The Beach at Galle Road

by Joanna Luloff

  “Shh!” The man’s forehead wrinkled in annoyance. Lena looked at Carol as if she still expected an answer, but the man’s “shh” had surprised her into silence. The man was bearded and older. His fingers were stained red and his knuckles were thick and bulgy. Although he was sitting down, Carol could tell he was tall. As a compromise, Carol lifted her book silently for Lena to look at. The man nodded his approval, and Carol glanced again at his red fingers. Following her gaze, he examined his hands and then began to mime some kind of cutting action and pointed to the kitchen. Carol thought this silent game of charades somewhat ridiculous and found the man displeasing.

  “This is Paul,” Lena whispered.

  She expected him to shush Lena again, but instead he extended his hand to her. She took it lightly and was surprised by its roughness. Lena and Paul smiled at Carol and seemed to be waiting for something, so she pointed up at the kitchen, raising her skirt slightly to step over the bench, and made her way toward the oil smells.

  After chopping carrots, onions, and potatoes until her palms and fingers ached, Carol returned to her room. She sat on the bed cross-legged with her back pressed against the wall. Its coolness surprised her and she lifted her hair off her shoulders to allow the chill to spread. She began to write a letter, starting it in the middle of the page. She supposed she was writing to her mother. “I am surprised to find myself atop a small mountain miles and miles from Colombo or any place I read about in my guidebook. A girl named Lena brought me here. It is a quiet place where I suppose I’ll learn to meditate and maybe learn something about Buddhism.” Carol wrote about three pages, describing the train ride, the landscape, and Godwin. She went back to the beginning of the letter and wrote, “Dear Mom, I’ve arrived and all is well.” She signed the bottom, “Love you. Miss you. Carol.”

  OVER THE FIRST several weeks, Carol loved the routine of her new home. Being at the meditation center felt like being in school, and the discipline suited her. She woke at 5 a.m. to drink a cup of tea before the one-hour sunrise meditation. Then there was a morning yoga class whose instructors rotated weekly. Working meditation brought her to the garden for weeding, or to the kitchen for chopping vegetables, or to the well for cleaning. Occasionally she would hike or take a bus to purchase supplies at the market in town. After lunch, she usually read in the library or took walks in the surrounding woods. Once, at the end of her second month, she had stumbled into Paul and Lena. They were sitting on a boulder; she was stroking his hair and he was looking bored. When he saw Carol approaching, he shrugged Lena’s hand away. She nudged him in the gut and giggled something into his ear before raising her hand in greeting. “Hey, roomie, what’s up?”

  Carol spoke for the first time that day. Her voice sounded hoarse and crackled in her throat. “Just taking a walk.”

  “Paul and I were trying to find a little privacy.”

  Carol blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “You didn’t interrupt anything,” Paul said with a wink. “Sit with us awhile.” Lena’s face flashed annoyance before she patted the rock.

  Carol felt her blush deepen. She looked up the path. “I think I’ll keep walking for a bit. Thanks.” They exchanged quick good-byes and Carol climbed away from them, taking large steps over boulders and tree branches. She wondered if it had been obvious to Paul and Lena that she had been blushing. Paul winks at everyone, she thought. It doesn’t mean anything.

  AFTERNOON MEDITATIONS WERE long and uncomfortable. Carol tried to concentrate on her breathing, the way her breath pushed out of her nose, the way her shoulders, chest, and stomach would rise and fall. But she was often distracted by the pain in her lower back, by the numbness in her crossed legs. When she felt her body aching, she couldn’t keep her mind clear. She thought about her mother. In her first two letters, her mother had written that Carol was being selfish, staying away so long, wasting her talents and her mind. “Just because you’re afraid doesn’t give you the right to run away. We’d all like to run away from time to time, but we stay, or if we do go, we come back. We go to work. We raise families. You could go back to school. You could be a teacher. You could still find a man to marry. What are you doing, Carol?” She had signed the letter “Mom,” not “Love, Mom,” and with that one word missing, Carol felt the weight of her mother’s anger and disappointment. Carol wanted to write back, I left because I was afraid to stay there, the way I was living. But instead she stopped writing to her mother. Her last postcard was a short scribble: “I may not write for a while, but I don’t want you to worry about me. If anything were to happen, my friend Lena knows how to contact you.”

