Paradise Park (45 page)

“Mom!”

“Sharon!” She recognized me right away. “Hi, sweetie!” She opened up her arms and hugged me. We were both talking at once. “Did you change your name?”

“Oh, let me look at you. Sweetie! Baby! Yeah, years ago.”

“So what’s your name now, Mom?”

“I go by Stella, and that’s it. No last name.” And right there with the other saleslady behind the cash register, and the occasional customer coming in and going out, Mom hugged me, and I cried. I loved it.

Mom never stinted in showing her affection when she was in the mood. Even though she was, like me, in general a bony, thin person, her spirit could be fat and soft and bosomy. She was wonderful at lying on couches. When it came to motherhood, it was more the outdoor stuff she hadn’t kept up with—like buying food and taking trash out, and remembering to register me for school. Kids thought I was cool in sixth grade or so, because at my mom’s house there were no rules. They knew
that being a poet, Mom didn’t work outside the home, but unlike their mothers, my mom was laissez-faire. She never picked me up, or expected me home or anything, so she was a legend in my middle school. She was this invisible supernatural anarchist homemaker. Of course, even when I was ten, I knew that actually it was her alcoholism, not her altruism, that kept Mom so thoroughly off my case. I just didn’t let on—I just burnished up that myth people had of her and me. Then Mom took off and left me sleeping alone in the empty house. She blew her legend status, and no one envied me anymore.

Still, I stood there in that New Age store on the Cape, and I said, “Mom, I want you to know, I haven’t come here to dwell on the past. I’m not here just to go over and over again all the damage that was done. I just came to find out how you are and—”

“I’m good,” she said, “I’m doing pretty well. This place is real good for me. It’s a sanctuary for me.” And she told me about the store, and how she’d worked there the last five years, and lived in an old house with her cat, Sappho, and she was affiliated with a Wellfleet-based coven of witches, with whom she practiced magic and womyn’s rituals. She had just had her croning ceremony.

“Oh, Mom,” I said, hushed. What would my community think of this? “Oh, Mom. You’re pagan.”

“Yes, I am,” she told me. “And sober.”

“Mazel tov!” I said.
“Baruch Hashem,”
and I meant it, but the words were a little bit painful coming out. I wondered if she was remembering the same things I remembered. The times she’d been sober before.

“Three and a half years,” she said. “I wrote you a letter.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I didn’t have your address, so I couldn’t mail it. Do you want me to find it for you? How long are you in town? I could find it for you and give it to you.”

“No, that’s okay, Mom.”

“It’s about the steps I’ve taken in my sobriety.”

I really didn’t want to talk about her sobriety, since it made her so serious, since the whole subject was so important and so painful and about the past, and I kept promising myself we didn’t have to go back into the past. That was not what my visit was about! The past was just
not a happy place for me. Growing up in my family had not been altogether hunky dory, which was maybe why later on I’d had to go through growing up again extra times.

“There’s a big thank-you to you in it,” she said, referring to the letter.

“Really? For what?”

“For being my daughter,” Mom said. “I wanted to thank you in the letter, since I realized I’d never thanked you for that before.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“What?”

“Why did you need to thank me? I couldn’t help being your daughter, could I?”

She looked hurt. “I just wanted to thank you for supporting me. You know, when you were a little girl, you were a great support to me,” she said.

What choice did I have? I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.

“You always tried to cheer me up,” she said. “And you did. Did you know that? You did cheer me up. Do you remember when you used to make those puppets for me?”

“No, I don’t remember,” I said.

“You don’t remember Madeline and Pepito? And you tried to make the horse, but you couldn’t get the mane to stick to the sock.”

“No.” I shook my head, even though of course I did remember. It was second grade. The yarn wouldn’t stick, because I didn’t have fabric glue, so the horse looked somewhat bald, but the show went on anyway. I didn’t really think it was fair for her to bring it up. It seemed self-serving of her to remind me of when I was her little girl.

I said, “Mom, that’s not important. That’s done. That’s gone.”

“It wasn’t all bad,” she said.

