I fluffed up Jane’s black-and-white fur. I fluffed her up and down.
She lay on her back and purred at me.
I said, “I’m not afraid of Wayne. Well, even if I am, how can I live that way? In fear?” I said, “The truth is I’m more afraid of me.”
She wrinkled up her pink nose. “I’m the one,” I said. “I’m the one who all of a sudden upends the apple cart. I don’t even know why. Whatever happened to the person I used to be, who used to meditate?”
Jane just squinched her eyes shut as I rubbed her front, since cats do not tend to empathize much with guilt and self-loathing. I was wishing myself back in time so I could change what I had done—except I could never decide how far back I’d go. I just felt like now I’d really burnt my bridges. All of them. Wayne hated me. Corinne pitied me. And Brian—how could I ever face him again? Well, how could we face each other? I wanted to call him. I was dying to go see him—to apologize, or say good-bye, or tell him he’d been right about Wayne—he did hit me. It almost didn’t matter what I’d say, if I could talk to Brian one more time. Maybe just to confirm the whole thing with him had been real, and not just my dream. But I knew better than to seek him out. He’d hate me for dwelling on that night, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that.
I felt like a latch-key child waiting in Corinne’s house alone. Every day and every hour I decided to devise a new plan, and then I couldn’t think of any. Go see Leilani? She’d see through that in an instant. Me coming over to feel sorry for myself—as if she weren’t the one imprisoned in a saltwater tank! Take the bus up to the temple? Break down and cry all over Rabbi Siegel’s desk? “Sharon,” he would say, “what is it after all that you are searching for? You have searched and searched. Even in the uttermost parts of the world. And yet, what is it that you really need?”
I sat and watched through the window as the mail truck drove haltingly up the winding street. Squeak, squeak. The brakes squeaked at every stop as it crept along each day. It was like something from one of Dovidl’s stories, the broken-down mail truck needing maintenance, but the Postal Service never fixing it. It was like one of those allegories for your soul.
I picked up the phone. Ruchel was the one I called. “Hello?” My voice wobbled.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Sharon.”
“Excuse me? Who is this? Oh, Sharon! Sharon! We missed you on Shabbes! How are you?”
“I’ve been away,” I said. “But I’m back now. I’ve been in Britain,” I blurted out.
“In Britain! That must have been a short trip.”
“It was,” I said, “but it didn’t feel short. It was very full,” I said.
“You went to see family?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I was seeing them….”
“I didn’t know you had family in Britain. I have cousins in Golder’s—”
“I was also thinking; I was thinking a lot,” I told her. “I had this powerful experience, Ruchel. I had this cataclysmic experience.”
“Has v’shalom! Are you all right?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer. For some reason, now of all times, I was starting to cry.
“Sharon, you’re all right? You’re crying?”
“I have a frog in my throat. Excuse me.” I coughed. I caught my breath. Still, it was hard to get the words out. Every word I spoke I started to cry harder. “Ruchel, I have to change everything. The place I am right now. I can’t stay in this place any longer. The place I am, it’s not working. It’s untenable. The person I am right now—it’s no good. I have to try to learn to … I need to learn how to …”
But it seemed like I didn’t need to say any more. To her ears what I was telling her was as clear as clear. “You want to learn!” she exclaimed. “You need to learn!”
17
White Cloud
RUCHEL and Dovidl drove me to the airport in their little putt-putt Honda. The day was hot and muggy, and the vinyl upholstery sticky against my skin. I leaned out the open window, since the back seat was so cramped with the babies. Dovidl wasn’t wearing his frock coat, just his black suit pants and white shirt. Instead of his black hat he was wearing a big black velvet yarmulke that covered his whole head. Ruchel was wearing designer sunglasses, and a long-sleeved navy striped blouse, and a cotton duck skirt, yacht style. I realized, They’re Hawaiian Hasids now. They’ve gone tropical!
