Paradise Park (40 page)

In Estie’s neighborhood some of the houses were brick, and some were two-family buildings with siding or fake fieldstone divided right down the middle in different colors. When you looked in the windows, you could see little shoe-box rooms with crystal chandeliers hanging down like stalactites in a cave. It was like Jerusalem, in that so many men, and also little boys, wore black suits and black hats, and the women were covered up in skirts and white stockings—just like me sitting there in my
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clothes. Estie’s cousin Shmuley was driving, and he wore the hat and the coat and the pants, the works. I said to Estie, “How come your fiancé didn’t meet you at the airport?” She and Shmuley both burst out laughing.

Estie’s house was freestanding, with brick front steps and a couple of bushes in the front. There was a loose gravel driveway on the side, and there was even an old garage that the Karinskys used for storage. Wobbly from the plane and the new scenery, I hadn’t even stepped out of the car when Estie’s nine brothers and sisters surrounded us, squealing and shrieking and shouting, climbing on the car, picking up our stuff for us and carrying it inside. The munchkins were all talking to me at once. They told me all their names, which I forgot instantly. I was just too tired to take it all in.

The Karinskys’ place was packed. On the first floor there was a living room and dining room and a kitchen. On the second floor there were just four bedrooms for all those people. Mendy Karinsky, Estie’s father, was a pediatrician, and had his office in the basement. He, it turned out, had not been born a Bialystoker, but came from a non-Hasidic community and had married in when he was finishing his medical training. He was big and barrel chested like an operatic tenor. He used to throw back his head and laugh. Nothing seemed to faze him. He had a lot of joy inside—and never did anything around the house. With the children he was always the good cop, while Feige Karinsky was the enforcer. Dr. Karinsky used to come running up the stairs from his office and open the door to the kitchen and roar like a lion and the kids would come squealing, and he’d toss them around and tickle them into hysterics while Mrs. Karinsky worked around him, trying to get dinner on the table.

Mrs. Karinsky spent all her days trying to keep the rest of the house
under control. At any given time someone was crying or screaming or praying. The decor was formal, with wallpaper and fake Oriental rugs, and a chandelier in the dining room, but the place was so overrun with kids and trucks and tricycles and decapitated dolls you didn’t really see the decorations or the furniture. The stairs creaked; the window-unit air conditioners were straining; the whole place was buckling under the weight of the family. Estie kept saying how she was so excited for me to be there, and I was excited, too, only, seeing how full the house was, I was amazed I’d been invited. The bedrooms were packed with bunks and trundles and cribs and toys and prayer books; there were no garden views or anything like in Bellevue; there were no empty spaces. Still, somehow Mrs. Karinsky made room for me. She gave me guest towels and special nonfoaming toothpaste to use on Shabbes. She was a big lady, really big, almost like Mrs. Eldridge had been, and she wore this great big housedress and breathed heavily when she climbed up the creaky stairs. She might have been pregnant, but she was too heavy to tell for sure. You could hardly believe she was Estie’s mother, Estie was such a slip of a thing.

So a lot surprised me, but you know, I was there to learn, and to be forged in the crucible of Judaism. I was there to lie down every night and wake up every day Jewish. To pray every prayer and observe every fast; to celebrate every new month according to the phases of the moon. I was there to forget everything else I’d ever been, or rather, to remember everything I truly was.

The next day was Friday, and I helped in the kitchen cooking, while the kids were fighting in the living room. The children fought all the time: scratching, biting, hair pulling. You name it. I was kind of shocked—partly because the Simkovich kids had been pretty quiet, and partly because I guess I’d thought that coming from such a religious family, the children would be little angels, but they were just as mean and vicious as regular kids, and to tell the truth, it seemed like they were worse than normal, because there were so many of them, and they were so close in age.

I’d also assumed that Mrs. Karinsky would be an incredible kosher gourmet cook. But it turned out she actually hated cooking, and the food she made was really bad. Her chicken would be greasy, and her brisket would be all dried out, and her hot dogs were boiled so they went boing! if you dropped them on the floor. All the kids made fun of her cooking—even Estie. They’d dangle stuff from their forks and ask in Yiddish,
“Mama,
vas is dos?”
—What is this? She pretended she didn’t care. She let the little ones eat as much candy as they wanted. She told me, “I don’t have the kind of kids who’ll come up and say, ‘Can I have a
pulke?’”
—which was a chicken leg. “What do my kids eat? They eat junk.”

