Splendor (11 page)

She waited a minute for me to ask what
chai
meant.

I did.

“It means ‘life,’ ” Ziva said. “Are you eighteen?”

“I will be in April.”

“I’ll be twelve in July,” she said. “Then I’ll have my bat mitzvah.”

I assumed this was the female equivalent of the bar mitzvah, which I knew about because of Will. “I thought you have to be thirteen for that.”

“That’s just for boys,” she said. “Girls mature faster.”

She went over to the couch to watch Daniel and David’s game. I stayed where I was, looking up at the light fixture. It was beautiful; the whole thing glowed, each nautilus segment so thin that light permeated it.

“Ari fell asleep,” Sabine said, coming down the stairs. She looked tired, like maybe she’d fallen asleep for a little while herself.

“Good, good,” David said, still glued to the game he was playing.

Sabine smiled at him, indulgently. Then she turned to me. “Scarlett,” she said, “we’re so glad you’ve returned.”

“Thanks for inviting me.”

“Are you hungry? We’re ordering Thai for dinner.”

That sounded delicious.

“Are we getting lettuce wraps?” asked Ziva.

“Of course,” said Sabine. “Why don’t you go upstairs and order for us? Be sure to get lots of soup. It’ll be good for Ari.”

Then she joined me in looking at the light fixture. “You like it?”

“It’s amazing.”

“Thank you,” she said with the pride of a mother.

“You made it?”

She nodded.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s really cool.”

I started looking around the house, wondering what else Sabine had made. The more I looked, the more circles and spirals I saw—in a mosaic around the fireplace, in the backsplash behind the kitchen sink, in the stack of dessert plates on the countertop. “You really like circles.”

She smiled. “Yes, but not singularly.”

Then I noticed more—the way the nautilus shells on the light fixture were arranged in rays, shooting from the heart of the sun; the angular rigidity of the metal screen in front of the fireplace; the massive dining table, rectangular and heavy in mahogany wood.

“Lines, too,” I said.

“You have an artist’s eye,” Sabine said. “Really, though, it all boils down to curved and straight lines.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” she said, “take a curving line, and continue its curve. What do you have?”

“A circle?”

“Yes. A circle. And any straight line—horizontal, vertical, diagonal—extend it indefinitely, and it’s still a line. It projects. It reaches outward, whereas a curved line—a circle—is, by its nature, self-reflective.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it before.”

“I’ve spent way too much time thinking about it,” Sabine said, “as evidenced by my artwork.”

“Well, does it matter?”

She looked at me dolefully. “Everything matters, Scarlett.”

I must have looked doubtful.

Sabine went on, “Much in Kabbalah centers on interpretation, symbology.”

“So what do circles mean?” I asked. “And lines?”

“Feminine and masculine,” she answered promptly. “Take our ancient rite of circumcision—the cutting away of the foreskin. The shaft of the penis—the line—is masculine. By removing the foreskin, we reveal the corona—which means ‘crown,’ or ‘circle,’ the feminine. Some say that circumcision is the ritual act of revealing the sacred feminine within each man.”

I shuddered, and Sabine laughed. “Too graphic?”

“Maybe a little,” I admitted.

“Perhaps,” she said, “but it’s important. Even God is both masculine and feminine.”

“Then why do we call God ‘he’?”

Sabine shrugged. “Most probably as a result of patrilineal society,” she said, “but Genesis tells us God is both. It’s written, ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.’ ”

I remembered reading something in the book Martin had given me, about how the Sefirot act as a map of the body of God. And the Sefirot had masculine and feminine elements, too.

“Anyway, in spite of all that, David and I chose not to circumcise the boys,” Sabine told me quietly, so that Daniel wouldn’t overhear her talking about him. “When it came down to it, we just couldn’t cut our children.”

Briefly, I wondered about Will. I had never seen him naked, and I didn’t know whether or not I’d be able to tell if he was circumcised.

“Here’s something else that’s circular.” Sabine reached into the refrigerator and withdrew an egg. She handed it to me.

The light brown shell was decorated with symbols, which I recognized as Hebrew. It reminded me of an Easter egg, decorated as it was.

