The Lightness Read online

  “He’s kind of a legend,” Harriet said.

  “He’s the most advanced practitioner here,” Nisha said. “Even though he’s really young.”

  “He’s like a prodigy,” Harriet said.

  “Our own personal holy man.”

  “I heard he can actually levitate.”

  “Meditate under water.”

  “Fly, even.”

  “He used to be engaged.”

  “He’s not anymore.”

  “He does something to the plants.”

  “No one knows what it is.”

  “He never lets anyone past the fence.”

  “Especially girls.”

  Nisha pointed me in the direction of the garden. “But I guess you’ll be the exception,” she said.

  “Good luck,” said Harriet, in that singsong, ironic way she had, but when I looked back, neither girl was smiling.

  The garden was just out of sight of the main buildings, down a matted path that curved gently around the side of the mountain. It was the size of a baseball field and, like many actual baseball fields, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, a man was squatting among the plants, half-hidden by leaves but clearly wearing a pair of pink floral gardening gloves. For the briefest of moments, he looked exactly like my father. Then I blinked and shook away the association. He was much too young, for one thing. The shoulders were as wide, but the coloring was all wrong. The hair wasn’t right, or the face. And yet, even through the blinking, the shaking: there was something.

  “Don’t touch the fence,” he said without looking up. “It’s electric.”

  I hadn’t been planning to touch the fence, but now I found that I very much wanted to.

  “Why?” I said.

  He stood and wiped the sweat away from his face, leaving a few traces of dirt in his beard. His shirt was open a little. His throat shone like a bird’s. I turned my face up to the sky to avoid staring. Was it bluer this far up, or was I imagining it?

  “Keeps out the animals,” he said. “Girls included.”

  “They said I had rota here,” I said. The fence was tall, at least eight feet high. I thought I could hear it vibrating.

  He considered this. “How are you with plants?” he asked.

  “I used to help my dad in the garden,” I said.

  He smiled then, and pointed to a door in the side of the fence that I hadn’t seen before. “Come on in,” he said.

  My father had been a gardener too, an amateur one. Your garden-variety gardener. When I was young, he cultivated our front yard so that one half was filled with flowers, and the other with vegetables and herbs. When he was in a good mood, I was sometimes allowed to help him weed or plant; both left me filthy and tired, but I liked to lock fingers with the root systems as I pulled them out of the ground. “Imagine the garden as your mind,” he would say as we knelt in the dirt. “If you plant seeds, and tend the earth around them, they bear fruit. And just like your mind, the flowers are constantly changing. They rise, they bloom, they decay.”

  “What’s the point, then?” I asked him once. “Why grow things that only die?”

  He leaned on his shovel. “Everything is impermanent. Mountains. Flowers. Even us, what we think of as ourselves.”

  I looked down at my stomach, my knees. I held up my bitten fingernails.

  “Let me ask you this,” my father said. “Where is the self? Can you point to it? Can you tell me what color it is? No, not your sternum. Not your eye. Your Olivia.” I could point to nothing that would satisfy him. “You see,” he said, and I nodded as though I did.

  It wasn’t until much later that I understood that the things he said had anything to do with Buddhism, or that others might not subscribe to his worldview. Most of the girls at my school believed that they had eternal souls, for instance. Most of the girls at my school knew that true love, when they inevitably found it, with eyes and thighs like theirs, would last forever. Most of the girls at my school, if they had ever thought about it, which they had not, would have been confident that they actually existed. From a young age, I suspected these things to be not strictly true. This may or may not have contributed to my essential loneliness.

  After my father left, the garden grew wild. The two halves, edible and decorative, became indistinguishable. Some plants died, others grew tentacles, and the front yard of what was now my mother’s house became a mass of curling vine and leaf and stiff dead stalk. The neighbors scowled when they passed, but my mother said she liked it better this way. “Back to the land!” she shouted happily one morning when she found a litter of foxes fighting in the deep brush, the kits pawing at a small kill their own mother had brought them, smearing its red pulp onto the grass.