“I know! Did you think I came out here to accuse you or something? Because I didn’t. Not at all! That’s the farthest thing from the truth! The thing is—”

“You were a big help,” she said. “That’s what I was thanking you for in the letter.”

“Hey, I’m glad,” I told her. “Here’s the thing, though. I’m a Bialy-stoker Hasid now.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s sort of like a transcendentalist Jew.”

“Oh, Sharon!” She turned a little pink.

“It’s just who I am right now,” I said.

“If it’s you,” she said, “it’s you.”

“But the thing is, I need to know about the future. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to ask your advice.”

“My advice?” She sounded surprised. I guess, despite being a crone now, people didn’t often seek her out as a person with a lot of wise advice to give.

I told her about my whole predicament. The way I’d changed my life, and how I was involved with Mikhail, but when it came to marriage I didn’t know what to do.

So she cocked her head to one side. “Well, I have to say … I have to say, and I think you know this about me, when it came to deciding who to marry, I wasn’t too terribly successful.”

And I said, “I know, but my rebbe said to ask you….”

She wavered a moment. She said, “Well, do you love him?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Well, that’s your answer right there. Isn’t it?” she said.

“You loved Dad, right?”

“Well, you know he was an asshole,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I know. I know. But originally, at the beginning. You loved him, right?”

“Very much.”

Then we both just stood there quietly. Since it was a fact Mom and Dad had loved each other so much once, and then look what happened to them, i.e., my mother the fragile wreck, my dad the pathological provider, et cetera. So I couldn’t help thinking, No,
that’s
my answer, right there.

L
ATER
, I walked alone down by the wharves, by the whale-watching boats lying high in the water, the
Portuguese Princess, Dolphin Fleet I
, and
Dolphin Fleet II.
It was gray and misty out, and the horns of incoming fishing boats sounded mournfully in the water. Mom had offered to put me up for the night and have my palms read and my cards done, and introduce me to a terrific fortune-teller, but I’d turned her down on all counts. Being a religious Jew, I figured I couldn’t make my decisions
based on tarot cards, and as for spending the night, remembering the holes Mom had dwelled in before, the newspapers piled up to the ceiling, the rotting fruit, the paths between her piles of bric-a-brac, I was a little bit afraid to accept her hospitality.

It was misty, and my hair hung down damp around my shoulders. I rested on a park bench near the arts-and-crafts huts by the water. A golden retriever was sitting there, too, leash tied to the bench leg, just waiting patiently for his human. He sniffed my backpack, which was full of kosher food from New York.

“I’d give you some, but it’s not good for you,” I told the dog, whose name, according to his collar, was Sam. “Oh, don’t look at me like that.” I ruffled the fur on his neck. We were both so down in that misty sea-weather. We were both sitting there so clammy.

He started snuffing me. He licked my hand.

“Hey, you,” I said, “don’t you think it’s always lonelier at the edge of land?”

Lick. Lick.

“Yeah, I’m just really tired. I just came from really far away. I’m far from home. Do you know what I mean?” Sniff, sniff.

“Well, I guess food is part of home. But also shelter. Also your bed. You know—just that one place you can curl up, and you can chew it up and shed all you want to—that’s what I’m talking about.”

Sniff.

“Hey, if you were mine, I’d give you the sandwich. I would.” I reached over to Sam and put my arms around him. “I wish you were mine.”

Not wanting to be rude eating in front of him, I walked all the way down the pier before I ate the lunch Mrs. Karinsky had packed for me: roast beef sandwiches on challah rolls, and plastic containers of what her kids called rubber kugel cut in squares. Mrs. Karinsky packed my lunch, I thought. Yet your mom and dad—they’re indelibly in your genes. You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried.

The water was gray and deep. The whales out there were all probably just starting to unwind after all those fleets of whale-watching boats. They were all probably just stretching out in the water together enjoying
their quiet time. The whales out there, they understood about family; they lived in pods. The whales, they knew. You could tell from the bones in their flippers. You could see from those spreading bones like fingers, they had once been animals on land; they’d looked like wolves and run in packs. And even when they took to the seas, even when they were buoyed by the waters and changed their shapes and grew humongously, they swam together, and they sang together, and they were kin. They lived a communal life. They played and swam and nursed their babies in their big extended aquatic families. They called to each other through the waters, all the way across the oceans, they recognized each others’ voices They knew whose voice belonged to whom.

