Paradise Park (55 page)

“Except,” I said, “if by some chance you do need something else—we’ll always be there for you.”

Then Mohel Steve said,
“Yasher koach!”
meaning more power to you. “Spoken like a true Jewish mother!”

So, of course, as soon as he called me a Jewish mother, everybody started laughing. I thought, Why is everybody laughing? That’s what I am.

“Great name,” said Telemachus afterward, when everyone was milling around, gathering to go.

“I love the name,” said Mom. She gave me a kiss. A little bit timidly she said, “I have to admit, I thought you were going to name him after Andrew.”

“I thought so too,” Dad said slowly, coming up to the other side of me.

I was just stunned to hear them say that. So many thoughts were running through my head. First of all, the thought that for Mom and Dad it was still all about Andrew. Everything began and ended—mostly ended—with him. There were my parents, one on each side of me, and they’d both come with exactly the same idea and the same hope! So of course in that moment I was filled with guilt that this had never even occurred to me. I had never once thought of naming the baby after my brother. Of course that’s what I should have done. That was the real Jewish tradition, wasn’t it? And there were Mom and Dad, after all those years, still with their sorrow. How could they not feel it? You would feel it forever, losing your son. I had never even realized a sliver of how they must have felt until just that moment. And meanwhile, after all these years, even now, I’d still managed to do the wrong thing. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

“I love you guys,” I burst out, and I threw my arms around both of them, both my mom and dad, and I drew them together into my fat postpartum, invincibly strong unconditional arms. And I held them, and I held them, and they stiffened up, and they shrunk back from their royal spheres’ crushing like that and smushing together in my iron grip. But still I held on to Mom and Dad. I held them until they were really uncomfortable. I held them as if they were my own prodigal sheep returned into my fold.

And afterward my father had to wipe the condensation from his glasses, and my mother had to gasp for breath. They were both so shaken up—we all were, all three—but I wasn’t sorry. Not one bit.

Oldies’ Night

W
HEN
you get older and start taking stock—when you start looking back and maybe even revisiting the so-called scenes of your youth—you can’t help feeling torn between nostalgia and foreboding. That’s how I felt about going back to dancing again. Deb kept working on me to come to Oldies’ Night when spring rolled around, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. I dreaded getting there and seeing how everyone had aged, and youth had fled, since that’s what youth does—and you can chase her all you want, yet you’ll run in circles. You’ll end up in vicious circles, unless by some chance you are dancing on a painted Grecian urn, and John Keats writes your story, and then your mad pursuit will be about infinite beauty, rather than futile attempts to relive the past, and your dance will be truth, rather than consequences. The consequences being that youth flees, and grace puts on weight, and gravity comes to the quick. So I concluded that I’d rather remember dancing the way it was than go back now. Then curiosity got the better of me.

I came to Oldies’ Night with Mikhail, and Zohar riding in a backpack on Mikhail’s back. Our little boy was nine months old, and his face was perfectly round. His cheeks were so big and soft they jiggled and
shook as we walked along. His cheeks were so big that from certain angles you couldn’t see his ears. His eyes were dark, almost black. He had only fuzz for hair, but he had dark eyelashes all fringing his eyes. And we walked into the MIT student center, which had a bank, and a barber shop, and an ice cream store, and Zohar said, “Ha!” which meant, This is very interesting.

We went to MIT’s student center and found an enormous room called the Sala de Puerto Rico. And it had air conditioning and a polished tile floor, but no people at all. I said, “I thought it was today.” I rummaged through my bag. I tried to remember the date.

Then Mikhail saw the note taped on the wall. Dancing Outside.

So we walked out to the lawn on the other side of the student center, and there on the grass were dancers, something like a hundred of them, and they were old. They were middle aged, and they’d brought their spouses and their children. And they were wearing cutoff shorts and faded T-shirts. The guys were bald, and they had beards, and serious bellies, and hairy legs. The women were wearing sweats and athletic shoes, no Indian gauze skirts. They had perms and they had gray hair, and (like me) hips. But meanwhile, the music was blaring from the speakers; the same old dances I used to know. My feet just started jumping. Slowly I started twirling. “Mamamam!” Zohar said. “Mamamam!” He kicked his bare feet.

