Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  Music was the high point of the service. There wasn’t any choir or organ, but everybody sang the hymns. All that harmony was soothing after a sermon where you had to seriously get your head around Ezekiel’s wheels with wings and wheels with eyes and everything spinning, so that picturing the scene just about blew your mind.

  I had so much trouble with the concepts that the Lius wanted me to take formal instruction from Pastor McClaren and also to join their Bible study group. So I did. I appreciated it that they were trying so hard to mentor me, even though I didn’t have the understanding to start moving toward conversion. I hadn’t heard Jesus speak to me yet, but the Lius weren’t worried, since they relied on faith. I wasn’t worried either. Not yet, anyway. My vision was still fresh in my mind. And in terms of religions I was just starting to look at my options!

  8

  Revival

  QUITE often in Greater Love I would feel it—this greater love shining down upon me from the Bible study class and the altar and the cross overhead. This gentle warmth would fill me—the whole idea of gentleness and mercy; and I could feel just a brush of this incredibly tender holy spirit that wasn’t far away or out there at all, but dwelt in me, in my own personal tabernacle—my heart. And I would leave Saturday-night Bible study with my Bible in my arms and I’d step out into the Hawaiian winter night, which was so mellow and warm, and I’d walk along, and my whole being would be relaxed and happy, and I’d take the bus home to Kaimuki humming hymns. But then when I got to my house there would be cars packed together all along both sides of the street, and the house would be rocking and shaking. There’d be another party going on, and the whole place streaming with Baron and T-Bone’s friends, and their friends’ friends, and their acquaintances. And, it wasn’t as if I didn’t enjoy a party, but right after Bible study it was not the atmosphere I was looking for.

  Having envisioned God and moved, and started a new job and all, I have to admit, all of that got old pretty quick. Now I felt this longing to move again! Up and go to Molokai, or Walden, or Inisfree! Or west, to the western islands. To go somewhere with no boomers and woofers vibrating the floor at night, and no gold earrings to sell. To go off alone—or even better to go off alone with someone. Except who would that be? It was kind of self-defeating to keep thinking of Brian.

  A lot of times I just stood around at work and sighed. “I wish I could go somewhere just to be with my thoughts,” I told Mrs. Liu at the store.

  “Somewhere you can pray,” she said.

  “Yes!” I burst out. I flung myself down on the counter. “Where I can pray in peace.”

  “Not on glass,” she chided. I was always leaning against those glass jewelry cases, and Mrs. Liu was always wiping off the smudges. The Lius were very neat. Mr. Liu wore aloha shirts, and Mrs. Liu wore cotton muumuus, but they were always pressed.

  “You need a retreat,” Mrs. Liu said.

  “I wish.”

  “Our Father,” she murmured, “please make Sharon a retreat.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  Then the very next day, boom! With that kind of beginner’s luck that people sometimes have when they first start praying for things—I got this great opportunity! It happened like this. I strolled by the Women’s Studies Program to see Corinne, and there I ran into the psych prof Margo who used to tip me off on gigs at the medical school where you could be examined or studied for extra cash, and she started telling me about her Mind-Body-Spirit Exploration Seminar, which she and her husband, Harrison, held at Christmastime as an annual couples’ retreat. See, Margo and Harrison were scholars who didn’t feel totally fulfilled in the ivory tower. Every year they organized this great big workshop for couples about self-realization in relationships. They had actually written a book, Our Partners, Ourselves, and this was their chance to open up their research to the community. They had about one hundred couples coming out between Christmas and New Year’s, for a teaching and learning vacation, a vacation exploration where couples could relax at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and swim and watch the hula shows and eat, drink, and be merry and have the time of their lives, but also have an opportunity to learn about each other and grow together, and basically just remember what they saw in each other in the first place and catch up on where they were now at. But the program had grown so successful that Margo could use some help. So she told me I could man the registration desk and be a troubleshooter. For this they would pay me, while I was participating and learning as much as I wanted about how to realize myself and enhance my relationships, et cetera! So of course, I saw immediately that this was not exactly what Mrs. Liu had been praying for, but it wasn’t too far off either! I signed on.

  ROLLING up to the hotel in tour buses, the one hundred couples looked a lot older than I’d expected, and tireder, which was understandable, since they’d been on long flights. They got out where Margo and Harrison and I stood to greet them; and they looked like moles blinking in the sunlight, surprised out of their winter slumbers. We had to guide these folks along and help them through the shops that fringed the bottom of the hotel and into the hotel proper, all beige stucco and adorned by a mosaic rainbow.

  The main thing about this hotel was it had its own lagoon carved from the beach and enclosed with cement pylons topped with lava rocks to look more natural. There were guaranteed no waves inside that lagoon. Still, it was pretty in a greenish way. And when I saw my room, man, I wasn’t disappointed. It was a far cry from the hotel I’d stayed in when I first got to Hawaii. There was a dresser with a television, and a bathroom with towels. There were two queen-size beds, just for me! There was even a balcony looking out on the ocean. I’d come up in the world! At least temporarily.

