The Book of Jonah (10 page)

2.
JUDITH, OR THE GOOD STUDENT

Judith had one of those happy, complete-unto-itself childhoods that seem to exist as a sort of aspirational fairy tale in the American mind.

Her parents were upper middle class, steadily employed, stable people, in love with each other and in love with their only daughter, committed to giving Judith as perfect a girlhood as possible. The family took ski trips to Colorado, beach trips to Hawaii, culturally edifying trips to Paris and London and Athens and Israel; they went on safari in South Africa when Judith graduated junior high. Her birthdays were always resoundingly celebrated, she received a present on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah. As far back as she could remember, she was encouraged, she was supported, she was continually reassured as to how special and brilliant and beautiful she was.

And somehow in response to all this, Judith worked nonstop. She was one of those kindergartners who was thrilled the day she got her first piece of homework: happy to get it, proud to do it. On the bulletin board in the classroom recording the number of books each student had read, the line of cutout stars tacked beside Judith's name was always several inches longer than any other child's. She would put herself to sleep reciting the multiplication tables, one through twelve; she prepared for science or history tests by creating fat stacks of note cards that she would study one by one, over and over, with monkish concentration. Her greatest disciplinary problem as a child was reading ahead in her books against her teachers' instructions.

She was the one who, at twelve, had requested an SAT tutor, knowing full well it was a test she would not have to take for more than four years. But she was hardly the sort of girl who shied away from the extremes of preparation. Once, when she and her parents had gone over to a neighbor's for Passover, she spent the pre-Seder mingling time sitting on the rug and working on her Latin homework on the coffee table. Observing this, the mother of the hostess—a compact old woman with brilliantly silver hair and the weathered skin of someone who had spent the greater part of her adult life either over a stove or on the beach in Florida—said of her, “She's like a dog with a bone, that one.”
Os, ossis,
thought Judith.

Her labors were not limited to schoolwork, either. There were also the many activities—in theory recreational but, as she got older, intended more and more to enhance what her father called “the old college application.” In elementary school she took piano and private French lessons and pottery. By high school, to these had been added model UN, debate, various honor societies, B'nai B'rith Girls (local and regional), monthly volunteering at the local soup kitchen, and running cross-country.

This last area was the one in which Judith distinguished herself least. Though she was theoretically built like a distance runner—unusually long-limbed and tall since girlhood—she was not athletic, and the rituals of team sports (the whooping after victories, the sobbing after losses) did not come naturally to her. The dynamics of the sport were intuitive enough, familiar enough, though: Just go. And the greater purpose, as her father only occasionally had to remind her, was to demonstrate that she was a well-rounded young woman.

By the end of her sophomore year, it was clear Judith would have enough credits to graduate from high school a year early. This situation was deemed worthy of an official family meeting, so Judith and her parents gathered in the living room, sat on the couch underneath the portrait of Judith's father's grandfather—ancient, white-bearded, dour in black coat and black skullcap—looking, Judith always thought, as though he'd stepped into the painting directly from some authentic Jewish
shtetl
past.

“I'll be honest, I'm selfish,” her father, David, said, in his jokey, half-ironic way. He was a professor of literature, who had at the time recently completed a highly praised translation of
The Canterbury Tales
. “I don't want to lose my favorite person in the world a year early.”

“We don't need to frame it that way, David,” her mother, Hannah, corrected him. She was a prizewinning poet and novelist and an artist-in-residence-cum-professor at the same college where Judith's father taught. “Sweetheart,” Judith's mother said to her, “you can have our advice if you want it, but ultimately this is your decision. And we'll support you regardless. But,” she added delicately, “I think it's important to remember, you have your whole life to be an adult.”

“Very true,” her father assented quickly, winkingly.

“Your days as a child are fleeting,” her mother said, and snapped in the air—a flourish typical of her mother.