  Carol often thought about Lena. She envied Lena for her optimism and generosity. Even when Paul was ignoring her or criticizing her lack of discipline, Lena just tugged at her hair and shrugged it all off. She admired Lena’s lack of a plan, her uneven fingernails bitten down like a child’s, and how she carried herself so lightly. In yoga class, Lena’s joints bent in all the right ways—there was no struggle in her body.

  Her own body, Carol noticed, was changing. She was eating much less, and after three months, the earlier rumblings in her stomach had subsided. She began to enjoy the sparseness of her diet. Rice and curry once a day spread out over a large plate. She ate with her hands, and her fingers always seemed to smell of cardamom and chilies, garlic and ginger. Her stomach had flattened out, and when she rested her hands on her hips, she felt the smoothness of her skin pulled taut over bone. Her skin had darkened, and as she held the ends of her hair in her fingers, she was surprised how it had lightened to a reddish brown. She hadn’t looked in a mirror in over six months, but she guessed that she looked healthy and less sullen. In brief spasms of vanity, she imagined men gazing at her. In her daydreaming, she pictured herself at a beach in the south, walking out of the sea in a bathing suit, her hair wet and dangling down her back. She imagined kissing one of these imaginary men, feeling his hands on her face, on her neck, traveling down her arms, holding her around her waist. Falling in love again. Moving out of her loneliness and toward another person, but this time with the certainty of her own desires attached. She didn’t want to admit that her imagination often reflected her mother’s own wishes for her.

  Back in the meditation room, Carol’s eyes snapped open. She saw Godwin across the room, and some of the visiting monks, and she saw Paul. She glanced at his long fingers placed lightly on his lap and wondered what his rough palms would feel like against her skin. She pressed her palms against her eyes, pushing against the daydreams with long breaths out her nose and silent counting that echoed in her head until her mind was a whirl of colors floating, colors in empty space.

  AFTER CAROL HAD been at the center for six months, Godwin invited her for tea. The invitation had surprised her—she usually met with him only for her ten-minute sessions on Sunday mornings. But it was Thursday, and having tea sounded as if it would take longer than ten minutes. Normally, conversations with Godwin seemed a bit impersonal. He met with at least twenty boarders each Sunday and the interviews were slightly routine. “How is your journey going? What have you been studying? Do you have any questions for me?” To everything, he seemed to reply, “Good, good.” At first, this had been enough for Carol. It was nice having someone listen to her. But lately she had felt restless, tired of the same questions. The previous week, Godwin had sensed her impatience. “You keep tapping your fingers against your legs.”

  Carol stopped tapping.

  “It’s not a bad thing. Just something to notice.”

  On this Thursday, Carol put on her favorite skirt—a purple wrap skirt newly purchased from town—and a clean white blouse. She braided her hair and neatly wrapped it into a bun. She wished she had a mirror.

  When she arrived at Godwin’s cabin, she was at first surprised, then disappointed, then angry to see six boarders already sitting in a circle, sipping tea. Godwin was laughing and gestured toward a cushion for Carol to sit on. Lena was there, and next to her, Pau
l. In greeting, Lena waved and Paul winked. “Wondered when you’d get here,” Lena said.

  “I didn’t know we were all invited.”

  “I left you a note on your desk. Didn’t you see it?”

  Carol shook her head. There hadn’t been anything left on her desk, she was sure of it. She would have noticed it when she left their room.

  Godwin began, “Now that you’re all here, I’ll begin by letting you know why I asked you to come today. You are all long-term boarders, students, and I wanted to prepare you for my upcoming departure in two weeks.” He explained that it was temporary—a pilgrimage to the south, a visit to his home village, and then travels to Australia. He would be gone for four months.

