Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “Okay. Breathe. Focus.”

  “Just please keep talking.”

  “I think I knew, even then. I didn’t want to know, but I did. I knew that there was something between us that would be there forever. Yes, of course, there have been other women. There probably will be again. But—”

  “Excuse me, but wasn’t the point of this story to get her mind off the pain?” interrupted Lori. “Because I don’t know if this is exactly doing the trick.”

  “It’s doing the trick for me,” said Matt.

  “For once, can it not be all about you?” She was glaring at him across my bed.

  “It’s not about me. It’s about us. Me and Amanda.” He leaned over me, cupped my face in his hands. “What I’m trying to say is—I love you. I always have loved you. I always will love you. Whatever else happens, whatever ways I’ve let you down, whatever way I let you down again, I want you to know that this is true.”

  “Aaaaaaaargh.” It was a long, animal snarl I didn’t even recognize as mine, emerging from somewhere deep in my gut. I stuffed the corner of the sheet in my mouth, tore at it with my teeth. I grabbed onto Matt’s hand and squeezed it as if I wanted to break every bone.

  “Breathe,” he said again. “Just breathe.”

  “Matt. I don’t think I can do this.”

  “You can do it. I know you can. Just pretend it’s a really intense Ashtanga practice. Every contraction is another pose. Just breathe from one to another like you’re doing vinyasa.”

  I growed again, gnawed at the sheet. I groaned. And that’s when I saw him: Mr. Kapoor. He was standing at the foot of my bed, dressed in his yoga shorts, his bare chest swelling. His face was fierce. “Do your breathing and all will follow!” he roared. “One breath only. Then one more. A little pain—no problem.”

  I shut my eyes and begin to do ujayii, that deep, familiar, sibilant hiss in the back of my throat. I cling to the breath like a life rope as another wave of pain crashed over me, then another. In. Out. In. Out.

  Mr. Kapoor kept shouting. “Every cell of your body is intelligent! Liberate its wisdom.”

  I’m trying to. It hurts too much. In. I want it to stop. Out.

  “Feel the pain as sensation, mate, not as pain.” Now Harold was there, too. “Is it pressure, or tingling? Is it moving, does it stay the same? Don’t add to your suffering by resisting what is.”

  It’s burning. It’s ripping. In. It’s splitting. It’s tearing. Out. Oh, I can’t do it. I can’t.

  “Who is the I who cannot do it?” Saraswati’s eyes were piercing blue. “Show me that I.”

  I don’t know, I am gone, the person I thought I was is shattering into a thousand pieces…

  “The Divine Mother comes in many forms.” Prana Ma’s voice was tender. She wrapped me in her arms. “And one of those forms is you.”

  And then a tornado of pain blew through me, so huge that it spun all the gurus out the window. I was roaring, and spitting, and drooling, and tearing my nails down Matt’s arm. This wasn’t a quiet ashram temple. It was a sacrificial altar, with priests slaughtering goats to wild drumbeats. I was Kali with her tongue hanging out and blood dripping from her teeth. My pelvis was a ring of fire.

  “Mmmm, hmmmm.” At the foot of my bed, Dr. Pat was sliding her hand inside me. “You’re ready to push.”

  “Matt,” I hissed. “Get me out of here. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to have a baby. I want to be a Tibetan nun. I want to be a yogini. I can’t do this.”

  He put his hand on my heart. “You’re already doing it.”

  And it was true. All on its own, my body was heaving, my belly rippling. I was turning myself inside out. The earth was cracking open.

  “Here comes the head,” said Dr. Pat. I heaved again. Something heavy and soft was sliding out of me, with a sucking feeling. Somewhere, someone was starting to wail. And then Dr. Pat was setting a slippery bundle onto my chest, and wrapping us both in a soft blanket. I saw a wet, dark head, a red face, a squalling mouth. Matt was bending over me. Forget our past lives: We had all three just been incarnated.

  “Here’s your little girl,” said Dr. Pat.

  It didn’t register, at first. Then I heard Matt’s voice. “Our girl?”

  For all things born in truth must die, and out of death in truth comes life. Face to face with what must be, cease from sorrow.

