Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  Women and Children First

  Stories

  Francine Prose

  For Sara Bershtel

  Contents

  Tibetan Time

  Women and Children First

  Other Lives

  Everyone Had a Lobster

  Creature Comforts

  Tomatoes

  Everything Is About Animals

  Electricity

  Everyday Disorders

  Criminals

  The Bandit Was My Neighbor

  Useful Ceremonies

  About the Author

  Tibetan Time

  MOST OF THE BUDDHISTS were therapists from the Upper West Side. Milling awkwardly in the small lobby outside the temple, the ones who seemed to know each other were being especially friendly to the ones whose nametags they had to check. The women were rather quiet and smiled pleasantly while the men discussed how long some Tibetan lamas live. A young man with a ponytail said, “There’s lots of monks in Lhasa who claim to be over a hundred. Hey, it’s Lost Horizon city up there.”

  A gray-haired man in a blue parka, one of the few not wearing a nametag, said, “Well…in Tibetan time. Who knows how those guys keep track. They’re not exactly punching in the forty-hour week.”

  “Or the fifty-minute hour,” another man said, and quite a few people chuckled.

  Ceci was acutely aware of how strongly she smelled of perfume. Yesterday, on her way home from work, she had stopped at a bookstore on Eighth Street, leafed through a fashion magazine till she was the only one at the rack, then surreptitiously unfolded a perfume ad, rubbed the scented strip on both wrists, and put the magazine back. She’d thought: How peculiar. She was spending the evening alone. But wasn’t that same magazine always telling you to do little things just for you? It was a designer scent, florid, with a musky edge of the dry cleaner’s. She’d washed her hands at home this morning, and again in the bathroom after the two-hour bus trip here. Why hadn’t it come off? She was sure others smelled it, too, and were dismissing her because of it as a completely unserious Buddhist.

  One by one, the newcomers were being drawn out on the subject of what they did for a living and why they’d come down, mostly from Manhattan, for the all-day meditation retreat. When Ceci said she taught kindergarten at a private school in the Village, the slackening of attention was palpable. That was how she knew that few of the Buddhists had kids. Luckily she was the last to be asked; as to her reasons for being there, she could say what the others said. They’d said interest, curiosity. A few said that certain questions kept coming up in their practices. One man said, “So many of my clients seem terrified of some emptiness, and I know that for Buddhists emptiness is what you’re shooting for. Plus, I’ve heard the Lama is pretty therapeutically sound.”

  An elderly German woman said she used to travel a lot; now she was homesick for the incense and bells. “It has been years since I heard a good old Katmandu bonnng,” she said, and made a temple bell gong in her mouth.

  Not one person said: I needed to get out of the apartment, I needed a day in the country with other people. Yet many looked pale and chapped, with red noses and brittle, brownish-gray hair; they looked like they’d been indoors too long. For all Ceci knew, every one of them might be like her, crying at night, weeping into the pillow like a sixteen-year-old. She wondered how many of them had picked this retreat as she had, from a newspaper ad. Under the Dharma Center ad was an ad for a travel bureau. If Ceci had had the time and the money she would have taken the charter flight to Negril.

  And yet she was glad that she’d come, and that she had paid the extra fifty dollars for a private interview with Lama Sakuro, the Tibetan master visiting the U.S. When she sent in her money, she had imagined telling the Lama that her husband had left her and taken a job at an observatory in Arizona. She would ask: How could she be so surprised that he meant what he’d said all along? He really was an astronomer first. He really didn’t want kids. She would ask what you did when you realized that your life will never turn out like you planned. Obviously she was going to the Lama the way other people visited storefront fortunetellers, only the Lama was safer—unlikely to offer to remove the curse from her money, or anything like that. What did she know about Buddhism? Prayer wheels, rock gardens, the Dalai Lama—she knew what everyone knew.

