by John Updike
The best of the Price silver along with that serpentine candelabra Granddaddy saved from the Peabody creditors I put for safekeeping in a rented lockbox at the same bank where I opened my own independent account. I'm still angry about the way my trust fund got absorbed into Charles's medical education and I can't tell you the satisfaction it gave me not to check the little box marked Joint. The Price and Peabody silver you still have (and that precious teeny-tiny salt-and-pepper set way back from the Prynnes) I hope you are taking out and polishing once every three months and keeping in " felt bags, not plastic, between polishings—that Florida salt air is death on silver, whereas somehow in Massachusetts the salt doesn't matter so much, maybe the lower humidity doesn't hold it in such suspension. Grandmother's lacework tray for calling cards for instance I noticed looked definitely pitted, and I know that didn't happen in Dedham where all those pieces were kept in the Perkins breakfront. I don't know why you have the tray out since you have so few callers and nobody uses cards any more anyway. While we're on these materialistic subjects, I think your plan to cash in your CDs as they come due and go back into the stock market now that interest rates are down is disastrous. For one thing everybody is doing it and the market is inflated. For another with inflation flattening out thanks to Reagan's hardheartedness cash is as good as gold—better than gold, in fact, which slumps right along with the soft dollar our export industries are clamoring for. My advice would be to rake off the interest every six months when you roll them over if you must have the spending money but keep the capital in these no-risk certificates and let Daddy's portfolio—all that heavenly old IBM and AT&T he picked up for almost nothing—enjoy the bull market if there is going to continue to be one. The gain there over the years is so great that a little bearishness only dents your paper profits but if you were to enter now at the peak with real cash it would break your heart. Someone of your age or even mine trying to select stocks tends to be disastrous because we have no real grasp of this new world of services and computer communication and go for solid old things like steel and rivets and coal oil and GM that are losers. Real things nowadays are losers. Things like fast food and videotapes that people use only for a minute and then forget are where the money is, somehow. But not all the companies doing that are doing well either.
I guess this is what they call parting advice. Today makes me nervous. I'm making my leap into a new life. For breakfast, this Mexican girl brought a tray to the room in worn blue jeans and a man's cowboy shirt and they just assumed I wanted greasy hash-browns with my inedibly peppery scrambled eggs. The coffee was actually gritty, I think they just boil the grounds in a pot and pour it. I'm sorry you've been besieged by this retired general from across the courtyard but glad you decisively repelled him, even at the price of being rude. He sounds odious. As well as pathetic. Write me your health news as the A does its wonderful work. For now I think the address on this stationery (isn't the logo a riot?) will be best, in case I have to beat a hasty retreat. Say a prayer for me if you still do such things.
Love and hugs,
Sare
April 24
Gentlemen:
Enclosed please find endorsed checks totalling, by my own calculations, $174,963.02, for deposit in my account, #0002743-911. Kindly send my receipt and subsequent account statements to me c/o Babbling Brook Motor Lodge, Forrest, AZ 85077, marked PLEASE HOLD.
Thank you sincerely,
Sarah P. Worth
April 24
Dear Dr. Epstein—
I will not be in next Monday or any Mondays as far as I can foresee. I have taken a step—not the step, since over the years we have discussed so many steps I might take, but a step—out of my psychological impasse, away from the resentful dependency you and I have often agreed was so unhealthy. I feel fragile and naked but free. Thank you for giving me, in all our many talks—my talks, I should say, coupled with your wise listening—the ego-definition and strength to attempt this. Perhaps now the task next before me is ego-transcendence.
If Charles calls with some ridiculous proprietorial tantrum, you will know how to handle him.
With gratitude and esteem,
Sarah (Worth)
[tape]
Dear Midge. Hi. It's me. Sarah. I think it's May fifth, but there aren't many calendars around here. Oh, Midge, what a time I've been having! Just let me check and see if this damn thing is working, the little spools going around. They seem to be. Well, I got here. Tell Irving. We see the Arhat in person go by in a limousine every.day, sometimes twice a day. It's bliss, tell him. Actually that's only half the truth of it, but there's no point in telling him the worst, he's such a gentle hopeful soul, Irving, and I'm sure he'll never make it here to see for himself. The fact is that along with its being really quite as heavenly and spiritual and freeing as we used to imagine there's also a strong element, everything being so loosely structured, of dog-eat-dog.
