by Ann Patchett
Teresa looked at all the people walking past her table at the airport coffee shop and wondered how many of them were starting their honeymoons and how many of them were in love and how many of them would not be in love later on. The truth was she had more or less forgotten about Bert. It took a long time but it was a fact that now entire years would pass when she failed to ask the children how their father was because she simply didn’t think of him. She had lived long enough that Bert and all the love and rage he had engendered were gone. Cal was still with her, Jim Chen was there, but Bert, alive and well in Virginia, was gone.
Revived by the coffee and the rest, Teresa stuffed her feet painfully back in her shoes and beat a slow path to her gate. Maybe she would stay in Switzerland forever, maybe she would become a Buddhist. She couldn’t imagine doing this again.
Holly had neglected to go into the tiny room that had once been a broom closet beneath the kitchen stairs to check the computer for the status of her mother’s flight from Paris. It was only now that she was at the airport in Lucerne standing in front of the arrival board that she could see the plane was three hours late. True, she didn’t have occasion to go to the airport very often, but what kind of an idiot forgets to check the time before making an hour-long drive? Because it was a rule that whoever took the car also had to take the phone, she was able to send a text to Mikhail and explain the situation. She knew he wouldn’t care. He told her they didn’t need the car but still, she felt like she was inconveniencing the community by keeping it for so long. Assuming that the time now listed was in fact correct, they would not be returning until after two o’clock. She had told her mother to take the train from Paris. No one flew from Paris to Lucerne. The train was a snap. But her mother had despaired at the thought of taking a train from the airport to the Gare de Lyon and then finding the train to Lucerne. And maybe it would have been impossible, with the jet lag and the luggage. Holly could have taken the train up and met her in Paris but she never suggested that. She didn’t want to be away that long.
Holly had completed her morning kitchen work early, washing and peeling ten pounds of potatoes, cutting them into chunks, and leaving them covered in cold salted water while at every moment striving to remain present in her task. She had gone to the guest-room where her mother would be sleeping to make sure there were towels and a washcloth beside the basin and a bottle of water and a glass beside the bed. She excused herself from morning meditation early, stepping around the cushions of others as quietly as possible to leave for the airport, though of course now she realized she hadn’t had to do that at all. She could have stayed. Her sense of irritation with herself was so ridiculously disproportionate to the event that she had to wonder if the problem wasn’t really that she didn’t want her mother to visit. While she understood the importance of letting all thoughts rise without judgment, to see them and to let them go, she decided it would probably be best just to squelch this one.
Holly bought a Toblerone bar at the news kiosk and then looked around the waiting area for discarded newspapers, as chocolate and news were the two things her life was lacking. And sex. Sex was lacking but she had enough sense not to look for that in the airport. She found copies of Le Matin, Blick (but she didn’t do so well reading German) and, wonder of wonders, a complete Tuesday edition of the New York Times. Suddenly she was soothed. The idea of spending three hours in the airport with three newspapers and Toblerone was nothing short of a miracle. She peeled back the tinfoil and broke off a piece of candy, resting it on her tongue to melt before she read the science section of the Times: Tasmanian devils were dying of oral cancer; there was reason to think it might be better to run without running shoes; and children living in poverty in the inner cities were as likely to suffer from asthma as children in war zones. She tried to figure out what she was supposed to do with the information. How could she save the devils, get them to stop biting one another, which appeared to be how the cancer was spread, and why was she worrying about a small, vicious marsupial in Tasmania and feeling next to nothing about the asthmatic children? Why had she read the entire article about running when she wasn’t a runner but skipped the piece about geothermal energy? Exactly how shallow had she become? She folded the paper in her lap and sat with the information for a moment. She thought that she should leave Zen-Dojo Tozan more often, or maybe leave it altogether, and she thought that she should never leave it under any circumstances, like Siobhán, whom Holly had never seen go farther than the mailbox at the end of the driveway.
When Holly remembered her life in California, she remembered seeing everything in terms of who had less than she did and who had more, who was prettier, smarter, who had a better relationship (everyone, usually), who was getting promoted faster, because as much as they had praised her at the bank there seemed to be people they preferred. She was constantly trying to figure out how to do it better, how to get it right, and in doing so she had started to grind her teeth at night. She had chewed a soft crater on the inside of her left cheek, and was picking at the cuticles of her thumbs until they bled. She made an appointment with an internist, told him her problems, and then showed him the inside of her mouth. He peered around her tongue and teeth with a penlight, looked at her hands, and then suggested meditation. Or that’s what she thought he had said, “You’re going to need meditation.”