  Needless to say, I never invited anyone to my house. This may or may not, etc.

  To start, Luke had me weed the flowerbeds. “Gardening for beginners,” he said. “Just tug and toss.” Something else I knew how to do. Luke worked beside me for the whole two-hour period, saying little, occasionally gesturing at a gnarled section I had missed. I stole glances at him whenever it felt safe, but he concentrated on his tasks so fully I felt he wouldn’t have noticed me even if I’d taken off my clothes. (Not that I was thinking about that sort of thing, of course. No, I was not.) His cheekbones were high and sharp, which gave him the look of an ancient Greek dignitary, and his skin was brown and smooth under all that hair. I fixated on the soft baby skin in the crook of his elbow: I wanted to pinch it. He had freckles too, which was really unfair of him. He never furrowed his brow, even in the sun, and when he reached his hands into the ground, he closed his eyes completely.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, I realize that now—far younger than I am as I write this, an age I now find embarrassing in other people, particularly men. But back then, he seemed timeless, ageless, fixed as a character in a film. As if no matter when I had arrived, that summer or twenty years from that summer, he would have been there, waiting for me, looking just the same. Nothing like my father; exactly like him.

  Just when my back was beginning to hurt, Luke stood and squinted at the sun. “Rota’s over,” he said.

  I took off the gardening gloves he’d given me and set them carefully on a bench. He bent and picked a purple flower from one of the beds I had cleared. He looked at it for a moment, twirled it between his fingers, and held it out to me, and all at once I felt exposed. For the first time that day, I had the sense of myself as a girl alone with a man. I took the flower, making sure not to touch his fingers with mine.

  “Ah,” he said. “Your hands are like the Buddha’s.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not knowing what he meant. Later, I would blush over the compliment—my fingers are short and stubby, not at all like the Buddha’s graceful tapers. I put the flower behind my ear.

  He nodded and disappeared into the garden shed. I let myself out.

  On my way back to the main building, I considered throwing the flower into the grass. I was thinking of Nisha’s face when she saw my assignment, and the way Harriet had dug her nails into my arm. I was thinking of the bright red of the door of the garden shed, which had obviously been freshly painted, days or weeks ago, though the rest of the wood was weathered and gray. It was vulgar, that shining apple red. It was alluring. There was something wrong with me. But in the end, I couldn’t bear to give the flower up. As I approached the lawn, I pressed it for a moment between my palms and slid it into my pocket, so no one would see.

  After rota, we had some free time before dinner, which was typically followed by another period of meditation or an evening activity, and then lights-out. When I got back to the lawn that first day, I looked for Harriet and Nisha. Surely they would want a report, I thought, considering, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. They weren’t waiting for me. I sat alone on one of the large white rocks and watched the other girls mill around and sunbathe, talking or reading magazines in the grass. One of them kept taking off her top, exposing her breasts to the sun. Each tim
e, a staffer would hurry over and tell her to cover up, but whenever the staffer looked away, the girl would pull her shirt back over her head. Every time she was chastised, she looked surprised. Her breasts were high and round and lovely, nothing like mine. I could understand why she wanted to show them.

  Toward the end of the free period, I saw Janet and Laurel emerge from the woods. Laurel wore a bright pink caftan that floated behind her like a sail as they walked toward the main building. She was tall, but she walked with a slight hunch, a kind of hollowing. Janet stomped by her side in ripped black jeans and a black t-shirt. Serena was not with them.

  “They’re so weird,” said someone close by. I didn’t turn my head. “Always skulking around in the woods. Last year they disappeared for like a week. When they finally came back, they were completely covered in these small scratches, and no one said a word. I don’t understand how they get away with it.”

  “Laurel’s all right,” said another.

  “You’re just saying that because you want to fuck her.”

  “Well,” the girl said, and then she made a humming sound, or maybe an eating sound, and the two of them laughed and wandered away, but not before Laurel turned her head and looked right at them—at us—her eyes narrowed, as if, though she was much too far away, she had heard her name, heard herself be desired.

