Karma for Beginners (5 page)

. . .

Our loneliness exists only in the illusions of our limited minds.

Steam fills my lungs and after a few minutes I feel dizzy. I don't care, though. I want the water all the way up hot. I dig my fingernails into the Ivory, leaving half-moons in the slippery white. My mom is in our room, getting dressed for Evening Program, but with the door shut and the water up I'm safe in the box of the bathroom. I wonder if my knees will get used to wood chips, if me and Devanand are the only ones on Grounds Crew. The last few days, he made me weed all day near the main entrance. I wonder if tomorrow will be the same, or if instead he'll send me back to that junkyard parking lot where the buses are again. I wonder if that guy is always there.

Finally my head spins so much I'm about to fall over, so I turn off the shower. I wrap myself in a towel and crack the door; cool air floods in like ice water and I gulp it down. Once I steady myself, I close the door again so my mom won't talk to me. I want privacy; I'm not sure why.

I look in the mirror at my sunburn. It makes my cheeks pink and my freckles come out. I kind of like it. I see T-shirt tan lines on my upper arms and make a note to wear a tank top next time.

Evening Program has a dress code: long skirts for women, buttoned shirts for men. Beyond that, you're just supposed to look “nice.” I only have one skirt: when I was almost twelve, my mom wanted to talk to this guy selling hippie clothes out of his Venice boardwalk stall, so I got a skirt. It's paisley with a drawstring and a ton of flowing fabric, so even three years later it still fits. My mom says I look “attractive” in it and I should wear skirts more often. I don't like them: they make me feel too girly, sort of weirdly naked. She says I can borrow some of hers for Evening Program dress code. She has a lot.

I walk into the bedroom mopping off my face. “Jesus, Tessa, how much hot water did you use?” my mom says at the cloud billowing out behind me. I shrug. I had a long day. After a shift of telemarketing, my mom used to come home and say she needed a drink. I never had a job before now; I figure it's kind of the same thing.

She's putting on earrings in the mirror above the altar. Her long ones from Peru, green stones and brass that dangle down. She's got lipstick on, slicked red across her lips, and a turquoise dress. She looks girly, and also beautiful. I want to ask her what she did today, but I don't.

I want to ask about a lot of stuff. Like why we moved here in the first place. Like who the hell am I supposed to talk to, since she's away all day and there isn't even school. Like what is the beard guy, really, and how come everyone treats him like a different category of person, and some people make weird noises and fall down. Why does everybody have a name that's not their own? What's that bracelet of beads she keeps touching? And how come she knows so many new words all of a sudden? There's a lot of stuff that I don't understand.

I've never seen her this happy before, though, and I don't want to mess it up. She's always getting excited and joyful about stuff, workshops and classes and, of course, guys, but she's never settled into it like this: just come in, sat down in it, and stayed. Before, her eyes would dart around, flickering like butterfly wings, never staying all the way still. Even when she landed, she'd keep fluttering those wings, just enough to have momentum when it was time to pick up and go. There were always a couple cardboard boxes left in the corner. But now, we've only been here a few days and already she's unpacked it all and put it all away.

On the way out of Evening Program my mom and I hold hands. The sweat from hers seeps into the cracks in my palms. We slide our shoes back on and she says, “Let's go for chai.” Everyone stands around a plastic vat in the big open lobby, talking about meditation experiences and
seva
schedules and people whose names I don't know. They talk about Iran-Contra, because everyone hates Reagan, and someone makes a joke about televangelists and Tammy Faye Bakker. Jayita and Dev are there, loose and liquid, arms around each other; I want to say hi but they're too far away, so I stick to my mom's side. Or at least I try.

It's not so easy; all the guys come up to her. Avtar and Bhav from kitchen prep, a blond guy named Rick, this guy with a beard named Gajendra. They cluster around, shouldering each other out. Everyone knows my mom's name. Nobody asks mine. Rick pushes me aside without even noticing and my mom laughs, sparkles up at him while she sips her chai. She sticks her chest out. Gajendra says something to her about “the sacred feminine,” and I decide that he is gross.

Then a woman I haven't met, in dangly jewelry and a flowing skirt just like my mom's, comes up and touches my mom's shoulder. My mom squeals and they hug, ignoring Rick and Gajendra and Avtar and Bhav. My mom and the woman throw their heads back and laugh together, tinkling. They make all the men invisible: the guys just stand around, suddenly aimless.

I wish I could make that happen.

After a minute my mom remembers I'm there. “Oh! This is my daughter, Tessa.” She points me toward the woman. “This is my friend Vrishti.” Vrishti is a redhead. Almost as pretty as my mom.

