Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  Later that day, my throat began to hurt, and when I instinctively reached up to feel it, I encountered glands that had swollen to the size of robin’s eggs. I remembered friends describing the symptoms of mononucleosis and suspected that was what I had. If so, I was going to need help soon. I’d need to get penicillin and have total bed rest, neither of which I could accomplish on my own. It was with some relief that I realized I was going to have to go home to my family.

  I gathered my strength, sat up, stepped out of bed, and slowly made my way down the steps and into the kitchen to the phone. I was sweating from the exertion. I dialed my parents’ number and collapsed onto a kitchen chair. As I waited for someone to answer, I looked around the kitchen and thought about all of the things needing to be packed and moved, supposedly that day. I hadn’t done a thing about arranging it all. Clearly I wouldn’t be able to play any part in it. I was vaguely wondering what I would do, when my mother picked up the phone. I said hello.

  “What’s wrong with your voice?” she said. “You sound terrible!”

  I told her how I was feeling and how long I’d felt that way.

  “Then you’d better come right home, young man. Good heavens! Living in that big house all by yourself. You could have died and we wouldn’t have known about it. I’ll be right down to pick you up.”

  Good old Mom. Always prepared for a crisis. She was at her best when her children were sick.

  I managed to make it to the foot of the steps, but realized I’d never make it up them. I went into the living room and lay on the sofa, which was where my mother found me, twenty minutes later.

  “You kids! Your front door is wide open! Don’t you know someone could waltz right in here and rob you?”

  “They could come in the window, too, at this time of year, Mom,” I croaked.

  She was in no mood to be argued with, especially by a sick son.

  “You just be quiet, young man.”

  She rummaged around in her purse and came up with a blue plastic tube, from which she removed a thermometer. She shook down the mercury and put the thermometer under my tongue.

  “I’m going to go up to your room to get you some clothes.”

  I didn’t particularly want her poking around in my things, but I was in no position to argue. In a few minutes, she came back down with a pile of clothes in her arms.

  “It looks like a cyclone struck up there,” she said. “I thought I’d taught you kids to clean up after yourselves. I couldn’t find a suitcase. I’ll just take these out to the car and come back in to get you.”

  She went out the front door with her load and returned a few minutes later. She took the thermometer from my mouth and went over to the window to see it better in the light.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be moving out of here today? Who’s going to move all this furniture for you?”

  “I haven’t made any arrangements, yet.”

  She looked at me incredulously, the thermometer suspended in front of her face.

  “You haven’t made any arrangements? What have you been doing?”

  I could hardly tell her that I’d been depressed because my married lover had left town and, consequently, I’d been stoned for the last week and a half.

  “I’ve been sick,” I said.

  “I don’t care how sick you’ve been, you could have asked somebody to help you out. I don’t know how you kids can be so irresponsible.”

  She looked over the living room and dining room, assessing the amount of work that needed to be done.

  “I suppose your father and I and your brothers and sisters could move it for you. But we won’t be able to do it today. We’ll have to call your landlord and ask for more time. Do you have a place to put it all?”

  “No. But Claire and Tony gave me money to pay for storage, so we just have to call one of those places.”

  “Just call them up, the day before you want to store all this, huh? What if they don’t have room? What if they need more notice? You didn’t think about any of that, did you? You’re darn lucky you’ve got a family to take care of you. That’s all I have to say.”

  She looked back at the thermometer.

  “My goodness, you’ve got a hundred and three fever. Let’s get you home to bed. Your father and I will deal with the rest of this.”

  She got me home, and they did deal with the rest of it, quite efficiently, as a matter of fact. My father talked to the landlord, who gave him several extra days, because the demolition of the house wasn’t scheduled for another week. My mother found the least expensive storage company in town and paid the first month’s fee. The next night, my dad borrowed a public works truck through one of his old cronies and went over to the house with my mother, my brother George and a couple of his friends, and my sister Marion. They cleared out the furniture and took it to the storage bin, bringing home only leftover food and my clothing and personal effects.

  I was just as happy not to be a part of it all. It was a relief to have virtually every reminder of my life with Claire in storage. The illness, and the drug I was given for the pain of my mono-induced strep throat, helped me feel as if I’d put my feelings for Claire in storage, too. When I thought of her, it was as if I was looking down on her from high up in the sky, almost as if from outer space. I sensed that I had feelings for her, but they were distant feelings, like the pain in my throat, from which I felt utterly detached. It was as if they were someone else’s feelings and I was looking in on them, an interested but uninvolved observer.

