by Anne Cushman
Bound Angle Pose
(Baddha Konasana)
Sit on the ground and place your soles together, letting your knees fall out to the sides. Clasp your toes with your hands. Drop your heart toward the opening book of your feet.
Don’t force yourself open. Wait for your unwinding core to invite you in. Release the dense, stubborn tissues that hold you bone to bone. Sense the soft organs that float inside the protective shell of your skeleton. Hear your body start to sing in its ancient language of sensation and emotion. Begin to excavate the relics of memory buried deep in this city of muscle, nerves, and bones.
Your body is made of stories. And with every breath, you will learn that the present is made of the past.
Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.
—Swami Sivananda (1887–1963)
CHAPTER 3
THE FIRST STEP in going on a spiritual pilgrimage, as it turns out, is buying a whole lot of very expensive gear.
“Now this backpack,” said the salesperson at REI, an aggressively athletic young woman with a blonde ponytail and a baked-on tan, “has a built-in water pouch. You don’t even have to take the backpack off to take a drink—you just sip through this retractable straw. And for an additional forty-nine dollars, you can add a filtration system that will remove microbes down to .2 microns.”
I was standing in the backpack section, looking at packs: packs with wheels, packs with zip-off daypacks, packs with steel security cables. They had special pockets for water bottles, sunscreens, sunglasses, snacks, iPods, cell phones, rain gear, cosmetics, travel guitars. I could feel my travel expense budget melting away like a popsicle in the tropical sun. “I mainly just want something very light,” I said. “I’m going to have enough to carry already—I’m researching a book.”
Her eyes lit up. “This one has a zip-off protective computer shuttle with its own shoulder strap. And there are holes in the back to plug in for Internet access, if you happen to be somewhere your AirPort card doesn’t work.” She eyed me speculatively. “Have you thought about bringing a satellite phone or a GPS unit?”
“It’s not like I’ll be climbing Everest.” I was starting to feel defensive: Why wasn’t I climbing Everest? “There are phones at all the ashrams. Even email.”
I should know. For the past few weeks I’d been surfing the websites of ashrams that seemed like they were straight from the days of the Mahabharata, aside from their Internet access. The sites described swamis who could manifest gold watches out of thin air, bury themselves alive in airtight coffins, stand for days in pits of blazing fire. They described rivers so holy that a dip in their waters washed away generations of bad karma, hills so sacred that a walk around them guaranteed a royal rebirth.
I’d already bought my roundtrip ticket to Delhi, leaving in just over a week. Maxine was in a hurry: She wanted to get the guidebook out in time to catch the yoga wave, before everyone moved on to pole dancing. My head was starting to throb. I stared at my list: Mosquito net. Water bottle. Fanny pack. Passport belt. Suitcase lock. Walking sandals. Hiking boots. Travel yoga mat. Inflatable meditation cushion. Melatonin (for jet lag). Grapefruit seed extract (a guy in my yoga class swore that a few drops of it would kill intestinal bugs). Spirulina (“The hardest thing to get over there is green vegetables that aren’t boiled to a pulp, and believe me, you do not want to be eating the salad”). Probiotics capsules. Vaccinations against tetanus, polio, hepatitis. A sleep sack to protect against filthy mattresses. An inflatable Therm-a-Rest pillow. Water purification drops. A water filter. Earplugs. A face mask. A wide-brimmed sun hat. A rain poncho. In short, hundreds of dollars worth of gear designed to protect me from the place Maxine was spending a couple of thousand more dollars to get me to.
Two days ago, I’d waited in line for two hours at the Indian consulate to get a visa, only to arrive at the counter just as the man with the rubber stamps closed it for his lunch break. Who takes lunch at 10:30? “Back in one hour,” he informed me cheerfully; but when I returned at exactly 11:35, a note on the door informed me that the office was “closed for Raksha Bandhan.” Whatever that was: A meal? A holiday? A ritual? A disease? Not tonight dear, I’ve got Raksha Bandhan.
