There Will Be Lobster

by Sara Arnell

  Blood vessels restrict.

  The heart beats faster.

  Palms sweat.

  You want to run.

  You want to get the fuck away from whatever’s making you feel like this.

  You want your stomach to stop turning over and over.

  You want to scream.

  The guru said that the solution is to stay and play.

  Stay and play.

  Stay and play, I repeated to myself over and over.

  Yes, I thought. I’m a fighter or a flighter. I fight with my own demons. I binge on wine thinking they’ll go away for a little while and give me some peace, but when I wake up with my head pounding and the bags under my eyes twice the size they should be, I realize the demons are right where I left them, there, on my shoulder, challenging me to fight them off or run from them. I wanted to stay and play. I wanted to be able to face things again and, most critically, face myself.

  Stay and play. Yes, I said to myself. I felt clarity like I hadn’t in a while. Plans formed in my head for a future I could be proud of. I looked around at the people in the room. These could be my new friends, I thought. I was excited to get my mantra.

  I’m going to get my mantra, I told myself.

  I’m going to chant my mantra.

  I’m going to be maniacal about making the time to meditate every day, twice a day.

  I’m going to take better care of myself—eat better, love myself better, respect myself more.

  I’m going to slow down my heartbeat and resist my hormonal urges to flee from situations that make me feel uncomfortable, insecure, and diminished.

  I’m going to trust myself again, and next time I come to a meditation session, I’m going to sit on a floor cushion because I won’t want to run. I won’t feel the need to take flight.

  The guru finished up his talk by leading us in a twenty-minute group meditation.

  “Wow,” I said to the person sitting next to me after we wiggled our toes, opened our eyes, and emerged from the meditative state.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I wondered what I would have found if it wasn’t meditation.

  Would I be sitting at a bar sipping a glass of rosé, pretending I was not drinking alone, pretending I was waiting for someone who was running late, then, three glasses later, telling the bartender plans changed and that “he” wasn’t coming anymore and could I have the check? Or similarly, would I strike up a conversation with someone at the bar and commiserate together about being stood up, left out, and drinking alone through no fault of our own? Would I toast with him or her to evicting inconsiderate assholes from our lives, order another drink, and sit like a reconciled bar fly who has just landed on a pile of fresh shit?

  Would I be wandering around my house never bothering to get dressed and not caring about anything more than wanting the day to turn to night as quickly as possible? Wondering how early was too early for me to crawl into bed for the night? 6:30? 7:00?

  Would I take up whistling or humming to break the silence of having no one to talk to?

  Would I wear a rubber band on my wrist and snap myself into life until the swelling itself became its own painful reminder that I needed resuscitation?

  If I didn’t find meditation, would closing my eyes continue to haunt me with thoughts of tragedy and death? I saw them all the time. I worried about them all the time. I had to yell at myself to stop it when I shut my eyes and saw my daughter lying dead in a field.

  Lying dead in the road.

  Lying dead in a bed.

  Lying dead in my arms.

  Maybe now, maybe soon, I can close my eyes, I thought, and see a flower. A butterfly. The smiling face of my daughter. See beauty. See a future for myself.

  It was time to get our mantras. A line formed. The guru sat on one of the folding chairs at the end of the studio. There was another folding chair, facing him. The newly initiated walked up to the guru one by one and sat in front of him. When it was my turn, I walked toward him slowly. It felt like a procession. “Pomp and Circumstance” was playing in my head. He smelled like sandalwood and incense. I breathed him in and exhaled the hope of something better. The fruit and flowers from the ceremony were piled high on the white table. He said we could take some on our way out. I walked to the chair positioned next to him. I felt wobbly. What if I fall on him? I thought. What if I stumble? I was so unsure of myself in every way. My lack of comfort with my body—with my entire being—made me think I had no more motor skills than a waddling toddler. I sat down without issue, putting my exaggerated worries behind, and breathed a sigh of relief. He smiled. I think I did the same. He told me to lean forward and, with his face to my ear, whispered my mantra. He repeated it three times then asked me to whisper it back to him. “Good,” he said. “It’s yours. Don’t give it to anyone else because it won’t work for them.”