I, in the meantime, also had new clothes. I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a skirt instead of shorts. I had white ankle socks, and pure white athletic shoes instead of sandals. I was actually going to the Bais Sarah women’s program in Bellevue.
From Shirokiya, with my employee discount, I’d bought a good down sleeping bag, and a couple of towels. One of those state-of-the-art rolling flight bags, and a red rain poncho that folded up into its own pocket. I could have bought a travel iron for really cheap, but since I never ironed it didn’t seem worth it. I did buy a bra stash, though! You couldn’t tell from looking at me, but I had something like two hundred bucks in cash squirreled away between my boobs. Two hundred in twenties, as my mad money, in case I got to Bais Sarah and it turned out to be a heavy-duty brainwashing facility and I had to sneak out to the road and hitch a ride to Seattle and buy tickets on a Greyhound bus that would be leaving for someplace no one would ever find me.
Curbside at the airport, Ruchel gave me a hug, and Dovidl gave me a laminated card printed with a special prayer for safe journeys that I should read right before takeoff. The babies were fussing and people were milling around. It was a confusing scene, and I was rushing rushing to get away before I started to cry. I remember actually feeling relieved when I said my last good-bye, and trundled inside to agricultural inspection. The inspectors looked inside my suitcase and inspected my guitar. They slit open the cardboard box that I had so carefully packed with my five hundred or so records and tapes. Then they slapped some Agricultural Inspection tape of their own over the box and I finally checked my bags and went on my way. There were no paper cups of pineapple juice anymore. Free juice had been discontinued.
When my plane lifted off into the blue sky I looked out from my window seat, and I could see Oahu under me, the whole island and the ocean surrounding it, all in perspective. All the houses were receding, and the cliffs and the beaches, and then the other islands close by and just as green, strung out in the ocean. There were Molokai, and Maui, and the Big Island. There they were, smaller and smaller, like lazy turtles lying in the sun. Then the clouds wisped over the view.
I leaned back in my chair and stuck out my feet just to feel my backpack down there. My guitar was in the overhead compartment, and all my other earthly possessions were in the belly of the plane. I felt this calm desolation, as though I had died.
WHEN we got to Sea-Tac Airport, though, my stomach was in knots, just realizing that here I was on the Mainland ready to enroll in some kind of hostel or halfway house or boarding school, depending on how you looked at it. Dovidl and Ruchel had told me I was going to be met at the airport, but I almost hoped, walking down the aisle of the plane with my stuff, that no one was going to be there after all, and that the whole thing had been a mix-up. Part of me almost wished I would arrive in Seattle, anonymous and alone, and have to go exploring and find a job, like maybe in one of the famous Seattle coffeehouses, and maybe hanging there I’d find out about the folk-dancing scene and hook up with the folk community. But when I came out into the airport with the other passengers filing off the plane, I saw right in front of me, impossible to miss, a tall, burly, bearded man in a black frock coat and hat, who I realized was Rabbi Simkovich. He had three or four children swarming around him, and he was carrying a placard like from a rabbinic limo service: SHARON SPIEGELMAN.
So I took a good look at him with the kids, and I walked right on past. I took my backpack and guitar, and hurried all the way out to the concession stands, and bought myself a bag of trail mix, which despite my stomachache I opened up and started eating. And I looked w
ay down to the escalators and to the glass doors of the baggage claim, where my suitcase and my sleeping bag and my cardboard box would soon be circling round and round. The thought definitely crossed my mind, the thought of leaving. But there I was with the stubs of a free ticket all the way from Honolulu to Seattle. I knew running off wasn’t right. I headed back to the gate.
The people there were thinning out, but the rabbi and his kids were still standing there expectantly. I hung back out of sight for maybe five minutes and I watched them waiting, looking all around for me. Then I put down my backpack and I watched them a little more, and as I watched, I nibbled on my trail mix. I was willing myself to come up to them, but I was nervous as a squirrel, nibbling, nibbling. Ready to run.
