In the morning Rinpoche said he wanted to play golf. It so happened that there was a miniature golf course and a swimming pool on the motel grounds, but he said he wanted “Real golf, like Joey O.” At breakfast my sister told me he’d read the pamphlet in one sitting the night before and was anxious to test out Joey’s theory about the mind controlling the golf ball, the idea of bringing about what you think about.
I was terrible at golf, a classic hacker, and just did not have the psychic energy to accompany him that morning. Anthony was a sometime player. He kindly volunteered to take his Uncle Rinp up to the nearby course—Bully Pulpit, it was called—and treat him to eighteen holes. “You have no idea,” I said, “what you’re getting into,” and he laughed and climbed into the pickup and told me, out the open window, “I just want to beat him in something, to make up for the wrestling match.”
Natasha and I took a walk. We headed out of the motel lot and along the main drag, then veered off toward the Little Missouri, which had been dried almost to a trickle by that summer’s drought.
We’d had our rough moments, Natasha and I, in the years between about fourteen and sixteen and a half. Little things, mostly. Phone use, room cleanliness, the occasional remark that Jeannie and I felt went beyond the usual adolescent rebellion and into the territory of disrespect. “You have to let them destroy you,” a particularly sensitive friend had said, of teenagers and parents. And I remembered Jeannie’s reply: “That seems a little extreme.”
Since her senior year in high school, though, Natasha and I had gone back almost to the place we’d been when she was younger. We had a wonderful connection, the same sense of humor, similar tastes in food, a shared interest in the human condition. Like her aunt, she’d had a long string of boyfriends, each eccentric after his own fashion, and I think she appreciated the fact that I never teased her about them too roughly, that Jeannie and I allowed her to find her own way in the maze of love.
That morning, though, I felt that a small new trouble had sprouted between us.
“I want you to have a happy life,” I said as we turned onto a quiet side street. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted, and all your mother ever wanted for you.”
“Too late now, Dad.”
I wrapped one arm around her shoulders, gave a squeeze, let go. “Awful as it is,” I tried, “horrible and unchangeable as it is, I know you can still be happy one day. I know that like I know my own name. You were wonderful to Mom. You did everything you could possibly do, and a hundred times more than anyone else your age ever thought of doing.”
“Yeah, you, too. You were great. I just feel like I haven’t laughed in a whole year and I’ll never be able to again.”
“Rinpoche makes me laugh.”
“Yeah,” she said, and I could feel her then, drifting along on a river. She could either paddle hard and pull herself away from the pain, or turn the rudder two degrees and end up going back over a waterfall of sorrow that she’d crashed through a hundred times since her mother died. She and Jeannie had been extraordinarily close for a mother and daughter—more like friends than anything else. The pain filled her, still; I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice.
“What do you think . . . What they say about Shelsa, any truth to that?”
“To what, Dad?” she said, distracted, drifting.
“She’s supposed to be, I don’t know the right word . . . something other than an ordinary six-year-old girl, I guess.”
It brought her partly back. “I’ve been watching her. She’s really not a normal kid, if you look closely. There really is something special.”
“Like what? Tell me what you see.”
“I wake up early and come downstairs and she’s in the living room, praying. Most kids would be watching Sesame Street or something. She’s praying.”
“Just imitating her father, maybe. You used to pretend to edit books when you were about that age. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“That’s natural.”
“Is it natural to sit so still out in the yard that birds come and land on your shoulders?”
“That happened?”
“A bunch of times. Another time I woke up and she was next to the bed staring at me in this weird way, nothing like a little kid would look at you. I had the feeling she was, like, praying for my soul or something.”
“Creepy?”
“No. It made me feel good. Other times she’s just a little kid, fussing, laughing, throwing things.”
I made a humming sound, noncommittal, nonconfron-tational.
“Want to hear what Aunt Seese says about you?”
“Only if it’s good.”
