Paradise Park (36 page)

“Damn right,” he said, but more to himself than to me.

“I’ll go,” I said, but I didn’t leave.

He wouldn’t even look at me.

“Brian,” I whispered.

Finally he relented and got up and opened the door for me. “Sharon, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” I said.

He touched my face, but still he shook his head at me.

I went home—where else would I go? I figured the less I thought about the whole thing the better. And I got there, and Wayne’s large glossy truck was still parked in front of our small scruffy house. I let myself in, and he was sitting on the couch. He looked terrible. He was still wearing his clothes from the night before. He hadn’t shaved. It looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

So I figured I’d go into the kitchen and get myself some cereal. I really was hungry. I got a bowl and spoon and poured myself some Wheaties.

“Where were you?” Wayne said. He was standing in the doorway. I poured the milk in. “At the party.”

“All night?”

“Look,” I said, “it took me a while to get home.”

“A while? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!”

“You were the one who took the truck,” I said.

“Where were you really?” he said.

“At the party.”

“You’re lying,” he said. “You were with Brian.”

I decided to keep eating.

“You were with him.”

“I don’t think you really want to have this conversation right now,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I do.”

“Well, it’s not happening. I’m not talking now.”

“Tell me the truth,” he said. And he grabbed my bowl and he hurled it to the floor, milk splattering, soggy bits of cereal flying. But the bowl didn’t break. I was staring at it, fixated by the bowl wobbling there on the white tiles. “Look at me.” He put his hands on my head, and he forced me to look him in the eye. He kept at it, asking and asking, “You were with him, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

“Stop it!” I screamed.

But he kept on saying, “Tell me the truth! Tell me the truth.”

No. No, I thought. I won’t talk. I refuse to talk. “I’m not telling you anything until you calm down!” I finally said.

He backed off of me. He went back in the living room and started walking around. When he came back he’d calmed way down. He said, “Sharon, I can’t have lies between us.”

“I know.” All of a sudden I felt tearful. Suddenly I was starting to feel remorse.

“I can’t live in a relationship without honesty.”

“You’re right,” I said. “We can’t live that way.”

“All I’m asking—what I need to know is—were you with him last night?”

“Yes,” I said.

He hit me right there with the flat of his hand. I could taste the blood in my mouth. I could hear my ears ringing. He hit me again. My whole head was growing on my shoulders, my eyes were swimming, tiny particles were coming before my eyes. My whole mind was being shaken up, and I saw stars—the tiniest solar system with pea-size planets orbiting around. I saw a whole constellation of stars; they were leaping and jumping like a flea circus. The room was going dark, but this whole microcosmos was coming down in little flecks of light. And there I was, falling. I guess actually I was blacking out. I was falling into this minute universe; this small blackness that was inside my head. And Wayne’s voice was getting blurry, and blurrier. “But I loved you! I loved you!”

I found myself some time later on the kitchen floor. There was one of our old termite-eaten cane chairs lying beside me, and there was blood,
and there was milk, and the white cereal bowl still unbroken. The vinyl tiles were caked with dried-up cereal. I didn’t see the spoon. One of my eyes wasn’t opening, so my view was skewed. Gradually I lifted up my head, but the room was going around. I thought, Is this what it’s like to have a concussion? Then I remembered Wayne. I was afraid he was still in the house. I put my head down and listened. The house was very still. I listened harder. I could hear the mynah birds outside, and little white-eye birds—the ones who’d driven out the native Hawaiian honey-creepers—the white-eyes were in the bushes singing to each other. I heard no cars on the street, only far away a motorcycle, like the buzzing of a fly. Slowly I lifted up my head again. I sat up, but I couldn’t put any pressure on my wrist. I must have sprained it. I crept along the floor into the living room, all the way to the louver windows in front, where I had to stand to see out over the bushes that his truck was gone.

Then I went to the bedroom and took my guitar. I stuffed a canvas beach bag with some clothes. There was a necklace Wayne had given me, and there were other pretty things, but I didn’t take them, just the extra clothes to wear, and my toothbrush, and my old book, my falling-apart Norton anthology—I thought of that.