The three of them discussed the issue at length—weighed the advantages and disadvantages with regard to college applications; considered the possibility of a gap year and how it might be spent; speculated on the social implications of starting college at seventeen. And, in the end, Judith decided she would not graduate high school early, but would instead spend her senior year compiling AP credits that could be used to graduate from college early. Her logic—for which David and Hannah commended her—was that she could still put herself a year ahead in her education, but without sacrificing her last year of high school with her friends and without having to enter college as the youngest person on her freshman floor. Plus, it was the financially prudent decision: a fourth year at her private high school, Gustav Girls' Academy, though not cheap, would be cheaper than a fourth year at whatever private college she ended up attending. Of course, her parents told her that financial considerations shouldn't matter to her. But really, none of the logic mattered to Judith at all. She made her decision because she agreed with her father: She didn't want to lose a year with her favorite people, either. She didn't want to miss any family meetings.

It was not as if Judith was in any hurry to be done with the work of high school, either. True, she was often stressed, nearly always sleep-deprived. But these were not conditions she minded. In fact, she took a certain pride in her fatigue—as though it were a state to be aspired to. From this perspective, she could appreciate better the notions of athletics: When she and her teammates were sweating and staggering up the hill on Triangle Street, she felt a particular form of communion with them—the same she felt walking into the library at Gustav Girls' Academy on a Saturday to see it crowded with her classmates, her mammoth backpack heavy on her shoulders with books and binders.

Later in her life—when she would occupy long hours at galleries and auctions, staring at works of art she might buy to decorate the walls of the Colonel's casinos—she wondered quite what had impelled young Judith to work quite so hard. She had been, if anyone was, a child of the leisure class. Why, then, had there been so little leisure?

Some of it, she understood, was just the twists of her DNA—“who she was.” She had classmates at Gustav's who smoked pot between classes, went to Ani DiFranco shows on the weekends. But the majority—even the vast majority—had been little terrors of self-discipline, like her. The differences between most of her classmates and her were the differences in degrees between fervor and fanaticism.

The work, Judith came to believe, was somehow intrinsic to the proposition of being a daughter of the upper middle class. On the most basic level, Judith and most of those she went to school with were raised to believe that the key to success in life was hard work: to have the life and career you wanted, you had to go to a good college; to get into a good college, you had to do well in high school and in everything else; and to do well in everything required hard work. It was the fundamental proposition—the promise—of American achievement. Yet the intensity of the effort, she understood later, was out of proportion to this logic. The 5:00
A.M.
wake-ups, the summers at SAT-prep camps, the time spent studying in class, outside class, in the car on the way to National Honor Society meetings: It was as if they felt they owed it to themselves, to their parents, to the big bedrooms in which they slept and to the new cars in which they were driven and to the backyard pools in which they swam. It was as if the work, finally, made them not rich, but deserving.

There was also for Judith—as for many of them—another element to her diligence, though it was one she tended not to dwell on in her adult life: She was Jewish. Her family was not observant in the Orthodox sense of the word—they didn't keep kosher, didn't refrain from watching television or handling money on Friday night. But Judaism was important to them. They belonged to a Reform synagogue, went once a month for Shabbat and on many of the (major) holidays. They participated in any food drives the synagogue held and made regular donations to MAZON and to the ADL, understanding such giving to be as much a practice of their religion as eating matzo on Passover. There was Judaic artwork throughout the house, a
mezuzah
on the front door. Hannah, whose own mother was a survivor of Buchenwald, always set her novels among the highly Jewish milieu in Philadelphia in which she'd been raised; she won a Brochstein Medal for her translations of Yiddish poetry. And perhaps most powerfully—there was among the family a collective reverence for thought, for academics, for scholarship. For Judith, the obligation to study had been inextricable from her idea of what it meant to be a Jew. The Jews, she was taught, were the Chosen People—and this was not a guarantee of exceptionalism but instead an obligation to carry on a tradition that included the articulation of monotheism, the founding of many of the world's great philosophies, the invention of psychotherapy, and the discovery of relative physics. Her most profound moments of religious feeling came not in temple, but rather when she would be in her bedroom working on a paper or problem set, and hear her father typing away in his study; hear her mother gently, quietly reciting verse. Then Judith would feel—would feel she knew—that God was real, imminently real, and they were all a part of something much larger than themselves.

