Between Gods: A Memoir (18 page)

I nod, and she qualifies her offer: “I mean, I’m pretty busy. But I’d like to help you. If you need anything.”

I do, I think. I need a friend like you.

I picture her speaking her mind with Eli. I picture her onstage, letting loose her brilliant spool of song.

“I grew up very …” She pauses. “I grew up very Jewish. There weren’t many Jews in Peterborough, so my parents really emphasized it. School, summer camp, family life.”

There’s another silence, then she asks, “Do you have somewhere to go for Pesach?”

I blink.

“Passover,” she says.

“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t really—
we
haven’t really—”

A man with dark dreadlocks approaches and taps her on the shoulder. “Dance?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

“Sure.” She turns back to me and smiles. “Stay in touch, Alison,” she says.

Something about the conversation with Shayna, the simple fact of her, encourages me. A prayer directly answered, as though God has waved a magic wand and granted me the perfect answer to my wish. I suggest to Degan that we start to practice Shabbat in earnest. “Sure,” he says.

“That was easy.”

We abandon “24 Hours Unplugged” like a too-small T-shirt: tossed in the corner and forgotten. On Friday afternoon I check my email for the last time. My cousin Lucy writes that she has been invited to teach in Israel. Would I think of joining her for a visit? I’m not ready for Israel, but I thank her for the offer.

In response to my question, she hesitates, but she agrees to hold a corner of our wedding
chuppah
. If we have one.

She signs her email “Shabbat Shalom! (for tomorrow).”

In my Inbox, as well, are six other emails from my publicist, an urgent message from my website provider and a new sluice of requests for writerly help. I shut the whole system down.

There ought to be an expression for the precise kind of relief that accompanies turning off the computer for a full day. Shabbat would be worth it for this alone.

I do as our textbook says and “prepare the environment,”
which means I wash the dishes and wipe the kitchen counters for the first time in days. I make my new favourite curried chickpea soup from the Rebar cookbook. Then I go to the gym and run hard on the treadmill for forty-five minutes. I come home and shower; the calm in the apartment is palpable. The sun is setting. The new day beginning.

Degan gets back from a hard day with clients. “Shabbat Shalom,” he says.

I’m ravenous after my workout, but when I suggest skipping the change box devoted to charity and going straight to the meal, Degan says, “No!
Tzedakah
is the most important part.”

We bless the light, the bread, the wine. We eat slowly and talk about our wedding, about our future children and about ritual. A child who grows up with Shabbat will know comfort and stillness, will know at least one way to God. We make a game out of practising our Hebrew, and brainstorm who might hold the other poles of our
chuppah
. We make love without protection. A baby. It feels not only possible but fated.

Bashert
.

Later, before bed, I remember to check the mail. I stand on the porch in my slippers, moonlight in my hair. A manila envelope is sticking out of the mailbox. The return address is McClelland & Stewart publishers. The first copy of my new poetry book,
The Dream World
. The culmination of years of work has arrived in an envelope so light that it might contain nothing. A chapter ends, a new one begins. I hold its thin weight in my hand.

nine

M
USIC
N
IGHT IS A TRADITION
Degan and I started in St. John’s—one night a month when our writer friends come bearing instruments and we abandon the books we are writing in favour of song. On Thursday, the doorbell rings at nine. It’s a fellow poet, a guitar case strung over his shoulder. Other poets and novelists fill the porch behind him. The harmonicas and mandolins pile up. We drink, and sing Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and early Neil Young. The din escalates; the ashtrays fill up on the back porch. The music turns current: the Decemberists, AA Bondy. More guitars arrive, and Degan pulls out his keyboard.

The evening peaks around two in the morning when, for a brief moment, there are forty writers stamping their feet and hollering out Bruce Springsteen: “I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book!” The floorboards vibrate; a bookshelf
collapses. Several people take this as a cue and pack up their instruments. There are last cigarettes on the back porch while cop cars drift by below us in the street.

At four in the morning there are five of us left.

“Look what I’ve got.” Someone pulls out a handful of white pills.

“Advil?” I ask.

The friend grins. “Ecstasy.”

