Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  Tom spoke up. “I think the issue is not whether people are allergic, but how we feel about sharing our space with an animal.”

  “That’s exactly what I was trying to say,” said Kathryn. “Because we’ve never had an animal in the house before.”

  “But, but, I can’t believe you guys,” I said. “We’re all animals. You’re the first to say that. What’re you—telling me an animal has no right to join the community? Kathryn, I can’t believe you of all people would say something like that, considering your line of work, considering your whole green philosophy that you live by!”

  “I don’t want cat poop in the kitchen,” Kathryn said.

  “Oh, right, so you’ll go on the Rainbow Warrior and defend the lives of marine mammals, but you won’t let Marlon live with us?”

  “Sharon, don’t get worked up,” Rich said.

  “Well, I am worked up. I’m incredibly worked up, because I really want to live with you guys. I want to be a member of this community, but I feel like you are asking me to choose between you and Marlon, and I feel like that is a specious choice—because friends don’t ask friends to choose between one species and another!”

  Will got up and plopped onto the saggy green vinyl couch next to me. He gave me a big hug. He was the mad hugger of the group. He was such a peacemaker. Everybody loved this guy. He said, “Come on, we’re all still friends here.”

  “I have an idea,” Tom said. “If the kitchen is not okay for Marlon’s litter box, could we put it in the bathroom?”

  “Well …” I began.

  “Which bathroom?” asked Rich.

  “No!” said Kathryn. “I’m not stepping into kitty litter in my bare feet….”

  “How would you be stepping into kitty litter?” I asked her.

  “In the mornings when I’m stepping out of the shower and I don’t even have my glasses on yet, all I need is a cat box….”

  “Kathryn,” I said, “you can’t be serious. What’s this really about? Do you not want me to live here? Is that what you’re trying to do here? I mean, where is this hostility coming from?”

  “Hey, it’s not hostility,” Kathryn said.

  “Then what? Do you feel weird about me coming just because Rich and I slept together something like seven years ago?”

  “Sharon!” she said.

  “What?”

  “That is so ad hominem.”

  “You guys, you guys,” Will chided, “can we get back to the items for discussion. The agenda, remember?”

  “I would be happy to get back to the agenda,” I said, “I just want Kathryn to stop demonizing Marlon.”

  “Demonizing Marlon!”

  “Yeah!”

  On the first vote Marlon was not accepted into the co-op, and I was in tears, but with Will’s amendment that we keep the kitty litter box in my room, Marlon had the majority of me, Will, and Tom. Rich voted with Kathryn, but I didn’t hold that against him. I knew he had to. Then we had a third vote about what if we had a probationary period with the cat, to see how we all would adjust to him, and that was bingo! the magic consensus that according to the bylaws we had to achieve at our official meetings. We had a lot of bylaws. As I said, we were a strict democracy.

  But the upshot was: Marlon was in! He was in like Flynn! I was hugging myself for about two days. And I moved us into the house, and we had a little back room with two windows with glass louvers and a white vinyl tile floor, and I put up my poster and I dragged in my buton, and purchased new laminate storage drawers for my clothes (I had no closet), and a spider plant and a Swedish ivy, and a ficus for oxygen.

  You know how at times you can just love life? Not just as a necessary good, but in all the details—every little thing. I loved my life when I moved into the co-op. I loved cooking with the group and doing KP with Will, and bringing home the groceries on this rusty old bike we kept in the yard, just as a little runabout, since we were opposed to cars. I loved the smell of whole-wheat bread baking in the oven. I loved all my housemates—even Kathryn, although less so. Will and Tom and Rich were like brothers to me. Moneywise, I’d left the bakery and found a lucrative job in Ala Moana Shopping Center at Shirokiya, which was this incredible department store that sold games, and cosmetics, and perfumes, and suitcases, and shoes and gadgets and everything you could imagine, only they were all designed for life on a Japanese planet—so a lot of the shoes were little white tabbies, and the cosmetics were Japanese brands, and the kitchen gadgets were woks and rice cookers and deep fryers.

