Karma for Beginners (9 page)

. . .

As you progress, all desires transform;
what was bitter becomes sweet; what was sweet, bitter.

Monday I go over to the
seva
office like it's school, and turn my homework in. I drop the papers on the fake wood desk between the spider plants and head for the front desk. Still no mail. The lady there is starting to look at me funny. I head for the lot.

I wonder the whole way there if Colin will be weird, but as soon as I see his face I can tell that he's not. “Hey.” He grins. “Fancy meeting you here.” I smile back. I wonder if he can tell how many times I've thought about our hug since Friday.

“So today's a big work day, Tess. We're almost done. If we work hard I bet we can pull the engine before it gets dark.”

We keep going through lunch, take apart the starter and remove the heating cables, disconnect the fuel lines. When the sun starts to sink, Colin gets out the jack and a big wooden board; we slide them underneath the bus. My thighs burn with the weight. It feels satisfying, all the way down to my bones. I can smell both our sweat. I'm working too hard to be embarrassed, though. Finally we get the jack cranked up; Colin undoes a bunch of bolts with his socket and then we use all our strength to wiggle the engine around till it slides out, metal scraping metal, heavy as a boulder.

There's a big gaping hole in the back of the bus where the engine was. I beam at the steel hulk sitting on the gravel, smudged black grease on the pale wood board. I'm smeared too: my cheeks, my hands, my jeans; my hair's a mess. Colin has motor oil on his eyelid. I've never accomplished something like this before. It's like getting a baby out, or an egg, or putting up a wall. Rumpled and dirty, we breathe heavily and grin at each other, proud.

“Good job,” Colin says, and wipes his brow. Then he hugs me again.

He's gonna be gone a couple days; he has to take the engine into town to the machine shop so they can do the pistons and the rods and cylinders. The way he tells me is careful and kind. He explains exactly what he has to do, just how long he thinks it'll take. “Don't worry if it's a little longer, though, okay? The shop can be a little flaky. It might be an extra day or two, but I'll be back.” He looks me straight in the eye when he says that last part. “I'll be back.” Nobody's ever done that before.

I want to look away, but I don't. I stay right there. “Okay.”

I'm reading my mom's copy of
Whole Earth Review
when our doorknob turns and the door clicks open; I'm still reading when she comes in and dumps three big plastic shopping bags onto the bed. I've got my Walkman on,
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
by the Cure. “Just Like Heaven.”

“Tessa?” my mom says, twice. I pretend not to hear her.
Show me show me show me how you do that trick
.

“Hel-
lo
?” she says again, loud and close. I wish she'd shut up; I love this song—
The one that makes me scream, she said
. I finish reading the paragraph, then act like I just noticed that she's there.

“Don't roll your eyes at me,” she says as I take my headphones off. “And don't give me that look.” I don't think I rolled my eyes or gave her any kind of look, but I don't feel like arguing. “Whatever.”

She raises her eyebrows like she's going to hand me down another
don't
, but I raise my eyebrows back and she decides against it. “Fine,” she says. “Anyway, I didn't come back here to argue. I came to show you something!”

Hooray. I can't wait.

She goes over to the bed and shakes her plastic bags empty, one by one. Mounds of clothes spill onto the coverlet. All white. “What, did you do laundry or something?” I ask. It's not that I
want
to be snarky; it's that I don't seem to really have a choice.

“No, I didn't
do laundry
,” she says like I'm stupid. “It's a
tapasya
.”

“Oh, right, a
tapasya
.” Pause. She doesn't answer, though. So I say it like
she's
stupid: “What's a
tapasya
, Mom?”

“It's an austerity. A step on the spiritual path? I'm going to be wearing all white now. Giving up my attachment to adornment and dress.”

I think it's pretty weird that giving up your attachment to adornment and dress involves getting a whole new wardrobe. “Ah.”

“You're a teenager, so dress and adornment are probably more important to you right now. But I'm in a different place.”

