The Lightness Read online

  In truth, I felt that I would have known this about Laurel even if she hadn’t talked about it openly. It was something in the way she held herself. But her jab meant that Janet was, like me, well, unversed in the ways of men, as my mother would have put it.

  fig. 1: the closest I had ever gotten to sex was the time I built myself a bedmate. I stuffed a matching set of pajamas with dirty clothes and topped it with an old pillow printed with Mickey Mouse’s insane grinning head. I’d seen the movies, or some of them. I was desperate to know what it would feel like. I nestled into my soft monster’s armpit at night. I reached into the fly of the pajama pants and pulled out a handful of stuffing. I climbed up onto him, rubbed against the little semi-soft cone. I did more. I acted out the things I’d seen, heard of. Needless to say, this illuminated almost nothing.

  “I’m not going to sleep with him,” Serena said. “But I am willing to suggest that I might, if he tells me what I want to know.”

  “There’s no denying it’s a classic strategy,” Janet said.

  “My way’s much more direct,” Laurel said. “Sex makes men talk.”

  “Your way is complicated. Sloppy.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with sloppy,” said Laurel. “How about this, I’ll go for it instead—with those arms I bet he’d take me halfway to transcendence in one go.”

  “Stop,” Serena said. Her voice was suddenly icy, and the smirk melted off Laurel’s face. “You won’t touch him. I don’t want you to even think about him that way, Laurel. It could ruin everything we’re trying to do.”

  “Why?” I said quietly. My popped knuckles were burning.

  “We are trying to transcend our physical reality, not surrender to it,” she said. “Understand that the body is merely the foam of a wave, the shadow of a shadow, the Buddha said. Snap the flower arrows of desire and then, unseen, escape the king of death.” It sounded good, though later I would try to pull it apart and find nothing there. It wasn’t until the end of the summer, after everything, that I would finally understand what she meant.

  “Sex is actually allowed in Buddhism,” Laurel said. “In fact, there is some direct connection between tantric practices and levitation. Didn’t Padmasambhava achieve it after spending a month in a cave doing nothing but fucking his consort?”

  “Aren’t you the expert now,” Janet said.

  “We all have our areas of interest,” Laurel said.

  “It’s not about allowed,” Serena said. “And we’re not Padmasambhava. This is exactly why I don’t want you getting involved in this part. You’re not advanced enough.”

  “Well, if you don’t need us at all,” Laurel said, “just say so.”

  “I need you, dummy,” Serena said. “Everything I’ve read suggests a group is more powerful than a single practitioner. Just not for this part.”

  “And what if your plan doesn’t work?” Janet said.

  “Then I’ll make another,” Serena said. “I’ve prepared for multiple scenarios.”

  “Desire is the root of all suffering, the Buddha taught,” Janet said.

  “Desire is the root of all pleasure, too,” Laurel said. She was sullen now. She knew she had lost.

  “Pleasure is also suffering,” Serena said. “Because it goes away. You know that. That’s why you’re here. Now, do we have an agreement?”

  We had an agreement.

  For the record, I had no idea whether Serena had ever had sex. I wasn’t even sure if Laurel and Janet knew, and I didn’t ask them. It seemed contrary to the spirit of things. Serena said very little about herself, as a rule. Conflicting rumors aside, I knew nothing of her life outside the Center. This too was part of her appeal. Now I’m reminded of Sappho’s poetic fragments, or some of the salvaged figures from the Acropolis, the pyramids—curved half-moon faces, carved-out bodices, headless women, armless women, hairless women, disembodied hands still holding on to their precious baubles, having lost everything else, two legs and a shoulder riding an eyeless, hoofless horse. Fragment with the head of a goddess. What’s there is beautiful, but the real ecstasy (from the ancient Greek ekstasis, signifying displacement or trance, literally “standing elsewhere”) comes from the violation of the form—from the empty space. He loves a bodiless dream. The holes into which you can imagine the missing parts, more appealing in the mind than they could ever be in marble, or in flesh. The holes into which you can imagine yourself. The sacred is always obscure. This is a trick we never tire of playing on ourselves.

