Paradise Park (54 page)

It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was sweating it trying to finish my letter to the baby that I’d been working on ever since Telemachus had told me that when he was born his parents had written a letter to him with all their thoughts and hopes and dreams for him, and now it was one of his most treasured possessions. So there I was sitting on the floor scribbling for all I was worth, and the baby kept waking up and wanting to nurse and scream and be carried around. “You’re defeating the purpose of your own letter!” I kept telling him.

“Sharon, you must get some rest,” Mikhail said.

“I have to finish!”

“But, Sharon,” Mikhail told me, “tomorrow is the bris….”

“That’s the whole point!” I said. “I have to write him the letter now, because tomorrow it’ll be too late.”

“How can it be too late when it is just eight days he is here in this world?”

“But he’ll be named!” I said. “He’ll have a name, and then he’ll be a completely different person … because he’ll have this public persona—he’ll be part of a social contract—do you know what I mean?”

“No,” Mikhail said, as he strode up and down with the baby in his arms.

“He’ll belong to everyone else,” I said, looking at the baby’s little bald head. “And now—he’s just ours.” I admit, I choked up a little bit.

“But he will always be ours,” Mikhail said. “Even if you finish the letter tomorrow.”

“It won’t be the same,” I said. “It’ll never be the same!” And then I started writing some more, but then I lost the whole thread of my argument, and I meandered, and my head ached, until finally I threw down my pen. “What’s the use! It’s hopeless. Throw it out,” I told Mikhail, and I thrust my whole yellow pad at his free hand.

“But, Sharon, you are writing page twenty-three!” Mikhail exclaimed, looking down at the scribbled pages.

“Just throw ’em out,” I said. “They’re no good. They’re all about me, not him. They’re all about my dreams and my hang-ups, not his. God, I’m so selfish.”

“Sharon, Sharon,” Mikhail said. “Isn’t it natural to write more about yourself than about him, since he’s only one week old? Isn’t it normal that you, the parent, have more hang-ups, because you have lived a longer time?”

“I just don’t want to make a mistake,” I said. “I just don’t want to do this wrong, and I’m already messing up. I’ve already messed up the letter.”

“Where are the rules to write a letter?” Mikhail asked.

“I wrote too much!” I said. “I already overdid it. What I wrote was overkill. It was pure self-indulgence! You’re going to have to write it,” I told Mikhail as he dragged me off to
bed. “You’re
going to have to finish it.”

Mikhail said, “You are a very serious mother.”

I
was
serious, which is why I didn’t do too well at the bris. I mean, at the business end of the bris. The rest was beautiful.

We had this mohel who drove up in a car with the license plate MOYL, and he made jokes all the time—or, rather, not so much jokes, but he talked in a jokey way, like he kept calling the baby young man, as in “Come here, young man, let’s have a look at you.” And he took our precious baby and undressed him, and opened up his diaper to check him out, and said in this cheerful voice, “I think he’s in the top fifteen percent already!”

And I thought, Go ahead, baby, pee all over him. How dare he talk about you like that!

The mohel was into putting people at ease, usually at the expense of his patient. This mohel’s name was Steve, and he was also a doctor. He was clean shaven, and about fifty, and very, very short, and with wry smiles, and a million personal anecdotes, and he wore a suit and tie, and aftershave, and as I said, was jocular and relaxed and he had a piercing tenor voice, so that when he laughed he had that slightly manic girlish laugh that really high obnoxious tenors have. I hated him right away.

People were congregating at the Sharon Community Center. The bris fell out on a Sunday, so the parking lot was filling up with all our friends from work, and from the Havurah, and from the music community.
Everybody brought a vegetarian dish and laid it on the table, and Telemachus and Chris brought gallon containers of our Fresh Squeezed organic apple juice, so we had quite a feast. There was spinach lasagna, and zucchini lasagna, and rice pilaf, and Waldorf salad, and tortilla chips, and salsa, and guacamole, and pita and hummus, and baba ganoush, and I don’t know what else. Aunt Lena was organizing the food. She was wearing a black-and-white suit in an oversized houndstooth check, and she had a black patent leather purse and pointy little black patent leather pumps. Her whole face was full of joy. Everyone was congratulating her. People were congratulating us too. They were mobbing Mikhail, who was holding the baby, and crowding around me, asking about the birth, but I was almost too distracted to notice. Both my mom and dad had come.

