“Shut the fuck up,” Nicole groaned.
“You could be like a green plant,” I said, “and you could be growing in one direction, but then all of a sudden you notice the sun is over there, and you push all your cells toward the light, and you’re growing somewhere totally different.”
“I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired,” Nicole said.
“Okay, okay.” I got into bed.
Linda climbed into her sleeping bag and curled up on her side, and Ruth Ann turned off the light and carefully lay down on top of her sleeping bag, which she slept on unzipped like it was a duvet. We all lay quiet in the dark. Then suddenly Linda began to cry.
So then Ruth Ann and I had to get up out of bed and comfort her, because Linda was afraid she was going to have nightmares, having been spooked by all the talk about fires and burning, which she was afraid of. “Oh, honey,” Ruth Ann said, “it’s just metaphors. It’s just a way to describe how your soul can feel.”
“I don’t want to burn,” she said.
“It’s just poetry,” I said. “Look, I’ll prove it to you.” And I got out my puffed-out anthology and I said, “Listen to this. Energy is Eternal Delight. That’s William Blake. That is probably the source Rabbi Simkovich’s story came from!” I said, “Listen to this one:
The Human Dress is forged Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d,
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
But that only made Linda cry more. And she said, “I can’t take this. It’s too hard. It’s too hard! I don’t want to be thrown into a forge.”
“But it could be good!” I said. “Being forged could be a good thing. See, I never was forged, and that was why my sparks never lit. That’s what I honestly believe. I never got hammered and molded like I should have when I was younger. That’s why I was running around all the time. I was molten.”
Ruth Ann put her hand on my arm. “Sh.”
“It’s too hard,” Linda cried. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “Now I can’t sleep. Now I’ll be up all night.”
“Make her stop!” Nicole’s blond head popped out of her sleeping bag. Nicole was almost in tears herself by this time, being so exhausted and strung out.
“I can’t, I can’t,” Linda sobbed.
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Mamma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” Ruth Ann sang. She was rubbing Linda’s back. “And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mamma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring….”
I shuffled back to my own bed, and I lay down. Instantly my arms and legs went limp, I was so tired. My eyes shut; my words escaped me. All you could hear in the room was Ruth Ann singing on and on, making up rhymes whenever she had to, just to keep going. “And if that cart and bull get broke, Mamma’s gonna buy you an artichoke….”
I don’t know how long I slept. A noise woke me—a sharp crack, then a crunching sound. I jumped out of bed and I stood there in the dark. Then I saw the light coming up through the window from below. I ran to the window and there was a yellow taxi easing around the circular drive. Nicole! That was the first thing I thought of. Her bed was empty.
In my nightgown I sprinted down the stairs. In my bare feet I ran into the marble entry hall outside where Nicole stood with her bags.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“You can’t.”
“I am.” She started dragging her stuff outside.
“But where will you go? You can’t run away. You can’t!” I ran after her.
She just walked calmly toward the cab.
I leapt for her in the driveway. I probably scared her to death, jumping on her like that.
“Let me go!”
“No, wait,” I begged. “Nicole …”
“Let me go!” She clawed at me. She scratched me, but she was smaller than I was.
“No, wait. No, listen. Please!”
“You’re hurting me!”
“You don’t understand! You can’t go back out there.” The lights of the taxi shone on us. “You can’t go out there again.” I was holding her with all my strength. “You don’t understand! This is a matter of life and death. Nicole, Nicole, how will you live?” I demanded, since I hadn’t realized yet that she had stolen all my cash from me. “You’ll go out there and you’ll be killed. They’ll fuck with you and they’ll kill you….”
“No, you’re fucking with me!” She bit my arm. She actually bit me.
The driver was poking his head out the window. “Hey! Which of you ladies wants a ride?”
“Don’t you see …” I was pleading with Nicole.
She wrenched away. She ran around and opened the taxi door and flung herself and her stuff into the back seat. The taxi took off in a shower of tiny rocks.
