Paradise Park (38 page)

Man, when I heard him talk sometimes, and I sat there all covered up in my skirt, I thought more about sex than I had in a long while, because the rabbi kept bringing up those kinds of behavior I’d enjoyed so much when I was younger. And now in class, I was almost embarrassed to think about the guys that I’d been with, and how I’d wanted them, and how I’d enjoyed myself. In the rabbi’s class it seemed like even my memories were X rated. And that was when I realized I wanted to be a Jew. Not just a Jew in name, but a Jew in deed. A praying Jew. A baking Jew. A Jew in a dress. A Jew like maybe my great-great-grandmother might have been. A
frume leibe. A
religious heart. A pure, strict heart.

I felt such nostalgia for that better, purer life from way back, I wanted to go there. I wanted to time-travel and grow my sleeves out long, and let my skirts blossom around me and take up counted cross-stitch and write epistles. Listening to the rabbi speak, I wanted to head back to pre-Revolutionary days, or at least before the sexual revolution. I felt this compelling urge to be a virgin again, and the crazy thing was how sexy the idea seemed to me. I felt so heated up about it, all throbbing to reform. I’d be thinking, Oh, oh, oh, if I could undo those things I’d done. If I could close my legs again. If I could go back a ways and sleep alone in my own bed. Or be like Madeline—not just the little girl in the old house in Paris, who naturally slept in a twin bed—but Madeline in
The Eve of St. Agnes
, in her wakeful swoon, all innocent in her magic castle, “Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,/As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.” That’s what I wanted—all my experiences and my desires folded back into themselves, all my petals folded up into this intense bud of chastity. It almost made me blush thinking
about it; I’d always thought that poem was so hot. That was where on Molokai I’d ripped the page in my old anthology, which was a book that never could shut up tight again.

I’d come out of Rabbi Simkovich’s class determined to dedicate my every waking hour to
snius
, which was modesty, and to
tefillah
, which was prayer, and to
limudei kodesh
, which was holy learning, and to
midos
, which were virtues. I’d come out planning to buy long-sleeved T-shirts, so my elbows would not be exposed, and tights, so my legs would not be bare under my skirt. I’d come out planning to throw away all my records and my tapes, which were music from the other side, the so-called modern world, and probably advertisements of its seductions. And I’d be thinking of my past delusions and tisking my tongue at myself, and I’d be fired up thinking about cleansing my heart and soul and all the passages to them. I’d throttle any stray man—even any stray thought of a man—that might try to trespass me again. And that was all before lunch.

Even better than Simkovich’s class was Torah study. We worked in small groups with our
madricha.
And we would study a chapter of the Torah, which the
madricha
would read to us in Hebrew and then translate and explain in English. And what I dug was we spent a lot of time focusing on our foremothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, who were role models for us to emulate, since they were totally dedicated to Torah, and family. My
madricha
was a young girl, Estie, who was seventeen years old, and counseling was her summer job before she went home to Brooklyn to get married. She looked like Snow White with her long dark hair, and fair skin with a few tiny moles, and dark brown eyes. She knew a million midrashes, which were stories for every phrase in the Torah that we read. She was a girl genius, I was sure. It seemed to me she knew every legend of the Hasidic masters, not to mention all the vast traditions of Judaism. I was in awe of her learning. I looked upon her teenage face, and I saw the wisdom of a thousand Bialystoker rebbes.

I said to her, “I feel like all the rabbis are speaking through your lips.”

That seemed to make her nervous. “No, no,” she said. I guess she didn’t like to think of herself as supernatural. “I learned midrash in school. See?” She took out a bunch of spiral-bound notebooks and she showed me pages filled with big round handwriting. “These are my notes.” She was trying to make it look like she’d studied the wisdom of the Hasidic masters just like spelling or geometry. But I didn’t buy that.
I held Estie in reverence, the way monks worship the child incarnation of the Karmapa Lama.

Estie also taught our small group’s halacha class, which was a very practical class on Jewish law, and, to be perfectly frank, the one I dreaded, since I’d had such bad experiences with Jewish kitchen laws in Jerusalem. Yet in the environment of Bais Sarah, my prejudices against religious rituals started to melt a little bit. By week three of the program I could get excited even about this stuff. Because every rule and ritual was actually one step closer to Hashem!