Where shall I begin? I left Charles, of course. He went off to work Monday morning as usual and instead of puttering about as usual I packed my more practical summer things and some raspberry-colored jeans I had found in some Army-Navy store up along where Boyl-ston Street gets grungy, across from the Pru—purple is not an easy shade to find, I tell you—and my running shoes and an old denim jacket of Pearl's and two sweatshirts that really were more pink than mauve but I didn't know how strict the ashram's color code was going to be—I'm being boring about the clothes, I know—and off I set, in my one prim and proper suit, the black-and-white check with the boxy jacket and pleated skirt, and with enormous butterflies in my stomach. I mean, this is my life, and I'm throwing it away!
I landed in Los Angeles, to make it harder for Charles to trace me through the airlines, and, coming in to land, I couldn't help thinking of how planes keep colliding in the air there and how absurd if my big pilgrimage were to end that way, instant nirvana. But actually the landing was perfect, once we came down through the chop. Then I stayed in this motel near the airport in a dreary area called Hawthorne—I'd always had these glamorous illusions about Los Angeles and Hollywood but what I saw looked like just one big Neponset Circle—and after a bad night, where these Japanese kept knocking on the door, I rented a car and drove what seemed forever on Route, I think, Ten and didn't see anything of Palm Springs with all those celebrities and golf courses and arrived really bleary from the shimmer on the highway and the mirages. But once I got to this little sad town in Arizona called Forrest, just the air, Midge, was so good to breathe, so spicy and quiet and energizing—tell Irving all his lessons in pranayama came back to me and my sinuses felt absolutely cleansed, though the cold I had when I left has actually come back worse than ever, you can probably tell from my voice. Well, they work you like dogs here, at least at first, and there aren't near enough blankets for these cold clear nights, and it's a real dogfight at dinnertime for food, some people are just too tired to stand in the endless lines, and at noon they bring you these soggy vegetarian box lunches out in the fields or wherever they have you working, and sleeping six to a trailer everybody's germs travel all around—but I'm getting way ahead of myself, and don't mean to complain. Down deep in my atman, beneath all these sniffles and this hysterical physical fatigue, I am absolutely at peace. Tell Irving I'm tasting at last that samarasa he used to talk about, that I could never quite get to just by holding my breath or stopping all thought as he used to try to make us, which just sent us into giggles, didn't it?—how can you stop thought, since even in dreams it goes on, I mean. The electricity in your brain just crackles and crackles until you're dead.
Midge, I know I'm rambling hideously. I'm actually shaking, I'm so cold and probably feverish and achy all over. Those summer clothes I brought aren't really the right thing, and my raspberry-colored jeans get incredibly filthy and heavy and soggy. The worship crew—that's what they call a work crew—I'm attached to is pouring cement for the foundation of this building called the Hall of a Millionfold Joys, though they told the county commissioners it'
s just going to be an agricultural greenhouse and tractor garage, and all day long I shovel this gray goop so it goes into the corners of the forms without pockets of air under it and then smooth it with these big flat wooden things like huge rakes without any teeth. It's more fun than hoeing artichokes and setting out hybrid heat-resistant tomato plants, which I was doing the first two weeks in this absolutely merciless sun, but, my goodness, your shoulders do ache from pushing the goop around—I'm not sure a woman's muscles are put together exactly like a man's. And these aluminum trailers really aren't very well insulated, though from the outside they have that quilted look. The only heat they have are electric heaters, but between midnight and six electricity is cut off for every place but the guardhouses along the border and the section where the Arhat and his close advisers live and the Kali Club, a kind of disco or dance hall where the sannyasins express their joy and gratitude to Shiva for the eternal cycle of creation and destruction. Everybody in my trailer is hoping eventually to get into one of the new A-frames they're putting up, where only three or four sannyasins have to share the space and a family, if there is one, can get some privacy. You don't see many children here, the Arhat thinks birth control is the number-one global issue on a materialistic level, but there are a few, cute as can be in their little purple bib overalls and round-toed sneakers and whatnot. The color code asks we dress in the shades of the sunset, symbolizing the end of mundane concerns, and that gives us quite a latitude, when you think about it. You see people in red and orange and everything, really, but blue and green, though at sunset in this air there often is a tinge of green. Also the Arhat calls these the love colors—he has the cutest way of saying "love."