“You have this chance,” I screamed after her. “You have this chance to change your whole life….” But the car was halfway down the street.
“You’re only seventeen!”
Rabbi Simkovich and Rebbetzin Chaya must have had heard the noise. They came running out of the house.
I could barely tell them what had happened, I was so upset. “Can’t you call the police?” I kept asking them. “Why can’t you call the police? Why can’t you get her back?”
Yet, apparently, Bais Sarah not being a prison, the Simkoviches had no way to force Nicole to stay. They could call the police, and they could call her parents, but when it came to transforming her into a religious girl, there wasn’t any more they could do. Chaya helped me back inside. The other girls, who had heard the commotion, came running downstairs, and I was wailing, “But she’ll die out there!”
“God forbid,” Chaya said.
“She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t even know what’ll happen to her out on the street, and without Hashem.”
“Sh!” Chaya said sharply, as if to say not in front of the children. She was hustling all the girls back to bed.
Chaya took me to the kitchen and gave me a mug of tea. The house was quiet again. When Rabbi Simkovich came to check on me I was starting to calm down.
“But, see,” I said to him, “the Torah is the tree of life. It’s the life raft, right? It’s the one thing that can hold you up. Then how can you let go? How can you just leave this place and let go?”
“Torah is not so small you can’t also hold on to it in other places,” Rabbi Simkovich said.
That was when a terrible realization came over me. The chill and fright came right back again, only now I was starting to fear for my own self. Because just then it hit me: this Bais Sarah business wouldn’t last forever. The summer was coming to an end. We were all going to be set loose again and scatter. We were all getting pushed from the holy nest into the valueless abyss! In my case they’d be returning me to Hawaii, which mean Wayne, and Brian, and Imo. As if I hadn’t hurt them all enough already. Later, much later, I heard from Rich that Brian had finally wangled a job at Imo’s university, and he and Imo had settled down in Auckland, and they had a house, and they had a boat. While Wayne, according to Will, had been spotted with what looked like a wife in the new Costco that had opened up, and they were buying big flats of strawberries. And so, years later, it turned out they were all fine—but at the time, in Bellevue, I could only picture them as the mortally wounded victims of my sins. And coming back to Hawaii, I’d have to face them all again—not to mention all the religions I had flunked, whether in school, or on my own in real life.
So naturally I was terrified by the idea of going back to Honolulu. I just wanted to erase everything I’d ever done. I just wanted to forget the person I had once been. Don’t look back, I screamed inside myself. Don’t even turn around and look. I was sure I’d turn into a pillar of salt. It wasn’t just that Hasidic Judaism promised me a new life and new identity. The Bialystokers promised me a new world as well. They were holding out to me a new earth and diet and language. They were providing an entire protective bubble—more
protection than I’d ever found anywhere else. So now I was panicking! Because how could they pull the plug on my snow globe? How could they send me out from my brand-new sparkling little cosmos into the immodest Hawaiian sun?
“I can’t go back out there!” I burst out. “I can’t go back to the islands.”
“What’s the matter?” the rabbi asked.
“There’s no Yiddishkeit there!” I told him how for the first time I felt like I was onto something. I said at Bais Sarah I had finally started my real life, and tapped into what at the bottom I truly was: a Hasidic Jew. I could not slip back now. I would fall. I could see it now. I would go back and I would fall away.
Rabbi Simkovich stroked his beard and he nodded to me, and he said he would think about this, and he would discuss it with Chaya. Perhaps they would find a solution. Im yirtzeh Hashem, God willing, we would find a way for me to continue learning.
“Im yirtzeh Hashem,” I echoed. “I need to take my Judaism to the next level,” I said. “I have such a need. Because I want to go up those staircases, I want to, so much. I want to find my way up to the higher realms, because I feel like that’s my calling. Like it’s bashert. I just need a little bit of help along the way.”
“Of course,” the rabbi said. “Of course, a little bit of help. I understand.”