The instant she heard the word she felt her heart surge, as if her heart had been waiting for this exact moment. Finally! her heart said to her. At last! “Where can I learn to meditate?” she asked. Just the word in her mouth brought forth joy.
The doctor looked at her as if wondering how crazy she might actually be. “Med-i-ca-tion,” he said again, slower and louder this time. “You’ll need medication for your anxiety. I’m going to write you a prescription for Ativan. We’ll work with the dosage. We’ll have to figure out what’s right for you.”
But Holly dropped the white slip of paper in the trash can after giving the receptionist a twenty for her co-pay. However unwittingly, the doctor had told her how she would be cured. She didn’t even understand exactly what meditation entailed at that point but she knew she was going to find out. She read a couple of books, listened to some dharma talks on cassette tapes in her car, and then found a group that sat on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. She started a sitting practice at home, getting up early before she went to the bank in the morning. Six months later some people from the Wednesday group invited her along for a weekend retreat. Later, she sat in silence for a week at a spirituality center just north of Berkeley. It was there she saw a notice on the corkboard about Zen-Dojo Tozan. She felt the same acceleration in her heart that she had felt when she first misunderstood her doctor. There I am, she thought, looking at the picture of the chalet balanced on a soft sweep of mountain flowers. She pulled the push-pin from the brochure and let it drop into her hand.
Things like this happened to Holly. At times she had a sense of being guided, and when she did she attributed it to Cal.
For years after Cal died, Holly was rocked with regret that they hadn’t been closer (and there was regret about other things as well). But since coming to Switzerland, she’d started to see that for a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl in a stressful living situation they’d done pretty well. They yelled at one another but carried no grudges. They shoved but never slapped or pinched. They threw couch pillows at one another, not dishes. Holly corrected Cal’s homework without condescension, and Cal, in the shining memory of her childhood, had once yanked two girls off of her in the hallway at school, one by her ponytail and the other by her shirt collar, as they were attempting to stuff Holly into her locker. “You bitches get off my sister,” he had said as the bitches stumbled backwards and then ran down the hall in tears. He had hurt them, scared them senseless. Holly, who made it her business to look after everyone else, was for that one golden moment protected. By her brother.
As the two oldest children, Holly and Cal worked together to look after Albie and
Jeanette, keeping them away from the stove and the knives when they were younger. And they looked after their mother too, maybe not in tandem, but they made an effort to lighten her load, to keep things from her whenever possible. The more Holly felt Cal’s presence in her life now, the more she knew he cared for her, that he forgave her. The better job she did at keeping her life quiet, her eyes open to the simple beauty that surrounded her, the better she was able to hear him. She didn’t hear him in any nutty way, they didn’t sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn’t avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn’t be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot. It had been almost impossible to hear her brother when she was at Berkeley, at the Sumitomo Bank, or anywhere in Los Angeles, but in Switzerland, this place where he had never been, well, it was better.
Holly went back to her newspapers. She read about Broadway plays. She read a book review and an op-ed about flooding in Iowa. She read about the plight of women in Afghanistan. She finished half of her chocolate and put the other half in her purse for later. Seeing the time, she got up and went to stand with the families and the drivers holding hand-lettered signs. When she saw Teresa walking towards her—so tiny! so much older! how long had it been now? ten years? more than that?—she was flooded with love, such a huge wave, both her love and her brother’s. She held out her arms. “Oh, Mom,” Holly said.
Where to begin with the marvels? First of course was Holly, who, with her cropped black hair touched in gray and her Birkenstocks and wooly socks, was radiant. All those people packed together on the other side of security, all those people making a single, indistinguishable mass, and then, bam! Holly. She was something else entirely, no one could have missed her. When Teresa fell into her embrace it was as if they had never been parted. She had such an overwhelming memory of the nurse coming into her room the morning Holly was born, laying that perfect baby in her arms, the baby who was now this beautiful woman. Teresa kissed her neck, pressed her cheek to her daughter’s sternum. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” she said, not knowing if she meant the three hour delay or all the years it had taken her to get there.
“I had a nice time,” Holly said, running her hand across her mother’s head. She took the carry-on and her purse, slung them over her shoulder like they were nothing, like she could have just as easily slung Teresa over her shoulder too. She walked her straight to the restroom without asking if she had to go, and she did. This was the person Holly had always been: in charge, making decisions, being helpful without being asked. When Teresa pointed out her luggage at the baggage claim, Holly scooped it up and laughed.
