Paradise Park (23 page)

Then Rich would walk by and say in a snide voice, “Om shanti shanti.”

He always made fun of me. He kept joking I was trying to get religion because I wasn’t getting anything else. He was so crude. One day I turned on him. I said, “Rich, it seems like you’re really threatened by my growth.”

Rich guffawed, “Yeah, I am. I’m afraid of what you’re growing into.”

“Very funny.” I looked at his postgraduate beer belly. “Why don’t you worry about how
you’re
growing?”

The topic actually came up at our house meeting. Not Rich’s weight, but my studies. We were all sitting around the table eating popcorn out of a punch bowl, and I said, “It’s time for new business, right?”

“Yeah,” said Tom.

“Well, under new business I’d like to say it really bothers me that people object to me studying in the living room.” “That’s not new business,” said Kathryn.

“What is it then?”

“That’s an area of concern,” she said.

“Okay, fine. Whatever you want to call it. When people walk by and make comments while I’m reading, then I don’t feel like I’m welcome in the house.”

“I never made a single comment about your reading,” said Tom.

“I wasn’t talking about you,” I told him. “Om shanti shanti,” I said. “That was harassment.”

“It was a little joke,” Rich said, getting on the defensive.

“To me, it wasn’t a joke, okay? And I’m tired of being harassed just for studying religious texts.”

“What, now you’re getting into martyrdom?”

“You see what I mean,” I appealed to everybody.

“I was being facetious. Give me a break.”

“No, you give me a break,” I snapped. “I never bothered you.”

Rich glared at me. “How about demanding we all say grace before dinner?”

“Demanding? It was a suggestion. It was an idea. I said, I am floating this idea out to you that maybe we should consider discussing just possibly allowing some meaningful words to leave our mouths before we stuff our forks into them!”

“And we voted it down,” Tom said.

“Three times!” Rich said. “Sharon, we all care about you … am I right?” he asked the others.

“We love you,” Will said. “It’s just that it seems at times …”

Rich jumped in. “Like we’re living with this person who is slowly turning into some kind of humorless …”

Kathryn finished for him. “Fanatic.”

“Fanatic? You guys!” I spread my hands. My fingers were shiny with popcorn butter. “How could you think that about me?”

“Sometimes I’m scared for you,” Kathryn said.

“You are so hostile to me,” I said.

“Stop!” said Will.

No one spoke for a minute.

“I guess we’ll work harder on sensing people’s boundaries,” Will said.

“Amen,” said Rich.

I shot him a glance.

He was staring down at the table with a poker face.

I began withdrawing somewhat from my life in the house. I spent long hours in my room with Marlon and the letters I received from Gary. Yeah, who would have thought? Gary and I were writing to each other all the time. He was sitting there in Jerusalem and I was in Hawaii, and we were writing to each other. I used to read his letters over and over to myself because they were so mysterious. They were so sadly beautiful. I’d never realized Gary could write in such a poetic style. (Now he was sending all his letters typed.) “Sharon,” he wrote to me. “When I read your letter my hands trembled. All these years, and in the end, you, like me, are seeking God. I’ve traveled the whole world searching. Ten years I’ve traveled, and lost myself so many times on the way. Love, success, money, these were all mine. Yet all that time my heart was restless. Only now in Jerusalem I am coming to the beginning of
myself. I am reading the ancient texts. I am living in the Old City of the angels and the prophets. I am finding the key.”

It turned out that after traveling the Pacific with the German chick, Katrina, he had followed her back to Germany and lived with her for several years, after which she had unceremoniously dumped him for another guy. Gary had then taken off and wandered throughout Germany and Holland and worked for a while as a stringer for the Associated Press, during which time he visited Anne Frank’s house. While he was there in the hidden rooms where Anne had lived, he saw the table where she had eaten and the bed where she had slept, and he began sobbing. All of a sudden he’d realized something. He was a Jew. Of course, he had been Jewish all his life, but it had never hit him before. That he was a Jew like Anne. He was Jew enough to be killed for it. As soon as he realized he was Jewish, Gary took off for Jerusalem. He didn’t know the language, or anything, but he went straight from the airport to the Western Wall. There, two rabbis from the Torah Or Institute were waiting for him. They picked him right up and took him back to the institute to teach him Judaism, which was the key to himself that he had been missing all this time.

