The Best American Essays 2015 (33 page)

Culminations are at least lifelong, and sometimes longer when you look at the natural and social forces that shape you, the acts of the ancestors, of illness or economics, immigration and education. We are constantly arriving; the innumerable circumstances are forever culminating in this glance, this meeting, this collision, this conversation, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope forever coming into new focus, new flowerings. But to me the gates made visible not the complicated ingredients of the journey but the triumph of arrival.

I knew I was missing things. I remember the first European cathedral I ever entered—Durham Cathedral—when I was fifteen, never a Christian, not yet taught that most churches are cruciform, or in the shape of a human body with outstretched arms, so that the altar is at what in French is called the
chevet
, or head, so that there was a coherent organization to the place. I saw other things then and I missed a lot. You come to every place with your own equipment.

I came to Japan with wonder at seeing the originals of things I had seen in imitation often, growing up in California: Japanese gardens and Buddhist temples, Mount Fuji, tea plantations and bamboo groves.

But it wasn't really what I knew about Japan but what I knew about the representation of time that seemed to matter there. I knew well the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in which a crane flying, a woman sweeping, is captured in a series of photographs, time itself measured in intervals, as intervals, as moments of arrival. The motion studies were the first crucial step on the road to cinema, to those strips of celluloid in which time had been broken down into twenty-four frames per second that could reconstitute a kiss, a duel, a walk across the room, a plume of smoke.

Time seemed to me, as I walked all over the mountain, more and more enraptured and depleted, a series of moments of arrival, like film frames, if film frames with their sprockets were gateways—and maybe they are: they turn by the projector, but as they go each frame briefly becomes an opening through which light travels. I was exalted by a landscape that made tangible that elusive sense of arrival, that palpable sense of time, that so often eludes us. Or rather the sense that we are arriving all the time, that the present is a house into which we always have one foot, an apple we are just biting, a face we are just glimpsing for the first time. In Zen Buddhism you talk a lot about being in the present and being present. That present is an infinitely narrow space between the past and future, the zone in which the senses experience the world, in which you act, however much your mind may be mired in the past or racing into the future.

I had the impression midway through the hours I spent wandering that time itself had become visible, that every moment of my life I was passing through orange gates, always had been, always would be passing through magnificent gates that only in this one place are visible. Their uneven spacing seemed to underscore this perception; sometimes time grows dense and seems to both slow down and speed up, when you fall in love, when you are in the thick of an emergency or a discovery; other times it flows by limpid as a stream across a meadow, each day calm and like the one before, not much to remember, or time runs dry and you're stuck, hoping for change that finally arrives in a trickle or a rush. Though all these metaphors of flow can be traded in for solid ground: time is a stroll through orange gates. Blue mountains are constantly walking, said Dōgen, the monk who brought Zen to Japan, and we are also constantly walking, through these particular Shinto pathways of orange gates. Or so it seemed to me on that day of exhaustion and epiphany.

What does it mean to arrive? The fruits of our labor, we say, the reward. The harvest, the home, the achievement, the completion, the satisfaction, the joy, the recognition, the consummation. Arrival is the reward, it's the time you aspire to on the journey, it's the end, but on the mountain south of Kyoto on a day just barely spring, on long paths whose only English guidance was a few plaques about not feeding the monkeys I never saw anyway, arrival seemed to be constant. Maybe it is.

I wandered far over the mountain that day, until I was outside the realm of the pretty little reproduction of an antique map I had purchased, and gone beyond the realm of the gates. I was getting tired after four hours or so of steady walking. The paths continued, the trees continued, the ferns and mosses under them continued, and I continued but there were no more torii gates. I came out in a manicured suburb with few people on the streets, and walked out to the valley floor and then back into the next valley over and up again through the shops to the entrance to the shrine all over again. But I could not arrive again, though I walked through a few more gates and went to see the tunnel of orange again. It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge. An epiphany can be as indelible a transformation as a trauma. Once I was through those gates and through that day I would never enter them for the first time and understand what they taught me for the first time.