  I worked in the luggage department, and my register was behind a glass counter that displayed items like voltage adapters and two-faced alarm clocks you could set to show the time in two different countries, and holster money wallets invisible under suit jackets. You strapped them over your shoulder so you could keep your money securely under your armpit. For ladies we had the bra stash, which was a white money pouch that snapped front and center onto your brassiere. So there I had a job, I had the house, I had Marlon, I was eating three meals a day. I felt like I was together enough to stop by Crawford Hall and see Brian.

  HE was sitting in his office in his same old swivel chair with his dirty bare feet up on the desk, and his sandy beard, and his picture of Imo thumbtacked up to his bulletin board, and he was marking up a big floppy manuscript.

  “Hey, Brian.” I stood in the doorway.

  He looked up, startled. I hadn’t come by in over a year. Not since before my vision! “Sharon?” He sat up all of a sudden and skidded back his chair. His feet thumped onto the floor.

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you?” he said. “I hear you’re in the house with Rich and Kathryn and company.”

  “Yup, I am. I’m living the cooperative life. How’s Imo?”

  “She’s great. She’s here for two weeks. She’s giving an invited talk at IWOMP.”

  “What is that? Wait … wait …” I was trying to puzzle it out. “Indus-try without … monetary operations?”

  “International Workshop on Migratory Populations.”

  “That was my second guess. I was just about to say that. I was coming to see if you wanted to have lunch.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll buy,” he said graciously, and he ushered me out the door. “You look so thin. You look like a little waif!”

  “Thanks a lot!”

  “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “I’ve been good,” I said. “I’ve been in a good place. I’ve been moving in all these new directions.”

  “New directions where?”

  “Well, the house, and I’m working at Shirokiya, and also I’ve been studying, um, methods of seeking enlightenment.” “Huh?”

  “Just doing a lot reading, and just thinking—you know, just taking a step back, because you can’t just always be converting every day of the week!”

  “Oh,” Brian said. We’d arrived at the lunch wagon down by the parking lot, and he bought meat sticks, and manapua, and root beers, just like the time I first came to see him along with Gary. “I’m not sure I even want to know what that means.”

  We headed around to the side of Moore Hall and sat down to eat in the shade of a Bo tree.

  “What about you? What’ve you been up to?” I asked Brian.

  “Still working on my book.”

  I drank my root beer. I stared at the ants climbing over the sticky seedpods by our feet. “Look at those ants,” I said. “Look at that whole civilization there. It’s like to them, every crumb we drop is a meteor. Do you ever think about that?”

  “No,” Brian said.

  I flicked ice at him with my straw. “And you’re supposed to be the trained naturalistic observer! What a waste.”

  “Ants aren’t my thing.”

  “That’s because you’re specialized up the wazoo.”

  “I think it’s supposed to be up the yazoo.”

  “Whatever! The point is, specialization is your crutch! The point is—what’s happened to being a generalist? What’s
happened to synthesizing all the parts of nature together? Nobody talks about synthesizing anymore, except in theology.”

  “So that’s why you’re studying enlightenment.”

  “Methods of enlightenment.”

  “Right.” Brian was looking at the ground. Now I had him looking at the ants too. “How’s Wayne?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, surprised he had to ask. “We decided to go our separate ways a year ago.”

  “He hit you, didn’t he?” Brian said.

  “No,” I shot back. I was offended he thought of me that way, as having so little self-respect I’d stay in a relationship with someone who beat me! Wayne hadn’t ever really hit me. True, sometimes I’d been afraid he’d hit me, but that was different! “We just had different philosophies of living,” I said. “It was like where I’m going he wouldn’t follow.”

  “And you’re going—where?”

  “It’s hard to explain to people like you.”

  “What kind of people is that?”