Finally I went up to the rabbi and admitted who I was.
“Sharon! Baruch habah!” Welcome! he exclaimed, and he took my backpack, and the kids swarmed around me. They were all about four years old. We went down to the baggage claim, and piled into the club wagon, and the rabbi drove us out to Bellevue.
The roads were big, and they were long—and they weren’t circular like the ones in Hawaii; you knew they were connected up to big freeways and highways, by which you could drive clear across the country. All around us were verdant Mainland trees, deciduous ones, and evergreens. And there were mountains, also green, and huge enormous shopping plazas. Everything was large scale and bright and new, and then downtown Bellevue came up, and it had two office towers of tinted mirror glass, one bronze, and one blue. We kept driving out along this pretty green lake, which I thought was Lake Washington, but later I found out was Lake Sammamish. I saw boats in the lake, and kids fishing, and ducks. I had my eyes glued to the windows of the van; I was trying to get my bearings and check out the surroundings, but at the same time this music was pounding through the van’s sound system. It was that Bialystoker pop song about the Messiah who they called Moshiach, and it was very cheery and up tempo and loud, “Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach! Moshiach, come today! Hey!” The kids were busy offering me candy and also eyeing my bag of trail mix to the point where I started looking at it myself. Peanuts, raisins, dried papaya and pineapple chunks, banana chips, dried coconut flakes. Was this stuff somehow not kosher? So there I was checking out Washington State from the inside of a Moshiach mobile.
We started driving through some real old-growth suburbs with Tudor houses set back and plush green lawns, and oak trees. I thought, Well, this is nice, but where are we really going? Where’s Bais Sarah going to fall out? And then we started up a sweeping drive, and there on the hill I see a great big mama house, all red brick and turrets, a Victorian castle with a slate roof and bay windows and the biggest front lawn of all the houses we’d seen yet. And it turned out that was the Bellevue Bais Sarah Institute. Whoa! From the outside the place looked just magnificent.
When the rabbi opened the door, we came into a vast entrance hall with curving stairs, and everywhere was marble and carved wood, except the walls were peeling and stained yellow. The mansion was seriously run-down, but no one seemed too worried. Up in the stairwell hung a grand portrait of the Bialystoker rebbe in a niche in the wall that looked like it had been designed for an even bigger painting.
“The house was left to us,” the rabbi said. “Alice Rosensweig, oleva-sholom, left it to us in her will five years ago.”
“You mean, she didn’t have kids?” I asked.
“She did have kids,” the rabbi said. “But she left the estate to CHAI of Bellevue.” And he put up his hand, like nothing more should be said. So, of course, I said nothing more.
Then the rebbetzin came down the stairs, with all these women, the ones who studied there in the institute, and they milled around me, and they started asking questions, about the flight, and about Hawaii, and the rebbetzin, whose name was Chaya, was asking all about her sister, back in Hawaii, and about Ruchel and Dovidl’s kids. Chaya Simkovich was very plain and skinny, despite having so many kids. She had a somewhat long, horsy face, no resemblance to Ruchel, and this sardonic way of talking that made me think she was a real New Yorker.
I was pretty much mobbed. There were fifteen women already studying there for the summer, and there were maybe five girls who were called madrichot, who were teenaged counselors who had come from back east in Crown Heights to help guide the students and give them one-on-one tutoring, and then there were more little kids, I wasn’t even sure at that point how many, but later I found out there were eight, and the kids were all the rabbi’s and his wife’s.
