by Blair Hurley
“I—” She couldn’t say, I haven’t been all week. She couldn’t say, I’ve betrayed you. “No one I knew.”
Her mother ran to the front steps. She banged her delicate fists on the church doors. She rattled the padlock on its chain. “Let us in. Let us in.” The crowd took up her chant for a few rounds, banging on the doors. But no one was inside to hear them.
She was making a spectacle of herself. Here was the mother who hid in the upstairs bedroom, the frantic and fearful one. But now she was out in public, beating on the locked doors. “It’s over,” Nicole called, embarrassed. “Stop.”
Her mother whirled toward her. “If you’d stayed, they couldn’t have done this,” she cried. Then Paul’s hands were on her shoulders, ferrying her back to the car.
That night she stood in the backyard of a shambling old Victorian up in the woods somewhere close to the train tracks. Paul’s old high school friends were passing red cups of warm beer around a low campfire. Someone offered her one, and then she was alone again, holding the beer, staring into the fire.
That was where she met Jules. He was the only one who talked to her that night. She saw him emerge from the house, black against the deepening sky, and move down to the fire next to her, downing his beer. “You look familiar. You came with Paul?” he said.
“Not with. He’s my brother.”
“I can see it.” He looked her up and down as if searching for things in common: the mouth, eyes, wide straight shoulders. It allowed her to look at him as well—pale skin, thin nose, knowing dark eyes—and she realized she did know him: he went to the all-boys school they shared plays with. When she’d had a bit part in a play last semester, she had seen him hanging out at rehearsals; he was dating the star.
He wore a leather jacket and was painfully thin under it, the way she always looked naked in the bathroom mirror—spindly and flat-chested.
The play gave them something to talk about. He knew girls in her class; she knew that he had been suspended from school for drinking on campus. “I heard you got in trouble” was how she put it, and he laughed.
“Yeah, I got in trouble.” He shook his head and crumpled his cup. “Those pissy little headmasters and headmistresses like getting all tangled up over me. I’m just one more in a long line of disappointments.”
“Okay, I get it,” she said. “You’re a bad boy.” Inside the house, she saw Paul laughing with his arm around a girl she knew—Jennifer, his friend, the girl he seemed to find again whenever he was home from college. Through the lit windows, she watched him take the girl upstairs, where no lights were on.
“That’s me,” Jules said. “The one you’ve always been waiting for, right?”
Not always. But now, she thought. Maybe.
She let Jules come closer and touch her hand as they moved away from the fire. She led him into the sheltering dark, and they found their way out of the yard and into the woods.
It was a warm spring; the woods were marshy and damp, full of mud. They climbed until they reached a dry patch of pine needles. Jules was immediately upon her, kissing her and gripping her waist. She kept quiet, terrified but thrilled, unsure of even how to kiss back until something softened in her and let her move her lips gently, relax her tongue until it was liquid and compliant.
“You’re sweet,” he said. “Where are you going after this?”
She didn’t understand; she was going home. Home had an impossible gravitational pull. Home was everywhere.
He shook his head, grinning. “You’re not going home yet, are you?”
In answer, she wriggled out of her jeans. Part of her wanted to say, Stop, stop, let me keep everything the way it always has been. But part of her didn’t.
At first it was difficult, and painful, and mortifying. A lot of wrestling and fumbling, the wrong angle, the wrong fit. But at the very end there was another feeling, not quite pleasure but getting there, something deep and awakened now.
He lay back. “First time?”
She nodded, and she saw his teeth flash in the dark. Then he squeezed her shoulder. The earth was still under her; somewhere around them, an owl called, and then the train went by. She was still here, coated in pine needles, disheveled, trembling, but alive. Awake, I breathe in.
“Yeah,” she said. Then, awkwardly: “Thanks.” She was glad it had not been someone who was tender and who cared that he was her first. She had wanted to get it over with and feel nothing.
“Anytime.” He rose, straightening his jacket, brushing the dirt off his pants. She wanted to roll over and grab his leg, pull him back down to her, but she knew this would be a terrible breach. She lay very still instead, watching him stretch and adjust himself, the very maleness of him.
“Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said.
She nodded. That was all she had been expecting. She stood, yanking up her jeans, and brushed away his offered arm. “I’m not a baby. You don’t have to hold my hand.” She walked away down the hill, feeling his eyes on her as she moved steady and straight.
She rode home with Paul in a tired silence, then waited until the house was dark before creeping to the bathroom and burying her blood-streaked underwear at the bottom of the trash. In bed, she opened her copy of Understanding Buddhism under the covers. When explaining dependent origination to a great Indian king, she read, the monk Nagasena asked what part of him made him Nagasena. Was it his ears, his eyes, his body, his hands? What part of him was him? No one thing was him, the monk explained. But neither were they not-him.
The monk gave a parable:
It is precisely as if some man or other were to choose a young girl to be his wife and were to pay the purchase-money, and after a time that young girl were to become a grown woman, and then a second man were to pay the money and marry her and say, “I am not carrying off your wife; that young girl of tender years whom you chose to be your wife is one person; this grown woman is another person.” Whose side, great king, would you take?
