Paradise Park (31 page)

We had our dress rehearsal in the temple social hall. Our costumes were royal blue, and hung either straight or funny on you depending on
who had sewed yours. We had long-sleeved white blouses and then these blue jumper things over us. There weren’t buttons or zippers or anything, so you pulled them over your head, and on mine the neck hole and the armholes were just a little bit too small, so I could barely get the jumper on, and I couldn’t really raise my arms. And they were trimmed with purple rickrack around the hem and neck, and we wore matching kerchiefs over our hair out of the same royal-blue material, so we looked like, I don’t know what, maybe royal flying nurses, or a bunch of older novices at a funky convent.

So we were all set for
“Kora Bushka,”
which was probably the simplest, most repetitive dance in the repertoire. I turned on the music, and immediately Henny Pressman started turning the wrong way. She started doing everything mirror-image backwards. We were all dancing and clapping and stamping and making with our hands in these retarded costumes, and Henny was completely, totally, one hundred percent of the time, on the wrong foot. I mean, after something like six years practicing this dance! I mean, why?

I shouted above the music, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I ran to the tape player and stabbed the off button with my finger. Everyone was looking around. I said, “Henny! I’m talking to you!”

“I’m sorry,” Henny said. She was a bit flushed. She wasn’t used to being yelled at. “I got a little excited.”

“Well, get unexcited. This is not exciting. What we’re doing here is not exciting.” I was so furious, I felt so ridiculous, tears were starting in my eyes. Then I thought, What are
you
doing, Sharon? What kind of teacher are you being, yelling at this poor woman? I thought, Are you forgetting everything Siegel told you about the vocation of teaching? Are you turning into some kind of Friedell snooting at all the world’s amateurs? And I stopped myself. In a quiet voice I said, “Let’s try again. Henny, let’s see it. Start on the left.”

She lifted her right foot.

And that was when I hit rock bottom. I’d been sinking down pretty low. I’d been sedimenting down for years, and yet at that moment I felt lower about myself and about my life than I’d ever felt before. I felt at that moment the whole truth of my situation, which was that I’d gotten to a point where I wasn’t a rebel or an experimenter or a seeker after God, or
even a drifter in exotic places. I was a thirty-three-year-old permanent resident of Honolulu, and purely for the cash I was rehearsing a bunch of sixty-year-olds in a dance that some of them still didn’t get. “No,” I told Henny, “your other left.”

I
N
Kapiolani Park Sunday there was a bandstand and a white-and-blue plastic banner that read
ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY
. All around under the ironwood trees people were standing with their kids and buying food from the food booths. Not just hot dogs, but falafel in pitas, and “shave ice,” and bagels. Hawaiian Bagel had a booth of its own and was serving its genuine Mainland-style bagels, the boiled kind, which were a great exotic delicacy at that time. And there were a couple of booths set up by the Israeli consulate from San Francisco and the Jewish Federation, and there was the floating random crafts fair that always materialized at big community happenings, with ceramic planters and polished wood bowls and miniature Hawaiian sculptures and tables in the back displaying burnished glossy hardwood dildoes. There were blue-and-white balloons, and the mayor spoke, and Rabbi Siegel said the benediction. The Air Force band played the Israeli national anthem, and a medley from
Fiddler on the Roof.
People sat on the park benches, and on tatami mats on the ground in front of the stage, and the kids ran around on the grass. Toward the end, after a lot of speeches, and a kiddie choir, we went up onstage. I looked out over the crowd and saw about four hundred people, actually quite a lot. And I made myself say into the mike, “Please welcome the women of Martin Buber Temple.”

Our music cranked up over the loudspeakers, and we took our partners for
“Kora Bushka,”
and we started to move more or less in the right direction. Henny was doing all right this time; Betsy Sugarman was rushing. But mainly we were correct and in the proper places, thumping the stage, turning heavily in each other’s arms. I tried to keep up my smiling face. I tried to keep my body light, but my feet were so glum they clomped like wet clay on the ground. By the time it was over, and applause came up from here and there, and we bowed, my shoulders just sagged.

