Long Quiet Highway

by Natalie Goldberg

  During this time I never went to Roshi. Suddenly, I who was so inquisitive had nothing to ask, nothing to say. I was stunned by the way life was unfolding. Though I often heard about impermanence in lecture, I couldn’t bear experiencing it.

  When I sat meditation, I cried about my grandmother. I worried who would sit shiva for her when she died. She was ninety-four years old now, in a nursing home on Long Island. All the relatives had left for Florida. Who would be there when she died? My body shook as I silenced sobs, tears running down my face in the white zendo. She had had a hip operation two years before and was spending the last of her days in bed and in a wheelchair among strangers. My grandmother? The one who told me stories:

  “I stood in line with Mrs. Segal one Saturday to see the Rockettes. It was cold and we took turns standing in line and warming ourselves in the Horn and Hardart cafeteria across the street. Mrs. Segal wore a feathered hat. She’d say, ‘Mrs. Edelstein, go inside. It’s your turn to be warm.’ We were polite, and though she was my best friend, in all the years I knew her, we always called each other by our last names.”

  One evening, I saw a photo on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune of a Jewish cemetery in Lodz, Poland. So many Polish Jews had been killed in concentration camps, the caption under the photo said, that there were more dead Jews in Lodz than live ones. I could see in the newsprint that the letters on the gravestones were carved in Hebrew. I looked at the picture a long time. My grandmother had come from Poland. The last time I’d seen her was two years ago, before the operation. When I mentioned visiting her, my mother would say, “She’s completely senile now. It doesn’t matter. She won’t recognize you.”

  A garbage truck went by on the street. I looked up from the photo. I needed to see my grandmother again. I didn’t care what shape she was in. I resolved to go.

  As the bus made a full turn on the cloverleaf, headed from Newark Airport to the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan, I looked once, twice, out the window. I couldn’t believe what I saw. There was a small flock—maybe seven—of pheasants, dark brown, heads bent, feeding on something in the yellow grass at the intersection of two busy highways. It was a good sign. The East Coast still had some magic.

  From the Port Authority, I walked to Penn Station and took a train to Hicksville. At seven in the evening, I stepped off the train and took a cab to a cheap hotel that the cab driver suggested. I waited in my gold-and-turquoise room for the next morning when I would see my grandmother still alive. That night, I watched a sloppy movie on television about a cowboy shooting his lover’s father and hiding out in the hills. I ordered a club sandwich from room service. I took a long bath in the pale yellow tub and saw mold forming on the ceiling.

  I arrived at eight A.M. at the Polly Peterson Nursing Home. Polly was a rich woman who had left her mansion to the county twenty-eight years ago when she passed away. The county added on wings to the back of it, tore down the formal gardens and stuck up railings in the hallways.

  “I’m sorry, no visitors until ten o’clock,” they told me.

  “Listen, my grandmother’s here. I traveled from Minnesota just to see her. I haven’t seen her in years. What room is she in?”

  “She’s in room 208. Take the back elevator, make a left, and go down the second hall.”

  “Thank you.”

  I ran past orderlies in white pushing carts of white bed sheets. The elevator door closed slowly and rose in its own sweet time to the second floor, where it opened with the speed of a flower. I jerked left and looked for the second hall. The corridor smelled of urine as though no amount of Lysol could remove it from the light pink cracking plaster walls. Old men and women sat in wheelchairs in the hall, screaming, while the nurses cleaned their rooms.

  “Mother Jesus, Mother Jesus,” yelled one woman with knotted white hair. “Help me. Help me.”

  I passed 207. The next room must be my grandmother’s. I turned in. The room was light gray. A curtain sheet hung around her bed. I pulled the sheet aside. There she was. I stood over the bed and just looked, as though trying to adjust my eyes to darkness. She wasn’t aware that I was there. She was blind. Cataracts had grown over her eyes. I had heard about it, but I had forgotten. There was a red rash on her forehead. No teeth. They’d taken away her false ones. Only three natural ones were still left on the bottom. No wedding ring, no earrings. My mother had taken all the jewelry, so no one would steal it. My grandmother was mumbling in Yiddish to herself.