All that week and some of the next I stayed at Corinne’s house, and she and Rae doctored and nursed me and alternately begged and scolded me to go to the police and swear out a complaint against Wayne, but I wouldn’t do it. And they said they couldn’t believe me, and they told me I had to stop acting like I was at fault—they didn’t understand how I, the victim, could be blaming myself for what had happened. I kept telling them I felt so guilty, but they didn’t see why, since I never told them straight out I’d slept with Brian or anything.

Corinne said to me that I was a battered woman, even though Wayne had never battered me before. She said I was in denial, but I owed certain things to myself like safety. She told me that above all I must stop blaming myself for what went wrong. She said that I must have a plan. I did have a plan, which was to go back to the way my life had been before, i.e., back to the co-op house, and to my friends, and to my job at Shirokiya, but Corinne and Rae were worried about my safety. They were convinced Wayne would come after me and kill me. They were talking me into going to a safe house for a while; going underground for shelter. And when
we talked I tended to agree with them. Yet, when I was alone and thinking, when they were at work and I was home with the cat, Jane, I rebelled against the whole idea. Why should I hide? Why should I live under house arrest? Hiding was not in my personality, not at all. “Jane,” I said, “I’m not going to hide. I am not going down into some little hole.”

I fluffed up Jane’s black-and-white fur. I fluffed her up and down.

She lay on her back and purred at me.

I said, “I’m not afraid of Wayne. Well, even if I am, how can I live that way? In fear?” I said, “The truth is I’m more afraid of me.”

She wrinkled up her pink nose. “I’m the one,” I said. “I’m the one who all of a sudden upends the apple cart. I don’t even know why. Whatever happened to the person I used to be, who used to meditate?”

Jane just squinched her eyes shut as I rubbed her front, since cats do not tend to empathize much with guilt and self-loathing. I was wishing myself back in time so I could change what I had done—except I could never decide how far back I’d go. I just felt like now I’d really burnt my bridges. All of them. Wayne hated me. Corinne pitied me. And Brian—how could I ever face him again? Well, how could we face each other? I wanted to call him. I was dying to go see him—to apologize, or say good-bye, or tell him he’d been right about Wayne—he did hit me. It almost didn’t matter what I’d say, if I could talk to Brian one more time. Maybe just to confirm the whole thing with him had been real, and not just my dream. But I knew better than to seek him out. He’d hate me for dwelling on that night, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that.

I felt like a latch-key child waiting in Corinne’s house alone. Every day and every hour I decided to devise a new plan, and then I couldn’t think of any. Go see Leilani? She’d see through that in an instant. Me coming over to feel sorry for myself—as if she weren’t the one imprisoned in a saltwater tank! Take the bus up to the temple? Break down and cry all over Rabbi Siegel’s desk? “Sharon,” he would say, “what is it after all that you are searching for? You have searched and searched. Even in the uttermost parts of the world. And yet, what is it that you really need?”

I sat and watched through the window as the mail truck drove haltingly up the winding street. Squeak, squeak. The brakes squeaked at every stop as it crept along each day. It was like something from one of
Dovidl’s stories, the broken-down mail truck needing maintenance, but the Postal Service never fixing it. It was like one of those allegories for your soul.

I picked up the phone. Ruchel was the one I called. “Hello?” My voice wobbled.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Sharon.”

“Excuse me? Who is this? Oh, Sharon! Sharon! We missed you on Shabbes! How are you?”

“I’ve been away,” I said. “But I’m back now. I’ve been in Britain,” I blurted out.

“In Britain! That must have been a short trip.”

“It was,” I said, “but it didn’t feel short. It was very full,” I said.

“You went to see family?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I was seeing them….”

“I didn’t know you had family in Britain. I have cousins in Golder’s—”

“I was also thinking; I was thinking a lot,” I told her. “I had this powerful experience, Ruchel. I had this cataclysmic experience.”

“Has v’shalom!
Are you all right?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer. For some reason, now of all times, I was starting to cry.

“Sharon, you’re all right? You’re crying?”

