Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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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 looks at her admiringly. Pam is smart in areas she isn’t, like economics and politics. Aliza is smart, too, but in a different way. Judith always thinks of the two of them together, “Pamanaliza,” because they’re inseparable, and also because they stand out at this school for having done interesting things with their lives so far — not just coming to the M.S.W. straight from a B.S.W. or a social work job, like most of the other students. Until three years ago, when one of Aliza’s knees went bad and she had to quit, she danced in a jazz troupe. Aliza looks like a dancer: slender and lithe, delicate yet dramatic, with sleek long black hair and skin as white as paper. Pam, on the other hand, is plain: a bushy-haired redhead with thick lips and eyelids who never wears make-up. She came to social work with a first-class honours degree in political science and economics, and also an impressive-sounding part-time job at the CBC.
Now Judith looks to her left at Cindy, seated in profile at the square table, twisting her hair. There’s nothing particularly interesting or impressive about Cindy. She’s a blonde, good-hearted, small-town girl who has lived all her life in Dunhill, and is clearly not as bright or sophisticated as the other three of them: all verbal, intense Torontonians, and Jewish at least to some degree. Aliza, like Judith, has two Jewish parents, but Pam is only one-quarter Jewish — through her mother’s father — and she also went at one point to a Catholic girls’ school, so she isn’t truly Jewish. But still she feels Jewish to Judith. Cindy continues to daydream and twist her hair, and Judith thinks: A heart of gold this person has. Definitely a person of the heart rather than the mind — someone wonderfully kind and caring — and the first one Judith calls whenever she has a question about homework.
There is silence around the table now: Aliza is sipping coffee, and Cindy and Judith are just waiting while Pam, scribbling on a napkin, does the math on what they owe each other. What we owe each other, thinks Judith, staring out the window at the rain. Until they started divvying up the articles a few minutes ago, they’d been having a discussion, prompted by a comment someone made in Greg’s class, about “privilege” and oppression: What constitutes real privilege or oppression, and what are the relative weights of different types of oppression? For example, this person asked, is it “worse” to be black than gay? Is it worse to be poor than disabled? Obviously, as Greg was quick to point out, one can be more than one thing — one can be poor, disabled, and gay — and anyway there shouldn’t be a “hierarchy of oppressions.” But it seems to Judith there probably is a hierarchy of oppressions, and a hierarchy of privilege, too.
Watching the rain lash against the windows now, she feels peaceful and contented. She can hardly believe it’s only been three weeks since school began — three weeks ago she didn’t even know any of these people. Yet now they’ve become, for this year at school at least, this year in galut, her home base, almost a substitute family. It is strange in one way, but in another way marvellous. Miraculous, even. All she did was enroll in the Dunhill School of Social Work, and now, presto! she has a life. An instant life: just add water and stir. People to be with. Things to do. A whole world she’s a part of. Temporarily, of course. This is not her real life; that is in Israel. But still, this is amazing. It’s as if she came home one day and found on her doorstep a big gift-wrapped box with a huge gold bow on the top.
Judith speaks, and her voice, raspy with emotion, breaks the silence. “I don’t know about being ‘privileged,’” she says to her gang. “But I feel very, very lucky.”
Ten minutes later, after swapping bills and coins and putting on their coats, they hurry in two pairs across the street, heads down against the rain, dodging the puddles and the racing river of mud near the curb. Aliza stops to prance in it joyfully in her tall red boots while Cindy and Judith reach the other side of the street, and as they run toward FRANK, Cindy mutters, “I wish we could just go home now.”
“Well, at least it’s Suzy and not Weick,” Judith answers.
Cindy doesn’t say anything. Judith has the impression now, and not for the first time, that Cindy is not as big a fan of Suzy as she is. Maybe she’s even a bit jealous that Judith likes Suzy so much. Together they run up the stairs, duck into the building, and stand there panting, waiting for the others. Aliza and Pam soon follow.
“You’re out of your mind,” Pam’s saying to Aliza, and Aliza is laughing, showing perfect white teeth, her long hair dripping. “You’re nuts, I mean it.”
The elevator comes and they ride to the fourth floor. “Nuts,” says Pam, as they walk into Suzy’s class.
Suzy sees them and smiles. Judith feels instantly happy and at the same time an inner ache. A part of her has been waiting all week for this class. But not, in fact, for this class; for Suzy. She has been wanting to see Suzy again.
Everyone takes a seat, Suzy begins to speak, and Judith feels, as she always does in her class, a fine, almost invisible thread, like a spider’s, stretching between them. Suzy looks at her often when she lectures, more so than at anyone else, and whenever she asks the class a question, she turns first toward her, as if appealing to her silently in some way. It’s as if Judith, on Suzy’s compass, is north, and the needle keeps flying there. Sometimes Judith answers Suzy’s questions (almost always correctly), but lately she’s started looking down or away, not wanting to be seen by her classmates as a suck. Either way, this class feels like a dialogue between her and Suzy, with everyone else mere spectators. She’s asked herself if she was just imagining all this, but apparently it’s noticeable also to others.
“Teacher’s pet,” Cindy said to her on the second Monday of school, during the break in Suzy’s class. They were walking to the cafeteria, with Pam and Aliza not far behind. Suzy had just been teaching them about paralinguistics, a form of nonverbal behaviour that includes, among other things, people’s tone of voice, and can tell you a lot about how a person really feels. So before answering, Judith replayed Cindy’s comment in her head, listening for envy or meanness in her paralinguistics, but there didn’t seem to be any. It sounded like Cindy was just saying what she saw.
“No, I’m not,” said Judith. But she blushed and felt gratified. She wanted Suzy to like her best of all. She got her wish, too: at the end of that class, she lingered behind to ask Suzy a question, and Suzy invited