Midge, you should see me. I'm huddling in all my clothes except for my cement-covered running shoes in my grape-colored sleeping bag on the thin carpet over the cold aluminum floor a foot or two above the desert sands, which are crawling with scorpions and snakes and things like leggy pale rats—I always thought deserts were supposed to be dead but this one is just bop-ping with life, especially after the sun goes down—and talking into this gadget, a Seiko mini-cassette player I bought at this electronics boutique they have over at the ashram mall. They sell a lot of gadgety stuff here, I was surprised, even mugs and T-shirts with the Arhat's picture on them, and for what I'd call wild prices, since there's nowhere else to buy anything for forty miles around and anyway all the profits go into the Treasury, of Enlightenment and represent the love we feel for the Arhat.
He is beautiful, tell Irving, and Liz and Ann and Gloria and whoever else shows up for yoga these days. So beautiful. The posters we had don't really do justice to the glow he has in person—the aura, I suppose it is—this incredible olive smoothness of his skin, which isn't half as dark as you think of Indians' as being, and a surprisingly substantial nose the opposite of re-trouss6, and thick black eyebrows in two perfect arches, and these rich chocolaty eyes there seems ho bottom to, just pools of knowingness, and this amazingly gentle smile that isn't exactly mocking but on the verge of it, and these delicate graceful hands with all their rings flashing when he waves through the limousine window. I see him drive by every day, now that I'm no longer stuck out in the artichoke fields—I got terribly sunburned those first days, all across my shoulders and the back of my neck, since I had my hair pinned up, and you know what a good tan I usually take—and you wouldn't believe the peace he generates, even at thirty miles an hour. We all hold hands and chant for him and the feelings of positivity and centeredness are fantastic. Tears come not just to my eyes but everybody's, even people like Fritz who have been with the Arhat for years, even back in India, when the ashram began. Fritz is my group leader. My lover, too, I guess I can tell you. You, Midge, but not Irving or anybody else. Actually, Fritz'd kill me if he heard me calling him Fritz instead of his ashram name. The Arhat gives us all names, when he gets around to it, he hasn't given me mine yet and the others say it takes months often before he notices you. Fritz's is hard to remember if you aren't at home in Sanskrit yet. Something like Victor or Vic Scepter—that isn't quite it. Oh well. I'm tired. I say he'd kill me and that's not true, but actually he does have a funny little temper. He's German by birth and likes things to be just so. Acb ja.
The others who live here in the trailer are all over at the Kali Club right now. How they do it after working—worshipping—twelve or fourteen hours a day I have no idea, but they're all younger than I and tell me if you love the Arhat enough you don't need sleep. Let me go back to the beginning, I know this is confusing. I stayed in this motel in this tiny town called Forrest, with two "r"s, I don't know who he was, somejrancher or explorer or vicious Indian-killer I suppose, with all ticky-tacky newish houses and nothing in the way of trees except for a few straggly cottonwoods down by the creek they call Babbling Brook but that to me seemed dull as ditchwater and utterly silent, even though April here is supposed to be the great run-off time from the snowmelt in the mountains. The mountains are very far off and look transparent except for their snowy tips. The rocks are reddish and have a soft look as if a child just got done kneading them. That's k-n-e-a-d. To finish up about the trees—there was a lovely tamarisk in pink bloom outside the stucco post office, and in the motel courtyard a strange kind of huge tree with tiny oval leaves and long pods at least a foot long hanging down rustling and clattering in the wind. There's always a certain amount of wind out West. The town seemed to be mostly cowpoke types and retirees from the insurance business in Phoenix, and when I asked about the Arhat's ashram you should have seen how their faces hardened up. They bate him, Midge—this is old Goldwater country and they still call people hippies and say he's brought in all these hippies to have drugs and orgies and furthermore the city he's putting in illegally is playing havoc with the local water table. They told me how he'd gouge all my money out of me and work me to death and pump me full of drugs. The man at the post office said, "That devil fella they call a rat sure earns his name." I can't do the Western accent very well yet. One man, I think he was an Indian, American Indian I mean, even though he wore one of those little plastic truck-driver hats, you know, with a visor and the name of a beer on them, spat at my shoes when I tried to explain how the Arhat's message was simply love and freedom and furthermore he was making the desert bloom. On top of all this, the motel gave me a breakfast with hash-browns that made me queasy all morning.