We sleep hard, my mom in the queen bed, me in the corner on the twin. She stays in our room all night. I dream about Ohio—Roy Rogers and the grocery store. We go down the cereal aisle and my mom lets me pick out everything I want. I ride on the foot of the cart while she pushes me, fast and faster.

I wake up when her alarm goes off at four; lie still while she gets dressed and leaves for chanting. I watch the sky turn from navy blue to orange; stars fade and trees turn from silhouettes to real. I think: Akron doesn't have trees like this. I also think:Today I'm going back to Grounds Crew
seva
, and how can I get Devanand to send me to that back parking lot again.

I tell him I wasn't happy with the work I did on the flowers; I want to space them out more evenly. “Okay!” he exclaims with a grin, long gross beard jiggling. His T-shirt today says SRI CHINMOY 10K and has a bunch of people running down a mountain. “The work is for the Guru, so it's important you be happy with it. That's the essence of
seva
!”

When I get into the lot, I think maybe I made a mistake. The guy isn't here—nobody is, just bus parts and junk and my asters, which are spaced pretty evenly, to tell you the truth. I stay anyway, though, and start replanting; what else am I going to do?

Pretty soon I hear a clank behind me. When I turn around, there he is, beneath the bus again. I wonder how you're supposed to say hi to somebody when they're under a bus. Do you go up and kick their foot? Or yell at them? Or just stand and wait and hope eventually they'll notice that you're there?

I pick the final choice, big surprise. I've never known how to talk to someone if they didn't talk to me first. Not any kid at any school I've ever gone to, or grown-ups at parties, or even sometimes my mom. For example: we've been in this place a week already and I haven't even asked her why. It's like the law of inertia we learned last year in Lab Science. It's safer just to let things stay still; once you start, you never know when they'll stop moving.

I put my fingers in the dirt, dig up more flowers. The bus tugs at me like a magnet and my mouth wants to move, but I keep my eyes on the roots, try not to break them. Finally he must feel me thinking, because he comes out from under the bus.

“Hey there! You again!”

“How's it going,” I say into my shirt.

“Huh?” he squints across the lot.

“How's it
going
.” I enunciate a lot and lean forward, like I could cross the ten feet between us with my voice and my neck. It comes out too loud.

“Oh,” he says, like he's surprised I actually asked. “Um, it's going pretty good. Almost done with this one, then I'm ready to move on to the VW. Engine needs a rebuild. You know.”

“Yeah.” I actually don't know. Pause.

“Okay, well, back to work.” He wipes his hands on his jeans and crawls back under. I just stand there staring at the spot he stood in till I catch myself.

. . .

You must shield the delicate web of inner silence from the influences of the world.

By seven we're usually getting dressed for Evening Program, but tonight my mom still isn't back. The sun sinks outside the window. I wait till it's definitely too late for Evening Program, and then I put on my sneakers and go out for a walk.

The path by the main building circles around and tucks into the woods. The little lights along the sides make it so you can still walk there at night. I've never walked in the woods at night before. My eyes adjust and I feel like a raccoon, pupils wide, watching things through the black. The branches blur together into a blanket above me, rustling, and for once I'm not scared to be alone.

When the path pours me into open space again, I'm almost sad. A country road cuts through the ashram property; I look both ways. No cars for a long, long time. I cross into the courtyard, with the statues of Jesus and Buddha and the elephant god. Little lamps around them cast shadows on their faces. Clumps of lilies and chrysanthemums hide them, so all you see is the light beams floating up from below. I think how everything is like that: you only see the shadows that the light makes, you never see what makes the light.

I sit there for a long time, in the courtyard surrounded by gods. Crickets are the only sound. After a while they blur together with my breathing, and I'd stay out here all night except that the truck pulling by on the road, too loud, snaps me out of it. By now it's probably ten; my mom will be worried, if she's back. I wander over to the glass-walls-red-rug building, try the door. Everything is always unlocked. I remember if you go through that building, out the other side is the shuttle stand.

I do, and there is, and I sit down on the bench beneath the canvas tent. Sure enough, after a minute a bus engine rumbles through the silence. The shuttle driver, a gray guy with a grizzly beard and tie-dyed baseball cap, raises his eyebrow, but I climb on without looking, just like going to school. In my seat I watch the woods out the window with my raccoon eyes. He turns up the tinny speakers and the chant spills out, “
Jaya Jagatambe
,” same as Evening Program. I hum along.

Back at the room, Mom is mad. I open the door and catch her mid-pace on the thin carpet. She whirls around. “Where were you?” Her eyes flash; underneath the angry is a scared red softness. I look away.

“Look at me, young lady!”

Young lady. Wooh. With my mom, you have to do a lot to get a “young lady.”