All you really need to know is that there is a hillside in Japan in which time is measured in irregular intervals and every moment is an orange gate, and foxes watch over it, and people wander it, and the whole is maintained by priests and by donors, so that gates crumble and gates are erected, time passes and does not, as elsewhere nuclear products decay and cultures change and people come and go, and that the place might be one at which you will arrive someday, to go through the flickering tunnels of orange, up the mountainside, into this elegant machine not for controlling or replicating time but maybe for realizing it, or blessing it. Or maybe you have your own means of being present, your own for seeing that at this very minute you are passing through an orange gate.

CHERYL STRAYED

FROM
Tin House

T
HERE'S A PAIR
of pants I wore almost every day for the first five years I knew my husband. They were what I like to call
sport pants
, which differ from all-out sweatpants (or
yoga pants
, as fancy people now like to call them) in that they were made of a sturdy cotton twill rather than jersey material. Cut comfortably loose, the elastic waistband was the only place where the pants made any contact with my body. Anything could happen inside those pants without detection. I could be fat or less fat or kind of slender. They were extraordinarily utilitarian and patently unsexy. Nuns might opt to wear them. Or park rangers. Or seventy-year-old piano teachers. Or butch lesbians who captained coed Ultimate Frisbee teams. Or me. I wore them so often my husband took to referring to them as my uniform.

I wasn't always so blasé when it came to my husband and clothes. The first time I slept with him—back when he was essentially a stranger to me, on the second night I knew him—I wore a black lace getup that's called a baby-doll nightie. It was a little handful of a thing I'd purchased at a Goodwill just before I met him, when I was twenty-seven and constantly roaming thrift stores on the hunt for something that would help me project the sexy image of myself I was hoping for. I bought it even though I've always been profoundly confused by lingerie. Isn't sex about something that clothes are the opposite of? I could never quite discern when, in the order of things, I was meant to put lingerie
on
when the whole point was ripping things
off.

These were the questions in my mind on the second night that I knew the man who was not yet my husband, after I excused myself from the bedroom where we'd been ferociously making out and ducked into the bathroom across the hall. As I went, I grabbed the just-purchased nightie from the top drawer of my dresser, a gob of cheap black lace in my hand. Alone, before the mirror, I removed my regular clothes and put on the nightie and studied myself. The nightie had thin shoulder straps, a form-fitting see-through bodice that gently mashed my breasts upward, and a flouncy short-skirted bottom. If the outfit had a title it would be either Slutty Cowgirl or Pretty Pirate. I looked awesome but felt ridiculous. Was I really going to return to the bedroom dressed like this? It seemed desperate and dumb and yet I couldn't help myself. I wanted him to see me like this, to seem to him to be the kind of woman who nonchalantly ranged around her place in a black lace thingamajig that scarcely covered her rear, so I walked into the bedroom and stood ever so briefly before him as he gazed at me, reclining on my futon on the floor, and then I got into bed with him and he pulled the damn thing off.

I never wore that baby-doll nightie or any other piece of lingerie again. My future husband and I became lovers and then we got married and the idea of putting that nightie on became just about the last thing on this earth I would do. I'd bought it for the sole purpose of finding and fostering intimacy, but in fact I wore it on the night when we were the least intimate, when I was projecting a slightly fraudulent image of myself to him instead of the actual me. Which, for better or worse, is a woman who wears pants a nun would find appealing.

The cool thing is, my husband finds them appealing, too. We fell in love while I wore and wore and wore those pants. The pants inside of which undetectable things can happen.

The black lace nightie disappeared soon after I wore it that one time. I handed it over to the Goodwill, tossing it back into the endless thrift-store stream from which it came, into the hands of another woman with fantastical dreams about herself. The pants lasted and lasted, for five years or more, until one day I understood it was the end of them. They'd served their time. I'd worn them so long and so often they'd become threadbare. The elastic of the waist had given way; the hemline had frayed. Instead of putting them on, I put them in the garbage can.

