Paradise Park

  And I said to both of them, “Thank you so so so much for coming!” as if they’d come from far away, which they had, and they shook Mikhail’s hand while Steve, the mohel, was calling everyone to order.

  “People, if you would gather over here …” Steve was saying.

  Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off my parents, standing there in the same room like that. I was just in such awe, watching them, and their total politesse. The way they glided near each other, and nodded their heads.

  “Hello, Milt.”

  “Hello, Estelle. How are you?”

  And they smiled, and they inclined their heads, and then they proceeded in their separate, translucent, shining spheres.

  “Baruch habah,” Mohel Steve sang out. “Blessed be he who enters! For those of you who haven’t been to a bris before—and for those of you who have, but don’t remember—or don’t want to remember—I’ll be translating as I go along, and explaining. The first thing is—does the cutting hurt the baby? Just for a moment, just for a bit. Does it traumatize him? Will he be in agonizing pain? Absolutely not! One little cut—one drop of blood, on the eighth day of this young boy’s life, to symbolize his covenant with his God, and with his people, Israel. This might in fact be the easiest Jewish ritual he has to undergo—especially when you remember that Abraham, the first Jew, circumcised himself. When he was ninety-nine. So think about that, men, as we proceed.

  “Zeh kiseh shel Eliahu. …This is the chair of Elijah. …” Steve’s voice pinged through the community center. “As tradition has it, this chair here symbolizes Elijah’s throne, and the time when the prophet will return to bring forth the Messiah. It’s also the chair where our Sandek is going to sit. Sandek means ’with child’—this is the guest who has the honor of holding the baby on his lap, for the circumcision. Okay, who’s going to sit on the hot seat?”

  “Mikhail. Go up there,” I whispered.

  “All right, Papa,” said Mohel Steve. “You’re not going to drop him, now! Take this pillow and we’ll just put this young man on your lap, and now we’ll say this blessing….”

  Tears were already welling up in my eyes. Telemachus stood on one side of me, and Deb on the other.

  My tiny baby was screaming. He was turning bright red, and screaming with all his tiny might. Mikhail sat still as he could, as if he were afraid to move. And Steve took out his glittering instruments, and after that I couldn’t even look.

  The screaming just went on and on. That one moment Steve had talked about stretched out, it seemed, for hours.

  “Are you okay?” Telemachus whispered.

  “No, I’m not okay,” I sobbed, and I buried my head on Deb’s shoulder.

  “She’s not okay,” I heard people murmuring.

  “Sharon’s not doing so well!”

  The baby kept on screaming. I didn’t even realize the mohel was finished. Mikhail was chanting a blessing in Hebrew and in English. “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with thy commandments, and commanded us to introduce my son into the covenant of Abraham our father.”

  Steve was telling everyone to join in saying: “Even as he has been introduced into the covenant, so may he be introduced to the Torah, to the marriage canopy, and to a life of good deeds.”

  But I still wouldn’t look. All I heard was blessing after blessing, and my baby screaming, and then a dull thud. “What was that?” I gasped. “It’s Philip!”

  We all rushed to his side. Philip was lying crumpled on the floor. All six and a half feet of him. He’d fainted dead away! He lay in a little clearing of the crowd—just like a felled tree.

  Telemachus and Deb and I rushed to his side. Telemachus lifted Philip in his arms. As he dragged him off, Philip’s eyes opened, and then closed again.

  “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who didst sanctify beloved Israel from birth, impressing thy statute in his flesh …” Steve was chanting, “and marking his descendants with the sign of the holy covenant….Just go ahead and give him a drink, and he’ll be fine—happens all the time—it’s always the guys.… Because of this, for the sake of the covenant …”

  So we dragged Philip off to revive him, and we sat him down on a chair in the back, where he slumped ashen faced, and while we were doing that the baby got his name.

  “Let him be called in Israel Zohar ben Michayel. Zohar, son of Mikhail.”

  “What did he say his name was?” everyone was asking.

