Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  She floated her outstretched arms gracefully from side to side. In Hawaii, my mother had started eating nothing but fruit until 2:00 p.m. She looked radiantly beautiful and was about sixty pounds lighter than I was.

  “I wish I could do tai chi right now.” Heaving myself onto my left side, I deliberately ignore the relationship advice and steered the conversation toward neutral territory. “My back is killing me.”

  “So just do it! One young woman came to my tai chi class up until the day before she delivered. Twins, no less. She had a water birth with a dolphin as a midwife.”

  “Mom. Remember? Incompetent cervix? Bed rest? Premature labor?”

  “Oh, phooey. Doctors come from such a fear-based mentality. All they care about is not getting sued. If you had the right attitude, you could be walking to Japantown for sashimi right now. But don’t take my word for it. I’m just your mother.”

  On the other hand, maybe relationships were the safer topic, after all. “So don’t you get bored, being with someone you aren’t totally crazy about?”

  “Who said I wasn’t crazy about Pete? I adore him. I just don’t think about him that much. It’s very restful. He goes off to work, and I can go get a facial.” She stood on one leg, the other delicately suspended in the air. “You’re just the way I used to be, honey. You make things too complicated for yourself. I suppose it’s inevitable at your age. But it’s hard to watch.” Typically of my mother, she was already flowing through the tai chi series with a dilettante’s ease. I watched her with a complex, familiar combination of exasperation and envy, as if she were a younger sister I had to take care of even as she threatened to upstage me. But from where I was lying, I could see her neck beginning to crumple, the delicate network of wrinkles under her eyes: my baby’s grandmother.

  “Mom. Didn’t you ever wish you had gotten in touch with my father?” Now that I was single and pregnant, perhaps I was finally eligible to hear the lore of her club of abandoned women.

  My mother swooped her torso low to the ground in a long curve. “But I did,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “Not for a long time, of course. I was too proud and too hurt and too angry. But finally, when you were four years old, I tracked him down. I left you with the neighbors for three days—remember, they had a little girl you used to play with?—and flew up to Seattle to see him. I told everyone I had a job interview.”

  “I remember that trip.” What I mainly remembered was the smell of the neighbors’ house: a combination of dirty cat litter and Pillsbury biscuits. Their daughter was a year older than me and obsessed with Barbies, which I loathed. She had told me as we were going to sleep that my mother was not going to come back, and that I was going to have to live with her for the rest of my life and play Barbies with her every day. I had believed her and cried myself to sleep in the pink glow of her nightlight. “So what happened?”

  My mother kept moving, slowly, as if underwater. She didn’t look at me. “I waited on a bench outside his office building and stopped him when he came out for lunch. He hustled me into a cab and we went to lunch in another part of town, somewhere where no one he knew would see us. I had brought a picture of you in your yellow overalls, climbing a tree. But he wouldn’t even look at it. By that time, he was in a new relationship with someone he was very much in love with. He was terrified that I would ruin it.”

  “So—did you?”

  “No. It turns out he had already prepared legal papers saying we had never had sex and therefore you couldn’t be his child. He offered me a large amount of money to sign them and go away. Enough that I could get out of debt and get a new start in life. Move to a different town and put you in preschool. Even go back to school myself, if I wanted.”

  She dropped her arms and looked at me, finally. “I could have pushed for a paternity suit. But what would that have accomplished? It would have wrecked his life and not helped ours. It was better that you should have no father at all, than a father who resented you for destroying his dreams.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Somehow I thought that the less you knew about my story, the better. Maybe that way you wouldn’t have to relive it yourself.” She pulled the hair-tie out of her platinum hair, shook it loose, then pulled it back in a knot and retied it. She looked at my belly. “So much for that theory, huh?”

  “IF IT WERE up to us, we’d definitely go for the gold.” Devi Das studied the splashes of yellow paint that Ishtar had painted on the wall opposite my bed, whose names all hinted that they had the power to transform not just my room, but my whole life: Whipped Cream Fantasy. Melted Buttercup. Peaches ’n’ Brandy. Dragon’s Gold.

  “I totally agree. And for the curtains, something like this?” Ishtar held up a swatch of burgundy silk.

