Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  NONFICTION BY ANNE CUSHMAN

  From Here to Nirvana

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Anne Cushman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cushman, Anne.

  Enlightenment for idiots : a novel / by Anne Cushman.

  p. cm.

  1. Americans—India—Fiction. 2. Pregnant women—Fiction. 3. Yoga—Fiction. 4. India—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.U824E55 2008

  813'.6—dc22    2007040268

  ISBN 9780307381651

  Ebook ISBN 9780307407443

  v3.0_r1

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY ANNE CUSHMAN

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READING GROUP GUIDE TO ENLIGHTENMENT FOR IDIOTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Kathleen

  PROLOGUE

  Step on your mat.

  Let a river of breath sweep your arms overhead and then fold you forward, your spine pouring from your pelvis in a waterfall of muscle and bone.

  Lie on your back with the soles of your feet together and your knees winged out to the side, your tender belly exposed.

  Curl on the floor in a fetal position, a seed under frozen earth.

  Each of these yoga poses will lead inevitably to another, each one blossoming out of the one before in a rippling wave. So where you end up will be, in some way, bound to the place you started. Don’t try to separate beginnings from endings. Your last pose will have your first pose buried within it, if you look deeply enough.

  WHEN MY MOTHER was six months pregnant with me, my father walked out the door and never came back. That’s pretty much all I know about him; all I need to know, my mother says. She doesn’t like to talk about him; the few times I got up the nerve to ask, her face shut down like an iron gate clanging shut. “Not everybody has a daddy,” she used to tell me when I came home from preschool and asked where mine was. “Daddies are optional.” “He was very young,” she’d say when I got older. “We both were. He just wasn’t ready to grow up yet.”

  There were no pictures of him in our scrapbooks or displayed around our home—more precisely, around any of our homes, because we moved every couple of years, trying to find a job or a city or an apartment or a boyfriend that could make my mother happy. But once, snooping around in my mother’s wallet trying to find a dollar for a candy bar, I came across a folded snapshot tucked behind an expired library card. There was my mother, impossibly young, standing on a boardwalk by the ocean beside a boy with a crooked grin and a tangle of dark curls exactly like mine. His arm was around her, but he was looking in the other direction, out to sea. She was leaning into him, tiny and blonde. She didn’t look anything like me. But even at nine years old, I recognized that her expression was mine: happy but guarded, afraid to lean into the joy and trust it to catch her. Knowing that any minute, it could be snatched away.

  I never told her I found the photo. I never told her something else, either: that it isn’t true that my father left and never came back. I carry a memory around with me, as creased and hidden as my mother’s snapshot. In this memory I am very young—I couldn’t be more than three, because we were still living in the studio apartment in Los Angeles where my father had left us. It was the middle of the night. My bed was under a window in a tiny alcove off the kitchen. I woke up from a dream of a field of pumpkins growing bigger and bigger all around me, to the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the clock and the urgent sense that someone had just been calling my name. I sat up, pulled aside the corner of the curtain, and peeked through the window into pooled moonlight and tree shadows black as spilled ink. My father was standing in the driveway below, looking at the house. Although I’d never seen him, I knew instantly who it was. But I just sat there, hidden in the shadows, watching him look up at the blank eyes of the windows. I had the feeling that if I just pulled back the curtain and stepped into the light where he could see me, he would reach out his arms to me. He would come inside, and he would not be able to go away again. But I didn’t move. After a long time, he turned away. He walked to a pickup truck on the other side of the street, got in, and drove off with no lights on.

  I NEVER TELL this to anyone. But sometimes I think that this story is the pose that’s buried within all the poses that came after.

  The student of hatha yoga should practice in a solitary place, in a temple or a hermitage, an arrow-shot away from rocks, water, and fire. The hermitage should have a small door and no windows. It should be level with the ground and have no holes in the walls. It should be neither too high nor too long, and clean and free from insects. It should be laid daily with cow dung.

  —Hatha Yoga Pradipika, ca. AD 1400

  CHAPTER 1

  MY CELL PHONE RANG at 6:27 a.m., ripping me out of a nightmare in which I was teaching a yoga class wearing only a bra and panties.

  “Amanda? Maxine here,” snapped a voice that was not the one I was hoping for. Strange how the fantasy—maybe it’s Matt—could hijack my mind before I was even awake. I squinted blearily at the glowing red numbers on the clock. Oh, damn. I must have slept through my alarm. In exactly thirty-three minutes I was supposed to be at The Blissful Body Yoga Studio, substitute teaching the Monday Rise and Shine class. The regular teacher had called me late last night, croaking with laryngitis; I knew that I was probably seventh or eighth on her list, but still, for an aspiring yoga teacher, not even certified yet, subbing for this class was a rare honor. And here I had almost slept right through it.