“That your real work in this life is different than what you’re doing now. That you were born to help Shelsa fulfill her destiny.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“The harmony of all religions or making a new religion, or something.”
I’ll be the L. Ron Hubbard of my generation, I thought. But it was just a defense reflex, a little sarcasm-armor I’d been throwing up around myself for as long as I could remember. The truth was, I had a feeling then that I’d had two or three times before, though always in the company of Rinpoche. To describe it as chills running up my arms or spine would be easy but inaccurate; it was more as though the temperature around me had changed a few degrees and I was being physically shaken, but only once. One shake. It was the dependable world going unstable on me for a second or two. I didn’t ignore it, exactly. It was about as easy to ignore as an irregular heartbeat, a tooth breaking, a toenail falling off. I rationalized it. Just a reflex, I told myself. Like making a small jump sideways if a kid yells “Boo!” in the bushes on Halloween night. For all his wisdom about the spiritual path, my favorite monk had this part of it wrong. I loved Shelsa, loved being with her as an uncle, loved the warmth and the joy and the sense that she loved me. All of that was perfectly natural, ordinary, and good. But I remained noncommittal about her special spiritual purpose, and I knew, like I knew it was morning in North Dakota, that if she did have some special role to play in this life, her uncle had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But I didn’t want to get into an argument with Natasha on the subject, not then. We looped around behind the buildings, a dry cliff rising to our left, then the miniature golf, the pool, the motel and parking lot to our right.
“Anthony and Rinpoche were out here till really late last night, playing mini-golf. I watched for a while.”
“I thought the place closed at nine.”
“Rinpoche charmed the woman at the desk—they’re all volunteers—and she said she’d stay and watch as long as he had energy to play. He’s good!”
“I wondered why Anthony didn’t come into the room until late. I thought maybe he had a girlfriend here or something.”
“He’s with Lizzie.”
“I know he’s with Lizzie. I thought he might be just . . . out someplace having a drink.”
“You think he’d cheat on Lizzie?”
“Not at all, not for a second.”
“You don’t have somebody, do you, Dad? Already?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. And then, “Let’s make another loop. I wanted to talk to you about your decision.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m staying at the farm. There’s plenty of room. The people who go there on retreat, most of them, pay, so Aunt Seese says she can pay me, too, and I’ll have two days off every week if I want to go someplace.”
To that point I’d been diplomatic, restrained, wise. And then this slipped out: “You’re throwing everything away.”
“Like what, Dad? I finish college and maybe go to grad school and cost you, like, another two hundred thousand bucks? And then I get a job and get a promotion and get married and move out to the suburbs with my husband and we have kids. And we love them, and love each other, and raise them, and then they go away, and then he dies, or I die?” With each phrase of this recitation her voice had bec
ome frailer and frailer. By the time she said, “What good is that, tell me?” it was all broken up into shards.
“Mom loved her life, Tash. If there’s one thing I know it’s that she loved it, loved me, loved bringing up you and your brother, loved our house and her garden and being able to take a train into the city. She spent her whole life helping people, me, raising you guys, helping her friends, nursing Grandma at the end.”
“Right. Exactly. And look where she ended up. Look what happened to her.”
“You think she’d want you to leave school?”
“Don’t play that card, Dad. Please!”
“All right. I’m sorry. And it’s your decision, of course. At this point in your life it’s all your decision. Anthony said I should leave you alone, but—”
“He did?”
“In the strongest terms. . . . But I can’t let you make a big decision like this without at least telling you what I think. It’s my job. I’d be shirking my duty. And what I think is: I admire you. I love you more than you can possibly imagine. It’s been the great privilege and joy of my life to raise you and your brother, not even to raise you, just to be on earth with you. Mom felt exactly the same way. Some people say having kids puts a strain on the marriage but it was just the reverse with us. There were some strains beforehand, and once you arrived they got smaller, much smaller, not bigger. . . . But I don’t see why you can’t finish college and then come and work here. What’s wrong with that idea?”
