hold before the work a fabric swatch from a curtain—try to envision it all.
* * *
By the time Judith began high school, her parents—despite being so strictly proud of her—sometimes did worry about their daughter, who appeared to them so profoundly studious, maybe to the exclusion of other things she might have been. She had a couple of friends going back to elementary school but could not be called popular; there was a boyfriend for a few months during her junior year, but they had immediately recognized that he was hopelessly overmatched beside their daughter (indeed, literally so, as Judith was three inches taller). And while they were not lying when they told her how beautiful they thought she was—inside and out—neither did they claim that this beauty was of a conventional kind.
Judith herself recognized she had pulled a few of the least desirable cards from her parents’ combined genetic deck. She had her father’s long, lanky frame, but without the unexpected grace that made him a good dancer at weddings. She had her mother’s proud beak of a nose, but without the delicacy of eyes and mouth that had once induced Hunter S. Thompson to drunkenly proposition her at a party in the early seventies. (She declined, or so she said.) Least fortunately of all, Judith had inherited the hair of David’s mother—what the girls in B’nai B’rith Girls cheerfully referred to as her Jewfro: jet-black, Brillo coarse, antigravitational in its growth. Judith and Hannah tried innumerable strategies over the years to tame it—involving the use of dozens of different conditioners, wide-toothed combs of various compositions, mornings of flat ironing, an entire summer of professional straightening—but ultimately concluded there was simply nothing to be done. For all of high school and college and for her year of graduate school,
Judith wore her hair in two slablike waves, separated by a side part.
But Judith was not an overly self-conscious teenager. She did have uncomfortable moments of visualizing herself as she walked down the hall at school: the tallest in her class, with a gangling gait, elbows and knees more prominent than breasts. But she tempered her awareness that she was a somewhat odd-looking young woman with the confidence that there was something compelling in this oddness—in the stark contrast of her pale skin and her black hair, in the small round mole just below her left eye. If this unconventional look was not to be appreciated now, she had faith it would be someday. Besides, half the indisputably beautiful girls at Gustav’s were anorexic. Literally none of the teenage girls she knew seemed entirely happy with their appearance.
And she could not help but derive at least some added bodily satisfaction from having lost her virginity to a twenty-five-year-old.
Judith’s parents would have worried less about their daughter’s social life if they’d known that while she was indeed profoundly studious, she was not merely so. Indeed, she prided herself on this broadness of character. But if her parents had had a fuller picture of their daughter’s life—interior and exterior—they would have only worried more, and with better reason.
The intensity Judith showed in her schoolwork was only one manifestation of a general intensity she was aware of in her character—a kind of insatiable avidity that at times got out of her control. When she was eight, her Hebrew school teacher explained that the yad in the glass case on the principal’s desk had been saved from a Lithuanian synagogue burned during World War II. Judith stole this—and for two weeks she would lock the door of her room and secretly admire the beauty of the yad’s weathered bronze, the elegantly articulated fingers; would sleep with it under her pillow, as though trying to absorb the potency of loss and survival and holiness the object seemed to her to emanate. Then the rabbi gathered all the students of the Hebrew school into the shul and talked for forty impassioned minutes about the legacy of the Shoah, the necessity of its remembrance in object and thought, the inestimable value of artifacts like the yad—and about ten words into this, Judith realized, with the suddenness of being shaken awake, that despite the sense of piousness she’d perceived around the whole project, she had done something very, very wrong. Fortunately (or so she judged at the time), she managed to secretly return the yad, and her guilt was never discovered.
Judith’s zeal had an indiscriminate, free-floating quality, fixing on objects ranging from the somewhat predictable, such as her religion, to the ostensibly random, such as ancient Egypt—which her fifth grade class spent three months studying, during which time Judith memorized the names of every pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom and taught herself dozens of hieroglyphs. Growing up, Judith simply had a zeal for zeal: a passion for levels or acts of greater vehemence and sharpness than those around her appeared satisfied with.
This zeal found a new outlet when she discovered masturbation—creating a link between a penchant for extremism and sex that, she would realize later in life, was not altogether beneficial. Like most of the girls with whom she swapped stories when she got older, she had basically no idea what she was doing at first. She would be watching a PG-13 bedroom scene or even just looking at photographs of Greek statuary, and an unfamiliar mood would come over her. She would retreat to her bedroom, lock the door, and, through some clutching and unclutching of her legs around the corner of her mattress, effect waves of sensation that seemed to issue from the source of the unfamiliarity. Practice led to more sophisticated methods—until she could spend hours engrossed in a secret world whose dimensions and sensations could not be articulated. She realized, of course, that other people masturbated, too; she’d had the Conversation with her mother well ahead of her first period, she’d endured a sixth-grade sex-ed class. But with her eyes clenched tight and the windows of her bedroom thrown open—she believed no one masturbated quite like this.
Such points of differentiation were important to her. Like many high-achieving teenage girls (like many high achievers of any age), she had an instinctive anxiety around being “normal”: being like anyone else, not special, just another Gustav’s girl. This concern, she believed, was at least part of why anorexia was so rampant among her peers: It gave you a secret—a secret suffering.
