Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  “And you actually feel this?” I said. “It’s not just a theory or an idea?”

  “Yes. I feel. I know it in my hands and face, in my belly. Right now I feel this. All the time.”

  “Make me feel that, then,” I said suddenly. “I mean it. I’ll let go of wanting everything else—except seeing my kids. Teach me that—not just as a thought or a pretty notion. Teach me to have that understanding deep inside me and I’ll let everything else go.”

  Rinpoche held his eyes on me for a ten-count then said quietly, eerily, as if he’d been working for six years to show me how to ride a bicycle and finally, at last, I’d gotten the balance right and was wobbling off on my own, “Otto, my friend,” he said, “wery good.”

  With that conversation echoing inside me, we made yet another stop, in Glendive, for smoothies and a two-block stroll. A thousand miles into the trip now, I was running low on driving energy, needing to stop every hour or so and recharge. And perhaps I was procrastinating, too, wary of Celia’s “news,” or of what I’d just heard myself say. It was true—I’d give up almost anything to be able to feel what Rinpoche seemed to feel, to have that perspective on life, to lose all fear—but the truth had surprised me. It had spoken itself. I examined it the way an antiques dealer examines a document or a painting or a desk, for authenticity. Beyond wanting to see Natasha and Anthony and Celia and Rinpoche and Shelsa, I was beginning to feel that I’d exhausted or released or set aside all my other wants. Success at work, money, dinner party invitations, even good meals—somehow, on this trip most of the juice and zest had been squeezed out of those things. It was as if Jeannie’s death had made me confront some central question I’d spent my life avoiding—not just the puzzle of death itself, but some larger mystery of which that was only one piece. It was as if my flaky sister had known that and had arranged this second road trip as a way of offering an answer. I told Rinpoche I wanted to walk around the block on my own. I needed a moment.

  Glendive looked, to my eye, sunbaked and desolate, the kind of place where, under a Lenin or Mussolini, a radical New York City intellectual might be exiled. There was a train station. A bar. A Mexican restaurant. A row of shops. In one dusty window a placard reading THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED! There was an electronic sign above the door of the chamber of commerce building, but its run of letters advertised community events a week or two in the past. That seemed fitting somehow, as if this part of the country lay stranded in the cattle-run days of yesteryear, or as if I had now decided to put the world’s tired entertainments behind me forever. To my surprise, this wasn’t a depressing idea. Intimidating, yes. Almost frightening. But not depressing at all.

  The sun blasted down on Glendive’s sidewalks. I wondered what it must feel like to be young there.

  With the stops and procrastination, four different moments when the pickup seemed to lose its force, the engine coughing and stuttering before running strong again, it was late afternoon by the time we reached the badlands. They began, swirls of sculpted dirt, buttes, colorful rock faces, shortly after we crossed into the Peace Garden State, the place where Celia and I had come into this world. For a moment, just the tiniest moment, I tried to imagine the lovemaking that had summoned me into this life, my parents naked, in bed, young. Perhaps all children do that at some point, however reluctantly. I wondered if I’d been made in an hour of love, or just boredom or lust, or just a patch of relief from a hard week of labor. I tried to picture the embrace that had brought my spirit into this body, but it was, even for a vivid imagination like mine, a bridge too far.

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  Shortly before six we swept down the I-94 exit ramp and into the town of Medora. A smaller and slightly less artificial Leavenworth, Medora makes a fair attempt at imitating an old western settlement. The buildings have faces of weathered wood, and there are some wooden sidewalks, too. There are horse-drawn wagon rides and cowboy shows, a cabin where Teddy Roosevelt is said to have slept, a magnificent national park named for him, a golf course, a handful of motels and restaurants, and, every summer night, something called a pitchfork fondue up on a high plateau overlooking a landscape cut by dry streambeds and marked by wandering elk.

