Karma for Beginners (18 page)

Bennett, which was “legendary.” I don't even know where Veterans Memorial Coliseum is. “Drums and Space” is making me uptight.

Clint is sitting too close to me on the couch, and I can't scootch over because Colin is right up on the other side. They both have their eyes closed. Once in a while the Dead make a particularly weird noise and Bennett says, “Oh, man!” Clint seems to be moving closer to me, and I can't tell if it's real or just the weed, but I keep feeling more and more smushed. I don't think Colin notices.

“Hey.” I finally nudge him, whispering, “Hey, Colin, will you drive me home?”

He's super stoned, but he says yes. “I hate ‘Drums and Space' anyway.” He grins at me when we're outside, out of Bennett's earshot. I'm relieved: at the smile, the ride home, the cold and open air. It was getting hard to breathe in there. I roll down the window and let the freezing air stream in.

I get there just as Evening Program's ending. Throngs of people swarm around me, searching for their shoes. I just stand there like a rock in the middle of a stream. Sanjit weaves near me in the crowd, head bobbing on his Adam's apple neck; he's with a bunch of other kids my age, strangers. They're here for the festival. Some are pale and weird like him and Meer, but most of them are normal: ripped jeans, hippie skirts, bandannas. They're laughing. They all act like friends. A feeling rises up in my throat that I don't even know the name of, and suddenly I feel so tired, more tired than I ever have in my entire life. I want to be one of them. I want to not have to lie and not have to be alone and not have to be sexy and not have to be cool anymore. I want to laugh with other kids. I want to be a kid.

When I turn around I'm face-to-face with Avinashi; she's arm-in-arm with a black-haired girl in a Pac-Man T-shirt. The girl looks nice. Avinashi looks happy.

I have this impulse to tell them about Colin. It's right at the edge of my lips. I'd tell them and they'd giggle, “Oh my god!” and ask all about it, if I'm anxious or happy, confused or in love. They'd ask me what it feels like, what we do. If it ever scares me. If it ever feels too big. If the secret ever feels too huge to keep. I'd tell them and they'd say,
Wow
, and let me spill all of it, and we'd stay up late like at a slumber party, and my secret would be outside of me and I could breathe again.

But I know that if I actually did it that's not what would happen. If I actually did it, their faces would fall, go dark like they just swallowed something sour. They'd say,
That's wrong, you know. He's way too old. You mean you've been lying all this time?
And then they'd go tell someone, pull an ace out from the teetering, fragile house of cards

I've built, and make it all smash on the floor.
I swallow everything and walk away.

. . .

As the ego is destroyed, great pain arises.
Beyond that pain is the true self.

My mom's going to be gone overnight, working for the festival; she'll be back before breakfast tomorrow. It's the first thing she's said to me in a week. I don't know why she announced it; usually she just waits till she thinks I'm sleeping, then leaves.

I looked for that journal two more times, combed the room before the cleaning lady came, but nothing's turned up. I still don't know where my mom goes most of the time, and we still don't talk about anything. She's changed, though; I can tell. Since that day with Vrishti she's turned inward and inward till all she is is one big secret. She's getting thinner, like Jayita, and that waterfall thing doesn't ever happen anymore—the warm flood of joy that used to fill her up sometimes is gone. Her eyes are dull, except when they dart around and wheels spin in her head. She's like a shell made out of chants and prayers and secrets. I almost even miss hearing about her spiritual journey, just to have her talk to me. But she won't talk about anything, and there's nothing I can tell her.

In the row of pay phone booths, I spin on the black plastic stool. A glass wall folds me in; I know no one can hear me.

Colin picks up. “Hello?”

“Hey there,” I say, sneakers pressed against the phone booth wall.

“Hey.” His voice curls into a smile. “What's up?”

“Oh, nothing,” I say. “Except that my mom's out all night tonight.”

There's a pause. “Really?” he says.

“Yes, really.”

“Hmm.”

“Yes, hmm.”

“So what are you proposing?”

Colin says the best feeling known to man is waking up in someone's arms. He says there's nothing like it. It's weird to think of how he found that out, but he is twenty. I can't expect a clean slate. And the weirdness goes away when he says to me:
I wish that I could wake up in your arms
.

“You wanna wake up in my arms?”
He laughs. “Yeah. Totally. Your place or mine?”

. . . . .

I decided my place. It feels safer somehow than sneaking out to his house overnight. No one can see me come or go, watch me pull up in the van. All we have to worry about is smuggling him into the room, and then we're golden. There's the lobby and the stairs, or there's the fire escape. The lobby and the stairs both have the risk of people, but the fire escape's back by the parking lot. If we wait till dark no one will see.

