All around me the sky was turning lavender. The evening was coming on from far away. I turned over my letter, the cheap typing paper all scribbled over with indignations. And I took out my scratchy ballpoint, and I wrote:
That stuff before. That place I was before—please excuse my language (or spelling if there was any). Let me clarify what I was talking about:
I know you don’t take this, coming from me, seriously, but I am serious, Professor Friedell—a lot of times I feel like I could explode (which I did unfortunately at the time of your St. Augustine lecture). I hear and I see and I read, but I don’t understand. It’s like with Hebrew—I can sound it out but I don’t know the meanings. That’s the metaphor of how I feel.
You think I am not a committed student. You think I am not trying. But I am too committed. That is my whole problem! That is why your comments got me so upset. It was because I care so much about learning. To me Augustine is not just about his time; he is about my time too. To me the journey is not a trope. I came all the way out here to Jerusalem. That is how committed I am. Yet I am almost in despair. Even though I am in Jerusalem I don’t feel gathered up. I don’t feel healed. And I mean I came from far; Honolulu has to be one of the 4 corners of the earth. But where is the canopy spread over me—forget of peace.
The light is white lavender gray blue and there are two stars and the moon. They say the stars up there aren’t even the stars; they’re just the ones that used to be there, and it takes so long for the light to get down here the real ones have died already. So is it just dead bodies up there? Are they messages from the past that we don’t understand? Just words floating down, but no one can read them? Two stars are shining here. They’re burning holes in the clouds. They aren’t dead, they’re definitely alive. I believe they are alive. Ha. I believe. What does that mean? Do you want to know the truth? I believe in God without any reasons. That’s the part that drives me crazy—I know He exists but I’m not sure how I figured it out. Maybe you’re born with it. Who knows? Maybe it’s just basically because I’ve had a good life. I mean, not always lucky or smart, but I’ve seen stars, more in a night than some people get to see in their whole lives. I’ve been to places hardly anyone else has been, and some places, on the inside, where no one has been. I’ve had a good life—maybe more like Coyote than Road Runner and with those crackly bloodshot eyeballs once in a while and flattened like a cat under a truck once in a while and mad as Hell most of the time about these completely meaningless things like, no offense, your lecture that time, but inside me somewhere there’s this person naive and ready to do something totally different—then boom, you get a telegram, and it’s your best friend, it’s Marlon, and he’s dying—and you just wonder all over again if it makes any sense. I guess I’m basically an optimist with nagging metaphysical questions. Why else would I clean out checking and savings and come to Jerusalem?
I came all this way. I got here and I drove up, and I saw the flocks and the ancient walls, and the thing that hurts most is that Jerusalem is just a place. It’s just a place. I thought it was going to be so much more. I thought it was going to transcend, and it was going to transform, and that people here within the walls would revert to their true selves. They would go back to their former states, the personalities and the spirits that they had once been, or at least should have been! So I came here flying so high. I went up to Jerusalem, and it is just a city, and there is traffic, and laundry on clotheslines. And you come here, and everybody is carrying his own burden, and still traveling his own little individual (selfish) road.
I have stood on the walls of the Old City. I have walked through the gates, and I’m no better than I was. (Maybe worse.) Which has got to be me, right? I know it’s what you bring—I realize that. It makes me cry, because I don’t have it in me. I thought seeing this place would make more sense, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. There is this whole spiritual existence out there and I can’t get there. What do you need to do? How many books? How many journeys? What are the words and what kind of food? macro? micro? do roots feed the soul? carrots, turnips, potatoes? or the ancient songs? I lift up my voice in the wilderness, eyes to the hills, my timbrel and lyre to the mouth of the sea whence cometh my aid and dance on the sand a song of praise with words I don’t understand. What can you do with just an alphabet, when you don’t know the constellations, just that ayin is an eye or a well, and what’s down the well? You live in this thin layer on the crust and you can never delve down to the underground rivers or get onto the other planets and get any perspective. And they say you should climb to the top of the hill and cry God is in this place! and lift up your voice along with your eyes whence cometh your help, but what if you do that and afterwards it wears off and you’re just sitting there on the hill back where you started?