To say I’m not a drug person is an understatement. One drag of a joint makes me curl up like a grub from paranoia. But our friend says, “This is so different from pot. So much better. So clean. Just trust me.”

“Ecstasy,” Degan says. “Is it, like, sexy?”

“Sorry, pal,” says the friend. “It’s totally not. If it’s cut with speed, it might feel sexy. But this, the pure stuff …” She shakes the pills in her palm like dice. “This ecstasy is purely existential.”

Maybe because of how hard the winter has been, or because of how relieved I am that it’s finally over, I obey without question. I swallow my pill. Degan swallows his. Around the room, others follow suit. We slump on the sofas, waiting for the drug to hit.

“I don’t feel anything,” I complain. I pause. “But my teeth are kind of tickly.”

Degan picks up his guitar, plays a few bars of “California Dreamin’.” The words are so beautiful: a windswept street, brown leaves blowing down it at dawn. Tears stream down my face. Then, just as quickly, they dry up. The flip side of grief is a blazing, blistering gratitude for being alive. We lie around grinning at one another. An hour passes. Someone scratches their leg. Two more hours pass. The little voice in my head that
constantly narrates my life (better change my hair appointment, I’m not looking alert enough, I wonder what Julian thought about what I just said) stops. Entirely. It is replaced with a cavernous, cool emptiness, a calm that drifts slowly across my field of vision like snowflakes seen through huge, distant windows.

The warehouse of my self has been ransacked, but there’s no need to do anything about it, no useless searching for the culprit.

“They did a study,” someone says.

An hour passes.

“They did a study where they gave Zen monks pure ecstasy. The monks said you would practise for
years
to get even a taste of this.”

The minor feuds between writers in the room, the jealousies, are abandoned. We dance, then forget our feet and fall back onto the couches, smiling. Visible darts of light beam from the corners of our eyes. Technically, I know, it’s just an inhibition of serotonin uptake. But after the darkness of these long winter months, I want always to live in this light.

The next day I wake up and grope around on my bedside table for my watch: 5:25. How can it be so early? We just went to sleep. Then I realize it’s 5:25 in the afternoon.

I roll over onto my back and cover my eyes with my forearm. It takes me several minutes to force myself up out of the bed. My T-shirt is plastered to my back with sweat. I get in the shower: the drops feel like sparks on my skin, each one distinct, each alive. The water is simultaneously boiling hot and freezing cold. I towel off; in the mirror my eyes are wild and my pupils enormous.

I’ve made a date. When my old school friend Jordan heard what I was going through, he suggested someone I might
contact, a cousin of his father’s named Aaron, who lives in Toronto and has a big interest in Judaism and the Holocaust. Their family is Czech, the same as mine. Aaron’s number had sat crumpled in my pants pocket for weeks; when I finally fished it out, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I called and we set up a date for Shabbat dinner. Tonight the date has arrived.

I dress hurriedly and scrawl a note for Degan, who is still passed out on the sofa. A taxi whisks me uptown to Forest Hill. The houses here have big lawns, and Saabs parked in the driveways, and pillars like Southern plantations. An uneasy silence buffers the neighbourhood; not even Toronto’s omnipresent ambulance sirens permeate the insulated atmosphere.

Aaron, a balding man in his fifties wearing a shirt and tie, greets me at the door. “Shabbat Shalom,” he says.

I wait to take his cue about shaking hands in greeting; he doesn’t reach out to touch me.

“Isn’t your fiancé coming?” he asks.

I flush. “He had to go out of town,” I fib, picturing Degan prone on the couch.

Aaron hesitates for half a second, then says, “Okay! Next time!”

I take off my shoes and enter the front hall, my feet sinking into inches of plush carpet. A huge crystal chandelier beams light in every direction, like the rays of a child’s crudely drawn sun. I blink rapidly, trying to regulate the brilliance flooding my eyes. Aaron shows me into a dining room. There’s a long table covered in a white linen cloth, around which fifteen people are seated. I had been under the impression this was just a small dinner. “Everyone, this is Alison,” says Aaron.

Everyone murmurs hello.

It’s clear that they’ve been waiting for me, sitting around the table for God knows how long, unable to begin until I arrived.