I skip dinner, stomach jumping; run up to my room to get ready. I've never spent the night with someone, and I realize all I have is pajamas and big T-shirts. Shit. You're supposed to wear a negligee. I head for my mom's dresser drawers. The top drawer is underwear; she does have some lacy stuff, but that's too gross. I dig through, looking for something else, I don't know what, when my fingers hit paper. I pull out a purple card with a lavender mandala on the front. Inside it says, “
Guhahita Prapati: who lives in a secret place in my heart. Only surrender. Guruji
.”

It makes me feel gross, even though it's just a card. I hold it at the edges like it could get my hands dirty, slip it back beneath her bras. I root through the other drawers, trying to think about clothes. In the last drawer, there's a nightgown. It's short and sheer and is made of silk from India. I put it on. It fits. I wear my orange underwear, plain cotton but at least bikinis, and go to put on makeup.

When he knocks on the window, I'm in bed waiting. I wish he could've just climbed in like Romeo and seen me with the covers perfectly arranged, but the window's locked. I open the latch and lift it; then there's a screen. “You have to get the screen off from the inside,” he whispers, not noticing my negligee.

“How?”
“See the screws at the corners? You have to undo
them.”
“I don't have a screwdriver!”
“Shit.”

I stand there freezing, waiting for him to come up with something. “Okay.” He thinks. “How about a tweezers?” My mom has a tweezers in her makeup bag. I run and get it.

It works; I lift the screen out of the window, and he crawls in. After he brushes off and closes the window, he finally sees me. “Wow.” He looks me up and down. “Beautiful.”

I beam. He swoops me up like a 1950s bride over the threshold. It surprises me: I kick my feet and giggle, cracking up all the way to my mom's bed. He lays me down; my heart is pounding. There's only a thin wall between us and the rest of the ashram. Good thing I locked the door from inside.

It feels strange to be in my territory, closer somehow. At his house I'm separate from the rest of my life; eventually I always leave and come back to this place he's never seen before. But now he's inside it, inside the rest of my life, inside me, and there's no place to go back to, nowhere that's just mine: he's everywhere. It feels scary and a little crowded, but also brave. This is what being in love is like, I think—letting a person in the most you can, into every corner of yourself, not keeping anything reserved. “I love you,” I whisper into his eyes above me, out on a limb of a tree I didn't even know existed.

Afterward we get stoned and then do it again; finally, we fall asleep. I sleep light, dreams high on the surface of my mind; and the moment dawn starts to peek through the curtains, I'm wide awake. “Hey. You have to go,” I whisper loudly, rustling his shoulder.

“Mmm, wait,” he says without opening his eyes. “Lie back down.”

I almost forgot: waking up in his arms. I lie down on my side, stomach pressed against him. He puts both arms around me. I'm already awake, but it
is
pretty good. I'm about to drift off when I hear voices in the hall.

“Okay,” I say, almost shaking him. “You
have
to go.”

He rubs his eyes, bleary, smiling. “Do I
have
to?”

“Yes.”

That crowded feeling from last night is worse now, running underneath my skin. My mom said
before breakfast
. Every set of footsteps in the hall sounds like hers, and I'm completely sure we are going to get caught.

“Nah,” he says, shuts his eyes, rolls over toward me. “Just another minute.”

I jostle him again; he doesn't move. I lie there for a second, watching the ceiling. I'm starting to get panicky. I want my room back, clean and empty, free of the thick risk of his presence. He's twenty. If he gets caught, it doesn't really matter. His parents won't get mad; nobody would give him any consequences. But I'm fifteen; that's three years until I'm on my own. It would ruin my entire life. It almost makes me mad at him, that he doesn't think about that, that he's not looking out for me. I wait another minute. It seems like a year.

“Okay,” I finally say, out loud this time. “You gotta go.”

He yawns, moans, sits up. Thank god. His clothes are sprawled out on the floor, and he takes his sweet time gathering them. In the meantime I fold my mom's negligee, slip it back in her drawer, and pull a T-shirt on. He's putting on his sweater when I hear my mom's voice, chanting. Shit.

“
Colin
,” I stage-whisper. “That's my mom.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Where?” he whispers back.
“Down the hall. You gotta get out of here. Now.”

He stuffs his feet into his sneakers, starts to tie them. “Leave it,” I say. “Don't lace them up. Just go.” I hear her voice again, closer. I'm sweating. He's hustling. I feel like the walls of everything are closing in on me. I push him toward the window and out onto the fire escape, his spine hard beneath my fingers. When he gets out he turns to kiss me, crouching down. “Bye,” he says. “I had fun.”

“Me too,” I say, not sure if it's true. “Go go go.” And he's gone. I grab the screen, start screwing it back in as my mom's key turns in the lock.

She cracks open the door, but the second lock catches it, the chain we never use. “Oh,” she says.

“Hang on,” I call. I turn the last screw. “Coming.”

When I unlock the chain a gust of cold air blows through from the crosscurrent. “Brr,” my mom says. “The window's open!”

“Yeah,” I say, thinking fast. “I wanted some fresh air to wake me up.”

