by Tracy Franz
On the way back down, we stop at the Motherlode, the lodge our family owned for barely a year before the business lost viability. It is strange to move through this remodeled version of my memories. Very few people are in the building today, and my mother and I comment on each space in hushed voices: “This was here, wasn’t it?” and “This is new.” I must have been ten years old when we moved in. My second stepfather, an alcoholic, poured away all that we had every night at the bar—rarely charging the patrons for the party. I was forbidden visits from school friends because, as my mother once said, “This is no place for a child.” She had been right of course, and so I mostly gave up friendships altogether—the start, perhaps, of a lifelong habit of letting go.
But in brief spurts, I remember feeling great joy here: there were those long, solitary hikes that were my refuge and then lying invisible on soft moss among jagged brambles, looking up at the sky, and thinking, I am a part of THIS. Fireweed blossoms, pungent Devil’s Club, the sound of the river, and black, black earth offering me up to blue sky. Or, in winter, it was the snow that held me. It was here where I first began to do what I called “The Big/Small”—I’d feel myself expanding to the size of the universe, and then I’d shrink back down to a grain of sand. In this way, I think I discovered some sense of spirituality; my way of seeing was my one true magic power. And it was this sensation, this practice that I would try to articulate to Koun so many years later. He was the first person to ever understand what I was talking about.
As we re-enter the Mat-Su Valley, my mother and I settle into a deep silence. When we are together, I realize, we are two women caught in the same stories—stories that we have rehashed and analyzed so many times before. And I know we’re both there now, turning it all over in our minds as we drive through memory and landscape. Perhaps for both of us it is the last character who is most difficult to forgive: my third stepfather, the man who rescued my mother from a bad marriage to a reckless alcoholic, and then pulled her into something more sinister. Fred had been jealous, controlling, cruel—and all of this interspersed with bouts of equally confusing kindness and charm. In this way, through these dualities in his nature, he became the architect of our reality. He put us in our place. And after I went off to college, my mother got the full brunt of it, as I knew she would.
And then there was the last time I saw my stepfather—I was in graduate school in Spokane. It was their first and only visit; I had not returned to Alaska since leaving six years before. In a restaurant, Fred revealed the impending divorce while my mother stared at the ice shifting in her water glass. There had been an eeriness to it all—the constant hand-holding and touching, like a grotesque of newlyweds, juxtaposed with the fear and pain in my mother’s eyes. But I was focused inwardly, on my own failing marriage. There were too many echoes there for me to cope. She told me later that everything in the divorce had been on his terms—the unequal division of money and debt, the date of his leaving her life, certain intimacies. And there were also the suicide threats, the veiled death threats. No horror surprised me. This was a familiar territory. Family friends were delivered a story and devoured it; my mother was abandoned by all.
How could they not see?
How much do I not see?
Monday, August 23
In my mother’s mailbox, there is a letter from Koun today—a fascinating jumble of events and thought. He says that at last he has “plateaued” to a certain degree at Shogoji because he now understands all of the ceremonies and doesn’t have to constantly cram. But maybe it is better when I am always on my toes, always hyper-aware.
In addition to this, he has been given the responsibility of translating letters for Jisen-san, so she seems happy with him lately. The other monks have nicknamed him “Solar Man” because Jisen-san decided that no one can touch the solar generator except him. At the moment, it’s funny. But this privilege—this departure from rank—will likely get me in trouble in the end, he writes.
Also, Jisen-san has warned him about returning to the U.S.: Women everywhere! You be very, very careful!
~
I arrive at Cheryl’s place in the evening for an informal gathering of teachers. A blond woman greets me at the door in Japanese, and I respond immediately, before registering the improbability of this. We cycle through a textbook dialogue.
“My name is Carla,” she says. “It is nice to meet you.”
“Where do you live?”
“How long have you lived there?”
“What do you do?”
And then she explains that she teaches Japanese in the same high school as Cheryl.
“Your Japanese is so much better than mine—where did you learn? University?” I ask.
“I was married to a Japanese man for a few years, in Hokkaido.”
“They always say, ‘Take a local lover . . .’ Fortunately or unfortunately, that was never really an option for me.”
“Well, it is highly recommended!” She laughs—such friendly, open energy. I have no doubt that she is a very, very popular teacher.
“Hmm. Maybe our students should exchange letters.”
“Sure, pen pals—the next best thing to a lover.”
Tuesday, August 24
I have breakfast with Tozen at the same little diner as before. When the waitress delivers menus and offers coffee, I ask for tea. Tozen announces, “I am Japanese, so I drink coffee.”
I respond in kind: “I am American. So, I drink green tea.”
He tells me, “I hate Japan. Everyone is the same. NO individuals.” Then, “Do you know Ryokan?”
“Sweet bean jam?”
He lets out a BIG belly laugh. “No, Ryooooookan. He is a very famous founder of Buddhism. A real individual.”
After we finish our food, Tozen reaches into his bag. “I have something for you.” He produces two books for me to borrow, and two books “as a bribe” for me to come back and bring my husband.
“These authors understand Zen is no striving. Americans always want goals.”
