Paradise Park (32 page)

When Dovidl finally wrapped everything up, we all folded the chairs and the screen as well, and Fred and some of the other guys brought in two long tables from the other room, and we all helped out setting them with white tablecloths and real china, cloth napkins, wineglasses, and silverware. Dovidl raised his silver wine goblet and sang the blessing over the wine, and we all had some. We washed our hands in the kitchen with a two-handled silver cup, pouring the water over one hand at a time, and we filed back to the table, and Dovidl said the blessing over two loaves of challah, and we all had pieces. And then we had chicken soup with real pieces of chicken floating in it, and pieces of carrot and celery and matzo balls. And Ruchel, who all of a sudden I noticed looked quite pregnant, brought out two platters, one with roasted chicken with stuffing, and yams on the side, and the other with brisket of beef, sliced on a bed of onions and stewed tomatoes. It was rib-sticking Mainland food in Manoa in the summer, but you couldn’t stop yourself from taking more. It was like Thanksgiving. Just about when you thought you were completely stuffed, along came these desserts, which were bundt cakes with

vanilla and chocolate swirled, and a lemon glaze. I didn’t mean to be a pig, but now here was this table spread before me, and the food was so good, I couldn’t help it. My mouth and stomach opened wide. My hunger was huge! I downed a couple of pieces of cake, before I even realized that Dovidl was telling a story. He was standing up at the head of the table and talking, and as he talked, he was swinging one end of the black silk sash he wore around his black frock coat, so the black silk fringe was swishing around. And he was telling this story in that slight Yiddishy accent he had.

“Once upon a time there was a town that had no watchmaker. Watches and clocks of all kinds the people had. Yet their watchmaker had long ago passed away. There was no watchmaker, and also there was no one in the town to fix the watches when they broke. The people of the town had to wait for the traveling watch repairman to come to them to take care of matters like these. Well, usually the repairman came every year. Every year he came to see the watches. But all of a sudden one year he didn’t come. So all right, he’s busy—next year he’ll be here. But the next year he didn’t come either. The next, and the next. What should the people do? They had no one to help them with their watches or their clocks. Some showed this time, some showed that. Matters were growing more and more confusing! The proper time was already a thing of the past! At last, after ten long years, the watch repairman arrived. ‘What took you so long?’ the people asked. ‘What was keeping you?’

“He said,
‘Nu
, all right, show me your watches.’

“The people lined up, one hundred in line, to bring him all the watches and the clocks and every timepiece they had. The repairman put his jeweler’s glass up to his eye. He got to work. What do you think happened? Some of the watches he fixed right away. A little of this and a little of that. A few turns here, a few screws there. Done. Those watches belonged to people in the town who wound them up every day, and polished them every night. When they had a little problem, the owners fixed it as best they could. So, at the end of ten years, a little alignment, a little tune-up, was all they needed! But some of the other watches in that town. They were another story. The repairman opened them up. He looked at them.
“Oy vey!
They were going to need major surgery.” Those watches belonged to people in the town who did not
wind them every day, and did not polish them every night. When those watches had a little problem, the owners said, forget about it. This is too hard for me to fix. Let it sit in a drawer, let it wait for the repairman to come. And the watches sat in a drawer and they grew rustier day by day, and they grew slower, and then finally they stopped!

“Now imagine that the people in the town are you and me, and their watches are their
Yiddishe neshamas
, their Jewish souls. And imagine that the repairman is the Moshiach, the Messiah we are waiting for and expecting to arrive any minute! The question for us is—should we be those people who give up and say let my
neshama
sit in a drawer, let my soul wait until the Moshiach arrives? Or should we be those people who keep after it and polish and wind every day? That is the question we should be asking….”

