Karma for Beginners (11 page)

He's not talking, I'm not talking, so finally I do like he did when Violent Femmes got embarrassing and dig in the backpack for a tape. I have a feeling Colin will always want to talk about music. I wonder if he ever heard of Green Tea Experience.

The first tape I find says “Pink Floyd The Wall.” I heard some dirtball boys talk about the movie of that once. Apparently there's some intense scene where the guy freaks out on drugs and shaves his nipples off or something. I was always kind of curious. I put in side two and ask about the story of the band.

I was right: immediately he quits being quiet. “Oh man, ‘The Wall.' This album is
historical
,” he says. “It's a concept album. You know what a concept album is?”

I shake my head. I don't really care what a concept album is. I just want him to talk to me.

“It's an album where the whole thing is a story, not just a bunch of songs? Anyway, it's about this guy named Pink, and his parents oppress him and everyone at school tries to stifle who he is and mold and twist him to fit into society, and no one understands him? So he builds this wall, like a literal wall, around himself, like to protect him.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. But eventually he becomes this big rock star, and the wall drives him crazy, 'cause he's totally lonely and isolated from everyone else, know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“And by the end of the album his conscience, like, puts him on trial, and the judge, which is really just him, tells him he has to tear down his wall and open himself back up to other people.”

“Wow.”

“It's kind of deep,” he says.

“Yeah.”

This song called
Hey You
comes on and he reaches over and holds my hand on the gearshift. It doesn't bother me when he gets quiet again.

. . .

Surrender all desires, for they are the only root of misery and suffering.

When I show up at the lot in the morning, he's already there beneath a yellow school bus, socket set catching the early morning sun by his feet. I consider kicking his boot like before, but I decide that it's a bad idea. Sure, yesterday each time that I got nervous, he was perfect, holding my hand on the gearshift, saying just the exact right things. But between then and now there was a night. What if he spent it thinking, She's boring, she's fourteen, she's just a kid. What if he even thought that it was wrong? I don't want to act like I expect everything to be okay, just in case it isn't.

I say his name.

He comes out from under the bus wiping grease off his forehead, and I almost die at how gorgeous he is. Of course I always knew it, but before, it was distant, like a mountain or a statue, something far off and amazing.

Yesterday I saw it close: dirty hair, scar running through his eyebrow, pores dotting his cheek, all the perfect imperfections that make a person just exactly them. Not the beautiful that comes from far away; the beautiful that comes from real.

He sets down his wrench. “Hey,” he says. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I sit down on the gravel. He looks at the ground. I can tell he's planned something out; he looks nervous.

“I, um—I want you to know I didn't take you out there intending for anything to happen. It's important to me that you know that.”

“Okay.”

“It's not like I had some plan to put the moves on you or something.”

My cheeks get hot. “I know.”

“And it's okay that it happened, but at the same time. . .” He trails off.

I can't believe he is going to trail off right in the middle of that very sentence. “At the same time
what
?”

“Well, at the same time, Tessa, I really value our friendship.”

Crap.

“It's not that I don't want to hang out with you; It's actually the total opposite. I do want to hang out with you, I want to
keep
hanging out with you, and I don't want anything to get in the way of that.”

My eyes are starting to sting. I keep them on the gravel. I can't look at him.

“And, you know, I'm kind of a lot older than you.”

What does he think I am, stupid? “I know.”

“And it really wasn't my plan for that to happen yesterday.”

“Yeah, you said that.” He doesn't have to rub it in.

“And so I think it's a good idea if it doesn't ever happen again. Ever.”

I'm trying to keep my eyes closed enough to hold the tears in and not so tight that I squeeze them out.

“Know what I mean, Tess?” He cranes his face closer to mine, trying to get me to look at him. He waits. I can't believe he is trying to get me to look at him. I can't believe he's making me talk.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” It comes out choky, catching on the phlegm in my throat. If I say one extra word, I will start to really cry.

“Okay. Because I really like you, you know. I really do.”

And for some reason that one nice thing at the end of all the horrible things makes my chest crumple and I do cry, not a few tears like the day after he was gone, but hard, with noise and everything. I sound like a horse. It is officially awful, but I can't stop; everyone always leaves me, and my chest is hitching on its own.

He just watches. His eyes crinkle down at the corners like he feels bad, which makes me cry harder. He fidgets and sits on his hands. He opens his mouth like he's going to talk, but nothing comes out. He looks away, and then back at me again. Then he says, “Fuck it,” leans in fast and hugs me.