  As we glided into town, Rinpoche was kind enough to inform me that we were supposed to meet our family at the barbecue rather than at the Badlands Motel. The whole plan seemed suspect. Dickinson—where Rinpoche, Celia, and Shelsa now lived, and where I’d been born and raised—was only thirty minutes farther along the interstate. Why not just drive those last few miles and have a barbecue at what Celia and I still referred to as home? Why sign up for a meal that offered, as a main course, two things my sister never ate: steak and hot dogs? Yes, there would be salad and vegetables of various kinds, but it seemed a strange scheme, even for her. A night in a motel in Medora with all assembled? What was she thinking?

  Driving up the winding road toward the pitchfork fondue parking lot, I reminded myself that Celia’s thinking process was a creature that traveled along an untraceable route, off radar, a B-1 bomber of the psyche. I wondered if she’d been raising Jasper Jr. on veggie burgers and expensive supplements. I wondered if, during the long train ride and the days on the farm, she’d been indoctrinating my children with her eminently kindhearted but utterly impractical philosophies about the living of life in the U.S.A. I wondered, too—another fresh breeze—why I was so afraid of her.

  And then I remembered the feeling of pushing off at the top of the waterslide. That trust, that letting go. The fact was that, impractical though she might be, my sister had managed to stay alive for forty-six years without suffering any humiliating accidents, incurring unpayable debt, or going to prison. She was happily married, a joyful mom. It was time, perhaps, for me to let her be. In the most profound way, to just let her be.

  There she was, there they all were, a collection of flesh and spirit that was happy to see us. And we were exceedingly happy to see them. Shelsa, the six-year-old black-haired angel, leapt into my arms with an exclamation—“Uncle Ott! Uncle Ott!”—that warmed me to the atrial valves. Hugs all around, kisses, quick questions about our travels and theirs, the good news that Jasper Jr. was safe and well and being looked after by a worker at the retreat center.

  The evening was another perfect one, hot and dry with a gentle breeze. We shared the plateau with a few hundred other hungry tourists. There was a covered area in which veggies, fruits, and bread had been set out, cafeteria style; thirty or forty picnic tables. And the main attraction: vats of hot oil into which workers dunked slabs of raw beef impaled on actual pitchforks. Carnivores and abstainers, the Ringling clan filled our plates and commandeered a table and we sat there eating and talking, so much happier than the last time we’d gathered.

  “What was the best part?” Natasha wanted to know. The few days of sun had brought out the spray of freckles that crossed her nose and upper cheeks. She looked to me, at that moment, unspeakably beautiful.

  I deferred to Rinpoche.

  “Transwestites,” he said without hesitation.

  My sister was looking at him from across the table, face aglow, innocent, overflowing with love.

  Anthony said, “Huh?”

  Uncle Ott to the rescue. “It’s a joke,” I said, “a word I taught him after he heard something on the news. . . .The best part was probably the Boiling River in Yellowstone.” I described our adventure there in great detail, elk and all, stretching out the story until the other subject faded away.

  “And for you good people?”

  “Anthony hit a guy on the train,” Natasha said.

  “Hit a guy?”

  “Cweep,” Shelsa said. They all laughed.

  I looked at my son.

  “He tried to feel up Tasha. I pushed him more than hit him, the creep.”

  “You knocked him down.”

  “Defending your honor, Sis. He was drunk anyway, I think. He more or less fell over his own feet.”

  “And then what?”

  “And t
hen,” Cecelia said, “the nice train people came and took him away and I think they made him get off at the next stop.”

  “All those visits to Manhattan,” I said to Natasha, “and nothing. You come out here to the sensible West, and a creep makes a grab at you.”

  “Anthony chased the cweep away, Uncle Ott. We didn’t like the cweep. He made a bad touch.”

  “He sure did. What did you like the most, Shels?”

  “That Tasha’s staying,” she said, brown eyes fixed on me like a puppy’s soft paws.

  You could feel a shiver go across our little group, a bad wind.

  “Staying with you in the motel?”

  Shelsa nodded, but among the rest of the Badlands brigade there was now a terrible, post-wind stillness. A sudden, frozen, arctic silence. Just to my left a family of polar bears wandered.