If the hills would start teaching. If the mountains would come down to my level! If Jerusalem had arms to embrace me, and lips to speak. Then I would be getting somewhere. If philosophy were a dance. My spirit has dancing feet. I have to keep moving. I am a kinesthetic learner! That’s how I understand.
My point is I am different from what you thought. My point is I am not a critical negative person, as in “everyone’s a critic.” I am not interested in negativity. Dwell on the stars, not the negative. That is my whole tenet!
So I’ll be back in Honolulu on May 1—or before that, if I can change my ticket—to be there for Marlon, and I was wondering if you could possibly take this as my final paper for the course, since it basically summarizes some of my current views and independent research into religion. I realize it only touches Augustine briefly, but since he was sort of the starting point of the research it was justified. I could type it up if you want—but the main thing is if you would give me full credit for it, because, obviously, your course is required.
Thanks,
Sharon
15
A Table Before Me
I stook in the hallway outside Friedell’s door, and I looked at the grade lists taped up to the wall. There were lots of other letters posted up, typed in black. Lots of Cs, millions of them—and getting a C was what I’d once been so afraid of! And there were WDs for withdrawn, which I could have done if I hadn’t been out of the country, too far away to do it! Then, there was my ID number, and like a drum roll the dotted line across the page: ………………….. and a great big letter F.
“Sharon Spiegelman,” said Professor Friedell, opening his office door. He recognized me right away.
I couldn’t even speak at first. “Did you get my letter?” I blurted out finally.
“Won’t you come in?” he said. In his office he started ruffling through the piles of stuff on his desk. Then he plucked my letter out.
“Did you read it?” I asked him.
“I did.”
“Then why, why …” My voice started to tremble. “Why did you do that to me?”
“Sharon!” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t do anything to you.” He was so maddening.
“You gave me an F!”
He neatened up my fourteen pages, and they rustled like tissue paper. “Well, you’ve missed the final and skipped the research paper.”
“But, but—” I spluttered.
“This is not a research paper,” he said.
“Maybe not a conventional one. Maybe not the formal definition of one,” I said, “but you can’t say there’s no research in there. You can’t say I didn’t put my time in there. I put my whole life into that paper.” I came up close. I leaned over his desk. I almost shouted, “Don’t you understand? You are negating not just my paper, but my whole experience! Don’t you see? You are canceling out not just my words, but the thoughts and feelings in my head!” I said, “You just see the tip of the iceberg, and that’s all you want to see. I’ve been through hell. It took me six days just to get a reduced fare back here, and then I was flying for twenty-four hours, and the minute I touched the ground, I had to find out about the death of possibly my closest friend left
on this island. And I didn’t even make it back in time to say good-bye.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Sharon,” he said. “But this is still not a research paper.”
“What, because it has no footnotes?”
“It has no thesis statement. It has no argument. It has no outside sources. Do you want me to go on?”
I picked up my letter from the desk. I picked up all the crinkly translucent pages of it, and the curves and lines of my words were like veins scribed in the paper. They were like living veins of blue ballpoint! And I said, “You don’t get it. You just don’t get it at all what I was trying to do here. This is a critique of the whole educational system here! You think this is just all about me. But it’s about you, and all the people like you. This is about the failure of higher education to teach me.”
“Now, that may be true,” he said.
My ears pricked up. “And I could type this up. I could put a lot more time into this. If you could just give me an incomplete, I could do this as an independent project over the summer. Because you know what, I’m the kind of person that when she gets interested in an idea never gives up, I’m the kind of person who is not afraid of hard work. …”
Yet Friedell kept murmuring over and over like a spell, “But, Sharon. Sharon, this is not a research paper. This is simply. Not. A research paper.”