“Is it hard-boiled?” I asked.

“It is. It’s for you, Scarlett.”

“For me?”

Sabine nodded. “And it’s no ordinary egg. This egg is a
first
egg.”

“A first egg?”

“Yes. It’s the first egg laid by a young hen.”

“How do you know that?”

“A friend of mine raises chickens. I told her it was important that she give me a first egg.”

“But why?”

“You wish to learn about Kabbalah?”

I nodded.

“Scarlett, Kabbalah is a lifetime of study. It is not a hobby. And normally I wouldn’t advocate the pursuit of it by a student so unpracticed. But I feel, somehow, that you may have a special talent for it. And I want to help you.”

I rolled the egg between my palms. It was smooth, cold.

“I’ve told you before to open yourself, Scarlett. This egg is special. I think you’re special, too. So does Martin.”

“Thank you.” It made me feel embarrassed and kind of happy to think that she’d spoken to Martin about me. “So…what do I do with it?”

“You eat it, of course.”

The answer was too pedestrian. “That’s all?”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something else, I guess.”

“The words on the egg constitute an incantation,” Sabine told me. “It’s a
petihat ha-lev,
or ‘opening the heart.’ It’s meant to help you in your quest to take in what Kabbalah has to give you.”

The egg had warmed in my hands while Sabine had spoken. I looked at it carefully—the words, of course, but also the egg itself. It curved perfectly into the palm of my hand. It was a promise.

“I just…break it?”

“The strength is in the
intention,
Scarlett, not the words themselves. Crack the egg, and eat it.”

Gently, I tapped the egg against the countertop. A spiderweb of lines spread across the shell. I peeled it away.

“As the egg loses its shell, so too should you free yourself of what binds you, holding you back from manifesting your latent abilities. Open the egg, Scarlett, and open yourself as well.”

In three bites I ate the egg, focusing on the smoothness of the white, the graininess of the perfectly round, golden yolk. I chewed. I swallowed.

The doorbell rang. I felt myself stiffen, as if maybe that ringing heralded the arrival of some great truth.

Ziva ran loudly down the stairs. “The food’s here,” she called.

After dinner David watched a movie with the kids. Ari had woken just after we’d finished eating, and demanded soup. His hair stuck up in all directions. Again he was bare-chested, clothed in a pair of orange sweatpants.

“Does he ever wear a shirt?” I whispered to Ziva.

“Not if he can help it.”

“What about school? He has to wear one then, right?” Honestly, I couldn’t imagine anyone making Ari do anything he didn’t want to do.

“We don’t go to school,” Ziva said. “Our parents say they don’t want us to be institutionalized.”

I checked her expression to see if she was joking. She wasn’t.

“So you’re homeschooled?”

“We don’t do school,” she said. “We live our lives.”

The movie they watched was in Hebrew, but it seemed to be something funny. All four of them laughed loudly, and often.

Sabine and I cleared the dishes and then she showed me a little room off the kitchen where I’d be sleeping. Together we put sheets on the foldout bed.

“Tomorrow I’ll take you with me to meet my prayer group. But first, maybe I should tell you a little more about us.”

I nodded. We spread the quilt across the mattress and then sat down.

“Do you know anything about Hasidism?”

I didn’t.

“Have you ever noticed how young people—teens, and people in their twenties—tend to rebel against the generation before them?”

“Yeah, sure, like with politics and fashion, things like that?”

“Exactly. Well, Hasidism, a movement in Judaism, is something like that. It began as a pull away from the meticulous observance of the religious rules and regulations that some believed were smothering the very life from our faith. It was begun in the eighteenth century. Hasidim chose to embrace laughter, revelry, singing, and dancing. Their goal was direct contact with God. But, like many good things, it grew to look a lot like the group it rebelled against—much the same way children, in their adulthood, come to act like their parents.”

I laughed a little, wondering which of my parents I might turn into. Neither seemed plausible.

“The group of which I’m a member keeps what we believe is the best of Hasidism and sloughs off the rest. But like the Hasidim, we, too, gather to discuss the Torah and its mystical interpretations. We sing, we chant, we dance. We drink wine. We attempt to feel God, to see the face of God.”