  When Godwin introduced a tall, angular monk with tiny hands from Dharmshala who would be acting in his place, Carol felt her mind wandering. She thought about what the word “traveling” had meant to her, how she had first used it to explain her plans to her mother. “I’m going to travel through the south, around the old Portuguese ports, and then to the holy villages in the central north, Sigiriya and Dambulla.” At the time, Carol had thought of travel as movement, as distance covered, as independence and exploration; now she was suddenly aware of how little moving she had done. Besides the occasional trip to Kandy Town, she had stayed in one place these entire eight months. When she pictured Anuradhapura or Galle, the images were stolen from a guidebook. She had planned to go to all these places, but every time she imagined packing her bags, she felt a rising panic. I’m just not ready, she told herself. There’s still plenty of time. She was comforted by the consistency of the long termers. Lena was here. So was Paul. Most of the monks stayed several months. Godwin was here. There had been no need to move on just yet.

  But Godwin was going now and Carol felt unsettled. After the meeting, she wandered from the cabin, dazed and exhausted. Though the sun had started to set, she began to walk along the summit path. She wasn’t sad exactly, but she wanted to cry, to feel something. Instead she sensed a vague blankness as she lay down in the middle of the path and felt the evening darken around her. She heard footsteps but kept her eyes closed.

  “Carol?” Paul stood above her.

  She opened her eyes.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded and glanced at his hands, dangling above her head.

  He bent down at her feet. Carol held his gaze until he looked down and slipped her feet from her sandals. She watched him take off his shirt and place her feet against his shoulders. He took her right foot into his hands and rubbed his thumbs against her heels and toes. His hands were softer than she remembered, and when he brought her foot toward his lips, she watched him kiss the arch of her foot, tongue tracing a path from her heel to her toes, the breeze cooling the place where his tongue had been. Carol shivered when he returned her feet to the ground. He slowly moved over her, and Carol liked the weight of him. When he kissed her, she kissed him back.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Carol walked to town. Usually she hated the bustle of the rickshaws and shouting merchants, but this morning she sat on a bench and watched the motion around her. She ate chickpeas fried with coconut and chilies and enjoyed the gentle burning sensation left on her lips and tongue. She walked to her favorite tea stall and asked for a chai and a jar of mango preserves to take back up the mountain. Her favorite merchant smiled at her.

  “Madam Carol, we have peanut butter today.”

  “Great. I’ll have two jars.” Carol sipped her tea. “You look happy today, Saman.”

  “My daughter is getting married. We are going to Nuwara Eliya to celebrate. I have hired some musicians and two white horses to lead the procession.” Saman stuffed the jars into a bag decorated with a Barnes and Noble label.

  “That sounds wonderful.” Carol scrutinized the bag. She wondered how a Barnes and Noble bag could make its way up to Sri Lanka’s hill country. For a moment it made her think of books, of her old life in the stacks of libraries.

  “You should come, madam. Nuwara Eliya is a beautiful village. There are many old colonial hotels and lots of grass. The air is cooler and you can smell tea in the air around you. The fighting, too, has settled down and everyone is saying what a good time for travel it is.”

  Carol paused at the reference to the civil war and realized how removed everything seemed up at the site. “Thank you so much for the invitation, Saman, but I can’t go this week. Maybe another time. It really does sound beautiful.”

  “Yes, madam.” Saman handed the bag to Carol. “Kandy is a nice town—it is my home. But there is a great deal more of Sri Lanka to see.”

  Carol nodded and quickly walked away from town. She felt that Saman had been scolding her even though his tone had been friendly. She would go visit these other places. Soon, she promised herself.

  Back at the mountain, Carol sat in her room. She now had four jars of peanut butter on the shelf next to her mother’s unopened letters. She had given all her pens to Lena, who, each evening as their candles burned down, wrote frantically in her journal. Outside their room, Carol heard shuffling footsteps. She pictured the boarders with their “In Silence” pins attached to their shirts and wondered how it would feel to never hear any external sounds from your body except for the sound of your feet walking, going nowhere. She imagined what if would feel like to forget what your voice sounded like. In the solitude of her room, Carol began muttering noises. Not words exactly, just urgent reminders of the timbre of her voice, the feel of it in her throat.

