All the rest of that day Mikhail sat on an old folding chair in our room. We usually threw clothes on top of that chair, but he’d shoved the clothes onto the floor, and now he just sat and sat. His mouth was set in a hard line. His face was flushed, his fingers eerily still. I think that was what frightened me the most. The way he didn’t even fidget. He had been such a fidgety person, always keeping time with all his fingers and his toes. Now he’d had all his fidgets stamped out. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to rant and rail with him, because it hurt so bad. It was as if somebody had taken away my hope, and my career, and stabbed me in the heart. It was as if somebody had repossessed my art, even though when it came to pianos I couldn’t play a note. And I was in crisis, and I was in turmoil, because Mikhail was. And I was grieving, because he was. And I doubted the whole world, because he did. And I just wanted to put my arms around him and cry, but I didn’t, because I thought maybe that would make him feel worse. So I kept away, and I let Aunt Lena go on about how Mikhail never opened any mail, and how I should have known that about him, that he just threw it away. Also Mikhail didn’t know how to run a business. He didn’t charge enough for lessons, and he allowed his students’ parents to become late with payments. Thus they took advantage of him, which I should have known. While meanwhile he himself kept spending, including money for competitions. Mikhail did not understand money, and Aunt Lena blamed me, which wasn’t really fair, but I let her, because she did it out of love for Mikhail—and it got her off his back.
Mikhail went to bed early. Then Aunt Lena went to bed. But I stayed up. I sat on the sofa in the living room and I stared at the piano crater on the floor. The newspapers and dust. A million practicalities buzzed in my mind. Like how would we tell all of Mikhail’s piano students? He had no instrument to teach them on. How would we tell them? He couldn’t call up all their parents. I would have to do it. I would have to tell them Mikhail was now making house calls. He would come teach in their own houses and apartments! Except we had no car. How would he manage to get to all of them? I thought, we’ve got to find some money. I thought, it’s up to me. I’ve got to find us some money to get that piano back. I have to beg, borrow, or steal some. Which brought to mind my father, of course, except as usual I didn’t know quite how to ask, given the awkward situation. All my situations were awkward situations. Given that I had used those options up before. The begging, borrowing, and stealing. And with Dad just plain helping never was a possibility. I stared ahead of me at the empty void, and I thought, how? How? How? But I could not see a way to get the piano back.
Then, for the first time, I saw how crazy we were to be having a baby in September. We couldn’t even take care of a piano. How could we support a child? And where would we even put a baby in Aunt Lena’s apartment?
I thought and I thought until, even with all my worrying, I could barely keep my eyes open. I thought until I practically had to dive for bed. But when I lay down to sleep, I had a terrible dream. Mikhail and I were birds. We were huge white birds flying. We were albatrosses, but we were too big. Our wings were so heavy we could barely lift them up. Our wings stretched out, so we had to wait for the wind to help us fly. When the wind came, only then, we lifted off the ground. Then we pumped and pumped with all our might, and we stretched and reached until we felt as though all the fibers of our bodies were close to breaking. There above us was the sky, and it was cool and smooth and serene, and we gasped for air and opened up our beaks and we pumped our ungainly wings, and the wind lifted us like two gliders and we pumped some more and with all our effort we rose into that blue—it was such a color, not even blue, more purple. It was like blueberries and muscat grapes. We were so close we could taste it. Then all at once we crashed. We’d hit the ceiling. Glass sprayed down and cut our faces, and chicken wire tangled up our flight feathers, and we fell back again, and we were wounded, both of us. We were bleeding. But all the time I heard a voice, and it was calling, “Sharon! Sharon!” And I tried to raise up my wings again, but they didn’t work anymore. They were broken.
I opened my eyes. I was thrashing around on the bed. I was bathed in sweat, but Mikhail was holding me, calling, “Sharon, what is the matter?”
“What do you mean, what’s the matter?” I cried out. “You know what’s the matter.”
“I thought you were hurt,” he said.