Which I took to mean that I could stay at Bais Sarah forever. What a relief!
The sun was rising, tinting the kitchen pink. Pretty soon everybody had to get up and pray. Yet I got to rest in bed after my ordeal. I got to curl up inside my sleeping bag with the shades down. And there I dreamed about my future life. I would be a Jewish nun, forever dedicated to prayer and raising bees and traveling on pilgrimage each year to the Holy Land, and maybe even founding a winery for the vinting of the most exquisite kosher wines (since currently at Bais Sarah all we had was the purple Manishewitz type), and then I would find Nicole and bring her back, along with the infant daughter she would have by that time, and she and Ruth Ann and Linda and I would live together, and the little child, Estie, would lead us. We would live together in one transcendent Jewish-feminist commune: the Holy Order of Felicity.
18
Discovered
THAT afternoon I was still so groggy, I thought that when Rabbi Simkovich came up to me at lunch, he was going to chastise me for nodding off during his talk at dinner. But right away I saw that wasn’t it. The rabbi seemed so pleased. He was beaming.
“Baruch Hashem,” he said. “I have been talking to Chaya, and we think we may have found a solution for you. Estie Karinsky’s mother has offered you an invitation to come to Crown Heights.”
“Estie’s mother? How …”
“She has heard about you, and she and Estie, Dr. Karinsky, the whole family, has heard, and hope to see you, and for you to come to Estie’s wedding. They would like for you to come and visit them in Crown Heights.”
Crown Heights! I thought. Wait, but I’m planning to stay here. What happened to staying here forever? What about my women’s community?
The rabbi didn’t seem to be reading my mind, however. He was talking about the Karinsky family and going on about the Bialystok community in Crown Heights, and the very special neighborhood they had there that he himself had come from, which was in fact the home and headquarters of the Bialystoker rebbe, who lived in a grand house that was an exact replica of the original rabbinical palace of his ancestors in Bialystok. The community had built the home for him in the middle of Crown Heights. Number six-thirteen, it was called, and not by coincidence, since there were six hundred thirteen commandments.
Crown Heights, I kept thinking—but how can I leave Bellevue? Yet the very name Crown Heights sounded so regal. The way Rabbi Simkovich spoke about the place, you could tell immediately this was the center of the whole Bialystoker community. And to live near the rebbe of Bialystok—that was like ascending those holy staircases three steps at a time! How would it be to live right near the home of the Bialystoker himself? You might bump into his retinue on the street! You might touch the shadow of his robe!
I couldn’t help confessing to the rabbi that I had been hoping to stay put, yet the more he talked about Crown Heights, the more in awe I was. No other woman in the whole program had an offer like this one. Not a single one; I had been chosen, and singled out for Estie Karinsky’s invitation. I had been selected personally by the rabbi, and when I’d least expected it! All of a sudden I realized something important was happening to me. All of a sudden I realized what I was being given. I walked around the rest of the afternoon in a daze. It was essentially like being discovered—but on the highest spiritual level. Like if goodness had a Broadway; like if there were an angelic Nashville! For several days I couldn’t even say whether I would accept Estie’s invitation. I couldn’t even figure out if I was worthy. Yet I felt myself drawing nearer and nearer to saying yes. I dreamed of Crown Heights as this illuminated citadel. I dreamed of all the crowns of silver tinkling with little silver bells. I dreamed of black ink crowns adorning the Hebrew letters of the Torah, the tiny prongs leaping upward. And I said, Yes, yes, I’ll go. Yes, I’ll rise up to the heights. Yes, I will enter the Heart of Light!
I’D forgotten the grime back east. There we were at the end of August in Estie’s cousin’s car driving to Brooklyn, and the sky was gray, and the streets were gray, and the buildings were covered with schmutz. Estie and I were in the backseat, and she was so excited to be coming home, and I was excited, too, don’t get me wrong, but I was also thinking, Where are the crowns? Where are the heights? All those years in the Pacific, I’d forgotten how the other half live—with old brick, and cracked-up sidewalks, and snivelly malnourished excuses for trees. Brooklyn was the most built-up place I’d ever been. Where there were yards, they were maybe the size of a small car, and a lot of times that car would be parked on them.
