The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  That was how the guru looked at me when I was naked.

  The memory made me laugh, out-of-control laughing, which made him laugh, and that was how it was at first with him, a tumbling joy, an erotic escape hatch.

  “You shouldn’t go home. You should stay,” he said.

  It was as if I could watch myself making those decisions from somewhere across the room, and I knew it was wrong, but it felt right. It felt like I had to stay. A deer was nibbling on grass outside the floor-to-ceiling window of his palatial bedroom. The sky was a soft grey at the edge. We could only make out the shadowy shape of the deer. We watched for so long, silently, that the sky pinkened, and other deer, all clearly defined in rich browns and greys, joined the first one. A flawless tableau. I didn’t want to go home. I knew that if I were a good person, a good mother, I would want to. It sounds awful, but I didn’t miss my family. I didn’t miss Bryce. I felt like I’d found my home. Like I could finally breathe.

  I padded to the window, slowly, pressed my palms against the glass. They kept eating. I slid open the door, tried to move every isolated muscle in infinitesimal stages so they wouldn’t notice. Thanks to daily progressive muscle relaxation exercises, this worked, until all ten toes pressed into the grass, and they were eyes up and then tails retreating, into the woods.

  He laughed as I slid the door shut.

  “You thought you could just join them. Like they wouldn’t notice you’re not a deer!” He kept laughing as he walked into the ensuite bathroom, scratching one ass cheek.

  Still, I felt like wildlife, like I was free.

  I didn’t say any of this to Miranda and the cop. I took a deep inhale, counting to four, and exhaled to four. I pressed my hand to my chest. I smelled the lavender oil I’d placed on my wrist that morning.

  “He made me feel special,” I said, which sounded so elementary, so pedestrian, but I could tell by their expressions this was the kind of thing they expected to hear.

  My primary job that first summer was in the laundry, rows of stainless-steel industrial machines in the basement of the centre. It was my self-admonishing cave. The row of rectangular fluorescent light fixtures flickered like TV static. One row of lights had burned out completely and was never replaced. It felt punishing, the heat and the mounds of linen, but that was also the point. I deserved hardship, and I needed to provide service. If every day started down there, my journey would eventually end in some sort of soul healing. I didn’t fully understand the concept of soul healing in an intellectual way, but I felt it. I felt it in the hot cotton sheets pulled out of the dryers, folded on the long metal table.

  Soul healing was the main goal of most of us living at the centre. Everyone walked around like they had done bad things, or had come here to avoid doing bad things. We moved around underneath the rich ladies who paid piles of money to come for silence and meditation, for sweaty yoga and forest walks. I washed the plain white sheets they slept under, had soaked with their tears about the husbands who ignored them or the ones they no longer loved. They’d screamed into the pillowcases, or rested their heads in bewilderment, thinking Is this all life is? Everyone spoke to one another as though life was joyful, as though they were finding simple joy, as though that joy was in the small moments of life. But their eyes said that malaise was killing them. I tried every workshop offered at the centre, except the one about laughter. In that workshop the leaders encouraged you to begin laughing, but not because anything was funny. You just had to fake it at first, and then eventually everyone truly started laughing. I found just the sound of it to be heartbreaking, all that forced boisterous guffawing at nothing. The facilitator knew I was a skeptic. Linda. Linda cornered me whenever she saw me, her eyes unnaturally bright. You should take my laughter workshop, you look like you need it!

  I worked in the kitchen, too, and we served women who frequently said things like I really needed this rest with such sincerity, but they never looked tired. My wrists and hands were covered with tiny moon-shaped burns, my skin puckered from hot water and steam, then flaking and red later as I fell asleep. I rubbed shea balm on them every night but it never quite worked. This was a deep discomfort I deserved.