  —Bhagavad Gita, ca. 300 BC

  CHAPTER 27

  WE BROUGHT THE baby home from the hospital the next morning just after breakfast. Astoundingly, we were allowed to just walk out of there with her, without even passing a basic burping-and-diapering exam. Matt and I sat on either side of her car seat in the back seat of Lori’s VW. I held my breath over every bump, gripped the edge of her car seat so tight it left red marks on my palms. When we finally pulled up to my house, I couldn’t figure out how to snap the portable car seat out of its base. So I scooped the baby out of the seat instead, sliding one hand under her head, the way we’d practiced with rubber dolls in my birthing class. She was floppy and soft and unbelievably small. I was terrified that I would break her.

  My housemates had festooned the front hall with Tibetan prayer flags and blue banners proclaiming “It’s a Boy.” “Gender is just a societal construct, anyway,” Ishtar said, as she followed me up the stairs to my room, trailed by Ernie and Devi Das. I set the sleeping baby in her tapestry-draped bassinet and curled up on my bed, as close as I could get to the bassinet without actually climbing in it myself. Matt and Lori headed home to get some sleep, both of them promising to come back later and help out. I was dizzy with hormones and exhaustion. But I was afraid that if I didn’t keep watching the baby, she’d stop breathing.

  “So Prana Ma was right, after all.” Ishtar sat down cross-legged on the foot of my bed, her wildest faiths vindicated. The baby was a girl: hence, lighting candles in your ears drained the toxins from your brain, amethyst crystals could predict the outcome of the presidential elections, space aliens killed JFK. “And you even named her Aradhana, just like she said you would.”

  “I still might change the name. It’s just that they wouldn’t let me take her out of the hospital if I didn’t give them something for the birth certificate, and all the names I’d thought about were for boys.” An enormous bouquet of gladiolas sat on the bedside table. I picked up the card from my mother and read it: “Welcome, Aradhana dear! I’ll be on the next plane from Hawaii to meet you. Just please don’t call me Grandma. I prefer something like Nona, it’s so deliciously Italian.”

  “So all the ultrasounds were wrong?” Ernie peered into the bassinet.

  “Dr. Rao must have misread the early one. She did tell me it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate. And as for Dr. Pat—she was just having a little joke, I guess. I told her she didn’t need to tell me the baby’s sex, because I already knew. So she never told me that I was wrong.”

  “You won’t change her name,” said Devi Das. “You can’t. It’s karma.”

  “It does sort of seem to be sticking.” I couldn’t stop staring at her, as if she were a drug I was already hooked on. Her tiny face was red and slightly squished, the nose flattened in transit. Her mouth was definitely Matt’s: a pouty bow, pursed in concentration. Her tiny fingers clutched at a blanket printed with dinosaurs. Her brow was furrowed in a worried look, even in sleep, as if she were already starting to suspect that if anyone around here was going to get it together, it was going to have to be her.

  “I think I’ll take a nap,” I told my housemates. But really, I just wanted to be alone with the baby. As soon as I was sure they were all the way downstairs, I scooped her out of the bassinet. I felt like I was doing something illicit, as if I needed someone else’s permission to pick her up: but whose permission would that be? I lay down on my back and placed her on my belly, her head nestled just below my breasts. I had a feeling we would both sleep better that way. It was more what we were used to.

  Her face was working in her sleep, as if she were dreaming.
What could she be dreaming about at less than a day old? My breasts? The unfamiliar tug of the diaper around her thighs? The long, squeezed passage down the birth canal? The liquid darkness of the womb? Dread, surprise, joy, and awe flickered over her face, a preview of a lifetime of pains and passions. I wanted to wrap her up and put her in a cardboard box somewhere for the rest of her life, so nothing would ever harm her. In my dreamy, half-drugged state, it almost seemed like that would be a workable strategy.

  “Aradhana,” I whispered, trying it out. Was the name random, like so much else in my life? Or was it destiny? And how would I know the difference? More and more, it seemed like “it was meant to be” was just another way of saying “it’s what happened.”