“I feel so aware here,” I said to my roommate Nicole. “This place is just like my old monastery, except with food.”

Nicole looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s like a prison here!”

The two of us were walking around the neighborhood in the afternoon, and all around us were these Victorian houses and stupendous trees. And I protested, “How can you say it’s like prison? How can you say that? This is one of the most gorgeous areas I’ve ever seen.”

She lit a cigarette. Smoking wasn’t allowed inside Bais Sarah, so Nicole smoked away in the glorious suburban countryside. Her straight blond hair looked like damp straw against her raggedy black dress. She wore borrowed clothes, because her own stuff had been deemed inappropriate for the program. She had the look of a little match girl. “I have to get out of here,” she said.

I just shook my head. I really couldn’t imagine what her problem was. “You’re in a place where all you have to do is learn, and breathe and imbibe Judaism! How can you call that a prison?”

“You’re here of your own free will,” she reminded me. “My parents sent me.”

Which was true. I had to give her that. I’d forgotten that Nicole was only seventeen. She was the same age as our
madricha
, Estie, only a far different seventeen, having been locked up at various times by her parents and sent to a military-style alternative boarding school for troubled teens, where your shoes were confiscated for insubordination. When she was sixteen she’d run away from home and lived on the streets, where she’d supported herself by selling her body, until now her parents were doing a last-ditch heroic religious intervention, except as usual they hadn’t asked Nicole’s permission first. “My mother hates me,” she said. “She wishes I was dead.”

“She’s just pissed off.”

Nicole drew herself up. There were tears in her blue eyes. Her eyes were actually a stunning aqua, like the blue sky shining into swimming pools. She was offended at me for belittling how much her mother hated her. “Do you even know her? Do you even have a right to say anything?”

“Look, all I’m trying to say is this place is a gift here. This place is actually a gift and you don’t even know it.”

“I’m going to kill myself,” Nicole told me, really seriously.

“God forbid!”

“Cut the crap,” she said.

“If you would just open up your eyes,” I said. “Look. The mountain is out today.” There it was, above our heads, and far away. Mount Rainier. Small and white, like the moon in daytime. “Don’t you see,” I said, “it’s a sign.” I looked at the mountain and it seemed to me like God’s chop mark on the landscape. It seemed to me Mount Rainier was living proof. God had touched the sky in this place. He had left His mark on Bellevue and Bais Sarah and Washington State! Even apart from all the trees, and the beauty of the lakes, He had placed His finger on the horizon, and left His fingerprint, that snowy mountain that would never melt, a permanent white cloud.

But Nicole barely glanced at the mountain, she was so miserable. The wings of her soul were bent out of shape from having to give up her freedom, or, as Rabbi Simkovich put it, her so-called, illusory freedom. Her mind was closed shut from her parents’ spying and harassment. And there was more that she had been through. I knew that from my own experience, coming from a not entirely perfect family myself. So I didn’t ask. I just kept on peppering her with how great things might be if she actually opened up her eyes and ears to Torah. I just kept regaling her until she didn’t trust me anymore.

I was becoming known among the other girls as somewhat hard core. Compared to a lot of them my background was pretty sheltered, never having been in a mental institution or imprisoned, for example, but in the Bais Sarah environment a lot of the girls were actually afraid of me, because I guess I just seemed so intensely happy. My roommates Nicole, and Linda—who was clinically paranoid anyway—and Ruth Ann—they all looked at me at times like they were afraid of what I
might do. Apparently I used to pray and sing in my sleep, and I’d wake up my roomies in the dead of night raving and demanding the Moshiach to come down into the world.

Yet it wasn’t like I was trying to evangelize anybody in my sleep. It wasn’t like I was cracking up or anything. It was just that Bellevue swept me off my feet. I was in a whole other zone. It was like going under the waves until you think you’re going to faint or drown, and then suddenly discovering you can breathe the water. I barely thought about what day or year it was. I was surrounded by these tides of poetry and these great kelp forests of prayers and halacha. I was swimming way down among the tuna with their bulging, learned foreheads, and the silver sardine schools, and the leviathans, great rabbinic whales of the deep.

