The Great Spring

  After my mother died, my sister couldn’t bear selling her old house in Greenacres, near Lake Worth, so for two years we negotiated. That word sounds far too sane. Eventually I put a lien on the house. My mother’s lawyer refused to ever again do business with my sister. She was feral, distrustful, sure someone was cheating her—that I had no right to the small inheritance we were to share. Eventually she got a mortgage and bought the house.

  She wanted everything intact. A mausoleum. I shipped home two of my grandmother’s chairs and one small side cabinet and left everything else for her.

  Each year for the past three years I’ve gone down to Florida to pay homage to constant summer, humidity, palm trees, and alligators. I eat a single meal at the deli near my parents’ house and then drift down Lake Avenue to Hoffman’s Chocolates.

  This year, though, I take things more slowly. My girlfriend, Baksim, and I drive through the neighborhood, marveling at the houses lined in a row, all exactly alike. I park at the swimming pool and we walk the three blocks down to Ambertree Lane. Then we sit on the small brick wall in front of the door to the house and note how the wandering Jew plants grow unchecked across the walkway. I feel content to sit here for several minutes. Finally I step up to the brown door and ring the bell, put my ear to the metal surface, and hear it ring in the empty house. I ring it again and again. “Mommy,” I call out. “Mommy. It’s me. Open the door.”

  I want to go in badly. I haven’t been in there for four years, and my sister, though she punctually pays the monthly mortgage, has not been there either. The neighbor across the street checks on it periodically. From what I’ve heard from the occasional terse e-mails I receive from my sister, the roof is leaking and the ceiling needs work. She hoped to rent it out year-round, but so far only a single man comes down for three months each winter. She has never met him. He is supposed to be very clean and has rearranged my mother’s furniture. I want in, but I’ve left the key in the top drawer in my kitchen back in New Mexico. I’ve done this deliberately, to protect myself from these moments. I no longer own this house. Technically it would be breaking in.

  “Why don’t you go across the street to the neighbor?” Baksim suggests. “Maybe she’ll let you in.”

  I hesitate.

  “Go over and just say hello.”

  There’s a Christmas wreath on the door, and a lawn full of glittering deer, and a sled and a fat Santa Claus. I ring the bell, and the door opens.

  At first Daisy doesn’t recognize me. I mention my mother’s name. “Oh, yes.” She is friendly. “Would you like to go in? You’re family. Meet me at the side door. I’ll get the key.”

  That was easy, I think, and we walk back across the street. She hands me the key and, voilà, I step in.

  Every piece of furniture has been moved flat against some wall. No sitting arrangements, no conviviality. There’s a water stain on my mother’s dining room table and a batch of black ants on the white tile floor by the two windows. The ceiling paper is curling; water has dripped through, right at the threshold to her bedroom. All shutters are closed, and the air conditioning is on low to avoid mildew but not enough to cool.

  I get out quickly. No life in there.

  When Baksim and I get back to the hotel, I am paralyzed, remembering the evening walks to the pool alone after my father died, my mother ensconced in her chair in front of the TV she played loudly but could no longer hear or see clearly. The rough cement sidewalk on my bare feet, towel over my shoulder, sun setting too early in late November. I climb over the wall—the pool gate is locked at dusk—and look around. Then I peel off my bathing suit and dive into the dark water, confident that none of the seniors, who rarely show even in the daytime, will dare come now.

  Then the dreaded walk back to the little box house on the corner. I replay that walk: entering the dark house, the gray light from the screen cast on my mother’s face. She does not stir, and I lie down in the guest bedroom on the carpeted floor, where I’ve made a little bed of my grandmother’s quilt—the frame of the sofa that opens to a bed has collapsed long ago. But first I close the door, turn off the air conditioning, open the metal shades and windows, positing that I am the only one in the five-hundred-unit community who performs this daring act, letting the cool, heavy air waft in.

  . . .