I never took a class at the university again.
YOU know how fields have to rest sometimes? You know how the earth has to lie fallow before it gets planted again? The next five years I was lying fallow that way. And I didn’t know if anything would ever sprout in me again. A lot of times I was thinking this was it. This, meaning living in the house with Tom and Will and a postdoc here and there, since Kathryn and Rich had moved away and bought their shack on the North Shore and had their kid. The co-op sort of ran down without Kathryn to ride everyone. We stopped having our communal dinners, and it was more like everyone for him-or herself in the kitchen. A lot of times it would be just you alone there in the night facing the odd rice cake.
Having no educational goals, boyfriends, or visions—I just eddied. I got no exercise, apart from teaching the ladies at the temple, and I guess that didn’t count, since in class I never broke a sweat. Rabbi Siegel’s class petered out. Matthew converted, and Alyssa had her bat mitzvah, so they stopped coming. Fred was working a lot, and as for me—I didn’t have any great excuse. It was just that after all those years looking for inspiration and education everywhere, I didn’t have the heart anymore for Hebrew lessons, not to mention Siegel’s rabbinic wisdom. I was turning into something of a lump. And not just my soul, the rest of me too. I ate a lot of take-out food, especially from Patty’s Chinese Kitchen. I ended up gaining weight—at least twenty pounds. It was ridiculous—I’d grown so hippy. I tried not to care. I kept my head down, worked my job at Shirokiya. Paid my taxes to the IRS aka Ronald Reagan, despite the situation in Central America. I stayed sober, stayed clean, ran into Brian once in a while at the Manoa Safeway, and told myself I didn’t even care. I flattered myself how much I’d mellowed when it came to guys. I barely slept with a single individual, except for Will, and that was such a calm and stable relationship, we didn’t even break up, we just mellowed away—which might have been a hopeful sign of my evolution in dealing with the other sex—except that back then I wasn’t yet that knowledgeable about the evolution of other people, so it hadn’t been foremost in my consciousness that Will was in the process of evolving to be gay.
Well, what are men? I thought after our relationship had ended. They are like eating sweets. And you get older, and it could be your whole appetite starts to change. It could be after you stop eating sweets, then you will feel no desire anymore to try sweet things. You’d rather eat kumquats, skin and all. What is dialoguing with a kindred spirit? Way overrated. A lot more entrancing the first few nights than subsequently. I practically swore off relationships after Will, just like I’d sworn off classes and religious seminars and meditation workshops. My main activity was music, which I pursued in the used record and tape bins at Froggy’s. My happiest event was buying myself a new guitar. Yet strangely once I had the instrument I didn’t play it all that much. When I did take my guitar out, I played strictly for myself. I never imagined performing my compositions anymore. That’s what happens when you get to be twelve years older than you were—it turns out your audience, or at least, that great public you imagined once, has shrunk.
Every once in a while the question would arise in me: What’s happening to you, Sharon? I’d sit up and say: Woman, don’t you have any kind of plan? But mostly not.
Then along about 1988, in the spring, the ladies of Martin Buber Temple did come up with a plan—not for me, but for themselves. They were going to perform “Kora Bushka” at the Israel Independence Day Fair in Kapiolani Park. I think it was Henny Pressman’s idea. She was the one who designed the costumes and bought the material. The ladies sewed up the outfits—one for me too—since at that point there were five of them and they needed me to round out the group. So I got to be their coach and their pinch hitter too. I was fairly grumpy about the whole thing; I was actually fairly nervous. I didn’t want to get up in front of several hundred people with these old dames. Mostly I was a believer in humility and that one person shouldn’t think she was any better than anyone else, but when it came to dancing, a little bit of pride still stuck in my throat.
