Paradise Park (48 page)

I went down to the office, which was where Dr. Karinsky did the books for his practice and kept his files with colored tabs on shelves. And there on the wall was a bulletin board with school pictures tacked up of his children in all their years of school. A row of pictures for each of his ten children showing the progression from nursery on up. And there on one side of his desk was a bookcase with his thick medical books in red and royal-blue bindings, and on the other side a bookcase with his holy books bound in black with gold letters on the spines. All over the office were humorous paperweights and coffee mugs, yet the atmosphere when I walked in was not exactly jovial. Mikhail was standing in front of Dr. Karinsky’s desk looking red, you couldn’t tell from embarrassment or just from being angry, and the doctor’s lips were pursed, and he also looked quite huffy.

I said, “Dr. Karinsky, please, please, don’t take this the wrong way. We know what we’re doing, and I promise you that we are Jewish people. It’s not like we’re some kind of sheltie dogs at the kennel club. His parents were Jewish, so what more do you want?”

And Dr. Karinsky said, “Sharon, now he says his mother converted.”

“So what?” I said.

“So how she converted is a very serious matter. What kind of conversion and where and when are very important to find out. And not to know anything about this until now …” He looked at Mikhail. “That is something I do not understand.”

“It is my fault,” Mikhail said. “I take responsibility. Yet my mother died many years ago, and I may tell you that I love Judaism.”

“Isn’t that the key?” I appealed to Dr. Karinsky. “Isn’t it what you feel in your heart that ultimately really matters?”

“Please, Sharon. Let us—Feige and I—speak to you alone,” Dr. Karinsky told me.

So Mikhail was banished upstairs now, and Mrs. Karinsky came down—all so I could be harangued. Mrs. Karinsky was begging me to wait and stay, and unpack my things, and Dr. Karinsky was telling me about the vital importance of conversions, and they had to be the right kind. And Mrs. Karinsky was saying, “It is the mother, it is only through the mother, a child may become a Jew!”

“This disease, this intermarriage, is infecting, it is diminishing, the Jewish people,” Dr. Karinsky told me.

“But Mikhail and I aren’t intermarrying,” I said. “We’re two Jewish people. We are. We’re just marrying each other. The rest is just technicalities,” I said.

“Technicalities!” Mrs. Karinsky exclaimed.

“Sharon,” said Dr. Karinsky, “if his mother did not have a proper conversion, then she was not Jewish. And if she was not Jewish, then Mikhail is not either.”

“God willing we will find proof,” Mrs. Karinsky said fervently. “Then there will be no problem.”

I looked at the two of them. “You want me to wait for some kind of document search?” I asked them.

“Yes,” Dr. Karinsky said.

“Isn’t there any other way?” my voice wobbled.

“Of course, Mikhail can convert.” Mrs. Karinsky brightened a little.

“Convert? To his own religion?”

“He could go before the
bais din,”
Dr. Karinsky said, meaning the rabbinical court.

“And how long will that take?” “Maybe only six months!”

“Oh, no. No! We’re not going to wait that long! See, this is the thing. I know I’m going to marry him. We can’t help it. Because it turns out he’s my
bashert
. We were destined to find each other; that isn’t even our choice. And this paperwork, and conversions—I’m sorry. I just don’t see it. I just can’t see God being so literal minded. All I can see is Mikhail’s Jewish, no matter who his mother was. He loves being a Jew. He has a
Yiddishe neshama.”

“But it is not a question of how he perhaps feels,” Dr. Karinsky exclaimed. “It is a question of the future. The generations to come. It is a question of whether every year and every day through marriages like
this we weaken and dilute our Jewish people, little by little diluting until there is nothing left!”

“Why is marrying Mikhail a dilution?” I pleaded with him. “Why is dilution bad, anyway?” I burst out. “Haven’t you ever heard of homeopathy? The point is, he is my
bashert.”

“We must find out about the conversion,” Dr. Karinsky said.

“To me it doesn’t make a difference,” I told him.