When you’re young you get to be, in your own mind, at least, the star and ingénue. But then there is that moment when all of a sudden you’re too old for the part. And you know, because of the way people treat
you. The way they look, or rather, don’t look at you. You aren’t in the center anymore; you’re off to the side. You aren’t the dancer. You’re the teacher. Because you have to be a character actor now! And you just aren’t prepared for that. It’s just a shock. You never needed any character before. I was relieved to be done, it’s true, but just so humbled by the experience, not only from dancing with seven sacks of potatoes, but from connecting so intensely with the sack of potatoes inside of me, with just my out-of-shapeness and my age, not being twenty anymore, not being spun by young men, not being anymore even in the same vicinity as those people who could leap in the air.

Afterwards I ripped off my costume—literally—since it hurt squeezing my head out through that neck hole. I changed into my shorts and T-shirt and put on my rubber thongs. I couldn’t even see straight. All I wanted was to go home.

On the way to the bus stop I ran into this couple in costume, dressed like Hasids from Jerusalem. The guy had on a black hat and a beard and a white shirt and black trousers and black dress shoes, and, to top it off, one of those long frock coats with the black silk-fringed sash around the waist. The girl had on a long-sleeved dress and white stockings and pumps. The works. “Cool,” I said, because having been to Jerusalem I could appreciate their authenticity.

“Shalom aleichem,” the guy said.

“Aleichem shalom,” I said back, which was the reply I’d learned from Torah Or.

The two of them lit up. “You see?” the guy said to the girl, as if to say, I told you she would understand.

Then I saw, all of a sudden, they weren’t just a couple of kids dressed up, they were the real thing, a Hasidic couple in Honolulu.

“My name is Dovidl,” the guy told me. “This is my wife, Ruchel.”

I looked out at them from the middle of my deep blue funk. His wife? How old was this character? Seventeen? “Are you visiting from Israel?”

“No, no,” Ruchel said, “We live here. We’ve been here six months.”

“We came from Crown Heights. We’re Bialystokers,” Dovidl explained.

“You’re from what, Bialystok?”

“We are not personally from Bialystok. That was the seat of our rebbes. Now we are here to start a
CHAI
house in Honolulu.”

“A
CHAI
house?”

He nodded at me. “So we could bring Yiddeishkeit to Honolulu.”

His brown beard was curly, like a spaniel’s ear. And she had bobbed hair, which must have been a wig, and sunglasses pushed back on top of her head. They stood there together all covered up in black and navy blue, in these throngs of T-shirts and shorts and midriffs and bare legs. And they were telling me all about how they were sent out from their rebbe (whose seat was now in Brooklyn) to set up house here in the islands, as emissaries of religious Judaism, and they’d just arrived, and they were renting a home in Manoa Valley near the university. “I’ve been here before,” Dovidl said. “When I was single I came to help with the shul for Yom Kippur services. That was how I got the idea.”

“The idea to live here?” I said.

He gestured at the trees and the mynah birds squawking and picking at the crumbs on the ground. The blue sky was shining down on us, and a fresh breeze was blowing. It was just the same kind of day that had so amazed me when I first came to Hawaii. “This is like Gan Eden!” Dovidl said. “The Garden of Eden!”

“You’ll come by us for Shabbes?” Ruchel asked.

So I guess then a new seed was planted in me, but I didn’t know it. I hardly believed in seeds anymore. If I did see one I thought the worst of it. Whereas before when I was so naive I assumed just about any stray idea could possibly turn into a gorgeous flowering shrub, now I’d think—Well, you never know. It could just as well be a haole koa—a weed that starts out as small as a dandelion and then grows and grows, and its stem hardens and the thing puts down taproots deep into the soil, tunneling into swimming pools or any underground pipes it can find, and sprouts ugly branches and turns into a tree which you then have to pay serious money to get removed.

But a few weeks later, when I was at The Good Earth grocery shopping, I ran into my old friend Fred from Rabbi Siegel’s class, and Fred told me that he had actually been going to the
CHAI
class, to their services and all, and they served these unbelievable lunches afterwards. Like five-course meals of unbelievable food. And they did have classes there every week, which Dovidl taught, since he was a rabbi, but they were completely free and open to the public and were on Jewish thought—
not just the rules of Judaism but on the mysticism of the religion, and at the classes there was more food. He said, “You should go, Sharon.”

“Nah.”

“I thought mysticism was your cup of tea.”

“Nah, I’ve sworn off all that stuff.”

“How come?”

“Just some really bad rides, Fred.”

