“I’m Pamela?” she said anemically. “An instructor? And, I just want to say that doing TM is, like, really, really good for you? It’s like, eating vegetables for your soul?” She spoke so hesitantly, it seemed as if she was afraid to commit to the actual vowels and consonants required to construct a language.
“John, you’re going to go with Pamela. Susie, you’re coming with me,” Agatha explained. “We’re going to give each of you your very own, private mantra. This is a special word that the Maharishi has formulated just for you, personally. It’s been designed to give you a sense of peace when you say it. If you tell this word to anyone, it will lose its power, so you’ve got to keep it secret. Do you understand?”
John and I nodded.
Agatha looked at us, unconvinced. “Not even to each other, not even to your best friend, not even to your mom.”
“But what if someone overhears you while you’re meditating?” said John.
“You say it to yourself in your head,” said Agatha. “You think it. You don’t say it out loud.”
“But what if we forget it?” asked John.
“Tell your mommy that you forgot your mantra, and have her call the TM Center for an appointment to renew it.”
This seemed like an enormous waste of time to me. “Couldn’t we just write it down?” I asked. “Or have you remind us over the phone?”
Agatha shook her head vehemently. “A mantra is not a casual word. It’s something holy that can only be transmitted by teacher to student in person. Is that clear?”
John and I nodded again. Pamela held out her long, limp, bony hand and led my brother silently through a door on the left. Agatha motioned for me to follow her through a second door on the right. I thought fleetingly of Hansel and Gretel, then wondered how the Maharishi knew how to formulate a special mantra just for me when he’d never met me before in his life. Did he have ESP? Somehow, I doubted it. Perhaps my mother had sent the TM Center information about me that Agatha had forwarded on to India. I tried to guess what my special word would be. For obvious reasons, “S” was my favorite letter in the alphabet, and I hoped my mantra would begin with it. When I was seven, I’d had an “S” birthday party, “Saluting Susie’s Seventh” the invitations had read, and everyone who was invited had to wear something that began with “S.” We’d served spaghetti, sundaes, and soda—just about my three favorite foods— along with “sweets,” which was a convenient catch-all for an obscene amount of gummy bears, M&M’s, and Blow Pops. Maybe my mantra would be “Sugar,” I thought hopefully. Or, better yet, “Superstar.” Couldn’t that be a mantra? That sounded like a good one to me.
Agatha led me into a room that was even darker than the first. It also had two armchairs in it, another huge picture of the Maharishi, and a level of incense that could have very well been what motivated Congress to pass the Clean Air Act of 1970. It suddenly occurred to me that the word “suffocate” began with “S” also.
“Okay now, Susan, I’m going to whisper your mantra to you, and then I want you to repeat it back to me three times, so I’m sure you’ve got it,” said Agatha. Then she pulled me so close to her, I could smell the orange rind on her breath, and she whispered my special, secret, personal mantra.
At first I thought I hadn’t heard right. It wasn’t even a word. Why, it was barely a diphthong. It was a vowelly, gibberishy syllable, devoid of any possible meaning. I didn’t know how the Maharishi had come up with such a mantra for me. Frankly, I was insulted. How could he think that this tiny, unappetizing little sound reflected my innermost being? For starters, it didn’t even have an “S” in it.
“Now, repeat it to me three times,” Agatha commanded.
I wanted to say that I didn’t like this mantra and could I please have another—something with a little more oomph in it, something that, when I was finished meditating, might double as a great name for a magazine or a female superhero I was going to invent. But Agatha flashed me a squinty look I’d seen on dentists and traffic cops. I did as I was told.
“Excellent,” she whispered. “Now close your eyes. Keep repeating your mantra to yourself. Let your thoughts flow organically. That’s it. Now, breathe.”
Then I heard a rustle, and a click.
“I’ll be back when your time’s up,” she said curtly.
Suddenly, alone in the dark, I felt ridiculous, but I soon realized that keeping my eyes shut was preferable to staring at the poster of the Maharishi, who looked more and more to me like a lawn troll in drag. Slowly, I began to meditate. Agatha had explained that my thoughts would eventually drift—this was part of the “inner peace process”—but, somehow, all I could think about while saying my mantra was how much I hated it and wanted another one.