“Shall you come out?” Mikhail was asking him.

I was already a ways off. Without thinking I’d begun to dance. “This is for you,” this one bald guy said. He’d brought over a fancy name tag, a white circle like a moon, and it said
OLDIE
on it and there was a space where you could write your name, and how many years you had been dancing, and I took a black marker and I wrote, “Sharon.” Then I had to laugh at myself a little bit. I wrote, “22 Years.”

I didn’t recognize anybody from back in my era. And yet a lot of people looked familiar. Maybe it was just taking a while to place them. Or maybe I hadn’t ever known these people, but they were the kind of people I had known. Maybe they were just the same ilk. I took Mikhail by the hand, and he held Zohar, and I called the steps to them, and they followed, so we formed our own little unit there outside the circle, and we took turns holding Zohar and dancing, and then resting our arms and our backs, until all at once someone came up to me, and stared at my
face, and came a little closer and kept staring. He was a guy just arrived in a jacket and tie, and with gray hair, and a neat little gray moustache.

“Sharon?”

I knew his voice, and suddenly I recognized his little blinky eyes behind his glasses. I stood stock still. “Gary!”

“I can’t believe it.” He took my two hands in his. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m just—I’m dancing,” I spluttered. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? This is my husband, Mikhail,” I said. “This is my kid, Zohar.”

Gary shook Mikhail’s hand. He looked at Zohar. He looked at all of us. “Sharon,” he said to me, slowly. “Wow.” He kept shaking his head. “This is good. This is really good to see you again.”

“What’s up with you? What’s with the suit?” I asked.

“I came from work,” he explained.

“You work in Boston now? You work here?”

“Is that strange?” he said a tiny bit defensively.

“Well, I mean, of course not. It’s just I always had you pictured in my mind at Torah Or, and becoming a rabbi, and living in Jerusalem, and all that. So that didn’t happen?”

“Well, I’m living in Newton,” he said, “I work for the federation.”

“The federation of what?” I asked.

“The Jewish Federation,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“I’m involved in their adult programming. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the program Partnership for Lifelong Learning?”

“Nope.”

“I think I have heard of it,” Mikhail said politely. “Yes.”

“Well, that’s a program I codesigned.”

“Neat,” I said. “So you’re still into Judaism, just over here, instead of over there.”

“Well,” Gary said, “that’s one way of looking at it. The way my thinking evolved, I came to realize that outreach was my particular area—outreach to the assimilated, and to the intermarried. Outreach to the children of intermarriage. Outreach to those in the population who are totally unaffiliated. And, much as I love Israel, America is where the need is greatest. America is where the ignorance and the identity crisis is just—it’s staggering.”

“That’s great that you’re turning that around,” I said.

Gary folded his arms and he sighed in his dissatisfied patronizing way, and at that moment he was so much the Gary that I once knew that my hands flew up to my face. “Sharon,” he said, “if it’s anything I’ve become, it’s more pessimistic.”

“Really!”

“We’ve only just begun to see the fallout from two generations of assimilation.”

“Well, I guess that makes your job more interesting,” I said. “So now you’re married and living in Newton?” “I’ve been married,” Gary said.

I couldn’t get over how his hair had turned gray. Even his moustache was gray. But those eyes. He still had those same furtive brown more-sensitive-than-thou eyes.

“I think now I take a much darker view,” Gary was telling me.

“What do you mean? You always had a dark view,” I said. “Remember the honeycreepers? Remember how Hawaii was spoiled already by the time you got there? You were always a pessimist. You
loved
being a pessimist.”

“And what about you?” Gary asked.

“The opposite!”

“I meant, what are you doing now?”

