“Wait, stay here, I’ll go get your mother. Do you promise not to move?”
I nodded, leaning against the guardrail.
Moments later my parents pulled up together. My mother ran out of the car. “Natli, what’s the matter?”
I uttered three words: “I am lost.” I had no energy for a cover-up. Those words came from my core.
Everything halted. My mother stood with her hands at her sides. My father looked straight ahead, his face frozen, his arm hanging over the door of the car.
Nothing was to be done. It was a huge, unbearable opening between us.
My parents became embarrassed. So was I. We’d never been so naked with each other.
After a long, excruciating time, my father’s head turned. “Now can we go eat? I’m starving.”
. . .
The monk did not have this distraction. No restaurant for him. My experience was that the monk stood his ground for all time. He did not reply after he revealed his naked face.
But like the rabbis making commentary on the Torah, later Zen teachers responded to koans. In this case, they disagreed about the monk’s state of mind. Maybe the attendant in his silence had emptied his depths, and the rhinoceros, the source, stood there radiantly, painfully alive in his no reply. Or maybe he was just dumbfounded, petrified, thinking, What should I do now in front of my teacher?
In the next sentence, Zifu draws a circle and writes the word rhino inside it. I imagine he picked up a nearby stick and drew the circle in the dirt or in the air and wrote the Chinese character boldly in the center.
I found out later that Zifu was himself a Zen master—one who lived at least a hundred years after the interchange between Yanguan and the monk. Sitting in his monastery, Zifu heard the situation and plunged in. His dust circle was a stamp of approval. His response radiated back through a century and screams forward to us now.
Attendant, I see you! Zifu called out.
Yes, this exchange between student and teacher is complete; nothing is left out. Even if the attendant might have been immobilized rather than inexpressively present, Zifu catches the whole interchange and brings it to completion, enlightening the attendant, the rhino, the teacher, and folding us all into the great circle.
I spent the entire autumn of my fiftieth year roaming through these Chinese minds. I began to see everything as a koan. On the evening news it was reported that a bread loaf burned in someone’s kitchen in Blue Earth and the house went down in flames. Everything was now related. The house, the bread, the town in southern Minnesota, presented a koan. How could I step into those flames and burn too? Life became a revolving story. No matter from what age or country, it met me where I was.
I watched my friend Wendy, an old practitioner and the gardener for twenty years at Green Gulch, a Zen farm outside San Francisco, answer questions after a reading from her book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.
“How big is your garden?” one of my students asked.
Wendy was struck silent for a full minute. The audience fidgeted in their seats. I realized what was happening.
I leaned over. “Wendy, this is not a koan—she’s not challenging your whole being. She just wants to know in feet the area you garden.”
Wendy snapped back. “Many feet are cultivated.” Then she went on to speak of once putting a dead deer in the compost heap, and a month later nothing was left but hooves and bones.
In the Book of Serenity Guishan asks Yangshan, Where do you come from? and Yangshan replies, The fields. There are many fields to come from—playing fields, plowing fields, the upper or lower field, or the dharma field spread out before us.
Soon after I returned home to Taos, I had a week of teaching with my good friend Rob Wilder. He is sharp and has a generous heart. Little goes by him. We sat together at dinner the second night of the workshop. I was eager to share where I had been. I told him about koans; then I told him about the last one I worked on. I laid out the case, how I entered it, what I understood. He listened intently, the way only a writer can from years of developing an attunement to story and sound. He nodded often. I felt encouraged.
I went to bed that night happy. I had been afraid, coming home from St. Paul, that no one would understand where I had been.
The next morning was a silent breakfast. Almost everyone had cleared out of the dining room when Rob sidled up next to me. “Nat,” he said in a low voice, “I was thinking how amazing it is. We can know each other so well. We can be such good friends, and I had no idea what you were talking about last night.”
My head snapped back. What’s going on here? The fan of our communication is fractured?
A student walked in and we shut up.