  “Thank you,” I said, then got up and left. I took a bite of the apple I picked up from the table as I walked out.

  I missed Oprah and Deepak. I missed being talked through twenty minutes of meditating. I still need guidance, I thought. The guru told me that thoughts would come into my head when I was meditating. He said I could get frustrated and feel like it’s not working. He said if this happened to focus on the mantra and that all these random and extraneous thoughts would float away. I didn’t like to be alone with my thoughts. When I closed my eyes, I still saw things I didn’t want to see. I thought things I didn’t want to contemplate. Meditation didn’t make these go away. I remembered things I pushed back in my mind. I pushed them back for a reason, I thought. I pushed them back because they were too painful to deal with. Being alone with my thoughts dredged up memories. Scenes played back in my mind of situations and events and words and actions I hadn’t thought about in years. Sometimes I cried uncontrollably, and the calm of meditating was shattered by my breathy sobs.

  I wondered where these painful memories and repressed emotions were hiding in my body when they weren’t emerging to remind me that I didn’t deserve peace or happiness. Were they tucked under one of my fleshy folds? Did they have shapes? What color were they? Why was I now crying about some jerk from high school that made me feel bad? I thought I had overcome so much of what was coming back during meditation. “If they’re there,” said my guru, “you have to deal with them. Sit with your feelings, even for a moment, and don’t push them away.”

  “This is the work of meditation,” he said.

  “These are stressors that need to be released,” he said.

  “Don’t give up,” he said.

  My mind worked overtime during meditation. It dredged up things I obviously had not reconciled and released from my large suitcase of emotional baggage. It brought back memories, mostly painful, that needed to be released. It also brought back memories that needed to be reevaluated and re-stored with a more realistic perspective. I needed to rid myself of the negativity I had accumulated in my memory banks. They are coloring how I see things today. I need a memory makeover, I said to myself. I realized I needed to see things through a more positive lens when I remembered a phone call from André Leon Talley, the legendary fashion editor. He was in the back seat of a car service, driving up Madison Avenue. I’d known André since I helped answer his phone as a young assistant at Vanity Fair magazine.

  “I’m following your ex. I’m in a car service. He’s walking up Madison Avenue. He’s wearing pants that have been tailored. You can tell they’ve been fitted by a very good tailor. But his feet look like they hurt. His shoes look tight. His feet are pinched. The shoes are very narrow. He’s walking slowly. His feet are killing him. I can tell. He’s with a woman.” He said he had to go because he was holding up traffic, and he had a meeting at the Sant Ambroeus restaurant a few blocks away.

  I need to let this go, I thought, and focus on the mantra. I need to do what I was taught to do—let the thoughts
that come into my head during meditation leave my body and float away. I’m getting rid of clutter.

  I was glad that meditation would help me take the stress reaction from this memory and let me revisit it in the way it was meant to be received. It was funny. It was silly. It was André being a friend to me, as always. It was André being André and reaching out to let me know, in his own way, that he was thinking of me. I brought myself back to my mantra again and finished meditating. When I opened my eyes, I felt calm. I was OK, I realized. I was smiling at the thought of André scrunched down in the back seat of a car, spying from a distance. I imagined him in his signature caftan, phone in hand, peering out the back window, reporting on a fashion scene. I’m good, I thought. I can stay and play with my own thoughts.

  Memories kept bubbling up. I thought about a phone call I got from a shoe store I used to frequent. I tried not to think of this moment and always pushed it away when it surfaced. It made me angry and upset. It was a memory that I wanted to see through a new, more positive lens, so I assumed this is why it was dredged up during meditation. I played back the call from a salesperson telling me the shoes I ordered were in. I told him that I hadn’t ordered any shoes. “Hold on, please,” he said.

  A manager I knew for a long time from shopping there picked up the phone. “Hello darling,” he said. “Well, I guess you can figure out what happened just now; we called the wrong ‘Mrs.’”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing that I hadn’t been there in a long time and didn’t buy any shoes.