I wish I had a wall to put around me like the Pink Floyd guy so I didn't feel so naked, but Colin's shoulder is the closest thing there is. I get snot on his Led Zeppelin T-shirt. I can feel his neck next to my wet face, his arms tight around me. For a long time, I cry there and he doesn't move.

And then he does. When my sobs slow down he pulls back partway, hands on my shoulders, eyes pointing into mine. It's hard to stay locked into his gaze, but impossible to look away. I can't even imagine how I look to him right now, the snot and the red and the bloodshot. But he doesn't flinch.

He tilts his head; this look crosses his face, part shaky, part sure; and then he leans back in.

His lips are on my eyelids, then my forehead, then my cheeks. Then my nose, which is kind of funny; then my chin. It's like he's making a skin of tiny kisses on my face, thin and delicate but strong enough to cover up the raw, sewing me back together so the tears dry and the hurt stops. I stay there, still, barely even breathing.

I almost jump when his lips touch my mouth.
I don't understand what he's doing—five minutes
ago it was
That can never happen again ever
—but I don't
want to stop to ask. Who knows, this might be my last
chance. The back-and-forth of yesterday, then today,
now this, yanks me in opposite directions till I don't
know what the rules are: there's nothing to expect,
nothing's coming next; all I can do is be inside this, right
this second, now.

Now
keeps going for a long time. Finally Colin pulls away.
I get scared he's going to take it back again, but he doesn't.
Instead he looks at me and says, “Oh boy.” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head, then leans in for one more
kiss. After it: “Boy, oh boy.” And then he says, “I told this
guy in town I'd check out his car at ten. It's got a rattle.”

“Okay,” I say, even though I don't want him to go. We get up, but he's still near me, close enough that I can feel the sliver of air between our stomachs like something solid. I imagine it's a rubber band, pulling taut between us, keeping us connected even as he starts to back away.

Then something bright and moving catches my eye over Colin's shoulder.

Devanand.

He's close enough that I can see his T-shirt says
HARMONIC CONVERGENCE, AUGUST 15, 1987
in turquoise and magenta letters.

What I should do is pull back. What I should do is pull back so Colin and I are far apart, reconstruct the safe space of air between us. Instead I make myself very very still, like a rabbit staring at a fox. Devanand keeps walking, just a hundred feet away, watching his feet. I hardly blink. If Colin notices me move, he'll turn around; then Devanand will notice back, and what happens next could tip things in the entire wrong direction. The last thing I want in the whole universe is Devanand coming in and scaring Colin off again.

I lose my balance; my sneaker scuffles on the gravel. Just a second, just an inch, but it's enough to

make a tiny noise. Across the trees, Devanand quits staring at his socks-and-sandals toes and his eyes lock directly into mine. Shit shit shit. I freeze again. For a second there's a question. Then he pieces the picture together like a puzzle, and then his whole face focuses in on the space between my chest and Colin's. His brows knit and he tracks back to my face again, his eyes telling me:
I see you guys. I see
.

I know these ashram people say, “There's no such thing as duality,” that “opposites like
good
and
evil
are just illusions of the ego,” but I can tell you:
good
is thin veils of kisses, close-together chests with rubber bands between them, and
evil
is Devanand's eyebrows condemning my entire being in the parking lot. They are exact and total opposites. I don't care what they say about the essential sameness of the universe.

They duke it out inside my head all day. I'll be turning that last kiss over and over in my mind, and then Devanand pokes his face into my imagination. My afternoon becomes an epic battle between the warm ocean of the happiest I've ever felt and the terrifying knowledge that it could be destroyed at any moment by a gross-bearded hippie with jogging shorts and an antiauthoritarian authority complex.

When we're filing out from Evening Program, I spot Devanand's ratty auburn ponytail above the crowd. I'm sandwiched between Vrishti and my mom like vegetarian lunch meat; their skirts swish at my ankles as we inch toward the lobby. My chest thunks hard and I think,
Please please please don't let Devanand ever ever meet my mom
. If he meets her, he'll tell, and if that happens, she will break us up. I'm fourteen years old and Colin is twenty. I'm not stupid. I know what that means. But I also know that he is the only good thing that has ever happened to me, the only thing I have ever had that's mine. I can't let them take him away.