I gulped down some water to swallow the ball of cornflakes that sat in my mouth. I felt lonely, on the brink of isolation.
Suddenly something in front of my eyes shattered. The rhino emerged, glistening.
I abruptly started to laugh, big eruptions through my entire body. This was one whole world. Rob Wilder was my relation. We had plunged right into the lineage together. No one left out. His not understanding was part of it. The water glass, the spoon, the flowers in the vase, all glimmered and shook. Who was laughing? Hours melted in my hand. The walls of the building dissolved.
Everyone and no one lifted the spoon to take the next bite of cereal.
21
First Edition
My first semester in college, two months away from home, I had a blind date with a young man—a boy really, nineteen, a sophomore at a college two hours south. University of Virginia. 1966. I stood in the lobby of Thurston Hall, waiting for him.
His name was Robbie Rosen. He was from Charleston, South Carolina. A Jew who loved literature the way I did. We began talking immediately about The Brothers Karamazov. Thin, wiry, energetic, he’d begun a magazine down there, with JFK on the cover of its first issue. I can’t say I fell in love; that has too much weight and density. Instead I’d found someone with passion.
Robbie was going to be a writer; he loved his hometown; and he had a sense of place. “The Ashley and Cooper Rivers wrap around the city and meet in the Atlantic.” I imagined the distant sprawl and cascade of water. He talked about Charleston all the time, and I knew even then that no matter where this person wandered, he would end up where he began. He had no choice. His love was deep and rooted.
Forty years later, Robbie Rosen is still vivid for me. Something in him knew who he was, where he came from. No other person I met during college was as memorable. The rest of us could have scattered to the moon—or New Jersey, Boston, the Big Apple—by luck or chance. We had no innate connection anywhere.
I was mad for poetry and novels, but who was I? My father owned a bar. My mother shopped. We had no books in our house. What we read in English class was written by white men, often dead, from across the ocean. Their experience was not mine. I caught colds, sneezed in my grandmother’s chicken soup, opened and closed the refrigerator, bought chewing gum. I wasn’t worthy of literature. I never even dreamed of pen in hand and suffered no rough angst. So I remembered Robbie for the two things that would grow in me—writing and place.
One afternoon the phone rang in my adobe in New Mexico. A woman named Carolyn from the Sophia Institute on Society Street in Charleston wanted me there to teach.
Before this request, I’d found the South impossible to penetrate. No one, in my twenty-five years since Writing Down the Bones had been published, had ever invited me to the South. On my own I’d visited Oxford, Mississippi, where the great store Square Books had none of mine. The new lineage of writing practice that I’d sprung, based on two thousand years of watching the mind, of making writing a practice, like tennis, running, chess, or tea ceremony, did not interest the South. It was drenched in its own weighty, azalea-soaked history. But even more than my abiding curiosity about southern writers was the single question I asked on the phone: “Do you know Robbie Rosen?”
This was not what she expected. “Why, yes,
” she drawled out. “He’s an attorney in town, a friend of the institute. His wife is in a book club with me.”
“I used to date him in college—only for a few months.”
“Well, we’ll have to get you together with Robert.”
The following January I fly across the country.
I’m at the end of a flu, and after the weekend I’ll go down to Florida to try to organize my mother’s house. She’s been dead a year, and a gray sadness still hangs around me.
Carolyn picks me up at the airport and tells me that a small gathering at Robbie’s house has been organized for the next night. He’d seen a pile of my books, different titles, on a table at Barnes and Noble a year back and realized it was the same Natalie Goldberg he knew. She adds, “But I don’t think he bought or read any of them.”
In the brisk early evening, as we pull away from the airport in her car, I ask this woman I’d just met, “So tell me, what’s he like now? I don’t want to see him and have shock on my face. He must be gray. Is he still skinny and wiry? Tell me, does he still have that adorable nose?”
She bursts out laughing. “Only a lover would notice something like that. I never considered his nose.”