  5

  My father, when he was young, was handsome, and not just in the way all girls think their daddies are handsome. He wore blue-tinted contacts over his blue eyes; women would stop him on the street to marvel at the blueness. My mother was not one of these women.

  He was a dentist, and his waiting room was always full. He was popular, my mother told me, because of his reputation for silence. That is, he never asked you questions while his fingers were in your mouth. When he had his surgical mask on, and his nose and mouth were erased, the blueness was blinding.

  I didn’t like being taken to his office as a child. The metal of it all disturbed me. People with their faces covered.

  My mother was handsome too. Not even Paula would extend the theory of opposites so far as to expect otherwise. But her dark hair and dark eyes and loamy olive skin made a stark contrast against my father’s blue-and-blondness. Unlike him, she had been born far away, to a woman who had made the voyage to America quite pregnant, dragging a child in each hand (my mother was one of these children) while her husband played cards belowdecks. And she was tall, my mother. Six feet at least, with an ovoid face and stretched limbs, but it was her long, thick hair that seemed to take up all the space in the room. (She never braided her own hair, or in fact tried to control it in any way.) The only thing that took up as much space as her hair was her voice. I could hear her from anywhere in the house. I sometimes felt that I could hear her from anywhere on our street, anywhere in our city, anywhere in the world.

  Speaking of opposites: I almost never heard my father raise his voice. Instead, he responded to any quarrel or difficulty by softening his consonants, gentling his sentences, as if strife had only to be coddled, held close and licked clean. When my mother and I argued, my father would look at her and say, “Be soft.” And then he would look at me and say, “Be soft.” It’s no coincidence that it was he who was able to disappear.

  I look nothing like my mother, alas. I look like my father’s mother, the wife of a dairy farmer, with fat low breasts and wide hips and a heart for a face. In college, a boy trying to unzip my jeans would gesture at the reclining nude fixed unevenly to his wall, Blu Tack bleeding at the corners, and intone in my ear: You look like a Modigliani. I would look up and see a painting of my mother. I would laugh into the boy’s sour mouth. He would turn out to be the kind of boy for whom this ruined the mood. Well, bullet dodged, I suppose.

  (An angel, a Modigliani, a model, a slut. Men are always comparing naked women to other things, as if our exposed flesh is too bright to be experienced without simile. As if bare breasts won’t blind you if they’re cans, cantaloupes.)

  When I was young, my mother made Italian wedding soups and gnocchi and polenta with slabs of butter folded into the center. She fixed the porch steps and repainted the house and repotted the plants and sang in the evenings. She built a fire pit in the backyard, and killed spiders, and rescued sparrows, being careful not to touch their wings. (I have, at times, been jealous of birds.) When I had the hiccups, she made me drink a glass of water with a knife in it, blade angled toward my eye. Hurry, she said, clapping her hands. She was always changing her mind, moving the furniture.

  She worked at an advertising firm, but if you asked her what she did, she would tell you that she was an artist. At home, in the two-carless garage she used as a studio, she built enormous figures of women out of clay, their bodies obese and towering, earth-and-water flesh pooling and mounding over rebar bones, their faces sagging and distended, th
e opposite of her own. She called them the Mournful Fatties.

  On warm Saturday nights, she would invite all of her friends over, a wild array of people from buttoned-up businessmen to frizzy schoolteachers to pink-haired, nose-ringed comedians, and someone would have a full band in their back pocket (bass, guitar, drums, trumpet), and they would dance around the fire pit, stage belt-sander races across the yard, and play hide-and-seek among the Fatties, or dress them up in old clothes my mother kept in a trunk for this purpose, as sea captains or fairy princesses or accountants, all while drinking bottles and bottles of wine so red it was almost black, their voices reaching me in my bedroom like bells.