  “Hmmm…the color is perfect. But we’d use a different fabric, something more textured, maybe a nice velvet or a chenille.”

  After two weeks on our lumpy living room couch, Devi Das had moved into Ishtar’s bedroom. Their relationship was strictly platonic, he had insisted when I’d pumped him for details. I had my doubts about how long that would last; Ishtar was capable of coaxing lust out of a potato. But for now, they seemed to be having a fabulous time just staying up talking past midnight.

  One night, long after I’d gone to sleep, I’d woken up to hear tablas rattling through the wall that separated my room from Ishtar’s. “Now your hips,” came Ishtar’s voice. “One, two, one, two—round and round. There you go!” Ishtar was teaching Devi Das to belly dance. I started to laugh as I pictured his skinny hips gyrating, his carrot-colored dreadlocks flapping. But then I stopped with a pang of envy. It’s not that I was jealous of Ishtar, exactly—I had never wanted a romantic relationship with Devi Das. But it had been so long since I’d felt that giddy rush of delight that comes with getting to know somebody new—sharing the things you love most with them, staying up all night trying something crazy you never would have tried on your own.

  The days of bed rest were ticking by, as excruciatingly slow as a vipassana retreat. Every day I pulled out my India journal to try to work on my book. But my journal read like illegible notes from a dream that I had already forgotten: White calf eating coconut husk. Beggar woman with paan-stained mouth. Dung fire. Stainless steel cup. Haze of dust. Sometimes I tried to pick up one of my meditation books. But more often I read junky paperback romances supplied by Ishtar: The Naughty Debutante. Bridesmaid of Desire. A Strictly Business Affair. The Red-Haired Geisha.

  When I got tired of reading, I shopped. In store after online store, I piled items I couldn’t afford into my shopping cart, then signed out without buying them: Breast pump. Receiving blankets. Mobile. Bouncy chair. Electric wipe warmer. I pondered collapsible strollers that converted into backpacks, jogging strollers with fat tires and names that implied they’d be suitable for invading a small country. A faux fur diaper bag that I could carry to the opera; a camouflage one for those cross-country jungle crawls with my baby through enemy territory.

  In quest of used gear, I logged onto Craigslist, where I bopped back and forth between “baby and kids” and “men seeking women.” Sexy Italian Man for Friday Fling. Animal Safari Crib Bedding. Angsty Intellectual Seeks PhD Model to Discuss Penguins. Kelty Convertible Backpack Stroller. What would happen if all those guys looking for hot sex and romance were to click a few inches to the right instead, and find themselves browsing amid the long-term result—diaper genies and breast pumps? And what was I looking for, anyway? Loving, sexy, spiritual yogi with spare bedroom and independent income seeks penniless yogini, eight months pregnant. Ongoing obsession with ex-boyfriend welcome. Total bed rest a plus. I sighed and snapped back over to the baby section. I typed “diaper table” into the search box.

  AFTER THE PAINT dried on my room, Ishtar and Devi Das decorated it. They slung Indian tapestries along the walls, unfurled a faded faux Persian carpet on the floor. They hung burgundy velvetee
n curtains from thrift-store rods with elaborate brass finials shaped like dragon heads. They draped a silk shawl over my lampshade so it cast a dim golden glow. When Lori brought over a bassinet and a diaper table she picked up at a garage sale, Ishtar and Devi Das swathed them both in shawls and tapestries, too.

  “This doesn’t look like a baby’s nursery,” Lori told them when they had finished. “It looks like a bordello.”

  “Language, please.” My mother looked up from her seat in the corner, where she was painting her toenails peach. “Remember, there’s an infant in the room.”

  “Wait, we’re not done.” Devi Das stood on my bookcase and attached one end of a string of Tibetan prayer flags to the curtain rod, the other end to the light fixture in the ceiling. “There.” He gestured at the Buddha on my altar, which Ishtar had festooned with a garland of silk poppies. “Now it’s not a bordello, it’s a monastery.”

  Ishtar shrugged and flopped down on the bed next to me, extending her long legs and bare feet, tipped with scarlet nails. “Nursery, bordello, monastery. What’s the difference? They’re all portals to the Divine.”

