by Blair Hurley
“I don’t know—”
He smirked. “Go home. Go home to Daddy.”
“Asshole,” she said, and swallowed.
She began to feel as if she were wearing special glasses that let her see the fog hanging on every new leaf of every tree. She laughed and glided on a cushion of nauseous elation. The worry that had been like a second shadow—her mother, her conversion—began to retreat. Jules pushed her gently into a pile of moss and unbuttoned her jeans. “Want to? Want to?” he kept asking, and she kept saying, “Yes.”
But he didn’t actually. Just caressed her a little and held her and lay very still. She thought, Ah! This is what everybody was really talking about. Not all the lust and the wrestling around. That could be good. But this was far more dangerous, this closeness. This was what could pull you in.
“You gonna go gossiping around school about us?” Jules asked after a long time.
“What’s to tell?” That was an easy test to pass: she had no one she cared to gossip to. But he seemed pleased by her nonchalance.
“You act cool, man. I thought you were some good girl.”
“You were wrong.” All right, she would be his secret for now.
“Man!” He slapped his thigh. “Where’d you come from?”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said warily.
“Yeah. But it’s because I like you.”
This moment, she could see now as she told Jocelyn, was the beginning. It showed how easily she was governed by that simple, wordless, adolescent need: the need to be liked. She’d spend the next year chasing it, needing Jules to see her as adventurous and dangerous. By the time they ran away, it was bigger than that; it was her own pure, beautiful dream. Together they’d drive away from everything they knew to be safe.
Jules hugged her from behind, ground against her. “You like me too, bad girl. I can tell.”
She shrugged. It was a hard gesture to make when your heart was pounding with joy.
She believed everything she read in books. It was books that would signify her allegiance to the truth. So now she carried a copy of The Blue Cliff Record, a collection of Zen koans, in her bag at all times, and dipped into every book she could find about Buddhism, reading urgently, wanting to know, to believe, in everything.
Boundless wind and moon—the eye within eyes,
Inexhaustible heaven and earth—the light beyond light,
The willow dark, the flower bright—ten thousand houses;
Knock at any door—there’s one who will respond.
—The Blue Cliff Record
Her nights began with her tapping on the bulkhead door behind someone’s house in the twilight. Then a friend would open the hatch. She’d descend the crumbling cement steps, pass the rumbling washing machine, duck under hissing New England pipes. There, Jules and the others welcomed her in.
That spring, when she had converted to Buddhism but still barely knew what that meant, was the beginning of her basement year. In math, in English class, ignoring her teachers’ puzzled glances, she kept The Blue Cliff Record open in her lap and read koans. She was deciphering a code, the runes and diagrams of a non-Catholic world.
The couches in the basements where Jules hung out were always furry and matted with lint and potato-chip crumbs. They were surrounded by the detritus of suburban childhoods: Nerf guns, video game consoles, Ping Pong mallets, Halloween masks, Christmas lights in snarls. They played Ping Pong and smoked and talked. You could fill a night that way.
At these hangouts, Jules introduced her as a friend. They talked as if she weren’t there for a while, but they were watching her, she knew, and saw how Jules had his arm around her, passed her the joint and showed her how to inhale slowly.
“You’re a nice Catholic girl,” said Holly. “Not Jules’s usual type.” She had sleek ink-black hair and wore lots of bracelets.
“Not anymore,” said Nicole. “I’m a Buddhist.”
That made them interested.
“There’s a monastery in Tibet where you go off and live in a cave for seven years.”
“What, all together?”
“No, everybody gets their own cave, and you don’t talk to anyone. You just meditate.”
“That’s insane.”
“What’s so insane about it?” Jules asked. “They’re on a quest. Everyone should try just being alone with themselves for a while.” He squeezed her hand.
“I bet they jerk off in there, like, three times a day. Nuns, too.” Eddie grinned.
“Jesus!” Nicole said.
“What?”
“It’s just not a pretty image.”