  EPILOGUE

  From: Amandalayahoo.com

  To: Maxine@bigdaybooks.com

  Re: Enlightenment for Idiots

  Dear Maxine:

  You’ll be happy to hear that I just FedExed you the final manuscript for Enlightenment for Idiots. I’m sorry it’s a few months late. I’m sorry, too, that the first few pages are a bit crumpled. Aradhana got hold of it while I was trying to find the napkin where I’d written down your FedEx number, and her way of appreciating fine writing is to chew on it. Also, please ignore the typos in the last couple of chapters—Aradhana spit up on the keyboard and the “m” stopped working. I’d never realized how important the “m” is when you’re writing about spiritual awakening. I mean, there’s meditation, and mantra, and metta, and—well, you get the picture. I called tech support and got connected with this Indian guy in Calcutta, who didn’t know a thing about yoga, although he said that he’d really like to move to Los Angeles and get into it. I told him that a liquid had been spilled on the keyboard, and he asked what liquid, and I said partially digested breast milk, and he got really embarrassed and put me on hold for over an hour.

  Anyway, I would have cleaned things up a bit more, but I was afraid I’d miss the last FedEx pickup. And I know you said that this was absolutely the last extension you were going to give me, and that if I didn’t get the book to you by tomorrow at noon I was going to have to pay back the money you’d already given me, and I could just forget about getting the rest of the advance. And if I don’t get that advance I won’t even have enough to pay the diaper service.

  Am I telling you more than you want to know? It’s so hard to tell. One of the side effects of sleep deprivation is that I never know when to stop talking. Earlier today, I heard myself telling the FedEx guy that I’d been putting garlic mashed potatoes in my bra. It’s not a kinky thing—it’s for cracked nipples—but he kind of seemed to take it the wrong way.

  Anyway, if I’m remembering right, the last time we talked was a few months ago, when you and I had that little dispute about whether I could just split the book into two parts and turn in one now and one when Aradhana starts preschool. Well, you wouldn’t believe how much Aradhana’s grown since then. Back then, she was just this drooling colicky bundle who couldn’t even roll over. And as I tried to tell you before I accidentally dropped the phone in the Diaper Genie, it turned out she was what my parenting books call a “fussy” baby—which is basically just a nice way of saying she screamed all the time. She couldn’t sleep unless I was holding her, and even then she woke up as soon as I put her down, which meant that I did everything—ate, slept, checked email, whatever—with her in my arms. I even peed with her in my lap. My whole bed smelled like baby poop and sour milk. Every now and then, Lori or Devi Das or Ishtar or my mom would hold her so I could take a shower, and I’d stand there under the hot water pretending I was on a vacation at a spa. Once Ernie even offered to take her while I went to yoga at The Blissful Body. But my milk let down in Downward Dog, and I had to get out of there before I started dripping all over the mat.

  Devi Das kept telling me that I’d feel calmer if I meditated, and when I told him I didn’t have time, he asked, “How do you have time to do anything else?” I think that’s when I threw the diaper at him.

  Of course, I still loved her more than I’d ever have believed possible. And even when I didn’t, I just did what they told me at the Parent’s Support hotline and pretended I did until the loving feelings came back again. “Just fake it till you make it,” the woman who answered the phone kept telling me. It was two in the morning at the time, and I kept wondering if she was faking it, too—using this sweet, compassionate voice, like she was just so present with me, like she cared so much, when really she was clipping her toenails and thinking, What a loser. Why doesn’t she just hire a nanny?

  But I have to admit, that “fake it till you make it” attitude has turned out to be helpful with all kinds of things (including writing my book, although maybe I shouldn’t tell you that). And things are finally getting easier. Now Ari’s turned into this gorgeous, happy girl with great big eyes—one green, one gray, just like her dad. She laughs all the time, like bubbles coming up from her belly. She’s even starting to crawl, except so far no matter how hard she thrashes she can only go backward. I definitely know the feeling. But instead of getting mad or giving up, she just starts to chortle, like it’s just a total gas that she lives in a world where everything she reaches for just gets farther and farther away.