I look out at the close dark and vaguely remember that his mother was already dead when I met him. Something about being beautiful and crazy. It didn’t mean anything to me then. But now I know the pain of family relations.
Carolyn tells me he has a law firm with his wife; they have three children; he wrote a book about Jews in Charleston, another about “some kind of history.”
Oh, good, he’s been writing, I think.
Back then, when he heard I was from New York, he wanted to visit at Christmas. New York meant nothing to him except the city. What a surprise for him to end up for seven days an hour away in a split-level development on the Nassau/ Suffolk border on Long Island. We went into Manhattan only once, when my father loaned us his tan Buick to drive in to the Big Apple and meet some of Robbie’s friends from Larchmont, a wealthy and sophisticated suburb.
After that vacation was over, I returned to college and never heard from him again. I knew I wouldn’t—I’d been dumped. He sent my parents a thank-you gift, an ashtray.
But back then, it was easy to move on.
Now I was a writer, coming to Charleston, a place I’d heard so much about but had never been to. I felt good in my success, happy that this little nothing from the suburbs, who didn’t even dare wish to be a writer, had climbed through her haze and managed to speak—and some people had listened.
The night before I arrived, Carolyn had called a woman from Sullivan’s Island to drive in for the party at Robert’s (I found out no one called him Robbie). Three years earlier, she’d come to study with me in Taos and was working on a novel. “Oh, I wish I could, but we’re leaving for Panama early the next day and we have to pack.”
“So sorry you can’t make it. The gathering is at Robert Rosen’s.”
“Robert Rosen? What does he have to do with Natalie?”
“She dated him in college.”
“No!” A long pause. “I’ll be there.”
We pull up to a large historical house with a circular driveway, heavy foliage, and a wraparound veranda. A man comes to the door. It has to be him. The slightly curly hair—it used to be a shock of chocolate-red curls. He’s wearing a bow tie. “Robbie?”
We are happy to see each other, and the four of us—including Carolyn and her husband, Hank—stand awkwardly, filling the vestibule so no one else can pass. Out of the corner of my eye I see ornate wallpaper and wood floors. I want to stare and touch. This is a life in America so different from mine in the Southwest.
Robert’s wife is out of town, but his daughter, in her early twenties, is across a small sitting room. Though she is blond, with straight hair, she looks more like the Robbie of my memory. His skin is paler now, with no trace of that slight spray of freckles.
The present fades. The unimaginable ages of eighteen and nineteen step forward like real beings and stand beside us. Who we were then is vivid, almost luminous. I feel the fullness of how my life was forty years ago.
Robert does not remember coming to my family’s house—or dropping me. He carries no memory at all of my mother and father. But I do, and I link a small part of them with him. When your parents are dead, anyone who passed time with them has a connection to you. For that I feel suddenly happy.
Connie, my writing student, comes through the door. Robert introduces us and says, “This is my former psychiatrist. She saved my marriage. She told me to do everything my wife wants.”
My mouth hangs open. While she studied with me, he was doing therapy with her across the country?
She taps him in the stomach. “That isn’t what I said.”
He takes me into an adjoining room full of rare out-of-print hardbacks and shows me the books he’s written, centered on the South, Jews, and Charleston, including The Jewish Confederates, A Short History of Charleston, and a weighty tome Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, correcting the image of FDR’s anti-Semitism.
Five of us—my two hosts, Carolyn and Hank, Robbie, his daughter, and I—go to the Hominy Grill for dinner after the reception. Carolyn maneuvers it so Robbie and I sit together and have a little time to talk. They encourage me to order shrimp with grits.
He tells me he was married before to a New Yorker who couldn’t bear living in the South, and then changes the subject to a meeting where he knew the people were anti-Semites. He let them have it. His daughter rolls her eyes, but it’s evident she adores him. I notice she has the nose I was looking for on Robbie. She says, “He voted for Bush in the last election.”
I screech, “You couldn’t have. You, Robbie Rosen!”
