!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Adrift in Cambridge, I relied more and more on my remaining friends. Jeanne and Marcia stayed with me at 119 Oxford, giving us one spare bedroom for guests and parties. A month into the semester, on the first really cold evening of Fall, Jeanne observed, “Janie – Sarah – you’ve got to come out of your shell. There are other people in the world. Has he even written to you yet?”
“I don’t care and I don’t want him too,” I softly said.
Marcia added, “Studying is fine, that’s good you have that, but you’ve got to pull yourself out.”
“Maybe – don’t take this the wrong way, Sarah – but maybe, you should see someone?”
Marcia seemed to disagree. “No, Jeanne, it’s still too soon. Rebounds are not so good an idea, I think…”
“That’s not what I meant.” Jeanne looked directly at me. “I checked at the health center. They have a whole list of therapists who’ll see you.”
“What, you think I’m losing it?” I demanded.
“No, not at all. You are the most together girl I know. Maybe too together is the point.” My quizzical look egged her on. “You’re holding everything in, trying so hard to be stable, to hide your feelings from yourself.”
Marcia added, “You don’t want to get stuck there, Sarah. Jeanne’s right. Talking to someone who’s a stranger, but trained to help you help yourself, that might be just what you need.
I remembered Justine, on that plane trip from LA, how good it had felt to pour my feelings out. But she didn’t know what to do with them, except nod and listen. I made an appointment to see a psychologist, making sure they referred me to a woman.
It took a month of weekly sessions simply to tell my story, before she began to tease the feelings out of me. Then another month to dust them off, set them aside, and aim me towards the future. By Christmas, she suggested I let myself “go out”.
“What does that mean?” I asked, defying her rule that “I ask the questions.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll let that one slide. It doesn’t have to be a date, with one person, per se. You said you’d been to Hillel a bit last year. Maybe it’s time to give that another try?”
Once again, I found myself in one of Rabbi Gold’s Thursday evening study sessions, sitting next to Howard Lehrman. The topic was, “The Kibbutz Movement.”
“The first Kibbutz, Deganya, was founded in what was then Palestine, in 1909, near the Sea of Galilee, by an idealistic group of eastern European Jews. Eleven of them, including two women, built a farm on land purchased by contributions from Jews all over the world,” Rabbi Gold began.
Afterwards, Howard walked me home. He eagerly began, “After I pass my boards, I’m thinking of going over there.”
“To Israel?” I asked
“To work on a Kibbutz. See if I want to stay there.”
“How does that work?”
“The ‘Law of Return’. It’s a little complicated…basically, if you can show you are a Jew by birth or marriage, you can travel there without a visa, stay and work as if you are a citizen for as long as you want, even become a citizen.”
“Would you do that? Become a citizen, I mean?”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter that much, because they allow dual citizenship. I wouldn’t have to give up my passport here. I want to see what it’s like there, if they really do have a better society, a more inclusive sense of justice, like the rabbi said.”
Next session with my therapist, she observed, “Didn’t you say you’d already gone out with Howard before?”
“Well, this wasn’t really a date. We just met a Hillel, and talked a little afterwards.”
“How did that feel, seeing him again like that?”
I hesitated, then admitted, “Howard’s just a friend. I don’t feel anything special for him. But I do like being with him.”
“How so?”
“He’s more than a friend. He’s someone I could live with I think.”
“Like a roommate, not a lover?”
“I guess that’s right. Makes me wonder, how do I know when the spark is there?”
She simply nodded, then said, “Time’s up for today.”
Feeling a little clearer, about both Mike and Howard, I let myself drift back towards men. I discovered, in those therapy sessions, how I needed to keep my feelings and expectations low. “A little low-key fun,” was how she put it.
Mike had written several times that year, terse letters describing the oddness of the weather there, the new friends he’d made, even a ski trip he’d taken to see his sister in Sun Valley. “I think there’s a story there – I’ll send it to you when I finish.” Around my birthday, near the end of school, I received a package from him. Inside were a small toy Jeep, a poem, and…well, first, the poem:
The land-locked seagull, trembling as it dives
even as its eyes scan helplessly,
Searching for an ocean in the trees below.
Like a pontooned plane in Kansas, the white-beaked bird
feels lost and homeless, landless in the never-ending land.
An old man waddles, his grey-haired wife shuffling on behind,
a tiny little boxer prancing tightly at her calves,
Away from the waves, turning back from the sand,
Toward the bluffs and the trees and the grass.
Overhead –
of course, where else?
Flies the grey-flecked gull to the sea.
The man, leaning on his cane pivots slowly to his wife and dog,
as if it were all he ever had to do,
Addresses both, reflects and asks,
“Why should that gull be alone, flying home to the sea?”
Mike ended his letter with the news that Lizzie – Elizabeth, now – had indeed contacted him, and through a convoluted comedy of errors (something about a landlord not allowing a mixed group to rent his three bedroom duplex) ended up sharing a apartment with him in Hollywood for the summer. He did not make it clear whether this was platonic or otherwise, but he did note they could only afford one bedroom there.
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