  I looked at my sister. “What gives?”

  She cleared her throat. She glanced at Rinpoche, back at me. She smiled and lifted her face up slightly as if I were about to tilt a spoonful of chocolate syrup into her mouth for a taste.

  By then we’d eaten about half the food on our plates—the steaks were perfectly cooked—but everyone except Shelsa had set down their forks.

  “Oops,” Anthony said.

  Natasha shot him a look.

  I was beginning to have a bad thought.

  “Dad,” my daughter said, “I’ve decided I’m not going back to school in September. I’m going to stay out here on the farm.”

  One of the benefits of meditation—and I should say at this point that there are many—is that you begin to be able to see trouble coming up from inside you before it reaches the surface. This doesn’t mean you never get overly angry or say a careless word, but it does lessen the chances of those things happening. Anger, depression, resentment, what the Buddhists call craving—all those things form in your thoughts first, of course, and the practice of meditation helps you see them while they’re still tropical storms, before they reach hurricane stage.

  And that’s what happened in this case. Part of it was that Shelsa, my darling niece, had her big eyes glued onto my face and I would have been embarrassed to say what I was thinking then, to turn to her mother and accuse her of pulling Natasha away from a promising career, convincing her to live on an isolated farm in what had always felt to me like the perfect middle of nowhere. A sarcastic college friend, visiting with us senior year from Minneapolis, had said, “It’s a pretty place, Otto, but if I lived here, I’d move.”

  I swallowed the anger, met my daughter’s eyes. “I don’t understand, hon.”

  “I’m not going back to Brown. I want to stay with Rinpoche and Aunt Seese and Shelsa. Try something different.”

  “But you already took a semester off,” I said. “For mom.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “I thought you loved it there, you missed your friends.”

  “I do.”

  “What, then? You worked so hard to get in. It’s such a great school. I don’t see—”

  “It’s just something I want to do, Dad. We knew you’d be upset.”

  I couldn’t yet risk a glance at my sister. I turned to Anthony. He twisted his mouth to one side and looked away. Rinpoche chose that moment to go back for another serving.

  “I’m not upset, I’m—”

  “Let’s talk later, can we, Dad? It’s great up here. Look, the guy’s about to start his golf show. We can talk at the motel, okay?”

  “Okay, sure.” I swung my eyes up to my sister once. I looked down at my plate. Rinpoche sat beside me and handed me a double chocolate brownie and said, “Tell them about the Cou-nee dam, Otto.”

  But I was in no mood for that, and just then, a few yards to our left, the night’s entertainment began. A slightly built man had set up four or five mats there, the kind you see at golf driving ranges. They were facing out into the empty pastureland a few hundred feet below us. Nearby was a golf bag and assorted other paraphernalia—a medicine ball, a unicycle, rubber tees as high as his waist. People finished their meals and gathered around. I sat in my little stew of anger, half watching. Natasha and I were somehow looking at each other with our eyes facing forward, an electric current of disagreement zapping across the table. “Throwing it away” was the phrase that kept echoing in my mind. She’d worked so hard—academically and athletically. It had meant so much to her, the envelope with the Providence postmark and the acceptance letter inside. She’d been doing so well, had such decent friends, including a boy named Steven who texted her obsessively and who’d made the trip west to attend Jeannie’s memorial service. I’d been so proud of her for taking a semester off to be with her ailing mother and then, a week after Jeannie died, for having the courage to go back for spring term. But clearly, now was the time to put her own life back in order, to follow the road she’d started on: college, possibly graduate school, a career in the sciences, a life like the life we’d made for her. Comfortable home. Summer vacations, tennis camp, braces. What was wrong with that?

