CHARLOTTE DOES NOT SEEM SURPRISED to hear we’ve been fighting. “As a wedding approaches, the stakes in a relationship get higher,” she says.
“The funny thing is, Degan wasn’t as worried about Eli before, when he might have had cause to be. And now he’s worried for no reason.”
“Are you still thinking about Eli?”
“No. I’m not.” I weigh my words and find them to be true. The sentiment flakes a bit on the surface, but the core of it is genuine.
Charlotte says, “Perhaps it’s now safe for Degan to acknowledge his worry. Now that the real threat is gone.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I concede.
Charlotte crosses her ankles demurely. “So if Eli is out of the picture, who will be your Jewish guide?”
I pause. I can’t tell if she’s being rhetorical.
“I’ll be my own Jewish guide?” I say, in a little kid voice, shrugging and looking to her to see if this is the answer she’s after.
“Is that what you want?”
“I asked you first.”
She smiles. There’s a light layer of concealer caught in the creases around her mouth, but her words are pure, unadorned. She’s asking me what help I need.
“I’ve been trying to muscle through it,” I say. “Alone.”
“Because you want to do it alone or because you feel you have no other option?”
I shrug again. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, actually. It isn’t.”
“Who’s going to help me? My father certainly isn’t.”
“Should he?”
“Shouldn’t he? He’s the parent, right? Aren’t I supposed to be able to look to him?”
“You’re angry at him.”
“I’m not angry at him,” I snap.
She nods, her face placid. I have a flash of what it would be like to slap her. I puff out my cheeks and slowly let the air out. “Maybe I am angry,” I say. “But I don’t want to be. I get it. At least, intellectually. He didn’t grow up with it. He knows nothing about it. I know way more than he does.”
“Does that also make you angry?”
My eyes fill with tears.
“Helpless,” she suggests. “Sad.” It is unlike her to supply me with the words. I nod, biting my lower lip.
“Make room for the feeling,” she tells me.
I give in and let myself cry, hard and gasping, for several minutes, leaning over with my face in my palms. Then I look up and shake my head. I take a deep breath, glance around the room. “I feel better,” I say, and laugh. The heavy dread is gone. “That’s all it takes? To, uh, what did you say? Make room for the feeling?”
“Sometimes.”
I pull on my right earlobe. “I always feel that if I start to cry, I won’t be able to stop.” As I say this, I remember Granny Pick saying the same thing. My inheritance.
I look to Charlotte, my face scrubbed clean. “The thing about the Jewish guide,” I say. “What should I do?” Only very occasionally do I allow myself to ask her advice directly.
“You’d like to find someone—someone appropriate—to help you navigate the new cultural Judaism you’re discovering.”
I nod to confirm.
“Why don’t you ask for a guide?”
“Ask who?”
She sweeps her hand through the air above her head and raises her eyebrows.
“You mean, like, ask the universe?” I giggle. “Like, put it out there?”
“Yes,” she said. “Or however you’d like to think about it.”
I nod. Why not. How could it hurt?
At home in bed I fold my hands discreetly under my pillow. To be seen—by Degan, by myself—in a real prayer position, on my knees (which is the Christian prayer position anyway, I realize), would be too much. But I close my eyes, and this time when I try to picture God, the image that comes is a country sky, dark and full of stars. “I would like a friend,” I whisper. “Dear God, please bring me a Jewish friend.”
On Sunday morning I gather up my water bottle and my knee pads and walk through the slush to the contact jam. I wave at Michael from across the room and warm up with a woman with spiky red hair and a purple body suit. We tumble around a little, crack each other’s backs. The relief of physical communication below the busy level of my head.
Toronto is a big city, but, like any place, circles overlap. The writers and musicians, the painters, the dancers. I’m not surprised to see Shayna, Eli’s friend with the beautiful voice, stretching out her long legs against the banister.
She sees me, too, and gives a little half wave. “Alison, right?”
I walk the few metres to where she’s standing.
“Do you come to the jam?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“Not always. Often. But we know each other from—”
“I remember,” she says.
This time the pause is comfortable. We lean against the wall, watching as dancers begin to assemble their bodies into complex puzzles. Ariel flounces past in dinosaur pyjama pants, waggling his fingers in my direction. Shayna takes up her stretching again, unfolding her long limbs the way a grasshopper might. “How’s it all going?” she asks, holding her heel in her hand, extending her leg while bracing herself against the wall.
“Good,” I say. I scrunch up my face. “I can’t remember what I told you last time, but I’m studying for conversion. My fiancé and I.”
She lowers her leg and looks at me properly for the first time. “You’re converting?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Is your fiancé Jewish?”
“No.”
“Wow,” she says. “That’s brave.”
She laughs.
“No, I’m serious,” she says. She looks me in the eye to make sure I hear what she’s saying. “Most people who convert are marrying someone Jewish.”
I feel the blood rush to my face, feel that exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that comes from being seen when you’re vulnerable.
“It’s a problem that he’s not,” I say. “The beit din doesn’t want to create an intermarriage.”
“What do you mean?”
“If they convert me and I then marry a Gentile …”
She squints. “They know your dad is Jewish?”
I nod unhappily. Shayna sighs. “We have a history of turning people away.”
We rest our eyes on the dance floor in front of us, the mass of moving bodies. Someone grunts with pleasure or exertion; someone’s bare foot squeaks across the floorboards. I hear something that sounds suspiciously like a fart, but nobody comments or apologizes.
“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Shayna says.
Up close, I see the space on her forehead where her eyebrows have been plucked.
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.