You Are Having a Good Time
Page 15
My mom and I didn’t know how to serve Rinpoche. It was strange to have him sitting in our apartment at a table. When I was a kid, I could do it easily, but now I was awkward. When he and his attendant had finished eating, I stumbled over to the table and blurted, “Are you done?”
I always had trouble serving. It was not because I resisted doing something for Rinpoche but because I sensed that he wanted me to be natural. I didn’t know how to do that, and so I would get tongue-tied and completely strange.
The next day we went to an outdoor mall, and Rinpoche bought an adapter so he could play songs from his iPod in the car. He handed me the adapter and said, “Can you figure this out for me?” The instructions were extremely simple. They were intuitive. But I was dumbfounded, and twenty minutes later I turned to Rinpoche and said, “I can’t understand it.”
He screwed up his face and said, “You just put one end here and one in the car.”
I shrugged.
That night at a Thai restaurant Rinpoche asked Jim and my mom why they had been fighting. They said they didn’t know. He turned to me and asked, and I tried to think of the answer.
He said, “You should write a story about it.”
* * *
He stayed four nights and we saw a lot of movies. We ate at TGI Friday’s, and shopped at Banana Republic. During the daytime people came to have short interviews with him in our place, or we went shopping. On his last day, before we came back to the apartment for a potluck dinner, he said that it was time to go and see Carole. It was just me, my mom, and Rinpoche in the car. When we got to Carole’s hospital door, I said, “We’ll wait out here,” but Rinpoche told us to come inside. Carole was happy to see him, and she didn’t mind us anymore. Whatever it was between us had passed.
Rinpoche told Carole that when she died, she would think she had to do a lot of complicated things. She would want it to be harder than it was. He said she didn’t need to do anything complicated; he said, “Just mere knowing,” and something else. It was something that simple, and he repeated both over and over, to make sure they went into her head. She was less than a week from dying, and it was the last time I would ever see her. I went to New York a few days later, and we were on the phone when we said goodbye. I told her I was sorry I wasn’t there. I said goodbye. She was distant by then. She said, “Goodbye.” We knew we were really saying goodbye. After she died, Rinpoche told Bruce to go and buy a really nice vegetarian meal and burn it. He bought a bunch of vegetables from the grocery store and lit them on fire. I made fun of him at the time, but Carole probably liked that. She loved Bruce. We were in her room for twenty minutes, but it felt like two. In the parking lot I opened Rinpoche’s car door for him. I did it because I was so grateful to know him, because it was so clear to me in that moment that everything he did was for other people. It was the natural thing to do.
Acknowledgments
Thank you Anna Stein, Jin Auh, Mitzi Angel, Emily Bell, and Susan Golomb for believing in these stories; Michiko, Ron, and Cheryl for the retreat cabin; Sam Chang and Lorin Stein for your wisdom and knowledge; “Larry,” Mom, and most of all Clancy for saving my life.
A Note About the Author
Amie Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, VICE, McSweeney’s, and other publications. In 2012 she was awarded The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei.” She lives in Kansas City with her husband, the writer Clancy Martin. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
William Wei
Animals
The Imp
The Sew Man
Frank Advice for Fat Women
Night Report
The Commission
Catholic
Mynahs
Rinpoche
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Amie Barrodale
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
The stories in this collection were originally published, in different form, in The Paris Review, Subtropics, Apology, and J&L Illustrated.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barrodale, Amie.
Title: You are having a good time: stories / Amie Barrodale.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035424 | ISBN 9780374293864 (softcover) | ISBN 9780374713294 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author).
Classification: LCC PS3602.A777543 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035424
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