Devotion (8 page)

After returning home from Kripalu, I promised myself that each day I would practice
metta
meditation for at least fifteen minutes. Having been on retreat for three days, I didn’t think this was a particularly tall order. Surely I had the discipline to sit still for fifteen minutes. To prepare, I ordered an elaborate meditation cushion, and a timer that was supposed to chime with the sound of Tibetan bells. The meditation cushion with its three-legged plastic base shaped like a flying saucer proved uncomfortable and strange;
the timer’s chimes sounded like the electronic ring of a regular alarm clock. So I gave up on props and tried to just sit, using the comforting
metta
phrases that Sylvia Boorstein had taught.

May I feel protected and safe; may I feel contented and pleased…
My mind would break through the words almost instantly.
Gotta call the dentist. When’s the school picnic?
These first thoughts were all on the level of the utterly mundane. I tried to be a neutral observer—to simply watch the thoughts as if they were clouds in the sky—but it was difficult. I was full of self-judgment. This was what was in my mind? My first layer of consciousness felt like a trash can full of Post-its and to-do lists.

May my physical body support me with strength; may my life unfold smoothly with ease.
I couldn’t get all the way through these four brief phrases without some bit of detritus from my daily life intruding.
Why hasn’t that health insurance reimbursement come in yet?
It seemed impossible to quiet down. Again and again, I was overcome by an intense desire to open my eyes, to move, to check the timer—to stop. The desire felt physical—an uncomfortable surge of energy. As soon as one passed, another would start up again.

On some days I discovered that I was able to tolerate these surges of energy for at least a little while. And when I did, I began to see the endless, circular monologue beneath them. No wonder I didn’t want to go there! Worry, fear, doubt, resentment, envy, anxiety, comparison, sadness—apparently these were the themes of the complicated stories churning through my head. Rather than being like a still, clear pool of water—an image often used in visualizations—my mind was a stagnant pond badly in need of dredging. The checklists and tasks were the debris floating on
the surface. Either way, it was murky territory, and I didn’t want to go there.

But go there I continued to do—because really, what was the alternative? I had gotten a peek at the enemy, and she was me. If worry, fear, doubt, resentment, et al. were part of the fabric of my inner life, didn’t I need to know about it? Each day it took longer and longer to prepare myself to meditate; simply plunking myself down on the floor wasn’t going to do the trick. I started to worry that this was becoming a full-time job. What was an ambitious, sociable, urban-oriented forty-five-year-old woman doing, spending her mornings sitting in dead silence with her eyes closed in a house in the middle of nowhere?

After Jacob was off to school and Michael had left for his writing studio in town, I unrolled my yoga mat. Most mornings I didn’t feel like doing this, but I had learned that it was best to ignore what I
felt
like doing, and instead create a ritual, a habit. I put on the decidedly unorthodox yogic mixed tape that Michael had made me: an eclectic combination of everything from Pink to Leonard Cohen. And then I did my intense hour-long physical practice, which had begun to feel, to me, like the only possible preparation for meditation. It seemed that I needed to physically exhaust myself before my mind could find any quiet.

Once the final strains of k. d. lang singing “Hallelujah” faded away, I was ready—or at least as ready as I could make myself. I folded my legs into half-lotus and began the internal struggle to let go. I repeated Sylvia’s phrases. Focused on the out breath. Focused on the in
and
the out breath. Became aware of the birds chirping outside my window, the distant rumble of a truck strain
ing uphill. What
was
this exploration? I was like a scientist experimenting in a laboratory of the self. I watched the thoughts come, tried to label them simply as thinking.

Why did she do that to me? I never—

Thinking.

How are we ever going to be able to afford—

Thinking.

I hope he didn’t think that I—

Thinking.

The surges of energy continued. By now, I knew that these surges meant that there was more; beneath these painful, but still mostly mundane, concerns lurked something pure and deep that this simple process of sitting was stirring up. I couldn’t touch it yet. All I knew was that sitting helped—and by that, I don’t mean that it helped make me feel better. Let me be perfectly clear: meditation was not helping me feel better. It was hard, scary, and sometimes felt silly. What was I doing? I had deadlines to meet. Students to teach. Food shopping to do. But it was helping me to make out the vaguest beginning of an outline. I was starting to see what was there.

My parents had been driving home on a New Jersey highway during an early-evening blizzard when my father passed out behind the wheel. His foot became dead weight and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. His body slumped forward. My mother
screamed and lunged over him, trying to steer as the car made two wide circles across the entire width of the highway. It flew over the median, into three lanes of onrushing traffic and back again. By the time the car crashed into a concrete embankment and came to a stop, my mother had sustained eighty fractures. Her right leg was shattered, she had multiple broken ribs, a broken nose, a lacerated cheekbone. She was bleeding internally. My father was unconscious. It took two and a half weeks for him to die.