“Without knowing, there is no ketubah,” Dr. Karinsky said, meaning the marriage contract. “Without the ketubah there is no wedding.” His voice was one of laying down the law. He asked me how could any wedding happen in these circumstances. He asked me how could this be accomplished if Mikhail’s mother had truly been a Christian. Or if, God forbid, Mikhail under false pretenses had pretended he was someone he was not, then, then … Dr. Karinsky couldn’t even say what.

Quietly, I walked upstairs. I no longer felt my
Yiddishe neshama
rising upward. I was just flummoxed. If I had been one of the Karinskys’ daughters, no question I would go upstairs and do as I was told. Of course, if I had been one of their daughters I never would have been in such a pickle. They were, to continue that deli metaphor, a whole different kettle of fish. Yet I knew I could not do as I was told. That was the amazing thing. I had lived in this house for all these weeks, and studied in Bellevue, and strived so hard, and yet inside of me I was myself. I didn’t really have that strict
frum
heart I admired so much. My regular old wild heart was still beating inside of me. I was still, after all these years, and my mistakes, and seeming to know better, going to do what I wanted. Quietly I went up to Mikhail. I shook my head and said, “It’s no use. Arguing about it just isn’t going to be constructive anymore. Come on,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

Aunt Lena’s friend’s Buick stood moored in the driveway like an ark in the rain, and when Lena and Mikhail and I dashed out there with my stuff we all got soaked. Aunt Lena got into the backseat and she was telling us that she might have some letters at home from her sister that would explain all the mysteries, and that we might read them, and also her own recollections and impressions of her sister that she had written in her memoir. And Mikhail and I went back to the house and stood dripping in the entryway and apologized many times for breaking everyone’s heart and for falling in love before we got married, and going
perhaps more by the spirit than the letter of the law when it came to Judaism. And Estie was crying and blaming herself for everything—for bringing me to New York in the first place.

And then all of a sudden I looked at Estie, my teacher, and guru, and child-goddess, and I said, “Estie, you’re a good kid. You didn’t do anything wrong.” I’d realized that, all of a sudden. Estie was just a kid. It wasn’t a feeling of disillusionment. It wasn’t one of those moments of triumphant debunkment like pulling the curtain open and finding the great and terrible Oz is just a little old man. It was just me finally calming down. It was just me feeling all my Hasidic excitations melting away. My imagination that had been so fevered and dervishy was finally taking a little break, and it was so quiet inside of me. So peaceful.

Hello, I heard.

Who’s that?

Just me, I heard. It is I.

Is that me? Hey, it’s good to hear your voice.

Yet while I was getting in touch with my inner pronouns, Mrs. Karinsky was shaking her head, her lips twisting in anguish.

“Aren’t these things all fictions?” I said to her. “These rules that humans make up to regulate themselves?”

“When the Moshiach comes such artificial distinctions will have no place,” said Mikhail.

“You’ll see. All the wrinkles will be ironed out!” I said.

Dr. Karinsky was aghast. That unmarried, I would even think of going away with someone. I almost couldn’t look at him, because of his sorrow. I knew what the Karinskys were thinking. Haven’t you learned anything? Is this how you thank us? Is this how you act, after all our teaching? I could see it in their eyes. Such betrayal. Yet, ultimately, Mendy and Feige blamed themselves. I was taking off to Boston with this guy of murky provenance. So they thought they had failed. And maybe, looking back, that was the greatest difference between us. To the Karinskys breaking away and leaving was a tragedy, but to me it was just the opposite. Not that I liked to say good-bye, not that I didn’t miss people, but to me, deep down, leaving had always been a happy thing.