  Matt is madly in love with her, too—although that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s around all that much. That’s not entirely his fault, I keep reminding myself. Right after Aradhana was born, he landed a gig shooting a series of brochures for the San Francisco Zoo. It helped pay off Aradhana’s birth expenses, but it meant he had to spend pretty much every day in the African Savanna, the Lemur Forest, the Australian WalkAbout, and Penguin Island. He’d blow in at random times to snatch Aradhana up from my arms, cover her face with kisses, and tell her all about rhinoceros courtship behaviors. Then he’d hand her back to me when she started to scream.

  Anyway, when she was two months old, he left for Sri Lanka for three weeks, and he’s pretty much been in and out of town ever since. “I wish you had a man you could count on,” my mother keeps saying. But I keep telling her that I can count on him. I can count on him to be Matt.

  Before he left on his last trip, he gave me a photo album he made. I flip through it whenever I start to feel a little low. The pictures are amazing; maybe someday I’ll show them to you. Aradhana nursing, her mouth pressed wide against my breast. Aradhana asleep in a tangle of blankets, her arms flung out. A close-up of her tiny hand wrapped around my finger. Me rocking her in my arm, my hair a riot of curls, and a look on my face I’ve never seen before. You wouldn’t recognize me, Maxine. I look tender, and soft, and hopeful. I look…happy.

  It’s strange—my memory of those first few months of her life is one long, demented blur. But when I look at the pictures, I can see the joy in every frame. It’s as if Matt’s camera was fitted with a special lens that filtered out the surface insanity and let what was underneath it shine through.

  The picture I look at most often, though, wasn’t taken by Matt. It was taken by Lori when she stopped by one afternoon and found me and Matt and Aradhana sprawled on my bed, fully clothed, all of us sound asleep. In the picture, I’m turned toward Matt, with Aradhana tucked in the curve of my body between us. Matt is half on his back, one hand reaching toward us, his head turned away.

  I remember that Matt had gotten off work at noon that day—the macaw expert had called in sick, so his shoot at the South American Tropical Forest had been canceled. He’d come over to find me walking up and down the hall, sobbing, with Aradhana screaming in my arms. He’d bundled her up and taken her out to the park, still screaming, while I passed out on the bed. When I woke up, the sun was starting to set. Matt was lying on the bed next to me. Aradhana was nestled between us. In the soft, gray light I could see her long eyelashes brushing the curve of her cheek. Matt’s face was a few inches from hers, his mouth pursed in dreamy concentration, exactly like hers. It felt so right, for us all to be sleeping there together. The love between us felt so simple and clear. I thought, It�
�s too bad we can’t just stay asleep forever.

  Now, whenever I look at the picture, I see that the three of us are a family. But I also see how, even in sleep, Matt is turned halfway away from me and Aradhana. Even as his arms reach toward us, part of him is pulling away.

  The picture breaks my heart. But I keep it. To remind me of everything that isn’t possible between us. But also to remind me of everything that is.

  Okay, okay, I can feel you getting impatient, Maxine. You’re wondering, What does all this have to do with Enlightenment for Idiots? I’m getting to that. I really am.

  You see, I thought I was going to India to find the path to enlightenment—and that when I found it, I’d turn into a whole new person. But what if enlightenment really is for idiots? Idiots like you, and me, and Matt, and Sri Satyaji, and Mr. Kapoor, and everyone else I’ve met on this amazingly screwed-up journey? What if when all those spiritual teachers kept talking about the present moment, they really meant this present moment, not some better one? My present moment—with me typing in a spit-up-stained nursing shirt while Aradhana naps, and desperately needing a drink of water but afraid that if I cross the creaky floor to get it I’ll wake her up and this email won’t get done? Or your present moment, with you drinking a latte and reading my message, wondering if I’ve lost my mind?

  I mean, sure, my life is a mess. There’s this family I see at the park sometimes. The mom has a fabulous haircut and she always has makeup on, the really expensive kind that looks like she’s not even wearing any. And she looks like she’s getting plenty of sleep, even though her baby is just about the same age as Aradhana. She already fits back into her skinny jeans, and her baby wears these frilly pink dresses, and neither of them ever has pureed bananas stuck in the creases of their necks. On weekends, her husband comes to the playground with her and swings with the baby in his lap. He’s a big, good-looking guy with a great laugh, and he obviously adores them both. I look at their perfect family and I feel like…well, like I belong in the diaper pail.