I have often wondered what I was doing at the exact moment of my parents’ accident. I might have been sleeping, or lying in bed reading a magazine. I might have been sipping a cup of tea. How could I not have felt it happening? I was on the other side of the country, in southern California, but still—how does the fabric that connects us rip into shreds without our knowing it? The day of my parents’ accident, I had the only allergic reaction I’ve ever had to anything before or since. Hives covered my face and upper body. I became hot, itchy, swollen—as if some foreign creature had become trapped inside me and was desperately trying to claw its way out. Coincidence? Probably. But it’s hard not to feel that my body knew something that the rest of me didn’t.

I stood on the front stoop of my aunt Shirley’s gray-and-white Tudor house in Brookline, Massachusetts, and tried to pull myself together before knocking. Shirley—my father’s younger sister—was now in her mid-eighties, and had lived here for over
sixty years, since she was a bride. As a child, I barely ever visited; my mother couldn’t stand Shirley, and had kept me away. I could practically hear my mother’s voice:
Oh, please. That woman only pretends to be pious
, she would say.
She’s always so holier-than-thou.

But now, Shirley was the single existing bridge between my present and my past. Whenever I spoke with her, I was filled with questions. Had my father really been a believer? Or had his observance come from a combination of habit and fear? Why had my mother been so threatened by his family and their religious practices? She used to scornfully refer to them as
a tribe
. Was there something so very wrong with being a tribe?

In the past, though I often thought of spending a weekend in Brookline, I never had. I was too afraid. Afraid of feeling like an outsider in my own family. Afraid of being too different, too modern, too assimilated. Too much my mother’s daughter. My first thought on Shabbos morning would be how to sneak out to Starbucks for a venti cappuccino.

I rang the bell.
Shit
. It was Shabbos. I had forgotten, for a second. I shouldn’t have pressed a button, shouldn’t have set off the chimes inside her darkened house. There was a brass knocker right there in front of my face. Ringing a bell—the transmittal of electricity—was forbidden. How could I have done such a stupid thing? I hadn’t even walked inside yet, and already I had done something wrong. More than that—I had underscored the differences between us.

Shirley opened the heavy front door. She looked essentially the same as she always had. Her heart-shaped face was still unlined, and she wore a well-cut, modest skirt and a simple white
blouse. Her dark hair was pulled tightly back from her widow’s peak and tucked into a bunlike hairpiece.

“Darling”—she didn’t blink at the breach of Shabbos—“I’m so happy to see you. Come in, come in.”

Earlier that week, Michael and Jacob had scored tickets to a Saturday-afternoon Red Sox game at Fenway Park—just a short trip down Beacon Street from Brookline. My first thought was to go along for the ride, then spend the afternoon visiting my aunt while they went to the game. But when it came to calling Shirley, I had been torn. Would she be uncomfortable about my driving to see her on Shabbos? Would she feel like she had to turn me down—or worse, would she feel obliged to see me out of some Talmudic logic? After all, the Talmud allowed for all sorts of exceptions to the rules. You could drive on Shabbos in a medical emergency. Was there a provision for the nonobservant niece who drives on Shabbos anyway?

Shirley looked up at me, squinting in the sunlight.

“I think you’ve gotten taller,” she said. “Or maybe I’ve shrunk.”

I pulled up the hem of my jeans. “It’s the heels.”

We walked into her foyer, past the wide, curved staircase. Beneath the banister, on a metal track, my uncle Moe’s electrical chairlift sat empty. It had been installed a decade earlier, when Moe first began to deteriorate from Parkinson’s disease. Now, at ninety-three, he was upstairs in his bed, intubated and on oxygen. Moe and Shirley lived alone in this house, their children long gone. A solitary beam of sunlight shone through a high window, like an old movie projector in the cool darkness.

Shirley and I sat across from each other on two faded uphol
stered chairs. On the coffee table, a small pile of books written by family members had a place of honor:
Flames of Faith: An Introduction to Chasidic Thought
, by Rabbi Zev Reichman;
The Right and the Good: Halakhah and Human Relations
, by Daniel Feldman; and a hardcover edition of
Black & White
, my most recent novel, which it would be safe to say was the only contemporary fiction in the house. I mentally skimmed its pages, thinking about disturbing passages, nudity, profanity. I knew Shirley had read it—she had called to compliment me on it when it was published earlier that year—and hoped she hadn’t found it too upsetting.

Above the fireplace hung the portrait of my grandfather—it had been transported from Central Park West to Brookline many years before. He peered through his pince-nez, leather-bound book in hand. I imagined, for a moment, that he could see the array of photographs crowded on top of the grand piano. Shirley is the mother of four, grandmother of twenty, and great-grandmother of thirty-two and counting: dozens of boys in yarmulkes, their faces framed by the wispy tendrils of
pais
; girls in formal dresses, lacy white anklets, black patent leather Mary Janes. What would my grandfather think if he saw me, in that room?

“This is the newest addition to the family.” Shirley handed me a photo of a young couple—a pale man in a black, wide-brimmed hat and a woman in a shoulder-length wig—holding a new baby. “Ezra’s first. A boy.”