  Baksim grew up poor in Hong Kong, where she didn’t go to school until she was ten, and only then because her mother had managed to marry a British soldier stationed there in the fifties, after the war. Her stepfather sent her to a British school in Hong Kong, where she didn’t speak a lick of English and she had her first pair of shoes and the other schoolmates made fun of her because she was Chinese. When she complained at home to her mother, the advice was “fight back.”

  She waited until each one of the three bullies was alone to take her revenge. With those shoes—her mother made them for her too large, intending them to last, with strong metal around the rim—she kicked each of her taunters hard in the butt. The last one, the leader, was a heavy British girl with thick glasses. The girl fell to the floor crying. Baksim was about to smash her glasses with her shoes but instead said, “I’m sorry I hurt you,” realizing her enemy was in pain. After that they became fast friends, the little Asian girl and the fleshy white Brit who towered over her.

  When her mother first met her stepfather, Baksim was farmed out to a poor family at age seven for two years. Her mother was afraid the English soldier wouldn’t want her if she had a child.

  Baksim’s adopted family ate one bowl of rice a day and some salted fish. When they sat at the table, they kept their feet raised on the chair rungs. Rats came out at dinner and wandered under the table, hoping a crumb or morsel would be dropped. Barefoot, thin as a wire, she wandered the streets. The ghetto people called her “the wooden beauty” because she was so sad.

  After her mother couldn’t get pregnant in England, she confessed to her new husband that she had a little girl left in Hong Kong. Her husband flew back and appeared at the door of the boarding house. Baksim was standing in the hall when the owner opened the door to this tall white westerner. He told her to call him Daddy and yelled at the man that her mother sent monthly checks for her care, yet she was filthy and starving.

  The next day he took her to the movies to see One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She sat next to him with one fist full of popcorn and the other gripping chocolate malted milk balls.

  Now, after thirty years on Wall Street, Baksim treats me to the Breakers, this hotel on the beach, first built in 1896 by oil, real estate, and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler to accommodate travelers on his Florida East Coast Railway. It burned down twice, and in 1925 the contractors abandoned the wooden construction for fireproof concrete. They built a 550-room replacement after the Villa Medici in Rome, complete with a large lobby ceiling painted by a classically trained New York City artist. The building and grounds occupy 140 acres along the Atlantic Ocean.

  Out the large window in our room on the fifth floor we can see the panoramic curve of the beach as the waves roll in. Wave upon wave, breaking onshore. At night when we open the windows we smell the salt air and feel in the black expanse all the distant places you can travel to, all the multitudinous stars sparkling over it all. McCullers wrote, “A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of a midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart.”

  McCullers showed me bone-chilling betrayal and crushing abandonment. Like much great literature, it pointed to something right in front of our noses: there is no cure for human life, except to live it, being willing to rip off blinders as we go and let the light in.

  Losing

  It is only me now

  and I do not fit in my own shoes

  The mountain is mine

  Moonlight and the faraway call

  of the train—all mine

  But who stares at me in the window?

  My dead father has hollow eyes;

  and gri
ef—that old lover—

  is mine too

  14

  In the Crossing

  (for Ann Filemyr)

  My father’s just home from work, his long white sleeves rolled up, a thin belt at his waist, pleated gray pants. He leans back in our backyard, bends his right arm at an angle and flings the rubber ball as high as his powerful arm will let him.

  We both lean our heads back, calculating where it will come down. Take two steps this way, two steps the other way. Hands cupped in front of us, measuring the speed, the exact spot—wham into both my hands.

  I throw it to him, and again he leans back and flings that ball into the early June evening air. The crickets not yet sounding, the steak barbecuing next-door at the Carosellas’. “Vinnie Carosella doesn’t play ball with his daughter,” my mother yells from the kitchen window. “Buddy, Natalie is going to hurt her womanly insides.”

  I want to play through the night, and even my father is fascinated. How far could he really toss this thing? In one shot the ball seems to disappear into the clouds.

  He climbs up on the outdoor redwood furniture, first the bench and then the table—the umbrella hasn’t been put in the center hole yet—and he tosses it ever higher.

