It was complicated because there were two sick people in Seattle. One of them, Carole, was dying. She had a tube in her stomach that drained the fluid out. Her face had changed. It had gotten thin, so that it looked like a skull. She went in and out of consciousness. I mean, she slept and woke up. When she was awake, she was never gone, but her conversation was confused and she was emotional. The emotion that she felt most powerfully was wanting. It was so powerful and so insane when it came over her that it riled people up. It came over them.
That was my impression at the time. Later I found out that people had donated money to Carole, and my mother had spent it on us. She hadn’t done anything extravagant, but she had used it for us. She reasoned that it was less than what she’d spent taking care of Carole, and that was true. Really, it was awful what was happening to Carole. She’d gotten cancer in a three-year retreat. She had travel insurance, but they denied her claim. She didn’t know—as many people don’t—that you can’t take no for an answer in a situation like that. She accepted it, for a while, and the cancer grew. Later she had trouble taking her medications. She was prescribed a medication that broke the cancer up, but it made her feel bad. She said it was poison. So she’d take it irregularly. That let the cancer spread. Then we had a big meeting coming up—something a lot of people would go to—and Carole wanted to look good. She took some psylium husk, and it collapsed her stomach, and that was how it happened, really. She was going to die.
A lot of people came to visit Carole now that she was dying, but my mom was the one who visited the most. For this reason, and because my mother had spent her money, though I didn’t know that at the time, Carole had come to hate my mother. There was also an iPad. Rinpoche had given Carole an iPad, and Carole gave it to my mother. But the story she told people was that my mother had taken it. This is how it is when people are dying. I barely ever visited. Once, I went with a couple of other people. One person massaged Carole’s feet and said, “How do reincarnation and emptiness make sense together?”
She meant, if it is a dream, if it is empty, then why do we die and turn into dogs. I was quiet and then I said, “They are one.” I meant reincarnation and emptiness are one. The woman who’d asked was about fifty. She was a powerful, intelligent woman. She nodded. She nodded in the way you nod if someone has said something stupid. I said, “What I meant was that it is like dreaming through the night—having all different dreams.” For some reason I was shaking. I was sure my answer was correct, according to Buddhist philosophy, but more recently I learned the correct answer, which is a bit subtler.
The woman made a little more conversation. We got onto the subject of Sikkim, in India, where Rinpoche had been taken after he was recognized in Bhutan. She said in his room, on the walls, you could see scratch marks from his tantrums.
“What do you mean?” I asked, and she said, “He clawed the walls because he didn’t want to have to study. He wanted to be an ordinary boy and go play with all the others.” Later I saw a still from a film by Satyajit Ray. It was Ray’s documentary on Sikkim. He had filmed Rinpoche at four or five. In the still, Rinpoche had a long face that came to the point of his chin, and he wore a five-pointed crown. He was scowling at the camera like an old man.
Rinpoche had asked to stay with Jim in Seattle, but Jim had told him that he didn’t have room. Also, Jim said his place wasn’t right, because of the floors.
Jim was an editor. He did carpentry as a hobby. Several years earlier, he had lifted up the floors in his condo, planning to lay down hardwood, but the job was too big. And then he had gotten accustomed to concrete.
He saw himself as the senior student in the Seattle sangha. My mother hosted all the get-togethers at her apartment—when we’d meet to recite a sadhana, or have a tsok—and she had been a Buddhist as long as Jim. She didn’t ever say she saw herself as the senior student, and she didn’t ever act like she ought to be the senior student, but if anyone else tried to act senior, it offended her, and she undermined them. Jim in particular. Probably because he didn’t like her, but also because the way he chanted was affected. People who have spent a great deal of time chanting learn the sound of their own voices. This sound is always different—sometimes it is very low, and sometimes it is sweet; sometimes it is metallic and sometimes it is sharp. Sometimes it is melodic. Often old Tibetan men chant very low, from their stomachs or below even that; often Western practitioners who have really practiced a lot pick up turns here and there that are melodic. This melodic sound, in the sangha of Jim’s first guru, had become a group quality, so that the students all embellished words here and there in certain ways. Jim chanted this way. He was the only one, and so rather than sounding beautiful, it was disruptive. It sounded aggressive. I don’t think that he meant it that way, or if he did it, was so subtle only some people could hear it. But really it doesn’t matter. It was how he chanted, and he was the chant leader. The proper etiquette was to follow him. But my mother didn’t like it. She chanted her own way—very softly and very badly, often tripping over the words. She was extremely sensitive to tone. Bruce thought tone—the way he said my mother’s name—was a silent weapon. He did not understand that his inflections stayed with her for weeks: he didn’t like my mother. It was primarily because he was not attracted to her. There are other ways to say that. He didn’t like my mother because she didn’t groom herself well, and her house was dirty. He was clean. His house was clean, and he owned several blazers, and his skin always shone, but to my mother, none of this mattered. To her, he didn’t have any taste. If my mom had cleaned, which she did not, then she would have cleaned better. My mom had once had money.
