“We’re not fighting,” Mom says. “Nothing to fight about. I’ve already made up my mind.”
“So you’re leaving your children?” Dad says.
Mom twists her head around, doing the neck rolls that help her relieve stress.
“I’m not leaving them. I’m finding myself,” Mom says. “Do I have to remind you they have a father to take care of them while I’m gone?”
“I’m not happy about this,” Dad says.
“I don’t need you to be happy,” Mom says. “I need you to take some responsibility.”
“Don’t talk to me about responsibility,” Dad says. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
“What do you have to say?”
Dad glances towards us.
“Not now,” he says.
“Now is a perfect time,” Mom says. “Let’s get it all out in the open.”
“I’m not the one who destroyed this family. That’s all I’m saying.”
“What do you mean?” I say. I was there the day the divorce papers showed up. Divorce papers from Dad. “What’s he talking about, Mom?”
Mom doesn’t answer.
“That’s all I’m saying,” Dad repeats, looking at Mom.
There’s silence in the room. Sweet Caroline sniffles and rubs her nose with her sleeve.
I look towards Mom, still waiting for an answer. None comes.
“Fine,” Dad says. “You need to go off on some insane escapade to India? I can take care of the kids for a little while. I’ll move into the house.”
“Not the house,” Mom says. “I’m subletting the house out to the yoga center.”
“No!” Sweet Caroline says.
“Why would you sublet?” Dad says.
“Because I need the income, Joseph, and you can’t give it to me.”
“But we can’t live at Dad’s place,” Sweet Caroline says. “It’s too small.”
“Where will they stay?” Dad says. “I’ve got my workshop.”
“You can’t clean out a bedroom for your own children?”
“I’ve only got two of them,” Dad says.
“In India, two full families could live in that apartment,” Mom says.
“That’s why I don’t live in India!” Dad says. “And I don’t crap in a hole in the ground, or whatever they do over there.”
Sweet Caroline slides over and pulls me down the hall, all the way into her bedroom. Mom and Dad continue to argue behind us.
Sweet Caroline closes her door.
“We’re dead,” she says.
She looks at me, fear in her eyes. She’s not often afraid, so it freaks me out a little.
“I was right about Mom,” I say. “You see that now.”
“You were right,” she says.
It’s sad that the one time I get my sister to admit
I’m right is the one time I don’t want to be.
“She doesn’t even care about my bat mitzvah,” Sweet Caroline says.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I say, remembering my own bar mitzvah after the divorce. The two sides of our family were so far apart and angry, Herschel said I should have hired Henry Kissinger as a party planner.
“I’ll kill myself if we have to live at Dad’s,” she says.
She slumps down on her bed, biting savagely at a nail.
The Israeli rhythmic gymnastics team looks down at her, a pyramid of smiles. “I thought you liked Dad.”
“I love him. But I don’t want to live with him. That would be terrible.”
“What’s so terrible?”
“Who’s going to do the laundry? Who will buy us clothes?”
“Dad, I guess.”
“Come on, Sanskrit. He’s been wearing the same khakis since 2003.”
Mom might be distracted, but at least she keeps the house running. Dad’s apartment looks like a scene from a hoarding show. Zadie’s house was the same way, only with more expensive junk. They say that’s common among survivors. They lost everything once, so they refuse to throw anything away now.
“He’s not a good father, Sanskrit. You know this.”
She pulls off a chunk of nail, wincing as she draws blood.
I say, “You never talk like that. I wasn’t sure we were even living in the same family.”
“I don’t mean all the time,” Sweet Caroline says. “He’s a good weekend father when he only has to have fun with us and make sure we’re not kidnapped. But he’s not good with the other stuff.”
“Neither is Mom,” I say.
“That’s true,” Sweet Caroline says. “But we know how to work around her.”
Dad shouts in the other room, “My place is too small!”
“So get a job and buy a bigger place!” Mom says.
I wince. It’s painful to hear them cutting at each other like this. It reminds me of why they got divorced in the first place. At least why I thought they got divorced. Now I’m not so sure.
