The Lightness Read online

  He turned, squatting back on his heels. “What do they say?” he asked. He shook a clot of dirt off his glove. He peered at the fence over my head. He was performing disinterest admirably, but he wanted to know—even I could see that, even then.

  “They say you can levitate,” I said. “For one thing.”

  “Oh, that.” He turned his attention back to the plant he was coaxing into the ground.

  “Is it true?”

  He squinted at me. I could see a few strands of chest hair through the hole in his shirt. “Is that all they say?” he said.

  “They all want to marry you,” I said. I knew I was being childish, but I couldn’t help myself.

  He laughed.

  “Yes, it’s very silly,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to marry me, I take it?”

  “I don’t believe in marriage,” I said. That, at least, was true. “No offense.”

  “You’re a very interesting girl,” he said, in a voice that made me want to take back what I had said. He reached out and encircled my ankle with two of his fingers. He squeezed it tight, then released it, and returned to his work. Afterward, I kept catching him smiling.

  Now, with many men behind me, I can recognize this for what it was: an intimacy too easy to be real. The flower he gave me on the very first day, the probing questions, all those gentle, innocent touches. He knew what he was doing. I did not. This is the way plenty of stories go, of course. But this one will end a little differently.

  That night, the four of us returned to the rock palm. We had decided to start with the basics. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, that kind of thing. Ten million slumber partiers couldn’t be wrong, or at least not completely, Janet said. But Serena was distracted that night, dissociated even. She was often distant. You could map her by this prefix pattern, from the Latin, meaning apart, asunder, away, or even utterly, or signifying reversal, negation, lack, release, or, sometimes, intense force. She often looked as though the world weren’t real to her, as though she had to swim through it like salt water.

  So: Light as a feather. Stiff as a board. Serena’s kimono slipping. My fingers on her hot skin. Her body in the air between us.

  “This isn’t enough,” she said.

  Serena stood in the center of the thick wool blanket, and Laurel and Janet and I each took a corner, and then we backed away until it pulled taut under her feet.

  “More,” she said. We refastened our grips. I took half the blanket under my arm and leaned back, my toes lifting. Laurel was panting, she was pulling so hard, and for a few seconds, Serena rose up—the blanket, with enough force applied, had become as stiff as floor. She raised her arms. She jumped. The blanket jolted and we all fell in a confused jumble on the ground. My cheek landed against a soft patch of moss, my knee bruised against the rock. Twigs cracked like bird bones beneath our bodies. I laughed.

  But Serena had fallen hard. She rubbed at her hip with a palm. “This is serious,” she said. “Every year, thousands of people come up here, to the Levitation Center, hoping to do this. But everybody, everybody fails.”

  “Almost everybody,” Laurel said.

  “Exactly,” Serena said. “Let’s try again.” We tried again, pulling and pulling until the blanket burned our fingers.

  The magic carpet: a dream almost as old as the dream of human flight. That you might find an old, everyday object and use it to elevate your old, everyday self. Except that old, everyday objects tend to do old, everyday things.

  “This is kid stuff,” Serena said at last. “We’re better than this.”

  We were, as it turned out. But not that night.

  4

  I don’t remember when I realized that my father wasn’t like other fathers. I don’t have a specific moment to point to. The feeling was simply there, like a skin. Soap, sneaker, suitcase: everyday. As a child, I snuck into his shrine room, turned the objects I found there around in my hands, guessed at their names. The little bell, the little scepter, the peacock fan. No other father I knew of had any of these. At school, I told my classmates that I was a Buddhist—how my mother would have raged, had she known—but I couldn’t tell them exactly what that meant. But what do you actually do? they asked, obedient churchgoers all. We meditate, I said. So it’s just sitting around, they said. No, I said, no, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t explain.

  Here’s something you may not know about Buddhism, something Serena explained to me that my father never did: contrary to popular American mythology, Buddhism is not actually about gentleness, or kindness—though the Buddha did promote compassion for all creatures, and though basic goodness, which means exactly what you think and also more, is something many Buddhists cultivate. “Wisdom is the primary concern of a Buddhist,” Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche wrote. “Morals and ethics are secondary.” The ultimate aim of Buddhist practice is not inner peace (om, namaste, etc.) but rather to end human suffering. Turns out that the way to do this is not to be kind to your neighbor, but instead to become fully awake to the truth of the universe. Well, sure. Why not?

  My mother dragged me out of my father’s shrine room whenever she found me in there alone. She forbade him from talking to me about religion. “Some things you can’t help but pass on to your children,” she told me once. “But I want you to have every possible choice about this.”

  “I choose Dad’s religion,” I said. “You don’t even have one.”

  “Your brain isn’t fully developed yet,” she said. “You can’t pick anything as important as religion until it is.” When I asked her when my brain would be developed, she seemed to consider it, staring hard at the place between my eyes. “Not until you’re married,” she said at last, and laughed at her own joke, and tucked her long black hair behind her ears like a girl, which I see only now that she still so essentially was.

  My mother was too kinetic for meditation, of course. She was too loud for church, too large for any temple. My mother found the idea of basic goodness unsavory, if not downright insane. My mother believed in nothing.