My arrival was a big event in the house. Everyone was so excited I’d come all the way from out in the Pacific Ocean, and they couldn’t do enough for me, carrying all my stuff up to the second floor, showing me my bed, which they’d pushed up near the window. I was going to be bunking with three other women in a grand old bedroom with flaking paint, and a pocked and pitted hardwood floor, and a fireplace with a mantel carved out of marble veined green like Stilton cheese. Above the fireplace there was the rebbe again, like Chairman Mao, watching from his picture frame. My bed had just a bare mattress with black-and-white ticking. Everybody slept in sleeping bags like at camp. A little black prayer book lay where my pillow would have been. There were two dressers in the room, and I got the top half of one. There was a washstand right in the center of the room, for ritual washing right when you rolled out of bed. For regular washing there was this mildewy powder room with rusty old sconces and a claw-foot tub and a shower rigged up with a voluminous plastic shower curtain that you pulled around you.
Everyone was fussing over me, and talking at once, and then suddenly Chaya said, “Girls, look at the time! It’s time for afternoon shiur!” meaning, afternoon class. And she said to her own children, “Kids, go downstairs now. Give Sharon time to rest.” And they all left me alone so I could unpack and settle in and take a shower. They all stampeded back down the dark wood stairs.
I was tired, but too jazzed to lie down. I unrolled my sleeping bag onto the bed. Then gently I laid my guitar on top. I started unpacking everything into my drawers. All my new T-shirts, nightgowns, and skirts, brand new from GEM in Honolulu. I undressed and stuffed my bra stash in with my socks.
Stepping into the claw-foot tub, at first I couldn’t figure out how to make the handheld shower come on, and then I ended up spraying myself in the face with cold water. I washed my hair really quick and got out shivering. I got dressed in a white T-shirt and a long, pretty much ankle-length blue skirt, and my white socks and my blinding white athletic shoes. And I combed out my hair, all down to my waist, and started walking around the bedroom nervously with that extra bouncy step you get when you’re wearing brand-new running shoes. My hair was squeaky clean down my back, and my clothes were new and fresh, and I was wearing a slip. I just felt so peculiar, and expectant, and clean, and yet strung out. There I was, dressed up like Alice in Wonderland. There I was, thirty-eight years old. The newest girl at the orphanage.
WE were all called girls at Bais Sarah. I wasn’t even the oldest one there. One of my roommates, Ruth Ann, was fifty-two. Another one, Linda, was forty. And then the third, Nicole, was just seventeen. We were all called girls, because we were in school, and because we weren’t married. Some of us had been married, but weren’t anymore. Some of us had even been homeless, or addicts, or turned tricks on the street, but at the program none of that mattered. Everyone was back in fresh clean skirts, like we were starting over, like we actually could be girls again. So, in an old house in Bellevue all covered with vines, lived sixteen big girls in two straight lines. We woke each day at seven A.M. We said hi to the rebbe in his frame. At seven-twenty we broke our bread. At seven-forty grace was said. We prayed in small groups from eight to nine. The beginner’s group was, you guessed it, mine.
Every morning we sat in a circle in those school-type chairs with built-in desks, except that Rabbi Simkovich had an armless chair, because he was too big to fit comfortably in a desk chair, and also when he got inspired he hoppe
d up and walked around as he talked. Every day he would take some little tiny passage from the Tashma and we’d all turn to it and read it, him in Hebrew, and most of us in English on the facing page, and then he’d explicate it, and extrapolate from it, and basically develop out of that one passage this entire lecture about the Jewish philosophy of life. He’d take just a few short phrases, and he’d be off for hours on this whole improvisational mystic odyssey. For example, he would say, “Turn please to page four hundred eighty-five.” He’d start reading in Hebrew in this singsong voice, and then he’d look up and say, “What does this mean? There are two types of love. And we’re speaking here about love for our God, Hashem. The first type is ‘ahavah be-ta’ anugim,’ which is love with delight! Ecstatic love for Hashem! Can everyone feel this way?” He looked around the room.
I was thinking, Yeah! because I had felt that kind of charge before. Sometimes in confused circumstances, but yeah.
“No,” Simkovich said. “Not everyone can attain this kind of love for Hashem. This love is born into the very few, only to the tzaddikim, the greatest of saints. This is the love of tzaddikim dancing from their own goodness, and rejoicing from their delight in Hashem.”