My eyes are on her, but I'm trying to stay in my own head. I liked it out there, on the trail, in the courtyard, by myself. I don't want to let her in to mess it up.

“
Where were you?
”

I shrug. “I went for a walk.”

She looks at me like it's incomprehensible I could put one foot in front of the other without her assistance or permission.

“What's wrong with that?” I ask her. I don't expect an answer; it just feels good to say it.

She paces toward me. “What's
wrong
with that, young lady, is that you are not to just run off unsupervised without telling me where you're going! You didn't even leave a note! And don't look at me that way.”

“What way?” I'm not even looking at her, not really.

“You
know
the look I'm talking about. Don't play games with me.” She's annoyed I'm getting her to answer my questions and not the other way around. Ha.

She glares at me and exhales really hard.

“Why are you even trying to sound all bossy like that anyway?” I say, half under my breath. “You sound stupid.” I don't really want her to hear me, except I sort of do.

She hears me. “
What
did you say?”

Right now it's the part of the fight when I can back down and it's over, or keep going and it isn't. These last three years we argue often enough for me to chart the different moments that stay the same from fight to fight: where the exit hatches are, what buttons I can press to ratchet things up. I could say “nothing” right now and that would be it. I'd let her win, she'd leave me alone, and I could fold back inside myself where it's safe. But I don't. Instead I puff my chest up, make my face hard, square my shoulders. “I said,
Quit it
. Quit bossing me around.”

“You don't tell me what to do! I will boss you around if I want to boss you around. I am your
mother
. That gives me certain rights. You think I
like
sitting here waiting for you and wondering where you are? You think it's fun? You're just so thoughtless. Jesus.” She yells like she can force her viewpoint into my brain if she says it loud enough.

Secretly I know I could have left a note, but I don't care. I'm not going to say I'm sorry, and I'm not going to say I'll “do it different in the future.” Even though that's what I'm supposed to say, and even though it might make the whole thing end, and even though it's sort of true.

Because it isn't fair.

“Why?” I ask her. “You don't ever leave a note. You always leave, and I sit there waiting, wondering where
you
are. That's what you did tonight!” I don't flinch. I want an answer. “Where were you?”

And then her chest deflates; her face relaxes. She folds her arms and shakes her hair. Her chin juts up. “I was with Vrishti.” All of a sudden she's the teenager. “We went and had a chai.”

I just look at her. She looks at me. It should make me feel better, her realizing that she did the same thing I did; but instead it scares me, seeing her look young that way. She's supposed to be the mom.

After a second she folds me into her arms like she forgives me. “Oh, Tessa, I'm just glad you're back.” She squeezes my floppy arms against my sides; my elbows poke my ribs. I think about the crickets and the shadows and the trail, how good I felt until I came back here and she got mad. I want to be alone again, quiet and contained inside my skin, away from her yelling and her leaving and the red soft beneath them both. I wish I had a door to close, a room to go away to. I stand there and let her hug me.

The next morning I stop at the front desk on the way to
seva
. My heart thuds hard as I ask the lady if there's mail for me, harder when she goes in back to check. A little bright space opens up inside me in the moment before she comes back, a little space of
maybe
, and I have to remind myself not to let it open all the way wide to
yes
. Not yet.

When she comes back empty-handed, that space seals right back up, like a Ziploc baggie. On the way to
seva
I tell myself: It hasn't been that long. Maybe his record company hasn't sent it to him yet. Maybe he's on the road. I know how to say those things; it's what I always do. It opens up the seal a tiny bit, just enough so that little bit of hope won't suffocate.

Devanand's not at the shed, so I grab a trowel and some marigolds and head back to the lot, try to forget the letter and focus on my plan.

The guy's there again, beneath the bus. This time I go over and kick his boot. “Hey,” I say, ignoring the law of inertia. He pulls out from under, looks up at me, surprised. For a second I hang there, wondering what I've just done. But he's out now, staring up at me, and an object in motion will remain in motion, and I have to say
something
. “What're you doing?” I ask.

“I
was
fixing the transmission on this bus, till someone came up and kicked me.”

My throat goes down into my stomach and I blush. I did the total wrong thing. I pissed him off. Why did I do that? Crap. Should have just stayed still. I'm about to turn around and go back to my stupid marigolds when he grins.

“Hey, I'm just joking.”

“Oh.” Right. Of course. Joking.

“I could use a break, actually. The air's kinda thick down here.” He wipes his face with his arm to get the sweat off. A big black smudge smears his forehead. “What're you doing back here anyway? They got you on garden duty?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I glance back at the flat of marigolds.

“Seems funny they'd waste 'em back here, there's nobody ever in this lot except me. But I suppose I should be flattered.” Flattered why? It's hard to tell exactly what he means by things. At least he's not using any weird words, though. So far.