  Nothing, of course, for Shakespeare = nothing, as in nothing, also as in noting, as in gossip, and noting as in overhearing, and noting as in overhearing gossip, and no thing, as in what a woman has between her legs. My mother believed in all of these nothings. Nothing was sacred. Noting was sacred. No thing was sacred.

  Well, opposites attract. We are told this. Paula Abdul has seared this into our brains. My parents were attracted, that much is clear. But they were repelled too, and just as forcefully. I don’t know what that means. Magnetization was not the only force at work, I suppose.

  After breakfast the next morning, we found Serena waiting for us on one of the Center’s whitewashed boulders, immersed in her copy of the Dhammapada, a verse collection of the Buddha’s essential teachings, a picnic basket on the ground between her feet. It was the first truly hot day since we’d arrived, and everything was oversaturated and filmy. I could already feel the sweat beading on my lower back, dampening my t-shirt. Even Janet looked a little deflated, but Serena radiated perfect nonchalance, stretching one leg and then the other as she read. Now I see what a firm grip she had, how rigidly she composed every scene, the life of tableaux vivants she built up around herself. Now I imagine the way she must have propped herself up just so, waiting for us. But that day, she seemed to have sprung from the ground, as much a part of the landscape as the rock beneath her thighs, as unconcerned and constant as the punishing heat itself.

  Serena hopped off the boulder, and the three of them linked arms automatically, and somehow the linking didn’t limit their movement but freed it. Janet picked up the basket, Laurel took the book, and they all began to walk. I didn’t mind the exclusion as much as you’d think: I still loved them as a set. Their movements and conversations were like an expertly dealt deck of cards, every exchange quick and sure and easy. Muscle memory. I can’t help but remind you, here, that the heart is also a muscle.

  So even if I hadn�
��t worshipped their collective beauty, or their declarative freedom, or their easy belief in my father’s religion, I would have worshipped this: their flagrant, defiant belonging to one another. I worship it a little even now. Yes, despite everything—no, because of it. I am perverse, you see. Please note that I never pretended otherwise.

  You should also note that Buddhism, as a mode of thought, has little use for worship, and none for idolatry. The Buddha told his followers to trust their own experience. He instructed them not to accept anything blindly, even if it came from him. If what I offer is helpful to you, please use it, he said. If not, throw it away.

  Girls, on the other hand, are master idolaters. They are like Catholics in that way, or Satanists—all gilded shrine and ceremony, all theme and ritual and symbol. They hunger for the gaudy trappings of faith.

  I took a few quick steps to catch up with them. “We only have a couple of minutes until our morning activity,” I said. Today it was some kind of team-building obstacle course the staffers had arranged on the lawn. I could see them milling around, wiping their foreheads and admiring their work. One section was constructed of patterned sheets stretched over the ground, like a child’s fort. Tires made a lacy pattern in the grass.

  “Isn’t she sweet,” said Laurel.

  We kept walking. I asked no questions. Gift horse, etc.

  The path to the rock palm was easier in the light. Laurel sang a little as we hiked, a song I’d never heard before, something about turquoise dragons and tiger’s lightning. Her voice was pretty, lower than I’d thought it would be, and not breathless at all. Janet and Serena joined in at the bit about the fearless warriors. When we’d almost reached the tents, I noticed a sleek gray cat sitting in the grass by the side of the path. She turned toward us as we passed, and I saw that there was only a slit where her left eye should have been, like an empty buttonhole, with something milk white and unmoving behind it. I must have made a sound, because Serena looked back. “That’s Ava,” she said.

  “Ava?”

  “Avalokiteśvara,” she said. “Named after the bodhisattva, the personification of perfect compassion.”

  “What happened to her eye?” I asked.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Serena said. “Ki ki! So so!” she shouted, and Ava disappeared into the bushes.

  In the daylight, I could see that the rock palm was flat and clean and almost entirely edged by forest, except for the plane that jutted out over the drop, coming to a sharp point, as if accusing the horizon of something. I inched over; we weren’t at the summit by any means, but it was still dizzying to stand at the edge. I could see, across the valley, the weeping willow that once was a girl. I could see the ground too, far away, sharp yellow rocks and tangled bushes. It made me feel sick to look at it. I looked up instead; the sky was cloudless.

  From behind a tree coated with minty lichen, Laurel pulled out three lawn chairs, their spongy plastic cracked and faded.

  “Sorry, Olivia,” she said, setting them up in a row. “There isn’t one for you.”

  “She can have mine,” Janet said.

  “No,” Serena said. “You sit in yours.” She settled herself in the center chair, the blue one, pulled her sunglasses down from her head and stretched out her legs. The plastic squeaked against her skin. “Olivia will come sit with me,” she said. She opened the picnic basket and took out an enormous bag of Jordan almonds. I went over and sat at her feet.

  Janet sat in the yellow chair and Laurel reclined in the red one. Laurel rolled up her shirt, and I was briefly transfixed by the impossible smoothness of her stomach, that soft, unbroken plane, her navel ring a little crown jewel. I wanted it to stay inviolate and clean forever, like a blank page. I also wanted to slash a jagged hole through its center, the way you can’t help but disturb a still pond you find in the forest, make it gulp your heavy rock.