  “Male rationalists,” I said. “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Try me.” He was partly laughing at me, yet still I felt this rush of pleasure. I could see myself through his eyes, and so I felt doubly his kindness toward me, and his friendship, and that he loved to look at me.

  “I had a vision.”

  “And what were you on at the time?” he asked.

  “See, that’s just what I was talking about! You’re immediately jumping to the rationalistic explanation! I said vision, not trip. I had this true, unadulterated vision of God! I saw something. I was out on a ship, and it was sunset. And the water actually turned transparent. And then a whale came, and she lifted up her tail; she opened up the whole ocean. And you could look and look all the way down. And I saw God’s presence. In the deep.”

  “You’re such a nut.”

  “See, I knew you’d say that.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “If you knew God was out there, wouldn’t you go seek Him?”

  He looked at me like before his eyes I was turning into a toad. “What’re you? … a born-again?”

  “Oh, yeah, I did that.”

  “And now you’re coming around to convert me.”

  “No, I’m not evangelizing or anything like that,” I said. “I mean, I was born again, but it didn’t take on me.”

  He grinned. “Only you, Sharon.”

  “It’s just one path—it’s like The Varieties of Religious Experience. They’re just all different paths.”

  “Mm-hmm. Yeah.” He gathered up his wrappers and headed for the trash can. I followed him.

  “What? You think this is just my flakiness here? It has nothing to do with flakiness. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up in a totally nondenominational family. My parents were the most irreligious people you ever saw. My dad was an economist, for Pete’s sake. He worshiped the almighty dollar. My grandpa was a card-carrying atheist. I mean, this was not how I was raised! I never even gave the idea of God a second thought. I never asked to have visions. But now it turns out I am someone who is heading in the visionary direction. That’s where my spirit is going. I can’t even help it.”

  Brian turned to me. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Why do you always have to be going somewhere?” he asked.

  I looked into his smart brown eyes. “Brian, you are such an agnostic,” I told him. “You’re like I used to be. You don’t even get it. It’s like love. If you fall in love with someone you just want to be with him. You want to see him and touch him all the time. It’s like this searching all the time. It’s like the song by Solomon: ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’”

  “Who do you love these days, Sharon?” Brian asked me.

  Somehow my metaphor of love and God escaped me. I said, “You.”

  We stood still a second and hushed. I was all tongue tied, but what I’d said was true.

  “I mean, for example. You know, for instance: you. That’s what I meant.”

  “I know, I know,” Brian said. He let go my shoulders. He understood the whole thing. He saw I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  I sprinted across campus and to the bus stop. And when I got to my stop by the Termite Palace, I ran the three blocks home, and I jammed my key in the lock and dashed for my room, where Marlon, who was essentially nocturnal, was sleeping on the buton, and I pushed him over to one side, since he liked to sleep right in the middle, and he snarled at me, but I didn’t even care. I lay there and squeezed my eyes shut, just trying to calm down; trying to forget about the whole thing with Brian, yet playing back every word of our conversation.

  I should never have confided in him. He, of all people—he was the last person in the world who’d sympathize with someone becoming visionary. And then how I felt about him, telling him to his face. “Oh, Marlon,” I said. “It’s so ironic, everybody used to think I was such a liar, but they didn’t even know.”

  Admittedly, in middle school and even high school, I used to make things up—for example, that Mom was a photojournalist and that was why she was gone. She was riding jeeps all over Vietnam. Land mines were exploding all around her, but her camera shutter just kept clicking. There she was out in the battlefield documenting the slaughter. Or like the time I told my dad my friends and I had been abducted at gunpoint by a pair of car thieves running from police, which was how I’d ended up in Providence for several days.

  But my far greater problem was always my compulsion to tell the truth. That was the thing I really got punished for. Run away for a while, and your father would try to get you into a probationary program for at-risk kids. But tell your father he was a fat-ass and his new wife was a gold digger, and he would beat the you-know-what out of you.

