Paradise Park (42 page)

We walked into the Karinskys’ air-conditioned living room, where the last of the relatives were sitting among suitcases, and poring over photos, and sipping iced tea, and Mikhail and I sat there with them. We ate bialys with soft shredded onions at the center. We ate a whole bagful that we’d bought at the bakery, and we licked our fingers. And still we talked and talked. The main thing we discussed was why does the Messiah tarry? What is he waiting for?

“He waits for all Jews to celebrate Shabbes,” Mikhail said. “If every Jew would rest and worship on the Sabbath, then he will come.”

“I don’t buy that,” I said. “Because he cares about the whole world, not just the Jews. I think he’s holding out for world peace.”

“Stop that,” Mrs. Karinsky said in passing as her little four-year-old boy knocked his one-year-old brother down.

He let go, yet the baby was crying.

“The baby’s crying,” I called to Mrs. Karinsky in the kitchen.
“Nu
, pick him up,” she called back.

Gingerly I picked him up. He was sticky, not to mention loud.

“He waits,” said Mikhail, “for the solution of the divisions within man’s mind and heart. The question therefore is not why he is waiting but why we delay to receive him. Why are we not ready?”

“But I am ready!” I exclaimed. “Oh, my God, I am so ready.” At which point the baby started screaming like he was about to die, and I ran into the kitchen, where Mrs. Karinsky was already making a bottle. Her brow was beaded all over with sweat, and the sleeves of her house-dress were pushed up from doing dishes, her forearms soapy. And more kids were running around, and all the counters were piled with boxes and bags of paper plates and plasticware, and a soup was simmering in a giant stockpot. And I’d been intending to hand over the baby but I just meekly took the bottle and turned back to the living room.

Thursday, Mikhail figured he should go home, so his piano students wouldn’t forget about him completely. He had dinner at the Karinskys’, and then afterward we stood on the brick steps in front of their house, and he gave me his address and he said he would write me a letter, and
he invited me to come visit him and his aunt Lena in Brighton. I could stay with nieces of his rebbe. We stood there some more, even though he had to go or else miss his ride to the bus station with his rebbe’s friend, and I wished I could just give him a hug, and I think he wished he could do the same to me, yet in the Bialystoker community that was not done. Instead, I said to him, “I feel as if we are standing on the exact same step of the same staircase….”

“It is
bashert,”
Mikhail said. “We are on one plane.” It was such a serious moment; I was half afraid the guy would get down on his knees and propose to me! Yet he said, “I will wait for you to come to Brighton, and I will play for you. Do you know Scott Joplin? I will play him for you by heart.”

And then something inside of me woke up. Some resonance began to sound inside of me. All my instincts were telling me: Go with this guy. Go to Brighton with him. Don’t go back inside the house. Go now. There is nothing for you back inside. There are only air-conditioning units. There are only large numbers of children. Go with Mikhail. All my instincts were telling me this, and I would have gone. I really would have taken off right then, except for one thing, which was that my instincts in the past had proved to be so unerringly terrible!

So Mikhail went off to catch his bus back to Boston, and I went back inside the house and helped Mrs. Karinsky reorganize the refrigerator and freeze the mini-knishes from the reception. A deep melancholy began to envelop me, along with a headache, and I thought to myself, Well, now I’ve lost Estie and Mikhail both.

Well, I thought, for once in my life I’ve actually held back. For once I’ve learned from my behavior in my past relationships, i.e., following Gary, and running off with Kekui, and hooking up with Wayne (twice!), and loving Brian so much I could never believe he was married. Now I have reached a point where I am in control of my feelings and I don’t actually do the first thing that comes into my heart. Self-control. That was my thing now. I’d stood there on the steps and I had actually experienced self-restraint, and it tasted so strange. Like anise.