“I have a frog in my throat. Excuse me.” I coughed. I caught my breath. Still, it was hard to get the words out. Every word I spoke I started to cry harder. “Ruchel, I have to change everything. The place I am right now. I can’t stay in this place any longer. The place I am, it’s not working. It’s untenable. The person I am right now—it’s no good. I have to try to learn to … I need to learn how to …”

But it seemed like I didn’t need to say any more. To her ears what I was telling her was as clear as clear. “You want to learn!” she exclaimed. “You need to learn!”

White Cloud

R
UCHEL
and Dovidl drove me to the airport in their little putt-putt Honda. The day was hot and muggy, and the vinyl upholstery sticky against my skin. I leaned out the open window, since the back seat was so cramped with the babies. Dovidl wasn’t wearing his frock coat, just his black suit pants and white shirt. Instead of his black hat he was wearing a big black velvet yarmulke that covered his whole head. Ruchel was wearing designer sunglasses, and a long-sleeved navy striped blouse, and a cotton duck skirt, yacht style. I realized, They’re Hawaiian Hasids now. They’ve gone tropical!

I, in the meantime, also had new clothes. I was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a skirt instead of shorts. I had white ankle socks, and pure white athletic shoes instead of sandals. I was actually going to the Bais Sarah women’s program in Bellevue.

From Shirokiya, with my employee discount, I’d bought a good down sleeping bag, and a couple of towels. One of those state-of-the-art rolling flight bags, and a red rain poncho that folded up into its own pocket. I could have bought a travel iron for really cheap, but since I never ironed it didn’t seem worth it. I did buy a bra stash, though! You couldn’t tell from looking at me, but I had something like two hundred bucks in cash
squirreled away between my boobs. Two hundred in twenties, as my mad money, in case I got to Bais Sarah and it turned out to be a heavy-duty brainwashing facility and I had to sneak out to the road and hitch a ride to Seattle and buy tickets on a Greyhound bus that would be leaving for someplace no one would ever find me.

Curbside at the airport, Ruchel gave me a hug, and Dovidl gave me a laminated card printed with a special prayer for safe journeys that I should read right before takeoff. The babies were fussing and people were milling around. It was a confusing scene, and I was rushing rushing to get away before I started to cry. I remember actually feeling relieved when I said my last good-bye, and trundled inside to agricultural inspection. The inspectors looked inside my suitcase and inspected my guitar. They slit open the cardboard box that I had so carefully packed with my five hundred or so records and tapes. Then they slapped some Agricultural Inspection tape of their own over the box and I finally checked my bags and went on my way. There were no paper cups of pineapple juice anymore. Free juice had been discontinued.

When my plane lifted off into the blue sky I looked out from my window seat, and I could see Oahu under me, the whole island and the ocean surrounding it, all in perspective. All the houses were receding, and the cliffs and the beaches, and then the other islands close by and just as green, strung out in the ocean. There were Molokai, and Maui, and the Big Island. There they were, smaller and smaller, like lazy turtles lying in the sun. Then the clouds wisped over the view.

I leaned back in my chair and stuck out my feet just to feel my backpack down there. My guitar was in the overhead compartment, and all my other earthly possessions were in the belly of the plane. I felt this calm desolation, as though I had died.

W
HEN
we got to Sea-Tac Airport, though, my stomach was in knots, just realizing that here I was on the Mainland ready to enroll in some kind of hostel or halfway house or boarding school, depending on how you looked at it. Dovidl and Ruchel had told me I was going to be met at the airport, but I almost hoped, walking down the aisle of the plane with my stuff, that no one was going to be there after all, and that the whole thing had been a mix-up. Part of me almost wished I would arrive
in Seattle, anonymous and alone, and have to go exploring and find a job, like maybe in one of the famous Seattle coffeehouses, and maybe hanging there I’d find out about the folk-dancing scene and hook up with the folk community. But when I came out into the airport with the other passengers filing off the plane, I saw right in front of me, impossible to miss, a tall, burly, bearded man in a black frock coat and hat, who I realized was Rabbi Simkovich. He had three or four children swarming around him, and he was carrying a placard like from a rabbinic limo service:
SHARON SPIEGELMAN.