  “Now you know,” he said. “We miss you. Come visit.”

  “I will,” I said. I thanked him, not sure for what. I ended the call and burst into tears. I couldn’t get control of my emotions. I couldn’t even articulate what I was crying about. Was it the fact that I was not the one buying multiple pairs of expensive shoes? “Now you know,” he’d said. Know what? I thought. All I knew was that I wasn’t in control of my reactions and was bouncing around emotionally like a spinning top. Why didn’t I laugh when I realized it wasn’t me they should have called and said something to diffuse the awkward moment and rise above a simple mistake? I had lost all perspective. Why didn’t I say something like, “Hey, are they my size?” and laugh it away? I could have joked back, eased the discomfort we all felt. But all I could do was put down my phone and cry. Again. Blurt out in self-pity. Again. I went back to my mantra and finished my twenty minutes, which felt more like a painful past-life regression than an ancient Vedic practice designed to help combat stress and generate inner peace. Keep going, I told myself. Don’t give up. Meditation’s been around for a long time. It’s gotta work, because I’ve got nothing else.

  I need coffee NOW, I told myself one morning. Typically, I sat up in bed and meditated before I even went downstairs. I would wake up, go to the bathroom, prop up my pillows, sit up in bed, and start my morning meditation. I always had ups and downs with getting started and settling in. Beginning was the hardest part. I frequently checked the clock to see how much time had passed. Sometimes it was only a few minutes when it seemed like more. I realized multiple times during my meditation that I lost my mantra and was ticking off the shopping list. I daydreamed. Things came into my head that I had hoped never to think of again. There were times when I just opened my eyes as if I forgot I was meditating. And there were the mornings when I would power through my meditation for twenty minutes, ignoring my instruction to be easy and almost lazy with the mantra. I would silently chant my syllabic sounds in a fast, unrelenting breath where I’d breathe in on the first sound and out on the second. There were many mornings when I wanted to give up because it seemed too hard to focus for twenty minutes, the way I was taught.

  “We don’t try to meditate,” I was told.

  “Mantra is a vague, faint idea,” I was reminded.

  “Let the mantra float away. You don’t even have to enunciate it,” I was told.

  “Be effortless with the mantra,” I was ultimately instructed.

  But this one morning, my head was bobbing, and my chin was on my chest. I couldn’t keep my eyes open or my mind alert. My mantra disappeared from my thoughts and I couldn’t get it back. I can’t. I need coffee now. Coffee won’t interfere with my state of readiness for meditation, and it certainly won’t make me tired. This isn’t working, I complained to myself. It’s actually stressing me out. I felt my brow furrow and my jaw clench.

  I threw back the covers to get out of bed and head to the kitchen. If I just had coffee, I could get back to it. And maybe just a little something to eat as well, I concluded as my stomach growled back at me. I sat on the edge of the bed, about to get up, when I saw a bird fly into my window. It lightly hit the glass then disappeared out of sight to the patio below. I threw open the window and looked down. The bird wasn’t dead. It hopped around on the stone floor as it recovered from this mishap. It’s just a little stunned, I thought. I kept watching, wanting to make sure the bird would be OK. After a few minutes, the bird flew into the cherry tree outside my window and sat on a branch facing me. We looked at each other. I’m making eye contact with this bird, I thought.

  I wondered if it was a sign that things would be all right. I thought of the dove that Noah sent from the ark after the rains stopped to see if the waters had receded and dry land was emerging. Noah knew that the dove would come back to the ark if it couldn’t find a dry place to settle. When the dove returned to the ark, Noah knew that the world was still covered with water. Seven days later, he sent the dove out again. He waited seven more days, and when the dove didn’t return, he knew that the waters had subsided, and the dove had found a place to land. The bird in the cherry tree took flight after a few more moments and disappeared onto the distance. Was this my “ark moment”? I thought. Was this bird letting me know that the world was a safe place for me again and that I could begin to reestablish myself? Was this experience telling me that we all hit obstacles but need to overcome them and continue on? That we need to find a place to alight and begin walking the land again? I closed the window and went right back to bed. I was always looking for signs and signals and couldn’t help but believe this was a big one. It seemed to me that I had a biblical lesson play out before my eyes. If you can’t pay attention to this, I told myself, you are completely underwater. I knew that coffee and food and all my other self-indulgent needs of the moment could wait, and I finished meditating.