“Oh!” I said. “We’re living in Sharon. And Mikhail is a pianist, and we have a band. But actually he’s a classical pianist. If you ever have a fund-raiser,” I said, “he does fund-raisers. He could do a concert for you. If you ever want to come out and hear him play, he can play any music. He’s an incredible musician.”

Mikhail was turning red. He didn’t like me to boast, but I couldn’t help it. Since one of Mikhail’s main problems professionally was that he didn’t publicize his own work, and since I was so proud of him, any chance I got, I tended to toot his horn. “And then we’re taking care of Zohar, along with Mikhail’s aunt Lena.”

“So you’ve ended up in the sandwich generation.”

“What’s the sandwich generation?”

“The one in the middle, managing both child care and elder care,” Gary said. “I’m going through that with my mother.”

“No, I meant, Aunt Lena is taking care of the baby too. And I’m
managing an organic juice store in Brookline, and I’m studying for my HN—to be a licensed herbal nutritionist. Jewishly we’re in a Havurah.”

“And you’ve found what you’ve been looking for?” Gary asked.

“Well,” I said, “to be honest, I’m not crazy about the discussions at our Havurah, since people are so long winded, and anybody can talk as long as she wants about whatever issues happen to occur to her, whether or not it’s relevant to the text, so that aspect isn’t so great. But the singing is good. The singing is really really nice. Oh, did you mean, in my life? Did you mean, in my life in general?”

“I think he’s hungry,” Mikhail said to me.

“Okay,” I said. “But get his bib. In general in my life, you know what the thing is? I stopped looking. The thing I realized was I didn’t need to go on looking anymore, and learning this and reading that and taking classes, because God was actually looking for me! So I’ve decided to be a receptor. I’ve decided to be more of a listener, and a sounding board who is open to God in all the ways he might come—visions, dreams, prophecies, music—in all his myriad forms. Do you know what I mean?”

Gary shook his head at me. I think, but I’m not completely sure, I saw him roll his eyes. He said, “You haven’t changed at all.”

“Oh, I have!” I told him. “How can you say that?” But maybe when enough time passes, people can’t even see the changes in you anymore. Maybe after a certain point their memory of you is so strong they can’t shake it. I couldn’t hold it against him for remembering me as that flaky, self-absorbed person he used to know, since, after all, I remembered him the same way!

The evening was mellowing into this sea-blue. We oldies huffed and puffed. We wove in and out of circles. Swung in lines. Sweat dripped down my face. No question I was out of shape. Yet, as I danced, I felt a calm come over me. I wasn’t conscious of how I looked or how I moved. I barely noticed Gary, or anyone else at all. I wasn’t conscious even of the steps. My feet were in a trance; they moved by themselves, remembering everything. So I danced, and I was not in this time or that. It was like, so you’re forty pounds heavier. So what? So you’re twenty years older. If you were aged, you could be ripe. You could be vinted. Cured.

My feet got so hot inside my shoes, I took them off, and also my damp socks, and I danced with the grass tickling my soles. We all danced on the grass, and people’s children ran around or crawled around the edges. And
Zohar sat and looked for small rocks that he might swallow, and Mikhail and I had to pry them loose from his hands. A few summer-school students were standing around watching. A little ways off knights-in-armor were running at each other with fake lances tilting, while fair ladies in long satin gowns and cone hats were applauding from lawn chairs. It was a chapter meeting for MIT’s Society for Creative Anachronism.

The sun began to set, and
“Hinach Yaffa”
started up. That old dance I’d taught back at the temple in Honolulu. I said, “Hey, Mikhail, this one’s easy.”

The old song floated out through the air. Those lyrics from the Song of Songs where that poor girl is searching and searching for her lover and she can’t find him. I understood those verses. What it was like wandering all around, searching, desperate. It was the feeling you got from loving God, yet loving him from this totally unenlightened place; loving him with this intense, unrequited love. Well, that was being a pilgrim. I’d been there. That was burning up inside with being young.