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110 8 Afterward We’d been in Baton Rouge for six years when, a month or so before Passover, Stuart and I went to Tucson, Arizona, for the weekend, leaving our three children, ages eleven, seven, and seven, with a babysitter. We went because the University of Arizona law school was interested in hiring Stuart as a visiting professor, with the possibility of the position turning into a full-time one; and, on the theory that they wouldn’t get the husband without the wife’s approval, they invited both of us out to take a look around. They’d even lined up a realtor to give us a tour of the local housing market. Stuart wanted the job, which turned out not to exist but at the time seemed to simultaneously represent a step up on the academic ladder and a better town—the kind of town that people on the East Coast might actually even want to visit—but my own feelings were decidedly more mixed. After all, I liked Baton Rouge. Within five minutes of breathing the desert air, though, I was convinced that Tucson was paradise. There are Democrats in Tucson—loads of them—and old idealistic hippies of every stripe. There are artists and dancers, coffee bars and independent bookstores, practitioners of Reiki and yoga centers on every corner. The air is clean, the hills are covered with wildflowers, people go around dressed in floppy, light-colored linens and sandals and eat fresh vegetables. St. Anthony’s would get along without me. And as far as Beth Shalom went, who needed Beth Shalom? My bat mitzvah? I’d do it in the desert. In Tucson there were half a dozen synagogues to choose from, and one of them actually invited us to join them on Shabbat morning for worship services at the top of a canyon. The closest we ever got to nature at Beth Shalom was the parking lot. Come Saturday morning, Stuart and I, along with a dozen or so members of the Tucson synagogue, climbed past cacti and prickly pears, through ancient red rock embedded with the fossil remains of a thousand extinct undersea creatures. At last we arrived at a deep pool fed by a waterfall, where, on large flat rocks at water’s edge, both men and women donned yarmulkes and prayer shawls, gathered in a circle, and began to chant the prayers: Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohanu Melach ha-olam, sheasani Yisrael. Blessed is the Eternal our Lord, who has made me a Jew. My voice, along with those of my fellow Jews, rose in the desert air, echoing off the cliffs and climbing to the heavens. By the time, several hours later, the realtor whom the law school had lined up picked us up at our hotel, I was ready to pack my bags. “I think you’ll be very pleased with the housing market,” she said as we rounded the corner in her sleek, silver Mercedes. I didn’t respond. I was too busy decorating our new house—the one with the white stucco walls, exposed beams, and tile floors—filling it with tribal rugs and big jugs of wild- flowers, modern art, books. And there I was, on the terrace: I’m doing yoga, or perhaps I’m painting. I’m doing yoga and I’m painting, and my hair is pulled behind me, in a braid. How happy, how radiant, how peaceful I look. And that is because I have become Pure. I have achieved Godhead . I am glowing with light. All the crap, all the mess, of my normal, everyday life is a thing of the past: the irritating woman at Beth Shalom who always corners me after services to insist that I write a letter to the editor on whatever is bugging her at that moment, the nut-ball who rails against Bolshevism as if the Russians were about to invade Baton Rouge, the neighbor who likes to tell me that Clinton was the anti-Christ—all of them are gone, vanquished, dispensed with. Indeed, I am on a new, higher plane altogether, joyful, actualized. I am like a saint, or a guru, or even a prophet, but better looking, and a lot more stylish. We won’t move to Tucson, but I don’t know that yet, and so, as I sit in the front seat of the realtor’s Mercedes, I am gazing at the foothills that surround our new, imaginary...

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