“You just can’t stand the idea of them being less than perfect, Nicole. It says a lot about you.”
Holly rose to her defense: “I think it says a lot about you, Eddie, that you assume everyone jerks off three times a day if left to their own devices.”
“If they’re not, they’re going crazy. It’s a surefire way to go crazy. The human is the social animal.” That was Eddie, fervent and political, dabbling in communism. “Why do they do it?”
“They value the mind so much that they want to free it from the prison of the body.”
Much of what Nicole said was about things she didn’t understand then but wanted to. She talked to Jules in a constant stream, reciting haiku and telling him about the emptiness at the heart of all things, loving the easy way he kept his arm around her, the way he listened. They talked about South America and the Gulf War. Eddie, freckled and red-haired, whose basement they hung out in more often than anyone else’s, wore soccer jerseys with the names of Chilean teams on them and sat cross-legged on the coffee table. The others—Jon, Colin, his girlfriend, Holly—sat around listening to him talk about Chile and Venezuela and the prisoners there. He told them about his favorite revolutionaries, listing their manifestos and arrests as if describing his favorite baseball players and their stats.
Eventually they drifted away in ones and twos. Eddie went upstairs, and she and Jules humped quietly on the couch until she heard a cough and saw Eddie’s red Converse tennis shoes in the line under the door. They hastily rearranged themselves, and then Eddie came in and sat on the recliner facing them, grinning, rolling an empty beer bottle between his hands. “This guy, Nicole,” he said. “You found yourself quite a guy.”
“Yeah?” She was still flushed and sweating, trying hard to look composed.
“Yeah. Knows how to treat a lady, if you know what I mean. Or should I say ‘ladies.’”
“Shut up, Eddie.” Jules struggled into his jacket.
“Ask him,” said Eddie, still grinning, rolling the bottle, his eyes on Nicole. “Go ahead, ask him. He’s got quite the reputation.”
“Enough.” Jules stood up and got in Eddie’s face.
Eddie shrank back. “I’m a pacifist, dude.”
“Then be a little more passive.”
Jules borrowed Eddie’s car to drive her home. Throughout that year she’d find he was good at borrowing things—someone’s car, someone’s basement to spend the night in. Once they arrived, they sat at the curb, beyond the streetlights, and Nicole took a comb from her bag and fixed her hair, sniffing her clothes for smoke. “I’m gonna be in trouble if my dad’s still up.”
“That’s what you get, for being with me,” Jules said. “See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” She felt her heart lurching. She knew her father would be angry and worried; she didn’t care. Nothing really mattered except for Jules’s languid hand on her thigh.
She told her father she’d been to the candlepin bowling alley with friends. And later, that she was studying at the library. Just lie, she told herself. If it means nothing to you, then the lie, too, is nothing.
While she and her father were seeding the lawn for new grass, she felt that companionable silence between them, the easy way they worked together. “There’s this monastery I’ve been reading about in Japan,” she said. “They meditate for hours under a waterfall. The point is to maint
ain this incredible focus while the water is pounding on their heads.”
“Jeez. What are they? Franciscan?”
“Actually, Zen. They’re Buddhists.”
“Hmm,” her father said.
Nicole pressed on: “There’s this other monastery out west, in Colorado. It’s run by this guy called the Karmapa. He’s second-in-command under the Dalai Lama. They send the really advanced monks up into the mountains with nothing but a wet blanket. They have to dry it with their own body heat. They can control their body temperature.”
Her father straightened over the seed spreader, wiping his brow. “I knew people who got taken in by this craze when it first started,” he said. “All these swamis and gurus were popping up all over the place. People poured their life savings into these communes or the swamis themselves. And it never came to anything. They lost their money, or they got hooked on drugs, or they died. I wouldn’t want you to get taken in by the same things, Nic. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there.”
Nicole sighed.
Her father ruffled her hair, that gesture for which she was too old. “Let’s have a nice green lawn for when your mother gets back.”