But again, as an adult, Judith didn't think much about such memories—and if she did, her attention soon returned to the Hirst or Koons she had been charged with buying at auction; she would maybe hold before the work a fabric swatch from a curtain—try to envision it all.

*   *   *

By the time Judith began high school, her parents—despite being so strictly proud of her—sometimes did worry about their daughter, who appeared to them so profoundly studious, maybe to the exclusion of other things she might have been. She had a couple of friends going back to elementary school but could not be called popular; there was a boyfriend for a few months during her junior year, but they had immediately recognized that he was hopelessly overmatched beside their daughter (indeed, literally so, as Judith was three inches taller). And while they were not lying when they told her how beautiful they thought she was—inside and out—neither did they claim that this beauty was of a conventional kind.

Judith herself recognized she had pulled a few of the least desirable cards from her parents' combined genetic deck. She had her father's long, lanky frame, but without the unexpected grace that made him a good dancer at weddings. She had her mother's proud beak of a nose, but without the delicacy of eyes and mouth that had once induced Hunter S. Thompson to drunkenly proposition her at a party in the early seventies. (She declined, or so she said.) Least fortunately of all, Judith had inherited the hair of David's mother—what the girls in B'nai B'rith Girls cheerfully referred to as her Jewfro: jet-black, Brillo coarse, antigravitational in its growth. Judith and Hannah tried innumerable strategies over the years to tame it—involving the use of dozens of different conditioners, wide-toothed combs of various compositions, mornings of flat ironing, an entire summer of professional straightening—but ultimately concluded there was simply nothing to be done. For all of high school and college and for her year of graduate school, Judith wore her hair in two slablike waves, separated by a side part.

But Judith was not an overly self-conscious teenager. She did have uncomfortable moments of visualizing herself as she walked down the hall at school: the tallest in her class, with a gangling gait, elbows and knees more prominent than breasts. But she tempered her awareness that she was a somewhat odd-looking young woman with the confidence that there was something compelling in this oddness—in the stark contrast of her pale skin and her black hair, in the small round mole just below her left eye. If this unconventional look was not to be appreciated now, she had faith it would be someday. Besides, half the indisputably beautiful girls at Gustav's were anorexic. Literally none of the teenage girls she knew seemed entirely happy with their appearance.

And she could not help but derive at least some added bodily satisfaction from having lost her virginity to a twenty-five-year-old.

Judith's parents would have worried less about their daughter's social life if they'd known that while she was indeed profoundly studious, she was not merely so. Indeed, she prided herself on this broadness of character. But if her parents had had a fuller picture of their daughter's life—interior and exterior—they would have only worried more, and with better reason.

The intensity Judith showed in her schoolwork was only one manifestation of a general intensity she was aware of in her character—a kind of insatiable avidity that at times got out of her control. When she was eight, her Hebrew school teacher explained that the
yad
in the glass case on the principal's desk had been saved from a Lithuanian synagogue burned during World War II. Judith stole this—and for two weeks she would lock the door of her room and secretly admire the beauty of the
yad
's weathered bronze, the elegantly articulated fingers; would sleep with it under her pillow, as though trying to absorb the potency of loss and survival and holiness the object seemed to her to emanate. Then the rabbi gathered all the students of the Hebrew school into the
shul
and talked for forty impassioned minutes about the legacy of the Shoah, the necessity of its remembrance in object and thought, the inestimable value of artifacts like the
yad
—and about ten words into this, Judith realized, with the suddenness of being shaken awake, that despite the sense of piousness she'd perceived around the whole project, she had done something very, very wrong. Fortunately (or so she judged at the time), she managed to secretly return the
yad
, and her guilt was never discovered.