  I leaned my face close to hers, touched her on the shoulder. “Grandma, it’s your granddaughter, Natalie.” I was aware that no one had visited her in a long time. She turned her head and gazed in my direction. I began to cry. I touched her thin silver hair that was dirty and lying close to her skull. “Grandma, do you know I love you?”

  “Yes, I love you too. Tell me, who are you?”

  “I am Natalie, your granddaughter.”

  “I don’t know who she is. Tell me, who is she?”

  “I love you, Grandma. I love you.”

  I rubbed my cheek next to hers. On impulse, I pulled down the bar of her bed, lifted up the sheets and climbed in next to her. Her breath was terrible. I asked her the same questions over and over.

  “Who is your daughter, Helen? Who is Nathan? How many children did you have? Who is your husband? Where are you now? Who are you?”

  “Darling, I don’t remember.”

  She turned to me from time to time. “Have I ever met you?” A pause. “Oh, yes, Helen. I love her so. She is my husband.”

  She wanted water. I jumped out of bed to find water. Down the hall near the elevator, I found a fountain. No glass. I ran to the orderly.

  “My grandmother is thirsty. She wants water.”

  He ambled over to a closet and brought back a plastic cup. I filled it and rushed back to her side. When I got there, she was surprised. She had forgotten about water. She drank it, because I put it to her lips. Then I climbed back into her bed and put my arms around her.

  “Grandma, tell me a story,” I beseeched her.

  She answered, “About a glory?”

  I said, “How to begin it?”

  “There’s nothing in it,” she said.

  She had tape loops in her mind, and if I began something she had said many times in her life, she could respond out of some rote memory, though she didn’t know what she was talking about. I was satisfied anyway. I was working up to get her to sing. She used to love to sing. So with my arms around her, lying next to her, I began to sing lines from every old song I could think of that she used to like.

  “I love you, a bushel and a peck. Oh, my darlin’ Clementine. A pretty girl is like a melody.”

  The nurse walked in at this point, saw me and left. I didn’t care. I got quite exuberant singing, sure the nursing home hadn’t heard anything like this in years.

  Suddenly she joined in: “I like the likes of you. I do! I do! I do!” and her shoulders moved against the pillow. My grandmother stopped time. We heard a man’s voice above us on the loudspeaker, asking for a nurse from the third floor.

  My grandmother turned to me, laughing. “He thinks I’m singing to him!” She was fully aware. She grabbed my arm and touched me. I felt cells fly from her to me and back again. I clapped wildly. She was a great singer. The world was absolutely perfect. I kept clapping above our heads and my mouth filled with my tears. My grandmother hadn’t lived beyond her time, as my relatives said, shaking their heads. Her time was right now. Again, my grandmother drifted off, but it had happened.

  The nurse came in again. I had to leave for a while so they could clean the room. “After all, visiting hours don’t begin until ten.” She had to change my grandmother, who wore a diaper. The nurse informed me that there were coffee machines in the basement.

  I walked down the hall toward the elevator. Someone screamed, “Mercy, mercy, Lord. Give me mercy.” A nurse who didn’t see me yelled, “Shut up!” It didn’t ruffle the old lady’s feathers one bit. I heard her be
llowing it out again as the elevator door closed.

  I got lost in the labyrinth of the basement corridors. Nurses, orderlies, janitors walked by, chatting. They were relaxed. The basement was theirs. Finally, I found the machines. Egg salad sandwiches in diagonal halves peered through plastic doors. The thickness of the egg salad was displayed between white bread. I didn’t want any, nor did I want coffee. I pulled the knob for green LifeSavers.

  Two broken orange chairs and a dark green vinyl one were piled near the candy machine. At the other end of the room, two orderlies and a nurse on their break watched “Give Us This Day” on the TV. Their legs were up on a coffee table in front of them and they drank something from a brown paper bag. I bought an ice cream sandwich. With a spoon, I could feed my grandmother the vanilla between the two hard wafers. She loved ice cream.

  When I returned to the second floor, my grandmother was in the sun room with eighteen other patients in wheelchairs. Seven of them sat around two long tables; four of them had their heads lying on the table. No one talked. Some drooled. My grandmother was in a dress now, the old kelly green striped one. The zipper in the back was broken and closed by a safety pin. She sat quietly, her chin resting on her chest.