But if by the start of her sophomore year she regarded masturbation as a mark of distinction from her classmates, she was also aware that in most sexual endeavors she had yet to distinguish herself. Girls in her class had gone to second base, third base, even had sex with boys from other schools in town. Aside, though, from a few awkward smooches during a single game of spin-the-bottle at a friend’s bat mitzvah reception, until the fall of her second year of high school, Judith’s sex life had remained a strictly one-woman affair. She simply did not know how to flirt with boys, how to make herself attractive to boys, how to transform the friendships she did have with boys into anything physical. The gap between stilted coed hangouts at the movies and the aching joys of an orgasm seemed to her more or less impossible to bridge. And this frustrated Judith, not so much because she thought she’d actually get much pleasure from having a boy “feel her up” (the slang here all too accurate, given her height) but rather because not knowing something was antithetical to her disposition—really, to her entire way of life. The fact that she couldn’t find a boyfriend made Judith feel stupid. As a fifteen-year-old, Judith did not think of herself as lonely; she had several friends at school, and she had two best friends she lived with, Mom and Dad. Yet she understood that there were forms of companionship she was missing. She was, after all, a young woman who strove to be well rounded.
And then she fell in love with her English teacher.
The class was called Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Invention of America. Judith and the two other girls in the class, Amanda Veen and Stacy Barashkov, gathered on the first day in Room 13—sat around a circular wooden table by a picture window overlooking the commons in the back of the school. Gabe came in wearing an outfit she would come to know as typical for him: button-down shirt and tie, jeans and no jacket. He was really (really!) not much older than her, only a few years out of college; had been a creative writing and English major at Berkeley, the previous summer had completed two years of teaching in Uganda for the Peace Corps, had a short story published in The Kenyon Review and a half-finished novel on his desk in his apartment. But she would learn all that only later. When he walked to the table that day—with an insouciant, self-assured gait that struck her as distinctively masculine—all she knew about him was that he was new to the school, that he was very tall (six foot four), dark-haired, Grecian-nosed—and he pulled a dog-eared, jacketless book from the messenger bag slung across his chest, and read, “‘The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, / It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, / I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, / I am mad for it to be in contact with me.’” Then, closing the book and dropping it on the table as he pulled the messenger bag off his shoulder, he asked them, “So, ladies. What is Walt Whitman talking about?”
So that’s how this feels, Judith thought.
In truth, they were all in love with him. Amanda Veen responded by encasing herself in a stunned silence that lasted the entire semester, Stacy Barashkov by answering questions in class with anxious, rehearsed monologues, her hands flailing chaotically before her. Judith—in whom the most powerful of internal emotions tended to produce a useful if eerie (even to her) sort of calm—concluded that her best course to winning his affection was to show him that she was brilliant, too.
Her mother, reading over her first paper on Leaves of Grass, said with sincerity that she would have given it an A if one the students in her Poetry for Poets course had handed it in—this one of those times when she was even a bit awed by her daughter’s intellect. Gustav’s had a principled stance against letter grades, but Gabe was effusive in the pra
ise he wrote at the bottom of the page beneath her conclusion. For her next paper, on Emily Dickinson, Judith did hours of research in the library, tracing connections between the poet’s life in Amherst and the “psychological themes” of her verse. This time Gabe was a little awed, too. Judith was careful not to make her papers too fusty or schoolgirl pedantic: She wanted to demonstrate that she grasped the beauty and expansiveness of this writing, that she shared Gabe’s evident passion for it, saw the same sparks of the world it promised—sparks that she believed formed the twinkle in his eye when he read aloud to her and Amanda and Stacy (though she liked to think just to her), “‘Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— / We can find no scar, / But internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are—’” Most of all she wanted to imply that she ached with the same longings that animated the writing itself. “The garden behind her home became for the young Emily Dickinson the imaginative landscape in which dramas played out that she both craved and feared to experience in her actual life,” she wrote. She was aware that she was maybe falling love with nineteenth-century American literature as much as she was with Gabe—but, in an interpretation of events that was maybe a bit too imaginative for anyone’s actual life, she concluded that there really didn’t have to be much difference.
Either way, the papers had the desired effect, and at the bottom of her creative-writing exercise exploring Transcendental themes in her daily life, Gabe wrote, “Judith, you are an exceptional young woman. Let’s find some time to get together to discuss your writing face-to-face.” This comment—which, in an exceedingly rare occurrence, made her alabaster cheeks darken with color—would remain the highlight of a distinguished academic career.
They met after school for coffee in the café in the lobby of Gustav’s. In his usual amiable, relaxed way, he told her about going to college at Berkeley, about teaching in Uganda; he asked her about her family, her friends, her plans for college and after. It surprised her how easy it was to talk to him—or, rather, how easy it seemed for him to listen to her, have a conversation with her. She was used to boys being a little perplexed or put off by her demeanor, which, unlike that of many girls her age, was not bright and giggly, but contemplative, muted. She did not think of herself as shy, exactly—more reserved, though this was a distinction few adolescent males bothered to notice. But as she talked to Gabe in her measured, somewhat low voice, he nodded, he watched her face, he responded—all with an interest and evident appreciation she had never seen from a man who was not her father. And why should he react to her the way boys did? she asked herself at one point: He was not a boy. And Gabe would tell her—much later—that he found the calm way she talked, the watchfulness of her eyes intriguing, even sexy.
The Book of Jonah: A Novel Page 8