  Chapter 25

  I Want to Come Home

  “I want to come home,” my daughter said. “I want to transfer to a school close to home.”

  “Why?” I asked, trying to sound neutral and caring when all I wanted to say was “Pack now, I’m on my way.”

  “It’s not good for me here anymore,” she said. “It’s just not right for me anymore.”

  I had waited for this day for two years, longed for it. I didn’t even care if she wanted to drop out of college and take a break, as long as she was coming home. I dreamed of having her back in her room, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table together in the morning, quietly preparing for the day, her scent and presence filling the air. I was looking forward to finding a cold, half-consumed cup of coffee on a side table or counter. Signs of her. Habits of her. When she told me that she wanted to transfer to a college near home and commute, I wanted to do cartwheels across the kitchen floor. Nothing would make me happier, I thought. Then my self-sabotage mechanism kicked in.

  “You know I’m selling the house,” I reminded her. “I don’t have a plan as to where I’ll live or what I’ll do. I was counting on you being away at school while I figured things out. If you come home, I don’t know if I’ll even have room for you, wherever I end up. I was actually thinking of finding some small cabin on a lake, somewhere kind of remote. I can’t really do that if you come home and want to commute to a school. I don’t know. Are you really sure?” I asked. “Are you really sure you want to come home? I thought you might even stay in Vermont after sc
hool finished for the semester. I kind of counted on that too. That apartment you had last summer over the bar looked nice.”

  I suddenly felt like I was stuck to the couch. There was a heaviness that washed over me, and I couldn’t move. I felt disconnected to the reprehensible words that came out of my mouth:

  “This is taking me by surprise.”

  “I have to think about this.”

  “I’m not sure this will work.”

  “Can’t you just figure it out?”

  I could see myself wriggle and squirm while I talked on the phone and told my daughter she wasn’t welcome, that the timing was wrong, that there wasn’t any room. I watched myself hold my arm to the side with the phone away from my face so she couldn’t hear me crying. My nose was running, and tears streamed down my cheeks.

  Stop it, I commanded myself.

  Get it together.

  Be a mom for her.

  Stop denying what you want.

  See yourself as worthy of being happy.

  Cut the crap.

  Cut the shit.

  Come back, I pleaded with the part of myself that seemed to have disassociated from my body to watch me with disgust from across the room. Come back, I said to my conscience. I need you. Breathe. Breathe through this and get it together.

  “I’m coming home at the end of the term, Mom,” she said calmly.

  “OK,” I answered.

  “I’m glad,” I finally said, exhaling loudly.

  “I’m really glad. We’ll figure it out.”

  I wanted to change a few small things and perk up the house for her. I bought a photo by Slim Aarons called Poolside Gossip and decided to hang it over the fireplace in my bedroom. I moved the artwork that had been hanging there for years. It depicted the death of Socrates. I don’t know why it took me so long to move this death scene. Maybe it was self-punishment. The painting showed the philosopher in his room, surrounded by bereft followers as he was preparing to drink poison and die. It’s time finally, I thought. I can stop relating to this image. It’s not me. I took it off the wall. I wanted to see life, not death. I wanted to rid myself of negative influences. I wanted to be surrounded instead by positive premonitions. I wanted to wake up and look at the scene Aarons photographed—a white, modernist house in Palm Springs, California, with beautiful people sitting around a clear, blue pool. I imagined that the two stylish women sitting in lounge chairs at the end of the long pool could be me and a friend. The house was simple and elegant. It was surrounded by lush greenery and sat in front of a backdrop of majestic blue-and-purple-hued mountains.