My mother came in and kissed me on the cheek. “This is my mom,” I said to everyone who happened to be standing next to me. She gave me a big flat tissue-paper-wrapped present, which I later found out was one of those Native American dream catchers to hang above the baby’s crib.

Then my father came up with Cathy, and not to be outdone, they both kissed me too. And they gave me a box professionally wrapped with blue ribbons cascading in corkscrew curls. When I opened it later I saw it was a little tiny navy-blue sleeper with red trim, and red pompoms on the toes. Cathy must have picked it out.

And I said to both of them, “Thank you so so so much for coming!” as if they’d come from far away, which they had, and they shook Mikhail’s hand while Steve, the mohel, was calling everyone to order.

“People, if you would gather over here …” Steve was saying.

Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off my parents, standing there in the same room like that. I was just in such awe, watching them, and their total politesse. The way they glided near each other, and nodded their heads.

“Hello, Milt.”

“Hello, Estelle. How are you?”

And they smiled, and they inclined their heads, and then they proceeded in their separate, translucent, shining spheres.

“Baruch habah,”
Mohel Steve sang out. “Blessed be he who enters! For those of you who haven’t been to a bris before—and for those of you who have, but don’t remember—or don’t want to remember—I’ll be translating as I go along, and explaining. The first thing is—does the cutting hurt the baby? Just for a moment, just for a bit. Does it traumatize
him? Will he be in agonizing pain? Absolutely not! One little cut—one drop of blood, on the eighth day of this young boy’s life, to symbolize his covenant with his God, and with his people, Israel. This might in fact be the
easiest
Jewish ritual he has to undergo—especially when you remember that Abraham, the first Jew, circumcised
himself.
When he was ninety-nine. So think about that, men, as we proceed.

“Zeh kiseh shel Eliahu.
…This is the chair of Elijah. …” Steve’s voice pinged through the community center. “As tradition has it, this chair here symbolizes Elijah’s throne, and the time when the prophet will return to bring forth the Messiah. It’s also the chair where our
Sandek
is going to sit.
Sandek
means ’with child’—this is the guest who has the honor of holding the baby on his lap, for the circumcision. Okay, who’s going to sit on the hot seat?”

“Mikhail. Go up there,” I whispered.

“All right, Papa,” said Mohel Steve. “You’re not going to drop him, now! Take this pillow and we’ll just put this young man on your lap, and now we’ll say this blessing….”

Tears were already welling up in my eyes. Telemachus stood on one side of me, and Deb on the other.

My tiny baby was screaming. He was turning bright red, and screaming with all his tiny might. Mikhail sat still as he could, as if he were afraid to move. And Steve took out his glittering instruments, and after that I couldn’t even look.

The screaming just went on and on. That one moment Steve had talked about stretched out, it seemed, for hours.

“Are you okay?” Telemachus whispered.

“No, I’m
not
okay,” I sobbed, and I buried my head on Deb’s shoulder.

“She’s not okay,” I heard people murmuring.

“Sharon’s not doing so well!”

The baby kept on screaming. I didn’t even realize the mohel was finished. Mikhail was chanting a blessing in Hebrew and in English. “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with thy commandments, and commanded us to introduce my son into the covenant of Abraham our father.”

Steve was telling everyone to join in saying:
“Even as he has been introduced into the covenant, so may he be introduced to the Torah, to the marriage canopy, and to a life of good deeds.”

But I still wouldn’t look. All I heard was blessing after blessing, and my baby screaming, and then a dull thud. “What was that?” I gasped. “It’s Philip!”