  “What’s his name?” Deb asked me.

  Still, the baby was screaming.

  “Here you go, Mama,” Mohel Steve told me, and he handed me the baby, and he said, “I gave him a drop of wine—that usually puts them to sleep….”

  “You gave him wine?” I said. “At eight days old?”

  “He didn’t want it, so you should probably nurse him.”

  I lifted up my top, and the baby started sucking for all he was worth. “Poor little guy. You were hungry,” I whispered to him. “And nobody was listening. And when you wanted milk, they gave you wine. What kind of place is this?”

  Zohar gobbled down his milk so fast he wore himself out. My other breast was fairly bursting, and Zohar was fast asleep. So I had to take off his socks and tickle his toes just to get him to take a few sips on the other side, and even then he sucked with his eyes closed. Whether it was the wine, or the milk, or the covenant on his flesh, Zohar slept and slept. He lay curled up inside his car seat with his cheeks plumped out and his mouth in a tiny disapproving yet angelic frown. “Don’t worry,” I kept telling him. “You’ll never have to see Mohel Steve again.”

  Meanwhile we were all sitting down at long tables with paper tablecloths decorated with teddy bears, and we were having our festive potluck meal. I have to say, Deb’s spinach lasagna was starting to revive me, especially since by now it was something like noon, and I’d forgotten to eat any breakfast that morning, we’d been so busy trying to get out of the house for the bris. Mikhail had been looking pale, too, but now he was laughing, and he was singing, and he rolled in an old upright piano that they had there and played Jewish tunes, and Bialystoker nigguns, and Israeli folk songs.

  I said to Deb, “I’d get up and dance if I weren’t afraid of busting up my stitches.”

  “I didn’t know you danced,” she said. “You should come dancing at MIT sometime.”

  “At MIT!” I said, “Deb, believe me, I’ve been dancing at MIT. I mean I was one of the—I was in the—I haven’t been dancing there in probably twenty years! I wouldn’t even know the dances anymore. My whole repertoire is probably stuck back in the seventies.”

  “Come to Oldies’ Night,” she said.

  “What, is that when all the old fogies come back?”

  “Yeah, they play all the old dances,” she said. “They have it every year.”

  “It sounds depressing,” I said.

  Mikhail was calling me. “Sharon! We must have our speech.”

  So Mikhail and I got up in front of the crowd, and we hauled the baby in his car seat up with us. Philip, who was sort of convalescing in a Naugahyde armchair that we’d dragged in for him, shocked everyone by sitting up for a second and giving off a piercing whistle to quiet the crowd.

  “All right,” I said, “Mikhail and I have written letters to the baby about his name and who we hope he might turn out to be, and …” I looked down at the baby sleeping. He was so beautiful I almost choked up again. I didn’t know then he was just resting up so he could scream all night. “So here goes,” I said, and started reading.

  Dear Zohar,

  Your name means radiance, splendor, and light. When I think of your name I think of starlight and sunlight and the way light shines on the water. It is the kind of light that you see on the ocean. It is the kind of light that fills the night sky when there are so many stars they look like dust. It is the light that comes from God. It says in a poem that God’s light is “a shining like shook foil.” That’s the idea I had when we nam
ed you. Not that we expect you to shine all the time, but we hope you will take your light and join it to everything good. And take your inherent sparks, and let them fly upward as far as they will go. That was our idea—that your name would be a little reminder to you all the time—because it’s so easy to get bogged down in life. In fogs, and darkness, and shadows. It’s so easy to live in caves. Yet remember your name. That you are made out of light.

  I turned to Mikhail. He was in a reverie. He didn’t realize I was done. “It’s your turn,” I whispered.

  “Oh!” He rustled his ripped-out notebook papers.