Flight

A
FTER
we eloped, we went into a flurry getting Aunt Lena’s friend’s car towed most of the way back to Boston, organizing our blood tests and marriage license, me getting a job, us all settling into the apartment, and dealing with our general euphoria. What I remember is Mikhail’s narrow room and his narrower bed, and sometimes rolling off, except there was always laundry on the floor to break the fall, so a lot of times you didn’t wake up. Softly we made love. Softly, we fell off the bed. Since we’d been such religious Hasids, we didn’t even dream of using birth control, yet we were flabbergasted at how fast I got pregnant. We felt so lucky, we could hardly believe it. I’d assumed when you were almost forty, babies were something you had to work on. I’d figured by this time all my eggs were getting kind of old. Yet there we were, expecting a child in September. I’d wake up in the morning so glad, and not even knowing why—and then it would all come back to me! There was Mikhail squished next to me in bed, and there was that baby inside me bouncing around where you couldn’t see.

I went off every day to work at Fresh Squeezed on Com Ave, where I was a juice technician preparing power protein shakes and smoothies with fresh wheat grass that we grew right there in the store—we had our
own little patch. I went off every morning and opened up the place, which included me having my own blueberry banana drink with zinc, and then serving our customers (with guidance from my boss, who was a licensed herbalist), which could mean anything from a quick shake to diagnostic queries about their physical and spiritual states, so that every night when I came home I pretty much had to lie down, I was so tired from being pregnant, and working so hard and learning so much, and I’d come up the stairs and be aching to lie horizontal on the couch, except Mikhail would have a student in the living room, and Aunt Lena would be in the kitchen talking on the phone in Russian to her friends, so I’d have to lie on our bed and listen to scales until finally the piano student would leave and the next one, too, and Aunt Lena would get off the phone and maybe even go out, and then Mikhail would come.

“Sharon!” he would say, so happily. And he’d rub my bare feet with his hands. He would knead the balls of my feet, and roll his knuckles over my arches until I just sighed, it felt so good after standing up all day, and then he’d take off my clothes and rub the rest of me and I’d lie still, not even whispering, because Mikhail’s ears ached from teaching piano all afternoon. We’d lie there on the narrow bed, nursing my feet and his ears, rubbing our bodies up and down, just throbbing. Our days would disappear. We couldn’t even say anymore who we had seen or what we had done, because we could not remember.

It was that newly wedded time when there are so many plans and schemes in your head, and you are so full of the future that at night, even when you are done with each other, you can barely sleep. Because we were busy cooking and trying to figure out what teensy unborn babies liked to eat. And I was studying my books of herbal remedies. Mikhail was entering more competitions. He was taping his recital programs in studios and sending out the tapes to all the piano competitions so that he would be discovered. We were filling out the forms in black ink, and mailing the packages and entrance fees. That was already heady stuff, sending away to be discovered like that. And then there was me, getting started on a career in herbalism under the mentorship of my boss, who was a young kid named Telemachus Cohen, whose parents were a pair of famous herbalists well known in the community and who were funding the Fresh Squeezed venture. Telemachus Cohen was planning to franchise his company nationwide, and I was going to own and
operate one of the pilot stores once we branched out. This dude Telemachus was about twenty-five and had long pre-Raphaelite hair that he tied back in a ponytail. We both tied back our hair to keep it out of the drinks. He was something of what I would call a natural philosopher. He took everything in stride. It was as if whatever life dealt him he would accept with total calm—and, since life had never dealt him anything bad so far, he went about his business with perfect serenity. He had tanned skin, and dark brown eyes, almost black. He was a walker and a hiker and biker, and he had thick thick calves, the thickest I’d ever seen. I wondered sometimes if I could even half span them with my hands, but I never did. That was being married.

Being married was such a solemn happy state. I’d never thought those two words went together, but with marriage they did. When you were married you thought about the present moment, but you also thought about the future—so that was happiness and solemnity together. When you were married you just did not act on every idea or desire that came over you. You tended to come home to your husband and act out your desires on him. He would play Debussy like jazz. Then the two of you would pray together standing in the narrow shoe-box bedroom facing east. You would say all the evening prayers together in Hebrew.
“Baruch atah, adonoi, elohenu melach haolam, asher bidvaro maariv, aravim.”
Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who at thy word bringest on the evenings. ”You said all the words by heart, and you thought, God, give us more days just like this one. Whereas before you might pray for someone or something new to come along, now you were praying for everything to stay just the same.