Ruchel was passing around more cake, and tea with lemon, and booklets with songs printed in Hebrew and English. But you know what I was doing? I was crying. It wasn’t just that the food moved me, although it did. Or the songs—which I didn’t know. It was the story suddenly hitting me all at once. Because it reminded me of my watch, the silver one I used to have, that I’d inherited from Grandpa Irving, and that had been like my lucky charm, and that I’d brought with me all the way out to the forest on Molokai, and Tonic, and on
Gaia
and everything, and it had been my only thing from back home on the Mainland, and the only thing from my family, and I’d actually not kept up winding it, but I had been careful of it all the way up to the monastery, and then I’d just given it away. So what did that say about me and my soul? After all those years I didn’t even have a broken run-down watch to show for myself. I’d thought I had to give it up. It was like a sacrifice. I donated it to the monastery to prove I didn’t care about material things. And now I didn’t have my watch at all. I had nothing.

People at the table noticed that I was crying, but then pretended not to, except for Betsy Sugarman, who was sitting next to me. She said, “Would you like a tissue, dear?” and gave me a whole wad of peach-colored tissues from her purse. So that attracted attention, and then Ruchel came over, and she asked if she could do anything.

I snuffled up my tears. I said, “It’s just been a hard week.”

“Would you like the last piece of cake?” Ruchel asked me.

“God, no.” I clutched my stomach, and pretended to laugh.

“I’ll eat it,” Fred volunteered. So he did, and then he took me home in his rusted-out pickup truck. That was a relief, because Fred was the kind of guy who was perfectly happy not to have a big long conversation.

I got home and everything was quiet, and I lay down on top of my bed, and my sadness welled up inside of me about my
neshama
, and my silver watch. Except just like it always happens, now that I was all alone and I felt like I could cry as much as I wanted, I couldn’t do it anymore. All my sadness was still there, all my pitifulness, like an underground lake, but the tears wouldn’t come.

So then Tom knocked on my door.

“I’m sleeping,” I called out.

“Sharon, do you have the toothpaste?”

I opened the door. “Tom, I have my fucking own toothpaste. It is not the house toothpaste. If you want toothpaste go to Longs and
buy
it!”

He was hurt. He looked down at me from his mellow heights. “I was just wondering.”

“Not everybody has jobs where they get to take naps as part of their day,” I snapped, it being a well known perk of Tom’s profession (early childhood education) that he had naptime every day after lunch.

“Hey, sorry I woke you up,” he said, ambling off.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I thought, back inside my room. I don’t know how much more I can stand. I don’t know if I can even take cooperative living anymore. I felt like my whole outer skin was peeled back. I just felt like I could hardly bear to deal with people. What did that say about me? Seven and a half years in the house, and my cooperative powers were all used up.

That weekend I almost skipped Will’s opening night in
South Pacific
, I was feeling so down. I actually had to remind myself that Will was one of my best friends, and supporting him was my duty, and if I was in
South Pacific
(which I would never be—not being a Rogers and Hammerstein fan to say the least—but if I was) he would be down in front to support me. So I got up and washed my hair and put on a dress, which was a patchwork dress I owned back then, and I went along with Tom to the Kennedy Theater at the university. I sat there with Tom and the curtain went up, and everybody clapped, since it was such a great beach scene with the waves and the sky and tons of sand everywhere, and there went the sailors, running on the beach, and there went Will
running by in his white shorts, and Tom and I started beaming. It really was a fine production. By intermission that feeling of relaxation came over you where you weren’t worrying about the performers at all. So I went out into the lobby, and I milled with all the other people, and I’d calmed so far down I nearly had a heart attack when I ran into my ex, Wayne.

“Sharon?” he said.

He’d gained weight in the past couple of years. His hair must have been at least a quarter of an inch long. I realized he was out of the military.

“How have you been?” he asked me. He was so warm and friendly, as though we barely knew each other. “Whatchyou been up to?” “I’m just here watching my friend,” I said.

“It’s a great show, isn’t it?” Then he said, “Mom, Dad, this is Sharon.”

