I’d also assumed that Mrs. Karinsky would be an incredible kosher gourmet cook. But it turned out she actually hated cooking, and the food she made was really bad. Her chicken would be greasy, and her brisket would be all dried out, and her hot dogs were boiled so they went boing! if you dropped them on the floor. All the kids made fun of her cooking—even Estie. They’d dangle stuff from their forks and ask in Yiddish, “Mama, vas is dos?”—What is this? She pretended she didn’t care. She let the little ones eat as much candy as they wanted. She told me, “I don’t have the kind of kids who’ll come up and say, ‘Can I have a pulke?’”—which was a chicken leg. “What do my kids eat? They eat junk.”
Mrs. Karinsky also hated cleaning, so the dishes were chipped, and there were lollipops sticking in the carpet and stuff like that. She didn’t seem all that happy about the situation, but in a Zen-like way she accepted it. She said, “So people come in the house and they see a mess. So what? I’m not in the business of caring what people think.”
Still, Friday night was special. I laid the table for a feast under the dusty chandelier, and so what if the food was barely edible? There was a lot of it, and it was all steaming by the time Dr. Karinsky and the boys got home from shul. The Shabbes candles were aflame, more than a dozen. They stood in their candlesticks on foil like a shining altar on the sideboard. And we all stood around the table and everyone was singing nigguns, which were these wordless tunes sung at the Shabbes table. After all the blessings we sat down to eat, and Dr. Karinsky welcomed me and said I could stay as long as I wanted, and he told everyone I was from Hawaii, and all the kids looked at me, impressed. Later, after dinner, the boys got out a book they had that was a yearbook of all the Bialystoker emissary families in all the CHAI houses all over the world, Anchorage to Zaire, and they looked for me under Hawaii, but, of course, I wasn’t in the book, not being officially part of any Bialystoker embassy.
Two days went by, and even though they hadn’t seen each other all summer, there still wasn’t any sign of Estie’s fiancé. The September wedding date was set; the hall was rented, Mrs. Karinsky was flustered with the preparations. Still, Estie was mellow. She had her white wedding gown hanging wrapped in plastic in the coat closet in the downstairs entrance hall, because the bedrooms were so short on closet space. During the week she just went to her usual job, which was watching kids at this little corner preschool. I tagged along and earned a little bit of cash as a teacher’s aide. I used to lead the singing. I had everyone singing “Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach!” which was a big hit. All the kids were clapping their little hands. They were about two years old, the ones Estie taught, and they came just a few hours in the mornings. The girls wore tights and little dresses, and the boys still had long hair pinned back with barrettes, and they looked like girls, because in the Bialystoker community you didn’t cut little boys’ hair until they were three—which might have struck me as a weird custom at some earlier stage of my life, but seemed to me, living there in Brooklyn, only weird in a good way, not crazy at all, but wild and fairylike, and just magical. It was all magic to me.
And at the school at naptime I used to hum those nigguns to the kids when they lay down on their mats. Sometimes I almost went into a trance singing. I used to close my eyes, and the children would lie there perfectly still. One by one they would drop off to sleep.
Estie was the one who said I should bring my guitar to school. I hadn’t played in months. When I took it out at naptime my fingers were stiff. Creakily they found the chords. They just played from their own finger-memory, but gradually a song took shape. Softly my voice was humming. Gardens and islands began to fill up my eyes, and green plants, and mists—they all came to me in this joyful dream. Slowly words came to me, and I began to sing. “Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea. …” And I sang and sang the verses, all of them, until finally I came to the end and my eyes opened, and all of a sudden there I was in the classroom again. The pale dark-eyed children were lying on their mats; their soft soft hair was spread around them and their little limp arms; they were all asleep. And Estie and her senior teacher were staring at me.