  These Buddhists seemed very keyed up about their upcoming interviews with the Lama. The oldtimers swaggered a bit. They’d seen the Lama many times, always when they had reached some stage in their spiritual progress and wanted permission to take on a new practice. Each managed to mention how long it had been since they’d taken refuge in the dharma. They all agreed that the Lama kind of pooh-poohed the theoretical. He was better at giving out meditations. One woman said that this had been the hardest thing to understand—that the words themselves had power. But what the Lama told her was, they’d worked for three thousand years. Several people nodded at this. The man in the parka said, “The people who get into trouble are the ones who think the Lama’s going to be some kind of fortune cookie.”

  Ceci wondered: How does he know about me? But of course there must be lots like her. And what was so bad about that? It occurred to her that for many people, the moment before they crack into a fortune cookie is probably the closest they ever come to a moment of genuine spiritual awe, of facing destiny straight on. Once, in a Chinese restaurant, she’d reached for a fortune cookie and her husband had grabbed her hand and asked if, sight unseen, she would trade fortunes with him. It made her a little anxious not knowing exactly whose fortune was whose, but finally she was just flattered that he wanted anything of hers. Last month she read in a magazine about a Chinatown luncheonette where one of the cooks was a pharmacist—sea horses, reindeer tusks, that sort of thing. Now the place had a new crowd of regulars: the dying, alone or with friends.

  From the temple came the velvety sound of a gong, less a sound than a feeling, like an enormous Q-tip stroking the length of your spine. No one spoke till the sound died out, a fading away that lasted so long that by the end, everyone had sheepish smiles, which brightened considerably when someone said, “Lunch!”

  There were two factions: the Buddhists who only talked about Buddhism and the ones who made small talk. The more worldly ones seemed embarrassed, as if the serious ones were their slightly out-of-it siblings who might alarm the new visitors. Every time one of the first type said something like, “Well, basically, it’s all illusion,” the others would let that remark pass and then compliment the food, an excellent curried ratatouille with crusty baguettes and butter. The German woman said, “This is some dining room”—which it was: handsome, wainscotted, grand enough for twenty people to fit around a long oak table, but also attractively rough; dust motes streamed in the gold, vintage-photograph light. The worldly Buddhists took turns explaining how the rambling building was originally a boardinghouse for workers who’d come to dig the reservoir nearby. A soft-spoken woman named Beth said, “And the Indians. This place was apparently a healing spot for the Indians.”

  “You know what the Lama eats?” the ponytailed kid said. “Barley gruel. Even when there’s food like this already made, he has his cook stew him up a plain bowl of barley gruel.”

  “It’s what works for him,” said the man in the blue parka. “What makes him run. You don’t put diesel fuel in a Cadillac.”

  Everyone passed around condiment jars. It struck Ceci as a good sign that the Buddhists ate with such gusto. She did what they did, smeared Thai basil and chili paste with butter on the French bread. Down the table, they were discussing the Tibetan diet: leaden dumpling soup, sausages stuffed with sheep fat and red pepper. Though Ceci ate greedily, she felt she was growing smaller, becoming that
invisible person whom no one expected to interact with the group. Out in the world, every one of these people was someone’s slightly out-of-it brother or sister; but here they had found each other, and Ceci was on her own. The first to finish lunch, she stood up and excused herself with the lamest of lame, self-erasing smiles.

  She drifted into the small lobby and perched on the edge of an antique rattan couch. On the coffee table were three books. She picked up the smallest one first. Lotus Perfection, by Lama Suravindo, in paperback with thin pages and blurry print, from the Samskara Press, New Delhi. She soon exchanged this for a large glossy picture book of Tibet and turned past the photogenic yurts, the prayer flags with the blue sky and white Himalayas behind them, past the masked demon dancers in the temple courtyard, straight to the wedding party. At first glance the bride looked so pretty, pink-cheeked, in her embroidery, striped blankets, tons of silver and turquoise and coral jewelry. Then you saw that she was terrified, and about twelve.

  The third book was an offset-printed local history of the reservoir. In one of its few photos, reservoir workers, dressed up in shirtsleeves and derbies, posed on a lawn. It gave Ceci a funny chill when she recognized the monastery behind them. The men were young, and all seemed eager to appear jaunty, but many looked wild in the face, frightened, their eyes as black and buttonlike as the Tibetan bride’s.