Of course, it took a lot of letters back and forth for me to get the whole picture. As I said, Gary had a very spiritual poetic way of writing. And yet it was the strangest thing corresponding with him. I understood so well what he had been dealing with in his wanderings. I knew exactly what it was like to have a heart that was restless. Reading his words was like reading my own. It was like meeting my own twin wanderer after years of separation. I thought: Could it be that in some karmic way, everything is coming around again? After all, he’d had no way of knowing I would still be in Hawaii when he’d written his postcard. As he explained, he’d only really written it for himself.

“Dear Gary,” I wrote. “I believe in symmetries in the universe. Correspondences! I believe that people can fall into a certain pattern, even when that pattern is so complicated you cannot figure it out. Like you, I am into prophets. Like you, I am trying to reconnect. Here we are, on opposite sides of the world, yet magnetic currencies flow through us. We are both coming from the same place.”

My letters to Gary were long. I used to write him page after page. It took me that long to express my thoughts. Plus, my handwriting was big.
I wrote to him all about my house and about school and Shirokiya and my vision and rebirth. I’d mail off my latest thoughts and then I’d wait and wait. But it took over a week just for my letter to reach him, and then sometimes ten, twelve more days for his answers to come back. Day after day I’d open our rusty old mailbox that Kathryn had spray-painted white. No cigar. Oftentimes all I’d find would be our house bills, along with the green chameleon who used to hide there in the back.

“Hi, little guy,” I said one day, poking my face into the mailbox.

The chameleon looked at me calmly. He was about ten inches long, mostly tail, and he was bright green, like a leaf with the sun shining through it. He breathed in and out and spread his tiny little toes on the corrugated metal mailbox floor. He looked out at me. I looked in at him. We each contemplated the view.

“Can you change color?” I asked him.

He breathed in and he breathed out. He never forgot to breathe.

“I mean, it’s okay if you can’t,” I said. “I have this friend. And it seems like he’s changed so much and I’ve changed so much we’ve come full circle back together again. Do you think that could be?”

The folds in his neck puffed in and out. His eyes were like shiny black seeds.

“I’m thinking about dancing again,” I said.

It was true. Ever since Gary and I had started corresponding, my whole body wanted to dance. My feet wanted to jump. My arms wanted to fly into the air. Gary and I were writing all the time about our memories. Admittedly, his were mostly of the Holocaust and of Our Sages, who he was learning about in Torah Or, while mine were mostly about the two of us spinning in the air. Mine were more about this dancing couple that was once us. Still, when I wrote about us dancing, Gary wrote back:

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I remember all of that. And now look how far we’ve come. We are still dancing on the same path! Sharon, I have learned this:
There are no coincidences
. This is truth. There are no coincidences. There are no random acts. Everything that happens in life happens for a reason. Even you and me, Sharon. Even us. We happened for a reason. You could call it karma. Or fate. They are just names. They don’t matter. I am talking about God’s will. I am speaking of
bashert.”

I almost had to put Gary’s letter down on my
buton
where I was
reading. That was pretty heady stuff there. I mean, as I used to say to Kekui, this was not how I was raised—this was not my background—this whole providential view of the world, as if God were looking down at people and taking notes for later. Yet here was Gary writing and saying—could this be? That he still loved me? And it was intentional, at least on God’s part? I looked at every typed word. The thin Torah Or letterhead crackled in my hands. A mysterious elation began to come over me. Mysterious, because my rational side just could not understand how all this might work. Elation because all of a sudden it was like the world turned inside out; the resurrection of everything I’d buried long ago. I could see my jerk ex-boyfriend transformed, and my old love reciprocated, and my dancing partner joined to me again. All of a sudden I had before me these tangible signs. And God’s will and Providence were real to me.

W
HAT
happened to me that weekend clinched it.
Bashert
was here to stay.

I had been going for a few weeks to a discussion group that Professor Flanagan had recommended to me. The discussions were put on jointly by the Unitarian community and a Quaker fellowship that shared the space. The two groups were amicable partners that met on alternate Sundays three weeks out of the month, and on the fourth week held forums for learning where different people from the community would come and give talks about their beliefs or their work, or whatever turned them on. For example, a Catholic priest would come and talk to us about Catholicism, or an astronomer would come and show us slides of planets in the solar system and speak about his personal views of the origins of the universe.