Still, I kept repeating it. For all the anguish TM had caused me, I wanted it to work. At Silver Lake that past summer, my friends and I had played a game called “hyperventilation.” It wasn’t so much a game as a pleasurable massacring of our brain cells. With hyperventilation, you breathed in and out frantically while counting to 30. Then you held your breath while your friend gave you the Heimlich maneuver. If they squeezed enough air out of your lungs hard enough, you blacked out for a second or two. When you came to, you felt gobsmacked by bliss. You got a massive head rush that made your whole body tingle deliriously. You felt completely disoriented, giddy, and weightless. “Ohmygod, how long was I out?” we’d always squeal, stumbling around dreamily. When our friends informed us that barely three seconds had passed, we cried, “Wow! It felt like forever!” Then we’d have to wipe drool from our chin and the beginnings of a horrendous migraine headache would begin to take hold, but who cared? We wanted to do it again immediately. Hyperventilation was drugs without the drugs, brain-kill without the middleman.
With TM, I assumed I’d feel the same sort of rush I got making myself pass out at day camp. But nothing happened. Instead of inner peace, I began feeling irritable. I thought of my mother, sitting outside in the waiting room. She’d paid $200 for this little syllable of mine. This money was the last of the tiny sum she’d inherited when her grandmother died. It was the rest of her life savings, and she’d spent it on TM, hoping it could improve our lives in some way.
Yet what was so wrong with our lives, I wondered? We weren’t starving to death or getting slaughtered in Cambodia. Sure, it was true that my dad kept getting laid off. As a civil rights lawyer, he worked for nonprofit agencies where he earned only slightly more than his clients. Whenever there were budget cuts, he lost his job. He hopped from one short-term position to another, and these increasingly took him away to ho-hum places like Cincinnati and Houston. And okay, when he came home, he and my mom tended to fight—a lot. And most of the time, even when he was working, we were pretty much broke; when my mom and I went to the corner grocery store where we could “sign” for bologna and bread, Murray, the butcher, politely asked if my dad had plans to pay our bill anytime soon. Whenever people said to me, “You’re dad’s a lawyer, so you guys are rich, right?” I assumed they were being sarcastic.
And then, of course, there were the dangers in our neighborhood: a bomb had gone off at Rust Browns, the new nightclub next door, spraying glass all over the sidewalk, and across the street on Amsterdam Avenue, someone had been shot to death in front of Hanratty’s Restaurant, leaving bloodstains soaked into the asphalt that immediately became a major tourist attraction for all the kids in the neighborhood. And oh, yeah: there was my brother’s thyroid condition that had mysteriously caused him to stop growing for a year. And then, I suppose, there were our relatives, a number of whom seemed mentally ill; that past Christmas, in fact, my mothers father had given John and me an advanced calculus test at the dinner table, then called my dad a pedophile. Since then, my mother had barely spoken to her side of the family.
Clearly, our lives did have some problems, and thinking about all of them, I suddenly became unbearably sad. My mother had invested so much money and so much faith in trying to solve them. Yet even though I wa
s barely ten, I knew: the problems we had were far beyond the reach of Transcendental Meditation or anything else she could hope or imagine. And this made my heart ache even more.
Afterward, back in the waiting room, Agatha and Pamela informed our mother that our TM initiation had gone smoothly. All we needed to do now, they said, was to meditate twice a day. They also said some other stuff about our need for self-discipline and attentiveness, but I wasn’t listening. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. It was only 2:53 P.M.—Lincoln hadn’t even been dismissed from school yet—but I wasn’t thinking so much about him anymore as about escaping the nose-piercing stench of patchouli and the horrible, shivery feeling of despair that had developed in the pit of my stomach. By the time we finally left the center, I was so relieved, I skipped to the bus stop.
“See, it seems like you kids got something out of that after all,” our mother said on the ride back home. “It really made an impression on you, didn’t it?”