But what was my reward? Two entire weeks went by and Mikhail never once wrote to me! Every day I’d check the mail, and no letter had arrived. Every day I’d wake up and pray in the bedroom so full of beds there was hardly any floor space, and I’d help the little kids get dressed,
and do a couple of loads of laundry, or at least try to clear the toys from the stairs, and then I’d sit like a lady from olden times wondering silently—how much longer till I hear from him? If I’d carried a handkerchief I would have twisted it up in my hands, just helplessly waiting for the mail.

Mrs. Karinsky, however, was acting quite cheerful. She seemed to think all my prospects lay before me. In her mind my path was clear. She said to me at Friday-night dinner, “We will talk to our family in Brighton. We will mention Mikhail’s name and discuss him. God willing we may make a match.”

A match! I thought at the other end of the table. I don’t even like him anymore!

Yet Mrs. Karinsky brushed all this aside. She and the doctor, her husband, were delighted, because my
bashert
had come to play at Estie’s wedding. Dr. Karinsky sat at the table and tucked into his brisket, and tickled any of his kids that came within arm’s reach, and he said to me enthusiastically, “There are maybe possibilities.”

“Hee, hee, hee!” squealed one of the toddlers, whose name was Moshele.

“I’m not even touching you! Look at this!”We all looked. Dr. Karinsky wiggled his fingers in Moshele’s direction, and the kid went into hysterics, even though his dad was just waggling his fingers in the air. The kid was on the floor. He was going to lose his dinner. Along with eating everything put in front of him, that was one of the doctor’s specialties: phantom tickling. You had to admire his prowess.

As soon as Shabbes was over, Dr. Karinsky got on the horn to his brother and his brother’s cousin, who was related to Mikhail’s rebbe. Within days the Karinskys were full of glowing things to say about Mikhail’s learning and his character, and his strivings, and the parallels between us in our spiritual journeys and our growth toward Hashem.

Isn’t this a little quick? I kept thinking. Aren’t you all a little bit eager? Particularly when the man in question, my supposed match made in heaven, has not once picked up a pen to write me a letter. Even after he promised he would! I was disillusioned with my fine musical friend, to say the least. Out of sight, out of mind, was what he had turned out to be. Deeply philosophical on the spur of the moment, yet thoughtless and fickle in the long haul. I trudged over to the preschool every
morning, and I was feeling somewhat hurt that everybody wanted to match me up so fast to such a fly-by-night. In my white stockings and my dirndl skirts and long-sleeved blouses, I sang the children to sleep. I watched them on their rest mats in the shadowy blue light of the classroom’s blue curtains. To the Karinskys, every little act was going to bring on the Messiah. One by one you took all the jumbled-up pieces and people of the world—then you snapped them together to complete the picture. And that was what I believed, too, or so I’d thought. It’s just that I’d never considered that I was just a puzzle piece myself to slide in place. Just a little bit of foliage. A piece of sky. Nobody wants to be part of the twig on the third tree on the left. You want to be Eve, or the tree of life, or an angel in the picture. It’s true: just as Harrison and Margo said all those years ago at their workshop: you want to be a whole.

T
HEN
that Wednesday a letter did come for me, and it was from Mikhail.

Well, I looked at the letter, and I looked at it, and I thought, Oh, my God; I thought, Sweet Jesus (if you’ll excuse the expression), what is happening here? I felt such a rush and a confusion of emotions. Awe, and wonderment, and joy, but also, I’m ashamed to admit—a tiny bit of jealousy that Mikhail had been the one to hear the music. That Hashem, through the spirit of the third Bialystoker, had chosen to whisper in Mikhail’s ear. It was so petty of me, so small minded, yet I couldn’t help feeling—what about my ears? What about me? Yet I squashed down that feeling. I forced back down the jealousy that I was just the object, and not the instrument, of divine revelation. Grow up, I told myself. You can’t traipse through life hogging all the epiphanies. And I went to the kitchen and ate maybe half a pound of assorted cookies, just turning and turning in my mind everything Mikhail was asking me. A proposal of marriage! That was wild enough. But a proposal at the behest of Hashem himself! One inspired and directed by the Lord God. At that point I just had to go upstairs to my bed and lie down.