“I am hurt,” I told him.
“Oh, Sharon,” he whispered to me. “I’m sorry I have made such a mess. It was my fault.”
“Your fault!” I said. “They didn’t even give you the benefit of the doubt. They just took the piano away!”
“It was my fault,” he said again.
“I’m afraid,” I told him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Please do not fear. We will start paying bills!”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I wailed. “We will.”
“I had a terrible dream,” I told Mikhail.
“What did you dream?”
“It was … I was …” Even as I began describing it, the whole scene was melting away. I was already starting to forget the whole thing. But I told him, “We were birds, and we were trying to fly, but we couldn’t get up there to the sky. It was like we were land animals, but we thought we could fly. And whenever we got close we got tangled in nets, and we broke our wings. But all the time a voice was calling to me.”
“A voice?” Mikhail asked intently. “What did it say?”
“Just my name. Over and over. Sharon. Sharon. And now I can’t sleep. And I’m afraid to go back to sleep,” I said.
“But this dream is from God!” Mikhail said.
I looked at him. He sat bolt upright in bed. “This dream is from God. It must be for us to instruct us what to do!”
I propped up my head on my hand.
“This is a vision,” Mikhail said.
“It didn’t feel like one,” I told him.
“At the time, no. You were asleep,” Mikhail pointed out.
“True,” I said.
“In the dream you were flying.”
“And you were too.”
“We were flying. We were moving. We were traveling. We must move!” he said.
“But how?” I asked.
“Then a voice was calling Sharon … Sharon … And saying what?”
“That was it,” I said. “Just my name.”
Mikhail got up. We both got up. We padded out into the living room. I was still wearing my shirt from the day before, but no pants. Mikhail was wearing his underwear. He started pacing around the apartment. He paced and paced, trying to come up with the meaning of my dream. He turned on one reading lamp by the couch so he wouldn’t trip. He began leafing through the last few days’ papers on the end table. He was looking for words. He was looking for any words of inspiration. “Real Estate,” he said to me. “Relocation. Houses. Sales. Rentals.”
“No,” I said, slowly.
“Allston, Belmont, Brookline, Cambridge …” He was skimming the names of the towns. “Medford, Newton, Peabody, Quincy, Randolph, Revere, Saugus … Sharon!” he exclaimed.
“What?” I said.
“Sharon, Mass. Apartments, sales, rentals. This is the meaning,” he told me. “Flying upward. Calling Sharon. This is what it means: go upward to Sharon.”
“You mean the town? The town of Sharon? But Sharon is south,” I said.
“Figuratively upward,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said.
“Arise,” he said. “To Sharon.”
Gosh, I’d probably been to Sharon twice in my life. Who went out there? It was an hour’s drive! The only thing I could think was, well, it’s cheap in Sharon. You have to give it that.
“To Sharon!” Mikhail said, and spoke with such joy. I felt myself rising even then. There we were, the two of us, looking at my vision. There we were, and we had no piano, we had actually nothing, except for the most important thing anyone could possibly want. Instructions that had come from God.
So of course, there were those worrisome economic issues, like we had no money and no car, no credit rating, a baby on the way, et cetera. But at that moment there was no question in our minds that there we were dealing with a commandment, and a categorical imperative, and a bolt from the blue. This was about miracles and mystic faith, in which case you had to put aside the practicalities. You had to abandon your initial prejudices and assumptions, i.e., us move to Sharon? That suburban wasteland? And you just had to concentrate on the crux of the matter, which was that I—actually we—had together been called out of our chaos by God. Just like the Israelites. Just like the pioneers. Just like the first settlers of this country. Like the pilgrims themselves when they were called to the wilderness to dedicate themselves and to find in their own personal American desert a new Sharon, and a new Canaan. And when you looked at it that way, when you considered my dream that way, then how could it not come to pass? A dream of such flight and divine provenance. You sat by the light of one lamp with newspapers scattered all around you and you just wondered. You were just in awe. And there I was with my husband. And there I was with my vision. Who would have thought? It had been so painful inside while it was happening, yet once told—who could have guessed?—like rocks that polish up to gems, my dream interpreted so resplendently.