After feeling sorry for myself a good long while, and realizing I would never be a whale, I went back to the car. What I really need is just a nice cheap clean motel room, I thought. What I really need is a shower. What I really need is a good night’s sleep. But all I wanted was Mikhail.

A day later I stood in Brighton in front of a tall dilapidated brick building, and I checked the number with the envelope I was carrying, and I went inside. The foyer was scuffed-up white and black tile, and the inner door by the mailboxes was propped open with somebody’s old shoe, so I just let myself in and slipped inside the elevator, which was slow and saggy. Over the years the cables must have lost some of their bounce. But I made it up to the fourth floor and knocked on number 404, which was Aunt Lena’s apartment.

A tiny yet beautiful lady came to the door, and behind her a flood of light. I saw this big cluttered sunny room and the shining back of Mikhail’s baby grand piano, a swish of light satiny wood.

“Hello,” said Aunt Lena.

She was not at all the way I’d imagined her! I’d thought from her voice that she was about a hundred, and with white hair and rosy granny cheeks. But actually Aunt Lena was a firecracker, no more than seventy, and had wavy black hair and makeup, and a plum-colored dress with gold buttons.

“Hi,” I said, “I’m Sharon.”

“Yes? You are Sharon!” Lena exclaimed. “Come in, come in. He is teaching. I will get you tea. If you will wait … if you will come into the kitchen.”

Mikhail looked over the top of the piano, naturally surprised to see me there since I’d never warned him I was coming. He called something to me. Yearningly, he stretched his neck and his whole body toward me, except his arms were down, because he and the little girl next to him were playing “Lightly Row” and what looked like the girl’s mother was sitting on the couch waiting. So I went with Lena to the kitchen, which was one of those oblong rooms you get in old brick apartment buildings. It was filled with plants, and tea tins and hanging wire baskets full of onions and potatoes, and apples, and nearly black bananas, and I sat at the table, which was piled with loose-leaf paper, carefully written over in Russian, page after page in heavy black ink, which Lena told me were her memoirs she was working on, and all about how she had come from Russia to New York right after the Second World War and left everything that she had once known and gone into the fashion industry. In a low voice, something of a stage whisper, she told me all about her three husbands, one worse than the next, and what they’d done to her during the marriages, during which she had no children, and how she came to Boston years ago, pursued by a certain gentleman, whom she refused, but who had secured for her this apartment in this rent-controlled building, after which she went into the communications field, working as a translator for Russian patients at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, from which, only two years ago, she had retired.

“To me Mikhail is my adopted son,” Lena said. “To me he is my son altogether. His mother wrote to me before she died. She asked me that I sponsor him, and of course this was what I must do. It has not been easy for him,” she confided in me.

“Why?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Because he is a genius!”

I leaned over to see Mikhail at the piano with the little girl. He was counting as she played. “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” On the couch the kid’s mother was also somewhat anxiously counting the beats, mouthing, “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”

“He has piano students,” Aunt Lena said. “It is not a living. Yet there is
no support for music in this country. His wife said, no, she will no longer support. Income. Salary. Money. Car, plus insurance. Furniture. What she cared for was earning a living, not for him. She left him—for what?” “Shallow material things?” I said.

“A timpanist!” Lena spat out the word. She started telling me about this timpanist who had once supposedly been Mikhail’s friend, and how he played so-called New Music that had no rhyme or reason, and was the darling of the music department at Harvard, and had a concerto being written just for him—while Mikhail sent tapes yet never succeeded at the competitions, because you see there were so many pianists. Yet there were few timpanists, and he, this so-called friend of Mikhail, took advantage of the fact, and of Mikhail’s trust. Mikhail never dreamed anything was going on between his wife, Elise, and John, this so-called musician. But then, just when Elise and John were about to run off together—the piano lesson ended.