  As the Buddhists came in from lunch, the German woman who was homesick for temple bells was talking about her travels. The man in the parka trotted beside her, asking questions, while soft-spoken Beth—who was, Ceci gathered, the parka man’s wife—trailed miserably behind. The man told the German woman, “You know, you remind me of Alexandra David-Neel.” A long look passed between them, and the German woman said, “What a compliment. John Lennon may be your hero, but Alexandra is mine. Magic and Mystery in Tibet is my bible.”

  John Lennon? The parka man hardly seemed the type, but still he nodded agreeably. His wife sulked. Naturally Ceci was on her side. How could Beth meditate and still keep an eye on that? Ceci thought of her husband’s last letter. He described stopping at a Denny’s on the way to Phoenix and seeing a young woman by the door, pacing, looking for someone, a little frantic. The woman was beautiful and glanced at him, but they didn’t speak. When Ceci’s husband left the restaurant—he wrote this in the letter—he felt a devastating sense of loss, that he had lost his entire life by passing that woman by. Two hundred miles down the road he still longed to turn and drive back. How was Ceci supposed to answer that?

  She’d wanted to write back: Listen. That woman was me. For wasn’t that how they’d met, in the lobby at the Museum of Natural History, where she’d gone with her class and was chasing after a stray child? Her husband, who was there to consult with someone on the staff, had looked at her and kept looking. Maybe that was a technique he’d learned for searching out new galaxies: you just focused on a spot and waited. But she didn’t write that, didn’t write anything, because it was so obvious: the woman in Denny’s wasn’t her. It was someone else entirely.

  Another gong sent everyone straight to the den; probably they had their own name for this pine-paneled room, with its brown linoleum floor and colonial maple couches. They sat on the sofas and, when the chairs were full, on the floor. Ceci was the only one wearing shoes. What had the others done with theirs, and when? The man in the parka said, “I’d like to start by welcoming those of you who are new to the Dharma Center. My name is Walter. We will begin with ten minutes of meditation.” He took off his Swatch and set it on the floor in front of him, a gesture Ceci found comforting. The Buddhists took this opportunity to straighten their backs and cross their legs—the serious ones in full lotus—and upturn their hands on their knees. Ceci took off the black leather sneakers she’d bought on Fourteenth Street and tucked them uncomfortably under one thigh.

  Ceci closed her eyes and opened them. No one else’s eyes were open, except for the kid in the ponytail, but at least his gazed blindly ahead, not scanning the room like hers. She shut her eyes again and thought: All right. Ten minutes to think. But what were the others thinking? She couldn’t ignore the breathing, its measured intake and fall. After a while she heard someone’s stomach growl.

  Finally Walter looked at his watch and smiled and hit a kind of mini-gong. There was a lot of shoulder shifting and neck rotating. Walter handed out a mimeoed sheet. “I think this explains itself,” he said. “We’ll use the next hour to talk about the dharma. Then a short break, then a half-hour sitting meditation, then individual sessions with the Lama, then final meditation. Then dinner—and a party!”

  Walter let the smiles die out. Then he said, “I thought we might begin by talking about suffering and desire.” He spoke with the faintest trace of an accent, every slow, soft word a testament to how unhurried and at peace he was. Whenever he quoted the Buddha, his voice got even lower. “What it all boils down to is, suffering comes from desire.”

  Ceci thought of Walter’s wife, sulking while he chatted up the German woman; her only desire was for her husband not to flirt with a woman who, though elderly, still had terrific cheekbones. But didn’t that prove it? Suffering came from desire. Even the memory of desire was enough. When Ceci remembered her husband, there were certain places, certain nights and times she was careful to avoid. But finally you couldn’t predict when your own desires would jump up out of nowhere and hurt you. On the bus down from New York, Ceci had sat across the aisle from a mother and her beautiful four-year-old son. “Kitty cat,” the mother called him. “Sugar pops.” She kept stroking his hair, patting his head, scrubbing her knuckles along the back of his blue satin baseball jacket. Ceci had had to watch that.