  Then there was the food. We had these buffet dinners that were part of the package deal, and there were salads, and beets, and steamed asparagus, and potatoes au gratin, and cauliflower, and did I say soup? and fish in cream sauce, and spicy chicken wings, and broiled tomatoes topped with bread crumbs, and then right at the end of the line, there was roast beef carved by a chef, and you could get this humongous slab, only there wasn’t any space left on your plate to put it, so the chef would have to lay it right on top. I was in heaven. At breakfast the next morning we had omelets and bacon and hash browns in silver dishes covered with silver domes on top, and glazed pastries, and toast cut in triangles that came prebuttered. I ate as much as my skinny bod could hold. I could have stayed all day at breakfast, but we had to start the morning session.

  Everyone trooped into the Prince Kuhio Ballroom, which was set up with these lovely yet quite uncomfortable gilt chairs. Margo and Harrison presided at a table with a white skirt.

  “Aloha,” Margo said.

  “Aloha,” said everybody.

  “You can do better than that,” she said. “Aloha!”

  “Aloha!” said everybody.

  “Now one more time. ALOOOOOHA!”

  “ALOOOOOHA!”

  “Welcome to Hawaii,” Margo said. “And welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives together.”

  Everyone applauded.

  Then Harrison gave the introduction on the Body, Mind, Spirit triangle, which led to the day’s first Our Partners Ourselves exercise.

  “Body. Mind. Spirit,” Harrison said. He was tall and originally southern, although he’d lived in Hawaii for years. He just had a little bit of a southern accent left, so his voice had sort of a soft center. He was actually a little younger than Margo, I think, and he had a lot of brown hair, and a moustache and deeply sympathetic brown eyes. Even in his aloha shirt you could picture him as some kind of Civil War cavalryman. He was really a very handsome man. The women in the group totally responded to him. “When we love,” Harrison said, “what do we love? Do we love the whole person? For what they truly are? Or are we attracted to one facet? Are we attracted to one side of the triangle? And if it is one side, then which side is it? Can we truly identify which is the single part we’ve come to see?”

  Body, I thought, so
mewhat ruefully, since that was the facet Wayne and I had got stuck on. I was standing there on the sidelines, in my dress that I had worn for the occasion, which was one of those tank-top T-shirt dresses; basically a tank top that extended down to the floor, and was the color of orange sherbet.

  “Pass out the affirmations,” Harrison told me. “Yoo hoo, Sharon?”

  All of a sudden I woke from my reverie and passed out all the photocopied affirmations. And I thought, “Please” would be nice. I thought, Jeez. But I did understand that Harrison had to focus on trying to get these folks to rethink their whole entrenched attitude about each other. “Turn toward your partner,” Harrison instructed. “Look at each other. Really look. Look as if you are seeing each other for the first time.” And he turned toward Margo and he took her hand and looked deeply into her eyes.

  So everyone turned toward his or her partner. For a long long time everyone looked deeply into each other’s eyes. Then a few minutes passed. Then a few more. People couldn’t help stealing some looks up front, but Harrison hadn’t moved. He was still gazing at Margo. So everyone kept on gazing, and some people took each other’s hand. And some people tried to hold both hands, but then they had to put their affirmations on their laps, so they settled for just one hand the way Harrison did it.

  And Harrison read, “When I love you, I love the whole you.”

  “When I love you, I love the whole you,” the couples echoed back.

  “Not just part of you, but all of you.”

  “Not just part of you, but all of you.”

  Then Harrison paused for another long pregnant pause. There was actually a beautiful silence in the ballroom, and I looked up at the modern chandelier and saw it throwing these neat prism rainbows on the walls, and I looked at the carpet and saw the pattern was hibiscus flowers, bloodred flowers and green leaves. What startled me was suddenly Harrison broke the silence and said in this firm, yet totally loving and compassionate voice, “You are a hole.”

  “You are a hole,” the husbands and wives said to each other.

  And I thought, Huh? Because I’d handed out all the affirmation sheets and hadn’t kept one for myself. But what I found out later was they were all saying, “You are a whole.”

  All around the room, the husbands and wives were gazing at each other so earnestly. I tried to imagine gazing at anyone that way. Just knowing anyone that well—so you’d look and look and you’d never burst out laughing. I looked from one couple to the next and they were all perfectly serious, and their eyes so earnest—tender and unblinking. It was such a landscape of commitment I felt like I’d traveled to a completely different place. The Land of Eyes.