* * *
My mom, me, and my mom’s friend Louise were standing in the front bedroom of my mom’s apartment; we had begun to clean for Rinpoche’s attendants. We were in my bedroom, which had an ocean view. Sea lions swam in the water. They had a funny habit of coming up four times for air and then going under again, and sometimes they barked. Twice I saw orca whales swimming through the water out front. One had a massive, ragged fin. It was so different than at Sea World in Austin. But the apartment was full of a decade of clutter.
Louise said, “It seems odd to put Rinpoche in Carole’s apartment and put his attendants here.”
My mom said, “Well, that’s what Jim said.”
“It’s kind of stupid to give him the little apartment in back and put his attendants in yours with all this space and the view.”
“Well, tell Jim that,” my mom said.
I said, “Call him and tell him. He won’t listen to us. Call him and tell him. When we say it, he won’t listen. If you say it, he’ll listen. Call him and tell him.”
I repeated myself a few times.
Louise said, “I will.”
“Because Rinpoche should be in here,” I said. I pointed at the floor, meaning that he should be in my room.
“I think your mom’s might make more sense,” Louise said. “He hates the sound of motorcycles. He likes quiet.”
“No,” I said, “this is clearly the better room.”
* * *
Louise’s call changed it, and we began to really clean. I took all the bags and baskets and boxes and unopened mail and trash bags of pills and the dharma books, and the hundreds of audiocassette recordings of dharma lectures, and put them in a pile. It took about an hour. The pile covered the entire living-room floor. You could walk around it to get to the patio, or to the couch, but it was about twelve feet in diameter. It was evening, and looking at the pile, and all the mess that remained around it, I recognized the amount of work there was to be done. I was sure it could be done, but looking at the pile, I thought, It cannot be done.
The next day, my mother bought twenty-five moving boxes. I took every single thing out of the refrigerator and out of the cabinets—every cooking utensil, every exotic spice—and we went through them. The things she wanted to keep went into boxes, which we would take to storage later. The things she would throw away went into g
arbage bags. The nicer things that she did not want we put outside, and people took them away—for example, the meat slicer. She had too many expensive culinary supplies. We went on in this way, in each room, first clearing the clutter and then beginning to clean the surfaces. When the clutter had all been thrown away or boxed up and carried down, my mother hired a carpet cleaner, and he came and shampooed the carpets. He mentioned, on leaving, that I had quite a lot of hair. I began to clean the surfaces in each room, and my mother began to go and find—with economy—the small things that were needed to fill a space. She made several trips to her office, where she “borrowed” five armchairs, two standing lights, two patio chairs, a patio table, a desk, a coffee table, and several side tables.
Then she came home crying. Jim had called her on the phone while she was out.
“What did he say?”
“He said he doesn’t know if Rinpoche can stay with us.”
“What?”
“He said he wasn’t sure about it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said you can’t turn around and change your mind. We’ve been working too hard. You can’t just up and change it.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he had to think about it.”
“Why?”
“He said, ‘The clutter! The clutter!’” She imitated Jim’s voice saying, “‘The clutter.’”
“What clutter?” I said. “We’re cleaning. Did you tell him we would clean it?”
“I told him that, and he said, ‘How?!’”
“What’s he mean, how? You take it and you throw it out, that’s how. Maybe he doesn’t know—he is so busy buying fish at Costco.”
My mother smiled.
“Remember that disgusting fish he served us? It looked like it had exploded.”
“He said he was going to return it.”
“Return a fish!”
“They do that, too, at Costco—they’ll take anything back.”
“But he couldn’t have—he’d be ashamed to bring in some exploded salmon and a receipt.”
“I’m sure he did it—brought that nasty thing in and got his twenty-five dollars. He kept saying, ‘How are you going to clean in time?’ and ‘The clutter!’”
“I don’t like that, the way he says your name.”
“He’s abusive. I’ve had the thought about him before, of just—he’s abusive. To go and change his mind like that. Yes, Rinpoche can stay with you; no, he’s staying across the hall—I’m in control and I’m the boss and you will do what I say and it will be the way I say it is.”
“Abusive.”
“It’s not physically abusive, but it’s abuse. Getting our hopes up. Look at all the work we did, and then—not even a ‘no’ but just an ‘I’m not sure’—make sure we’re still on the line, working, sucking up—it’s classic male abuse.”
