The Lightness

by Emily Temple

  Finally, I saw the battered matchbox, sitting next to the telephone. (What had my mother been doing? Talking to creditors, lighting them up one by one?) I stood in the middle of the kitchen, opened the box, and lit a match. I was for a moment transfixed by the fire, the way it ate the stem so purposefully, and as a reward I let it burn me a little. Then I shook the match and dropped it onto the tiles. I lit another. This one gave a little flare of green. I could hold it to anything—the roll of paper towels, the hanging apron, the curtains—and it would be over. I would walk out the door. She would not hit me again.

  I cannot be the only woman who fantasizes, sometimes, about spinning the wheel, driving her car off a cliff. It seems impossible to do, and therefore I long to do it. If only to make a hole in the preordained. If only to do something other than follow along, bumper to bumper, a dutiful mirror, for once in my life. If only to destroy something, even if it is myself.

  I say this, but I can’t even take a leap into the goddamn ocean.

  I imagined what it would be like, to stand across the street and watch my house burn down. The house where my parents had fought. The house where my mother had hit me in the face with all her strength. The house with the empty room in the attic. The house with the empty hole in the wall. The house where my father had read to me, book after book, as I curled against his warm shoulder. The house my father had decided to leave. I imagined the whole thing burning at once, as even and bright as a match head. I imagined the fireman approaching me, asking if there was anyone inside.

  “Yes,” I would say, closing my eyes as the heat came off the house in waves. “Upstairs, on the left.” I wouldn’t give him the key, but it wouldn’t matter, he’d have an ax. I wouldn’t be the one to kill her, not me. If it happened it would be the blaze (an accident), the inexperience of the fireman (budget cuts), the slow traffic between the new fire station and the old house on fire (can’t be helped). If it happened, it wouldn’t be because of me, the bereaved, the new orphan standing on the curb, shiny and sore as a burn. But it wouldn’t happen anyway. They would save her. Probably, I mean.

  I blew out the match and dropped it to the floor. I put the matchbox back into the drawer where it belonged. I reasoned with myself that if my father came home, which he could still do, at any time, despite everything, I didn’t want him to return to a hole in the ground. I didn’t want him to be angry with me.

  Before you ask: I don’t know if I could have done it. I do know that I wanted to punish her. I wanted her to know what it was like to have something she loved taken away. (As if she didn’t know—but I wasn’t thinking about that, not then. You can’t expect so much from me.)

  I went out to the garage. Inside, the Fatties were waiting. I had the distinct sense that they were judging me—not for lighting the match, but for letting it burn out and take nothing with it. They leered at me. They whispered among themselves. Their clay eyes were rimmed with pity. Furious, I began to destroy them. All of my mother’s work. Some were hard and dry, and I beat at them with my mother’s sledgehammer. Many were still soft, and I twisted their limbs, massaged their shoulders onto the floor in clumps. I smashed and tore and clawed and cut until I was standing in a room full of clay mounds and dust with a group of rebar skeletons, some of them knocked prone, but most still standing, bare and scraping as winter trees. The Fatties had thin dead women inside of them the whole time. Well, it figured.

  I spared Beth. I am sentimental in that way.

  In the morning, my arms were sore and I was ashamed. I went downstairs and made coffee, the way my mother and I liked it, much too strong for my father. I cleaned up a little, picked the spent matches from the floor and sent them down the garbage disposal. But when I finally approached the closet door, key in hand, I couldn’t hear her inside.

  “Mom?” I tried. Nothing. I turned the key and opened the door. The closet was clean and organized. Nothing was on the floor. My mother’s shoes were in their boxes. The overhead bulb burned. I couldn’t see her. I felt a stab of panic. Had she been transported or simply transformed? Had she deserved punishment or escape?

  “Hello?” I said.

  And there she was, coming from behind the coats, as though being birthed whole and enormous from folds of wool and fur.

  “What have you done?” she asked, stepping out into the light. She had changed her clothes, but her face was drawn and tired. I was sure she already knew. She could sense that the Fatties had been murdered. Now I realize that, like the fire, their destruction was something she might have done herself. That’s how she knew I had done it.

  I said nothing.

  “Why do you want to hurt me?” she said.

  I thought, How can I possibly hurt you when you have all the power?

  She ran her hands through her hair and winced. “I may have a concussion,” she said.

  As she pushed past me, I thought: She would have done it right; she would have lit the draperies. As her favorite author once wrote: Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.

  Two weeks later, I packed a bag and left. I signed up for the program at the Center online, with the copy of her credit card she’d given me for emergencies. I bought a plane ticket with it too. I used it to pay the cabdriver. She said nothing. She said nothing at all to me for two weeks, and then I was gone. You see I had to go. You see I had to find him. It wasn’t her fault; it was mine.

  Love can’t be owed, you know, no matter the chain of reincarnations. Not to a parent. Not to a child, even. People are wrong about that.

  “What are you doing here?” Serena said. She was slightly blurred from sleep. I said nothing, suddenly unsure of myself. Standing in the kitchen, holding the match. I wasn’t used to seeing her look so flammable.