It's funny she should say that: I'm the one with three pairs of identical jeans and the same red Nikes I've had through four shoe sizes. I'm the one with T-shirts and mousy straight hair to my shoulders. The only makeup I've ever worn is hers; the only earrings, thieved from her jewelry box. She's the beauty: lip gloss, purses, dripping gypsy jewels.

“Congratulations.”

We stand there and look at each other. These days there's so many pauses between my mom and me, all filled with annoyed facial expressions.

She huffs and stuffs the white clothes back into their bags. “Yes, well, I was thinking I would offer some of my clothes to you, Tessa, as a gift. But if you're not interested, that's okay. I'm sure someone else can use them.”

“Wait, no,” I say. Secretly I've been starting to get sick of red sneakers and identical jeans. “What are you getting rid of?”

“Oh, so you
are
interested?”

Here is how much I want to show it: just enough that she'll hand over the clothes, and not enough to give her any satisfaction whatsoever. “Sure.”

“Okay, then.” She heads over to the dresser, starts pulling out stacks, shirts and skirts and leg warmers mixed together, folded up. They're organized by color: orange swimming into red pouring into magenta, then purple, then blue. One by one she shakes them out and lays them down. “Whichever ones you want,” she says. “They're yours.”

I pile up her T-shirts first:
LIVE SIMPLY THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE, ESPRIT,
a drawing of a watermelon slice. Then her baggy purple silk Tibetan tunic, beige eyelet skirt with a
Little House on the Prairie
ruffle at the hem.

“Tess, try on the leotards,” she says. “I bet they'd look great with jeans.”

I'm skeptical but I pick one up, royal blue with aqua stripes, long-sleeved. In the bathroom I put it on and slide my jeans back up. It cuts into my butt but when I look in the mirror I can't believe what I see. I look amazing: like a woman, sort of. I pull the sleeves up, snap the scooped neck against my collarbone. The elastic gather in the front makes my boobs kind of huge. It's weird how a different shape of shirt can make you look like an entirely different person.

“Let's see!” she hollers. I'm embarrassed leaving the fluorescent cocoon of the bathroom, but she giggles like a girl and says, “Woo-hoo!”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Tessa, what a babe! You look great.”

“I do?”

“You totally do.”

“Thanks.” I stand there with my hands in my pockets. I've never looked great before.

“We gotta find more stuff that fits you like that. C'mon over here.” She starts rooting through piles, pulling out tops and holding them up, squinting. When she's been through them all, she hands over a heap and says, “Here. Go try these on.”

The lame part about leotards is you have to take off your pants to take your shirt off. Between that and the annoying butt thing, the jury's still out on whether leotards are worth it. Luckily, though, she's handed me mostly regular shirts, stretchy and tight but comfortable. I pull on a long-sleeved T-shirt with batik tulips. She hollers.

“Lemme see!”

I come out and show her. “Awesome!” A little like she's trying to be cool, but I let it pass. “Next!”

She calls me out of the bathroom between every one, and each time says how fabulous I look. By the fifth outfit I'm spinning around, faking that I'm Christie Brinkley on the catwalk, and we're cracking up. At the end we both flop down on the bed, heaps of clothes soft like a backyard leaf pile. She rolls over on her side toward me, loose and smiling, close enough for me to feel her breath. “Maybe tomorrow I can skip chanting and we can go to the Amrit for breakfast, huh? I heard they're making yogurt coffee cake.”

“Sure.” I smile back. “Sounds good.”
“It's a deal. I'll wake you up. Hey, Tess?”
“Yeah?”
“Love you, you know.”
For the first time in forever I don't feel embarrassed
when she says it.
“Love you too.”

. . . . .

We sleep in her bed that night, curled up together in the soft warm dark. By the time the light seeps in at sunrise, her side is empty. I rub my eyes and see the note on the table:
Off to chanting! Don't forget to clean up the clothes, Tess. All of them, please
. A smiley face and a little “om” symbol at the bottom, and
P.S. We'll get coffee cake next week
.