  Dinner that night was a slurry of quinoa and kale and black beans, delivered in one enormous bowl to each table in the long, loud dining room. On the way in, just past the door, there was a little station with stacks of plates. The plates were mismatched in color and size, probably donated; the one I picked up had an unbearably twee strawberry-and-picket-fence pattern. I turned it slowly in my hands and touched my fingers to the smallest, most delicate strawberry, feeling suddenly tender. Then I was promptly jabbed in the back. When I turned to look at the girl behind me, she only grinned. She might have even looked pleasant, except that her mouth seemed twice as large as it had any right to be, her teeth twice as white.

  I smiled weakly back; I felt the urge to run, or at least to slink off to a corner where no one would catch me fingering cute plates in my spare time. But I wasn’t here to be the same person I was at home, I reminded myself. I was here for a reason. So, still feeling a tingling in my back where I’d been prodded, I took my dumb little plate over to Janet and Laurel’s otherwise empty table, right in the center of the room. I sat down, leaving a few chairs between us for the sake of plausible deniability; they ignored me without effort. Above us, the rafters were wound with hundreds of prayer flags in faded primary colors that looked as though they’d hung there for decades.

  There was a basket of fruit on the table. I reached out and palmed a plum, but no—it was plastic. I went to put it back, but stopped when I saw two curved wounds, thin creases in the fake purple skin. Someone else had tried to bite into it. Which meant that someone, weeks or years or minutes ago, had known even less than I did. I turned the plum over in my hand. I rubbed my thumb along the creases. As comforts go, it was a mild one, but still. I placed the plum back in its basket, tooth marks turned in for privacy.

  “Always kale,” I heard Janet mutter, pressing her bamboo fork aimlessly into the back of her hand. She turned her head, and for the first time I got a good look at her left cheek. It wasn’t paint that I’d seen the day before; it was a birthmark, in the shape of a crown tipped on its side. It was a deep eggplant color, the same exact shade as her hair. She must have spent considerable time searching for the dye to match it.

  “It’s like they think we’re rabbits,” Laurel said, holding up a big green leaf, drawing out the a: raaaabbits.

  “Eat up, girls,” a passing staffer chirped, eyeing the fork still digging into Janet’s skin, the leaf Laurel was waving like a flag. “You know what they say: Kale is life!”

  “Sure,” Janet said. “You chew and you chew and you chew and there’s no reward.”

  “I think our Luke would beg to differ,” the staffer said brightly. “It’s organic.”

  They both seemed to straighten at the sound of his name. Laurel folded the leaf into her mouth and smiled sweetly at the staffer. Janet put down her fork, as if suddenly disgusted. “I doubt it,” she said, but so far under her breath I wasn’t sure I’d really heard.

  A few days went by. I can’t say how many; time bled uncontrollably at the Center, even that early in the summer. The Garudas had contemplative oil painting, calligraphy, more ikebana. We went on nature walks, where we learned and forgot the names of trees. We practiced oryoki, a mindful eating technique we did not manage to apply to our regular meals, and Kyūdō, a kind of Zen archery at which Janet alone excelled. We meditated for long periods. My dizziness slowly drained away, but I didn’t sleep much better. Instead, I listened to Janet and Laurel sneak out at night. Tap, tap. Not every night, but often enough. I didn’t sit at their table again—my nerve proving temporary—but I continued to watch them. Sometimes I got close enough to hear something of their constant whispers, each fragment unbearable: glimpse, gagged, gouge, that kind of girl. It wasn’t enough. Sometimes I couldn’t find them at all—they would disappear for hours, with no explanation—and while other girls were punished for breaking rules (within a week Harriet, who could never manage to hide her cigarette butts from Magda, became quite adept at hand-buffing the shrine room floor), when it was the two of them the staffers seemed not to notice, or at least not to mind. I always noticed. I always minded. Serena herself appeared only rarely, and then usually at a distance—I would see her traipsing away across the grounds in a thin white dress, like a will-o’-the-wisp, while the rest of us filed into dinner, or into bed. She was almost never at meals. She was almost never at activities. She was almost never at anything, unless she was, and when she was, she spoke to no one but her friends, the chosen two.

