Exodus: A memoir (18 page)

Was it the case, I worried, that we could never hope to find a community, Jewish or not, that would match up with the vocabulary we had acquired, the words we used to define the meaning of our own existence?

I could not, no matter how hard I struggled to, carve out a life for us in the full-to-bursting city that was Manhattan. I could barely carve out a space to breathe. I found myself disappearing into churches just to steal a few moments of silence; unlike most synagogues, they were left open to the public every day. I would sit in one of the rear pews, trying not to make any noise. What would I say if a pastor came out and saw me there? Staring straight ahead at the figure of Jesus on the cross, I’d wrestle with old feelings of guilt at being in a church (as a child, I would have to cross the street and walk on the other side, so evil were those imposing buildings) and the new, rational voice in my head that said, this is just a place, and whatever it might mean to others, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean to you.

Sometimes, in Catholic churches, there were candles that could be lit for a donation, and although I wasn’t sure what they were for, I sometimes lit them, just to see the flame flicker. I’d nurture some strange hope that by igniting something outside myself, I could ignite something internally as well.

I endured by waiting for things to get better. I had never tricked myself into thinking that these early years would be easy, and so I suffered gladly under the notion that it was all temporary, that eventually I would figure out how to live the life I wanted, the one I had given everything up for.

I was in my early twenties and raising a child, therefore not a typical denizen of New York. I had no resources. I went on a few bad dates with people who injured my self-esteem simply because I hadn’t yet acquired the language with which to communicate nor the padding with which to protect myself. My friends donated their old clothes to me, so I was able to wear the designer fashions that allowed me to blend in on the Upper East Side. They took me out to nice restaurants, and I was given a front-row seat at the show that is New York City. And the more I learned about people’s lives, the more convinced I became that this was not the life I wanted as a replacement. But I could still read books. And Isaac and I spent many Sundays at the Met or the Museum of Natural History, and it was those moments that reminded me why I had done it all. I held on to the hope that I would eventually be able to create a life for us.

To meet the gap between my meager income and the exorbitant rent, I donated my eggs. I pinched the fold of skin on my hip twice a day for a cold injection of hormones until my ovaries swelled to the size of grapefruits and six dozen eggs were harvested from me on some anonymous operating table in New Jersey. It took six months for my period to come back, messy and painful like a miscarriage. This couldn’t possibly be worth it, I thought then. Why was I continuing to struggle for the right to live in a city that brought me no sense of satisfaction or home? But where could I go? New York was the only place I had ever known.

It was Jean Baudrillard’s
America
that first gave me the idea of driving across the country, just after I stopped attending college. I read the book in the winter of 2010, after finding the new revised edition on a table in my favorite bookstore, and immediately became fascinated with the prospect of discovering the American landscape that was so foreign to me. I was yet unaware of the great tradition started by de Tocqueville, that of the European tour of the New World, but in many ways I already identified as a refugee in the country of my birth, and I felt a compelling need to experience it up close in an effort to define myself within or without its limits.

As a child, my idea of America had been reduced to the skyline of Manhattan, to the mass of the Atlantic that separated my community from its troubled past on the other side. America was the place to which we had come, a stop on the diaspora route, nothing more. Now here I was, exiled from a community of self-imposed exiles, neither a part of my past nor of my present. If I was an American, how was I to be one?

When I had read the great American writers, I’d found myself struggling to identify with the motives of their characters. I could not decipher the language of their culture or place their actions in any context. In Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I found the most sympathy in the stories that took place in Europe. I felt at home in
A Moveable
Feast
, in
This Side of Paradise
, both for the descriptions of old European culture that felt so familiar and for the depiction of the alien on foreign soil. I came back to the old European writers for comfort, and ventured into Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck only when I felt brave enough to do so.

So I took Kerouac’s
On the Road
with me on the flight out to San Francisco in June of 2011, while Isaac spent the requisite portion of his summer vacation with his father. I hoped to gain insight into the American tradition of the road trip, the sort of aimless back-and-forth momentum that kept Sal and Dean swinging like a pendulum over the map of the United States. What was the source of this restlessness that kept them from settling in one spot and calling it a permanent home? Was it some grand appetite for the giant parcel of land that was their birthright, a desire to claim it all as one’s own?

Baudrillard had started in California, Geoff Dyer explains in his introduction to
America
, and so I thought I would start there, too, the farthest point, and work my way back. I chose San Francisco, not Los Angeles, for what I was looking for wasn’t necessarily the source of America’s cultural mainstream, but its social inclusiveness. The Bay Area, I had been told, was a liberal bastion, the equivalent of New York without the Jews. It seemed a strong starting-off point, a place where I would not be too much out of my element—a place where the self-proclaimed strange could blend in.

I arrived just in time for Gay Pride, when the city comes riotously alive with parades and performances and parties that spill onto the streets. Nearly naked men streaked by, leaving clouds of colored glitter in their wake; women whose fat spilled in luscious rolls over skimpy costumes danced provocatively on stages; buttoned-up lesbians in short haircuts revved the engines on their bikes aggressively, as skinny, lip-glossed femmes clung to their waists. I was at once titillated, overwhelmed, and ecstatic. It seemed all the people around me were engaged in the business of being their most extreme and unrestrained selves, blissfully
oblivious to anything else. The rest of the country might as well have disappeared; you could almost believe that America had been transformed into a place free of judgment and censure.

