by Dani Shapiro
30.
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 upholstered 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 lifetime 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.
31.
One early spring afternoon, I met Steve Cope for lunch at Cafe Helsinki in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The cafe, a cozy spot furnished with scarred wooden tables and old sofas piled with comfortable cushions, had become our meeting place between my home in Connecticut and Kripalu. Over tabouli salad and falafel, I tried to express the confusion I had been feeling lately. I told Steve that I felt like I was stumbling along in the darkness. I was reading, thinking, exploring, meditating, practicing yoga. I had discovered gems of wisdom buried here and there. But there didn’t seem to be one, well-lit path opening itself up to me, the way I had hoped it might.
I wondered out loud whether this desire of mine for a little bit of this, a little bit of that, was spiritual and intellectual laziness. The smorgasbord approach to deeper meaning. I was reminded of a mom at Jacob’s school who posted flyers around town advertising herself as a shamanic healer, dream therapy guide, social worker, and facilitator of interspecies communication honoring Native American, Buddhist, Kundalini, and Kabbalah influences. Oy vey. How could I give Jacob a spiritual foundation when I was all over the map? Did I have to choose one way? Was that the true discipline?
Steve shrugged, then smiled. His bright blue eyes were sharp, unclouded. He took a sip of his cardamom tea.
“Do you know anything about ayurvedic impressions?” he asked.
I didn’t.
“According to ayurveda, we become what we surround ourselves with.”
I nodded. That made sense.
“And so it stands to reason that we have to be discerning about what we surround ourselves with.”
Discernment. Such a beautiful word. As usual, Steve had cut straight to the heart of the matter. I thought about what it meant to choose wisely—not just once or twice, but in every waking moment.
“Recently I’ve started going to church,” Steve said. This, coming from my friend the yogi, the Buddhist scholar. “After my mother died, I found it brought me comfort. Even though I only believe maybe thirty percent of what I hear in there—I don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the one true son of God, which is kind of central—I walk out feeling lighter.”
Steve didn’t sound remotely confused or apologetic. He could pick and choose what felt relevant to him, and leave the rest. Why couldn’t I do the same? When I was in an Orthodox shul, I felt like an imposter: a bacon-and-shrimp-eating fake who could still chant the liturgy like an old tune. When I was in more liberal shuls, I wasn’t comfortable either. Men and women davening together? Women wearing prayer shawls? I saw it all through my father’s eyes: women in tallits and yarmulkes looked silly to me, like little girls playing dress-up. And in yoga studios, chanting made me nervous. The Sanskrit words sounded disconcertingly like Hebrew. I had been told that it didn’t matter, that the vibrations of the syllables worked their own magic, but still, I felt like I was doing something wrong.
As I sat with my new friend, I realized that perhaps he was doing the hardest thing of all: living inside the contradictions. Buddhism, yoga philosophy, the high Episcopalian tradition in which he had been steeped as a child, were all able to coexist for him and create a greater, richer equilibrium. This wasn’t spiritual laziness. To the contrary, it required even greater effort and clarity.
“You know, Dani, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Steve leaned across the table. “There’s still a baby in there.”
32.
I started thinking about the Sabbath. I had been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book by that same name, in which he makes a distinction between the world of things and the world of time. Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, Heschel wrote. Forgeries of happiness. Had truer words ever been written? I thought of the stuff piled in our closets, spilling out of chests of drawers. Or the way sometimes (okay, often) I coveted some pretty thing I had seen in a shop window—a cashmere sweater, a pashmina wrap.
I was surrounded by the accoutrements of my modern life. From the kitchen table where I sat writing on my laptop each morning, just within my line of vision there was an espresso machine, a separate device to steam milk, bottles of gourmet vinegar, bee pollen, truffle oil. Piles of New Yorkers and Vanity Fairs, glossy catalogs, party invitations, and save-the-date cards for events scheduled months ahead. A scented candle burned near the stove. I lived in the world of things, and honestly, I didn’t want it any other way. I mean, what was I going to do? Check into Kripalu for the duration? Become one of the Haredim, like my cousins? No—I wanted to find a way to live in balance. Things, when magnified, Heschel wrote. The problem wasn’t the stuff of fast-paced life itself. The problem, he seemed to be saying, was one of emphasis. And the remedy came in the form of the seventh day—the Sabbath.
Heschel described the Sabbath—with its call to slow down, to devote a full day to quiet contemplation—as a cathedral of time. I had never experienced this. The Sabbaths of my childhood had not been cathedrals. They had been exercises in boredom—and also, in coming up with new and ingenious ways to bend the rules. We weren’t supposed to turn on lights, but there was a timer that did it for us. It wasn’t permitted to switch on the stereo, but my mother had the system rigged so that at two in the afternoon, the opening notes of her weekly opera program would miraculously begin to sound throughout the house. And then, if we happened to be visiting family in the city, there was the Sabbath elevator: in certain buildings, elevators were programmed to stop on every floor on Friday nights and Saturdays so that observant Jews wouldn’t have to push the buttons. How could this possibly be the point?
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments, Heschel wrote. I wanted to face sacred moments. I knew that some
kind of ritual was, if not essential, certainly useful. And so I began to consider lighting Friday-night candles. It was just one gesture, I told myself. I would gather my family together to do this one simple thing. It didn’t have to be the beginning of some slippery slope that would end in cold brisket lunches and desperate, quiet boredom. It was a beautiful tradition: the reciting of the blessing, the circling of cupped hands over the flames, ushering in the Sabbath.
I had the candlesticks from my childhood: tall silver ones from Tiffany that had been a wedding gift to my parents from Shirley and Moe. I moved them from the living room, where they had been a decorative touch, into the dining room. I placed them at the head of the table. I bought a dozen simple white candles. A book of matches was laid out and ready. Friday evening came and went. Then another. And another. The candles remained unlit. Homework got in the way. We had a dinner reservation. The Red Sox game was on TV. Each week, in the battle between things and time, things kept winning.
33.
In my twenties, I spent several hours a week in church basements. I sat on metal folding chairs in smoke-filled rooms and attended hundreds of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, how I loved Alcoholics Anonymous! I was a lost, sad, lonely girl who drank to excess—who did everything to excess—and in those church basements I felt safe and cozy, like a wayfarer coming in out of the cold.
My father had recently died. My mother was in a rehabilitation center, where she was slowly learning to walk again. Before my parents’ accident—and much to their dismay—I had dropped out of college to pursue a career in acting. It wasn’t going well. Each day I put on my makeup, fluffed up my hair, and dragged myself to auditions for bit parts on soap operas. I didn’t know which was worse: getting the jobs, or not getting them. If I got a part, it meant I actually had to act. I was a terrible, self-conscious actress. Still, people sometimes hired me. On my agent’s suggestion, I adopted a stage name: Dani York. Instantly I became a generic blonde of indeterminate origins. Casting directors often asked me if I was the British actress Susanna York’s daughter.