Mrs. Karinsky also hated cleaning, so the dishes were chipped, and there were lollipops sticking in the carpet and stuff like that. She didn’t seem all that happy about the situation, but in a Zen-like way she accepted it. She said, “So people come in the house and they see a mess. So what? I’m not in the business of caring what people think.”

Still, Friday night was special. I laid the table for a feast under the dusty chandelier, and so what if the food was barely edible? There was a lot of it, and it was all steaming by the time Dr. Karinsky and the boys got home from shul. The Shabbes candles were aflame, more than a dozen. They stood in their candlesticks on foil like a shining altar on the sideboard. And we all stood around the table and everyone was singing nigguns, which were these wordless tunes sung at the Shabbes table. After all the blessings we sat down to eat, and Dr. Karinsky welcomed me and said I could stay as long as I wanted, and he told everyone I was from Hawaii, and all the kids looked at me, impressed. Later, after dinner, the boys got out a book they had that was a yearbook of all the Bialystoker emissary families in all the
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houses all over the world, Anchorage to Zaire, and they looked for me under Hawaii, but, of course, I wasn’t in the book, not being officially part of any Bialystoker embassy.

Two days went by, and even though they hadn’t seen each other all summer, there still wasn’t any sign of Estie’s fiancé. The September wedding date was set; the hall was rented, Mrs. Karinsky was flustered with the preparations. Still, Estie was mellow. She had her white wedding gown hanging wrapped in plastic in the coat closet in the downstairs entrance hall, because the bedrooms were so short on closet space. During the week she just went to her usual job, which was watching kids at this little corner preschool. I tagged along and earned a little bit of cash as a teacher’s aide. I used to lead the singing. I had everyone singing “Mo-Mo-Mo-Moshiach!” which was a big hit. All the kids were clapping their little hands. They were about two years old, the ones Estie taught, and they came just a few hours in the mornings. The girls wore tights and little dresses, and the boys still had long hair pinned back with barrettes, and they looked like girls, because in the Bialystoker community
you didn’t cut little boys’ hair until they were three—which might have struck me as a weird custom at some earlier stage of my life, but seemed to me, living there in Brooklyn, only weird in a good way, not crazy at all, but wild and fairylike, and just magical. It was all magic to me.

And at the school at naptime I used to hum those nigguns to the kids when they lay down on their mats. Sometimes I almost went into a trance singing. I used to close my eyes, and the children would lie there perfectly still. One by one they would drop off to sleep.

Estie was the one who said I should bring my guitar to school. I hadn’t played in months. When I took it out at naptime my fingers were stiff. Creakily they found the chords. They just played from their own finger-memory, but gradually a song took shape. Softly my voice was humming. Gardens and islands began to fill up my eyes, and green plants, and mists—they all came to me in this joyful dream. Slowly words came to me, and I began to sing. “Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea. …” And I sang and sang the verses, all of them, until finally I came to the end and my eyes opened, and all of a sudden there I was in the classroom again. The pale dark-eyed children were lying on their mats; their soft soft hair was spread around them and their little limp arms; they were all asleep. And Estie and her senior teacher were staring at me.

I was a stranger there, no matter how welcome a guest. And most of the time it didn’t bother me at all, because I was so dedicated to my future. After all, I was essentially entering the Hasidic novitiate! And my host family tried so hard with me—despite the fact that they could barely keep their kids from killing each other. Mrs. Karinsky had so many dishes to clear every night, that during the week she used paper plates and plasticware. One time I’d actually said to her, “Don’t you think that’s bad for the environment?” She looked at me aghast. She looked like she’d been slapped. But she was too polite to say, Who do you think you are? Fuck off and die. So she said nothing, and I felt terrible. I looked down at the floor, ashamed of myself, that I had brought the subject up. How tactless. There were the Karinskys feeding and sheltering and teaching me by their example. There they were, springing me from all my predicaments, and all they wanted was my soul. What a small price to pay. What a simple thing to give, if only you knew how to do it. If only you could extricate yourself from the person that you were before.