  Did you know, dear son, that you are also a book? You are named for the Zohar. The Book of Splendor, which is the mystic Jewish book of Kabbalah. It is written in the Zohar: “Every living thing in the world has a pair of stars in the heavens corresponding to it. Each tree and plant, even every blade of grass.” When you were born, a star descended from the upper heavens into our own firmament. When you are awake that star watches over you. When you sleep that star ascends above, and a different star comes down to guard you. All throughout the universe the stars stand in their appointed places. The Lord has appointed them to their tasks. He has set them all in order in their degrees, and in their shifts during the day and during night. Therefore, dear Zohar, do not cry or fear, because you also have watching you from the heavens your own stars. And truly in life, there is nothing else you will need….

  “Except,” I said, “if by some chance you do need something else—we’ll always be there for you.”

  Then Mohel Steve said, “Yasher koach!” meaning more power to you. “Spoken like a true Jewish mother!”

  So, of course, as soon as he called me a Jewish mother, everybody started laughing. I thought, Why is everybody laughing? That’s what I am.

  “Great name,” said Telemachus afterward, when everyone was milling around, gathering to go.

  “I love the name,” said Mom. She gave me a kiss. A little bit timidly she said, “I have to admit, I thought you were going to name him after Andrew.”

  “I thought so too,” Dad said slowly, coming up to the other side of me.

  I was just stunned to hear them say that. So many thoughts were running through my head. First of all, the thought that for Mom and Dad it was still all about Andrew. Everything began and ended—mostly ended—with him. There were my parents, one on each side of me, and they’d both come with exactly the same idea and the same hope! So of course in that moment I was filled with guilt that this had never even occurred to me. I had never once thought of naming the baby after my brother. Of course that’s what I should have done. That was the real Jewish tradition, wasn’t it? And there were Mom and Dad, after all those years, still with their sorrow. How could they not feel it? You would feel it forever, losing your son. I had never even realized a sliver of how they must have felt until just that moment. And meanwhile, after all these years, even now, I’d still managed to do the wrong thing. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  “I love you guys,” I burst out, and I threw my arms around both of them, both my mom and dad, and I drew them together into my fat postpartum, invincibly strong unconditional arms. And I held them, and I held them, and they stiffened up, and they shrunk back from their royal spheres’ crushing like that and smushing together in my iron grip. But still I held on to Mom and Dad. I held them until they were really uncomfortable. I held them as if they were my own prodigal sheep returned into my fold.

  And afterward my father had to wipe the condensation from his glasses, and my mother had to gasp for breath. They were both so shaken up—we all were, all three—but I wasn’t sorry. Not one bit.

  23

  Oldies’ Night

  WHEN you get older and start taking stock—when you start looking back and maybe even revisiting the so-called scenes of your youth—you can’t help feeling torn between nostalgia and foreboding. That’s how I felt about going back to dancing again. Deb kept working on me to come to Oldies’ Night when spring rolled around, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. I dreaded getting there and seeing how everyone had aged, and youth had fled, since that’s what youth does—and you can chase her all you want, yet you’ll run in circles. You’ll end up in vicious circles, unless by some chance you are dancing on a painted Grecian urn, and John Keats writes your story, and then your mad pursuit will be about infinite beauty, rather than futile attempts to relive the past, and your dance will be truth, rather than consequences. The consequences being that youth flees, and grace puts on weight, and gravity comes to the quick. So I concluded that I’d rather remember dancing the way it was than go back now. Then curiosity got the better of me.

  I came to Oldies’ Night with Mikhail, and Zohar riding in a backpack on Mikhail’s back. Our little boy was nine months old, and his face was perfectly round. His cheeks were so big and soft they jiggled and shook as we walked along. His cheeks were so big that from certain angles you couldn’t see his ears. His eyes were dark, almost black. He had only fuzz for hair, but he had dark eyelashes all fringing his eyes. And we walked into the MIT student center, which had a bank, and a barber shop, and an ice cream store, and Zohar said, “Ha!” which meant, This is very interesting.

  We went to MIT’s student center and found an enormous room called the Sala de Puerto Rico. And it had air conditioning and a polished tile floor, but no people at all. I said, “I thought it was today.” I rummaged through my bag. I tried to remember the date.

