The Palace of Tears

The Palace of Tears

Pushing my youngest child in a swing was like being in a time warp of joy.I grabbed her feet as she flew toward me, the little leather slippers with owls stitched on the front. “I got your toes,” as she giggled in delight. I remembered the blue ones with cars my oldest son had 13 years ago. Each time she came toward me, excited with a little drool slipping down the one corner of her teeny mouth, I was in the moment, my heart rising up a little with the black rubber baby swing. Each time she slipped away, I had this sense of the younger parents next to me and of all the years that had come before this, all the times I had pushed a baby on a swing, coached a toddler to reach his little legs out and in, and reach for the clouds with your feet, reach for the branch, reach for mommy’s hand held out just beyond the reach of their toes. It was like I couldn’t make sense of being 43 with a one year old, like I couldn’t understand how I could have a baby and a teenager at the same time, gray hair and nipples leaking milk. 

 The baby’s eyes crossed as the swing slowed. She pulled her hands from the metal triangles attaching the rubber seat to the chain and clapped them together. How much her father would enjoy this, it killed me not to have him here. I looked over at the couple to my left, pushing their chubby little boy with dark curly hair who kept giving them rasberries. They were arguing over who had left the towel on the floor. “I just felt caught off guard because I thought we were in good shape for the open house,” the wife was saying passive aggressively, “So I freaked out and shoved it in your bottom drawer.” She made a clucking noise to the little boy, avoiding eye contact with her husband. “So, y’know … just so you know.” She grabbed the swing, pulled it up to her chin, locked eyes with the baby and said, “Ah, ah, ah … ah-choo!” and let the swing go, the baby giggling and kicking his little feet. 

 I didn’t feel so bad to be alone anymore. 

 Probably the best sex we ever had was by a swimming hole he wanted to show me. We had talked about it for a while, doing it outside, and I had been obsessed with 10,000 Maniacs that summer. And we had wildflower fever. We had to lay down where they grow… But the honeyed haze with which I now remember those 20 minutes seem impossible, like somebody else’s movie. I remember the sweat dripping off of him, the bees buzzing around us, how amazing it was to jump into the water after that. I was 41 but I could have been 14. I could not have felt any younger, more free. Then there was the time I wanted to go swimming in the city pool the next summer, when I was pregnant. I was so big and he had been moving in for months, the whole summer it seemed. It was taking forever, just a few boxes at a time, but each time a new load came in it was like my house’s pants felt tighter after a big turkey dinner. We worked all day without the air conditioner to save on the bill. It was dark and dank in the house and humid and bright outside. Come on, I said, it’s the weekend. Let’s take a break. I have to jump in the water. He said he’d be out shortly. I waited and waited, trying to bite my lip, to be patient, shifting my hips around on the stoop to ease my sciatica, but he didn’t come. Sorry, he finally said as he walked out onto the stoop, closing the front door behind him, but he didn’t mean it. We got in the car. He was silent and dark. I kept pointing out the items I’d brought to make it pleasant: towels and water bottles, snacks and sunscreen. I heard my voice go up and octave and I hated it. This is how I’d been with my ex-husband, trying to cheer him out of his moods. 

 When we pulled up to the pool, it sounded like a party in there with hip hop thumping like a sound cloud around. It was one of the few city pools with trees in the outer park, and it looked shady and inviting while the pool seemed blue and crowded and cool. I unbuckled my seat belt. “No fucking way,” he said. “What?” I was so close to relief. “I’m not going in there.” I felt ready to cry. 

I know what I should have done, of course. Had my therapist been the little angel on my shoulder, I would have looked at him calmly and said, suit yourself, I’m hot as fuck and I’ve given up my whole damn summer to help you move in, bent myself over backward to make you feel welcome and clear out all my stuff and my kids’ stuff you can have room for your own, and now I’m going in the fucking pool.

But of course, that’s not what happened. If it was, I wouldn’t still need therapy, would I? Nope. Not at all. Instead, I said, okay there’s another location on 4th and Washington, but it might be closed by the time we get there. He drove, slow as molasses, and parked and as I got out, I heard the lifeguard blow the final whistle of the day. Everyone got out and went to their towels. I got back in the car, choking back tears, and he said sorry but didn’t mean it for the second time that day.  