I could feel the pressure building at the top of my skull. I still hadn’t found someone to sublet my room. I hadn’t had time to do yoga for a week. My neck muscles were tied into knots and I was having trouble taking a deep breath. And now I was supposed to deliberate the advantages of a teal versus a periwinkle backpack.
“I’ll take this one.” I grabbed a random pack. “And a mosquito net.” I heaved the pack on top of my already heaped shopping cart and pushed it toward the checkout line. If I didn’t get out of there fast I was going to punch someone in the face.
IT WAS ODD that I found myself working as a travel guide writer, because I’d never really liked to travel. When I was a child, other kids fantasized about flying spaceships to distant galaxies. I fantasized about having a friend that I’d known for more than a year. But my mother’s restlessness hurled us up and down the West Coast in search of a place that would make her forget her disappointment in the way her life had turned out. She’d be happy, for a while, in each new home. She’d make gallant gestures toward domesticity—buying huge rolls of contact paper and papering half the kitchen drawers; painting my bedroom “any color you want, sweetie. But please, nothing pastel. Pastels are so trite.” When we moved to San Diego, when I was nine, she bought half a dozen fruit trees, which she brought home in the back of her Toyota hatchback, their root-balls wrapped in muddy brown burlap. “In a few years we’ll have homegrown apricots!” she crowed. We spent a happy Saturday afternoon shoveling holes in our front lawn and dropping the saplings into them. But she had neglected to consult a gardener, who undoubtedly would have informed her that June is not the optimal time for planting fruit trees. Within a couple of dry summer months, the trees were dead, their leaves dropping away despite our sporadic attempts at watering them. And with them died my mother’s enthusiasm for her secretarial job in a real estate office. By the times the winter rains hit, we were heading north up Route 1 to Santa Cruz, where she planned to finish her undergraduate art degree—a dream that, like most of her visions, never materialized.
Perhaps because of this rootless childhood, I grew up with no sense of direction. I got on northbound buses when I wanted to go south, drove the wrong way up one-way streets. I knew the delicate thread of streets that stretched between familiar destinations—say, the Bookends Café and The Blissful Body. But if I got thrown off course—a detour, some road construction, a wrong turn—I was lost. Coasting down a San Francisco hill on my bike, I was often astounded to see the bay appearing in front of me, with the Golden Gate Bridge rearing up in a place I’d never expected it.
Two years ago I had stumbled into the For Idiots work the way I did all my jobs—randomly. I’d been dog walking for a woman named Patricia, a forty-five-year-old graphic designer from New York City who’d been lured to San Francisco by a romance with an aspiring writer twenty years younger she’d met at publishing conference. She’d moved in with him in an apartment on Russian Hill and gotten him a gig writing guidebooks for her older sister, an editor in Manhattan. But I came home one day from running Patricia’s two collies in Golden Gate Park to find her lover in the driveway loading his furniture into a U-Haul. He had decided that he was gay, he told me, and that he would rather be a sculptor than a writer anyway. Upstairs, Patricia was on the phone, trying to appease her sister’s wrath by finding someone else to finish off the guidebook he’d been working on, Sea Kayaking for Idiots. “Didn’t you say you wanted to be a writer?” she’d asked me, the receiver still pressed to her ear.
“Well, yes—but I was thinking more of novels. Poetry, maybe. Or a screenplay. And besides, I get seasick.”
“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “All the research is done. It’s just a m
atter of writing it up.” And before I knew it, I was working for Maxine.
LORI WAS WAITING for me in the parking lot in front of REI, sitting behind the wheel of her bright green VW Bug, the trunk already cracked open so I could load my purchases. She’d offered to meet me and give me a ride home so I wouldn’t have to lug everything on BART. Normally, I insisted on being self-sufficient, so that the contrast between my life and hers wouldn’t be too overpowering, but this time I’d accepted gratefully.
“Tampons,” she said as I got into the car. “Don’t forget to bring a huge supply of tampons. I hear they’re hard to get once you get out of the big cities. And contact lens solution. Oh, and condoms.”
