Lauren Silverberg has trapped dozens of lizards in a plastic bag. They’re still alive. She removes one at random and skins it with an art blade. Then she glues the band-aid sized scales onto a rock.
I decide to sit alone. I make papier-mâché masks of girls who removed their faces and hid them in airports. I’ve made 9 so far.
I sit with my bunkmates in the Main Hall. The chicken is passing my table as Dr. White appears. He’s the cameo no one wants. Silverware stops moving and everyone sits up straighter. We remember our posture, our manners, and the value of small paper napkins.
Dr. White informs us that it’s a thinking cap lunch. He pantomimes a triangular hat with a chin string that ties. Today, after lunch, we’ll have Spiritual Discussion.
Spiritual Discussion is an unplanned activity, a back-up in case of rain or a heat wave with malpractice implications. Spiritual Discussion is the only time we see the rabbi, who is also still a student. The practice rabbis are stupefied by the weight of their responsibilities. The magnitude of post-historical interpretation and synthesis stuns and numbs them. They avoid Sex Gully. They swim but do not tan.
Dr. White assembles us into a co-ed group with four bunks. I’m in Golda Meir with a mattress filled with landmines and 11 linguistically pre-approved 13-year-olds who no longer share cigarettes or photographs with me. Chelsea Horowitz accused me of taking Canadian for my foreign language and I didn’t refute her. I’m exposed, vulnerable, and deficient. I’ve made myself a peripheral.
Scotty is in Bunk 8, Shimon Peres. He comes to Camp Hillel every year, too, but he’s been an undifferentiated part of the mosaic — the thin green medicated air above the stables, the partial shade of Eucalyptus leaking their chalky medicinal smell, and the chlorine lingering like a toxic eye pollutant.
We march single file to the foot of the terraced grove of lemon and orange trees that Dr. Silverstein’s vision made manifest. The oranges and lemons look stapled onto scaly branches. We are told to sit there. We sit.
Our topic is the philosophy of the 10 Commandments and how they might be reinterpreted based on our unprecedented historical circumstances, which are global, technological and post-modern. We were given a typed copy of the 10 Commandments at Orientation, but I keep confusing them with the 12 steps of AA.
My mother and Madeleine are both in AA, but only part of the time. I wonder if the 10 Commandments are subject to relapsing. If you fail in a Commandment, if you’ve been intimate with farm animals or purchased false idols, if you’ve sacrificed your children to the wrong gods, if you’ve mortgaged your Beverly Hills house and jet time share to throw it all on the line for a 7 and crap out, can you go to rehab and return to meetings again? Can you go back to Sinai Temple?
I read the 10 Commandments during Study Time. I curl on my side on my cot and twisted iron springs dig into my thighs. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt have no graven images. Thou shalt promptly make amends. Do not covet your neighbor. Thou shalt admit you are powerless over alcohol and narcotics. Thou shalt honor thy mother and father, even if they’re divorced, you’re their only child, and they’re trying to claw you apart.
Every summer my mother and Marty take me to a circus on the Santa Monica Pier. It’s an annual family ritual. I’m afraid the Ferris wheel will leave me stranded at the top while Marty rocks the seat back and forth with his elongated arms. My mother and Marty hold hands as they walk. They eat French fries, despite the calories and saturated fat. I stagger behind them.
My parents laugh as a woman in feathers and gold stilettos is sawed in half. Don’t they see she has the feet of a child, toes the size of grown-up teeth? Then the spinning cups promising the loss of limbs, and the miniature cars like metal coffins. Finally, a drum roll while a girl in pink sequins sinks into a spotlight. She smiles, wide and invitational. A man with pouches of blades takes her cape and tosses it aside. Then he straps her ankles and wrists. The wheel slowly spins. She’s the object of knives and hatchets, and flaming darts like miniature spears. Everyone applauds when she survives.
“Remove the contrived pain from your face,” my mother whispers.
Marty leans in, hearty. “It’s show biz.” His teeth are like glaciers. “Strings and mirrors, honey.”
“Not like your home village,” my mother points out. “You’ve got a real pillory.”
“When is witch dunking season?” Marty asks.
“May through October,” my mother tells him. “There’s a hiatus for bow and arrow deer butchery.”
“If they don’t drown, they get barbequed.” Marty shrugs.
Drowned and barbequed women must be peripherals to begin with. They’re born that way. The 10 Commandments don’t specifically mention circuses, but they’re a subtext. I can’t separate the 10 Commandments from the 12 rules of AA. Thou shalt carry the message to all suffering drunks and drug addicts. Thou shalt not do things to animals, particularly sheep, or sniff cocaine, one day at a time.
Then I’m back at O’Hare again, where, depending on conditions, regional aircraft fly me to Pittsburgh, Buffalo or Erie. I’m pretending I’m on route to Hong Kong or London. But my flight is delayed, departures are changing gates and TV monitors offer sequences of shifting instructions. Somewhere tornados blow roofs off houses and flood highways in small cities in regions of no consequence.
My father and Madeleine are waiting in the Pittsburgh airport. We’ll have hours of two-lane roads with stretches of gravel and no light back to our farmhouse. I smell earth and shoots of what will be Tulips, Freesias and Iris rising to the surface like the red tips of infant fingers. Then we’re on the dirt driveway to our house inside an apple orchard. Acres of wild grasses, shoulder high Mustard and Thistle grow between the barns and pond. Darkness is dimensional and primitive and I fall asleep immediately.
From my bedroom window, in my room of wood where nothing is painted, I study the Maple forest. It stretches for hundreds of miles in all directions like a secret undiscovered inland sea. Wind pushes through leaves like currents. There are fluctuating hieroglyphics in how Maple limbs swing and twist, purposeful and suggestive. This is also a language I will eventually comprehend.
Madeleine takes me on a morning tour of the farm. An apple tree has fallen in a snowstorm and lies on the ground as if sleeping. She shows me patches of strawberries she planted the season I missed, and where Dad repaired the gate and water pump. Then we bake pies in the old kitchen that has its own fireplace. We drive to Blue Heaven and pick buckets of blueberries. We can tomatoes, and peal and boil apples one wicker basket at a time. Madeline pours white and brown sugar, vanilla and cinnamon into the simmering pot. It’s barely autumn and we’re already preparing our winter larder. My father is in the main barn with his marijuana plants and magic mushrooms, his drying screens, plastic bags and scales. Then my yellow bus arrives on cue and I’m back in Alleghany Hills Middle School.
I don’t wear my clothes from Beverly Hills. I leave them in my Gucci pink closet. I don’t describe my bedroom with French doors opening onto a private terrace. I don’t mention eating Italian cakes with Paul Simon or Madonna giving me a bouquet of yellow Orchids from her dressing room. They felt like lamps pulsing in my hands and I understood illumination then and how it’s possible to see in the dark. I don’t mention this either. It’s just another detail that accrues to someone with a red passport and a parasol with hand painted Peonies and cranes on it.