It was the summer of the lantern flies. They were everywhere. I took the younger kids to do Tashlich at the Delaware waterfront, on a little pier they had turned into a park and at the head of the peir was a pole with a winding staircase to nowhere, just up - then you looked out over the water and came down. It was cool, but that day, there were just hundreds of lantern flies nesting at the bottom of the pole in the damp concrete at its base. And so they were also flying all around the stairs and one flew into Eli’s face and he got scared. On every step were dead bugs stomped on by those following the directions to kill the invasive species and this grossed the kids out. It was also the summer of Caronavirus, and Eli said all of it together felt like the apocalypse. I couldn’t disagree.

Later that day, after Andrew had taken the baby for a few hours, I found myself lying to a rabbi at Yom Kippur services, in which the discussion was casting off sin and becoming your best, most elevated self. I guess it was a shitty start to another shitty year. I felt entirely broken. She went around the room - which was not a room, of course, since we could not go in rooms during the lockdown for the virus, but the side yard of a Catholic school rented by the shul (irony), filled with a party tent and folding chairs – and everyone said who they had come to say Yisgur for. I had not come for anyone, because none of my immediate family has ever died. I had come because it was the only outdoor service that had any slots left available by the time I signed up. Reservations went fast these days because crowd size was so limited by the virus. I figured a service was a service. I almost didn’t sign up because I noticed there were so few people and the absolute last thing I had wanted was to be noticed. But in the middle of the day, after having to see Andrew and having to be without two of my children on the holiest day of the year while fasting, I realized I could not get through the day without an in-person service. 

During lockdown, I had been expecting to miss girls’ nights out and family dinners, but truly I was shocked at how much I missed being able to pray in the company of others, especially at the High Holidays. Judaism is a religion built on community and communal prayer. What you say, how you say it, and certainly your belief in what you are saying – which for most of the life of the religion has been in a foreign language anyway – all of that is far less important than the idea that you do it in a group of at least 10. There is something magical that happens when you sign and go silent together and it is not the same to do it alone or, God help us, on Zoom. 

And that is how I ended up with just 5 other people, the Rabbi going around the tent to ask who we were there to pray for. The worst part was that everyone else had lost people dear to them and a few during the pandemic. It was so terribly sad because some couldn’t even have a proper funeral. When the Rabbi got to me, I said I didn’t know you were supposed to say Yisgur for someone, so I would just do it in solidarity if that was okay. I did know, of course. My grandmother had gone every year, even in her last years, even if she went to no other service the entire year, to say Yisgur for her mother and the rest of her family that had been lost to the Nazis. I remember the yellow Yurtzeit candle burning on her dining room table. And I remember her telling me how she had hardly even looked back at her mother as her train pulled away from the station in Berlin. She was 16 and she was going to America and she was excited and she had no idea she would never see her mother again. That memory alone was enough to bring up tears as we prayed – Oh, how I missed my grandmother! 

But another thought occurred to me as the rabbi spoke of a palace of tears you could not enter without having mourned yourself, and I realized I was in mourning, but not for a person. I was mourning the end of my second marriage, which was not a marriage officially, but was a marriage to me and had brought me a child and a husband of sorts, a best friend, a lover, and a partner. And now he was gone, off to Levittown with our baby for the afternoon, and I was praying the deepest prayer on the holiest of Jewish days in the side yard of a Catholic School in the heart of South Philly, starving and afraid. I glanced back at the South African woman who had not been able to attend the funeral for her mother who died this summer and I saw a tear rolling down her cheek. We sang Aveinu Malkeynu, Our Father, Our King. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I looked to the sky and felt the tears come anyway, its haunting melody reaching down in through my throat and pulling my belly into my heart. Please God, I thought, please universe, please someone make this end. This cannot be the story of my life, of this country, of this planet. But I knew it could be, and more than that, I knew what I would need in the new year was a strong back, because it wasn’t going to get easier any time soon.