The Book of Jonah (20 page)

Those in her class at Gustav's who hoped their valedictorian would get her comeuppance when it came time for college acceptance letters were disappointed. She and her mother were cooking dinner together in the kitchen when her father came home from teaching—the propitiously fat envelope adorned with the blue Yale seal on top of the pile of mail. She remembered hearing the familiar, marchlike chords of “All Things Considered” on the kitchen radio as she tore it open. There wasn't much doubt as to its contents, of course; but then, had there ever been any doubt? She had gotten gold stars, glowing assessments—A's, 1600s, 5s, 800s—her whole life. She was the daughter of two PhDs, both of whom knew a thing or two about college admissions—knew a professor or two, for that matter, at Yale. It would not have been much of an exaggeration to say that they considered her getting into the college of her choice Judith's birthright. But even if none of them was surprised, when she read from the top page of the bundle of papers inside the envelope the word “Congratulations,” they all wept and held one another.

It was strange, Judith observed, as they ate ice cream from the freezer, their eyes still red, how they had all worked so hard to get to the point that would mark the dissolution of their family as they knew it. “It's the way of things,” Hannah replied. “All we can do is prepare you as best we can for the life you're going to have. We wouldn't want to lock you in your room for the rest of your life.”

“Pushing you out of the nest!” David added—but he couldn't sustain the jocular tone with which he'd started, and as he finished he began to cry again.

Over the following months, Judith at times did feel mournful at the prospect of leaving her childhood home, her parents. More often, though, she felt excited: for new challenges—for the next step. She read and highlighted the Yale course catalog; she emailed with professors in the departments she was considering for her major (English, French, Religion); she read about Puritanism, the New Haven Colony, the founding of Yale in 1701. And when she did feel worst about being separated from David and Hannah, she would remind herself, or they would remind her, that they would all always be only a car ride apart.

In the spring, she got an email from her future roommate. This was a girl named Milim Oh: Korean, from northern New Jersey, also graduating that June from an all-girls private school. She seemed as concerned as Judith that they establish their room as a sanctum of mutually comfortable tranquillity: lights out at eleven, music they didn't agree on in headphones. Suffice it to say, they hit it off from the start.

On an appropriately sunny and clear-skied summer afternoon, Judith graduated from Gustav Girls' Academy. She and her classmates dressed in white, wore garlands of white gardenias in their hair. White was not a good color for Judith. In the pictures she looked a bit like a giant candle with a stumpy, bulbous black wick. A former Gustav's graduate, now a justice of the state supreme court, gave the commencement speech. “Wherever the years ahead take you,” she told them, “the lessons you have learned here at Gustav's will be a wind at your back.”

That afternoon, David and Hannah threw a party for Judith in the expansive backyard of their two-story brick Colonial home: hired caterers, had a tent set up, invited friends of the family, Judith's friends and classmates, her favorite teachers (most of them, anyway). Everyone hugged Judith, told her how proud they were of her, how bright her future was. She did not quite know how to conduct herself as the center of all this attention; she was not arrogant enough to take it all as a matter of course, nor was she exactly humble enough to be genuinely embarrassed by it. She ended up making frequent trips to the bar for plastic cups of seltzer and then repeatedly needing to go into the house to pee.

Judith's aunt Naomi and her daughter, Margaretha, attended the party, as well. Judith's mother and her sister did not get along well—were, as David put it, “incompatible at birth.” David and Hannah were reticent about the details, but from what Judith understood, Naomi had always positioned herself as the free-spirited ying to Hannah's tightly wound, conventional yang, which for decades had been infuriating Hannah as nothing else did. And because Hannah and Naomi rarely saw each other, Judith rarely saw Margaretha, her only cousin, despite the fact that they were the same age.

“Your house really kicks ass,” Margaretha told her as she sat cross-legged on the the lawn, away from where the other guests were mingling. In contrast to Judith's white-and-lace, Margaretha was wearing a billowy tie-dye dashiki shirt and extravagantly ripped jeans.

“Thanks,” said Judith.

