I found something that promised to fix me.
I don’t even know what convoluted chain of Google searches led me there, but somehow I wound up watching a video about a reputation rehabilitation retreat in Malibu called Revibe.
Of course it was called Revibe. If you told me you had a business named Revibe, I’d pretty quickly guess it was either a reputation rehabilitation retreat or a spin-studio-slash-juice-bar.
But as silly as the name was, the place sounded like what I needed. It wasn’t like Personal History—instead, Revibe was there to repair “the whole person.” The video mostly showed shots of the ocean and, like, kites in the breeze and flowers and stuff, and it was narrated by voice-overs telling their stories.
“I’d been fired from my job for inappropriate sexual conduct.”
“I got expelled for threatening a classmate. I was kidding, but my school has a zero-tolerance policy.”
“Everyone knew I was a liar.”
“Even my fiancée couldn’t look me in the eye.”
“When I picked up my daughter, I had to park around the corner so no one would see us together and know she was related to me.”
“I was afraid to leave the house.”
“I was so ashamed.”
“Revibe helped me when no one else could.”
“I can honestly say Revibe saved my life.”
“Valerie and Kevin understood what I was going through in a way that no one else could—not my husband, not my closest friends. They understood, and they didn’t judge.”
“I’m forty-eight years old, and until I attended Revibe, I never really understood how to apologize.”
“Revibe, for me, is more than a retreat, a program, or a series of steps. It’s almost a religion.”
“After Revibe, I got a new job, in a field that matters to me, and I’ve never felt more fulfilled.”
“I was able to make amends with my fiancée.”
“Revibe got my life back on track.”
“Revibe made me a better person. Not just better than I’d been since my scandal—better than I’d been ever.”
“Thank you, Revibe.”
“Valerie and Kevin, thank you for everything you do.”
“Thank you from the very bottom of my heart.”
And if all of those endorsements sound kind of bullshit to you, don’t be so smug. That just means you’ve got the luxury of never having been truly desperate.
But I didn’t suggest it to my parents, at least not right away. Because I looked at the price tag, and it made Rodrigo’s services seem cheap.
How much did it cost?
Well, how much do you think it costs to save your life?
* * *
Soon enough it was time for Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur is the most-observed Jewish holiday of the year. Its English name is the Day of Atonement, meaning it’s when you’re supposed to apologize for all your misdeeds and indiscretions of the past twelve months and vow to do better going forward. You celebrate it by spending all day praying at temple, and you don’t eat or drink anything, including water, for twenty-five hours.
Even on a good year, Yom Kippur is never a “fun” holiday, but at least in the past I’d had Emerson there for company, and other kids from my elementary and middle schools. Now basically everyone I knew was away at college. The Jewish calendar moves around in relation to the solar calendar, which meant that this year Yom Kippur fell on a Wednesday in the middle of the semester. No one was traveling home for that.
Also, every other year, I’d been apologizing for things like “disrespecting my elders” or “making fun of Jason’s girlfriends.” So on a lot of levels, this was a particularly unpleasant Yom Kippur.
My family’s temple is huge. It’s like the Jewish equivalent of a megachurch, especially on the High Holidays. Even people who don’t show up for services any other time of the year come out of the woodwork on Yom Kippur. You can’t find a parking spot within four blocks of the temple, and police are stationed at every intersection to halt traffic so still more worshippers in suits and ties and kippot can make it across the street and into the synagogue.
There are not that many Jews in the world. This was something I didn’t realize when I was little and went to Jewish day school and assumed the whole world was like my world. In fact, I learned when I was older, only about two percent of the United States is Jewish, and only one-fifth of one percent of the world’s population is. So there is something kind of empowering about our being out on the street together, like we are strong in number after all, or at least we are on that one day.
Because so many people turn up for the High Holidays at my temple, they open up the back of the sanctuary and fill it with folding chairs. But my family has reserved seats in the actual pews, twelve rows back from the bimah, on the left side. We angled for those seats for a long time. We’d started out in the folding chairs, and it had taken years of maneuvering before we got moved up, at which point Mom said that she’d achieved her life’s work, though I’m fairly sure she was kidding.
I sat between my parents, as I always did, and I stood when everyone stood and sat when everyone sat and read responsively or silently as each prayer called for.
But I had trouble believing any of it.
Every year, Yom Kippur goes like this: all the Jews of the world spend hours and hours praying that the wicked will be vanquished and that evil will evaporate from the Earth. Now, for the first time in my life, I felt bad for the wicked. What if they didn’t want to be vanquished, even though that would be better for the world? What if they didn’t want to evaporate?
Between afternoon and evening services, my parents and I went for a walk around the lagoon. There’s not much you can do on Yom Kippur: you can’t watch TV or use the computer or your cell phone, you can’t eat or do any work. (Not that this stopped me from quickly turning on my phone while in the temple bathroom stall, unable to wait until the holiday was over to check the internet to see if my life had been torn apart yet again.) Basically your Yom Kippur options are praying, napping, and walking. As we walked, my parents argued about whether the new rabbi’s sermon was better or worse than the old rabbi’s sermons had been, while I looked at the lagoon and tried not to imagine drinking it all down.
Just a week and a half ago, on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, my parents and I had come out to this very spot for tashlich, a tradition where you cast your sins into the sea—or for my family, the lagoon, because it was closer. For tashlich you take pieces of bread and assign to each one a bad deed that you’ve committed over the previous year. Then you throw them out to the water, where the birds swoop in and eat them. The birds of the Bay Area must be filled with sin.
