Devotion Read online

  37.

  Sometimes it feels as if I’m building a bridge. This act of bridge-building requires stamina, balance, and more strength than I think I possess. What’s more, I have to walk fairly far out onto the bridge as I’m building it. At this point, I’m way out there—too far to make it back to land if the bridge starts to splinter. Sometimes it sways. Once in a while, I hear it creaking. Below me, a precipitous drop: a rock-filled ravine. Best not to look down. Best to put one foot in front of the other. Krama akrama, the Sanskrit teaching goes: Step by step and all at once. I guess there’s only one way to get to the other side: best to have faith.

  38.

  My cousin Mordechai—Shirley’s oldest son—has seven children. One or another of them always seems to getting married. Large cream-colored envelopes arrive with some regularity in the morning mail, addressed in ornate, swirling calligraphy: Mr. & Mrs. Michael Marrens. Mr. & Mrs. Michael Marin. Mr. & Mrs. Michael Marron. It’s become a joke between Michael and me. Even though my family has no trouble with names like Avshalom or Nechemya, they still can’t get my husband’s surname, which is Maren, right. Inside, the invitations are engraved in both English and Hebrew. The ceremonies are held at facilities in Orthodox enclaves like Monsey, New York, or sometimes Jerusalem. The wedding date is generally only a couple of weeks away; no long engagements for young couples who have never once been alone together, never so much as touched hands.

  A recent invitation threw me into a mini-crisis. Mordechai’s third daughter was getting married. This wedding was being held only a couple of hours’ drive from us, on a night we happened to be free. We had no legitimate excuse not to go, really. But still, when it came to sending in the reply card, I was paralyzed. Declining made me feel sad and alone. Accepting meant entering the universe of my family and their customs, which sometimes had the power to make me feel even more deeply sad and alone. How could I be related to this group of people, when our lives were so radically different?

  But I was trying to understand where—if anywhere—all this fit into my own Jewishness, wasn’t I? How could I even pretend to be exploring these matters if I wasn’t willing to be made a little uncomfortable? Sylvia Boorstein’s words echoed through my mind, where she seemed to have taken up permanent residence: It’s not a question, for me, of deciding to complicate myself with Judaism. I am complicated with Judaism. I have too much background in it not to be.

  Complicated with it, indeed. A few weeks later, Michael and I made the trip to Monsey, and parked outside a shiny pink building. We sat in the car for a few minutes, watching bearded men in black coats pass by. The bride was having her photograph taken. She looked beautiful, impossibly young. Was she eighteen? Nineteen? She was surrounded by girls wearing modest dresses, women in perfect wigs. They looked so familiar to me. Some of them were probably relatives. The family had expanded so rapidly I could no longer keep track. Babies were born and had grown up while I was busy doing other things. The couple who had gotten married at the last family wedding we’d attended now had five kids of their own.

  “I’m not going to dance.” Michael stared straight ahead as we continued to sit in the car. Neither of us were ready to make a move.

  “Don’t worry, honey. You won’t have to dance.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “Last time was twelve years ago!”

  “Yeah, but still. It was traumatic.”

  It was true. Michael—at the time he was my boyfriend—had made me promise that he wouldn’t have to dance. Under normal circumstances, dancing wasn’t his favorite activity; even dancing with me usually involved a couple of whiskeys. But what was I supposed to do when my cousins Henry, Mordechai, and Jonathan had converged on Michael and picked him up out of his seat by the back of his jacket? The next thing I knew, he was surrounded by a vortex of sweaty men lifting each other up on chairs high above their heads.

  The parking lot was filling up. We left the cocoon of our car and slowly walked toward the shiny, pink marble building. The black-hat crowd milled outside the two arched entrances framed by gold Hebrew lettering: apparently men and women weren’t even allowed to walk inside together. But then I saw, beyond the doors, that there was pre-ceremony mingling going on in the lobby.

  “I don’t have a yarmulke,” Michael whispered, once we were both inside. I looked around for a basket. Usually there was a basket of yarmulkes. But then I realized that none of these men would ever find themselves without one.

  With Michael’s bare head, my obvious lack of wig, and perhaps most of all my bare legs beneath my knee-length dress, I knew we looked as if we had made a wrong turn somewhere around the George Washington Bridge. We had stumbled into the wrong party. Where were we going to find him a yarmulke?

  “Excuse me.” A couple walked up to us. I had noticed them in the parking lot. They had driven a Volvo with Vermont license plates and looked like New England academics, as out of place in this crowd as we were.

  “Do you know if men and women are seated separately?” the woman asked.

  I told her I was quite sure we would be seated separately. After all, we hadn’t even entered the building through the same door.

  “What about for the ceremony?” she went on.

  Same deal. Men on one side, women on the other. I felt good about myself, filling this poor woman in on the rites and rituals with which I was familiar. See? I did belong here. I could be part of it—I could claim it as a piece of myself, no matter how small.

  “You know”—she inclined her head toward me conspiratorially—“we’re so relieved that there are other non-Jewish people at this wedding.”

  39.