“Why'd you do the chain?” she asks. “We never do the chain.”

“I don't know,” I say, buying time.

“Well, there must've been
some
reason.”

“I was nervous sleeping here without you,” is what I finally come up with.

“Really?” she says absently. Like she's going through the motions.

“Yeah.”

“Well. See? Nothing happened. You were fine.”

I don't say anything.

“Right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was fine.”

I'm exhausted, but she makes me go with her to the Temple for some special prayer. She says it's a purifying practice and it's necessary for me spiritually. I don't know why she even cares. She's always gone and gone and gone, right up till I need to be alone, and then she suddenly shows up and makes me go someplace with her. She's got big black smudges of mascara underneath her eyes, left over from last night it looks like, like a junkie or a rock star. I haven't seen makeup on her in months. At the Temple, you have to wear a skirt and cover your shoulders: by the shoe cubbies they have a bunch of huge plain black skirts with elastic waistbands, and also shawls. I put on both and look like a Quaker from the eighteenth century. “Go on in and sit,” she says. “I have to help get ready.” The Temple is a small octagonal room with a giant gleaming gold statue of the beard guy in the middle, heaped with pink orchids and roses. Everyone sits in concentric circles and has loud breathing experiences. There's no place to look that's not intense. The beard guy, the real one, is here, and he stares straight at me, eyes poking through my skin to the inside. I wish I could be in a plain white room, alone, no statues or flowers or energy, no stories or lies. I close my eyes and try to listen to the quiet, but then the finger cymbals start.

My mom comes in, waving an incense tray, singing a chant, Vrishti beside her, two other women behind. At the start of the verse, my mom messes up the words. Right away the beard guy's face clouds and he yells,
“Stop!”

They stop.

He turns right to my mom, picking her out. “What is this sloppiness?” His face looks like when I saw him with Jayita.

“What is this sloppiness?”
he yells louder.

One woman holds her breath; another tries to blend into the carpet.

My mom steps forward. “Guruji,” she says, giving him a weird and private look, “come on now, of course we're doing the best that we know how.”

He draws his neck back. “What did you say?”

Everyone else in the Temple is frozen, anticipating something, but my mom goes on like everything's okay, like she's got some special dispensation to say whatever she wants. Her hips tilt forward. Vrishti watches her, wheels turning in her head. “I said we're doing our best. I know you know that.” Her tone's familiar, chiding, like a wife on TV.

And then she tilts her chin down and looks up at him from underneath her lashes, sexy, like his name is Mick or Bud or Billy. Except there's no warmth beneath the look, no soft, no animal; it's just plain power. Just manipulation. And he locks his gaze with hers, and something passes between them, and Vrishti sees the whole thing and freezes, her eyes turning to ice.

My mom takes a step toward the beard guy, hips loose, tries to pull the power into her hands. But then his eyes spark and he yanks it back. “Are you suggesting my judgment is subjective?” She catches herself, backtracking. “Well, no—no, of course not—”

“Do you really have so much ego?”

“No, I didn't mean—”

“Pride is the strongest demon, Guhahita. Surely you are familiar with this truth.”

“Of course—”

“Then what place do you think you occupy that you may question my judgment? What great state do you believe you have attained?”

“I—”

“Let me tell you right now. You've attained nothing.” He pauses, to let it sink in deep. “You disappoint me.” She's a deer in headlights, stock-still and stunned. Everyone's staring. The beard guy spits on the ground and makes a noise that sounds like
peh
.

And then from inside my mom's shell all these tears come up, hot and wet and loud; I didn't know there was that much left inside. She falls to her knees in front of him. Vrishti stiffens, folds her arms tight. Everyone else backs away. My mom looks so alone up there, stripped down to nothing, so much more alone than even I have ever felt. No one comes to her rescue. She's begging his forgiveness. She didn't do anything wrong. Everyone is staring. I feel completely ill.

“Oh, Guruji, I admit I know nothing. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this lesson in surrendering my pride.” Her eyes are lost and desperate, body clenched. It's humiliating.

What are we doing in a place where this happens?

I ran out of the Temple before the chant ended, beelining for the pay phones. Now I'm locked in the stuffy booth, hiding. It's the only place I can find where I know I won't see my mom or the beard guy or anyone from that room. Colin isn't answering his phone, even when I let it ring a million times. Goddamnit.

. . . . .

I want to run. I want to run away from this place, climb out the window and into anything with wheels and drive and drive and drive. Except I can't; I don't know how to drive a car. All I can do is sit there in the passenger seat while my mom or Colin steers the wheel. And they're not here. There's no one here to take me away.

So instead I do the opposite. I close myself in our bathroom, the smallest space that I can find, and lock the door. I sit on the cold closed lid of the toilet with the shower running and sob till my ribs hurt, until the steam gets thick and hot enough to choke me. The air is closing in, making my head spin, when I hear the pounding on the door.