* * *
Five days went by. I had torn up the shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets, taken each shelf down, washed and dried it, and then cut new shelf paper to fit. I had thrown out everything in the refrigerator and in the freezer, cleaned every shelf and surface by removing the shelves and soaking them in hot, soapy water, and then replaced them. I had moved the refrigerator and the stove to clean and wash behind them, and scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I had found a draining pan under the refrigerator full of mold, emptied it, cleaned it, bleached it, and replaced it. I had removed everything from the bathroom closet and all of the drawers, and wiped the surfaces down, and scrubbed all the water fixtures and tiles with a brush and grout cleaner. I cleaned the fireplace and took the grate out to the grass to scrape it down with a razor. I washed the windows, and buffed the heating ducts with steel wool. My mother bought spray paint and repainted them white, and we opened all the doors to air the fumes. Several of the other Buddhists in Seattle came over to help us, but they were disoriented—like people stepping into a new job—and I was exhausted, and had taken control of the space, and had difficulty delegating. The place was completely clean, and they couldn’t find anything to do. They came to me asking for suggestions. Then, when I made suggestions, they were offended—they did not want to take steel wool to the feet of the iron railing on the patio of my home. This was understandable. But now Carole’s place, by comparison, which had seemed so clean and so un-in-need of work, presented itself by comparison, and I was too exhausted to begin, and two women from the sangha took over and did as I had done—carrying down what had seemed like no belongings, wiping surfaces that had appeared clean—and it took them two days, and by the end, they owned the territory of Carole’s place as I owned the territory of my mom’s apartment. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was alone. The women who had cleaned Carole’s had gone for coffee, to celebrate their work, and my mother was gone, too. Jim was coming over to hang art on my mother’s walls—a loan—and to rehang the doors of the closet in my room.
Jim noticed that the baseboards of one wall were not painted in the living room, and they were not painted in my mother’s room. I had not even seen them. I did not even know it was something I had omitted. My mother had seen the flaw and asked me to paint several days before. I had agreed, but then I had ignored it, and I had not delegated it when I had the chance, so now Jim pointed it out.
He had paint in his truck, and a long device for doing baseboards. After he had hung the art, he went down to his trunk and brought up paint. Quickly, efficiently, he painted the baseboards in the living room. He had an attitude. I thought he had an attitude. To me it felt like he was thinking, I notice the details.
We had brought the closet doors up from storage for him to rehang. They were leaning against the wall in the front room. I think maybe it was just the way Jim moved through my mother’s apartment—my space—like he owned it. I suddenly became enraged. Before he could paint the baseboards in my mother’s bedroom, and before he could hang the closet doors, I told him, “Leave.”
He said, “I don’t think I will,” and he went into the front room and I heard his power drill go. I was so enraged that I left. I went next door to Carole’s apartment. I made myself a cup of tea. I found some pasta from the nice grocery store in her refrigerator—something my mom had bought—and I realized I had not been eating. I warmed it up and sat. I was shaking with rage. My hands were shaking violently. I ate a bite, then looked at the food, and hugged myself because I was shaking too much to enjoy the food.
The front door flew open. I heard two people, a man and a woman, going through the drawers of a credenza in Carole’s living room. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then one was standing in the kitchen. I knew him. It was David, a student of Rinpoche’s from New York.
I felt like a cat burglar in Carole’s house. I felt like a sneak—someone stealing. I said, “I’m never over here.”
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“This food is mine,” I said. “My mother got it for me.”
David’s wife was in the other room. She said, “I found it,” and she came into the hallway, where I could see her, but she was out of the room, behind her husband. In her hands was the iPad Rinpoche had given to Carole.
I said, “I’m pretty sure Carole gave that to my mom.”
David said, “Carole can’t read her phone.”
I said, “Carole gave it to my mom. So before you take it, can you please remove my mom’s email from it?”
David’s wife said, “You can do that.”
She brought me the iPad, but I was shaking, and I couldn’t figure out how to delete my mom’s email. They watched me struggle with it. I don’t know what came over us, but the three of us were so angry. I was as angry as I have ever been. Later, when we saw each other, we apologized with our eyes. We never talked about it.
* * *
On his first two days in Seattle, Rinpoche stayed at a boutique hotel downtown. I heard later that right after he got to town, Carole called and said he needed to come to her hospital room. “He needs to come here now.
I’m dying now.”
Rinpoche and everyone piled into the van. The woman I mentioned, who massaged Carole’s feet and thought I was dumb for saying that thing about reincarnation, was driving. They drove for a while, and then Rinpoche said, “You know, we don’t have to go. She’s fine.” They turned around and went back to the hotel.
My mom and I were in our apartment. My mom was feeling left out. I was feeling astonished that Rinpoche was coming in two days, that he would be in our house.
Jim called my mom from the hotel bar.
“What?” my mom said.
He told her that he and Louise and Marc and Rinpoche were having a drink. He didn’t invite her to join them. He just let her know it was happening. My mom hung up on him.
The phone rang again.
My mom answered. She was irritated, but she was also hopeful. She hoped that Jim and Louise and Marc had called her back to invite her to join them. They didn’t. They’d just called to tease her. She hung up the phone again.
“What’s going on?” I said.
She said, “Louise said, ‘Why’d you hang up on Rinpoche.’ Real cute. They’re all over there laughing, having a drink with Rinpoche.”
Then I felt left out, too. It was strange to feel left out, when he would be at our house in thirty-six hours, but we felt that way. We felt like we had cleaned the place stem to stern. And now we were alone. What were we, the cleaning ladies? The help.
* * *
Rinpoche was in our living room. Even though it was clean, it sometimes had a funny smell, and so my mom and I had opened the sliding glass doors wide. A fierce ocean breeze whipped through the apartment. It whipped your hair around. After fifteen minutes, one of Rinpoche’s attendants said, “Maybe we could close the door,” and after that, we had dinner.
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