  The chosen two: well, they made a strange pair. Most days, Janet woke before the rest of us to go running, coming back to the dormitory drenched and red. She often did push-ups in the grass, sometimes with Laurel sitting on her back, legs crossed, looking performatively at her nails. But she was nothing like the jocks I had known in my former life. For one thing, unless you count the hair, I never saw her wear any other color than black. For another, she never, ever smiled.

  “Teeth are for digestion,” she said one morning to Shastri Dominique, who had told her that if she’d just smile, even if she had to force her muscles to comply, her body would respond with positive feelings, a Pavlovian response to the performance of happiness. “Why would I want to show my digestive organs in public?” Janet said. “Why would you even want to see them? Don’t be disgusting.”

  Dominique only exhaled through her nose, rolled her eyes, and moved toward Nisha, who had managed to fall asleep again, sitting up and dreaming.

  On the other hand: one particularly hot day, the Garudas were gathered for some outdoor activity, waiting for the relevant staffer to appear, and skinny little Jamie—a fragile, friendless girl whose fingers and toes were always blue from lack of circulation—raised one arm above her head, turned white, and crumpled to the ground. Everyone stared. Someone laughed. No one moved to help her except Janet, who in a single motion scooped her up and carried her off to the infirmary, whispering into her ear the whole time. Everyone else had merely puffed out her lips or pursed them, rolled her eyes or narrowed them, and edged away from the girl on the ground. Yes, even me. You should not, under any circumstances, expect me to be the hero of this story.

  Once, when no one else was in the dormitory, I snuck over to Laurel’s bed to get a closer look at the photographs she’d tacked up around her pillow. They were mostly dreamy, half-cast in sepia, or else oversaturated and hypnotic. In one, she reclined on the floor of a walk-in closet, fabric hanging down around her, a faded t-shirt stretched violently across her breasts—it read betty’s hot vinyl—and bit her lip at whoever was holding the camera. In another, she and a dark-haired boy shared a single cone of pink ice cream in front of a yellow brick wall. Two
pretty girls wearing sequins in the forest. Three boys holding up beers that had been duct-taped to their soft, tanned hands. One photograph had clearly been taken on the dance floor: someone in a red and blue dress blurred her way toward someone in a green jacket, a halo of watery light emanating from her head like she was the second coming, a girl Christ on the ascendant, her vodka-soda-lime raised triumphant and ready above the crowd.

  I reached out to touch the girl on the dance floor. My finger left a smudge on her dress. The girls in these photographs were the kind that people wrote songs about. This was the kind of life that American teenagers were meant to live. Park that car. Drop that phone. Sleep on the floor. Dream about me. No part of my life was so photogenic. Even if it were, no one would have been there to capture it.

  Now I know, of course, how easily photographs can lie. Or maybe that’s not quite right. It’s not that they lie, exactly: it’s that they invent their own realities.

  There was one more photograph of Laurel, lying on her side on a canopied bed in a pink silk nightgown, the same one I saw her wear most nights at the Center. Soft-bodied, long-legged Laurel, always sleeping in until the last possible moment. When I think of her now, so many years later, this is the image to which I return—the photograph, not the girl. Just looking at it you could tell how smooth she would be, how amenable to your touch. Just looking at it you could see how cozy her flesh, how easily punctured.

  In those early days, Harriet and Nisha pestered me about Luke, but I didn’t have much to tell them. All he did was point out my tasks when I arrived, then work beside me until rota was over. When I asked him why there had never been rota in the garden before, he opened his palms to the sky. “I’ve never needed help before,” he said. “I must be getting old.” When I reported this to Harriet and Nisha, a thrown bone, they shrieked with displeasure. Old? Old? Old? Not hardly. Not a little. Old?