  I ate the plainest of foods, giving up sea salt and tahini and Bragg liquid amino acids, sticking to the end of the buffet with the steamed vegetables, the unadorned brown rice, meant for the residents with allergies or who were undergoing sacred fasts. I did cleanup shifts, standing on top of an old produce box to reach the taps on the giant sinks, and burning myself on Hobee, the Hobart, a dishwasher that sanitized the giant pots and pans. I went to the evening yoga class with parsley in my hair, smelling of the night’s meal, hands and arms pink and rubbery from the heat and sweat. I lost weight. I didn’t cut my hair. Then I impulsively cut it all off with kitchen shears. I woke up with the sunrise and bathed in the stream on the hill above the centre. I was leaving my ego, leaving vanity, behind in the water.

  Miranda shuffled her papers. She was beginning to look annoyed, rubbing her eyes so that her eyeliner looked like smudged wings.

  “So you left your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “That must have pissed him off.”

  “Yes. But we were separated. He’d cheated first.”

  That wasn’t the whole story, but that was the only way square cops would understand the story. I didn’t tell them that before I left, our theoretical open relationship had taken a turn for the literal. Bryce had taken up with a new girl at the commune, one barely out of her teens who called everything the most. Even lentil stew or carrots pulled from the garden, they were the most! I wanted to bash her head in. I couldn’t handle the itch of violence she had awoken in me. We always did group conflict mediation sessions, and at the end we hugged and made peace. But I had no peace in my heart. I was acting. Standing in the healing circle, holding hands and discussing conflict resolution and our personal responsibility, I realized Sunflower was a failure. The disintegration of everything we’d hoped it would be. I saw Missy sitting in a tree several yards away, listening to her hot-pink Walkman, aggressively ignoring us. In those days, she listened over and over again to the same song she’d recorded from the radio onto an empty cassette tape in the living room: “Pump Up the Jam.” Sometimes she would dance around us in her bright yellow ankle socks, her arms filled with jelly bracelets, and I saw the teenager she was becoming.

  She scoffed at everything we said to her.

  I drove her to her last day of grade seven the next day, and then I just kept driving.

  After I phoned Bryce from the pay phone in town, telling him I wasn’t coming home just yet, he demanded to know where I was, but I wouldn’t say. I didn’t want him to show up and blue-eyes me back into his arms. There was something about him I could never resist, even when I felt so much anger and resentment I could barely breathe.

  I called at night so I wouldn’t hear Missy in the background and fall apart.

  I truly was trying to find myself, but saying that didn’t sound sincere, so I didn’t say it.

  “Tell Missy I love her and this is better in the long run. It won’t be for long, I promise.”

  “I’m not going to lie to her.”

  “Do what you think is best, you’re the parent now. Say something so she knows she’s loved, and that I haven’t just walked off a cliff or something. I don’t want her to think that.”

  When I hung up the phone, I felt relief. And then I felt guilt for the relief. I cried through evening yoga. But then at night, there was a quiet. A stillness inside me. I had to press my thumb to my neck to make sure my heart was beating. It was in those moments when I knew I’d made the right decision. A decision that no one would ever likely understand, a decision that would make me an outlaw, a madwoman, a monster to most of society. But it was stillness, and it was freedom, my solitude in a tiny bunk, under stiff white sheets, and it was everything.

  After I’d cried through several more nights of yoga, the guru led me to his house on the edge of
the property. It looked simple from the outside, but inside there was a fire and fresh flowers and an elaborate table of fruits and cheeses. I’d been eating so many plain foods that the berries, peaches, and brie made me feel alive again. He said he wanted to cleanse my aura while I tore through a handful of grapes like a starving wolf. He laid me down on the softest bed, and moved his hands all over me until I came in waves that seemed endless, and I saw a warm bright light and he held me for hours until I fell asleep. When I woke up he was gone, and one of his handlers was cleaning the room, and she offered me a cup of ginger tea and pressed one palm to my chest and said, “Welcome.”

  It sounds so creepy, to recount it, but it was blissful and oddly uncomplicated. And even years later, when we all offered our narratives to the investigators, I told them the truth, that I’d felt loved. When I told him I wanted to leave my husband, he’d put his hands on my heart and said, “Your heart yearns to be free.” He helped me choose myself for the first time in my life, even though soon it felt like I’d chosen him, traded one selfish dreamer for another.