I’d gone through nearly a loaf of bread, throwing out bad deed after bad deed long after my parents were ready to go home. Yet here I was still. Why couldn’t my sins stay at sea? Why did they seep back into me every time?
At a break in my parents’ conversation, I said, “I have an idea for what I should do,” and they both fell silent.
One of the greatest atonements I needed to make this Yom Kippur was to my mother. The summer was gone, and with it was any excuse she might have had for slow work. The school year was back in full swing, and this should have been her busiest time for speaking engagements and consulting gigs, but it wasn’t. She didn’t say a word about it, never blamed me, never even mentioned there was a problem, but it was plain that, day after day, we were both just sitting at home. And unless somebody did something, maybe we would be forever.
How do you atone for ruining the livelihood of one of the people you love most in all the world? Can you even atone for that? Or should you just evaporate?
“That’s great, Winter,” Mom said carefully. “What’s your idea?”
“It’s a reputation rehabilitation retreat down in Malibu,” I said. “It’s called Revibe.”
“What does that mean, ‘reputation rehabilitation retreat’?” Dad asked. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I nodded. “It’s pretty new, and it’s one-of-a-kind. The idea is that victims of public shaming go through a five-week program together, with the help of qualified professionals, to overcome their circumstances and forge a path forward.” That was word-for-word what their website said. I added, “It’s a lot of volunteer work and personal reflection, and it’s supposed to really make you become a better person, from the inside out. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that seems like it maybe has a shot of bringing me back some approximation of my old life.” I wanted that. My old life. I’d never wanted anything more desperately. “They have a new session starting at the end of November. If you think it’s a good idea.”
“I think it’s a terrific idea,” Mom replied immediately, and I could see the relief in her eyes, the hopeful glint, that we were no longer going to take this lying down, we were doing something.
“Hold up,” Dad said. “We don’t know anything about this place. What kind of ‘qualified professionals’ are we talking about here? What exactly qualifies them? And who are these other ‘victims of public shaming’ you’d be there with? I’m not sending you off to spend five weeks hobnobbing with criminals and sociopaths.”
“Do you think I’m a criminal or a sociopath?” I asked quietly.
“Of course not.”
“These are people like me, Dad. They’re people who made mistakes, and they can’t get past them, and they need a second shot.”
Dad rubbed his eyes. “This is a hard decision to make on an empty stomach, Winter.”
“Sorry.”
“How is this any better than that Google results fixer your mother tried to hire?”
Mom gave an aggrieved sniff.
I answered, “Because Revibe cares about the whole person. Their goal isn’t just to make you appear better; it’s to make you feel better and be better.”
“Is it a cult?” Dad asked bluntly.
“Oy gevalt!” Mom exploded. “Why are you so suspicious? Your daughter has found something she’s excited to do, and these are people who want to help her. What’s the problem?”
“Mom said I had to find a solution,” I reminded him. “And I did. This is it.”
“I don’t understand how it works,” Dad insisted. “And I don’t understand their motivation. Why would they want to help Winter?”
“Why would anyone want to help anyone?” Mom asked rhetorically. “Why do they need a selfish incentive to do a mitzvah?”
“Money,” I answered Dad. “They want to help because they get paid for it. Is that enough of an incentive for you?”
Dad harrumphed. “I’m assuming it’s expensive. Since it’s one-of-a-kind. And in Malibu.”
Malibu is down in Southern California, and it’s known for being the beach where rich people have second or third homes. Like, anyone you can think of in Hollywood probably has a Malibu house.
“We’ll make it work,” Mom said quickly. Dad gave her a look, and I knew she was speaking from her feelings, not from practicality; she had no idea what this cost and was confident she could do it anyway. She would go bankrupt trying to save me, if she had to.
“I’m going to pay for it myself,” I told them, the words bitter on my tongue.
“How?” Dad asked reasonably.
“I’m going to use my prize money.”
“From the spelling bee?” Mom asked. “Oh, honey, you can’t do that. That’s your college money.”
“I’m not going to college,” I reminded her.
There was an awkward pause. Then Mom said, “Not right now, no, but you will. You’re going to reapply this fall…”
“We’ll be looking at a different sort of school from where we were looking last year,” Dad conceded. “Okay, Kenyon’s off the table, but there are literally thousands of other options.”
“And what if none of them will take me?” I asked.
“You’re being defeatist, and you’re getting way ahead of yourself,” Dad said. “You will go to college. It doesn’t have to be fancy, or private, or out-of-state, or a four-year program. Frankly, I don’t care where you go. But you will get a degree, Winter; that’s not negotiable.”
“Fine,” I said, not because I believed him, necessarily, but because I needed to win this immediate battle before fighting a future battle. “But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s not going to be the sort of college that I need my prize money to afford.”
They didn’t say anything, as they pictured, perhaps, the places I could now wind up as compared to the places we had for so long imagined.
“I need to go to Revibe,” I said. “And I need to pay for it myself. Otherwise I’m never going to get better.”
“Okay,” Dad said wearily, “we’ll consider it.” And I got the sense that if he had not been fasting, and there had been any fluid in his body right then, he might have cried. But I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the distance, on the birds that were swooping around, always scanning for just one more crumb of sin.