  “Oh, hello, Maxine.” I tried to sound as professional as possible as I scrambled out of the tangled sheets and began groping around on the floor for my yoga pants. Of course it wasn’t Matt; I’d told Matt I never wanted to speak to him again. Maxine was my editor at Bigday Books, the publishers of the For Idiots: Guides to No-Risk Adventure series, which Maxine hoped would put her mark on the publishing industry. Her book contracts were helping me pay my way—barely—through my yoga teacher training, which I was counting on to launch me into a Right Livelihood career in which I never again had to dodge calls from credit card collection agencies. I switched on t
he overhead, scrunching my eyes against the light. “What can I do for you?”

  “I have a very important question for you.” That wasn’t surprising; all Maxine’s questions were very important. And almost all of them came extremely early in the morning. Bigday was based in Manhattan, and Maxine believed that “Pacific standard time” was just another excuse used by California writers to justify their chronic lack of work ethic.

  “Lay it on me.” I picked up a turquoise camisole and sniffed the underarms.

  “Amanda, what do you know about enlightenment?”

  “About what?” I was pulling the shirt over my head as she spoke; the phone must have slipped. Maxine couldn’t have just asked me about enlightenment. I had cranked out two manuscripts for her in the last eighteen months. The first one, RV Camping for Idiots, had forced me to spend my entire August traveling in a rented Winnebego from state park to state park, sandwiched each night between families with screaming toddlers watching Dora the Explorer on portable televisions. The second one—The California Winecountry for Idiots—had been particularly problematic given that I was in the middle of a yoga teacher training program in which the instructor had advocated drinking nothing but lemon water with cayenne and maple syrup. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “En-light-en-ment.” Her voice radiated impatience. “I know you’re into this whole yoga craze. So tell me: What is enlightenment?”

  “Well…” 6:31. Would anyone notice if my socks didn’t match?

  “As I understand it, enlightenment is a state of blissful awareness that’s not dependent on any external circumstances.” I tucked the phone in the crook of my neck and tugged a comb through my hair until it snagged, then gave up. “It’s the understanding that you’re not separate from anything else in the universe: the trees, the sun, the—”

  “Okay, I get it. My question is, is this something that people are looking for?”

  “Well, sure, I guess so. Some people, anyway.” I grabbed my rolled-up yoga mat and held the phone to my ear as I went down the creaking stairs, speaking softly so as not to wake up my housemate. Ishtar was annoyed enough about living with a writer; she claimed that when I worked my mental vibrations seeped through the wall into her bedroom, disrupting her meditations on global harmony. In retaliation, whenever I sat down at my iBook she had begun playing her tablas and singing hymns to the Earth Goddess with great hostility and volume. “I mean, it’s really the whole point of the yoga practice. It’s—”

  “So where would people go to get it?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you have to go anywhere.” Even I knew that. The books filled two whole rows in my bedside bookshelf, all with the same optimistic message: Be Here Now; Wherever You Go, There You Are; Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. “You can find it anywhere, like in the sound of a bell ringing, or a butterfly flapping its—”

  “A-man-da??” It was her ominous voice, the one that told me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be working at Starbucks again. “I’m talking about travel that involves No-Risk Adventure.”

  “Well, if you had to go somewhere—India, I guess. I mean, that’s where yoga came from.” I grabbed my battered mountain bike from the front hall and wheeled it out the door into a swirl of morning fog mixed with the salty wind off the San Francisco Bay. I groped for a metaphor she would relate to. “It’s like going to Paris to buy your clothes, versus just getting them at Target.”

  “So if we wanted to do a book about this yoga thing that really set us apart from the competitors—something a cut above all this Yoga for This and Yoga for That—we should send our writer to India to get enlightened. Am I correct?”

  I slung my legs over my bike. My ancient Honda had died a few months ago—the engine finally seized up at 185,000 miles—and I hadn’t been able to afford a new one. And with my credit cards run up the way they were—charging yoga workshops, teacher trainings, an occasional dose of Xanax—no one would give me a loan. “Yes. I’d say that’s correct.” If I pedaled hard, I could still be there on time.

  “Ah.” She sounded supremely satisfied. “So, Amanda. This is my concept. We send you to India. You track down this enlightenment thing, tell our readers all the places they can go to get it. We cover your expenses. When you find it, you come back, and as soon as you write the book, you’ll get the rest of the advance.”

  “Um…” I was feeling a bit slow on the uptake. I coasted down the hill, past the rows of Victorians with their windows still shuttered. I’d been dreaming for years of going to India. Was Maxine actually offering to send me there to write…to write…“What is the book I’m supposed to write, exactly?”

  Maxine let out a sigh. “Amanda. Have you not been listening to me? The book is ‘Enlightenment for Idiots.’ Are you on board with this? Or do I need to find someone else?”

  Yoga is the cessation of the turning of thought.