The roads down here are endless, and mostly dirt packed into ruts and ripples. It seemed to take forever to drive that forty miles, bumpety-bump-bump, trailing this enormous cloud of dust. I don't see how people in Arizona can have any secrets, because anywhere you go you leave this giant clue of dust in the air for hours. Not that there were any houses or people that I could see—not a sign of life except a few sorry-looking cattle and a lot of black-faced sheep who leave their wool snaggled all over the barbed wire. All the time, you are gradually rising, and the sagebrush, or maybe it's mesquite, getting sparser around you, and the ground rockier, and then suddenly you're overlooking this valley with tidy long fields of different shades of green, and yellow bulldozers and school buses crawling around on a system of roads below, and this big flat-roofed mall and rows of aluminum trailers, and on a shelf above them rows of A-frames being constructed on red earth scraped into shelves, and in the center of everything a sort of blue-paved space with an actual fountain, a fountain surrounded by rainbows and spray. The people in Forrest even mentioned the fountain to me as a waste of water, but I found out later it's perfectly ecological, just the same ten thousand gallons being recycled over and over as a symbol of the circulation of karma. Midge, I was stunned. I was stunned breathless. This bad to be the place I was meant to bring my life to. My poor bedraggled silly life, to be recycled. Even though Irving had shown us a few photographs you have to see it in context, to be in the space—all that gentle gray-green desert and then this unexpected valley with slanting walls of tumbled orange rock in their weird, soft-looking shapes the wind has carved, and this mild blue washed-out Weste
rn sky over everything like a face of Brahma. Inside I just felt this glorious relief.
There was a gate across the dirt road, and a guard dressed in lavender uniform but with a real enough gun, one of those Japanese machine guns that look like toys; but he saluted me, "Namaste," just like Irving sometimes does, and was really only a boy, an ordinary curly-haired boy about Pearl's age, rather cute and deferential, really, once I got over the shock of being accosted. I explained how I wanted to join and he asked me if I had been in correspondence with the Master and I had to say no, it hadn't occurred to me he would answer a letter and I had come pretty much on impulse. I heard myself saying this and realized that up to that moment it had been like I was doing everything in a dream and with one-half of my brain expecting Charles to wake me up and take me home. But then I took courage from the way Irving had made us see that all life is like that—lived on the skin of the void and without real substance, just motions we go through by constructing these hallucinatory goals and short-term strategies.
The boy frisked me for weapons or drugs—I had to laugh, but then felt I was undercutting some little performance he must do, like when you betray children who are being very serious about reciting a poem or shaking hands the way they've been taught to—and he gave me a card to put on my windshield, and from a checkpoint down in the ashram they took me to a place where several trailers had been put together to make offices. They call this hodgepodge the Uma Room, I know now. After a rudely long wait I was finally taken into this windowless place where a striking but not very pleasant red-haired woman with a black pearl in one nostril put me through an inquisition. So I wanted to become a sannyasin, she said. How come? I explained with what dignity I could «muster how I'd fallen in love with the Arhat through listening to his tapes and meditating on his photograph in a yoga class I'd been taking. Oh really? she said. Did I have any venereal disease and how much money was I bringing to the Treasury of Enlightenment? I explained to her I had left my successful doctor husband on a more or less sudden inspiration and all I could bring away was eleven thousand dollars. I had thought of saying ten, but eleven sounded more like it really was all I had. She said—her name, I should be explaining, is Durga, and she is sort of the Arhat's right-hand person, he's of course above the day-to-day details, and she has one of these quite red-headed complexions, with a face pale as ice, that opaque ice that builds up in the refrigerator, and furious green eyes and a cleft chin, which I think are generally handsomer on men—she said that didn't seem like very much and was there any way I could get any more? Did I have credit cards? Access to jointly held securities? To make a long story short, I got very dignified and said I had brought my body and mind and atman and what more could the Arhat in his transcendent wisdom desire? She got uppity on her own side and said the Arhat desires nothing, his name and the concept of desire should not even be put in the same sentence, but that his work was great, as I no doubt must have noticed while driving in as an uninvited trespasser. I said I bad noticed and marvelled and firmly intended to put myself at the service of this work. She asked me what my skills were, and I said those of a homemaker and helpmeet who had completed only two years of college intending to major in French philosophy, and she said it would certainly take some ingenuity to put those skills at the service of the Arhat. She spoke in this stilted way, like the high priestess in the old Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas, but with this lovely Irish lilt that kept coming through. I wondered if she were exactly sane, but now that I've learned she had been an artiste of some sort in Dublin once, I suppose that explains it.