Sweet Caroline is looking at a gymnastics poster, tracing the pattern of a girl’s leotard.
“What are we going to do?” she says.
“I think I have a plan,” I say.
Sweet Caroline looks at me, hopeful for the first time.
“Maybe we can keep Mom here,” I say.
“You can’t convince her,” Sweet Caroline says.
“You know how Mom gets when she makes up her mind about something.”
“I don’t need to convince her. I need to convince him.”
“Dad?”
“The guru.”
“I want to talk man-to-man.”
The guru is sitting on a meditation mat when I say it. He’s alone in the small yoga room in the back of the Center. He doesn’t open his eyes or even flinch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was expecting me.
“An excellent idea,” he says.
“In private,” I say, and I close the door behind me.
This is what I told Sweet Caroline I’d do. Tell the guru to back off and leave Mom alone. It’s probably what I should have done in the first place, but I was too afraid.
“We will talk,” the guru says with his eyes still closed, “but I think of it a little differently. I see us less as man-to-man, and more as spiritual being to spiritual being.”
“I’m not interested in word games,” I say. “I talked to my mom. I know you’re planning to take her away.”
“Sanskrit
. I like to say your name. It gives me joy. As it does your mother.”
“She likes to say my name?”
“She gave you the name, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but she’s usually frustrated when she says it.”
“It was her gift of love at your birth. A name is the first and greatest gift we give one another.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“What else would a name be?” the guru says. “A curse.”
Like the Zuckerman name. Like growing up as the grandchild of a survivor and everything you do is supposed to prove that God had a reason for allowing the Zuckerman line to survive. But what if God had nothing to do with it? What if it was just luck? Or fate?
Or nothing at all. What if it happened just because?
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I say. “I want to talk about you taking my mother away.”
“You’re wrong about that,” he says.
“You’re not going to India together?”
“We are going on a journey. That’s true. What’s not true is that I’m taking her. She’s choosing to go.”
“She has children.”
“I realize this.”
“But you have no problem letting her abandon us.”
“I don’t understand. You have a father, don’t you?”
“More or less.”
“So you are not abandoned.”
“We’re abandoned by her. Not by him.”
“I see. It
feels
like abandonment to you,” he says.
“What would it feel like if your mother left you when you were a kid?”
“My mother died at an early age.”
“Oh.”
I sit down on the mat in front of the guru. “So you lived with your father?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“I did not know him, Sanskrit.”
“Who raised you?”
“I was taken in by—I think you call it an orphanage.”
“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing to be sorry about. These are the cards—What’s the expression?”
“The cards you were dealt.”
“Yes,” the guru says.
“They’re bad cards.”
“I don’t believe in bad or good cards.”
“You’re not Jewish. We’ve had a lot of bad cards in our history.”
“My people have suffered as well. All people suffer. This is the first noble truth.”
“Why make it worse by taking our mother?”
The guru takes a long breath and pulls his ankles in tighter. I cross my legs like him.
“Your mother and I have something special together. A bond that goes back in time.”
“By time you mean February?”
“I mean a previous life.”
“Oh, please,” I say.
“You may not believe in such things, but I do.”
“I think you’ve confused her. Maybe even brainwashed her.”
“Your mother is making a choice. Just as you can make a choice.”
“What is my choice?” I say.
“To come with us.”
“To India?”
I laugh.
I wait for him to tell me it’s a joke, but he doesn’t. He slowly uncrosses his legs and recrosses them in opposite order, looking at me calmly the whole time.
“I’m inviting you,” the guru says, “now that I see you could benefit from it.”
“That’s crazy,” I say.
“Is it?”
“How could I benefit from going to India?”
“You are a spiritual seeker.”
“I’m not a spiritual seeker. I’m a—whatever you call the opposite of that. I don’t believe in anything. I’m supposed to, but I don’t.”
The faint sound of a gong chimes far down the hall. A yoga class is beginning in the big studio.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”
How dare I not believe when Zadie survived the
camps? When I owe my whole existence to that fact? I wait for something terrible to happen, for an artery to explode in my head or an earthquake to shake the ground out from under me.