“Because inertia will take me away from this, that’s what. I see what happens to the people who come here. I hear what they say about their lives. I see the effect Rinpoche has on them.”
“But you’ve been here three days, hon!”
“I’ve seen it when we visited other times. A week every summer, on holidays. I was paying attention, Dad. Maybe nobody else in the family was, but I saw what he did for them. I even talked to some of them. But it’s not even just that. It’s not like he gave them therapy or something. It’s deeper than that. He made their lives make sense in a new way, and I want to figure out that new way. I want to have that, first. And maybe then I’ll feel comfortable getting a job and getting married and having the house and kids and all that. Maybe then I’ll feel, I don’t know, comfortable with what happened to Mom.”
At that point she started sobbing quietly, a sound that had always ripped me in half. I put an arm around her and kept it there and we stood with our backs to the motel and the happy noises from the pool and looked at the sandy cliff. There were small holes in it here and there, tiny caves where who knew what kinds of vipers waited.
“Isn’t that why you got into the meditation and stuff?” Tasha asked through her tears. “Isn’t that why you took this trip with him?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well then why not let me do it? Because I’m not old enough? I could live only another hour, Dad. Another day, another month, another five years. And what? I should wait until I raise my kids and I’m old and then pay attention to this stuff?”
“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t wait. I just don’t want you to be poor and trying to get a job without a degree. I’ve worked with the poor. I’ve been volunteering in the Bronx since you were two years old. I’ve seen poverty close up. Some of those people, many of them, are wonderful, sweet, generous, even happy in spite of everything. But I don’t think that kind of a hard life is any fun at all, or even any prescription, necessarily, for spiritual solace. It’s a terrible strain, a constant pressure, a giant force pressing against them telling them they’re less. Their kids cool off in a fire hydrant instead of going to the Cape for two weeks. They drive old, shitty cars, or no car at all. They live in hot apartments, with roaches and rats.”
“That would never be me. You know that. Mom left us money, for one thing.”
“Not enough to make a life on.”
She turned toward me and I let my arm drop back to my side. Her face was wet, but she made no move to brush the tears away. A strand of hair went across one eye; she was looking slightly up at me. “Dad,” she said, and she was all unprotected then, heartbreakingly unprotected and real, the way I remembered her when she was two and three and four. Now, for all her adult strength, she could barely get the words out. “Right now I don’t want to learn about oceanography or Spanish or study climate change. I . . . want . . . to . . . figure out what happened . . . to my mother, why, where she went, what’s the point of everything. They don’t teach that at Brown. I want you to say you understand. That’s all. I want to hear you say you understand.”
For a second then, two seconds, I felt myself tempted to retreat from our raw intimacy and take up position in my fatherly fortress. My father would have done that, I’m sure of it. Older, wiser, the one who knew, the one who paid for everything, made sacrifices, the Boss. Three or four words and I could have taken refuge there, hurt her and protected myself, my position, my status. I watched that possibility, that option, rise up inside my thoughts like a man lifting a sword over the head of a prone captive. I watched it. And I let it go. It was hard for me to speak then, but I managed to say, “I do.”
And I did.
33
After that conversation I went back to the room and changed into my bathing suit. I needed a fifty-lap swim, or a twenty-mile hike, or to run a half-marathon—some rigorous physical exertion that would clear away the storm clouds that seemed suddenly to have gathered in my interior world. Tasha’s decision, her argument about the fragility of bourgeois life, had hit me like an eighth-round punch. I was cloudy headed, wobbly legged. This is what happens, I told myself as I walked across the parking lot toward the Badlands pool: you let go of your fatherly authority, your position as the older, wiser one, the life-veteran, the Dad Who Knows, you let that guard down for one second and BOOM! the fist of doubt catches you mid-jaw. Bathing suit and bare chest and all, I had the bizarre urge to walk into town and try to find a copy of the Daily News. There would be no articles on meditation and retreat centers (unless some married congressman had been discovered having sex with a West Village yoga teacher). All the assumptions we lived by would be safely in their place: the world was a dangerous zoo filled with crooks and schemers; the goal, the only response to our predicament, was to make money, have things, get your kid into a good college, so she could marry well, have a career that provided a new car and a big house in a neighborhood that made no bad headlines, so she could join a beach club or have a summer cottage, write tuition checks . . . so her child could go to a good college, and have a career that provided a new car and a big house in a neighborhood that made no bad headlines . . .