  My mother hisses through the screen, “The neighbors are going to think we’re crazy.” He tosses it again. My sister, with her brown curls, three years younger, is somewhere in the background and is the only one listening to my mother.

  Now that he throws it from the table I have to lean over to find its landing point. I run into a corner of the house and a tooth begins to bleed. The blood is running down my arm. My blue T-shirt has red blotches. It doesn’t hurt, so I ignore it. The amazing thing: my father doesn’t notice.

  Richard, the younger Carosella boy, yells, “Nice throw,” and my father turns his head and preens.

  I want that ball in my two hands more than God, more than Double Bubble, more than a licorice stick or the new blue three-speed bike I’ll get this summer.

  You want to know what happened to the tooth, the blood? You want to know who noticed? What I want to know is how come I can’t have it all back. The sweet corn bleeding with yellow butter and salt, the beefsteak tomatoes, the Sealtest cherry vanilla ice cream, the bing cherries. Shooting watermelon’s black pits across the table, a contest for how many ears of corn eaten. You try to beat my father—once he ate eighteen to win against Uncle Sam, his skinny brother. If my uncle hadn’t stopped at seventeen, my father would have eaten more. He would not lose. His veins were shot through with the slow coursing motor of a boat in idle, waiting to shift into gear.

  Wham. Into my hands again. The highest shot returned to me. I scream; I am victorious. My father glances down. “Oh, my God. Natalie, what happened?” I grin ear to ear.

  He grabs my arm, drags me to the screen door. “Sylvia, get a towel.” She glances out the window and runs down the stairs. My grandparents are behind her. My grandmother’s right cheek is clasped in her right hand. “Have you gone crazy?”

  My eyes dart from one to another. “I caught the ball.”

  They look at one another over my head. “What should we do?”

  “The emergency room,” my father says. He runs for car keys.

  Now I am trembling and quiet.

  A two-hour calamity, four stitches, and it is over. I still have all of my teeth.

  But the bigger problem is not solved. Where did my father go?

  Walk with me down Main Street in fall. Stuffed ghosts and scarecrows leaning against the hardware store windows. Walk farther, past the stationer’s. Von Leessen’s across the street—homemade ice cream. Walk farther to the library on the corner. Across Conklin is the brick Aero Tavern, wrought iron framing the many squares of windows. Inside, behind the bar backed by the light of a Seagram’s twirling mirror and rows of liquor bottles and a stand of bagged pretzels and Wise potato chips, is the person I’m looking for. Always in an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to midforearm. It’s Ben Goldberg. He is still young here.

  A few dry leaves drop to the ground off the elms and crackle in the gutter when stepped on. My father walks out the front door with the green bag in his hand. He’s going across to the other corner, where the bank is, to deposit last night’s earnings. He stops in the cigar store, picks up Newsday and the Daily News, buys four Bering Plaza cigars. Then pauses. Marshmallow witches and sugar corn for Halloween are displayed on the counter. The girls would like those. We, my sister and I, are the girls, and he is thinking about us. It’s not often, but how sweet when he does. He buys some trick-or-treat candy and then crosses the street. When he’s in the crossing, right in the middle, I want to yell, “Stop! Don’t you know you’ll die and someday leave us?” But it never enters his mind. He’s young, maybe forty. Death is another country. His father died at sixty-eight; his mother of Parkinson’s at sixty-five. But they are buried in a Jewish cemetery, a forty-minute drive down the Southern State Parkway.

  This is months before February, when he buys us cakes and cupcakes for Valentine’s Day, and we, all three of us—Rhoda, me, and his wife, Sylvia—are his Valentines.

  After he died—seven months after—I was driving a moving van up the interstate in the snow to St. Paul, Minnesota, and stopped for gas and remembered it was February 14. No more cakes from Daddy. He did it only twice in my childhood, but the occasions stuck. I cried the rest of the way into the outskirts of the Twin Cities.