  “Come in, I guess,” she said. I followed her into her tent, and she curled up on her bed, tucking her feet underneath a blanket for warmth. Half-asleep, with no chance to plan or organize, she was briefly identifiable as that sad girl whose mother was dead, who slept in a milk barrel. She didn’t look capable of hurting anyone that night, only of being hurt, of being left. It made me want to leave, seeing her that way. No: it made me want to caress and destroy her at once, like that pretty fish, like my own mother.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  15

  It may not shock you to learn that in the years between that summer and this one, I’ve come to be suspicious of American practitioners of Eastern philosophies. There’s something so rapacious about them: all those blond ladies sitting on cushions in their work slacks, the round-faced, dirty-haired college sophomores with their elastic mala bead bracelets—or else with spectacles and sweaters, high-chair philosophers spouting the Glass family values—the sweaty middle-aged men with framed pictures of their dead cats in their pockets, looking for Inner Peace. All that performative kindness. All that practiced calm. I’m sounding like my mother, I know. I know, I know, I know. But I don’t mean that there are no American practitioners who are truly engaged in the concepts. There are. Of course there are. I only mean that I’ve seen a pattern. Upper-middle-class white people, looking for meaning. Looking to hook themselves to someone else’s old magic. (fig.1: the booming yoga pant industry. fig. 2: the glut of mindfulness apps.) Even Buddhism’s emergence in this country, primarily via the Beats, leaves something to be desired. Sure, Ginsberg was on the level, despite being probably a pedophile, and Snyder was a true believer—that beautiful man, still in the woods somewhere, because sometimes the good do grow old—but Kerouac, most famous of them all (typing), was a terrible Buddhist. He couldn’t even sit for meditation because he had knee problems, and on his deathbed, scared as hell of hell, he renounced his heretic Eastern practice and converted back to Catholicism. Like, as Serena put it once, a fucking punk.

  I sat with Janet and Laurel the next morning at breakfast. Laurel ignored me, but Janet began telling us how Sarah had asked her to come back to the Center as part of a Kyūdō exhibition that winter, how she was trying to figure
out a way to scrape the money together, how she was the only one to be asked. I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I swirled my spoon around and around in my oatmeal. “What’s the matter?” Janet asked me. What’s the matter, what’s the matter with you?

  What’s the matter? we ask. Nothing, we answer. It’s a strange question, forward or backward. What’s the matter? Nothing is the matter. No thing is matter. There is no matter here. Only emptiness.

  matter (n.) from the Latin mater “origin, source, mother,” or possibly from the same root as the Latin domus, “house”; see also: no one ever leaves the house where they were born. See also: my mother believed in nothing.

  That afternoon, I went to the garden. Luke was watering the plants, his shirt tied around his head. He had his back to me, and with his head covered like that, he could have been almost anyone. Anyone with blue cloth hair, any kind of magical cartoon space prince.

  But then he turned, his face snapping into place. “There she is,” he said. He untied the shirt from his head and dropped it over his body. The patchy sweat marks made it look like it was patterned with large flowers.

  I came around to the door and he went back to his work. He was putting in three plants with wide, oval leaves. I stood behind him.

  “What is the traditional view of sex?” I asked.

  He didn’t look up, or miss a beat. “How traditional are we talking?” he said.

  “The traditional Buddhist view.”

  He thrust his spade into the ground and sat back on his heels. “It depends on how you look at it,” he said. “The earliest texts are not very permissive, I’m afraid. A number of the more explicit ones were written by monks, and you know what they’re like. Shantideva is very crotchety on the subject. The body is a bag of filth, and all that. Serena loves him.” Finally, he turned and squinted up at me. “On the other hand—do you know the Tibetan concept of Yab-Yum? You’ve seen the copulating iconography, I expect. Those are meant to represent the divine union of feminine and masculine, of wisdom and skillful means, and to offer a path toward transcending our sense of duality.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He laughed and stood, brushing the dirt off his knees. “I think the answer to your actual question is this: Western Buddhists are fairly open when it comes to carnality. The teacher who was most influential in bringing Buddhism to the West was—well, he enjoyed sex, let’s put it that way.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I enjoy sex too,” he said lightly. “Most people do. The body is not something to be afraid of. It’s only a tool.” He reached out and rested his hand lightly on top of my head.

  “I saw you and Janet together,” I said.

  He pulled his hand away, as if burned. “Ah,” he said.

  “And I will tell,” I said, though I had already told the only person I had any intention of telling. “I’ll tell Shastri Dominique. I’ll tell the police. You’ll be locked up. It’s disgusting.”

  “Is it?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He tilted his head. “Why?”

  I had a thousand answers for this and no answers at all.

  “You were supposed to be good,” I said instead. I sat down on the far end of the bench.

  “I don’t suppose you want to hear how good is an illusory construct, empty of actual meaning,” he said. “Though maybe you should. I could bring you some literature.” I almost laughed, thinking of my father holding out the book. But then Luke stood and came to sit beside me, so close I could feel the hard electricity between our hips, our shoulders.

