Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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blather on with that mealy-mouthed crap when, underneath it all, you understand exactly how the world really works.”
She turns and looks straight into his eyes. “Yes, Bobby. I do know, as you put it, exactly how the world really works. But maybe I want there to be more to life than just being born, accruing as much wealth as possible, and then dying. What’s so awful about that? At least I’m not just giving up on the world.”
He looks at her more gently now. “Fair enough. I agree, as you know, that there’s more to life than making money. But Judith, don’t waste yourself on lost causes. Don’t throw away all that talent and passion fighting windmills. It’s one thing to try and change things where you have some reasonable chance of success. But banging your head against a brick wall isn’t going to help you or anybody else.”
“I’m not banging my head against a brick wall. Anyway, what would you know? You always play the game — you never challenge, or try to change, anything. You weren’t like this when we were in high school. What happened, Bobby? How did you become so conservative? How did you turn into such a right-wing shmuck?”
“A right-wing shmuck?!” says Bobby. “Well, how did you turn into a left-wing shmuckette?”
“Shmuckette?”
“Well, if there’s a shmuck, there must be a shmuckette.”
She tries not to smile, but can’t help it. “You learned that word in French class, I suppose,” she says.
“From Madame Benoît.” Now they’re both smiling, picturing their wizened prude of a grade nine French teacher teaching them the word shmuckette. “She also taught me this,” he says, leaning forward, bringing his face close to hers: “Ma chérie. Je t’aime.”
“Yeah, sure. Madame Benoît taught you to say, ‘Je t’aime.’ Madame Benoît was your ‘chérie.’”
“You are my chérie. My one and only chérie.”
“Oy,” she says, but smiles. Then she grins.
“Ma chér-r-rie,” says Bobby in what she recognizes as his best attempt at a Parisian accent, and he swoops and plants a kiss on her laughing mouth. His lips feel smooth and firm. Younger than Moshe’s. Then he kisses her neck. Her ear. Her eyes. And again her mouth. His lips on hers are somehow both cool and warm at the same time, like sun-drenched marble. His lips move down and kiss her throat, and now they are sucking gently on her left nipple. Then harder. She forgets all about politics. She forgets about everything.
An hour later she wakes up, déshabillée on the living-room carpet, to the sound of pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and the smell of burning meat.
— 4 —
On Monday Judith makes the hour-long drive to Dunhill, again listening to Israel at Forty. When she arrives, there’s an atmosphere of excitement: that special crackle in the air of the first day of school. Her first class today is with Weick, and he starts off with another class go-around. When her turn comes, Judith speaks briefly, offering an abridged version of what she said four days ago. But she adds, since this course is “Knowledge and Values in Social Work,” that knowledge interests her more than values because it seems to her that most social workers’ values are anyway quite similar, and she’s eager to increase her knowledge about the latest social work theories, having been out of school for the past ten years. When she finishes, she sees Cindy off to the right, waving two fingers at her, and she waves back. Then she recognizes, a little past Cindy, some of the other students from Orientation, including the two women she rode in the elevator with that day. They’re sitting together in the row in front of Cindy, and the pretty dark-haired one is wearing a magenta Chinese-style jacket. Judith didn’t pay much attention to their spiels during Orientation, but now when they introduce themselves, she listens closely. The one with the magenta jacket, Aliza, used to be a jazz dancer, and the plain redhead, Pam, was in honours economics and poli sci. They both speak ironically and are obviously bright, and Judith decides she wants to know them better.
After the go-around, Weick begins to teach. He’s a stunningly terrible teacher. Among the worst Judith has ever had — lecturing in a monotone from ragged yellowish notes, and hardly ever raising his eyes to look at the students, even though there are only twenty of them in the class. Furthermore, the material he’s droning on about is stuff she already knows backwards and forwards from her B.S.W. Weick is teaching Systems Theory, a theory that was revolutionary in the late 1960s and 1970s, but now is old and tired. It was already stale even thirteen years ago when she first learned it. This theory is past its expiration date, she thinks. If they put expiration dates on orange juice, why can’t they put them on theories?
Weick keeps droning on, and after twenty-five minutes — when it looks like even he is about to fall asleep from boredom — he, for the first time, asks the class a question: “Can anyone give me an example of a system?”
Nobody answers. The question is too stupid. Every student in the room, having done a B.S.W., has already written three, four, maybe five term papers related in one way or another to Systems Theory. He can’t possibly be asking them what he seems to be. It would be like asking, “Can someone give me an example of a fruit?”
At the front of the room he waits. The silence becomes awkward. Finally he answers his own question. Proudly, like a five-year-old triumphant at knowing the answer. “The solar system!” he cries, drawing on the board a big circle and some smaller surrounding ones. “The sun with the planets revolving around it —”
Judith nearly groans out loud. I can’t stand this, she thinks. I really can’t. I know I promised Daddy I’d do this M.S.W., but there’s no way I can take a year of this. I can’t stand even another half-hour. It’s unbearable. She doesn’t dare glance at Cindy, or even Pam or Aliza, for fear that if they make eye contact, she’ll roll her eyes, giving herself away. So she keeps her eyes lowered to the page, like an ox with its eyes glued to the ground as it circles endlessly with its yoke. But after a minute she picks up her pen, and on the blank page before her, writes: I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this. She continues writing this over and over, like a pupil being punished — which is exactly how she feels — and forced to copy the same phrase a hundred times. She isn’t counting, but she writes this many times, punctuating it now and again with Stupid stupid stupid or Fuck fuck fuck. Once she writes Weick is weak. Weick’s a freak. Then there’s the sound of chairs scraping the floor, and it’s over. Weick has dismissed them early because it’s the first day. She approaches Cindy, who introduces her to Pam and Aliza. They all chat together politely, waiting in line to get out of the classroom. But once in the hallway and safely out of hearing distance, the four of them, huddled together, explode.
“Do you fuckin’ believe it …?”
“Systems Theory?! Fuckin’ Systems Theory!”
“Not one new idea — not one — I didn’t already know.”
“God! So boring! I thought I’d die!”
They go on like this in joyful outrage as they leave the building and then cross the quadrangle toward the cafeteria.
“What if all the other classes are like this?” Aliza asks.
“They’d better not be, or I’ll quit this program,” says Pam. “Can you believe they’re still teaching Systems Theory? It’s shocking. Hasn’t anything new happened in social work in all these years?”
“Apparently not,” says Aliza.
“Anyway,” asks Cindy, “what is Systems Theory doing in a course on knowledge and values?”
“Well, theories are a part of knowledge,” says Aliza. “But it’s probably the only theory he knows — that’s why he’s teaching it.”
“Or maybe he doesn’t have any,” says Judith.
“Any what?”
“Knowledge. Or values.”
“Ooooh …”
They