  15

  Losing Katherine

  After two days in Paris, still jet-lagged, we rent a car to drive down to the retreat center where I will teach. The estimated travel time is two and a half hours. But at the Orléans exit an hour south of Paris, I veer off the highway. I want to see the town whose name is referred to repeatedly in Paris: Porte d’Orléans, a subway stop; Velodrome d’Orléans, for cycling races; below the clock at Musée d’Orsay, Paris-Orléans; a dock called Quai d’Orléans.

  My assistant—a longtime student, wife of a rabbi, and PhD in art history—and I will have some fun. I keep repeating that word, strange to a Jew, but I consider it important. This is it. This one great life. Let’s take some pleasure, even when this Orléans turns out not to be much of anything: bland streets, one cathedral, one nasty tea shop—the only one open at 3:00 P.M. But we make the most of it: we go to their one musée des beaux-arts, which has a Gauguin and a slab of a hind leg of raw animal meat painted by Soutine and a quiet Corot we forget as soon as we pass it. But still, name a town in North Dakota that has anything equal. And there are fresh peaches in the market here in June, not to be seen till August in New Mexico.

  The problem is we can’t manage to drive out of the town. Around and around we go, with no map. Forget the GPS on Saundra’s iPhone. You are here, a metallic female voice repeats when we face a dead-end street at the edge of a river bluff. You have arrived. Very Zen of her but not helpful.

  But at last I am relieved of the burden of planning—this retreat has been in the works for almost two years. Justine, another longtime student, has a French grandmother who has a retreat center that her uncle, a conductor in Paris, developed for musicians. They’ve taken a barn and made it acoustically perfect for concerts. We will use it as a zendo. The first Sit, Walk, Write: True Secret Retreat ever on European soil. Many American students—and also ones from Canada and the Netherlands—signed up within a week. One student gave a donation for several fellowships. The stipulation: they must be longtime students who could never imagine—or afford—coming across the ocean. I called four in the winter evenings and told them to pack their bags.

  Justine’s father was a serious Zen practitioner under the famous Zen teacher Taisen Deshimaru. He was delighted this was happening on his mother’s farm.

  Saundra and I manage to arrive at Villefavard twelve hours late, just before the nearby Protestant church clangs out twelve midnight gongs. Then Saundra confesses she has been nervous the whole time, a natural Jewish state of mind. The lights are out and we tramp up the steps. So
on we drop into a sleep disconnected from country or the twirling Earth.

  Two nights later, about to begin the retreat, I am met at the bottom of the steps by Steve, a burly, tall, ponytailed man who has studied with me before. The twilight is casting a yellow glow on his face and on everything around us. He tells me, “Aunt Katie has hit her head, and she lay unconscious for eight hours before they found her. She’s in the hospital. The blood thinned by the pills she took for her heart condition seeped into her brain.”

  I grab the front of his shirt and lean into his chest. He is the nephew of my dear friend Katherine Thanas, who is eighty-five, insistently independent, living alone in her own apartment. Bloody Kleenex was found upstairs—they figure she tried to minister to herself. Whenever it was that she went downstairs, she blacked out.

  A black chasm opens in front of me: we are losing her. Through muffled sobs, I manage, “Any chance?”

  “None.” Her nephew chokes on that single word.

  I’d seen her last in early January. I had brought her bright red-blue-black striped wool socks.

  “Katherine, we need to jazz you up.” She wore white cotton toe-fitted ones for the zendo’s highly shined wood floor. Traditional Japanese.

  She laughed. “These won’t fit. I’m size eleven.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. We’ll go to the men’s store.”

  “We can try. They won’t be as colorful.”

  We found her shocking-pink-and-black-striped socks at a corner shoe store.

  “Warm,” she said, delighted. It was freezing cold in her apartment. The usual California attitude: a denial that it ever gets cold, so the housing is miserably insulated and heated.

  We ate at a Japanese restaurant. She’d been on an absolute no-fat—not even olive oil—diet for three years. The doctor said it would help her heart. He also said no one could follow such a stringent protocol. That, along with weekly energy work, turned her heart around. No open-heart surgery. The doctor was amazed.