“You can really learn a lot about the divine presence in the world.”

“Yeah, well,” I muttered, “I’m just feeling like I’m a little too old for all that shit.”

Fred looked confused. “I’m surprised at you, Sharon.”

“Why?”

“Because you seem so bitter. I never had you pegged that way.”

“I’m not bitter!” I protested. “I’m not bitter at all. I’m just settled within myself.”

“Oh.” Fred was really a very sweet guy. “Well, that’s a good way to be.” And he headed off to the bulk grains.

“Fred. By the way. How old are they?”

“You mean the rabbi and the rebbetzin?”

“Yeah, I wondered, but I didn’t want to ask.”

“They’re twenty,” he said. “Can you believe it? And they’ve already been married a year.” “Geez.”

“I know!” Fred said. “When I was twenty I barely knew what planet I was on!”

Something stirred in me when he said that. Nostalgia mixed up with regret. Not that I regretted where I’d been when I was all young and twenty, but that I couldn’t be twenty anymore. And maybe I
was
bitter now that I was older. I’d just turned thirty-four. Maybe I was getting kind of set in my tracks—so afraid of sticking my neck out to try anything I was turning into some kind of hermit woman. Some kind of cat lady, without even any cat. So I felt Fred’s question. I mean, had I become that conservative? Had I changed so much that I clung to even the most tepid boring equilibrium? All that day and the next my imagination kept piping up, all curious and spurious. “Whatsa matter, scared? What’s wrong with you?”

“No, I am not scared. It’s not about being scared!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I’m at a place right now—”

“You’re
no
place right now!”

“Shut up!”

“No, you!”

“You!”

“YOU!”

So then I would be quiet and my imagination would be quiet for a moment, too, until a little later in the day I’d hear, “How come you never go anywhere anymore? How come you never want to do anything anymore? How come mysticism isn’t your cup of tea? I want some tea.”

“You just want to poke your head inside every door you can….”

“Yeah! I wanna go see! I wanna get some free stuff! Free food! Free food!” And this would go on and on, that little voice inside of me, that little imp, even at this late date not completely cured from that idea I could get rich (spiritually speaking) quick. Almost just to shut myself up, I went to the
CHAI
house for the first time.

D
OVIDL
and Ruchel lived in a rented tract house with a lot of white walls and a bare parquet floor. There were just a few sticks of furniture, a couch and armchair, and against the wall, a few tall bookcases full of Hebrew books. When I came Saturday morning, they had the living room set up with around twenty folding chairs and a tall screen down the middle to separate the men from the women. They had prayer books with Hebrew and with English, but they were different from the ones I was used to from Torah Or. They were big and fat and full of prayers I’d never seen before. Dovidl started up chanting the preliminary songs, but it took a long time for the service to get rolling, because although we had ten people if you counted me and Ruchel, they were waiting for a ninth and tenth man. So that was a little bit offensive, but I kept quiet, since I’d come purely to observe. Eventually Fred showed up, and then, lo and behold, Betsy Sugarman appeared along with her husband, Dr. Sugarman. With Fred and the doctor, Dovidl had his ten males, so he started steaming ahead. Since, of course, he knew Hebrew,
and the service was all in Hebrew, Dovidl did the whole thing, the singing, the chanting, the reading from the Torah. Everyone followed along, while Dovidl announced the page numbers as he went—but he directed his voice toward the men’s side of the room. I sat on the other side with Ruchel and Mrs. Sugarman, who had a look of resignation on her face, a look of He-Made-Me-Come-Here, My Husband. She had a round lace doily pinned onto her hair.

The service was around three hours long, and for me it would have been even longer if during the silent parts I’d stood and sounded out every single Hebrew word to myself as I used to at Torah Or; but I didn’t bother. I just sat and daydreamed. My eyes wandered around the room, and I kept staring at the two pictures Dovidl and Ruchel had up on the wall. One was a big photo of an old rabbi with a white beard, and a smile on his face, and underneath it, pasted right up on the wall, was a shiny copper penny. The other picture was an even bigger photographic portrait, maybe three feet tall, and it was in a fancy gilt frame, and was an almost life-size wedding picture of Dovidl and Ruchel, he in his black frock coat and with his silky beard, and she in a white high-collared wedding gown all covered with lace, and her brown eyes glassy like a doll’s.