His daughter leans across the table. “Even my mother didn’t, and she usually would.” Her face brightens. “So they canceled each other out.”
He tells me, “Doing research for the FDR book, you wouldn’t believe what I read. They had to plan all of those deaths.” He shakes his head and he grimaces. “So gruesome. It was all thought out. You can’t imagine. Bush is for Israel.”
I ask him if he knew John Lewis. I have all of my longtime students read Walking in the Wind, his memoir of the civil rights movement.
He says Lewis has been to his house.
He gives me Saving the Jews and I carry it down to Florida. In between sorting my mother’s old trousseau silk nightgowns she’d bought sixty years ago at Macy’s and the old rusted tools in the garage, I page through his book. Though its heft is imposing, the text is not. It’s clear, engagingly written, not only for historians but for general readers. He wants us to understand. With more than a hundred pages of bibliography, I conclude he spent years in research. I feel proud of him.
Three months later, buds cracking through the April trees in New Mexico, I receive a weighty overnight package from Fed Ex. My heart sinks. It’s obviously another request for a cover blurb. I open it.
Inside is a first edition hardback of John Lewis’s book. And Lewis has signed it and written, “Thank you for all of your good work. Keep the faith.” I hug it to my chest.
22
A Time of No Place
I have so many good memories—swimming in the Atlantic as a young girl; sleeping under the stars by the Chama River in New Mexico; eating cherry pie with my ninety-year-old mother at Hamburger Heaven in Palm Beach, Florida; the gray-brown deer, considered sacred, that ripped the map out of my friend’s hand in Kyoto; eating green tea ice cream out of a Dixie cup in front of the gates to Eiheiji Monastery, deep in the mountains outside Fukui—yet it’s none of these that I recall this early January morning. What halts me like a shot of cold electricity is the stunning thought of the six months I spent miserably unhappy in Palo Alto, California, six years previously, at the beginning of this century.
I had gone straight to California from St. Paul, where I’d practiced for a year and a half with my old Zen teacher’s priest.
Eventually I was supposed to enter the ancient lineage myself, but that all went awry. I began to trust neither my intentions nor my interactions with the teacher. I found myself spending more of my days at a café than in the zendo. In the evenings I retired to the small apartment I lived in, looking out through my second-floor windows at the green leaves of maples and elms, and in winter through their barren branches. Spring brought the yellow neon skies and 2:00 A.M. downpours. I painted huge abstracts: “Searching for the Moon,” “Eye of the Storm,” “Inside the Mountain,” and “Walking in Ravines.”
Something strange and powerful was happening to me up there in the North, but I couldn’t recognize it. I went there looking for formal Zen transmission and left disappointed, with only one wish: I wanted more time on the second floor among the trees.
With this ache and confused longing that began in St. Paul, I moved to Palo Alto. My father had recently died, and my mother was alone on the East Coast. I worried about her. We’d been strangers for so long; now she was an old woman who needed me, and instead of being with her, I was moving to the other side of the country.
I probably shouldn’t have gone to the Golden State, but I had promised I would. My partner was living in the heart of Silicon Valley, running a small software start-up she and her friend from Sun Microsystems had created. Until then the computer world had passed me by—I’d put off using e-mail until my early fifties. But in Minnesota I was lost—stripped of what I thought I wanted—and one place seemed as good as another.
I stopped home in New Mexico for the Christmas holidays, where I came down with a whopping flu that would not go away, and drove across Arizona with my nose stuffed, eyes watery, and a chest that felt as if I were transporting the weight of the queen’s jewels.
In Palo Alto we lived in a tiny, three-room apartment for $2,400 a month. Yes, it was that expensive. A Meyer lemon tree was out back. I made sure to use the fruit—I made gallons of lemonade, lemon pie, lemon soup. Longs Drugs on University Avenue was the only whiff I had that this place had once been a locale of some simple dignity, drenched in sun with orchards nearby. The lettering on the outside was an old script, and the aisles were lazy and sloppy.
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