  Working in small groups turned out to be the killer. Once talking was permitted again, peace, serenity, and wordless love went out the window. Three to four couples clustered their chairs together and discussed the values Margo put out to them, and I had to walk around and not just hand out supplies, but comfort people as well, because the rules were everyone had to be totally honest—so naturally that opened up some floodgates. Like, for example, when they had to work with these open-ended statements that began, “Sometimes I feel …” and one wife would say, “Some times I feel like a maid,” or something like that. And then there would be countercharges and recriminations and lots of tears, and I’d have to help with hugging. There was so much honesty in that room that Harrison and Margo couldn’t spread themselves around fast enough. At one point I thought there was a pair that was going to come to blows. It was a case where it got to be the husband’s turn and he was this ornery old guy and he said to his wife right there in front of his small group, his face getting redder and redder, “Sometimes I feel that you make me come to these things to punish me.” And he got up and said he was going to walk out.

  And his wife, whose name was Barbara, started screaming bloody murder and pulling him back, and then he turned on her and yelled into her face. “Damn it all, I’m getting some fresh air!”

  And Barbara said to the small group, “You see the way he talks to me?” and she was crying.

  Margo came over and she knelt down next to Barbara and I handed out the tissues, and Margo told Barbara we had to let John, who was the husband, go and have some cooling-off time, and that this had happened before, but there wasn’t any reason to panic, because it was just that the emotions were sometimes so strong. Sharon would be a stand-in for John, and Barbara should take all the time she wanted and vent to me.

  So I ended up having to play the part of John for a therapeutic exercise. And I had to listen to Barbara vent at me for half an hour and I couldn’t say a word, because those were the rules. And I mean, I tried not to take it personally, but I couldn’t say a thing to defend myself while this woman hurled invective and curses on my head!

  THE next morning I got up real early, just around dawn, and I put on my new bikini, which was crocheted of turquoise string. I took a bath towel and my suntan lotion and padded down to the beach. The only guy down there was a Filipino groundsman who was raking the sand. I spread my towel and lay down on my stomach and just zoned with my eyes closed. Not exactly asleep, but at rest, and with my mind free of voices, I listened to all the little early-morning sounds. The mynah birds calling to each other, and the rumbling sound of the ice machine at the poolside bar. I was actually almost in a meditative state when suddenly freezing cold drops of water started falling on my legs. “Hey!” I yelled. I looked over and saw Harrison standing there in his wet swim trunks. “You’re dripping on me!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Harrison stepped back and dried off and shook himself like a wet dog.

  “How’s it going?” he asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “the small groups were rough, but they made me reflect a lot.”

  “On what?” he asked.

  “Just on life. Just the way two spirits can drift apart. How can you avoid that? When your soul is going one place and your partner’s soul is off somewhere else? It’s communication, right? That’s the key.”

  He’d knelt down next to me, and I guess he was looking at my back, because he said, “I can see exactly how far you could reach with the lotion.”

  “Really?” I had a thing about getting an even tan. I had my bikini top untied so I wouldn’t have a line across my back.

  “You can see on your back how far your fingertips could stretch,” he said. So then just to help out he rubbed on some more lotion, and I guess at the time I thought he was doing a pretty thorough job, but what’s some Tropic Sun between friends? He gave me a pretty terrific back rub.

  “Wow,” I said, and I propped myself up on my elbows, and I said, “You’re good!” and that was when he slid his hands around the front of me, and to my breasts. And I said, “Whoa!” because I didn’t know what to think—I mean, not being a prude in any way or feeling uncomfortable with my body, or with his, but in the context of the situation, I have to say a little warning bell went off inside my brain. I said, “Um. Harrison! Um. Wait!” and I pushed him off and flopped down with my chest against the towel and said, “Don’t you see just a little tiny contradiction here? Since we’re here like counseling married people? I mean, since you and your wife are here doing that?”

  And then, you aren’t going to believe this. He laughed at me. And that really pissed me off. And I just stood right up and wrapped my towel around me, and picked up my bikini top and my lotion and I said to him, “Harrison, you’d better apologize.”

  And he said in his southern velvety yet ever so slightly mocking voice, “Sharon, I’m deeply sorry.”

  And I looked at him and I said, “Yeah, well, you really are a hole.” But I don’t think he got it.

  Of course, I was going to tell Margo, but frankly, this being her husband we were talking about, I was worried about how she’d take it. She might believe him over me if he denied the incident; or she might just turn on me, assuming the whole thing had to be my fault. So I just thought very briefly about running to Margo. I admit, I wanted badly to
get paid for my week’s work, and that was mercenary. I felt like a worm. And a disillusioned worm at that! Because I mean, what was really going on here? What was happening at this so-called workshop? We had this couple of so-called counselors in front, a lecherous male sociologist, and a psychology prof—who was also a clinical psychologist on the side—and these guys had either some pretty major deceptions going on in their marriage, or some massive cynical scam going on, I didn’t know which. Then there were all these people from the Mainland who’d read the book and had come out here to learn from these total marriage gurus. And suddenly I began to wonder, as I walked around holding people’s hands and passing out dittos and values-clarification worksheets, was I participating in a genuine attempt at understanding that was actually leading people somewhere? Or was I actually engaged in highway robbery? I couldn’t figure it out at all. The only slightly encouraging thing was that about three quarters of the couples seemed to be really making strides in the togetherness arena.