In the lobby, I hold the Styrofoam cup to my mouth and blow to cool the chai. It burns my upper lip, but I don't mind. Finally Devanand is out of sight and I can think about trees and hands on the gearshift and what worn T-shirts feel like under fingers.

Around me people talk, bangles jangling on gesturing wrists, voices loud. They all speak the same weirdly formal language that's not quite theirs; it makes them the same on the surface, like cliques of kids at school. They're discussing some new rule the Guru made, something about separating men and women for meditation. There seems to be some controversy. Gajendra says that
he
, for one, is extremely concerned men won't have access to sacred feminine energies, and what are the women supposed to do to reconnect with the warrior archetype?

My mom steps forward from the guys clustered around her; puts down her chai and jumps down his throat in front of everyone. “I really think it's inappropriate to question him, Gajendra.” She sounds like she's talking to me, not an adult her own age. It's weird to me how adamant she is. “Don't you think that it's maybe a bit presumptuous? I mean, think about the layers of desire clouding and obscuring our perceptions. Think about all the things that we don't know or understand. Aren't you grateful he can see so clearly?”

Gajendra looks at my mom like she is wildly stupid. “Well,
Sarah
, of course I'm grateful for his clear perception. But that doesn't mean you give up your free will and right to question. That's just naïve.”

Everyone is listening.

“For example, have you actually considered how your own practice might benefit from this decree?”

“Well, the Guru says—”

“Yes, we all know what the Guru says. But what do
you
feel, Sarah?”

“Well—” my mom stammers. For a second she teeters, too far out on a limb and wobbly, like when one of her old boyfriends stopped pretending to listen but she hadn't stopped wanting to talk. I know that face— the scared-deer look in her big brown eyes, the flutter in her lips. I kind of want to link my arm through my mom's, tell Gajendra he's being an asshole, but at the same time I kind of don't.

Then she pulls herself up straight, fixes her eyes on him, strong. “You know what? What I feel, Gajendra, is what an incredible relief it is to finally simply
trust
someone, without argument or questioning or worry. What I feel is the joy of surrender.” Her feet are planted on the floor, her voice calmer and steadier than I've ever heard. Nods and “hmms” of Deep-Realization-Agreement come from the clutch of people around us. “
Surrender
,” she repeats, rolling the syllables in her mouth like something sweet, and there's nothing he can say.

The air has the crisp bite of almost-November. Outside the dorms, Mom and Vrishti hug good night. Vrishti looks into her eyes and says, “That was beautiful tonight, Sarah,” and means it. Normally I'd expect my mom to puff up proud, but she just shrugs, bashful. “It's just the truth.”

They look into each other's eyes like real friends, hands clasped in the cold air; then Vrishti squeezes and lets go. “Night, Sarah. Night, Tessa too.” She blows a kiss and jingles down the path.

Alone with my mom, I'm afraid she'll find out about Colin. I'm scared she'll hear my thoughts; she'll look at me and somehow see it on my skin. And I can't let her. I can't take the chance. I have to distract her. Just like I'm sure Colin will always want to talk about music, I'm sure my mom will always want to talk about the Guru, and so I lead her down that path.

“So, is there some kind of new rule about men and women at the ashram?” She looks at me, surprised. “Well yes, Tessa, there is.” Pause. Crickets. “Did you want to hear about it?”

“Sure.”

Her face lights up. “Oh! Well, the Guru gave us a big new teaching today. You know how usually men and women are all mixed together here, just like in the outside world?”

“Yeah.” That's weird:
outside world
.

“But Guruji says we've been progressing very rapidly, so it's time to begin to live in a more disciplined way. More like monks or swamis, sort of.”

“Oh, yeah?” What does she mean, everyone has to be celibate or something? I'm not about to ask
that
, though.

“Yeah. I mean, not
literally
.” She looks at me meaningfully. That answers that. “But for meditation, you know, any kind of practice, men and women will sit on opposite sides of the room. It's an austerity. He wants us householders to move closer to renunciation.”

“Huh.” Footsteps. Breathing. Voices in the distance. “So what does that mean, householder?”

“Oh.” She laughs. “Right.” Like she just remembered I don't know, and it's somehow funny. “Householder . . . is a phase of the spiritual path? Like first you're a child, and then you're a student; after that you're a householder. Householder's like when you have a family and your focus is on your relationships with them and all that stuff. Then the final stage is
sannyas
, when you give everything up to merge with the Divine. Normal people take years to get through each stage. But if you're really dedicated, you can speed it up.”