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 prepared: 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