  My family treated me with great tenderness. Dad never reprimanded me for the shoddy way I’d handled closing down the house. Mom always made sure I was comfortable and continually produced good food soft enough to be easy on my throat. George let me stay in my old bed, despite the fact that this kept him out of his own private room, which he’d inherited from me. This was extraordinarily generous of him, considering how long he’d had to wait to get a room of his own. He slept in the next bedroom with my little brother, Steven, who was thrilled to have me home.

  Steven was sensitive enough to my condition not to run into my room and throw himself on me every morning, the way he always had when I lived there, but he had a hard time staying away. Since he was starting to read more on his own, I often asked him to read to me, which made him very proud. Marion and Ruth came by often, too, and chatted with me or read to me from something a little closer to my tastes than the Dr. Seuss books Steven favored.

  After two weeks, I went off my painkillers. The physical pain had subsided, but the emotional pain came roaring back, filling the artificial void the drug had created in my psyche. I felt deeply loved by my family, but it suddenly came home to me full force that my old life was finished. I was going to have to start all over again, and I had no idea where to begin. Still feeling very weak, I couldn’t imagine exerting the energy it would take to accomplish a new start. I fell into a depression deeper than the one I’d experienced before my illness. I started pushing my brothers and sisters away from me as I sunk deeper and deeper into self-pity.

  It was George who made me realize I had to snap out of it. He had a way of making me see things in a different light. One day, he marched into my room as I lay on top of his bed, staring out the window, and dropped what looked like a cheap newsprint magazine on the bedspread beside me.

  “This is the fall class schedule for UWM. It just came in the mail. It’s time for you to sit up and figure out what you’re going to take this fall. And, by the way, you can start sleeping in Steven’s room tonight. You’re feeling better, now, and I want my room back.”

  He turned on his heels and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  “Go to hell,” I said under my breath.

  But, after a while, I started leafing through the catalogue aimlessly. When I came upon the theater section, my mind perked up. I’d always thought about taking a theater class, but had never done it. I read the description of a class called Theater Games:

  An excellent intro
duction to acting for the beginner. Various improvisational theater games are used to explore movement, motivation, intention, perception, action, and inter action on stage. No prerequisites.

  This stirred my imagination. I could see myself doing something like that, something creative and entirely new, something that had nothing to do with the life I’d been living for the past year, something that challenged me and brought new things out in me. Though I still felt very weak, I could envision the dim outline of the new life whose prospect had frightened me so much until then.

  I sat up and continued looking through the catalogue. I found a beginning dance class that sounded equally intriguing and would complement the theater work. Suddenly, I could envision an entire semester of exploring new subjects, a semester that would stretch my imagination. I found an introductory class on Astronomy and another on Existentialist philosophy. Before I knew it, I had found a pencil and was filling out the registration form. I felt like a man who had been lost at sea for weeks and had suddenly spied land. I asked George to mail the registration form that day, because I didn’t want to take a chance on not getting into the classes. He was happy to do it and proud of himself for getting me out of my self-involved stupor.

  Over the next two weeks, I got stronger, and by Labor Day, I was well enough to participate in a family reunion at a park overlooking Lake Michigan, near our house. My cousin Jerry was up from Chicago, the one who did transcendental meditation, and when he heard about my recent troubles, he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk and talk about it.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for an ear until I started telling him about the past year, about my involvement with Claire, about the frustration of my political activity, about my overindulgence in marijuana—all the things I didn’t feel comfortable talking to family about. It seemed as if nothing I’d done over the year had given me lasting satisfaction. As all of this poured out of me, I realized how empty I felt at the core. At various points, tears welled up in my eyes, but I was too self-conscious to let them go.

  Jerry listened calmly and attentively. Just his presence seemed to make me feel better. When I was finished, he told me in more detail than he ever had before about how transcendental meditation had changed his life. He’d been an engineering graduate student and all he’d thought about was grades. He was determined to be first in his class and get job offers from the best engineering firms in the country. He had a girlfriend, but he gave the relationship as little attention as he could get away with as he single-mindedly pursued straight A’s. It wasn’t until she left him that he realized what a stabilizing influence she’d been. He fell apart, physically and emotionally, his grades plummeted, and he was forced to reassess his whole life.

