Between Gods: A Memoir (3 page)

The day of my first session I climbed those stairs slowly and Ben was there to greet me at the top. His wife may have been a rock star, but Ben was a soft-spoken septuagenarian in corduroys. He reached out and took my hand. “Welcome,” he said.

I detected, I thought, a slight Californian accent.

He led me into his office, where there was a chair and a small couch. I watched to see which place he would take; he indicated that I should sit first.

I took the chair. It seemed safer.

I don’t remember our introductions that day, who told whom a little bit about themselves first. I remember only that at a certain point in the meeting he held up two fingers in the form of a peace sign. The diverging fingers were to illustrate two parts of the self: the conscious and the unconscious. These, of course, were not the words he used. Instead, he explained the concepts slowly, as though to a small child: that there are parts of ourselves we know and parts of ourselves we don’t know.

“The parts of ourselves we have repressed,” he said, “exert a great power over our lives.”

I held on tightly to the wooden arms of the chair. I had a sudden and overwhelming desire to go to sleep. My eyes blinked rapidly, involuntarily, as though trying to clear themselves of
the form Ben’s fingers had taken. I voiced several feeble protests, but I knew he was right; had, I realized, known all along.

He held up his two fingers again in a vee to demonstrate the split, and with that peace sign, the world as I knew it fell apart. Or, more accurately, doubled. There was no longer one world, one truth, I could count on, but two.

The known and the unknown.

The acknowledged and the unacknowledged.

The next week when I arrived at Ben’s office, the chair was gone. There was only the small couch, on which, I saw immediately, we would both have to sit. I accepted this with a childlike resignation. It was clear to me how the rest of the therapy would go: the enforced collapsing of boundaries, the gentle but relentless nudging toward that which I had always—wisely, I realized now—denied. That we would be sitting so close together, on the same couch—which was actually more like a loveseat—was a physical manifestation of the emotional openness I was expected to bring. After this, anything could happen.

For example: Several sessions later, in the middle of our conversation, Ben took off his sweater, to reveal a shirt buttoned at the neck but nowhere else. His hairy chest and belly protruded above his corduroys. I accepted this as though it was part of the process, drawing my knees in closer to my chest but continuing dutifully with whatever childhood memory I had been dredging up. Toward the end of the meeting, Ben happened to look down and find his shirt undone. The colour drained from his face. “Why didn’t you
tell
me?” he asked. It was the first time I could discern the individual person behind the generalized listener.

I couldn’t rightly answer him; couldn’t find a polite way to say that the whole exercise of revealing one’s feelings seemed so bizarre to me, so freakish and uncomfortable, that the exposure
of skin, the baring of the private body, seemed a logical consequence, in keeping with the proceedings.

Ben did his shirt up, being careful not to miss a button. We went on talking. Several minutes later, though, he stopped and said again, “I’m so embarrassed. Why didn’t you say anything?”

And again I was at a loss, shrugging, and answering with some timid platitude that must have given him more information about me than the entire rest of the session—perhaps all our sessions combined.

Here was a girl used to silence. Here was a girl used to hiding what was in her mind.

four

O
N THE MORNING OF MY THIRTY-SECOND
birthday, my phone rings early. I feel around for it on the nightstand. “Hello?”

I hear muffled breathing, a grunt that sounds like something heavy is being lifted. For a moment I think it’s some kind of crank call. Then my parents’ voices: “Happy Birthday to you—
dun-da-da-dun
! Happy Birthday to you—
dun-da-da-dun
! Happy Biiiiiirthday, dear Alison—
dun-da-da-dun
! Happy Birthday to you!”

My father punctuates the end of the song with tuba noises in the style of an Eastern European oompahpah band, true to his heritage, so the whole performance takes several minutes. I sit up in bed, lean my back against the headboard. Beside me, Degan pulls a pillow over his eyes.

“So?” Dad asks brightly. “How are you liking Toronto?”

“We just got here,” I say.

“Wait until you get a taste of the cost of it!”

“Thanks for the welcome,” I tease.

“The economy is crashing! Are you following the real estate news?”