  Then Mikhail saw the note taped on the wall. Dancing Outside.

  So we walked out to the lawn on the other side of the student center, and there on the grass were dancers, something like a hundred of them, and they were old. They were middle aged, and they’d brought their spouses and their children. And they were wearing cutoff shorts and faded T-shirts. The guys were bald, and they had beards, and serious bellies, and hairy legs. The women were wearing sweats and athletic shoes, no Indian gauze skirts. They had perms and they had gray hair, and (like me) hips. But meanwhile, the music was blaring from the speakers; the same old dances I used to know. My feet just started jumping. Slowly I started twirling. “Mamamam!” Zohar said. “Mamamam!” He kicked his bare feet.

  “Shall you come out?” Mikhail was asking him.

  I was already a ways off. Without thinking I’d begun to dance. “This is for you,” this one bald guy said. He’d brought over a fancy name tag, a white circle like a moon, and it said OLDIE on it and there was a space where you could write your name, and how many years you had been dancing, and I took a black marker and I wrote, “Sharon.” Then I had to laugh at myself a little bit. I wrote, “22 Years.”

  I didn’t recognize anybody from back in my era. And yet a lot of people looked familiar. Maybe it was just taking a while to place them. Or maybe I hadn’t ever known these people, but they were the kind of people I had known. Maybe they were just the same ilk. I took Mikhail by the hand, and he held Zohar, and I called the steps to them, and they followed, so we formed our own little unit there outside the circle, and we took turns holding Zohar and dancing, and then resting our arms and our backs, until all at once someone came up to me, and stared at my face, and came a little closer and kept staring. He was a guy just arrived in a jacket and tie, and with gray hair, and a neat little gray moustache.

  “Sharon?”

  I knew his voice, and suddenly I recognized his little blinky eyes behind his glasses. I stood stock still. “Gary!”

  “I can’t believe it.” He took my two hands in his. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m just—I’m dancing,” I spluttered. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? This is my husband, Mikhail,” I said. “This is my kid, Zohar.”

  Gary shook Mikhail’s hand. He looked at Zohar. He looked at all of us. “Sharon,” he said to me, slowly. “Wow.” He kept shaking his head. “This is good. This is really good to see you again.”

  “What’s up with you? What’s with the suit?” I asked.

&nb
sp; “I came from work,” he explained.

  “You work in Boston now? You work here?”

  “Is that strange?” he said a tiny bit defensively.

  “Well, I mean, of course not. It’s just I always had you pictured in my mind at Torah Or, and becoming a rabbi, and living in Jerusalem, and all that. So that didn’t happen?”

  “Well, I’m living in Newton,” he said, “I work for the federation.”

  “The federation of what?” I asked.

  “The Jewish Federation,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “I’m involved in their adult programming. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the program Partnership for Lifelong Learning?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think I have heard of it,” Mikhail said politely. “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a program I codesigned.”

  “Neat,” I said. “So you’re still into Judaism, just over here, instead of over there.”

  “Well,” Gary said, “that’s one way of looking at it. The way my thinking evolved, I came to realize that outreach was my particular area—outreach to the assimilated, and to the intermarried. Outreach to the children of intermarriage. Outreach to those in the population who are totally unaffiliated. And, much as I love Israel, America is where the need is greatest. America is where the ignorance and the identity crisis is just—it’s staggering.”

  “That’s great that you’re turning that around,” I said.

  Gary folded his arms and he sighed in his dissatisfied patronizing way, and at that moment he was so much the Gary that I once knew that my hands flew up to my face. “Sharon,” he said, “if it’s anything I’ve become, it’s more pessimistic.”

  “Really!”

  “We’ve only just begun to see the fallout from two generations of assimilation.”

  “Well, I guess that makes your job more interesting,” I said. “So now you’re married and living in Newton?” “I’ve been married,” Gary said.