  “So you’re saying that those ten years I spent at the Zen center, I might as well have been at a whorehouse?” Ernie was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the Buddha, filling out paperwork. “Why didn’t someone tell me that before I wrecked my knees meditating?”

  “Cheer up,” said Devi Das brightly. “We’re sure that many people wreck their knees in bordellos.” He picked up Ishtar’s foot and began to massage it.

  Lori reached into her backpack and pulled out an eggplant. “Well, I have to say that for me, this is the portal to the Divine.” She sat down on the foot of my bed. “It’s the one thing I can trust. You put the seeds in, you give them water, and the plants come up.” She leaned over and set the eggplant in the Buddha’s lap. “You can have faith in some guy who sat under a tree twenty-five hundred years ago if you want. I have faith in vegetables.”

  “So have you thought about what you’re going to name the baby?” Ernie asked me.

  “I’m still trying to decide. I just keep thinking of him as Noodle.”

  “You’d better be careful,” Lori warned. “One of my landscaping clients is an actress and a single mom. She called her baby Oscar all through her pregnancy, just because she said that that’s what she was really going for when she slept with the casting agent. After he was born, it stuck.”

  “He definitely needs a name with some kind of spiritual meaning,” said Ishtar. “It’s too bad that Prana Ma was wrong about him being a girl. Aradhana would have been perfect.”

  “No—nothing Sanskrit. No one will know how to pronounce it. I think you should go with something nature-based,” said Lori. “Like River or Redwood.”

  “Come on, give the kid a break.” Ernie set down his pen. “Suppose he grows up to be a Republican. Suppose he wants a career in investment banking.”

  “Then he can change it, just like we did,” said Devi Das. “He can devastate his mother by changing his name to Chip and running away from home to get an internship at JP Morgan.”

  Lori picked up the baby name book off the floor by my bed. “Okay, I’m just going to read off a bunch of names. See when he starts to kick.” She opened the book in the middle and began to read: “Jaspar. Jedediah. Jeremiah. Jerry. Justin.”

  “Jerry—now there’s a good basic name,” said Ernie. “You can’t get into trouble with something like that.”

  “That was Amanda’s father’s name.” My mother set the bottle of polish down with a click. “And believe me, he got into plenty of trouble.”

  “Woops, scratch that. That would be almost as bad as naming him Matt.” Lori kept on reading. “Kianu. Kory. Kristopher.”

  But I wasn’t listening any more. I was remembering a dream I’d had a few nights ago that I’d forgotten until this moment: a variation on the dream I’d been having about my father my whole life.

  I AM AT an airport. A voice comes on over the loudspeaker: “Amanda, please come to the baggage claim area. Your father is waiting for you.” I run through the airport trying to find the escalators. But wherever I turn, I am stopped by airport security guards who insist that I take off my shoes and walk through a metal detector. “No,” I keep telling them. “You don’t understand. I’m not trying to catch a flight to somewhere else. I’m just trying to find my way home.”

  “LINCOLN. Larry. Leonard,” read Lori. I looked around the room. Ishtar’s eyes were closed as she wiggled her red-tipped toes in Devi Das’s palms. Ernie was chewing on his pen as he studied his paperwork, oblivious to the fact that he had a long ink stain running down his bald head and around his cheek.

  Did my father ever dream about me, the daughter he never saw? Maybe not. Maybe it was possible to seal off a secret chamber of your heart, lock it with a bombproof metal door, and never open it again. Maybe, after a while, it was as if it had never existed.

  AT THE BEGINNING of May, when I was almost thirty-three weeks pregnant, Lori drove me and Devi Das to my first birthing class—the only time, other than my weekly doctor visits, that I was allowed to leave my house.

  The Great Expectations third-trimester birthing class was held in a cheery, white-carpeted room in the UCSF Women’s Health Center. Lori had a gardening job and couldn’t stay. So she just dropped us off at the front door and kept going, calling last-minute advice over her shoulder: “Be sure to request a birthing room with a bathtub! Find out where you can get a doula!” Devi Das and I mistakenly spent five minutes in the Managing Menopause class instead, listening to a lecture on the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy. By the time we got to the right place, my five pregnant classmates were already lying on their sides on pillows on the floor, practicing their breathing. “In through the nose, out through the mouth,” the teacher was saying, a woman all belly and breasts, like a statue of a fertility goddess. “Ooh. Aah. Ooh. Aah.” The pregnant women’s partners sat behind them, cradling their heads in their hands, puffing along with them.