“I can't believe you're going to Yale. I mean, who actually goes to Yale? Y'know?”

“Thanks,” repeated Judith. “Do you know where you're going yet?” It was the middle of June, so if Margaretha was going anywhere she would know by now, but Judith was trying to be tactful.

Margaretha shrugged. “I might go live in Holland with my dad.” She ran her palms over the tips of the grass. “I don't really believe in an ordered existence. No offense.” Judith nodded with a certain unease—feeling she was enacting her mother's relationship with her sister in this conversation with her cousin. “Do you want to go up to your room and get high?” Margaretha asked. “I have really good weed with me.” Judith had to admit she was intrigued—but the idea of smoking pot when all her neighbors and teachers and parents' friends had gathered at her house seemed dumb, inappropriate. (In later years, she would remember the offer kindly, though.)

“No thanks,” Judith told her.

“That's cool,” Margaretha answered. “Wait a minute, stand right there.” She reached into the knit purse sitting beside her on the grass and took out a Polaroid camera. “I'm doing this art project. It's like, people's faces and the worlds they live in. And you and your house and the lawn and everything, it's totally perfect.” Then, before Judith could respond, she said, “Smile!” and took the picture. “I'll send you the whole thing when it's finished,” Margaretha told her as she waved the Polaroid in the air. Judith nodded—in spite of herself greatly skeptical that she would ever see this Polaroid again.

A few weeks later, the Bulbrooks took one last family vacation before Judith left home: went to Australia, snorkeled at the Great Barrier Reef. When they returned in early August, they started in to the practical work of getting Judith to college: loaded her belongings into cardboard boxes, bought her a new computer and a new bathrobe and new sheets and new anything else they could think of. She said her goodbyes to her friends, these girls scattering to elite colleges of their own—Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and the rest. There was some sadness to these goodbyes, but it was a qualified sadness. They were all leaving for places they wanted to be.

The night before she and her parents were to drive to New Haven, Judith found she couldn't sleep, her mind too crowded with thoughts to be had—expectations, hopes, fears, remembrances—to find repose. Finally she got up and, walking quietly through the sleeping house, took the keys from the bowl in the foyer and got into the family's station wagon, now packed with cardboard boxes they had filled with the possessions she would bring with her to college. She drove for a while with no destination in mind—simply retracing routes through her hometown she'd taken for as long as she could remember, until eventually she came to the trailhead, to the trail that led to the creek: the setting of the most potent, most piquant memories from what she had already begun to think of as her childhood. Dressed in her Gustav's cross-country shorts and the Yale sweatshirt her parents had given her after her matriculation, she walked through the woods in the dark—trying to take in the fear she felt as part of the night itself—came to the edge of the water.

The moon shone through the gaps in the trees, its light silvery and scattering over the creek's black surface. She identified an image of herself in this, in the interplay of blackness and light. The gurgling of the creek was louder at night, she discovered—its sound as if echoing off the larger silence in the woods. She took off her shoes—felt the pebbles and soft ground giving against the soles of her feet—and then she stepped into the water.

Every senior at Gustav's had to complete an honors project to graduate. Judith had written about the Jewish conception of time. Since her trip to Israel the summer after her sophomore year, Judaism had become more central to her study, to her thinking. There were even days when she toyed with the idea of becoming a rabbi. (And who knows, she sometimes thought later—maybe she would have.) In her honors project, she'd written about how the narrative of the Hebrew Bible was linear—how each event led to the next, and in all these events there was a progression, of genealogy and of history: God's promise to Abraham, the redemption of his descendants from Egypt, the gift of the Ten Commandments to Moses, and on and on and on. This notion of linear time contrasted with time as it existed within Jewish ritual, which was not linear but rather circular, cyclical, built around holidays that recurred every week, every year. These two kinds of time came together, she had written, in the life of every observant Jew, which was organized around the observance of key life-cycle events: circumcision or naming; bar or bat mitzvah; marriage under a
chuppah
; the circumcision or naming of one's own children. “Every week ends with Shabbat, the day of rest,” Judith had written in her conclusion, the text of which had been heavily adorned with laudatory check marks by her teacher. “This gives every week the same shape, the same character, the same themes. In just this way, Jewish life-cycle events, from birth to death, give every life the same essential structure. Each life, whatever the differences in its specifics, is guided by the same essential story, across the generations, and all throughout time.”