“I suppose.”

He grins again. It's like he thinks I'm funny. “So where're you from?”

. . . . .

His name is Colin. We talk for almost a whole hour. He's not an ashram person; he lives over by town. They bring him in to fix the shuttles. He's good at fixing stuff. He's twenty. He doesn't come here every day; only when there's something broken. He has green eyes.

I've never had a crush before, not really. I mean, okay, Erik Estrada from
ChiPs
when I was eight. And Almanzo when he married Laura on
Little House on the Prairie
. But those don't count. They're not real people. The only real human person that's any kind of crush equivalent was Randy Wishnick, and he doesn't count either because it wasn't my idea, plus also because of how it turned out. As far as I was concerned, Randy was just another nasty dirtball boy atVolney Rogers Junior High when I showed up there halfway through the seventh grade. I was used to those boys: they wore jean jackets and had the short-long haircut—short in the front and long in the back— and freckles, little beady eyes. They weren't popular but they were never nerds either; they had their own kind of outcast power, and they were mean. Especially to new kids, and to quiet girls who read too many books.

But Randy wasn't mean to me. Instead he came over to my desk during fifth-period study hall and asked me, “Whatcha readin?” It was sort of embarrassing because it was Judy Blume, but at least it was
Deenie
and not some book about periods like
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
. I showed him the cover and he said, “Cool.” I could tell he'd never heard of it. After that he started trailing me through the hallway on the way to lunch. He'd strut around hyper in his Quiet Riot T-shirt, brag about shoplifting Nut Goodies from the Piggly Wiggly. I never really knew why he talked to me, except that he didn't have any other friends that I could see.

He kissed me for the first time on the hill behind the cafeteria, and it was nice. The tongue part was a little gross, but afterward he looked at me like I was someone who made him feel things. Up close I could see his hazel eyes had freckles in them, too, little flecks of green and gold. He leaned in and bumped my forehead with his, soft, and then this big grin spread across his skinny face and he started laughing, but not at me, and I started laughing too.

After that, lunch was always on that hill; he would give me half his Tater Tots so I could throw my six-grain sandwich away. Then we'd kiss. We both tasted like ketchup.

Then the second Friday he felt me up. He didn't even really kiss me first, just shot his bony hand up my shirt without asking and squeezed hard enough to hurt, pushing me back onto the ground with his weight. My eyes flew open but his stayed shut, and he made his tongue fill up my mouth and it got hard to breathe beneath him. All of a sudden his body felt like rocks pressing into my ribs, and I said, “Hey,” but he didn't look at me or stop, and finally I pushed up on him and threw him off and stood up and headed down the hill. When I looked back he was standing up in his Motörhead T-shirt, wiping grass stains off his jeans and yelling, “What's your problem?” after me.

So that's what I had till now: Almanzo, Ponch, and Randy Wishnick. The good ones weren't real and the real one was mean. I was starting to think the whole “guy” thing was just for banana-clip chicks and girls on TV and my mom, given who was available to choose from. I never knew whether anything else was out there.

Now I know.

I leave
seva
early to go and take a shower. I'm not that dirty, but I want to do something to separate this afternoon from tonight. This afternoon in the parking lot with Colin was mine, like my walk the night before was mine, and I don't want them blurring together with my mom.

When I come out toweling my hair off, she's sitting on the bed. I see her see the cloud of steam, start to say something about wasting water, but she stops. She's trying to be nice. “Come on, get dressed; we're going to meet Vrishti for dinner.” There's a lot of this Vrishti all of a sudden. She seemed okay the other night, but we'll see if she talks to me or just my mom.

At the dining hall, the two of them put exactly identical amounts of shredded zucchini and beets on their trays, identical tahini and identical sprouts. They also are the same height, both pretty, and both have long hair. One red and one brown. Like salt and pepper shakers. We come up to the table and everyone says hi to them.

Vrishti takes a chair on my left side and nods for my mom to sit on my right. She closes her eyes and says some long complicated chant before she eats; my mom does too. I don't know the words, so I just sit there between them and feel weird. But when they're done, Vrishti turns right to me and asks how old I am and what I think of the ashram. I just shrug. “It's cool.” It would take way too long to really tell her. But I'm glad somebody asked.

My mom's never had a friend before. In Ohio the women were always scared of her, the other single ones who worked in offices and drank Tab and went to the bar on the weekends. She was so much weirder than even the “wild girls” who smoked pot and had affairs with Bill in Marketing; she was so much prettier that no one ever expected she'd be lonely. Dayton and Venice, Big Sur and Akron: all the women were just variations on the same weird mix of judgment and envy. The only people she ever had to talk to were her guys and me, and even I felt the same way as those office girls sometimes.