I stood in a crowd in front of Dolores Park to watch the Dyke March. I looked on curiously as a young woman waving a rainbow flag climbed intrepidly onto a streetlamp, aided by others in the crowd who supported her while she yelled encouragement. A generous portion of her back was visible between the hem of her shrunken men’s suit vest and the waistband of her low riders. To me, she seemed a symbol for the tidal wave of American unrest in that moment, an icon of enthusiasm that would inevitably slide down that lamppost, aided by the grease of her own sweat, back into the crowd.

I was with two lesbians I’d met earlier that week: a lithe, golden-haired Scandinavian woman who had snagged a Jewish brunette for a wife. They seemed like a poster couple for the perfect gay relationship. I felt, for the first time, a sense of regret that my mother, who identified as gay, had not been able to actualize her own form of happiness for herself. I sent her some pictures of the event from my phone, telling her I wished she could be there to see it for herself. To which she replied, “I’ve got the parade here in New York, it’s plenty.” And I thought, for her it probably is.

The next morning I went to Humphry Slocombe in the Mission District to try its famous Secret Breakfast ice cream, realizing too late that the bourbon it contained was raw. I couldn’t walk a straight line for the next three hours, and so I stumbled happily around Haight-Ashbury listening to dreadlocked guitar players strum three chords. Everything was foreign, which felt both delightful and frightening at the same time.

After a few days spent discovering the city’s breathtaking
S-curves, its variety of one-dollar tacos, designer coffee, and tai chi enthusiasts, I picked up my car from an acquaintance who had driven it out from New York for me and ventured north. I crossed the Golden Gate on a brilliantly sunny day, but the bridge was suspended in its own personal cloud of fog. It reminded me of the biblical cloud pillar that had been said to follow the Jewish people in their forty-year exodus through the desert; I drove through it feeling thrilled by the blindness it imposed, as if I were relying on some higher, truer compass to see me through to the other side. As soon as the fog lifted, I found myself in Marin County, and the expanse of verdant fields rolled down on my right side to Sausalito and the shimmering Richardson Bay below. I veered west to Muir Woods, snaking along the one-lane road that curved sharply around the jagged edges of Mount Tamalpais. I sidestepped the glimmering peninsula of Stinson Beach in favor of the rarely appreciated Bolinas, a town so surrounded by natural reserves that it was practically off the map of civilization. Bolinas had a general store and a saloon, complete with swinging door. Inside was a pool table, a jukebox, and a very grumpy bartender who clearly didn’t like serving the occasional tourist. I stopped there only for a quick Coke before shoving the half door open again with my hip, strolling past the lagoon to the stretch of beach that overlooked Bolinas Bay, where a local man, originally from Texas, sat in his usual spot nursing his third beer of the day. I stayed long enough for him to share his earnestly expressed, hardly flattering opinions about Jews, although he could only attest to having met two in his lifetime. I congratulated him on finding a third. “Better yet,” I said, “she came to you!”

I turned south on Highway 1 and drove back through San Francisco to the hazy beaches of Pacifica and the hairpin turns of
Devil’s Slide, which offered breathtaking views of frothy waves crashing against the rocky shore below. This then gave way to Montara and the blink of a town named Moss Beach, where two new friends of mine, whom I had been introduced to at a group dinner in San Francisco, lived in a light-filled house overlooking the ocean.

Their names were Justine and Max. Max was a performer who traveled frequently, and Justine was a writer who spent most of her time in that remote house, working on her magnum opus. She invited me to stay with her while her husband was on tour. We discovered that we had the same birthday, although thirty years apart. I was, at first, mostly confused by her overt efforts at friendship, and I responded clumsily when she told me she saw herself in me. “What part?”

It does get better
, she wanted me to know.

“How did you do it?”

“It’s this right here,” she said pointing at her house, at the ocean below it, at the fog that wrapped itself around the town like a woolly scarf. “I carved out the space I eventually realized I needed. I created the stability and peace that I longed for.”

And it did seem that simple. She had left an urban life behind to live in the middle of nowhere, with her flowers and animals and fog tentacles, and retreated into the active space that was her mind. Like me, she felt assaulted after spending too much time in a city. Her thoughts needed more room to grow. We were all different, but it took us too long to realize that the mainstream formula for happiness might not fit and that we would have to find our own.

We walked alongside the ocean, just the two of us, with no one else around. The beach here was ringed in rocky ground upon which grew diverse and colorful species of moss; stretches of
yellow and purple and green extended from the narrow highway out to the drop, after which a slight strip of sand gave way to indifferent slate waters. Here and there a harrier hawk swung low to the ground; a scrub jay squealed frenetically in the brush. As I walked, I contemplated the value of a life lived in the wild, experiencing for the first time the peace inherent in isolation, and felt the first images of my future germinate quietly within my soul. If I was to find a real home someday, I thought, then it would be like this, surrounded by trees and water and birds, my identity allowed to grow into itself, privately and powerfully, without being shaped and molded by any community of humans.