I was a stranger there, no matter how welcome a guest. And most of the time it didn’t bother me at all, because I was so dedicated to my future. After all, I was essentially entering the Hasidic novitiate! And my host family tried so hard with me—despite the fact that they could barely keep their kids from killing each other. Mrs. Karinsky had so many dishes to clear every night, that during the week she used paper plates and plasticware. One time I’d actually said to her, “Don’t you think that’s bad for the environment?” She looked at me aghast. She looked like she’d been slapped. But she was too polite to say, Who do you think you are? Fuck off and die. So she said nothing, and I felt terrible. I looked down at the floor, ashamed of myself, that I had brought the subject up. How tactless. There were the Karinskys feeding and sheltering and teaching me by their example. There they were, springing me from all my predicaments, and all they wanted was my soul. What a small price to pay. What a simple thing to give, if only you knew how to do it. If only you could extricate yourself from the person that you were before.
I hated thinking of the past, but then the future frightened me even more. Estie’s wedding was imminent. The house was filled with relatives, and every bed and couch and inflatable mattress was full, and there were even a couple of kids sleeping under the dining room table. I was beginning to feel so anxious. I was afraid I was going to lose my own cot to some cousin from out of town. Every day I thought Mrs. Karinsky was going to move me out into the hall or to a friend’s, and then I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was in a fragile state—I was terrified somehow of being separated from the family, not to mention Estie herself and her example. What would happen to me when she wasn’t around for me to shadow through the day? What would happen when she was married off, and my whole excuse for being in Crown Heights had moved away?
ESTIE’S wedding was in the evening, and it was a hot Indian-summer city night. Everyone gathered in the courtyard of the rebbe’s palace, which was wooden, and gated and turreted, with peaked shingled roofs. Six-thirteen was actually a cluster of three-story buildings surrounding an open courtyard. One building was the synagogue, and one was the library and center for advanced study of the Bialystoker texts, where the best and brightest of the young men learned all day and night. The third building was a great hall used as a social center, with various rooms for parties, and offices for the rebbe and his assistant rabbis. All the buildings were painted in dark reds and greens and chocolate-brown, and on the inside they were decorated with carvings and plasterwork in the shape of flowers and vines and pomegranates. The whole complex looked as exotic and antique as could be, except for the fire escapes, and the air conditioning compressors. The rebbe himself had decided on central air.
The ceremony was getting started in the courtyard. There was a chuppah, which was a canopy; dark blue velvet cloth fringed and embroidered in gold, set up on four poles. It was dark out, the idea being that Estie and her fiancé, Yitzy, would get hitched under the stars, except you couldn’t see any stars, since the night was hazy and the city lights so bright. There were rabbis and witnesses and siblings crowded around. There were something like three hundred people all standing in the open air, men in their black suits, women in lace and silk and embroidery and pearls and diamond pavé brooches. From the back I watched the kids running around in party dresses and patent leather shoes, and the boys in these tiny white dress shirts and black trousers and jackets askew. It was so humid everyone was sweating. The relatives up by the chuppah held candles, but I wasn’t a relative, of course, so I stood in the back, tangentially—me and my feeling of increasing dread. Around and around Estie walked. She was circling around Yitzy seven times, with her mother and Yitzy’s mother leading her. As she walked, the skirts of her long gown trailed behind her, and almost wrapped up Yitzy as she went, so, from where I stood, the two of them, the bride and groom, looked like
a mystic caterpillar turning and turning, wrapping itself in white silk, winding up into a cocoon.
She’s gone, I thought. She’s gone; she’s gone. There were blessings being said, there was wine sipped, but all I could think was, My teacher and my counselor is gone. There she goes, abandoning me.
Crash! Yitzy stamped on the glass. Everyone burst out singing and swarming around the families crying, Mazel tov! Mazel tov! And dancing and whooping right there outside, the men in one mob and the women in another. I was lost in the crowd, smashed between old ladies.
When I came up for air, the newlyweds had disappeared. The bride and groom were supposed to go off and be alone for a while after the ceremony, and then they had to do family pictures, so, in the meantime, everyone else went inside the hall and started partying without them.