In Estie’s neighborhood some of the houses were brick, and some were two-family buildings with siding or fake fieldstone divided right down the middle in different colors. When you looked in the windows, you could see little shoe-box rooms with crystal chandeliers hanging down like stalactites in a cave. It was like Jerusalem, in that so many men, and also little boys, wore black suits and black hats, and the women were covered up in skirts and white stockings—just like me sitting there in my CHAI clothes. Estie’s cousin Shmuley was driving, and he wore the hat and the coat and the pants, the works. I said to Estie, “How come your fiancé didn’t meet you at the airport?” She and Shmuley both burst out laughing.
Estie’s house was freestanding, with brick front steps and a couple of bushes in the front. There was a loose gravel driveway on the side, and there was even an old garage that the Karinskys used for storage. Wobbly from the plane and the new scenery, I hadn’t even stepped out of the car when Estie’s nine brothers and sisters surrounded us, squealing and shrieking and shouting, climbing on the car, picking up our stuff for us and carrying it inside. The munchkins were all talking to me at once. They told me all their names, which I forgot instantly. I was just too tired to take it all in.
The Karinskys’ place was packed. On the first floor there was a living room and dining room and a kitchen. On the second floor there were just four bedrooms for all those people. Mendy Karinsky, Estie’s father, was a pediatrician, and had his office in the basement. He, it turned out, had not been born a Bialystoker, but came from a non-Hasidic community and had married in when he was finishing his medical training. He was big and barrel chested like an operatic tenor. He used to throw back his head and laugh. Nothing seemed to faze him. He had a lot of joy inside—and never did anything around the house. With the children he was always the good cop, while Feige Karinsky was the enforcer. Dr. Karinsky used to come running up the stairs from his office and open the door to the kitchen and roar like a lion and the kids would come squealing, and he’d toss them around and tickle them into hysterics while Mrs. Karinsky worked around him, trying to get dinner on the table.
Mrs. Karinsky spent
all her days trying to keep the rest of the house under control. At any given time someone was crying or screaming or praying. The decor was formal, with wallpaper and fake Oriental rugs, and a chandelier in the dining room, but the place was so overrun with kids and trucks and tricycles and decapitated dolls you didn’t really see the decorations or the furniture. The stairs creaked; the window-unit air conditioners were straining; the whole place was buckling under the weight of the family. Estie kept saying how she was so excited for me to be there, and I was excited, too, only, seeing how full the house was, I was amazed I’d been invited. The bedrooms were packed with bunks and trundles and cribs and toys and prayer books; there were no garden views or anything like in Bellevue; there were no empty spaces. Still, somehow Mrs. Karinsky made room for me. She gave me guest towels and special nonfoaming toothpaste to use on Shabbes. She was a big lady, really big, almost like Mrs. Eldridge had been, and she wore this great big housedress and breathed heavily when she climbed up the creaky stairs. She might have been pregnant, but she was too heavy to tell for sure. You could hardly believe she was Estie’s mother, Estie was such a slip of a thing.
So a lot surprised me, but you know, I was there to learn, and to be forged in the crucible of Judaism. I was there to lie down every night and wake up every day Jewish. To pray every prayer and observe every fast; to celebrate every new month according to the phases of the moon. I was there to forget everything else I’d ever been, or rather, to remember everything I truly was.
The next day was Friday, and I helped in the kitchen cooking, while the kids were fighting in the living room. The children fought all the time: scratching, biting, hair pulling. You name it. I was kind of shocked—partly because the Simkovich kids had been pretty quiet, and partly because I guess I’d thought that coming from such a religious family, the children would be little angels, but they were just as mean and vicious as regular kids, and to tell the truth, it seemed like they were worse than normal, because there were so many of them, and they were so close in age.