I am the young girl, she thought. But now she was the grown woman, too. She was neither and both. The split between them was exact.
The next morning, the family went to the Communion on the Common, the giant Catholic sit-in where priests would be giving Communion in protest of the closing churches. The crush began blocks away, and the four of them held hands like schoolchildren, struggling to stay together. They passed the First Church in Boston, now Unitarian; the First Baptist Church of Boston; Emmanuel Church (cross-denominational), the Arlington Street Church (Unitarian Universalist), and the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian). All of their doors were flung wide, and people were streaming out, watching the Catholics go by.
They crossed Charles Street, which was awash with crowds and closed to cars, and began to climb the damp brown hill. There was a curious dual air among the people: half day out, with balloons, funnel cakes, Bible stories, and skits for children, and half protest, with grim-faced picketers, angry shouts, tight-spun groups marching with military ferocity. The paths were lined with cardboard tombstones, labeled with the names of the closing churches.
Nicole clung to Paul’s arm, letting him carry her forward. She was sore from last night with Jules, or not sore exactly but strangely open, like there was a new place of feeling in her that hadn’t existed before. A new star. A bright center. She walked slowly among the busy clumps of people, wondering if she looked as though she’d changed.
At the top of the hill, she could see the speakers shouting into megaphones, but it was difficult to hear. “What did he say?” her mother kept asking her father tensely, and he would repeat phrases for her. She was struck by this now, she told Jocelyn: the tenderness and patience with which her father had treated her mother, always.
Others were pushing forward, trampling through the rare breeds of roses. Balloon animals were twisted into crosses. Children cried and were hushed. A phalanx of protestors bristled with signs. Young priests, with straight, serious thatches of hair and quick, angry voices, passed by. Women and chi
ldren parted before them in the crowd. A mother lifted a baby out of a stroller, holding it out, and a priest blessed it without looking.
“We cannot unconsecrate our holy ground,” chanted the crowd.
It seemed like all of Boston was on that hill, clamoring to be heard. The four of them held on to each other, sensing danger, as if they might become separated. “We’re all here, Liza,” her father said to her mother. “I think he meant not just us, but everyone around us,” she told Jocelyn. He meant all these sons of Irishmen, all these dockworkers and mailmen and police officers, all those guys leaning over porches in the South End and drinking in dark pubs in Somerville, all the mothers telling their kids to mix shame with a fearful kind of love.
She knew that the noise would miraculously fade when the prayer began, because they all knew what to do. It would be magical, even sacred. But it was not a silence for her anymore. She’d gotten herself tainted somehow. It had not begun with Jules, after all. This was what she had to tell Jocelyn, she saw now. It wasn’t just about sin and exile. She’d begun to feel her separation when she and her mother held the dying kittens in their hands and she wished with all her power to save them and could not. She wondered why suffering was permitted, and what kind of god would permit it, and all the things that she knew people had wondered before but were nonetheless important, and were her right to wonder about.
There was a wall between her and that Communion. She gripped Paul’s hand and tried hard not to cry. She was still very young. She wanted it all better, Paul back from college, her father opening a door to speak to her mother instead of walking away, her mother hushing their boisterous dinner table to say grace, and all of them falling silent to listen, gathered up into her quiet reverence.
The next day, she took the train into Boston. She walked to the Museum of Fine Arts, which was near her school, the grand white-columned museum she had often visited on school trips. She remembered that in the MFA’s Art of Asia collection, along with the flattened kimonos and painted screens, there was a Japanese Buddhist Temple Room. The room was always kept dark, and it was well insulated from the sounds of the tourists outside. On one side were benches, and on the other was a Buddha.
She was alone in Art of Asia. The corridors were half-lit, each doorway a small vanishing point in the dimness. She paused to look at the screens and drawings on the walls—crowds of monks and nuns, bowing and praying; dragons and saints perched high on cloud tops; cherry blossoms and lotus flowers on yellowing paper. At the door to the Temple Room, she bowed. It was cool and dark. Behind a wooden barrier sat three statues of stone and bronze going cloudy green. To one side, the deities: behind their heads, licks of bronze flames cast eerie shadows that seemed to move. And she could just make out, seated on a dais of lotus flowers, the Buddha in the center, shadowy gold.
In her dog-eared copy of Understanding Buddhism, the first chapter described Siddhartha the outcast, climbing the hill to the bodhi tree, weak from his years of prayer and fasting. The other ascetics had turned their backs on him because he had chosen to eat a bowl of rice. But I’m hungry, I need to eat, he told them. I must live. Why are you afraid of such pleasure?
The Buddha was smiling at her, welcoming her. Come in, come in.
She knelt. Then before she could help it, she was crossing herself. “Sorry.” Then she touched the floor—the earth is my witness—and breathed the words:
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the dharma.
I take refuge in the sangha.
“That was the part you wanted to see, wasn’t it?” she asked Jocelyn.
And still in her mind, it was a moment in time she couldn’t look beyond or behind.
Here is her heart tolling like a bell. Here is that frightened girl, looking for a refuge, a house that will have her. Here is her body, beginning its disgrace.