I knew this about myself: the best thing to do in such a mood was to jump into water, the colder the better, and swim until my arms and legs turned to rubber. I did that, scaring a bevy of teenage girls off to one side of the pool while the old guy swam his laps. It was therapy for me. It was a strange form of revenge, too—not on the teenage girls, but on my own shame, because I hadn’t learned to swim until I was twenty-two years old.
There, it’s out in the open. One of Otto Ringling’s great secrets. Afraid of the water into early adulthood.
My excuse is this: while there were two municipal pools in the Dickinson of my youth, Mom and Pop weren’t exactly keen on driving us in there for lessons. Swimming was not a skill that mattered on a farm in the dry plains; it wasn’t on my parents’ radar any more than teaching their children mah-jongg had been. All this wouldn’t have caused any trouble for me—lots of people go through life without learning how much fun can be had in the water—except that Jeannie’s family made a kind of religion out of water sports. They swam, they sailed, they were expert at cracking ice cubes out of the tray and watching them melt in a glass of Maker’s Mark.
Her mother owned a modest, four-bedroom “cottage” in Falmouth, on Cape Cod, two blocks from the beach, and even before we were married I went there as an invited guest (separate bedrooms, of course!). Before she started drinking for the day
, Jeannie’s mother—Ethel, by name, Rubbsie by nickname (don’t ask!)—would go out and swim what she called her ‘morning mile.’ I can picture her still, slapping in through the screen door while we late risers were at breakfast, the salty, tanned skin, the flapping flip-flops, the look of triumph on her bony face as she went to the sink for water. I can hear the acid-tipped remarks for which she was famous. “J” she called her daughter. As in, “What’s the matter with your beau, J, worried about sharks?” Later, after lunch, she and Jeannie and Jeannie’s sister and a cousin or two would all be cavorting in the surf, far out over their heads, and yours truly would take a jog along the beach, then wade in chest deep and splash around. Sometimes, just to make her mother crazy I think, J would swim over and wrap her legs around me, and we’d bob there, crotch to crotch, faces a few inches apart, and that would more than compensate for the eighty-proof barbs that would fly across the table at dinner.
For Rubbsie, the issue wasn’t just the swimming or the Midwestern roots or my relative sobriety or the fact that she knew I was living with her daughter in a state of sin. It was more the idea that I was to blame for taking her from a 4.0 average to a grimy walk-up on Ninth Avenue, a waitressing job, a life in which, outside the bedroom, our greatest pleasure was a bag of roasted chestnuts and a walk in Central Park. I, we, had not yet bought into the system. We hadn’t yet traded freedom for comfort. We had not yet abandoned the idea that we could make a life according to a pattern of our own original design, and to hell with what others might think.
On my fifth or sixth or seventh visit to Falmouth we shared the cottage with a visiting uncle named Eugene, Jeannie’s godfather (Jean and Gene—source of an endless supply of family jokes). Diminutive, stocky, a former fighter pilot in the Korean War, his pleasant face topped by what looked to be about five pounds of silky, pure white hair, Uncle Gene saw me splashing in the shallows one afternoon and immediately sensed my distress. That evening he took me back to the beach, just the two of us, and with an otherworldly patience taught me to swim. He was, it seemed to me as I churned through my laps in Medora, a sort of Rinpoche of the watery world, someone sent to push me past my fears and self-imposed limitations and into a happier dimension.
Lunch with Buddha Page 24