  Related: not long ago I read that our impulse to bite cute things is simply a product of cognitive overloading. Our brains are chemically confused by too much cuteness. This is so cute it hurts, we say. In fact, it does hurt: our brains interpret confusion as a threat, and a threat as pain. So an emergency neural signal is sent out: destroy destroy destroy. I’ll eat you up I love you so, etc. Mouths open, jaws and fingers flex, but societal norms generally prevent us from ripping the soft downy heads off other people’s babies, no matter how unbearable they smell, and so we nip and nibble only, hold little toes to mouths, make exclamations of edibleness. This is how we trick our brains into believing the threat has been disabled.

  Serena put her hands on my head, and I steeled myself a little. My mother used to make me sit this way when she French-braided my hair, which she used to like to do every Sunday, despite my furious protests. The braiding hurt, because she pulled so hard, because she was not a gentle person, but the braids were soft and smooth, and afterward, admiring myself in the mirror, I was always sorry I had fought her. This fact did not keep us from the same argument a week later, of course. But Serena did not try to braid my hair. She just ran her fingers over my scalp, passed bunches of hair between her hands, making fresh and tingling parts where they had never been before. Even in the heat, her hands were cool. I leaned my head back between her legs, and the yellow fabric of her dress surrounded me, making the bright day even brighter.

  I thought of how we must look from the outside: four girls sunning themselves on a ledge high above the earth. I imagined the photograph we would have made, had someone been there to take it—Laurel’s head tilted back in laughter; Janet scowling and strict, her purple hair like a glare on the film; Serena staring down the camera, her face inscrutable; Olivia at her feet, still unsure, probably caught blinking. We were so young. We weren’t so young. I wanted to collect it, that hour, that day, and stuff it still breathing beneath my bed with everything else I’d loved and thought I’d never forget the shape of. Even while it was happening, I knew I wanted it to last forever. I couldn’t have known it would last almost no time at all. I couldn’t have known that by the end of that summer, one of us would be erased completely, blacked out, as though something had spilled over the photograph, was already spilling that sunny, lazy day, already creeping, thick and dark, up to the developed edge.

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” Serena said. She pressed her fingertips into my scalp and I wanted to cry out for how good it felt. (Not many girls had ever touched me either, unless you count my mother, and you shouldn’t.) In Serena’s story, she was eleven. It was her third summer at the Center and she had wandered away from her parents to pick flowers in her favorite flower-picking place. Clouds passed overhead, changing the light so quickly it disoriented her, sent her careening dizzily across the grounds. She found herself near the garden. The new assistant gardener was there, and warmth came off his body in waves, so clearly and forcefully it made her take a step back. He looked at her as she approached, and then, with no ceremony at all, he began to float up, like a balloon. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She watched him rise to look over the top of the electric fence and then float back down. He didn’t say anything to her after. She watched him tend the garden until her father came, took her hand, and brought her in to dinner.

  “But how did he do it?” I asked. Oh, that, he had said, the liar.

  “If we knew, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Laurel said.

  “I’ve been trying to do it on my own ever since. And there are a few more things I’ve read about that we can try together, to get closer,” said Serena. “But all the books say that once you do get close, you need a teacher.”

  “I seriously doubt he’ll agree to teach us,” Janet said. “Even if he does know how.”

  “He does,” Serena said. “And he will.”

  “He never has before,” Janet said.

  “You’ve asked him?” I said.

  “Of course I’ve asked him. But I’m serious this year,” Serena said. “I’ve been preparing for this for a long time. This is the summer we’re finally going to d
o it. We just have to convince him first.” She pulled my hair tight against my scalp. “And now we have an inside man, which can’t hurt.”

  There was a sour edge to the pride I felt at this. Was this the only reason they had chosen me? “How are we going to convince him?” I said.

  “Just ask yourself,” Laurel said. “What do we have that he wants?”

  “He doesn’t want anything,” I said.

  Laurel laughed, throwing her head back against the plastic. “Of course he does,” she said. She pushed the waistband of her shorts a little lower. I closed my eyes, concentrating on quelling the prickling in my throat.

  “In case it’s not clear, Laurel would like Serena to prostitute herself,” Janet said.

  “In case it’s not clear, it’s a win-win,” Laurel said. “Sleep with an extremely hot guy. Learn to literally fly. Where’s the bad?”

  “Where do I start,” Janet said.

  “Obviously you wouldn’t understand,” Laurel said, and I leaned forward, because this was a partial answer to something I had been wondering, something important that couldn’t be asked directly. Laurel had obviously had sex. She had told us already about screwing the pastor’s son under the high school’s bleachers after church one Sunday that spring, the way his crucifix kept hitting her in the eye as he pumped and strained, until she caught it and ripped it off. Fake silver on a cheap chain. He followed her around for weeks afterward, laden with flowers and misspelled poems (“I miss your sweat body / I miss your sweat face”), but she wouldn’t suffer a repeat performance. He kept saying the same stupid thing to her: You look like an angel.