  The dancing was my mother’s favorite part. She would dance as long as she could get anyone to dance with her, and she could always get someone to dance with her. Men or women, though mostly men. She would pull their bodies close, wrap her legs and arms around them, grind her hips into theirs as they ran their hands along her thighs. She loved to be dipped, swung, and twirled. She loved to be touched, anywhere, by anyone.

  During these evenings, my father would usually stay in the house. I could hear him turning the pages of his book, or not turning the pages. There were hours and hours of not turning the pages.

  After her last guest had left, shoes worn through for his wife to wonder at in the morning, my mother would come in and kiss my father on the forehead. “Come to bed,” she would say.

  “I’ll be up soon,” he would say. And she would set her wine glass down gently beside him and go upstairs alone, and he would turn the page.

  Still: my parents, I always thought, loved each other as much as they were supposed to. No, that’s not right—for a long time I simply never thought about it at all. I assumed they loved each other because that’s what parents did. Mommy loves Daddy. Daddy loves Mommy. That’s how you got here, you know. (It is, more than likely, not.) Whatever silence, whatever argument, whatever smooth white china dishes thrown methodically down the staircase, one by one, spraying thick shards like arrows into the carpet, whatever standing and watching with folded hands, whatever curses—I figured that must be simply how it goes with Mommies, simply the nature of Daddies.

  Except no, that’s still not true, because I must have known something was wrong. I was only twelve when I entered the kitchen on a calm morning, looked at my mother drinking coffee at the table, my father washing dishes at the sink, and informed them that since I was almost a teenager now it would be perfectly all right for them to get divorced. I wouldn’t be traumatized, I said. I understood these things. I didn’t want to hold them back. They laughed at me, but less than a year later they separated, as if my permission had meant something to them after all. I do not remember feeling any kind of awe at myself, or any amount of pride. I felt only relief, a cooling sensation in my extremities.

  Desire is the root of all suffering. I moved stiffly through my tasks that afternoon in the garden, willing myself to say nothing, to ignore Luke’s face and that milky elbow crook.

  “What’s up with you?” he said.

  I was plucking steadily at the basil plant, its supply of leaves apparently endless. He poked me in the ribs, and all of my nerve endings turned toward that spot. “Ow,” I said. There’s no explaining some things, like the smell of basil, or what happens between people.

  “You look like someone died,” he said.

  “People are dying all the time.”

  “Well then,” he said, laughing, “you may as well be nice to me.”

  “I’m being nice,” I said. He poked me again, and I held my hand over the spot.

  “Tell me a story,” he said. There was a slight whine in his voice that surprised me. We had spent so many hours in the garden in silence; it had never bothered him before. It was as if someone had given him a tip that I was going to try not to love him, and he had decided that he’d really rather I did. He tilted his head, exquisite. He squinted at me, exquisite. He scratched at his beard, exquisite. Disappointing Luke was the root of all suffering. So I told him a story. That is, I told him all the usual stories a girl tells a man about herself, and also more. Binges, etc.

  For instance, I found myself explaining how my father’s new house was small and clean. How it was so new it seemed somehow fake. It was the kind of house you could build in a factory and cart off to any suburb in America, my mother had said, but my father assured me this was not so, that it had been built where it stood, as if this were something I cared about. It was the exact opposite of the house I had grown up in, which was old and rambling, with a nonsensical floor plan and creaky stairs and one wooden panel that, if you pushed on it, slid upward to reveal a secret compartment in the wall. But there was nothing inside the compartment when I discovered it, and no matter what I hid away in there—food, money, a letter—no ghost girl or wall sprite came to collect it and leave me a bit of power or a mortal bargain in its place. It was just a hole in the wall, and I was the only one who ever looked into it.