  A woman in a thin red nylon sweater over a wool dress glided over in her wheelchair and repeated, “Darling, will you help me? Darling, will you help me? Darling, will you help me?” I asked her what she needed help with. “Take me home. Take me home with you to Carolina.” I said I couldn’t. “Darling, will you help me?” She grabbed my skirt. A nurse walked in and the woman who wanted to go to Carolina shifted her attention. I fed my grandmother the ice cream. She liked it.

  Her room was ready. I wheeled her back and faced her in her wheelchair so she could look out the window, if only she could see. I slipped a green LifeSaver into her mouth. “Sweetheart, thank you. This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted.” It helped her bad breath. I kissed her and touched her lace.

  Her lunch was delivered. The ground-up food was on a white plate. There was a scoop of lumpless mashed potatoes, pure white, covered with a pale yellow gravy already solidifying from the cornstarch, ground beef and ground beets refined to the consistency of applesauce. My grandmother ate it all with no opinion. This was the same woman who never let us eat at McDonald’s, because they couldn’t possibly sell their hamburgers so cheap if it wasn’t really horse meat they served up between those white buns. Because she was blind, I touched the spoon to her lips, so she could feel there was food and open her mouth. She forgot from spoonful to spoonful that she was eating. Intermittently, she drank milk directly from a half-pint container that I held and tilted for her.

  I didn’t want to leave her. Again and again, I told her I loved her. She must know at least that before I leave.

  Someone rolled in for a moment. It was the woman from Carolina. “Darlin’, would you help me, darlin’, would you help me?” Then she rolled out to try someone in the hall.

  It is four o’clock. I have to leave. I may never see her again. This may be the last time. Again, I begin our old repartee, when we used to lie in bed together: “Shall I tell you a storv? About a glory? How to begin it? There’s nothing in it.” I kneel by her wheelchair. My chin is on her arm. She talks to herself. The sun is going down.

  As I waited for the slow elevator, I looked down the hall. A man I could barely see in the pale, early evening light was seated at the end near the window. He played a harmonica, really slow. I knew the song: “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines.” He wore a light blue short-sleeved shirt. The elevator door opened as slowly as time and I entered.

  I flew back to Minneapolis and still I did not go to Roshi. I saw him often in lecture; he sat zazen with us, but I had no personal contact with him to ask individual questions as I used to. I wasn’t mad at him or disconnected from him. How often he had said in lecture, “Finally, there is nothing to say. Just sit down on your cushion and face the wall.” I was listening to him now. I had nothing to say. I sat with my sorrow. The teachings were grinding into me.

  Part Four

  AFTER SIX YEARS OF living six blocks from the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, I left. The original reason I had moved to Minneapolis—to be married—no longer existed. I wanted to leave the deep north, I was finished there. And Zen Center? I barely said good-bye. It seemed as though I left the zendo, almost the way water mixes with Kool-Aid. The water becomes red from the cherry flavor. I left colored for life. But red water doesn’t know it’s red. It has not met itself yet. I left not knowing what I had learned, but I knew I would never leave Zen. Though my personal life took a different direction, I carried Zen with me. I knew the dharma was bigger than the Minnesota Zen Center. Roshi had taught me that.

  We have an illusion that a certain time, a certain place, a certain person is the only way. Without it or them, we are lost. It is not true. Impermanence teaches us this. There is no one thing to hold on to. Once, a few years earlier, I told Roshi in anger, “I’m never coming back here.” He laughed and said, “The gate swings both ways. I cannot hold anyone.” Yet, when I returned two months later, I could tell he was happy to see me, but he had to go beyond his personal likes and dislikes. He could not say to me, “Please, Natalie, don’t go. I like you.” He was my teacher. As a teacher, he had the responsibility to teach me, to put forth the depth of human existence, whether he or I liked it or not. “Meetings end in departures” is a quote from the early sutras of Shakyamuni. No matter how long the meeting or what the relationship, we depart from each other. Even marriage or monkhood, those lifelong commitments, end in death. In the face of that truth, he said, “You can go or come.” He was not tossed away by personal preferences; it was his practice to stand on something larger, regardless of his subjective feelings. And if I returned, the choice had to be mine. I was responsible for myself.