The Path has no byroads; one who stands upon it is solitary and dangerous. The truth is not seeing or hearing; words and thoughts are far removed from it. If you can penetrate through the forest of thorns and untie the bonds of Buddhahood, you attain the land of inner peace, where all the gods have no way to offer flowers, where outsiders have no gate to spy through.
—The Blue Cliff Record
When she hung out with Jules and his friends, they talked about “the system” and “the establishment” and how they were all getting processed like cornmeal through the gears of the capitalist machine. Eddie pounded a point home with his fist on his shoe. (“It’s dank, man, fucking dank, the way the world is now.”) Jules argued with Colin over whose father was worse (Colin: “At least your dad isn’t breathing down your neck about getting into Duke and perfectly replicating this messed-up line of multigenerational Colins.” Jules: “At least when your dad’s drunk, he complains about Clinton instead of locking you out all night because you didn’t empty the dishwasher.”)
They watched pop stars laugh and grunge acts growl on TV, and they wondered what lies they were being told about what was in the milk they drank and who really had a shot at the American dream, and why no one was marching or singing or writing about it anymore.
And sometimes in the later hours of the night, the talk would start about going. Just what if. What if one day you weren’t here. No note, no sayonara. Just gone. When Jules was fighting with his father, Nicole would ask:
What if we get out of here?
What would it be like just to be gone?
She read The Dharma Bums and reread Japhy Ryder’s grand vision for what would soon be happening in America. He said he pictured a great “rucksack revolution.” Millions of Americans on the move, traveling to mountains to pray, making old people and young people happy. Just a great big bunch of Zen lunatics in motion, spreading wildness with their steps. That was 1958. Had his prophecy come to pass? Nicole felt keenly that they’d missed something important by being born when they had. Battles had already been fought and lost. Kids had been dressing as hippies for Halloween for years.
She read about the girls in these books, simpering, foolish, half-naked. The girls were there for spice, Kerouac wrote.
Where were the girl wanderers? Where were the girl lunatics?
And if it was late enough, the thought of running away would lie out before them on the table like some rare artifact discovered buried under the house. They’d paw around it, look at every angle. Where. When. And they’d all get quiet, imagining.
It got to be just her and Jules and Eddie more and more—Colin overwhelmed by SAT test prep, Jon joining the swim team and actually becoming popular, Holly impatient with all of them. They were going nowhere, she said. They weren’t revolutionaries; they were wastoids. She delivered this pronouncement one night and then vanished from their lives.
Once Jules took her to his dad’s because he had forgotten his wallet. He asked her to wait in the car and left her parked in front of a small brick colonial with a fallen-in chimney. The lawn was covered with dead leaves and fallen brush, untouched since the fall.
Jules was strict in showing her only careful, regimented portions of his life. Well, enough of that, she thought. She got out of the car and pushed open the kitchen door.
Pots were in a jumble across the counter, with mail, papers, old receipts scattered in loose piles. One cabinet hung by a hinge. A drawer gaped ajar, the silverware inside scattered randomly.
“You’re new,” said a voice behind her. She turned quickly; a tall, bearded man with Jules’s cheekbones and his shell-shaped ears was leaning on the counter.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m with Jules. You must be his dad.”
She offered her hand, but he didn’t take it. “Yeah, I’m Jules’s dad.”
Jules came downstairs with his wallet. “Dad, this is Nicole,” he said. Standing wary.
“We’ve met.” His father picked up the beer bottle on the counter and swallowed. “So where are you going tonight? When will I see you? In a week or two?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. I always am.”
“Whatever.” He drained the bottle and tossed it into a bin with a crash. “Watch out for this one, Nicole. You seem like one of these nice girls. His mother warned me not to take him, but—” He threw up his hands. “Here we are.”
In the car, Jules opened and closed his hands on the steering wheel. “See? See why I didn’t want you to meet him?”
She didn’t know what to say: the dim kitchen, its disarray, his father’s cold disregard felt ominous. She knew what her mother would say: this was no kind of home; they were not the right sort of people.
