The Guest

Tonight there is rain and I walked home in my rubber boots, humming a little tune. I passed pink formica tables inside the doorway of a take out place. I walked behind two Hasidic boys strolling the streets sharing a cigarette and speaking in what sounded like Russian. But maybe it was Polish. I don't think I have ever heard Polish. Brooklyn is quiet when I get to my neighborhood. Here, the Haitians and Carribean people have gone to sleep, it is just another day for the gentiles. But in the secretive mystical magical world of Jewry, there has been a camp-out all over town.

     Earlier in the evening I walked to Borough Park, passing houses with sheets hung up on their balconies making white tents of four walls. Inside them I could hear children laughing and people talking. Candlelight streamed from every balcony. It is a holiday called Succoth. 

  Have all things changed so suddenly as to reinvent my little existence? Was it the prayers at Yom Kippur, in the Ocean Parkway Russian synagogue, where the chandelier swayed in glittering domes and the men swayed beneath the high balcony from where I peered down, holding Prayers of the Heart in my awkward hands? Or was it the drive through the autumn foliage, on the winding twisting narrow Taconic Parkway, heading to the house of my childhood friend? We sat on the floor of her attic, each with our Madam Alexander Maggie dolls, and looked through the trunks of clothing she had made. My Maggie wore a gold silk suit I had created and my friend dressed her Maggie in a riding outfit complete with tall leather boots all sewn by her with no pattern. Neither of us use patterns, we just cut and pin and tuck and sew until it looks right. My friend always loved horses when we were little and we both had collections of hard plastic ponies and mares and stallions. Now she owns a beautiful bay, with glossy black mane and tail, and black boots on its feet. I stood by the fence as she opened the gate and let out her mare named ShyAnne, talking to her. "This is my guest for the week end. Say hello," she said. The horse snorted.  Then she brought out a homegrown carrot from the pocket of her jacket and showed me how to keep my thumb flat and my palm low so the horse could eat from my hand. ShyAnne took the carrot with her soft lips. Was that when I began to realize the enormous mountain moving aside?
Or was it when I was invited to a dinner on Succoth? Maybe it was then, when the day was still light and the rain had stopped, and I put on my black outfit and my green rain boots and went to Borough Park where the Hasidic and Ultra Orthodox communities live together. The succah was set up just off their back door.  A long table was covered with a white tablecloth and challah bread and wine and candles were already laid out in waiting.  After the blessings and the dipping of the bread in honey, after the kaddish and the candle lighting, after the meal was laid out before us, a gust of wind swept through the bamboo roof and their back door slammed shut. "The doors locked," someone said. "We're locked in!" someone echoed. Everyone laughed. It was true, we were locked in and the door was steel. "Do you know about the Ushpizin?" someone asked me. "It means guest... each night one of the Holy seven comes to the dinner. Tonight it is Abraham."
     It took almost an hour of balancing chairs one on top of another to climb to the roof and lift up the bamboo poles and call into the darkness for assistance before a spanish speaking man on a bicycle agreed to come through the house and release us. When I went home it was after midnight.
     Great soundless piles of rubble are swept aside and the air shimmers. I am trying to learn something. Sometimes I sit with a book in my hands and I can hear the wind from another century blowing through the pages. Sometimes I look up at the blue sky with white clouds and I see a man in a pointed hat creating a woman in the atmosphere. And at night when I lie down to sleep, I feel enveloped and lifted, as if I am being removed from the earthly and the squalor of life, and held up, as a guest, among the heavens.