21
The Refusniks
ONCE we had the word from God, we knew exactly what we had to do. Get out of debt, save up, and work and work to meet the income requirements for a Sharon apartment building. I worked extra hours at Fresh Squeezed, and since he couldn’t teach, Mikhail started driving a taxi for the Red Cab Company. Sometimes Mikhail drove all night. Sometimes both of us worked straight through the weekend. Even on Shabbat. Yet we never had any misgivings. When you have such a precious gift—a divine message—when you receive your destiny like that you don’t look back. We worked so much we barely noticed anymore that we had a space problem living with Aunt Lena; we barely noticed the lack of privacy, because we were hardly in the apartment. Those space troubles seemed like a thing of the past. In fact all our troubles seemed now to be merely temporary.
We were full of sleepless energy. Sometimes it felt as though the two of us were outrunning winter, we worked so hard; the days went so fast. And all the time I was growing. There was no getting around it. My stomach was expanding. My skin was stretching out like a balloon, and underneath there was a baby, and that baby kicked and squirmed. But the strangest thing was, my earth tattoo, which had only been about the size of a silver dollar, began to expand as well. It stretched out bigger and bigger, and the lines grew thinner and thinner, but the earth was expanding on my belly. The earth just grew and grew.
I thought, This is what it’s like to have a baby. To stretch out taut like the head of a drum. To be the tip of a tree. To live on the edge. Late at night I would take baths. I would pile my clothes next to the damp stacks of Aunt Lena’s New Yorker magazines, and ease myself into the tubful of hot soapy water. My knees were two small islands, and my belly one big round one in the water. There I was, three floating islands. There I was, two knees and one planet earth. I’d learned from the Talmud that if you save a life it’s as if you are saving the whole world. There I was bringing forth a life, and I could see on my own flesh, on the ink traces of my tattoo, that this was also true: When you birth a child, it’s as if you’re saving the earth from smallness. I could see it happening, the baby transforming that flat ink-and-needle drawing on my belly into a wondrous globe.
There was such joy, even though we worked day and night. It was because we could see the future ahead of us, and we were racing toward it. Running all the time, and so fast, we almost made ourselves sick, but the difference was, we knew we were running in the right direction. Doubts and worries, Hasidic aspirations, desires for Mikhail’s pianistic glory—they’d all gone by the wayside—and it was tremendous to have thrown them off. It was like throwing off all our extra weight and ballast. We were light, we were free, we were crazy busy. That was when we started our band.
WE didn’t plan on a regular band, just a pickup group to play for a couple of Havurah friends, Josh and Beth, who were having a shoestring wedding. We got together once at Josh and Beth’s half a house in Belmont just to look over the music. Josh and Beth had been engaged for several years, so they were very particular about their wedding. Josh looked like the man who ate no fat, and he worked as a lab technician at MIT. Beth looked like the gal who ate no lean, and she was a technical writer for the company BB & N. Josh had dark eyes, and Beth had wide watery blue ones. Their house was a two-family that they’d bought together, and they rented out the other half to another couple. They’d bought their furniture at estate sales. That was the kind of people they were: fiscally sound. They’d moved to Belmont for the schools.