Wayne introduced me to his mother, Rosemary, who was about five feet tall and wearing a blue-and-white muumuu with a white cardigan sweater, and to his dad, George, who took my hand in his iron grip. He was about six foot six in an aloha shirt and jeans, and exquisite hand-tooled leather boots. They’d come out from Colorado to visit Wayne, who was now through with his tour of duty, during which he’d lived in Germany for a year and a half, and had come back to settle down, as he put it, and gone into the construction business and had his own place in Aina Haina, which he had fixed up himself.

It was so weird. It was like an out-of-body experience. Me saying to Rosemary and George, “Is this the first time you’ve been in the islands?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, it is,” said Rosemary. Me saying, “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Just about the prettiest place I’ve ever seen,” said George. “Sharon, where are you from?”

“I’m from Boston,” I said.

“And have you lived here long?”

“Just about fourteen years,” I said. All of a sudden my voice was sounding like theirs. It was just like talking to somebody from England and starting to talk British. It was awful, but I couldn’t stop. “Sure beats Boston,” I told them. “How long are you staying?”

“Just a week,” said Rosemary.

“My folks came out for a week too,” I said. “They came out for their golden anniversary last year. Mom said it was the best anniversary present she ever had.”

“You bet,” said George.

“Now, did they come on a package?” Rosemary asked.

I
T
was the boots I kept thinking about during the second half. George’s gorgeous cordovan leather boots with their long, pointy toes. So that was where Wayne was from, I kept thinking. The Mainland, where there was such a thing as dress boots.

I told Tom we had to hit the road as soon as the show was over. I told him I was going to have to make a break for it. But somehow, while Tom was off congratulating Will, and I was running away, there they were, Wayne and his folks, smiling at me, and there I was, coming up to them and getting all folksy myself. It was one of those compulsions I had—liking strangers, and somehow wanting to please them. I’d thought I was over that kind of thing, but I guess not.

We just stood out in the lobby of the theater and visited together. We just stood there and had such a pleasant time we all spontaneously decided to go back to the Tahitian Lanai and have a nightcap.

So we drove to Waikiki, and we went into the bar, and sat around at a table, a respectful distance from the paintings on black velvet, and we talked about life at high altitudes. And Rosemary and I had little drinks and Wayne and George had big ones, until Rosemary said it was really past her bedtime, and I said it was past mine too. And George and Rosemary kissed Wayne good-night and went to their room, and Wayne was going to take me home. And it was amazing. We just strolled down Ena Road to get the car, and Wayne didn’t invade my space, or rehash our breakup, or talk about our past at all. He was so relaxed and calm I couldn’t get over it.

A full moon was shining over the hotels. People were streaming out of the late movies, and we walked out to the marina on the sidewalk ribbon between the traffic and the beach. Streetlights on one side and on the other the gentle night, the white waves coming in small and soft onto the sand. “Wayne,” I said, “you’re different.”

“I’ve been working a lot on myself,” he told me.

Then it was my turn to look at him funny. He’d never talked that way before. “You’re a lot different from the Wayne I used to know,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at me with his clear blue eyes. “I appreciate that.”

“Can I just ask you something?”

“What?”

“Are you into est?”

“What’s est?” he said.

“Never mind.”

“Sharon,” he said, “I have one real regret.”

“Just one?” I teased him.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “I have one major regret.”

“Which is?”

“I didn’t treat you with respect.”

I thought about that a minute. Then I said, “Actually, I didn’t treat you with that much respect either.”

“I didn’t listen to you.”

“I know.”

“And you were saying important things,” Wayne said. “I didn’t get that. When you were talking about seeing God and all. I never considered maybe you were really after something.”

“Yeah, maybe. I thought I was. I didn’t get very far, though.”

“No?” He sounded surprised.

“Not really. I think I went about it wrong. I mean up on my high horse. Why’re you looking so surprised?”

“Sharon,” Wayne said, “if anybody could go far, you could.”

Now we’d reached Wayne’s beat-up Jeep. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I told him.

He came around and opened my door for me. “Can you forgive me?” he asked.

I told him the truth. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

Candlelight