  Closure (business): the process by which an organization ceases operations

  Closure (computer science): an abstraction binding a function to its scope

  Closure (psychology): a state of experiencing an emotional conclusion to a difficult life event, or, a point in the development of an artifact where social understanding and interpretation reaches consensus

  Closure (psychology, visual perception): the fact that peripheral vision tends to compress vision and to allow completion of details by already stored inner images

  Closure (visual arts): the process by which the mind fills in missing details of a framed object, as in the panels of a comic, or a cinema/television screen

  Closure (law): an act of closing a public trial

  Poetic closure

  Transitive closure

  A packaging “closure” is a bottle cap or screw cap

  40.

  Deep within my body, the past is still alive. Everything that has ever happened keeps happening. I might be meditating, and then, suddenly, instead of sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor in Connecticut, I am standing in a New Jersey hospital room, hearing the news that my father has died. While lying still in pigeon pose, my forehead pressed to the floor, suddenly I am in my car, driving up our driveway to see Michael standing on our front porch, phone in hand. His eyes meet mine as I grow closer, and I know that my mother is gone.

  It’s a seductive idea, closure—but I think it’s a myth. The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: Pain engraves a deeper memory was her response. The quieter and more internal I become, the more these stories unspool. Prayer, meditation, yoga seem to unleash the past, rather than to bury it. What good does all this searching do, when so much of what I find is hard to take? Why would anyone sign up for this? Especially when there are so many ways around it?

  Sometimes I want to run away: have a few drinks, take a sleeping pill, buy those overpriced stiletto heels. Anything to sedate myself—to mute the endless loop of stories. And sometimes I give in, and do exactly that. The clarity is too painful, and I want to forget. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Not in the long run. There is no permanent forgetting. Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, circled in neon. They are all the more alive for ha
ving been hidden.

  41.

  In the years following my father’s death, any time I had an important decision to make I asked myself: What would he have wanted me to do? The question became my ritual, my belief system. I was twenty-three years old, and aware that my father had died disappointed in me. Was I going to be okay? Was I going to pull myself out of my downward spiral? Would I find my way in the world? He had no idea, nor did I. In my early twenties, I had constructed a new identity for myself. I had shed the obedient, good, observant girl I had once been, as if stepping out of my skin and into another. I stopped reading, writing, playing the piano, spending time outdoors, going to shul—all the things that had kept my feet on the ground. I became rail thin, hard-edged, interested only in the surfaces of things. If I sensed a whiff of danger, all the better. I figured that I would skate and skid along that dangerous surface for as long as I could, until I crashed. Until something stopped me—if something ever did.

  Well, it was indeed a crash that stopped me. Only it wasn’t the crash I had imagined. It wasn’t my crash. My parents’ accident destroyed their lives, and in a devastating bit of symmetry, saved mine. What would my father want me to do? Over and over, the question became a beacon in my personal darkness, lighting the way. It seemed I couldn’t go wrong, as long as I listened to my dead father. He would have wanted me to leave my older, married sociopath of a boyfriend. So I finally did. He would have wanted me to go back to college. So I did that too. He would have wanted me to take care of my mother—and I tried. Oh, how I tried. There was no getting around the Fifth Commandment, Honor your father and mother. Not sometimes. Not depending on their behavior. Not when you happen to feel like it. Honor your father and mother no matter what.

  Now—five years after my mother’s death—she haunts me. She stands over my shoulder as I write. She is the old lady I see on Broadway, walking with a cane, clutching a Fairway shopping bag. At three o’clock in the morning, if I am startled out of sleep, it is my mother who waits in the darkness. She lives in my hips, and is lodged beneath my solar plexus. Pain engraves a deeper memory. The deeper I probe, the more I find parts of her inside me, buried artifacts. Closure is impossible.

  Honor your father and mother.

  I was unable to honor my mother. I fought her, avoided her, pushed her away. But I gave you life! she sometimes screamed in frustration. You wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for me! She is my own samskara—she lingers within me. She will die only when I take my last breath.

  42.

  Samskara—latent impression; predisposition; consecration; imprint; innate tendency; innate potence; mold; inborn nature; residual impression; purificatory rite; rite of passage.

  1. It is a predisposition from past impressions. It is one of the five aggregates according to Buddhism. They are impressions left in the mind after any experience.

  2. It is one of the twelve links in the causal chain of existence, according to Buddhism.

  3. It is a rite performed with the help of sacred syllables (mantra) to restore a thing to its original pure state.

  4. It is a purificatory rite in connection with an individual’s life in Brahmanic Indian society. It includes the sacred thread ceremony, marriage rites, funeral rites, etc.

  5. It is one of three kinds: velocity (vega), by virtue of which an object possesses motion; feeling (bhavana), by virtue of which there is memory or recognition; and oscillation (sthitisthapa-katva), by means of which a substance returns from a distance to its original position.

  43.

  If God doesn’t give us more than we can handle is my least favorite bromide, my second least favorite is this: Everything happens for a reason. On the cover of People, the sole survivor of a plane crash expresses his gratitude to God. He doesn’t understand why he alone was saved. “I put myself in God’s hands,” he says. “I have faith that everything happens for a reason.” We look for reasons in retrospect. We tell ourselves stories. Every near miss has a narrative. Since the time of the cave dwellers we have attempted to take the random events of our existence and fashion them into something that makes sense.