I hated thinking of the past, but then the future frightened me even
more. Estie’s wedding was imminent. The house was filled with relatives, and every bed and couch and inflatable mattress was full, and there were even a couple of kids sleeping under the dining room table. I was beginning to feel so anxious. I was afraid I was going to lose my own cot to some cousin from out of town. Every day I thought Mrs. Karinsky was going to move me out into the hall or to a friend’s, and then I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was in a fragile state—I was terrified somehow of being separated from the family, not to mention Estie herself and her example. What would happen to me when she wasn’t around for me to shadow through the day? What would happen when she was married off, and my whole excuse for being in Crown Heights had moved away?

E
STIE’S
wedding was in the evening, and it was a hot Indian-summer city night. Everyone gathered in the courtyard of the rebbe’s palace, which was wooden, and gated and turreted, with peaked shingled roofs. Six-thirteen was actually a cluster of three-story buildings surrounding an open courtyard. One building was the synagogue, and one was the library and center for advanced study of the Bialystoker texts, where the best and brightest of the young men learned all day and night. The third building was a great hall used as a social center, with various rooms for parties, and offices for the rebbe and his assistant rabbis. All the buildings were painted in dark reds and greens and chocolate-brown, and on the inside they were decorated with carvings and plasterwork in the shape of flowers and vines and pomegranates. The whole complex looked as exotic and antique as could be, except for the fire escapes, and the air conditioning compressors. The rebbe himself had decided on central air.

The ceremony was getting started in the courtyard. There was a chuppah, which was a canopy; dark blue velvet cloth fringed and embroidered in gold, set up on four poles. It was dark out, the idea being that Estie and her fiancé, Yitzy, would get hitched under the stars, except you couldn’t see any stars, since the night was hazy and the city lights so bright. There were rabbis and witnesses and siblings crowded around. There were something like three hundred people all standing in the open air, men in their black suits, women in lace and silk and embroidery and pearls and diamond pavé brooches. From the back I watched
the kids running around in party dresses and patent leather shoes, and the boys in these tiny white dress shirts and black trousers and jackets askew. It was so humid everyone was sweating. The relatives up by the chuppah held candles, but I wasn’t a relative, of course, so I stood in the back, tangentially—me and my feeling of increasing dread. Around and around Estie walked. She was circling around Yitzy seven times, with her mother and Yitzy’s mother leading her. As she walked, the skirts of her long gown trailed behind her, and almost wrapped up Yitzy as she went, so, from where I stood, the two of them, the bride and groom, looked like a mystic caterpillar turning and turning, wrapping itself in white silk, winding up into a cocoon.

She’s gone, I thought. She’s gone; she’s gone. There were blessings being said, there was wine sipped, but all I could think was, My teacher and my counselor is gone. There she goes, abandoning me.

Crash! Yitzy stamped on the glass. Everyone burst out singing and swarming around the families crying, Mazel tov! Mazel tov! And dancing and whooping right there outside, the men in one mob and the women in another. I was lost in the crowd, smashed between old ladies.

When I came up for air, the newlyweds had disappeared. The bride and groom were supposed to go off and be alone for a while after the ceremony, and then they had to do family pictures, so, in the meantime, everyone else went inside the hall and started partying without them.

There were two parties in two separate ballrooms, with two separate bands. One party was for men only, and the other was for the women, so that, without the men around, we sisters could let loose and really dance. There were circle dances and line dances and polkas, and even jitterbugging, women partnering each other under twinkling crystal chandeliers. There were maybe a hundred women bopping around that room. I thought, Sharon, how can you just stand and watch? Sharon, how can you be so melancholy? Mrs. Karinsky was holding out her arms to me, the bride’s own mom was reaching for me with a smile on her lips. I shook myself; I reached out into the center of the mob and plunged in. This trio was pounding out the music; and I have to say, the band wore frock coats, but these guys could swing. The drummer pounded out the beat, and the guy on sax was belting out Hasidic nigguns and show tunes. Sometimes his solos sounded like a cross between the two. He wailed “Old Man River” as if the song encompassed all the
sorrows of the Jewish people. But then the third guy would break in on keyboard and bring everything back up to speed. He was the most amazing one of all. His hair and beard were bright flaming red; his fingers were so lightning fast he’d have run away with every song if the other two had let him. He had no music, not even a cheat book, but just played while he looked out at the dancers. Any chance he got, he’d be improvising and hot-dogging on the keys, until his colleagues would start glaring at him.