  “Besides,” he said. “I am good. You know I’m good, don’t you?” He moved the hair off my face, and then reached down to pull it away from my neck too, grazing my skin with his fingertips. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said, softening his tone. “But there’s something about her. She’s so tough, it really breaks your heart.”

  “What about Serena?” I said.

  “Serena and I have known each other for a long time,” he said.

  “Since she was a little girl,” I said.

  “Serena was never a little girl,” he said.

  “Yes, she was.”

  He bit his lip, exquisite. “None of the girls I’ve met here are exactly normal,” he said. “It’s a special place.”

  “Do you love her?” I asked. I couldn’t move. I wished he would either kiss me or burst into flames.

  “Look,” he said. “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I know you are,” Luke said. He pulled on my earlobe and then traced his fingers down until he was pointing at my heart. “So you can’t understand, not really. You want, but the want is undefined. It doesn’t know itself.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I said.

  “Death comes without warning,” Luke said. “This body will be a corpse.” He nestled his large hand between my legs and pressed, hard, and I was shot through, and I’m ashamed to tell you that after everything, this, this was the closest I would ever in my life come to flight.

  When my mother wanted to hurt my father, she’d bring up the sins of his teachers: the alcoholism, the drug use, the manipulation, the sleeping with students. The Buddhist leader who knew for years he was HIV-positive but continued to have unsafe sex with his students, men and women both, including at least one straight man who resisted his advances but was overcome, held down; including at least one who later died from AIDS. The Buddhist leader who trapped women at parties, forced himself into their mouths, who told them this was the only way toward the illumination they sought, who reminded them of the vow they’d taken, to believe in the absolute purity of the teacher, no matter what. Because yes, even in Buddhism, there has been scandal. There has been abuse. That old slog: men with power. Every community has some bad apples, my mother said, but these are the men who are leading by example. How can the reins not rot in their hands? How can you still follow them?

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father would say.

  “Is what I’m saying not true?” my mother would say.

  “You don’t understand it,” my father would say.

  And this, this, the way he held the line no matter what—this is what disturbs me most now. I suppose it’s possible he was right, that my mother really didn’t understand, that there was some absolving circumstance that my father knew but couldn’t discuss, something that changed his perception of the truth, or even changed the truth itself. That old-world mysticism runs deep, even in contemporary Buddhist traditions. The tantras and sutras are complex and contradictory, and of course there are advanced teachings, secrets that students are strictly forbidden to share with anyone, especially their angry wives.

  “It’s complicated,” my father would say. “I can’t explain.”

  “Alcoholism is alcoholism,” my mother would say. “Rape is rape. Bullshit is bullshit.”

  In these moments I always felt the desire to protect him. My mother had always been a bully. She didn’t understand when to let things go. She didn’t understand that my father was inherently good and therefore deserved the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t realize the alternatives. But she did, of course. I see now that she realized everything. She was only demanding that he look at the facts, that he account for himself, and face his own ego, his own belief, without self-deception. (A Buddhist goal indeed.) When she spoke, everything my father loved seemed to be made of glass. I didn’t want it to break in his hands. But then, if it was so breakable to begin with, maybe it should have.

  Here is what I have come to believe: in the end, religion has done more harm than good. For one thing, there’s war, ethnic cleansing, genital mutilation, abused altar boys, the systematic oppression of women—the foundational text of Christianity locates women as the source of all evil, do not forget this when interacting with the faithful—as well as anyone who doesn’t fit into its narrow moral straitjacket. Hierarchy breeds corruption. Pa
triarchy cultivates debasement. Believing in something—anything—so blindly is corrosive. You follow a recipe instead of inventing your own world. There are certain corners you can’t see into. My mother used to say that raising your son or daughter to believe in God is child abuse. I have repeated this often, to shocked looks, even from my secular friends. I’m sorry: I believe it. Religious belief may be a pleasant distortion, a comfort, for a while, but too much, unexamined, for too long and it eats away at your body, turns you stupid, kills you. Serena was right: the effect is not dissimilar to alcohol.

  Is that what happened to my father, in the end? Was he simply obliterated by all his believing? I think it is what happened to me.

  The last time I saw my father, he kissed the palm of his own hand and held it up to me. I didn’t know what to do. Was I meant to mirror the gesture? Kiss his hand? High-five him? Press his hand to my face? It didn’t matter. There was no time. He was already in the car.

  If even now, after so many pages, you have no mental image of him, no solid grasp of his personality or his form, I will say this: exactly. There is no tree; there is no forest. My mother knew: there’s a hole in the bottom. How can you binge on emptiness?

  You may be asking: why have you been working so hard—all these weeks, all these years, all these pages—to sew yourself to a stranger?

  I have no good answer for you.

  That night, I heard Laurel’s breaths become deep and regular. I heard Harriet toss and toss and eventually start to snore. Then I heard Janet get up. She climbed quietly down the little ladder, but she didn’t immediately sneak out into the night. Instead she knelt by Laurel’s bed and kissed her on the forehead. Laurel moved a little, and Janet straightened. She seemed to waver for a moment before she turned and crept through the door of the dormitory.