  Shortly after we moved to Connecticut, I got a call one morning from the concierge at the inn down the road. A guest at the inn had seen my books in the gift shop, and asked if I lived nearby. He wondered if I might be able to meet with him. I admit, I was curious. It’s not every day that I get a call like that, out of the blue. What did this guy want? Was he a fan? A stalker? If so, he was a well-heeled stalker. The inn is no quiet country B&B. A late de Kooning hangs in the state-of-the-art spa, its yellow and blue swirls the only color in a room filled with white sofas and chaises draped with white cashmere blankets. The effect is of a heavenly sanitarium, Magic Mountain complete with haute-lite cuisine and a lavender-scented steam bath.

  The man and his wife greeted me in the lobby.

  “I’ll leave you two,” said the wife. She was a lovely woman, perhaps fifteen years older than me. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, her hair slick with massage oil. “He has a lot to talk to you about.”

  I followed the man into the great room. He was quite tall, distinguished even in his weekend casual clothes, gray-haired and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. As we poured ourselves some ginger tea and settled on the sofa beneath the de Kooning, I wondered. Did he know me, somehow? A friend of my family? He had a way about him—a certain kindness in his face—that reminded me of my father. I guessed he was in his mid-sixties.

  “I loved Slow Motion,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.”

  Slow Motion is very much a young woman’s story—a memoir of the mess I made of my coming-of-age. Why would it speak to him?

  A spa attendant whisked away the saucer on which we had placed our used tea bags. There was an absolute absence of clutter. Even the garbage cans were empty. I had recently taught a memoir workshop at the spa, to several women who had come to this most privileged place with some very heavy baggage: one whose Silicon Valley billionaire husband had left her; another whose only daughter had committed suicide.

  The man reached for his cup of tea, then set it down without taking a sip. “I was the last person who got on the last elevator to leave Windows on the World before the plane hit,” he said. “Someone held the door open for me. I don’t know who it was. Later, I remembered things. I remembered the sight of an arm reaching out”—here his voice cracked—“and holding the door open.”

  He went on to tell the details: he’d been having breakfast with a woman from an arts organization who had asked a favor he was unable to grant. As they left the restaurant, he stopped at a few tables to greet acquaintances. Once in the elevator, he rode all the way down to the lobby with his breakfast companion instead of getting off on the seventy-eighth floor to go to his office—his life saved not once but twice, based on timing and split-second choices.

  He shrugged. It looked almost involuntary, like a spasm. “Trying to be a nice guy, I guess.”

  He looked at me, this man with the kind face who reminded me of my father. His eyes, behind his glasses, were filled with the bottomless pain of his own good fortune. All around us, men and women padded by in thick white robes and plastic flip-flops.

  “I keep thinking there has to be a reason,” said the man. “Something I’m supposed to do now. Only I don’t know what it is.”

  I was certain that there was no reason. No reason at all. There was only this: luck, timing, consequences. Infinitesimal moments that added up and became personal tragedies, personal miracles. God wasn’t up in the sky pulling the strings. There was only one thing to say—one thing I understood from my own life, my own personal tragedy. Finally, I understood why this man had responded to Slow Motion. My parents’ accident wasn’t an event that changed the world, but it had changed me. I had risen out of the ashes of that sadness and loss, and did the only thing worth doing. I had tried to become a better person.

  “You make it mean something. That’s all you can do.”

  44.

  I
’ve been having trouble maintaining a sense of solitude. Oh, sure, I have the hours during the day when Jacob is at school, Michael is at his office, the dogs are asleep on the kitchen floor. But solitude—the kind of silence inside of which one can transact some private business with the fewest obstacles, in Thoreau’s words—does not simply have to do with being alone.

  I can be frenetically alone. I can be anxiously alone. I can be alone with ten thousand thoughts racing through my head. These kinds of states aren’t productive; they don’t count. The kind of solitude I long for is what I was able to achieve during those days at Kripalu, when my mind felt ironed clean. All it took was yoga and meditation around the clock! But I don’t live at Kripalu—and if I did, I imagine that the magic I felt there would slowly evaporate. The thing is this: I know I can find it right here at home, though certainly it’s more of a struggle and requires greater discipline. I have found it on my yoga mat. I have found it during meditation. I have found it when, first thing in the morning, instead of checking my e-mail (Free shipping from Land’s End! Twenty-four-hour J. Crew sale! ) I open Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary to a random page. This morning’s entry: “Arrange the pieces as they come.” Is there any other way to live than arranging the pieces as they come?

  So if I know all this, why such resistance? The door is always open. Why not go through? Why does it seem that I require friction, a certain amount of agony, before I batter the door down like a blind and crazy ram? Yesterday I wrote to Steve Cope that I am alternately as good as I’ve ever been, and full of despair. His response: “The tension arc between despair and wonderful is very good for the writing, don’t you think?”