“Dad,” I say. “Take some deep breaths.”

He mocks a heavy exhale.

There’s more muffled kerfuffle in the background, more grunting. Then he says abruptly, “I’d better go. I have to walk the dog,” and hangs up.

By the time I’m done on the phone, I hear the shower running. Degan comes out with a blue towel wrapped around his waist. “Happy Birthday, babe,” he says.

“Am I getting old?”

“Kind of.”

“I’m an old lady.”

“You’re five years younger than me.”

“Always,” I say.

He towels off his hair, buttons his shirt. Grabs a pair of pants from the back of the chair.

“Any big plans today?” he asks.

Good question.

“I might do some reading about Judaism,” I say.

“Don’t go crazy or anything.”

“Ha ha.”

His face goes serious and he nods. I’ve told him about meeting Rabbi Klein at the Griffin, about her comment “What a happy story.”

“I’ve always thought,” he starts to say, but he is distracted, checking his phone, pulling a comb through his hair.

“You’ve always thought what?”

“I don’t know. You and your family history. The secrecy. But you’ve always seemed kind of … Jewish.”

“Really? What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “It’s just a feeling.”

There’s a crash from down on the street, a garbage can being knocked over.

“I’m late,” he says. “We’ll talk tonight. And celebrate your birthday.”

“Okay, good luck today. Hope it goes well.”

He kisses me and runs to catch the streetcar.

When he’s gone, I wander through our rooms in my pyjamas, picking things up and putting them back down. I check Facebook, where I click on a raft of birthday messages. I notice my Jewish friends are also wishing each other a Happy New Year. It must be Rosh Hashanah. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know where to mark it, or how, or who with. Instead, I spend the day on the rumpled futon sheet reading
Help Me
by Eli Bloomberg, a young Jewish writer struggling with his Hasidic upbringing. I enjoy the read. There is comfort in the knowledge that Judaism is confusing for someone else, too, even for someone born and raised as a Jew. I Google him and see he’ll be interviewing another writer at the International Festival of Authors here in Toronto on the coming weekend. I decide to go hear him.

The event takes place on Sunday afternoon. I leave the house without telling Degan where I’m going. The bus down to the waterfront is packed full of old Italian men in undershirts, women with strollers, teenagers in flip-flops snapping their gum. By the time I change buses and find my way to the theatre, the interview has already started. Eli Bloomberg sits onstage in
an armchair opposite his subject. He seems immediately familiar. Not that I actually
recognize
him, but I have a strange sense of understanding what he’s about. He’s wearing a green blazer and his hair looks purposefully dishevelled.

Something about him reminds me of Kramer from
Seinfeld
. A smarter, more attractive Kramer.

I listen intently, take some notes. His questions are perceptive. When the interview wraps up, though, I collect my things and hurry toward the exit. Judaism draws me, repels me, draws me back. I’m exhausted just from sitting in the audience, a supposedly passive observer. All I can think about is getting home and crashing. And Degan will be wondering where I am.

Just as I’ve reached the door, I glance back and see Eli looking at me. He’s been talking to a petite brunette, but he walks away from her, leaving her with her mouth open, literally mid-sentence.

“I know you from somewhere,” he says to me.

I shrug and step back into the building; the door sighs heavily on its hinges.

“Really?”

He nods.

“I thought you seemed familiar, too.”

Up close, his eyes are a deep shade of green, his skin almost olive.

We run through our hometowns, our childhood friends, our schools, but find no common ground. “I just read
Help Me
,” I say. “So maybe that’s why. You’re pretty much the way I imagined you on the page.”

He brings a hand to his face, and I recognize the look other writers get when they’re wondering what you thought of their book.

“I liked it,” I assure him. “Would you sign it for me?”

“They’re not selling it here.” He shrugs, gesturing behind him to the festival’s bookstore.

“I brought my own copy.” I pull it from my purse.

“Oh,” he says, his face brightening. “Sure.”