I
T
was a full moon in August, and we were sitting in the music room. The moon was floating up through the window, so big and near you could see all the craters pocking the silver. And I looked out at the moon, and I felt a sudden wistfulness for Grandpa Irving’s silver watch. I wished I could touch it and rub my fingers over its round silver case with the pawn marks stamped inside its back. I felt regretful when I saw the moon.

Yet when I turned back to listen to what was going on inside, the feeling left me, because Rabbi Simkovich was standing up in front of our whole group, and he was pacing back and forth and in thought, and then he started telling tales of great rebbes—what they’d done and what they’d believed, and the miracles they’d caused to happen in their holiness and their delight in Hashem. He was telling the tale of Rabbi Moshe of Samdor, who worked as a peddler trading with peasants when he was a kid. Whenever he got home from work and said his prayers, he felt this
light
kindling his body! And he asked his older brother, Rabbi Zevi Hirsh, why am I all lit up like this after just walking around working all day? And Rabbi Zevi Hirsh answered, “Because whether you’re walking or working or what have you, if you are following in the ways of Hashem, then wherever you go all the little holy particles throughout the world will catch on you like burrs on your clothes. All the holiness of the trees and the road and the rocks and the bushes will spark onto you, and that’s how that light is kindled in you!”

“Yes! Yes!” I exclaimed. “Amen
v’amen!
Bravo!”

Nicole looked up at me from under her gold hair that she’d been busy picking through for loose ends.

Linda’s eyes widened with alarm, but a lot of the other girls started echoing what I was saying. The majority of us girls loved the stories of the rebbes best of all. How the first Bialystoker rebbe transformed sticks into bread. How the fourth Bialystoker turned into a bird for three days and three nights, so great was his feeling as he prayed. His soul became so light he flew right off the ground. The majority of us related to everything that happened to the rebbes, and wished we could apply the rebbes’ lessons to our own lives. That’s what I argued to my roommates as we got ready for bed that night. We four clothed in our modest long-sleeved nightgowns, so you couldn’t see the odd tattoo or self-inflicted wound.

I said, “Light is what it’s all about. Don’t you get that? Judaism is all light and kindling and flames! That’s what’s incredible. Your soul can be walking along, and all of a sudden it can ignite!”

“Could you just give it a rest?” Nicole said, and she got into her sleeping bag and zipped herself up.

But Ruth Ann was nodding her head. She had been a housewife and a mom who had led a really idyllic life in Redmond with no troubles at all, except gaining a couple hundred pounds, and then all of a sudden one day her three children were grown, and her husband left her, and she realized that there she was with her house and her cars, and her furniture, and her money, which, having pretty much the best lawyer in the state, she’d got from the divorce, and she had many things, but they were just like a memorial of the person she had been. They had no meaning, which was when she began returning to her own faith, Judaism. So now she said, “I know exactly what you mean. Our
neshamas
are like little candles….”

“And they’re just waiting to be lit,” I said.

Linda sat on her mattress. “Now, I’m not sure I would want to be lit up like that—like a firecracker,” she said slowly.

“What do you mean you don’t want to be lit?” I tossed my hair over my head to brush it out.

“I don’t want to go up in smoke,” Linda said. She was rather cautious, due to some of her past experiences—forgetting who she was and becoming homeless for a time.

“No, see, it’s not like a firecracker,” I said. “It’s not like soaking your
self in kerosene and lighting a match. It’s like the eternal flame. It’s burning forever. That’s what we’re talking about.”

“But I don’t like the feeling of burning up,” Linda said.

“It’s burning up in spirit,” I insisted.

“Go to sleep,” Nicole intoned from inside her sleeping bag.

“Or look at it this way. It’s like being magnetized,” I said. “It’s like having all your little iron filings suddenly aligned in this new direction. And the direction is upward, toward enlightenment. Or like phototropism—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Nicole groaned.

“You could be like a green plant,” I said, “and you could be growing in one direction, but then all of a sudden you notice the sun is over there, and you push all your cells toward the light, and you’re growing somewhere totally different.”