Thursday, August 26
I am sitting on Cheryl’s couch in her living room. It is near midnight, and both of us are sipping wine and growing drowsy. We have been talking about her dating life, the difficulty of finding love after a certain age, with two children, in a small town, with complication and history. There is this hesitation, a tentativeness. Maybe we both sense that we are now moving into the past.
“It’s strange,” I say, “as teenagers we were always so raw and yet so guarded at the same time.”
“Absolutely, it was painful. Do you remember that summer we painted Chris with my little sister’s watercolors? We were on my front lawn, and his shirt was off, and we painted his body.”
“Yes—how could I forget?” I always felt that was a pivotal moment, for all of us.
Cheryl sighs, looks over at me. “I kissed Chris, sometime around then. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“I didn’t know. But it doesn’t surprise me.”
“He had something, didn’t he? A kind of sadness. It was hard not to be moved.”
“Yes,” I say, “I always felt he and I shared that, that we were the same person in some ways. And there was always a lot of anger there, too. He was my friend and he said he loved me, but I did not love him, not in that way. I felt that he shamed me into dating him for those few months, and then I hated him for it afterward. I hated myself.”
“I know. Maybe that’s why I kissed him. I think I was mad at you. For many reasons.”
“I probably deserved that.”
“Sometimes I think about that time, about those first relationships or encounters—or whatever they were.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “all those devastating sexual games. The boys high on the social food chain preying on the girls below. I did not deal well with any of that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I guess I had some issues. Maybe I was easy prey.”
“Maybe we all were, in a way. Even those o
n the top of the food chain. They were caught up in something. That’s kind of sad, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes, though I wonder how many of them walked away with the scars we walked away with. . . .”
“True. That church boy in Anchorage—do you remember him?” asks Cheryl.
“I remember how happy you were, and how sad when he stopped calling. But I didn’t know the whole story, did I? We didn’t talk a lot then.”
“No, you didn’t know the whole story. . . . Tell me, do you really think it is possible for people to fall in love in high school, when we were just kids?”
“Who’s to say that kind of love wasn’t real? It was immature and chaotic, it was overwhelming, and a good part of it was probably chemical—or the result of some misguided narrative. But we felt what we felt. We were moved in some way that changed us.”
“Yeah—almost like waking up, or seeing something that you couldn’t see before. Like some kind of recognition.” Cheryl swirls the last bit of wine in her glass before drinking it down. “Tracy, did you ever really feel that way, back then?”
“No. Maybe once. Though I think I didn’t know why until just now. There was an awakening, yes. But I was carrying a terrible burden. And in that moment, it broke me.”
“Adolescence. Everything felt so dramatic then—life or death. And we kept so many secrets from each other.”
“And from ourselves.”
“I wonder where Chris is now?”
“I don’t know. I hope he’s happy.”
“I do, too.”
~
Two girls painting the skin of a half-naked boy stretched out in the grass like a lion in sunlight. The girls laughing and teasing inside that last bubble of fading friendship. The boy pretending to tolerate the girls but also finding pleasure in the attention. And a darkness turning in him slowly, like a stone.
How we are marked. How we mark each other.
Friday, August 27
It’s been raining hard for much of the day and I can’t bear to leave the condo. It seems as if my mood has been translated into weather—an internal and external melancholy.
Koun finally breaks the spell by calling in the evening—he’s out on takuhatsu again, and he has many adventures to relate: stung by three bees while out working in the fields; poured gasoline down his back when he tried to burn a big pile of weeds and twigs; saw flying squirrels gliding between the trees at dawn, as he rang the temple bell. He says overall he’s feeling genki—happy because the visiting university students who just left said their three-hour Shogoji stay was hard but inspiring because everyone made it such a good experience. “Lately I’ve been struck by how easy it is to be grateful.”
Also, Jisen-san says that in November Docho-roshi, the abbot of the head monastery in Zuioji, will come to Shogoji to hold a precepts ceremony, in which laypeople take up basic Buddhist vows:
(1)Not killing
(2)Not stealing
(3)Not misusing sex
(4)Not lying
(5)Not indulging in intoxicants
(6)Not speaking of the faults of others
(7)Not taking credit or assigning blame
(8)Not withholding the dharma or materials
(9)Not indulging anger
(10)Not slandering the Three Treasures (Buddha, dharma, sangha)
To participate, I’ll need to sew a rakusu—that bib-like mini version of Buddha robes—with some of the other laypeople. Our rakusu will then be passed on to Docho-roshi before the ceremony, so that he can inscribe a new name—a dharma name—on the back of each. After that, we will formally receive the robe from him during the ceremony.
Which of the vows, I wonder, will give me the most trouble?
Saturday, August 28
My mother and I have dinner at Thor’s place—pasta with shrimp, scallops, and a white wine butter sauce. It is all too rich for my now Japanese-y palate. I rub my aching belly while Thor expounds his Theory of Everything: “In our bodies we get to experience a limited perception. Otherwise we are just in the vast flow of everything—we have omniscient perception, but there is no way to experience the individual bits and hone in. I came up with this theory when I was just a kid.”