  The others—Anthony, Tasha, Rinpoche, and Shelsa—went and sat on the grassy slope so they’d have a better view. I stayed in my seat, not sulking exactly, but wrapped up tight in my assumptions. I see that now. I didn’t see it then. The fact of my sister coming over and standing behind me and giving me a shoulder massage did nothing to help me see it. “She has her own life,” Celia said, as she worked. I knew that. I’d figured that out when she was thirteen. But what I’d figured out by the time I was thirteen was that Dickinson, North Dakota, good, solid, and decent as it would always be, was no place for a person like me. And Natasha was a person like me, wanting adventure, curious about the wider world, a lover of shopping at Forever 21 in Times Square. The nearest Forever 21, I wanted to tell her, was probably in Chicago. Chicago was eight hundred miles away. She’d be on the farm a few months, the weather would turn bitterly cold, snow up to the windowsills, Steven would stop texting, there would be no other young people within ten miles, she’d want to return to Brown and it would be too late then. She’d be stranded out here, cooking for Rinpoche’s retreatants and watching the ice in the gutters drip for the one warm hour each day.

  “I need time,” I told my sister. “It’s a shock.”

  She stayed there with her hands on my shoulders and said nothing.

  The entertainer went by the moniker of Joey O, and even for a person like me, who played golf three times a summer and knew little about the game, he was impressive. He smashed the ball far out into the evening air, time after time, at first in the standard position, and then with both feet balanced on the medicine ball, up on the unicycle, left-handed, eyes closed, one foot raised. He made goofy jokes and received polite applause, said things like, “What you think about, you bring about,” and seemed to be insisting that his incredible physical feats were brought about mostly by attitude, a set of the mind . . . plus, as he joked, “Fourteen-hour practice days.”

  When the show was over he sold his own books, pamphlets really, from a van emblazoned with his name and sayings. I noticed that Rinpoche bought one.

  The sun was dropping behind a bank of thin clouds. The crowd dispersed. The six of us wandered into the parking lot and discussed transportation arrangements. Anthony rode with me, the rest of the gang in Celia’s ancient Subaru station wagon—bought used—with 305,000 miles on the odometer.

  On the short drive back to the Badlands Motel I tried to make small talk with my son about the Lincoln MKX, the train ride, the creep. But he was having none of that.

  “Pop’s all pissed off,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you be? Wait’ll Tasha finds out what the winters are like here. Wait’ll she wants to go shopping, or see a show with a friend, or go out for sushi, or any of the hundred other things she loves now and takes completely for granted.”

  Anthony was silent. I looked across at him. The long jaw and stubble, the shock of dark hair—inherited from his mother’s side. The strong shoulders, neck, and forearms. The sm
all sickle of a scar near his left eye from the time he’d fallen against a metal shelf in the grocery store, age two.

  “You think I’m off base,” I said, turning the pickup onto the main paved road and heading for the motel.

  “Dad,” he said. “Let go, man. Let us make our own mistakes. You’ve been a cool father in most ways, really. You have. But you brought us up with stories of you and mom living in a crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood, waiting tables with your college degrees, going where you wanted to go and letting things happen the way they happened. Personally, I think Tash is full of shit most of the time. And I think you’re right: come January, Providence, Rhode Island, is gonna seem like Aruba. This place isn’t for me, not at all. I love Rinp. Who couldn’t love the guy? But I’m not into the meditation stuff, the guru stuff, all that alternative shit. Tasha seems happy here, though.”

  “She’s been here three days.”

  “Dad, listen. We love you. The whole thing with Mom and everything was as shitty for you as it was for us. But now you should just let go. Make yourself happy and stop worrying about everything. Mom,” there was just the slightest break in his voice, “would want that.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m fine. Preseason starts in two weeks. Lizzie’s anxious to see me. The guys. I’ll be fine, really. I called and moved my flight up to day after tomorrow. If you can drive me to the airport, I’ll be on my way. But now, if you want my advice, you gotta get your own stuff straight and let us do our thing.”

  At least, I thought, he’d called it my “stuff,” not my “shit.” That counted for something.

  Joey O – Performing Golf Show

  Pitchfork Steaks

  Medora, North Dakota

  Meth Skeleton Cowboy Sign

  Miles City, Montana

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