“And Ezra is—?” I asked. It was hard to keep track.

“Henry’s youngest. They’re living in Jerusalem,” she said. “Both he and his brother Joshua have become Haredim.”

I searched Shirley’s face for clues as to how she felt about this. The Haredim are the most Orthodox of the Orthodox. This
meant that Shirley’s grandkids had swung all the way to the outer edges of the religious right. They lived in insular communities, cut off from the outside world, with no television, no radio or secular newspaper. They spent their lives—literally every waking minute of their lives—studying Torah. Her great-grandkids might not even learn to speak English.

“Is that…okay?” I asked. “Or is it…” I trailed off. Not sure of this territory. Not sure what to say.

“The way I see it, when you get to be my age, you move over into the slow lane,” Shirley said. “And you let the next generations whiz by.”

How becoming Haredim constituted whizzing by, I wasn’t certain. It seemed more like time travel—away from the real world and into a galaxy all its own. The word itself—
haredi—
derives from the Hebrew word for fear. “One who trembles in awe of God.” In their eyes, I doubt I would even qualify as Jewish. I fought the intrusion of my mother’s voice once again. As was so often the case, I knew exactly what she would think.

“So tell me—” Shirley changed the subject. She leaned forward, her hands clasped. “How is Michael? How is Jacob?”

My family—my husband and son—seemed so small in comparison to the gallery of photographs. So small and so very American.

“They’re great,” I answered, trying to regain my equilibrium. “Michael’s working on a few different screenwriting projects. Jacob’s enjoying school.”

“And the Red Sox,” Shirley said. “Who is his favorite player? I like Manny Ramirez myself.”

I wondered how my aunt had managed it. How had she raised
her enormous devout family while still maintaining an active connection to politics, world history, literature, even sports? Not a single one of her children or grandchildren had strayed from religious Orthodoxy. As evidenced by the photographs on her piano, quite a few had gone deeper into it. I looked over at the bookcases on either side of my grandfather’s portrait. To his right, Dickens, Melville, Cather. To his left, Maimonides, Theodor Herzl, Schneerson. The secular and the religious, coexisting in a home where Manny Ramirez and Haredim could come up in the same conversation.

Past the abandoned chairlift and up the staircase, the family’s patriarch lay on his side in his hospital bed. On the wall outside his room hung photographs of Moe as a vigorous, middle-aged man shaking hands with John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson. Now, his eyes were half open. His attendant, Bruno, sat in a chair nearby, reading an old copy of
Reader’s Digest.

“Look who’s here, Moe—it’s Dani!” Shirley said.

I bent down so that Moe and I were face-to-face. Was he conscious? Or not? It was impossible to know. And if he was, would he want to see me? I was the black sheep. Or rather, the blond sheep. The one who drove on Shabbos and worse—much worse.

“Hi, Uncle Moe,” I said softly. “It’s so good to see you.”

I thought I saw a flicker of recognition in those eyes. I wasn’t sure if I should touch him. Degrees of Orthodoxy dictate whether men and women—even relatives—are allowed to touch. How is it that I didn’t know, after all these years, where he fell on the spectrum?

Shirley moved about the room, checking Moe’s oxygen, his medication schedule. I was reminded of all the years I had visited my grandmother after her stroke. Shirley had spent the middle of her life traveling from Boston to New York each week to care for her bedridden mother. Now she was spending her later years nursing her husband in precisely the same way: at home, every need taken care of, loved until the end.

The only sound in the house was the hum of the medical equipment surrounding Moe’s bed.
Whoosh
, silence.
Whoosh
, silence. His eyes fluttered closed. The room was in shadows.

“Dani, come see my lady,” Shirley called. She stood at the one bright spot, at the window overlooking the small park on the other side of Beech Road.

I joined her at the window, and saw instantly what she meant. The park was full of different kinds of beech trees. In the center of the park, directly across from Shirley’s house, was a majestic weeping beech. She—the tree could only be a she—must have towered fifty or sixty feet high. Narrower at the top, her lower branches cascading in waves that appeared to be layers of a skirt, she looked as if she had been there forever.

“How big was that tree when you first moved here?” I asked Shirley.

She shook her head. “Oh, she hadn’t even been planted yet.”

My aunt put her arm around my shoulders. I had been only half born into this world of ritual and observance, of flames and spices, Hebrew volumes lining bookshelves, blessings for every moment in the day—and, like the stronger of twin animals, the other half had fought and won. Still, my history tugged at me. I tried to imagine what it would be like to spend an entire life
time in one place. To put down roots—to live in one single spot long enough to see the world sprout up around you. To watch the empty space outside your window become a sapling—and that sapling become an old, stately specimen. To give birth to a village. To be surrounded by the world you’ve created. To be governed by a belief so strong that nothing—not sadness, nor anger, nor grief—can shake it. To believe in God.