  Then I found myself telling him about the day I was standing with my bicycle on the corner, down the street from my house, and a boy came up and pushed me down, stole my bike, and pedaled away laughing. This was not long after my father had left. I ran home and told my mother, who called the police. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the back of a squad car. For a while, every time we passed a black boy, the cop would grip the wheel and ask, That him? though the boy hadn’t been black, and though I had described him carefully, twice. But soon the cop stopped asking, and his shoulders grew soft, and he began to talk, and to laugh loudly at things my mother said. She was wearing a floral sundress that day, one I liked, with buttons down the front. I could see her bare knees from the back seat. I had to stop liking the dress after that.

  Later, in the car on the way to my father’s house, she said she was sorry about what had happened, sorry about my bike, glad I hadn’t been hurt. “Better to learn earlier rather than later that there are bad people in the world,” she said. “Maybe if your father understood that concept we wouldn’t have to live in this neighborhood.” We stopped, and her face was bathed in red light; she looked boiled. When we arrived, she didn’t get out of the car. “Pay attention to her tonight,” she told my father through the window. “If you can manage it.”

  My father and I sat on the porch and watched her back out of his driveway. She ran over a bit of his lawn in the process. I kept crossing and recrossing my arms. He asked me what had happened with the bicycle and the boy. I told him the story. “Hmm,” he said. His hands were on the porch railing. It creaked under his weight. Lying to him felt intolerable.

  “I mean, that’s what I told Mom,” I said.

  He nodded, as if he had known all along. But he didn’t look at me, and so after a moment I told him the true story. The true story began like this: I was standing with my bicycle on the corner, down the street from my house, and a boy approached me and said, “I like your tits.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking down at them, new swollen things. “Thanks.” I did not yet know not to be flattered in these scenarios. The boy wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t handsome either.

  “Do you know what a pussy is?” he asked. (I blushed as I reported this, both to my father and again, years later, to Luke, but it felt like an important part of the story.)

  “Yes,” I said. I was thirteen, after all. Back then I knew everything.

  “It’s this,” he said, and pressed two fingers between my legs, right there on the sidewalk, in the middle of the day. I took a step backward.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Nice bike,” he said, shifting his attention easily, my pussy and my ten-speed being of about equal interest to him. He asked if he could ride it around the block.

  “Just once?” I said. Just once, he assured me. My heart was beating fast. I handed it over and he hopped on and pedaled away. Shocking twist: he did not come back. I waited for a long time, and eventually stomped home to tell my mother that I had been pushed, yes, pushed off my bike
, through absolutely no fault or stupidity of my own.

  “You lied to the police?” my father asked at the end.

  “Yes,” I said, miserably. I waited; he didn’t say anything, and after a minute or two he eased himself up off the railing and went into the house. I was sure I would hear him lock the door, because I was a criminal now, a deviant to be barred from all decent homes, but he left it open. I could hear him walking around behind those thin transportable walls. Soon he came back outside and sat beside me. He pressed a small jade figurine into my hand.

  “I was going to wait and give this to you on your birthday,” he said. “But I think you should have it now.”

  It was a young woman, naked from the waist up, her bare breasts covered by a thoughtfully arranged string of beads. She had one leg tucked in, and the other was beginning to wander off her lotus-ringed platform. She wore an elaborate crown, and the tiny look on her tiny face was one of serenity.

  (Here, I caught myself, embarrassed again. The description of the jade breasts was somewhat less important to the story. But Luke was smiling. “Tara,” he said.)

  “This is Tara,” my father said. “One of her major forms, at least. Green Tara.”

  I rubbed my thumb over her face. I did not think of my mother.

  “Tara is a great bodhisattva, a benevolent protector goddess, and the personal favorite deity of many Tibetans. Buddhist stories are full of Tara springing into action to save her devotees from certain death, snatching them away from the edge at the last moment, pulling their feet from the fire. She is the ultimate compassionate warrior. But the most important thing she protects you from is fear of fear. When you call on Tara, you’re asking to be freed of the delusions that keep you from seeing the world as it is. You can recite Tara’s mantra whenever you need her: om tare tuttare ture soha.”