  Walter said, “The way to stop suffering is to give up our attachments. Attachments to things we want. To what we already have and are afraid of losing. And what’s left is: living right. Dying right. Following the dharma without attachment or desire.”

  The kid in the ponytail said, “I hear where sometimes the Ethiopians don’t want the rice anymore. They tell the planes not to come. They know they’re dying; dying’s their business and they want to get on with it.” There was an uneasy silence. No one looked at anyone else.

  “Everyone suffers,” said Walter. “As most of you know, I escaped from Budapest in 1956 and never saw my family again. My wife lost both parents within the last five years. Only through the dharma have we learned to let go of all that.” Ceci waited for something to follow this astonishing statement, but there was only another of those long silences Walter used for subject changes. Walter said, “At first I didn’t believe it either. But what made me give it a chance was how scientific it was. This many mantras will get you that far. It’s all a matter of dosage. Why shouldn’t the repetition of words have a biochemical effect? All I can tell you is, it works.”

  Walter asked Beth to say a little about various meditation practices. Beth picked up a stack of 8 X 10 glossies; on each was a Tibetan tanka of a Buddha. Beth was even more soft-spoken than Walter, so that many of the older people had to lean forward to hear. Beth jackknifed forward, gesturing prettily, thumb and forefinger joined like a Balinese dancer as she explained what each Buddha did. The pictures were passed around.

  “This is the Medicine Buddha,” said Beth. “The healing Buddha. This Buddha seems to have an especially large following around here.” It took all Ceci’s self-restraint not to stare at her fellow Buddhists. Which ones needed healing? And what from? How ironic that now, filled with new curiosity and concern, she could not—for obvious social reasons—even turn around.

  The monastery was on a mountaintop. During the break, people walked outside. It was early April, chilly. The Buddhists puffed out their cheeks and chafed their upper arms. There was a view of three states which everyone stood facing. Ceci admired it for a moment and then thought: What now? The sound of the loudest gong yet floated out over three states, and everyone filed back indoors.

  Windowless, draped in red and gold silk, one whole wall occupied by a multit
iered altar holding dozens of brass Buddhas, vases of flowers, candles, and smoldering incense holders, the temple was surprisingly convincing. Even the incense smelled venerable and antique. On one wall was a large painting of an orange-robed lama, youngish and rather plump, with the beaming, cherubic face of those fish-riding babies in popular Chinese prints. There was nothing from modern life but a large canister vacuum cleaner, propped up in the corner—useful, no doubt, for the trails of uncooked rice on the carpet.

  Everyone found a pillow on the floor. When the gong sounded, Ceci closed her eyes, and, as Walter had suggested before the break, tried to meditate on her question for the Lama. But when everything settled down, the only thing she registered was her own perfume. That had been a mistake. She imagined a company stumbling onto an indelible perfume, forced to recall it after consumer complaints, leaving thousands, including Ceci, permanently marked. This was what she was thinking about when Walter hit the gong again and said, “You’ll see the Lama’s appointment schedule posted in the hall. But please, come half an hour early. Remember: Tibetan time.”

  According to the schedule, the Lama would be seeing someone every five minutes for two hours. Ceci thought: Why, he’s the Tibetan Dr. Ruth! When she saw her name at the bottom of the list—not near the bottom, but actually last—she lost all hope. She taught school. She knew how it felt to repeat yourself, day after day: Don’t hit. Share. Clean up. How the Lama must wish for a tape of himself saying, “Suffering is desire.”

  Ceci went for a walk in the woods but felt self-conscious, as if someone were filming her. She didn’t know when to start or stop or what to look at. After a few minutes she came back in and sat with the Buddhists waiting to see the Lama. They talked and talked right up to the Lama’s door. But afterward, they were silent and slinked away, avoiding eye contact like moviegoers after a film that has moved them too deeply to speak.