There were two parties in two separate ballrooms, with two separate bands. One party was for men only, and the other was for the women, so that, without the men around, we sisters could let loose and really dance. There were circle dances and line dances and polkas, and even jitterbugging, women partnering each other under twinkling crystal chandeliers. There were maybe a hundred women bopping around that room. I thought, Sharon, how can you just stand and watch? Sharon, how can you be so melancholy? Mrs. Karinsky was holding out her arms to me, the bride’s own mom was reaching for me with a smile on her lips. I shook myself; I reached out into the center of the mob and plunged in. This trio was pounding out the music; and I have to say, the band wore frock coats, but these guys could swing. The drummer pounded out the beat, and the guy on sax was belting out Hasidic nigguns and show tunes. Sometimes his solos sounded like a cross between the two. He wailed “Old Man River” as if the song encompassed all the sorrows of the Jewish people. But then the third guy would break in on keyboard and bring everything back up to speed. He was the most amazing one of all. His hair and beard were bright flaming red; his fingers were so lightning fast he’d have run away with every song if the other two had let him. He had no music, not even a cheat book, but just played while he looked out at the dancers. Any chance he got, he’d be improvising and hot-dogging on the keys, until his colleagues would start glaring at him.
So there were some tensions in the trio, yet everyone was dancing too hard to care. As long as the music kept coming, as long as those rhythms kept pouring on, we danced. And I held hands with the other ladies; I locked arms with Estie’s cousins. I had several different drinks from the bar, where there was also a whole smorgasbord set up with crudités and chopped liver sculptures in the shapes of swans, and miniature rye breads, and whitefish salad, and turnips carved like roses. I was wearing a borrowed dress from one of Estie’s cousins, which was an old bridesmaid dress, a lace-covered apricot satin concoction with great big muttonchop sleeves, which was not exactly my style. Yet who knew what my style was at that point? I had the shoes that came with the outfit, the kind dyed to match, so they were apricot, too, but scuffed in back and big on me, so my feet and my toes kept feeling their way inside these hollows and little caves that Estie’s cousin’s feet had previously established. I must have looked ridiculous, but I danced and danced. I kicked off the shoes into a corner of the room. I sweated up the satin of the dress. My face was hot.
The band stopped. There was a playful drum roll, and everyone burst out clapping. There stood Estie, alone in the doorway, like Princess Aurora, perfect and smiling, not a wrinkle in her white satin gown. She had a crinoline underneath, so her skirts poofed out and swished as she walked, and her dress was covered with frothy white tulle. Yitzy was off with the men. It was as if Estie had ditched him at the door. There wasn’t going to be any of that first dance as a married couple, or feeding each other bites of wedding cake. None of that. Estie smiled upon us, and her face was lit up with joy, but also confidence, as if to say, I’m back! She danced with her mother, and her grandmother, and, like the song says, her sisters and her cousins and her aunts, and as she danced, her dress flew up across the floor, and you could see the white slippers she was wearing underneath. Her lacy double veil came loose, and people had to help her pin it back onto her hair, and she had to stop and wait patiently, and she was so beautiful, I have to say—not just her face and her fair skin and slenderness, but the hope in her eyes, and, I want to say, her youth, but it wasn’t just that, it was the way she carried off being young, the way she was at peace with her seventeen years, so joyful in her family’s expectations. Gorgeous in her conformity.
Inspired by the sight of her, I ran up to the band. “Could I request a niggun?”
They couldn’t hear me at all, what with their earplugs and their massive speakers.
“Could I make a request!” I screamed.
The sax player knit his brow at me, as if I were disturbing him during a sacred act. The drummer ignored me altogether and just kept pounding on. So I went over to the guy on keyboard and I started humming to him. He looked at me and grinned, and immediately started picking up the tune. He began to play and then the drummer followed. When the sax looked peeved, my keyboard player started making exhortations in Russian, and after some back-and-forth the sax finally picked up his instrument and began to play, or rather, belt, the tune.