“Lori, I’m going to be meditating and practicing yoga in celibate ashrams.” I pulled the door shut. “I’m not going to need condoms.”
“Famous last words.” Lori pulled out of the parking lot. “I remember when you went on an all-women’s breast cancer bike-a-thon and ended up needing condoms.”
“What was I then, nineteen? I was an idiot.”
She pulled up to a light and stopped, looking at me and raising her eyebrows. “And your point is?”
An ayurvedic doctor once told me that my friendship with Lori worked because we were so different that our energies balanced each other out. I was vata and pitta, he told me—wind and fire—with a wiry frame, flyaway curls, and a tendency to stay up all night worrying about whether I looked stupid when I danced. Lori was kapha—earth—with the plump body, cheery temperament, and bossy efficiency of a sparrow.
Our friendship had survived every obstacle imaginable, including the fact that she had been in a committed, monogamous relationship since she was twenty-one. For the past five years, she and Joe had been sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the Sunset, jointly running a small organic landscaping business called New Leaf, their rare conflicts centering around things like where in their tiny backyard to put the compost heap and whose turn it was to enter the receipts into QuickBooks.
Now she reached for the CDs in the flap on her car visor and popped one into the CD player. A Mozart piano concerto began to play, its notes as ordered and efficient as Lori herself. “So. Have you told Matt you’re leaving yet?”
“You know I’m not speaking to Matt.” I looked out the window.
“Besides, he’s in London.”
“Well, good. Keep it that way. The moment he gets wind of the fact that you’re not just sitting here waiting for him, he’ll be all over you in a minute.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“It is that simple.” Lori shook her head in exasperation. “When will you ever learn? Guys are simple.”
“And when will you ever learn? For me, they’re not.”
This is something that Lori never understood: For me, men were a foreign language that I learned too late in life to be fluent. I grew up as an only child, shy and brainy, a year too young for my grade, with thick-rimmed glasses and a mouthful of silver braces. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder if they switched you in the hospital for someone else’s baby,” my mother would sigh, shaking her sleek blonde head as she wrestled a comb through my frizzy curls. While the other girls in my junior high were sprouting breasts and dating college lifeguards they told their mothers were sixteen, I was in the library reading Pride and Prejudice and fantasizing about Mr. Darcy. In high school, alone at home on a Saturday night, I would imagine that someday I would have a relationship with a blind man, who would love me undistracted by my long nose and unruly hair. I pictured our relationship in intimate detail: the way his fingers would caress my face, the close friendship I would develop with his seeing eye dog.
My first month in college all of that changed. Adopting puppies from the pound, it turned out, was one of Lori’s passions. She took one look at her scrawny, anxious roommate and saw a border collie mix who needed a bath and a good brushing. She dragged me to the optometrist for contact lenses; untied my tangle of curls from its tight ponytail and got it cut so it flew in a dark cloud around my face. She taught me which jeans made my hips look slim, which shirts brought out the golden flecks in my brown eyes.
To my astonishment, her remodel worked—although not in quite the way that she had envisioned. Lori had been hoping I would sail into a safe port in the stormy world of romance, like the one she anchored in with Joe. Instead, I began a series of affairs that went nowhere. I collected boyfriends as if my brief, overheated encounters with them could protect me from relapsing into the person I used to be. I went out with an artist, a dancer, a fisherman. For a few weeks I slept with a juggler from the Pickle Family Circus, in the tiny back bedroom of the apartment he shared with a trapezist, a clown, and a pair of equilibre artists who practiced their balancing acts in the kitchen.
I told myself I wanted a serious relationship. But in fact, I mainly dated men with whom there was a built-in limitation: They were leaving town in a few days. They had another girlfriend. They secretly preferred men. This way, I had an excuse for keeping them on the other side of an invisible glass wall in my heart—a wall that, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, it felt vitally important to keep in place.
But Matt was different. With Matt, the wall had come down: perhaps because I sensed that ultimately, he was the most unavailable of all of them.