It was going to be Mikhail on keyboard, me on vocals and guitar, and then, from our Havurah, our friend Philip on drums, and his friend Deb on clarinet. We all gathered in the living room, and Beth’s little terrier dogs were running around and barking, and had to be locked out on the screened porch, because they were jumping and nipping and worrying the music. Deb took out her clarinet and got right down to business. She was originally from Jersey, but was now a famous street musician in Harvard Square, and she had the most expressive face, with the kind of nose that in books they always call aquiline, which you have to guess must be a euphemism for big. Philip was unpacking his drum set. He was an unpublished novelist around six and a half feet tall, and he had a very small neat head up there on his shoulders, and he wore little round glasses, and khakis, and was afraid of microbes. He was so introverted and straightlaced, you would never imagine him in a band. Yet there he was fussing with a set of drums that must have cost ten thousand dollars, fiddling with the little metal stands. We all said, “Geez!” He was like someone coming to a friendly bowling get-together with his own professional bowling ball in its custom vinyl zipper case. My hands stroked the varnish sides of my beloved, yet admittedly plain vanilla guitar. Mikhail, who really was a pro, made no bones about anything, and just stood behind Beth’s electronic keyboard.
“I want you to play ‘Dodi Li,’” Beth said. “For the processional.”
“Do you have the words?” I asked.
“No,” she said, passing out the music.
“I need the words if I’m going to sing,” I pointed out.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to sing,” said Beth.
“Oh,” I said. I’d been kind of looking forward to singing. I was a little bit disappointed. But fortunately at the bottom of the page there were words in Hebrew, and they were the lyrics. Philip set the tempo, and we plunged in. And I, who could read the words, given the hours I’d put in praying when I was a Hasid, actually did begin to sing.
“Dodi li, va-ani lo, ha-roeh, ba-shoshanim….” I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine….
“Too fast! Too fast!” said Beth. “We want to walk down the aisle!”
Rehearsal with Beth around proved to be impossible, since she had an opinion about everything, and not a great understanding of the creative process. Josh was perfectly happy to let us do our thing, but Beth could not stop interrupting. After about twenty minutes of “Too fast! … Oh, no, now it’s too slow! … Are you going to play it that softly at the ceremony?” I could sense that the energy in the room was not positive at all. I could sense a lot of resentment from my fellow musicians. She’d interrupt, and they’d raise their eyes to the ceiling. They’d mutter to them-selves. They’d sigh. Still none of them spoke up.
Finally, I had to say, “Hey, Beth?”
“What?”
“Could you cool it?”
She looked at me with those big pale blue teary eyes. All of a sudden I remembered a girl from seventh grade named Lisa Frank, except we called her Lisa Frankenstein. She’d had blue eyes just like Beth’s—the kind always threatening to cry. Frankenstein always had those tears ready. It was one of her main assets. It was like having a high water
table.
“Beth,” I said, “I know it’s your wedding and all, but we need some space. This is only the first time we’ve ever played together!”
“But the wedding is Sunday!”
“But we’re a pickup band. Of your friends. Remember?” In the end we just had to put her out, like the dogs. We just had to get Josh to take her away all afternoon on errands so we could do our job.
“Thanks, Sharon,” Philip said to me, when we’d got rid of the audience.
“Alone at last!” I said. “Let’s play ball!”
And so we played. Mikhail began, and Philip took the beat, and Deb lifted up her clarinet and just whomped and wailed. We played klezmer, and Israeli folk, and corny renditions of “Hava Nagila.” And we played loud, and we played fast—except I gave Mikhail a dirty look when he tried to run away from the rest of us. I reined him in with one wifely glance. And we played the songs of Naomi Shemer, during which, of course, I took the lead, fronting the band. I sang “Machar”—Tomorrow—and “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”—Jerusalem of Gold. We played all the music Beth had left us, and some she hadn’t left at all. We noodled and we improvised. We went out on a limb. We played swing and jazz. We even tried some rock ‘n’ roll. And all the time the dogs were barking and barking out on the screened porch. It was two hours of holy noise.
When we stopped, no one spoke. We were stunned. We had come together as a few disparate musicians doing a favor to friends, and that elusive thing had happened. We had the stuff. We had that intangible thing that a million bands will strive for and never achieve. We clicked. Philip sat behind his drums. Nervously he fingered the drumsticks in his hands. Deb was standing drenched in sweat. Her whole body was depleted. She hadn’t just played every tune; she’d danced them. I looked at Mikhail and he looked at me.