Dear Sean,
Siddhartha, certain that he is close to the truth of why people suffer, sits under the bodhi tree through the night. Depending on which folktale or epic poem you read, he defeats Mara the deceiver, or he sits by himself; he fights armies and conquers death, or he sees the dawn through the leaves and finds himself alone and aware.
So he’s enlightened. What happens now? Does he look any different? Does he feel triumphant or sorrowful, or is he now above all human emotion? Is there a serene smile on his lips?
But maybe he feels thin and tired, as any forty-year-old who has sat on the hard ground all night would. Maybe he staggers a little as he walks down the hill, and goes unnoticed by the first few wanderers and mendicants on the road. He feels the terrible loneliness of the truths he’s discovered. He’s thinking of his family at home, the family that is afraid of what he might become. Maybe when a girl gives him a bowl of rice, and asks him if he is a god or a man, he eats in silence, pregnant with what he is and what he knows.
Can you unknow something you now know? Can you put the genie back in the bottle? It never felt like a choice. All my life, I drank the wine and it was blood. One day, I drank and it wasn’t anything anymore. I think I would have given anything for it to be blood again. Still would, sometimes.
THE TEACHER
New York was full of gurus. Unlike Boston, provincial and suspicious, sunk deeply in its own traditions, New York was ripe for self-improvement, for transformation, for charismatic leaders. All you needed was the confidence to tell other people what to do. A couple of brass balls and the right story.
On the first day of her new class, Lucille and Jeannie and Maxine unrolled their mats on the floor of her studio apartment. She’d leaned her mattress and bed frame against the wall and hung a silk curtain over it, then set up the little shrine with her brass Buddha; otherwise the floor was bare.
She began the session with a recitation of the Fire Sermon, but Maxine quickly interrupted. “Sorry—can I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“What first brought you to Buddhism?”
“At first I joined just to rebel against my family, I think. To be something they weren’t. But when tragedies visited me—it was Buddhism that kept me alive. It helped me go on living.”
Now they were quiet, ready to listen.
“To become one with whatever one does is a true realization of the Way,” she said. And they began.
“They’re so hungry. They’re looking for something I can’t give,” she remarked to Jocelyn.
They were walking back from Emmeline’s baby yoga class, jostling through crowds at the Fort Greene farmers’ market. Jocelyn put Swiss chard in her basket, her brows knitted thoughtfully, while Nicole wrestled with the stroller.
During meditation, she gave corrections, offered advice. Don’t try to hold yourself up from your shoulders; let structure roll up from the base of your spine. Count your breaths until you lose count. When you feel fear, annoyance, anger, don’t try to block it out; just acknowledge it, then let it move past you like weather.
As her students were rolling up their mats, they had other questions. When you’re home and your husband is asleep in the den in front of the lit box of the television and you’re suddenly crushed by loneliness, what do you do? If you wake up with the old chronic pain sneaking down your spine and into your hips, if you know it will be there all day, that now your day is ruined, how do you get out of bed? If your sister has cancer, do you get tested to see if you have the same awful gene, or do you lie awake listening to the thumping of your pulse at night?
Was this how her family priests had felt when widows came to them for comfort, when fighting siblings asked for advice, when husbands and wives sought marriage counseling? The clergy had trained in chapter and verse, in the esoteric nature of the divine—not in family and marriage and steady love. But apparently these things went hand in hand. She did her best to answer, sometimes making it up as she went along. You are never lonely as long as you have yourself. Let each day contain its own possibility. Each moment, you are a new self and have a new chance at happiness,
she said. Whatever you choose to discover, do it prudently. Fear comes from dread, our anticipation of the worst. To be wise, let go of your desire to see the future.
After practice, they seemed to leave soothed. That was all she could offer them. She could see how being a teacher meant giving everything you had, offering up the example of your life. She could almost see how a teacher or a student could confuse that with love.
“What do they want?” Jocelyn asked.
“Everything. They want all of me.” They called her up at odd hours, weeping into the phone. They wanted to be comforted, to be told that life would soon be better than what it was, that this was the absolute best use of their valuable time, that their children would get into the right schools, that their parents were proud of them, that if they just did this and this, all would be well.
Jocelyn sighed. “Isn’t that always the way?”
When the Master called her now at night, he was gentle. “I’ve missed you,” he said into the line. She listened to his voice with the lights off and rain streaking the windowpanes. It was almost like they were lying in bed together. This was the kind of intimacy she had imagined as a teenager, the thing she’d hoped she might share one day with Jules. Even when they were very young, she had looked forward to being old with him, the touch of their bodies all she needed.
When her Master had guided her through a meditation session back in Boston, steering her away from the hurts and pain of memory, she had felt a powerful relief; but he, too, had been moved by their progress together. Sometimes when she cried, his eyes also shone with tears.
Now he whispered on the phone that she was the only one of his students who understood what a spiritual life required; that it was not just comfort and reassurance, it was hard work, it was questioning and wandering, it was anguish and doubt. He would show her how to be; she was his responsibility, he would not let her fail. She worked the prayer beads he had given her in her hands, listening.