He bends over my book to sign it, his shirt pulling up to show the smooth, hairless skin on his lower back. I see the brand name on the back pocket of his jeans. I try, but cannot picture him in the black Orthodox garb he must have grown up wearing. The woman he was talking with earlier has been waiting patiently to finish her sentence, but she now realizes Eli is done with her. “Anyway,” she says to him, “I’ll catch you later?”

He doesn’t look at her. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “So long.”

He passes me the signed book, holds my eye for half a second too long.

Next morning there’s an email: “Dear Alison, Nice to meet you briefly yesterday. I can’t believe how familiar you seemed. Maybe I’ve heard you read? Are you working on anything? Publishing? Reading anything good lately? E.”

I write back right away: “Good to meet you, too! My new book of poems is coming out in the spring. I’m working on a novel around the Holocaust, so I’ve been focusing my reading in that direction. What do you think I’d like?”

“I don’t know you well enough to say,” he answers. “Yet. How about dinner?”

five

I
’M DIGGING THROUGH MY WALLET
for an elusive twenty-dollar bill when I come across Rabbi Klein’s business card. On the back she has written a single word: Kolel.

I check out the website: The Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning. Something about the extensive list of programs and classes, this untapped store of knowledge about my family’s lost faith, makes me giddy with possibility. Their “signature course” is called Doing Jewish:

Begin with basics and explore Jewish life from a liberal perspective: holidays, life cycle, basic Jewish philosophy, and creating a Jewish home
.

When Degan gets home from work, I tell him about the class.

“Why don’t you sign up?” he asks, tossing his bag onto the floor in the corner of the hall.

“I don’t know. I feel kind of nervous about it.”

“Nervous why?”

“I don’t know,” I say again. “I’m not Jewish, right?”

“You sort of are.”

“And I’m pretty tired.”
Tired
, we both know, means depressed.

“Maybe it will cheer you up,” Degan says. He goes to the fridge and cracks a beer, then starts digging around for something to eat. The top shelf holds two tubs of plain organic yogourt, the bottom a limp head of broccoli. The crispers are empty. “I’ll call for takeout,” he says. Since arriving in Toronto, we’ve had takeout almost every night.

“I’m going to get groceries tomorrow,” I say.

He reaches for the phone and the pizza coupons.

“Do you really think I should take it?” I ask.

“Take what?”

“The class.”

“Why not?” He lifts his beer and has three long swallows.

I nod. “Oh,” I say, “and there’s something else. I met a guy.”

He raises his eyebrows.

I laugh. “Not a
guy
guy. A writer.”

“What kind of writer?”

“A Jewish one.”

Degan runs a thumb lightly around the lip of the bottle. “Okay,” he says.

“I’m going to have dinner with him,” I say.

“Okay,” he says again.

He starts dialling the pizza number.

“Do you mind?” I ask.

“Mind what?” Then: “Hello?”

“If I have dinner with him?”

“I’d like to order a large pizza for delivery,” he says into his phone. And then, to me: “I trust you.”

The Doing Jewish course starts on a Wednesday night in early October. I don’t know what I’m expecting: a large lecture hall, maybe, and a stuffy professor with horn-rimmed glasses and a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, I am shown into a small, brightly lit room decorated with young children’s crayoned attempts at the Hebrew alphabet. The teacher bustles in after me with her papers flying.

“I’m Rabbi Glickman,” she says, and nods curtly, challenging anyone to contradict her. She is small and thin, with her hair cropped close to her head. Her features have a tightness in contrast to the openness of Rachel Klein’s.

There is a dry-erase board at the front of the class. With a bold black marker she writes: WHAT IS JUDAISM?

The class is silent. Eight or ten strangers trying not to meet each other’s eyes.

“Is it a race?” Rabbi Glickman asks.

A blond woman in her forties with a wide gap between her front teeth puts up her hand. “It’s a religion.”

“Like any other?”

“It’s harder to join.”

Titters from our classmates.

“Your name is?” the rabbi asks.

“Debra.”

“Okay, Debra. Why do you think it is harder to join?”

“The Jews are the chosen people. You can’t
choose
to be chosen.”

Debra glances at an Asian woman sitting across the room. “At least,” she says quickly, “that’s how the thinking goes.”