There I was lying on my mattress in the girls’ bedroom, and it must have been a couple of hours before anyone discovered me. Mrs. Karinsky happened to be coming up the stairs in the process of dragging her daughter Chaneleh up to her room after she had injured one of her siblings.

“Sharon, what’s wrong? You’re sick?”

“No,” I said, and I gave her the letter.

She read it quickly, then knit her brow, and read it again. “I never heard of such a thing!” she said.

“Is that good or bad?” I asked.

“You are going to answer him?”

“I don’t even know!” I said. “On the one hand, this miracle has happened. On the other hand, I don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Chaneleh was trying to escape down the stairs again, and Mrs. Karinsky had to run after her and haul her back. “So it’s all right, you don’t have to make up your mind in one day,” she shouted over the kid’s screams. “So take your time to think about it!”

“No! No! No!” shrieked Chaneleh.

“This story!” Mrs. Karinsky exclaimed. “I have to tell Mendy!”

Everyone was so impressed by Mikhail’s tale. The family, the whole neighborhood, couldn’t stop talking about it. The story of the niggun that had come to Mikhail almost overshadowed his marriage proposal. Everybody seemed to forget for a moment that I was supposed to write him back—or if they remembered they assumed that I already had, and naturally that I had already accepted. But the truth was, I had not written back. I had not accepted. There I was, alone in all the flurry, a lonely celebrity. I had no idea what to do. As a Bialystoker there was no question: I had spoken to the man, we had exchanged our deepest thoughts; I’d researched him through the Karinskys’ friends and relatives. His references were great, and he had received a miraculous sign from God. No question: the answer was yes. As myself, however, as my own woman, which I used to be—all I could think was: who did I think I was kidding? And—where did Mikhail get off writing now after all this time? Did he really believe I was going to jump to marry him after just one letter? A relationship of a week, plus a revelation on his part alone. He might be a psychopathic criminal! I didn’t want to prejudge him; I didn’t want to go by stereotypes; but by his own admission Mikhail had gone nuts at least once, when his wife left him. If the divine wedding niggun had come to me, that would be one thing—but I hummed and hummed, and all that came to me was Peter, Paul and Mary. Sometimes The Mamas and the Papas. Trust was the key—that I knew. But I didn’t even trust myself. I had no reason to trust myself. None at all.

Everybody was so eager for me. Everybody was so pleased. Estie said she would give me her wedding gown to wear. Mrs. Karinsky said we
could have the wedding right there in the house, in the living room. But the happier they all were for me, the more miserable I became. What Dr. Karinsky kept emphasizing was how Mikhail and I were on the same level—how the wonderful thing was the way we matched up in our learning, and our desire for holiness. He was probably right. But was that a good thing? It sounded dangerous, marrying somebody on my level. It sounded like a recipe for disaster. Was there even room for someone else on the same little parapet I was hanging on? And there was something else too. There was something I feared even more, which was that marrying would be the ultimate commitment to Bialystok Ha-sidism! To marry: that would be to make my final vows to the community. To pray for keeps.

Mikhail began calling the house. In the evenings he would call me on the phone. Yet somehow I could not speak to him. I just could not pick up the telephone and discuss matters. I told the Karinskys I couldn’t talk to him while I was in my decision-making process. No way, I told them, could I get on the line. I was so riven. I was so torn up with doubts. Some days I was sure the answer would be yes. And other days I would hear the voice of my inmost spirit calling me inside: Sharon! Sharon! NO! Deep inside me my old self lay dormant. Deep inside, all my memories and deeds pressed against each other. All my years in Hawaii; all my time out in the ocean. The mistakes I’d made; the loves I’d had. I was still filled with the person I had been.