Matt had told me early on that he was philosophically opposed to marriage. “A social convention that’s only recently been linked to romantic love,” he said, as we lay side by side in bed one Sunday morning. “Through most of history, it had more to do with the transfer of property and inheritance. These days, most of them end in divorce, anyway. And the ones that don’t, you can tell just by looking at the people that they don’t love each other any more.”
“But don’t you think there’s something beautiful about promising to always be there for someone, no matter what?”
“When you wake up next to someone, do you want it to be because they promised they’d be there, whether they liked it or not? Or because that’s where they really want to be?”
When I got to know him a little better, he told me that his earliest memory was of his father slashing his mother’s car tires so she couldn’t drive to Tahoe to go skiing with her lover; then his mother breaking his windshield with Matt’s stroller before storming off down the sunny Southern California street in her snow boots. Trying to run after her, Matt cut his foot, and his father had to take him to the emergency room. He still had the scar, which he showed me; a two-inch white band on the sole of his foot, which hurt when the weather got damp.
Matt divided the rest of his childhood between two homes: his mother’s commune in Los Angeles, where she was a pioneer in the swinger’s movement and eventually wrote a free-love manual called Your First Few Hundred that landed her on Johnny Carson; and his father’s mansion in San Diego, where he spent most of his time with a series of Mexican nannies while his father successfully defended the rights of large oil companies to drill selectively in designated wilderness areas. His father had died of a heart attack when Matt was twenty-two; his mother, now in her sixties, still lived in a nudist community near Las Vegas and on principle still only wore clothes when she left the compound, which meant that Matt met her mainly in restaurants, preferably pricey vegetarian ones.
My marital models weren’t much better. My mother had bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend: Sy, a melancholy salesman of high-end hospital equipment; Burt, an unemployed contractor who made blueberry pancakes for us every morning; Jeremy, who owned the Laundromat where we washed our clothes. They all dropped away after a year or so. My mother said it was because they couldn’t handle the stress of dating a single mom. But I always suspected it was because they couldn’t compete with the memory of my father, whom she had eliminated so rigorously from daily conversation that I knew she must still be in love with him.
But unlike Matt, I still believed in marriage. I believed in it the way, as a child, I had continued to believe in the Easter Bunny long after the evidence had
piled up to the contrary.
Only once had I managed to shake off Matt’s spell for a little while. It was almost three years ago, when Matt was in Peru shooting photos for a book about ayahuasca, and drinking lots of it. I was getting emails from him every few weeks, ranting about gateways to another universe and how I should meet him there—whether “there” meant Peru or the other universe was always unclear. At the recommendation of my therapist, I had gone to a bookstore to pick up a copy of Women Who Love Too Much. I was standing in the self-help section, browsing through it. “Being women who love too much, we operate as though love, attention, and approval don’t count unless we are able to extract them from men who, because of their own problems and preoccupations, are unable to give them to us,” I read.
Suddenly, the shelves began shaking, books tumbling to the ground in a cascade of suddenly irrelevant advice. Along with the other customers, I bolted out onto the sidewalk and stood there, breathless, waiting to see what happened.
“Just a tremor,” said the guy in a business suit standing next to me. He was short, not much taller than me, with receding blond hair and a pleasant, open face. We smiled at each other, caught in the instant, illusory intimacy of people who have escaped disaster together, if only in their imaginations. The bookshop collapsed to a heap of rubble…It took them days to dig us out from under the bricks…“It’s probably safe to go back in.”
“I don’t know. Personally, I’m not willing to risk death to get a book.”
When he laughed, I realized that he was younger than I had thought. “Looks like you brought yours with you, just in case.” He gestured to the paperback I clutched in my hand. “Do you? Love too much, I mean?”
“Not really too much. But probably too long.” Lori always told me that I’d hung onto Matt long after I should have dumped him, the way I kept leftovers sitting in the fridge until they were so disgusting I could throw them away without guilt. I looked at the book he was holding: The Wine Lover’s Guide to Cheese. His fingers were curled loosely on the cover, nails clipped into perfect half-moons over pink fingertips. “And are you? A wine lover, I mean?”