My husband was out of town at the time, working on a project that kept him away from home for a couple of months. It didn't seem right that he wasn't there to witness the end of the pants. My uniform. Our history. So I fished them out of the garbage can and cut out the crotch with a pair of scissors. It was a neat black rectangle of fabric that only two people on the planet would recognize for what it was.

I folded it into an envelope addressed to him. I didn't include a note. I put it in the mail and sat for a long time thinking about it, imagining him. How he'd laugh when he opened the envelope and realized what he was holding. How he'd press it to his nose and inhale.

KELLY SUNDBERG

FROM
Guernica

I
WAS TWENTY-SIX
, having spent most of my twenties delaying adulthood, and he was twenty-four and enjoyed a reputation as a partier. The pregnancy was a surprise, and we married four months later.

As my belly stretched outward with the tightness of the baby, my limbs grew heavy. I napped constantly on a long hand-me-down couch, the summer heat giving me nightmares. I dreamt of a woman floating in the corner staring at me, and I woke with my heart racing. One afternoon a hummingbird flew through the open door of the apartment to the window in the corner and beat at the glass. It was panicked, trying to turn glass into sky. I wrapped my hands around it, the hummingbird heart pulsing against my palms, then released it on the stoop.

They say that a bird in the house is an omen. It can mean pregnancy. Or death. Or both.

Eight years later, the police came to our door. When the younger one asked about my foot, I said that it didn't hurt. I told him it was no big deal, but when he asked for my driver's license, I stood up and found that I couldn't walk, that my foot was the size of a football, and it was bleeding. The bowl Caleb had shattered on it wasn't a little bowl like I had described. It was a heavy ceramic serving bowl, and I would need to wear a soft boot for a month and get a tetanus shot, and there would always be a scar shot through the top of my foot like a red star.

In the beginning of our relationship, I slept in his cabin in the woods with no indoor plumbing. I had to pee, so I let myself out. The ground was snow-covered and cold and I didn't feel like walking to the outhouse, so I went around to the side and squatted in the moonlight. The moon turned the snow into a million stars while my gentle lover slumbered in the warmth—such happiness.

We didn't want a church wedding, but our families insisted. Faith was what made marriage sacred. Faith was what kept people together.

I had doubts about marrying him so soon. Sometimes he would disappear for a straight week and return apologetic, smelling of alcohol. His friends gave each other looks that said they knew something I did not. One friend said jokingly, “How on earth did Caleb get you to go out with him?” Coming from a friend, the question seemed odd, but I thought it was just the way they ribbed each other.

When I met him, he charmed me. My best friend said, “You'll love Caleb. He lives in a cabin in the woods that he built by himself.” A former wilderness ranger, I was attracted to ruggedness and solitude. Caleb was a writer, and he was funny. One day he joked in bed about what our rapper names would be. I said mine would be “Awesome Possum.” He improvised a rap song titled “Get in My Pouch!” I couldn't stop giggling. I had never met a man who could make me laugh like he could.

My love for him was real, and I didn't want to be a single mother.

The young policeman told Caleb, “Go to your parents. Get away for a couple of days. Just let things calm down.”

The young policeman told me, “It's all right. My wife and I fight. Things get crazy. Sometimes you just need time apart.” I nodded my head in agreement, but I wanted to ask, “Do you beat your wife, too?”

Before our son turned two, we moved to Caleb's home state of West Virginia. He wanted to be closer to his family. There would be more opportunity for work there. His parents owned a rental house that they would sell to us. There were many compelling reasons for the move, but once there, he was the only friend I had. The loneliness was inescapable. This was common, I told myself. My parents had been married for over thirty years, and I don't remember my father ever having a close friend. I told myself that he was enough for me.