  —The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, ca. 200 BC

  CHAPTER 2

  INHALING, SWEEEEEP YOUR arms to the side and overhead. Exhaling, foooold forward from the hips.” I stood at the front of the yoga studio, gazing out at the faces of thirteen students and an intimidating panel of floor-to-ceiling mirrors that reflected their pastel bottoms back at me as they folded into their forward bends. “Let your body ride on the waves of your breath like seaweed on the ocean.”

  I hoped I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. I’d been in a teacher-training program for almost a year and a half, but I’d only taught a handful of real classes, and I still felt like a fraud whenever I did. I was afraid that the students would be able to see straight through my paper-thin facade of serenity to the realities of my life: a stressed-out twenty-nine-year-old galloping toward thirty with a broken-down car, no savings account, no career, and a kite’s tail of failed relationships flapping in the breeze behind her.

  “Exhale, step back into Plank Pose. Inhale, opening the heart into Upward Dog.” My pretense of peace wasn’t helped by the fact that my mind was churning over my conversation with Maxine. India! I can study yoga with the greatest living masters. I’ll live so simply, so spiritually, carrying everything I need in my backpack. But first I have to buy a backpack. And an ultralight travel yoga mat. And some new yoga clothes, something that won’t wrinkle, maybe some of those rayon pants with Hindu gods printed on their butts. “Exhaling, press back to Downward Dog, and take five long, steady breaths. Feel the line of energy from your palms out through your sitting bones.” Wait till I tell Matt. He’ll be so jealous. Oh, right, I’m not talking to Matt. I’ll get enlightened, then he’ll be sorry. He’ll want to sleep with me and I’ll just smile and say, ‘I’ll always love you, but I’m really beyond all that now.’ Or maybe we will sleep together, just one time. It will be a tantric kind of thing, not just physical. I pressed into Downward Dog myself to demonstrate, looked back at my thighs, and realized that I had put on my yoga pants inside out. The long seam ran ragged and obvious down the inside of my thigh. There was probably a tag hanging out right above my tailbone.

  I HAD STARTED doing yoga almost five years earlier, a couple of years after I graduated from San Francisco State with a BA in Creative Writing, $37,000 in student loan debt, and no discernible job-related skills. I had just moved into a shared house in the lower Haight, where I was writing and rewriting the first three paragraphs of a novel while working a collection of odd jobs—waitress, dog walker, pizza deliverer, nanny—at which I was uniformly mediocre. It was my best friend, Lori, who dragged me to my first yoga class, held in a studio a few blocks away from Golden Gate Park. “It will make you less uptight,” she’d told me. “I’m not uptight,” I had argued, folding my fingers into my palms so my bitten nails wouldn’t show. But because Lori had been for years the sanest person in my life—ever since I walked into my freshman dorm room and found her tucking her sheets into crisp corners on her bed—I went to class with her.

  Ropes dangled from metal hooks on one wall. I lay on a hardwood floor with my spine draped over a bolst
er, my legs strapped together, canvas sandbags weighting my groin. “Draw your tailbone toward your pubic bone,” the teacher commanded. “Soften your armpits toward your shoulder blades and draw the inner borders of your shoulder blades down your spine. Let your brain drop down toward the upper palate of your mouth.” There was something immensely comforting in the precision of the instructions: a roll call for my body, letting me know that everything was there, reporting to duty.

  I began going to class every day, sometimes twice a day. I went to classes in every style: The cautious, precise Iyengar classes, with their arsenal of blocks and straps and sandbags and metal folding chairs to protect students from the perils of a misaligned Triangle Pose. The feel-good Sivananda classes, with candles and incense and Indian kirtans crooning in the background. The Kundalini classes, with a wild-eyed, turbaned teacher who taught us to snort Breath of Fire and churn our bellies like washing machines.

  Within about a year, I found my way into the hard-core group: the 7 a.m. Ashtanga class. Six mornings a week I’d ride my bike down the still-empty city streets, ski jacket zipped over my yoga clothes, the wind biting my ears. The studio windows would be closed, the air thick with sandalwood incense, the heat blasting—to simulate the climate in India, said the teacher, a small, stern, incongruously busty woman with military posture and knotted ropes of muscles standing out in her bare arms and legs. We’d step to the front of our mats, draw our palms together at our hearts, and chant in Sanskrit like Hindu priests in jewel-toned workout clothes: Vande gurunam charanara vinde…Then we’d sweep our arms overhead and swan-dive into our practice, our breath hissing like surf in the backs of our throats.

  Our mats grew slick with sweat; the windows fogged with steam. I wrestled my legs behind my neck, balanced upside down on my forearms with my toes straining toward the crown of my head, dropped back from standing into a punishing backbend, hands groping at my heels. After class, my body tingled, throbbed, and glowed. Sometimes, later, I’d find bruises on my arms and legs from the pressure of bone against flesh. I would sneak glances at them throughout the day with a secret thrill, like bruises left after a night of hot sex.