We all rushed to his side. Philip was lying crumpled on the floor. All six and a half feet of him. He’d fainted dead away! He lay in a little clearing of the crowd—just like a felled tree.

Telemachus and Deb and I rushed to his side. Telemachus lifted Philip in his arms. As he dragged him off, Philip’s eyes opened, and then closed again.

“Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who didst sanctify beloved Israel from birth, impressing thy statute in his flesh …” Steve was chanting, “and marking his descendants with the sign of the holy covenant….Just go ahead and give him a drink, and he’ll be fine—happens all the time—it’s always the guys.… Because of this, for the sake of the covenant …”

So we dragged Philip off to revive him, and we sat him down on a chair in the back, where he slumped ashen faced, and while we were doing that the baby got his name.

“Let him be called in Israel
Zohar ben Michayel.
Zohar, son of Mikhail.”

“What did he say his name was?” everyone was asking.

“What’s his name?” Deb asked me.

Still, the baby was screaming.

“Here you go, Mama,” Mohel Steve told me, and he handed me the baby, and he said, “I gave him a drop of wine—that usually puts them to sleep….”

“You gave him
wine?”
I said. “At eight days old?”

“He didn’t want it, so you should probably nurse him.”

I lifted up my top, and the baby started sucking for all he was worth. “Poor little guy. You were hungry,” I whispered to him. “And nobody was listening. And when you wanted milk, they gave you wine. What kind of place is this?”

Zohar gobbled down his milk so fast he wore himself out. My other breast was fairly bursting, and Zohar was fast asleep. So I had to take off his socks and tickle his toes just to get him to take a few sips on the other side, and even then he sucked with his eyes closed. Whether it was the wine, or the milk, or the covenant on his flesh, Zohar slept and
slept. He lay curled up inside his car seat with his cheeks plumped out and his mouth in a tiny disapproving yet angelic frown. “Don’t worry,” I kept telling him. “You’ll never have to see Mohel Steve again.”

Meanwhile we were all sitting down at long tables with paper tablecloths decorated with teddy bears, and we were having our festive potluck meal. I have to say, Deb’s spinach lasagna was starting to revive me, especially since by now it was something like noon, and I’d forgotten to eat any breakfast that morning, we’d been so busy trying to get out of the house for the bris. Mikhail had been looking pale, too, but now he was laughing, and he was singing, and he rolled in an old upright piano that they had there and played Jewish tunes, and Bialystoker nigguns, and Israeli folk songs.

I said to Deb, “I’d get up and dance if I weren’t afraid of busting up my stitches.”

“I didn’t know you danced,” she said. “You should come dancing at MIT sometime.”

“At MIT!” I said, “Deb, believe me, I’ve been dancing at MIT. I mean I was one of the—I was in the—I haven’t been dancing there in probably twenty years! I wouldn’t even know the dances anymore. My whole repertoire is probably stuck back in the seventies.”

“Come to Oldies’ Night,” she said.

“What, is that when all the old fogies come back?”

“Yeah, they play all the old dances,” she said. “They have it every year.”

“It sounds depressing,” I said.

Mikhail was calling me. “Sharon! We must have our speech.”

So Mikhail and I got up in front of the crowd, and we hauled the baby in his car seat up with us. Philip, who was sort of convalescing in a Naugahyde armchair that we’d dragged in for him, shocked everyone by sitting up for a second and giving off a piercing whistle to quiet the crowd.

“All right,” I said, “Mikhail and I have written letters to the baby about his name and who we hope he might turn out to be, and …” I looked down at the baby sleeping. He was so beautiful I almost choked up again. I didn’t know then he was just resting up so he could scream all night. “So here goes,” I said, and started reading.

I turned to Mikhail. He was in a reverie. He didn’t realize I was done. “It’s your turn,” I whispered.

“Oh!” He rustled his ripped-out notebook papers.