“You pack like a Californian!” she said, thrilled by such a small thing. “I do, too.”
“How do Californians pack?” Teresa was laughing without getting the joke, her smile so wide she felt certain she was showing teeth that had not been seen in years.
Holly held up her mother’s black wheelie-bag. It was small and discreet, a footnote to all the giant bright-pink hard-sides reinforced with bungee-cords that circled before them. “Europeans pack like they’re never coming home. I think it has to do with the war.”
Outside the air was bright and cold despite it being the first of September. It had been ninety-six degrees when she left Los Angeles. Holly helped her on with her coat. Teresa was proud of herself for having brought the coat in the first place. At home in her living room she had put it on and then taken it off, locked the front door, gone to the taxi, gone back inside and put the coat on again. She could see the Alps in the distance from the parking lot now. She had seen them from the plane, the snow-covered peaks. Alps. She pulled the coat tighter. Who would have thought Teresa Cousins would ever see Alps?
The Zen-Dojo Tozan’s Citroën that Holly drove was more like a soup can than a car. The flimsy metal shuddered as she downshifted around the curves, the gearshift a long stick coming up from the floorboard. Back home on the 405, such a car would be crushed by the blowback from a passing SUV, but on this perilous mountain road it felt like all the other tin cans. They could bump into one another without significant harm, like people brushing past on a crowded street. No one had upped the ante in order to save themselves, built a daily tank that would obliterate the competition. They were all in this together. The guard rail that separated them from the vertiginous drop off the side of the mountain seemed similarly unprepared to save a life, but what difference did it make? They were all going to die anyway, all of them. They weren’t even at the Zen center—whatever it was called—and already Teresa felt she was getting the point. Who needed air bags? The reinforced steel-cage construction that created a barrier to the world? Teresa rolled down her window—rolled it down with a hand crank!—and breathed in the bright Swiss air.
“So beautiful,” she said. They shot into a stone tunnel cut through the side of a mountain: light then darkness then pine trees.
“Just you wait,” her daughter said.
“I have to tell you, Holly, I didn’t understand until now. I mean, I’ve been happy for you, but in the back of my mind I was always thinking, What’s wrong with Torrance?” They drove past two shaggy mountain goats on the side of the road, their curled horns looking like crowns. No doubt they were waiting for Heidi and Grandfather to herd them back into the mountains. Teresa looked over at Holly. “Why would anyone live in Torrance?”
“There’s nothing wrong with home,” Holly said, feeling so pleased to receive her mother’s affirmation. “But it’s quieter here. It’s better for me.”
“I think about Jeanette in Brooklyn with Fodé and the boys. I think she likes all the noise, her tight little space. I think that’s what holds her together. And Albie, always picking up and going someplace else, always looking for something new. That probably works for him. He’s in New Orleans now.”
“He e-mails me sometimes,” Holly said, feeling such a sudden longing for her brother and sister, wanting them all to sit together in the same room with their mother.
“That’s good.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?” Teresa said, craning around to catch another glimpse of the view that receded behind them.
“Has staying in Torrance been good for you? Was it the right choice?”
They were driving through a forest now. The trees, their lower trunks furred with moss, got thicker and taller and started to cut into the light while ferns stretched across the forest floor. There were enormous rocks, boulders really, that looked like they’d been placed by set designers around a fast-running stream. Show me an enchanted forest! the producer must have said.
“Your father wanted me to move all of us to Virginia when he left with Beverly, so we’d be close by. I didn’t even consider it, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have. It would have made things easier on you kids. I just couldn’t find it in myself to be that accommodating.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Holly said, foolishly taking her eyes off the road for a second to stare at her mother. “I never knew he said that.”
“Then after Cal died.” Teresa shrugged. “Well, you remember that. We sure weren’t moving to Virginia after Cal died, though I’ll tell you, it bothered me to have him buried there. It was just about going forward in those days, one step, one step, not falling all the way down into myself. I didn’t think about changing my life. My life had already been changed. I just had to get through it.”
“You got through it.” Holly took the car down to second. They were behind a truck, climbing and climbing.
“We all did, I guess, in our own ways. You don’t think you’re going to but then you do. You’re still alive. That was the thing that caught me in the end: I was still alive. You and
Albie and Jeanette, still alive. And we wouldn’t be forever, so I had to do something with that.”
Teresa put her hand over Holly’s hand, felt the deep rattle of the gearshift. “Listen to me talking. I never talk like this.”