The Unitarian church was just a lovely white house from the old days with porches and dark polished koa wood floors, and there was a scratchy sisal rug in the meeting room and folding chairs in a circle, and by the door a cork bulletin board where all the name tags for the combined membership of the Unitarian community and Quaker fellowship were pinned up. You reused your original name tag every time you came, and actually it was always a friendly feeling walking in and seeing everybody’s name pinned up there. We used those name tags with the clear plastic sheaths.

Well, the Sunday right after Thanksgiving my bus rolled up on Old Pali Road and I walked over to the Unitarian church; and there, in front of the church, was this silver-gray Cadillac, and it had a placard in the front window that said
CLERGY
. Inside the meeting room stood a large man in a gray three-piece suit and tie and dress shoes, and also a tiepin. I hadn’t seen anyone in so many clothes in years. He was a portly guy, but also on the tall side, and he had a little bit of gray hair on top and dark eyes, and he had reading glasses on, and he was leaning over and reading all of the name tags pinned up on the bulletin board. When I came up and took my name tag from the board and pinned it on, he extended his hand and introduced himself in this deep, rolling, yet melancholy voice. And he pressed my hand in his and said, “Rabbi Everett Siegel.”

We were all there—all the regulars, in any case, which was about twenty people, and we sat in a circle, and that week’s host, Dave, got up and said, “Let’s all welcome Rabbi Siegel into our fellowship.” And he gave Rabbi Siegel one of the leis we always gave visitors, a brown lei made out of seedpods and dry long grains. And people murmured, “Welcome.”

It was an informal group. By which I mean T-shirts and shorts and the occasional muumuu, and when guests came they usually sat with us in the circle and did more of a round-table discussion, unless they had visual aids, like that astronomer and his slides. Rabbi Siegel, however, stood right up front in his suit, and he paced back and forth and he cleared his throat as if he was trying to figure out how to begin. He stood there and struggled for a few moments. Then he looked us in the eyes, and when he spoke his voice was low, not soft, but low. It was the strangest thing when he spoke. It was like he was calling us by name. He said, “Stan Lebowitz. Lucinda Stern. Henry Miesell.” He said my name, Sharon. “Sharon Spiegelman.” He just kept naming names. He named about half the people there at that day’s fellowship. I thought at first he was doing some kind of getting-to-know-you game, but then I realized he was actually reading our names off our name tags. “Dave Aronson. Mitch Kahan.” Siegel looked at all of us, and he said slowly, like he was telling the slowest saddest joke in the world, “Some of my best Jews are Friends.”

I thought, what in the world? But Rabbi Siegel kept on talking.

He said, “We have questions. We have questions about God and about
life, about religion and morality. We have questions today and we seek answers. And yet, and yet, I have a question for some of you. Why is it that those of us who are born Jews look for answers in every single religion but our own? Once our people were a light unto the nations. Once our sacred Torah, the First Testament, was called a tree of life to all who held fast to it. And yet, and yet, in this age of darkness—in our century which is blackened by the greatest evil known to any since the dawn of time, since the dawn of man’s existence—our people are not a light unto the nations, but a flickering candle of indifference. Our tree of life is weakened with intermarriage, and ignorance. Our children and, in fact, we ourselves, do not know what it is to be a Jew.”

At which point I raised my hand—but Siegel just sailed on without even acknowledging me. When other hands went up he didn’t even look. Frankly, the guy was in love with the sound of his own purple prose! He was definitely not a Unitarian up there in his suit, with his Cadillac the size of a hearse. He went on and on. He said the Jewish people were God’s chosen people. And the Jewish heritage was the one true thing to which all Jews should turn. This chosen people stuff, that just made you want to slouch down in your folding chair and disappear! But there was something about him. He reminded me of someone from a long time ago. It was something in his voice—this peculiar, deeply mournful sound like muted taxi horns, or deep dark cello music. As Siegel kept talking I would catch a memory and then it would be gone, I would catch it again for an instant, and then I would lose it. And then it came to me—that voice! You could hear Grandpa Irving in the rabbi’s voice. All rueful, Brooklyn-Yiddish, dark, and smoky. You could hear him, my grandfather! Deep down underneath Siegel’s poetic diction, if you listened hard enough, he was there: Grandpa Irving! And I sat up in my chair and I closed my eyes and I thought as hard as I could, Grandpa Irving, are you there? Are you channeling through this Siegel or what? Hey, I’m sorry I gave away your watch. Grandpa Irving? What are you saying to me? But hard as I tried, I just heard the tone of his voice, not any meaning—just this endless shushing, like when you hold a seashell to your ear.