Ilisten to Green Tea Experience, twice through, the bass turned up. I can only play it when my mom's gone, but she's gone enough lately that I've learned every note by heart. I study his photo for angles that match mine. I've memorized the liner notes, especially the special thanks. It doesn't have my name or my mom's, but at the end it says “Thanks to my two angels,” and I always imagine that it's us.

After a while, Green Tea Experience starts sounding old and sad, reminding me of times when I was younger than I am. I don't want to be younger anymore. I want to be something different, but I don't quite know what that is.

I switch off my dad, put in Modern English, turn it loud. I look in the mirror and see myself in stolen lipstick with my Walkman on, new batik tulip T-shirt tight across my boobs,
I Melt with You
playing, and I imagine that I am the video. That the song has its own world, a place where you could actually go, and I'm in it. The batik shirt makes it easier for me to imagine myself there.

The future's—open—wide
. A knock startles me out of my video, back into the room. When I open the door there's this short, squat woman with a baggy dress and a bucket full of cleaning stuff. “Hey,” I say.

“Hi there. Main office sent me. Is this Sarah Walker's room?”

“Yeah, that's my mom.”
“Well, she's on the Guru's private staff? They sent me up to clean her room.”

“Clean it?” I'm confused.

“It's like a gift. A special privilege. The Guru must be happy with her.”

“Oh. Okay. Cool.” She shoulders past me into our room, ready to get to work, I guess. I scrounge a five from the dresser, put my headphones back on, and leave her there to pick up my mom's clothes.

At the Amrit, they're almost out of coffee cake. I get the last piece—the corner one, crusty—and an apricot juice, and settle at the window to watch the rain streak down. I take out my notebook, open it to a blank page.

Dear dad, I listened to your tape today
. And then I don't know what else to write. Which is weird. I've always known what to write to him. I write secrets, things that I can't tell my mom. I ask him questions that I always want to know: Where is he and what's the road like, what did he think when I was born. What really happened with my mom when I was four. I tell him he can tell me, that he doesn't have to worry I'll take mom's side, that I know he has a story too. I tell him it's okay, and then I wait for him to answer. And the waiting fills the quiet till my mom gets back from wherever she is, and I know that whenever I get too lonely I will always have the hope of him.

But that hope is starting to wear down, thinner than it used to be, like a patch of carpet that you've walked over and over for years. And I can't explain to my dad about being the girl in the video, and how my boobs look in the tulips shirt, and how that weirdly makes me feel like a new person and strong. And I can't tell him that when it's quiet I'm starting to think about Colin instead of him.

I close my notebook without writing any more.

I'm about to head back to my room and try on leotards when those kids show up. The boys are immersed in a plastic fork battle, but Avinashi spots me right away and makes a beeline for my table. She's chewing on her braid.

“Hey,” she says when she's close enough.
“Hey,” I say back.
She sucks spit through her hair. She's got that thing
where it seems like she has something specific to say but then she doesn't, so you just wait there and she waits there too, and it's weird.

“You got the last piece,” she says, pointing.

“Yeah.” What do you say to such a statement of the obvious?
Yes, you have made a correct observation, pale creepy braid-eater
.

“We're on break from Crafts.”

“That's cool.”

“At Crafts we're making bread dough sculptures of the deities. Then we're painting them with tempera. I'm working on Ganesh.”

“Great.” Rain slides down the glass, making the green greener, the ground wetter. I wish I was out there in it.

“Sanjit's almost finished Kali Ma, soon as he paints the skulls. Meer was doing Hanuman, but he broke it, so he has to start over. The Guru wants us to make the full pantheon of deities. So we can't skip Hanuman.”

“Cool.” Is there a reason she's telling me all this? “Well, are you going to come to Crafts? Because it doesn't look like you have another
seva
today.”

“Um, I don't think I'll come to Crafts,” I say. “But thanks.”

“Really? We're about to start on the aspects of Vishnu and we could use some help. Guruji says little hands are best kept busy, you know.” She raises her eyebrows like a baby Ninyassa, except the
Addams Family
version.

“Well, I've got some other stuff I have to do.”