I have not eaten anything other than potato chips in twenty-four hours and the smell of chicken soup wafting in from the kitchen is almost unbearable. Saliva pools in my mouth. My jaw aches from hours of clenching my teeth. Jaw clenching, I suddenly realize, is the reason ravers chew soothers. I’d never clued in before.

I’m introduced to Aaron’s wife, Sylvie, who I mistake for his daughter at first and who wishes us a Good Shabbos in a fabulously thick New York accent. The other guests include the owner of a huge hamburger chain and the head of a big Liberal think tank. I don’t catch anyone’s name. I am unable to turn my head to match faces with labels. It is stuck facing forward on my neck, as though with Krazy Glue.

As soon as we are seated, Sylvie lights the candles and we make
kiddush
. Next is the hand-washing ritual. We move single file into the kitchen, where a special two-handled goblet has been placed beside the sink, along with a tea towel embroidered with the Hebrew blessing. The rest of the crowd speeds through the process; when it is my turn, I look to Aaron. I have just met him; we’ve exchanged maybe two hundred words. But he seems to know I need help. He recites a line of the blessing; I repeat it after him. He recites another line; I repeat that. We are looking in each other’s eyes; the call and response is like saying wedding vows. Heady and intense. I turn away from him to hide the size of my pupils.

Back at the table, the Motzi is said over both plain and whole wheat challah. Apparently there is also a difference between egg challah and water challah; one tastes better but leaves more crumbs. Aaron says to the assembly, although I get the sense it’s for my benefit, “There is a blessing for everything. If you were
really
religious, you would do nothing all day but say blessings.”

“For example?” I ask.

“There is a blessing for going to the bathroom, to thank God for giving you a body that works.”

The Hamburger King, a small man with watery eyes, says, “No small thing! A body that works!”

Aaron scoffs. “You don’t say it? The bathroom blessing?”

“I do. At least once a day.”

“Are you kidding?” Aaron asks. “Really?”

I can see that Aaron doesn’t like being caught out as deficient in terms of his observance.

I sit with my tongue thick in my mouth while words fly like coloured ribbons snapped high over my head. Half the guests are American, and talk turns to the American primaries, Obama versus Hillary Clinton. “Would the American people ever vote in a black president?” someone asks.

And someone else answers, “No. If Obama gets the Democrats, then John McCain will take the presidency.”

The son of the Hamburger King, it is revealed, once went on a date with Monica Lewinsky.

The meal starts with bowls of clear chicken broth, a single sprig of dill suspended in the centre. We polish off the salad of walnuts and cranberries and go into the kitchen to serve ourselves for the main course. A Filipina maid is loading the dishwasher. This would be considered forbidden work for a Jew on the Sabbath, but it’s okay for a Gentile to do it in a Jewish home. I help myself to melt-in-your-mouth meat the texture of pulled pork. But of course it can’t be pork. It’s beef brisket.

Back at the table, a second maid hovers in the corner. Something about her strikes me as odd. I manage to sneak another look and then I see: she is made out of papier mâché. A life-sized, looming model of a maid.

The dummy is tilted precariously toward the table: my pupils yawn wider. I look again and could swear I see her wink. I think of Marta, the hired help I am writing about in my novel—and the woman around whom all the action turns.

As we eat, I am enticed by Sylvie—God, I love that New York accent!—to tell my story to the assembly, which elicits a deluge of name-dropping and story after story of Jews who were raised Christian. The journalist Katherine Ashenburg has written an essay about it. The cardinal of Paris, it turns out, was a Jew.

Aaron, at the head of the table, has been quiet throughout. But now he turns to me. “I’ve just come back from Israel,” he says.

I feel I am expected to give a particular response but am unsure what it is. I shift in my chair.

“I was there on a mission!” His mouth is smiling, but his eyes betray a deadly seriousness. “I’m a Zionist. Unabashed.”

“So the mission was …” My voice trails off.

“The mission was, and
is
, to bring lapsed Jews back to Judaism.
Baal teshuvah
—it literally means ‘master of return.’ Bringing
secular
Jews back to the religious element.”