But now the interviewer wanted to move forward, or, more precisely, backward. “Since we’ve already discussed The 614th Commandment and your other significant performances, I wonder whether this might be a good moment to shift to a period of your life you haven’t spoken about much in public. I mean the time you spent in Israel, at the kibbutz. When you were in your twenties. What happened then? At least your name, ‘Shlomith’, is from that period, as I understand, and it isn’t your birth name. Why did you leave the United States, and why did you decide to return?” The interviewer poured Shlomith more oolong tea in her gold-rimmed porcelain cup and waited.
Sheila the drummer, adrift in Park Slope
So, what happened? What happened was a chain reaction, whose intermediate stages and flash points can be described in many divergent ways. Everything depends on which party one happens to ask about the series of events (which at the time they occurred weren’t yet a series, nicely ordered in a line, canned and bundled, labeled and shoved in their box, like shoes are arranged on cleaning day, or jars in the refrigerator on jam-making day, or like the endless wires and connectors that build up behind the television crammed in a cable organizer: in a word, tamed, because the nature of wires and connectors is to be tangled like a nest of snakes, and the same thing goes for events; wires and connectors—and shoes!—collect dirt, dust, fuzz, fluff, hair, lint, rocks, just like events collect shocks, changes in direction, hesitations, ruptures, pastilles down the wrong pipe, and, with unfortunate regularity, terrible amounts of anger, which has a hard time finding a target: objects fly, hands are raised, almost striking, screaming penetrates all the surfaces, the walls, the floors, the earth, and space, the cerebral cortex and that heart and the kidneys, which specialize in waste treatment. All those disturbances ultimately end up hidden, like the refuse that disappears under a snake nest of cords and connectors, and under rubber shoe soles, in the grooves of the tread pattern; that is the treacherous nature of refuse and disturbances, and even so—breathe, breathe, breathe!—all that distracting, disgusting, difficult, depressing and indeterminate stuff has to be picked up, like apples fallen in the garden; all of them, apples and problems, need saucing and bottling like cables need bundling and shoes need arranging in a row. And if you place a label on the side of the jar, you know immediately what’s inside: BREAKING UP, LOVE, INFATUATION, COMING TO YOUR SENSES, BREAKING UP. A beautiful series, no?)
In any case, the facts are as follows: the year was 1963 and Shlomith, who at the time was not Shlomith, let alone Shlomith-Shkhina, but rather Sheila, was seventeen years old. She lived in a small studio apartment separated by a thin wall from her parents’ apartment in Park Slope on Carroll Street, and she was in bad shape. Before Shlomith lived in the studio, and before Sheila, it had been cousin Benjamin’s temporary residence, but Benjamin had found the love of his life and moved away. Soon after this, Sheila—we apologize that we have to use, temporarily of course, this previously unfamiliar name, which may be troublesome to commit to memory, but try to remember: Shlomith is (to some degree) the same as Sheila, and Sheila is (to some degree) the same as Shlomith (Sh is Sh is Sh: Shlomith, Sheila, Shlomith, Sheila)—began to pester to have the apartment for herself. She was fifteen years old. She had had enough of sitting together at the dinner table. She didn’t want to see her mother’s face, withdrawn in her martyr’s bitterness, which occasionally blew out an accusation, some sort of muffled exclamation, like a black cloud of spores from an old puffball fungus (Lycoperdon perlatum) that has seen better days. Sheila was bored and depressed, and that was why she was so insanely thin.
Finally, as a seventeenth birthday present, Sheila received her very own keys to “the practice apartment”, as her mother, Miriam, referred to it. Miriam had demanded that a hole resembling a cat flap be built in the wall, near the floor, so she could send food to her daughter, who was incomprehensibly uninterested in preparing her own, even though the flat had such a nice little “practice kitchen”, where Benjamin’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, Raizy had enjoyed making food, including challenging baked goods, which everyone on both sides of the wall had relished—all except Sheila. No, Miriam’s daughter was definitely not moving to the other side of the wall without this rescue hatch!
Sheila didn’t have any alternative. So she pushed a chest of drawers she had inherited from her grandmother in front of the hatch, and her father cut a hole in the oak back. This way she could choose for herself when she opened the drawer to accept the food her mother had shoved in, or the messages; all vital dispatches. However, now her mother couldn’t peek through the hole whenever she wanted. And Miriam definitely would have. Sheila could easily imagine her mother mopping the floor on her side of the hole, where something difficult to clean had supposedly fallen, something that had supposedly almost spread to the other side of