Later, in the middle of the night, there is a horrible, intense pain in my gut. I try to get up, but can’t move. Sweat drenching me. Falling into and out of consciousness.
Sunday, August 29
After today’s zazen, the Anchorage Zen Community gathers for tea at the aptly named “Middle Way Café.” I still feel unwell but am grateful for the distraction of human interaction. There are many new people in attendance—a testament, perhaps, to the rapid change in season. Clutching my tall mug of green tea, I settle in next to Loren, a second-generation Japanese from Hawaii. I have known him for all of an hour and he has taken to teasing me for constantly bowing—I laugh and then bow again, unable to stop. He begins to tell me the details of his family, tracing the history of the one temple on the small island where his father lived, and how his family struggled later during the Internment—losing a fishing boat, all hard-earned property. “But, you know, they got through it and here I am.”
With coffee in hand, Tozen and a petite Japanese woman take seats at our table. They begin chatting away in fast, fluent Japanese—something about the woman’s recent trip to Hiroshima, about it being her first time home in many years—and Loren joins them in his nisei Japanese. I do not know what, exactly, is different in the way each of them speaks, but there is something there, each of them perhaps offering up a language colored by geography and history and time spent away from their places of birth.
Abruptly, the petite woman stops talking, looks me in the eye suspiciously. “Ahhhh—do you understand me?” She asks this in Japanese. Tozen and Loren laugh and introduce me to Rie. She came to Alaska many years ago “for adventure.” It is the same reason I so often give for moving to Japan.
After tea, I drive to a walk-in clinic. The pain from the night before stays with me as a dull and sluggish ache and I am worried that something is really not right. Stretched out on white paper, I nervously explain what I’ve been feeling while the doctor presses her fingers against my abdomen. “Hmm,” she says, “let’s do an X-ray.” A short while later we review the pictures. “Severe constipation—full to the brim,” she explains. “Has your diet changed significantly?” Before, I had steady meals of very healthy Japanese food—and now a lot of bread and wheat pasta and dairy. So much for paying attention. How could I miss even the most simple and essential process of the body? How stupid could I be?
I explain the diagnosis to my mother afterward: “I guess I’m just full of shit.”
Monday, August 30
In the early evening, Mom, Thor, and I walk around one of the neighborhoods near downtown. Thor names all of the builders of all the houses we pass. He seems to hold knowledge of everyone, of everything about this place. We stop at one of his friend’s houses—really just a renovated old log cabin from some distant era. Amazingly, though, it is set in a huge, beautiful, Asian-inspired garden, all of which is surrounded by a high wood fence. “From the outside, you never would guess would ya?” says Pat, the friend, obviously proud of his handiwork. His buddy, Bill, is lanky and tall—unlike Pat, who is bald and tough looking. Both men sit on tree stumps in the garden, drinking beer from cans. They are in their late forties, but in their demeanor and mannerisms they remind me very much of the boys I knew in high school. There is something distinctly Alaskan about them and also something wonderful about this roughness held in such a refined and elegant space. When Thor mentions that my husband is in the monastery, Bill tells us that he is deeply enamored with Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. “That book changed my life, man. I tell you, that’s the only book anyone ever needs to read.”
Tuesday, August 31
After zazen this morning, I stand in my mother’s spare bedroom gathering various items into a backpack—my ever-present notebook, a few Japanese study materials, and a couple of books
and articles that Tozen gave me. My mother has already left for work and I’m feeling aimless and lost. My first thought is to walk down to the park and sit on a bench with a view of the ocean, but there is a chill in the air today—that first strong hint of the season to come—and I opt instead to hang out at a café, someplace where I can be insulated by a crowd while I read and write and study. I aim downtown toward a congregation of what look to be both tourists (identifiable by their well-matched caps and bright windbreakers) and locals (identifiable by their ambivalence to all manner of weather and temperature).
The café I choose is really a full-on restaurant down the street and kitty-corner from my mother’s condo, and it soon becomes clear that it isn’t the sort of place where people grab a pastry and an espresso and hang out for hours, poring over kanji and old Buddhist poetry and scribbling into a notebook. But I stay anyway, much to the annoyance of the waitress, who keeps asking if I need anything else.
I may need something, I want to tell her. I just don’t know what it is. Please bring me what you think I need.
Fall
SEPTEMBER
Returning
Wednesday, September 1
It is overcast this morning—drizzly, chilly. For the first time since I have been to this yoga-studio-cum-zendo, tall lamps glow from two far corners of the room, casting deep shadows—a clear signal that the long days of the Alaskan summer are quickly growing shorter.
This new light illuminates those who are present today—Loren, Tozen, Rie—as we kneel before each other after zazen. Funny, I think, just me and the Japanese Americans. Tozen signals Loren to distribute an unfamiliar stack of sutra books, and we begin the Heart Sutra together in a language that I cannot call my own:
Kan ji zai bo satsu
Gyo jin han-nya ha ra mit-ta ji
Sho ken go on kai ku
Do is-sai ku yaku
Sha ri shi