“Does it work?”

“It can,” Sabine said. “We look not only outward but inside ourselves, as well. We believe that there is a spark of God within each of us. We search for those sparks. We celebrate them.”

“It sounds all right,” I said.

“Others have searched for God,” Sabine said. Her voice grew serious. “Not all have returned.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of our sacred texts tells the story of the four sages. They sought the face of God and entered paradise.”

“What does that mean, ‘entered paradise’? Like, heaven?”

Sabine shrugged. “That’s one of the mysteries of the story,” she said, “the meaning of that phrase. I think that to enter paradise is to come face to face with the energy, the life force, that we call God. And for three of those four men, it was too much.”

“What about the fourth?”

“Ah, is that one more interesting to you than the other three?”

I nodded.

“He returned, transformed.”

“Then that’s the one I’ll be.”

Sabine opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She smiled at me and brushed my hair back from my cheek. “I think you may be right.”

In the morning Sabine woke me early, before the kids were up, and we drove to Laurel Canyon. After we left Venice we traveled on the freeway for a while. It was quiet and we moved quickly. Then we made our way back into the canyon and the roads grew twisty. I thought about our discussion from the night before—straight lines and curves. The freeway and the canyon road—or the roads on our island, for that matter—were like that. The first, direct and straightforward, a clear shot; the latter, circuitous, roundabout, complicated.

Finally we turned onto a street called Wonderland. That really was its name.

The house we parked in front of was pink stucco, two stories, with a red tile roof. When I pushed open the car door, I shivered at the cool air and wrapped my sweater more tightly around me, cinching its belt. I was glad I’d worn my boots, but as we rounded the corner of the house into the backyard, I saw a row of shoes outside the door of a small, rough-hewn structure.

“No shoes, huh?”

Sabine slipped hers off and added them to the collection. “End of the line for worldly things,” she said.

I unzipped my boots and abandoned them with the others.

“Come on in,” said Sabine. “Meet my friends.”

I don’t know what I was expecting. Long dresses and tunics, maybe, or witchy-hippie chic. What I
didn’t
expect was a room full of perfectly normal-looking women.

They all greeted Sabine warmly and welcomed me in a way that made me pretty sure Sabine had cleared my visit with them before she invited me. There were six women—“We believe that prayer should be done in a group, not in isolation,” Sabine had told me on the drive—and they had the air of people who knew each other really well. Like members of a family, they seemed comfortable together—touching one another casually, cutting into one another’s sentences, leaning into their conversation.

The room was nice. Windows had been pushed open in spite of the cool air and light spilled into the room, creating long, bright rectangles on the wood floor. The curtains undulated in the breeze. It was funny—now that I was looking, I saw straight lines and curves everywhere: in the pattern of sunlight on the floor, in the billowing curtains. Even the lines on the faces of the women surrounding me: around their eyes, fine straight lines; around their mouths, curved semicircles that accentuated their smiles.

After the obligatory introductions and niceties, Sabine said to me, “Feel free just to watch if you want, Scarlett, and join in anytime. We’re glad to have you here.”

Then we all sat in a circle, and one of the women—Melissa—led us in a chant. I didn’t understand a word of it. It wasn’t English; in fact, I don’t think the words were from any language. It was a chant, a melody, and it was rhythmic in an almost hypnotic way. Another woman beat gently on a drum. As they chanted I began to feel the circle of sound they were looping through, and though I couldn’t join their tune I started to feel lulled by it. Around me, the other women closed their eyes, relaxed their heads, and swayed in rhythm with the chant.

They went on like this for some time, losing themselves in the sound of their own voices. I felt myself loosening, too, as their wordless chant filled my head, crowding out other thoughts—of Will, of my anger at my mother, of Lily and Gunner—that fought for my attention.

I don’t know who stood up first, but suddenly all around me the women were dancing, spinning and weaving, some with their eyes still closed but somehow no one colliding.

I wanted to stand and dance too. I wanted to close my eyes and move my body to the rhythm of their tune. But something prevented me—I don’t know what—and so I sat, alone on the floor, while all around me the women undulated.