  It was then that a friend took him to a TM lecture. He was impressed by the calm demeanor of the teacher and by the fact that TM didn’t demand membership in a social cult of any sort. He decided he had nothing to lose and took the initial training. Immediately, his consciousness opened up. He found depths of creativity within himself that he never knew existed. He gave up engineering for architecture, excelled at that without having to obsess and, ironically, ended up first in his class, with offers to join the best architecture firms in the country. He chose a Chicago firm and, while working with a client during the first year, met his wife.

  It was exactly the kind of story I needed to hear at that point, a story of hope for the future. I decided on the spot that I would attend the first TM lecture I could get to at school, when the new semester started.

  For most people who attend school into early adulthood, fall is a time of fresh starts—especially in September, when summer is still in the air and the sight of falling leaves has not yet introduced bittersweet thoughts of dying light and cold weather. Having just returned to full health, the sense of a fresh start was palpable for me in the fall of 1970. Health alone was a great gift. The theater and dance classes made me more aware than ever of my body and helped distract my mind from thoughts of what I’d lost.

  Though not entirely. Claire wrote to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to write back. She sounded too happy in her own new world, though she said little about how she and Tony were getting along. Jonah was thriving in the sun and clamored daily to be taken to the beach. She was more than happy to take him. She hadn’t found a job, yet, but it was hard to worry about that in such a beautiful place. She kept promising to send pictures, but she never did. I was just as happy she didn’t. I wasn’t sure I could bear to see her, tanned and glowing in a bathing suit, with Jonah at her side. I still loved her and I wondered if she loved me.

  I was initiated into transcendental meditation on a crisp, sunny morning in early October, the day I turned twenty-one years old. I met my teacher at a suburban house in Shorewood, just north of the university, which was owned by a dedicated meditator. Like my cousin Jerry, I had found the simplicity of TM attractive and was ready to accept any kind of help that might straighten out my confused life.

  My teacher met me at the door and led me up the stairs to a second floor study, where she had set up a simple shrine on a small table. It had a photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, smiling blissfully through his graying beard, backed by vases of flowers. As instructed, I had brought a flower and piece of fruit, which the teacher took from me and presented to the image of the Maharishi in a simple ceremony before the shrine.

  Then we sat down in comfortable, straight chairs, facing one another, and closed our eyes. After a brief time, the teacher taught me my mantra, a few syllables developed over the centuries that have the effect of taking the mind to deeper levels of consciousness. I said the mantra out loud to myself a few times, then, as instructed, began to repeat it in my mind, which is how I was to do it ever after. For a brief time during this first session, I lost normal consciousness. It was not sleep. I know that. We all know what it feels like to doze off. But my mind went somewhere, someplace outside of where it usually functioned. And when it returned I felt utterly refreshed, as if my mind had been running nonstop since the day I was born and had finally had a chance to stop running momentarily. I felt lighter, happier, more centered.

  When the session was over, I thanked my teacher and she escorted me down the stairs to the front door, where I said goodbye to her. Then I opened the door and stepped outside. Sunlight hit me full in the face and bathed my body in warmth. It felt as if the light actually entered my body, my being, my core, and lit it up from inside. It was like some magical gold liquid that filled me up.

  I stood there with eyes closed, tears filling them. For the first time in months, perhaps years, I felt a true sense of hope. It wasn’t as if all my problems has been solved—I was still alone, still estranged from my family politically and spiritually, still without a job, still unclear about what I wanted to do with my life. But, for the first time in a long time, I believed that my life could get better, that it was possible to find love and purpose and meaning. I couldn’t remember having felt so happy to be alive for a long time. I could have stood in that spot for hours, until the sun fell behind the trees.

  But I didn’t want to. I wanted to move on. I wanted to engage life. I wanted to walk down the block and turn the corner, just to see what was around it. Instead of seeing life as a static state of uncertainty and anxiety, I had a glimpse of it as a great adventure that was unfolding before me and would continue to unfold in new and interesting ways as the years went by. I moved off the porch and onto the sidewalk and stepped into the future, whatever it might bring.

  About the Author

  Photo by Joseph A. Cohen

  Lawrence Kessenich is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, essayist, reviewer, and editor. He has published a number of short stories and won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. He has three books of poetry: Strange News, Before Whose Glory, and Age of Wonders, and he has had three poems featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has also published essays, one of which was featured on NPR’s This I Believe, and ap
pears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love. His short plays have been produced in New York, Boston, and Colorado, where he won the People’s Choice Award in a national drama competition. Kessenich is the co-managing editor of Ibbbetson Street literary magazine. Cinnamon Girl is his first novel.