  So I left Minnesota. I returned to New Mexico, but Roshi came with me. I carried his teachings south down Interstate 35, then out 90, past the exit to Blue Earth and Worthington, into the tip of South Dakota, stopping at Costa’s Café and eating at the salad bar full of marshmallows, canned fruit salads, and small cellophane packages of saltines. I carried his words, his friendship, down highway 81 into Nebraska, lingering in Norfolk among fertile fields and cows, with friends, Bob and Barbara, who lived in a big white house, then along Interstate 80, going west, past Kearney and North Platte, and then south through Colorado, opening into my beloved big sage space of northern New Mexico.

  I never said good-bye formally to Roshi and I am sorry for that. Though I carried him with me, our formal time of teacher and student in Minnesota was over and I wish I had expressed my gratitude. But I was ignorant. I didn’t know it was over. It seems to me now that I still didn’t know anything. Gratitude is a mature emotion. Only in the last year or two in Minneapolis, with the divorce, did I start to digest the teachings on a quieter, deeper level inside me. And at that time of my departure, I was in too much pain to understand my relationship with Roshi and what he had given me. I knew Roshi meant a lot to me, but I thought he would always be around, the way you think as a young child that your mother will be there, or a house, a street you live on. We are naive, innocent when we are children. I was still ignorant as an adult and as a Zen student. Six years I had been there and still ignorant! We take a long time to learn some things.

  Roshi once told us that there were three different kinds of horses: with one, just a tug at the reins made them start moving; the second, a kick in the flanks and they were off; and then there were those that had to be beaten to the bone with a whip before they started to move. “Unfortunately,” he said, “most human beings are the third kind.” He told us we act as though we were going to live forever. “Wake up,” he said.

  I drove my thick carcass out of Minnesota. I regret I did not thank him for his great effort, did not bow in front of him, present him with a little spice cake, an orchid, a wool cap to keep his shaved priest’s head warm. I know he u
nderstood. He did not teach in order to receive anything, but gratitude may be the final blessing for a student. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I know what I have received. Knowing that, the duality of teacher and student dissolves. The teacher can pour forth the teachings; the student absorbs them. No resistance, no fight. It is a moment of grace.

  Instead, most of us want more and more. We want to be recognized. We want our egos fed. To feel gratitude is to recognize the other, to lay down our own greed and aggression. What a relief! What joy!

  But a teacher does not teach to receive presents. That is the work of a teacher, not to get caught in the likes or dislikes of a student, but to come forth always with the deepest teachings. Often the student does not like this, thinks the teacher is mean, unfeeling, but a good teacher knows that if he or she plants a real seed, someday, maybe years later, even in the most ignorant of students the seed may sprout. So the teacher’s job is to close the gap between the student’s ignorance and the teachings, but often the student does not understand any of this. That is why the student is a student. The teacher understands this. That is why the teacher can have abundant patience.

  But if the student doesn’t know about the gap, how can she learn? There is something in us, an urgency to meet the teachings on the other side, that gnaws at our ignorance, that desires to meet our own true face, however lazy and comfort-loving we may seem to be. This something was working in me, albeit slowly, and often underground.

  When I arrived in Taos, I stayed for a month in a silver school bus out on the mesa with my friends Gini and Michael. It was wonderful to be back up in Taos, but I walked around there like a ghost. I’d see a new restaurant and remember when it was The House of Taos, a place where Neil and I hung out that served the best green chili pizza, and where Ron, the owner, stood in the back, tall and bearded, over the ovens. I’d see Taos Valley School, now a private elementary school, and remember when it was DaNahazli, the old hippie school where I taught writing to barefoot kids wearing cantaloupe-seed necklaces, and where Ram Dass would stop in when he was visiting Lama Foundation, and where we did Sufi dancing every Friday afternoon in the playground. Taos wasn’t the same, it was becoming gentrified—no, that wasn’t it. It was that almost everyone I knew had left. I carried an old dream of it in my body, but most of my friends had moved on to meditation centers in Boulder, San Francisco, Los Angeles.