Nothing happens, just a second gong tone from down the hall.
“I’m supposed to believe,” I say. “I was born Jewish. I go to Jewish school. My grandfather—he left money so I’d be Jewish.”
“You cannot pay someone to be as you wish them to be.”
“That’s what I told my parents. But it was his final gift.”
“A gift that has become a burden.”
I never thought of it like that. A gift from Zadie’s perspective could be a burden from mine. God’s gift to Zadie was a burden, too. God gave him his life, and Zadie was obsessed with being a success, like he had to prove he was worthy of it.
“Maybe it’s time to lay down the burden,” the guru says.
He says it like it’s simple, but how do you do it? What does it even mean? Do I leave school? Do I stop being Jewish?
“You’re asking many questions in your head,” the guru says.
“Maybe.”
“May I make a suggestion?”
I nod.
“Don’t try to answer these questions,” the guru says. “Let them remain questions for the time being.”
“How can I not answer them?” I say.
“Because it’s enough just to ask them,” he says.
“But why ask if you’re not going to look for an answer?”
“I’m open to an answer if it comes, but I’m not actively looking for one. It’s a different way of approaching it. I don’t try to figure it out. I simply get comfortable holding the questions.”
I ask a question in my head:
Why is my mom so screwed up?
I try to do what the guru said and not answer it, but it’s impossible. My head fills with reasons.
“Sanskrit.”
The guru says my name. It snaps me out of it.
“You have to practice this technique,” he says. “Don’t expect to get it immediately.”
I look across at him. We’re both sitting far apart on the floor, but it feels like we’re closer, like I could reach out and touch him.
“Come to India with your mother and I.”
“What would I do in India?”
“Grow.”
“I can grow here.”
“True,” the guru says. “But in India you might grow in a new way.”
“What about school?”
“We have many schools in India. It would be your choice which one to attend.”
“I wouldn’t have Zadie’s tuition money. Once I leave Jewish school, the money goes away. No second chances.”
“You wouldn’t need it there. We could get you into a private school that is affordable.”
I stand up.
“I don’t know what to say, guru.”
“Don’t say anything. Sit with the idea for a while. But it has to be your own choice. I would never tell you to leave school. Or your religion, for that matter. Sometimes, we return to the religion of our birth and find solace there. Other times, we must find the strength to rebel against it. Every journey is different.”
“I don’t know what my journey is,” I say.
“How could you?” he says. “You’re in the middle of it.”
“You have no idea where you’re going, do you?”
That’s what the woman in Starbucks says.
They’ve renovated since I was here last, and I was in the pickup line instead of the ordering line.
“Sorry,” I say, and I slip in behind her.
She grunts and turns her back to me. She stretches a little, then bends over to tie her sneaker. She’s wearing black yoga pants with blue stripes on the thighs that come to a V in her private place. It reminds me of lights on a runway. I hate her, but I wish I were a pilot at the same time.
“Wait. I recognize you,” the woman says.
She spins around, catching me looking at her butt. I quickly look up.
“The Center. Your mom is a teacher, right? I’m Sally.”
“Hey, Sally,” I say. She’s the Asian woman who was ready to attack the guru with a yoga mat last week.
“Your mom is the luckiest woman in the world.”
“She is?”
“If I had a guru interested in me? Wow. That’s like dating God.”
“He’s not a god,” I say. “He’s just like you and me.”
“Who says?”
“He says.”
“Of course he does. If he was God, he wouldn’t go around saying he was God. Only crazy people do that.”
“Can I help the next guest,” the barista says.
“Your mom is starting a whole new life,” Sally says. “It’s so exciting.”
She goes to the counter, and the entire line moves up one step.
Mom’s new life. Or
our
new life.
It’s up to me. At least according to the guru.
I think about leaving Jewish school. Going in for my last day. Saying good-bye to everyone. The CORE boys would walk by, and I’d say, “Hey, I won’t be around for Passover this year. I’m going to India.”