John and I nodded. “Sure,” he said. Then he turned to me. “Hey, Suze,” he said loudly, so that everyone on the bus could hear. “I’ll tell you my mantra if you tell me yours.”
For the next few weeks, our mother announced before dinner, “Okay, now is everybody ready to meditate?”
“Mmhm,” John and I parroted. Then he’d go and play for ten minutes while I sat on my bed and fended off a full-blown, mantra-induced anxiety attack.
One of the benefits of TM, Agatha had said, was that it enabled you to be “alone with your thoughts.” But as I quickly discovered, a lot of my thoughts were not anything I wanted to be alone with.
No sooner did I start saying my mantra than I started worrying. I tried not to, but I found I couldn’t keep my lurking fears at bay. At first, I worried about pretty run-of-the-mill stuff: getting picked on at school. My dad losing his job again. My parents getting divorced. But from there, the level of difficulty and sophistication quickly escalated. I worried what would happen if both my parents died suddenly in a car accident. Would I be able to get a job baby-sitting or decorating T-shirts so that John and I wouldn’t have to go into foster care? But where would we live? Earning 50 cents an hour wouldn’t cover the rent on our apartment. Maybe we could sneak into the Metropolitan Museum like the kids in the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. But there was a meat shortage going on, and cars were lined up for blocks because of the oil shortage. Tuna fish that used to be 39 cents a can was now 53 cents. President Ford had told everybody to wear “WIN” buttons, but what if inflation continued and I couldn’t make ends meet, and John and I had to go live in an orphanage? And eat gruel? And get hit with a paddle? Then I thought about a bunch of paperbacks I’d recently read including Love Story and a book called Sunshine, in which beautiful young protagonists died untimely deaths from cancer. What if I got leukemia? Would I have to die from chemotherapy, or could they maybe just amputate a leg? But then, how would I ever survive gym class? It was a nightmare now, and I still had my limbs.
And then there were the killer bees! We’d been studying them during “Current Events.” These bees were enormous mutants, flying up from Mexico. They were apparently the most pissed-off bees in history, and they were due to get to New York City sometime around 1982, at which point they would hunt us all down and kill us! What if I got cancer, and they had to amputate my leg: how would I run away from the hordes of killer bees? And on the radio, newscasters had been talking about Swine Flu. Three businessmen had died from it already in Albuquerque, and they were saying it was an epidemic. What if I got Swine Flu? What if my whole family did? And then, there was something called the “Harmonic Convergence” that Annie’s brother Jerome kept going on about. He said that in 1979, all of the planets from Mars through Pluto were going to line up exactly in the universe and the gravitational pull they’d exert would be so strong that the earth would spontaneously combust …
Just about then, when I was doubled over and mere seconds’ away from an aneurysm, my mother knocked on my door. “Hey, sweetie. Your meditation time’s up,” she sang brightly. “Get washed for dinner.” Then she cocked her head and looked at me strangely. “Are you okay? You look a bit flushed.”
“Oh, Mom,” I gasped, clutching my stomach. “I think I have Swine Flu.”
Soon, my brother no longer made any pretext about the fact that he was playing during meditation time. We could all hear “Vvrrrrmmm Vrrrrrmm Vvvrrrmm” emanating from his bedroom, followed by the metallic clatter of Matchbox cars crash-landing off the side of his dresser. As for myself, I figured that if inner peace was what we were really after here, then my TM time was far better spent daydreaming about Lincoln and brushing up on my valuable comic book reading and nail polishing skills. I found I could enjoy an entire issue of Everything’s Archie and paint smiley faces on all of my toenails in less time than it took my parents to achieve a day’s worth of enlightenment.
But in December, an invitation arrived in our mailbox. The TM Center, it seemed, was hosting a “Children’s Transcendental Christmas Party.” Come! it read. Meet other children with mantras! Eat healthy candy! Celebrate the season of peace!
“Yech,” said my brother.
“No way,” I said.
“I think it’ll be fun,” said our mother. “How many other children get to attend a Christmas party hosted by the Maharishi?”
“None,” I grumbled.
“Exactly!” said my mother, as if this was a good thing.