  I hadn’t missed much, the teacher assured me. But for the rest of the class, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being too late. Most of the other women had also taken the first-and second-trimester pregnancy courses, as well as some Infant Care classes and—for a couple of high achievers—an infant CPR intensive. They spoke with fluency of phenomena I was only dimly aware of—mucus plugs, meconium, Pitocin drips. One woman—a slender blonde in a pinstriped maternity business suit who introduced herself as a CPA for an Internet services corporation—mentioned that she’d been rubbing her nipples with a washcloth for fifteen minutes a day to toughen them up in preparation for breast-feeding. I thought she was joking until I saw all the other women nodding their agreement. “And have you or your partners been massaging your perineums every night?” the teacher asked. “It’s important if you want to avoid an episiotomy.” More enthusiastic nods. I avoided looking at Devi Das. All I knew about my perineum was that it was in a place that I could barely even reach anymore.

  Most of the other women had come to the class with their babies’ fathers—dazed but game-looking guys who eyed their women’s bellies with wary pride. Looking at them, I felt a pang of longing so strong it took my breath away. It wasn’t the men themselves I coveted—they all struck me eminently forgettable, especially compared to the fecund radiance of their wives. What I yearned for was the sense of casual coupleness that the women rested in: their affectionate, proprietary irritation toward their clueless but well-intentioned mates. I even envied the lesbian couple, two women in their early forties who held hands throughout the whole class: the pregnant woman short and chubby, with a long brown braid; the not-pregnant partner lanky, with short, gray-streaked hair and a T-shirt that read, “Ban Republican Marriage.” They inseminated through a sperm bank, the lanky woman told the group proudly. They shopped around for months to find just the right anonymous donor, an antinuclear activist with a Mensa-level IQ who had been raised on a feminist collective in Onta
rio. I was astonished by the thoroughness of their planning. By contrast, my own pregnancy seemed random, as if my baby were a stray kitten that had followed me home.

  All the other women also seem to have planned every detail, from their maternity workout clothes to the CDs they’d selected to play during labor. Three of them had already put their unborn children on preschool waiting lists. Two had arranged for au pairs from Chile and Sweden. The bricks of their lives were cemented into place. Whereas my life was tacked together from scraps of driftwood. The slightest breeze could bring it crashing down.

  “Now we’re going to practice our partner massage,” our teacher told us. “Especially in the early stages of labor, this can be a wonderful way to relax the laboring woman and take her mind off her discomfort. So ladies, why don’t you lie down on your sides and have your partners put their hands on your upper back…”

  For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine it: What if Matt were putting his hand on my shoulders, his hands kneading my back. What if Matt were breathing along with me, in through his nose, out through his mouth.

  I looked at Devi Das. The tip of his nose was chapped and red. His knobby, calloused knees stuck out from under his lungi. He looked like a birthing partner I’d grabbed off the rack at the thrift store, hastily, on my way to class.

  He smiled back at me.

  “Shall we go for it?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Sure.”

  ONE MORNING IN the middle of May, Tom called and told me that he was going to stop by that afternoon.

  I used his visit as an excuse to spend the whole morning washing and blow-drying my hair. Blow-drying turned out to be a big mistake—my hair flew around my head in a wild puff, like a dandelion about to go to seed. I tried on a vintage maternity party dress that Ishtar picked up for me at the Goodwill, with a neckline that showed off my hormone-enhanced cleavage. I hoped it would make me look like, say, the Naughty Debutante. But when I risked standing up to peek in the full-length mirror, I looked more like an elephant seal on her way to the prom. At the last minute, I yanked it off and threw on what I wore most days: a pair of stretchy leggings with the waistband cut, and a long, fuzzy, golden brown maternity sweater that Lori told me made my eyes look topaz. I didn’t want Tom, I told myself. But I definitely wanted him to want me.