  “Marlon,” I said, “do you think I should call Brian up and sort of …” Sort of what? Apologize? Try to explain myself? Anything I said would just make it worse. Everyone always compared lies to spiderwebs, but no one ever talked about getting caught in a web of honesty. “Maybe I should write him a letter?” But Marlon was snoozing away. And as it turned out I was the one who got a letter that day. In one of those out-of-left-field situations a letter actually came for me.

  We were all sitting down at dinner eating our zucchini-squash lasagna, and Rich said, “Oh, Sharon, guess what?”

  “What?” I was still feeling down.

  “This postcard showed up for you—from Israel!”

  “No kidding. Who do I know in Israel?”

  “It’s from Gary,” Rich said.

  “No way. How did Gary know I lived here?”

  “It came to the zoology department,” Rich told me. “It was sitting there next to the mailboxes.”

  “That is so weird. I was just there!”

  Rich handed me the postcard across the table. And the picture on the front was the ancient Western Wall in Jerusalem made out of blocks of stone and with little tufts of grass growing in the nooks and crannies. On the back, sure enough, there was my name, Sharon Spiegelman and c/o Department of Zoology, University of Hawaii, and some kind of message in Gary’s wavy handwriting that you could hardly read, not just because it was tiny and illegible, but because it was so inconsistent. There was no pattern to it. “Dear Sharon,” I read. “There has been this strangelement between us for too long….”

  “You came by the department today? I didn’t see you,” said Rich.

  “I hate to say it, but we need to discuss the oven,” Kathryn was saying.

  “What’s wrong with it?” asked Will.

  “Jeez, you’d think he’d have the courtesy just to print,” I burst out. I kept trying to read the card. I squinted up my eyes. I held it to the light. All I came up with was: “If I can be in our massage, markthing on a guest then only be thinking of you and histories we have slaved. You’ll been such a fiend. Love, Gary.”

  I started passing the card around, and we all put our heads together to try to figure the damn thing out, but to no avail. Kathryn got a few words: “It’s �
��You’ve been such a friend,’” she said. “It’s ‘histories we have shared.’” But that was as much as she could do. “What’s this return address?” Kathryn was sounding it out. “Torah-Or Yerusalami.”

  “It sounds like a deli,” said Tom.

  “You gonna write back?” Rich asked me.

  I took the postcard from Kathryn. I started bending it in my fingers.

  “Can’t we hold off on the oven?” Will asked Kathryn.

  “We’ve got Rich’s party next week!” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Shit,” said Tom.

  There wasn’t any way around that. We were having this huge blowout house party coming up, and there was no way to put it off. Rich had actually finished his thesis. A week from Friday—after eleven years—he was finally defending.

  THE theme was Mexican. We were having vegetarian enchiladas and re-fried beans and rice and bag after bag of chips and salsa, not to mention a couple of kegs of beer. And we were having a home-baked chocolate-frosted yellow layer cake—so it was a good thing we’d got the oven fixed. After Rich defended, he was going to come home with his whole committee and then we’d party. Kathryn planned the whole thing like a military operation. The morning of the big day we had the whole house bedecked with streamers and balloons. At minus four hours the cake went into the oven. At minus three hours Marlon ran to the neighbors and hid in the crawl space under their back stairs.

  Minus two hours, Tom was setting up folding chairs in all the common spaces. We’d actually moved the living-room furniture to the bedrooms. Will was at work. Kathryn was in the shower. That quiet-before-the-mob feeling came over the house. I started walking around the place. Just bopping a balloon here, tweaking a streamer there. What would I say to Brian when he showed up? I couldn’t look him in the eye, let alone Imo! Maybe I should go away. Maybe I should just disappear for a while. I wondered if in the hubbub anyone would even notice.

  I went into my room and shut the door. I sat down cross-legged on the pocked white tile floor. If I’d still had my guitar I could have played some. If I’d still had Grandpa’s watch, I could have held it at least. What I ended up doing was taking out some notebook paper and writing back to Gary.