We had our dress rehearsal in the temple social hall. Our costumes were royal blue, and hung either straight or funny on you depending on who had sewed yours. We had long-sleeved white blouses and then these blue jumper things over us. There weren’t buttons or zippers or anything, so you pulled them over your head, and on mine the neck hole and the armholes were just a little bit too small, so I could barely get the jumper on, and I couldn’t really raise my arms. And they were trimmed with purple rickrack around the hem and neck, and we wore matching kerchiefs over our hair out of the same royal-blue material, so we looked like, I don’t know what, maybe royal flying nurses, or a bunch of older novices at a funky convent.
So we were all set for “Kora Bushka,” which was probably the simplest, most repetitive dance in the repertoire. I turned on the music, and immediately Henny Pressman started turning the wrong way. She started doing everything mirror-image backwards. We were all dancing and clapping and stamping and making with our hands in these retarded costumes, and Henny was completely, totally, one hundred percent of the time, on the wrong foot. I mean, after something like six years practicing this dance! I mean, why?
I shouted above the music, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I ran to the tape player and stabbed the off button with my finger. Everyone was looking around. I said, “Henny! I’m talking to you!”
“I’m sorry,” Henny said. She was a bit flushed. She wasn’t used to being yelled at. “I got a little excited.”
“Well, get unexcited. This is not exciting. What we’re doing here is not exciting.” I was so furious, I felt so ridiculous, tears were starting in my eyes. Then I thought, What are you doing, Sharon? What kind of teacher are you being, yelling at this poor woman? I thought, Are you forgetting everything Siegel told you about the vocation of teaching? Are you turning into some kind of Friedell snooting at all the world’s amateurs? And I stopped myself. In a quiet voice I said, “Let’s try again. Henny, let’s see it. Start on the left.”
She lifted her right foot.
And that was when I hit rock bottom. I’d been sinking down pretty low. I’d been sedimenting down for years, and yet at that moment I felt lower about myself and about my life than I’d ever felt before. I felt at that moment the whole truth of my situation, which was that I’d gotten to a point where I wasn’t a rebel or an experimenter or a seeker after God, or even a drifter in exotic places. I was a thirty-three-year-old permanent resident of Honolulu, and purely for the cash I was rehearsing a bunch of sixty-year-olds in a dance that some of them still didn’t get. “No,” I told Henny, “y
our other left.”
IN Kapiolani Park Sunday there was a bandstand and a white-and-blue plastic banner that read ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY. All around under the ironwood trees people were standing with their kids and buying food from the food booths. Not just hot dogs, but falafel in pitas, and “shave ice,” and bagels. Hawaiian Bagel had a booth of its own and was serving its genuine Mainland-style bagels, the boiled kind, which were a great exotic delicacy at that time. And there were a couple of booths set up by the Israeli consulate from San Francisco and the Jewish Federation, and there was the floating random crafts fair that always materialized at big community happenings, with ceramic planters and polished wood bowls and miniature Hawaiian sculptures and tables in the back displaying burnished glossy hardwood dildoes. There were blue-and-white balloons, and the mayor spoke, and Rabbi Siegel said the benediction. The Air Force band played the Israeli national anthem, and a medley from Fiddler on the Roof. People sat on the park benches, and on tatami mats on the ground in front of the stage, and the kids ran around on the grass. Toward the end, after a lot of speeches, and a kiddie choir, we went up onstage. I looked out over the crowd and saw about four hundred people, actually quite a lot. And I made myself say into the mike, “Please welcome the women of Martin Buber Temple.”
Our music cranked up over the loudspeakers, and we took our partners for “Kora Bushka,” and we started to move more or less in the right direction. Henny was doing all right this time; Betsy Sugarman was rushing. But mainly we were correct and in the proper places, thumping the stage, turning heavily in each other’s arms. I tried to keep up my smiling face. I tried to keep my body light, but my feet were so glum they clomped like wet clay on the ground. By the time it was over, and applause came up from here and there, and we bowed, my shoulders just sagged.