When she'd written these words, she had believed them—the concept of bullshit was anathema to Judith Klein Bulbrook. But she had believed them on the level of fact, of reason—she had not considered them as having a deeper truth—a truth the words themselves could only fail to articulate. She did not feel them as she did now: standing to her ankles in the cold water of the creek, a few feet from where she had lost her virginity—on her last night living in the only town where she had ever lived. She saw in her mind's eye an image of ascending spirals of every color—felt herself a part of this image—safely held within it. Time was not a chaotic tumble forward, nor was it a steady dwindling into death, she thought. Time was ordered, it was governed—it was Godly.

She knelt down, her hands and her knees now submerged. If the water had been deep enough, she thought she might have submerged herself fully, stripped naked—to feel herself, as much as possible, a part of it. “I offer myself to this,” she prayed. “God, make me a part of your story.”

She remained in this reverent crouch until she started to lose feeling in her toes and fingers, until her arched back began to ache. Then she straightened, and made her way carefully back to shore. She put on her shoes, tied the laces, returned to the car. She drove herself home, and went to sleep. The next morning, her parents took her to college.

*   *   *

Judith's parting from her parents was, in the end, fairly subdued. Her mother had made her bed in her dorm room; they had all met Milim Oh, who was as polite and agreeable and reserved as Judith was when she met Milim's parents. Then Judith walked David and Hannah back to the now-empty station wagon, hugged each of them goodbye—and that was that. They had all had so many crying jags over the last few months in anticipation of this moment, maybe they were relieved the moment itself had finally come—and to find that it was actually so manageable, could have the features of any other goodbye. They would be seeing one another again in only a couple of weeks, as well: Hannah, in support of her new book of poetry, would be giving a series of readings, one of which would be at an independent bookstore in New Haven. Her parents would have dinner with her before continuing on to Boston and then flying to California for a string of readings at schools on the West Coast. Academic life would offer them many such opportunities to get together, they all knew.

Judith had several days of orientation events before the upperclassmen arrived and classes started. She met with her adviser, heard speeches by various deans and administrators, ate lunches in the courtyard with her residential college. The school was unembarrassed in its attempts to inculcate its new students with the idea that, yes, this was the finest institution of higher education in the country, and, yes indeed, they were now among the academic elite—the elect. Predictably, Judith was unembarrassed in her embrace of these notions: They were more or less exactly what she'd been looking for in attending the school.

It was during orientation week that she got drunk for the first time. Two boys on her floor managed to get cases of beer and a plastic bottle of vodka, and held an impromptu party in their room. Judith had done a little bit of drinking before: had snuck sips from the liquor cabinet at friends' houses during sleepovers, had drunk a couple of beers at parties during her senior year. But she'd never had sufficient will to get drunk to overcome her dislike for the taste of alcohol. Tonight, though—with the abandon of any freshman who'd just left home—she had the will. They played a card game that involved chugging and doing shots and ordering other people to drink, all the while listening to Wagner's
Die Walküre.
Later they played another game, called I Never, which afforded Judith the opportunity to impress her classmates with how sexually experienced she actually was. By midnight the party collapsed into what would colloquially be called a shit-show: nineteen-year-olds throwing up in the hallway, tearfully calling their long-distance high school boyfriends or girlfriends, Milim passed out on the couch in the lounge. Judith ended up in the bed of a soccer player who lived two floors above her—kept her underwear on and enjoyed herself just fine. The next morning she ran the perimeter of the campus until the skull-throbbing headache of her hangover (which she was even a bit proud of, recognizing it as the first of her life) had subsided, then spent the next three hours choosing her courses for the semester. As she walked among the stately cream-stone buildings to bring her adviser the appropriate form—the leaves of the trees on New Haven Green giving the first hints of their autumn colors—she realized she was in love with college.