Then I ran over to Estie and said, “I want to teach you guys a dance!”
I got everyone into lines. Then I put on my teacher’s voice. “Okay, ladies, this is a traditional dance from the seventies. Let’s go now: forward, walk, walk, walk, back, walk, walk, walk.” I taught everyone the Hustle.
The party went on long into the night. The children were crashed out near the dessert table, so when people started leaving and collecting their kids, they had to pick through the sleeping bodies on the floor. The band was packing up, the caterers stripping and collapsing the tables, revealing them to be particle board. Some ladies collected all the centerpieces, which were silk flowers rented from the ladies’ charity group. Estie took off with her new husband and a bunch of other relatives. You had to wonder when the bride and groom got a chance to be alone for real.
As for me, I wandered down the hall to the ladies’ room, and then padded back in my stocking feet, slipping and sliding on the tile floor. The women’s ballroom was deserted. No one had thought to collect me and bring me home. Not being a child, no one had thought to include me in the head count of cousins or carry me back to the house. Everything hurt. Maybe I’d had a little bit too much to drink. Nausea was starting to overtake me. Real life was coming crashing down. I leaned against the wall in the hallway. In my shiny apricot dress I slid down to the floor and sat.
“These are yours?” I looked up to see the red-haired Russian-speaking keyboard dude coming over and holding up my satin shoes.
“Not really,” I said. Still, I rustled to my feet and took them.
“You are related to the bride or to the groom?” he asked.
“Neither one,” I told him. In my current state, wondering if I was still even going to have a home at the Karinskys’, I felt offended at him asking. I felt as if he were asking a really personal question. I shot back, “Are you?”
“No! No, I am a musician,” he said.
“What do you have, a pickup group, or a regular band?”
Now it was his turn to look offended. “They are a regular band,” he said. “I came to try them out.”
“Oh, it was a tryout,” I said.
He lowered his voice. “I do not like their tempos.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
The other two musicians were coming out now, wheeling the equipment. As they walked, I felt a ripple of contempt sweep past.
“Their style is not mine,” Mr. Keyboard was telling me. “In fact I am a classically trained pianist! I have been a student at Berklee College of Music!”
“No kidding,” I said. “That’s a good school. Do you live in Boston?”
“Yes, in Brighton.”
“That’s bizarre! I used to live right there. I lived in Allston!” “Oh, yes?”
“
Years ago. I’m from Boston—originally. Probably from a somewhat different background than yours,” I added, taking into account his black frock coat, and his black tasseled sash, and in general his whole Bialy-stoker outfit, which I knew by that time was the exact garb of the gentry of Bialystok in the eighteenth century. “My background is somewhat secular,” I said. “I am in the process of learning the Hasidic lifestyle.”
He beamed. Everyone was always beaming when I mentioned my learning. “I am also in the process!” he said. “You! You look like a rabbi already.” “I have been learning three years.”
“Well, I’ve just been learning something like—I don’t know, three months,” I confessed. “I’m just scratching the surface. Estie was my teacher. That’s the main reason I’m here.”
“No. No, Hashem brought you here,” he said solemnly. And he looked right into my eyes. He was freckled, and still sweaty from playing. His face, and beard, and his whole body, were long; his brown eyes were so bright and intense he looked like someone from an El Greco painting—he had such a beautiful yet unrealistic look about him.
“And, what brought you to …”
“When I was twenty-two years old I received a Jewish visa to leave Leningrad. I came to this country in 1980.”
“I was going to say what brought you to Hasidism.”
“My divorce,” he said promptly. “During which my wife was leaving me for another man, and I grew mad.”
“Mad angry, or mad insane?” I asked.
“Without a mind. I returned to life through Rabbi Nachum Jarosiewicz—you have heard of him?” I shook my head.
“He came to me, and together learned with me until once again I remembered who I was, and so I lived with him a time until once again I returned to the apartment of my aunt, who has kept my piano. To which I returned for my studies and my learning together.”