  The room at the police station was cold, but I was flashing heat from perimenopause. While I explained how I’d given the guru all my money, though I hadn’t had much, sweat dripped down my back and then froze. Why couldn’t I ever be the same temperature as everyone else? When I described how I felt married to him, it sounded more sordid than it was.

  “It was love,” I said. The cop gave me a look that said he thought I was a crazy quack, but Miranda just looked down and scribbled another note in her pad. I had felt calm in that love, as I hadn’t in years. Not since before Missy was born. And maybe it was crazy to feel that way.

  Since the guru’s expulsion, everything was chaotic at the centre, but we were determined to keep it going. A group of long-time residents decided to take over, and we were in the middle of figuring out how to do this. But instead of asking permission for things, we organized by collective and tried to decide via consensus decision making. We’d been the ones doing the hard work all along, after all. So it wasn’t all that different. We replaced any events that had centred on the guru with extra meditation sessions about joy. We brought in a facilitator to teach forgiveness. It was funny that I’d escaped one intentional community only to end up in another, but this time the men were gone.

  Sex had always complicated my life. It had almost never made it better, no matter how good it had felt at the time. The acts of devotion, as the guru called it, made me feel closer to the goddess, to the spirit of the world, than anything else ever had. But over time, the sex began to feel a bit like a chore or a habit. I started to see him as ugly and demanding, as any other man. The feelings of transformation were just lies of chemistry and hormones, the alchemy of momentary compatibility, and it was just sex and that was all. Humans are so undone by it, and we are fools.

  Chapter 3

  missy

  we are dripping in America by the middle of the tour and feeling pretty good about ourselves. I’m in an airfield outside Baltimore, playing my fucking heart out. The crowds are stomping. Hands crushing beer cups. Arms raised in group awe. When the audience is with us, we own them. Their love is embarrassing and beautiful but also crazy to fathom. Here we are, the Swearwolves, a bunch of music-school geeks, but now we’re all so fuckable. And I love us. My tits through a thin T-shirt that reads THE BITE TOUR are on the cover of Spin magazine. I’m not even sick to death of half the new songs yet. When we reach the end of the set and Billy says our names, introducing us one by one, I fall in love with everyone, even when Tom prolongs the drum solo to a masturbatory length.

  And there is James. I want James. He’s in the front row, which is where I first met him. He’s that record store guy at every show, hanging around so much he’s genuinely friends with the band. He has an adoring face, a hot interrogation light, but a flattering one. His hair is golden, curled down below his shoulders. But he hasn’t been front and centre since New York last year.

  Near the end of our set, the crowd is a hungry mass and we are feeding them. I’m playing rhythm guitar for this song, and I kick out my leg toward James. He gives me a wink. I can feel the way he likes to wrap one hand around my hair and pull gently, and then with force. As we hold each other’s gaze, I’m briefly alight, floating above the sold-out crowd.

  The gender split in the major live music scene is a little like the army, a woman here and there, but mostly you are on your own. There’s no one to borrow a tampon from, and the girls my bandmates hook up with aren’t ever around long enough to get too deep. You have to watch your back, or try to make the most of it. I didn’t want to be prey, and so I became a type of predator, a slinking she-wolf bathed in gin and audience adoration with a boy in nearly every port. The boy in Baltimore was James, though he’d been my East Village hookup for about a year and a half. James rips off his T-shirt. He screams the chorus. He bangs his fist on the edge of the stage. The teenage girls in the front row don’t know what to make of his frenzy.