After she returned the RSVP, I set about worrying all over again about running into Lincoln. The morning of the Christmas party, I attempted another of my famous fake stomachaches, but it proved as ineffective with my mother as it was in gym class.
Agatha greeted us at the doorway wearing the same green turtle-neck, though now she also sported a Santa hat made of cherry red felt that drooped limply against her cheek. An artificial Christmas tree had been assembled in the center of the main room and decorated with strings of cranberries, origami whooping cranes, and little silk elephants studded with tiny mirrors and “Made in India” tags attached to their sides. The Maharishi’s picture had been trimmed festively with blinking lights, giving him a psychedelic, whorish look. Again, John and I had been informed that, in the Christmas spirit of giving, we’d be required to donate another week’s allowance to the Maharishi. This time, our mother gave the money directly over to Agatha, knowing full well that we’d sooner swallow our weekly 35 cents than fork it over again.
Looking around the party, I was surprised to see that there were, in fact, other guests. For some reason, I’d really believed that John and I were the only two children ever to do TM, and it both comforted and embarrassed me to discover we weren’t alone. To be sure, the room was hardly packed. There was a beefy boy about my age in a burgundy and white striped rugby shirt, who was picking up the oranges on the mantelpiece one by one and sniffing them. A couple of younger, fragile-looking girls were dressed in stiff taffeta party dresses and miniature platform shoes. They were each clutching Barbies, and judging from the dolls’ mutilated haircuts, either the girls had anger management problems or a real dearth of hand-eye coordination. A blond, spindly boy with bangs in his eyes and a crust of mucus beneath his nose crouched in a corner, where he appeared to be trying to hypnotize himself with a Duncan yo-yo. Another boy, about John’s age, was dressed, inexplicably, in a cowboy outfit and a Stetson.
One quick assessment and it was pretty clear to me that this gathering was essentially Special Education Woodstock. The other parents had enrolled their kids in TM not to enlighten them, but to supplement their Ritalin. The party was a convention of losers and misfits, and John and I seemed to be the only losers and misfits not taking prescription medication.
“See that Bruno gets two of these by 3:00 P.M.,” one of the mothers instructed Pamela, handing her a vial of pills. “Otherwise he’ll go through the roof.”
“They’re only trace amounts of lithium,” another explained apologetically, motioning to a
n envelope she’d left on the mantelpiece. “Still, we can’t be too careful now, can we?”
I looked for our mother, but she was already standing at the door in her coat, beaming at us with what looked like pride and relief. “Santa’s off to do some Christmas shopping,” she sang brightly. “I’ll be back to pick you up at 4:00 P.M. Be good.”
Pamela slipped into the room just then. She, too, was wearing a Santa hat. A jingle bell pin—the kind they displayed beside the cash register at the drugstore—was attached crookedly to her turtleneck. She was carrying a tray laden with snacks, and immediately, everyone descended upon her like a gaggle of pigeons.
“No-ho-ho. Please?” she begged, hoisting the tray aloft so no one could get at it. “These are for later? First, we’re going to play some games?”
There was a collective groan from the group.
“Okay everybody,” Agatha clapped her hands together. “Let’s all sit on the floor.” Seeing as there were still only two armchairs in the room, this was not hard to get people to do. Once we were all settled, Agatha crossed her legs and looked around at us radiantly. “Now,” she said, “I want everyone to say their name and then”—she made a gesture like she was plucking inspiration from thin air—“I want everyone to share their feelings about the Maharishi.”
“Oh, let me begin,” Pamela said excitedly. In her breathy voice, she said, “My name is Pamela? And when I look at the Maharishi?” she smiled gooily, “I see a man of peace and tranquillity and truth? Then she turned to the twin girls seated on her right. “Isabella, Francesca, what do you two see?”
Twisting shyly away, Isabella just shrugged. Francesca ignored the question and concentrated on walking her butchered Barbie along the patterns in the rug.
“I see,” Pamela frowned. “Rufus, what about you?” She looked to the blond boy holding the yo-yo.
“I thought we were supposed to say our own names,” he said petulantly.
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