  Later, Carol ran into Paul as she was walking from the garden. Her hands were dirty from weeding and her hair was falling around her face. He looked nervous and serious in a fake kind of way, his forehead wrinkled, his fingers tugging at his beard. He put his hand down heavily on Carol’s shoulder and squeezed it.

  “What?” she asked.

  Paul seemed startled by her question and dropped his hand to his side. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

  The question annoyed Carol. “You keep asking me that.”

  “Yesterday, you seemed sad.”

  “I’m not sad.”

  Paul tugged at his beard. “And you went to town this morning. I thought maybe . . .”

  “I went to buy peanut butter.”

  Paul nodded, but he looked distracted. “Lena wants to go to the coast, to Galle maybe or Unawatuna. I didn’t want you to think we were going because . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, Paul.” Carol was momentarily surprised to discover that she believed what she was saying. She had expected to feel sadness or panic, but Paul had suddenly looked very much like a child, head bent, hands curled up at his sides. Guilty. Carol felt like laughing. There was something funny about a tall man trying to look small and apologetic. She thought to herself, I very much want him to go, and the thought pleased her. “I’m thinking I might go to Nuwara Eliya soon,” she said.

  “That’s good, Carol.” Paul looked relieved, and again she felt a laugh developing. It seemed strange that the only two things people seemed to say to her were “Are you okay?” and “Good, good.” And now she did laugh—a buoyant laugh that was the loudest sound she had made in months. This will make a good anecdote one day, she thought to herself, when I find someone to tell it to. Her mother would find it amusing. She was already starting to save the details—Paul’s slumped frame, the extra jars of peanut butter—putting a shape to it with humor that would resonate in her voice.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Carol watched Lena pack, occasionally handing her a folded skirt or a book. Lena crumpled and balled the folded clothes into her backpack, undoing the work Carol had done. “I wish you’d come with us,” Lena said with her back turned. There was a tightness to her voice, and her movements were quick and impatient, like Carol’s mother’s had been when they argued. Carol wanted to put her hand on Lena’s arm to slow her down. She wanted to thank Lena for introducing herself that day in Colombo, for buying those tickets and bringing her here. Instead she passed Lena her purple wrap skirt. Lena looked at the skir
t and turned around. “This is yours.”

  “You can have it.”

  Lena gazed at the skirt in her hands, rubbed some dirt off the fabric. She brought it up to her nose and breathed in the smell of it. She looked up at Carol and dropped it into her bag. “Think you can spare a jar of peanut butter for our trip?” She smiled at Carol and slumped onto the bed. “I’m so ready to put on a bathing suit and drink some coconut juice. Get away from these mosquitoes.”

  Carol handed her a jar from the shelf. She helped Lena stack her bags against the door. In between these gestures, Carol understood that somewhere in the missing spaces of their conversation, there had been an apology, and forgiveness.

  After Lena and Paul left, Carol moved her things into a single room. Over the following weeks, Carol often looked at the pile of letters stacked on her shelf. The envelopes were flimsy and damp from the humidity. Carol had caught a couple of lines written in the smoothness of her mother’s hand: “It’s almost a year now since you’ve gone, and I miss you even though I’m still angry.” In these months of silence, Carol had often conjured up her mother’s voice criticizing Carol’s selfishness, the wasting of her talents, her stubbornness. But lately she had also begun to hear the layers of meaning beneath these words. There was worry—Carol would wind up alone, sullen, closed off after divorce. As she was, despite her fiercest efforts. And regret—her mother had always boasted of Carol’s scholarships and fellowships, held Carol’s academic success in a kind of awe. And a guilt associated with a daughter’s inheriting her mother’s own fear of abandonment. Where her mother had escaped her sadness through assertive busyness, Carol had chosen self-imposed exile.

  Carol looked around her sparse room and thought maybe she’d borrow a pen. She could start a letter. It would be easy. She would write, Dear Mom, I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long. I’m fine. The hills outside Kandy are beautiful and the winds are cool, but I’m thinking about moving on to the highlands or to the sea. The letter could begin something like that, and then she’d write some more and see where she wanted to go from there.