  I was a shy kid in high school. I didn’t even try a sip of beer until after my eighteenth birthday. And here I am, a few years after graduation, taking a full-year break from the conservatory, and there’s my photo in Rolling Stone, backstage with Kim Deal at a festival. Our first solo tour feels like the endless present. People aren’t just recognizing Billy when we pull into rest stops, or in the aisles of CVS picking up hand lotion and condoms. They know who I am. I hear my own voice over the radio sometimes. It’s a rush. I get cocky. We all do. It’s so easy to see a clear story in retrospect, but in the middle of it, all I feel is hands and mouths, Sharpies thrust forward to sign T-shirts, the sound of applause and the birdlike whoops of those fans in a moment of transcendence, the taste of beer and lemon Snapple, the cold hotel pillow at the end of the night. It’s the middle of the orgy, and all we have are feelings, so many feelings, and all of them colossal, creeping through our bodies and messing with our minds.

  I play each song without thinking about the notes. Some songs on the cello, others on guitar. I have a tattoo across the knuckles on my left hand that reads MORE. My father told me it was my first word. In these moments onstage, I am more body than brain, and I don’t need my brain to play each note flawlessly. My mind is concerned mostly with two things: how many songs are left before I can see James, and the fat crow sitting on the amplifier. The crow is looking at me too intently. I give him a pacifying nod.

  Crows will always remember your face. If you throw an empty coffee cup at a crow, it tells its buddies. They look after their own. They can live for a hundred years. I didn’t fuck with the crow. Tom did. By accident. Tom’s not an asshole; he just didn’t see the crow lounging on the rim of the dumpster before he threw the cup. He’s got drummer arms, so the cup went too fast, too hard. Surprised them both.

  It stopped raining just before our set. A rainbow cradled in thousands of upturned palms. Shirts were stuck to their chests with rainwater and sweat. I look at my left hand. It’s moving along the frets again. If you do something a million times you’ll just keep doing it. Even when you’re gone. Like when you pull up to your house and don’t remember driving there.

  Billy stands with his arms stretched open, like he’s trying to embrace the whole audience, his eyes closed. Rolling Stone magazine hailed this song as the “anthem of the year” and I can see hearts swelling. I wrote the song. Billy hates that.

  Tom likes it, he says it keeps Billy humble.

  Being in a band is kind of like group dating. If everyone is selfish at the same time, it doesn’t work. We can’t all be the deadbeat dad. I try not to be the mom, just because I’m the girl, and I’d never be able to compete with Tom, who moms us the best. He reminds us to eat dark green vegetables, get at least four hours of sleep a night. Last week in Albany we blanched fists of broccoli in chipped Travelodge coffee mugs with hot water meant for tea, coffee filters tented on top to seal in the heat. I ripped open a small paper packet of salt with my teeth for seasoning. The half-torn pa
cket salted the sweaty change in my back pocket for days.

  I come back to the song, now almost over, as my watermelon gum fades of its flavour and goes soft and pink in my mouth. It was great until it wasn’t, and I go to spit it out but will it poison the crow? I can’t chance it. My T-shirt smells like a gamy blend of sweat and lemon Speed Stick. Touring means bacteria is always at war with heat and fabric. I started the tour with shiny-new pink sneakers, limited edition Converse One Stars, and now they’re cracked from overuse, and one heel of my combat boots is worn down so I’ve been walking with a slight limp from a nail slowly moving up through the sole.

  The crowd always grows taller for the final song. Off to the side, on top of the Marshall stacks, three more crows appear. I didn’t throw the cup: I try to say that with my eyes. Animals can read emotion. The crows’ feathers seem to puff up, like a group of guys at last call looking for a fight. Birds make me nervous. So many feathers and tiny bones, nothing of substance. They’re a gang. They’re after us. It was my job to collect the eggs in the henhouse when I was a kid. They saw my little hands for what they were—perfect for pecking. I never got over it.

  Tom catches my eye, gives me a You okay? I give my head a nod toward the crows. Now they are six. He laughs.

  He mouths, You’re crazy.

  I yell, “You’ll see.”

  I turn back to the crowd. James and I hold eye contact. He rubs one hand against his beard, winks. Bookended by two open-hearted girls, singing their guts out. The last time we met up was in New York City last year, opening for another band at the Bowery Ballroom. He’d told me he was moving to Baltimore.