But she could feel only compassion for Jules. “You wanted me to see him. Otherwise you wouldn’t have taken me tonight.”
“I don’t know. I guess. I guess I wanted you to see—”
“What you’re up against?”
“No. Where I’m coming from.” He smiled. “You can’t change where you come from. It’ll always be a part of you. And I come from nothing good.”
When she got home that night, she hugged her father, who was sitting in the den. She wanted to crawl into his lap as if she were still a little girl. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She couldn’t raise his suspicions any further. “I’m fine.”
Later that week she saw Jules with the drama girl, the one he had said was still his girlfriend. They were standing in the parking lot of her school by his car, kissing. She stopped with her armful of books, feeling suddenly small and foolish. She’d been warned, but somehow it hadn’t been real until this moment. Was she one of many?
When he called two days later to meet, she walked to the corner in the twilight but wouldn’t get in the car. “Give me a good reason to go with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. I saw you. With your other girl.”
He smiled and stretched back in his seat. “Julie, you mean. You saw us.”
She had expected angry denials or pleading apologies, not this smirking self-assurance. “So you want to tell me what the hell you were doing?”
“I told you I had a girlfriend.”
“So—what am I?”
“You know. You’re my girl. Friend. My girl friend.”
“Oh. I see.” Her mind worked furiously. It seemed like the only thing to do was walk away. She did, fast, heading home.
She heard the car door slam. “Nicole, wait.” She didn’t pause. “Nicole.” His hand on her shoulder.
She turned, furious. “What do you want? You think I can just put up with that? Be one of your many girls?”
“I thought you were cool.” He sounded hurt. But he was teaching her a lesson as well. Don’t you understand what being cool really means? What de
tachment really is? Don’t you see that you’ve got to take whatever comes with a mixture of equanimity and disdain? Was this a Buddhist thought or just a teenage boy’s?
She looked up at him. “I guess it’s harder than I thought.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well, you can date other people, too. I get that. That’s how it works.”
“Yeah.” She knew she wouldn’t.
“Come on.” He shepherded her to the car. She put the seat back and he climbed on top of her, but they couldn’t manage to make things work. The back seat was full of Eddie’s dirty laundry and a case of beer. They squirmed and cursed for a few minutes more; then Jules slid into the driver’s seat. “Let’s go somewhere.”
They cruised through town for a while, scanning the buildings for opportunities. Break into the library? A park bench? Each suggestion seemed more depraved than the last. Finally they returned to the woods and crawled up the pine-needled hill to where the lights were farthest. This time, though, the ground was cold and hard; dirt slipped into her clothes. The things she’d been willing to overlook before were too real now. The next day she’d find herself covered in scratches from tree bark and pine needles, and have to invent a story for her father involving a trip to the park, hide-and-seek, a fall down a hill.
Still, it was exciting. Driving back home sore and silent, Jules’s hand on hers. The game they were playing: I won’t care if you won’t.
Julie, the drama girl, was always starring in the school’s latest production of West Side Story or Guys and Dolls. Her bright, heart-shaped face shone in the lights, her voice making up in robust volume for what it lacked in tone. She wore argyle sweater vests and little short skirts. High white socks and pink scrunchies. There was a different polish on her nails every day. Nicole noted the changing colors: orange, saffron, turquoise, maroon.
One Saturday when she was walking through Waban, she saw Julie ahead of her on the sidewalk. Julie stepped into the ice cream parlor, and without hesitation Nicole followed.
The parlor was crowded, and from several groups away Nicole sat and watched her order one scoop of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. Normally drama girl was never alone, always the type to travel in packs. She coasted confident and queenly through the school, magnanimous to the little others. But here she was, quietly staving off her melting ice cream cone in a sweatshirt. Did she eat ice cream only when she was alone? Maybe her crowd tolerated only fat-free frozen yogurt. Why else would she be eating alone here with no one to adore her? Maybe her life wasn’t as airy and wonderful as it appeared.