The Goddesses

by Swan Huntley

  Ana rolled her eyes. “Veneers are such a pain.”

  I smiled with my mouth closed so she wouldn’t see my yellow teeth, and I put my ten dollars in the basket. “Thank you for that class. It was really nice.”

  “You feel better, right?”

  “So much better, it’s incredible,” I said breathlessly. I was still feeling electric. And I might have been a little nervous. I wanted her to like me.

  “Thanks for dragging me out of the car,” I said.

  “You weren’t hard to drag.” She smiled.

  In the silence that followed, Ana took my hand. Her eyes were dark and glimmering and so alive, and I thought, This is a person who is truly living. This person gets it. This person definitely knows something you don’t know.

  “Have we met before?” she asked. “For some reason I feel like we have.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You never lived in Vegas, did you?”

  “Vegas? No.”

  She chuckled. “I must be confusing you with someone else. It’s hard to keep track of everyone when you get old. Every new face looks like someone from the past.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well,” she said, “come back next week. Your back will love you for it.”

  “I will.”

  “Here”—she held out the tub—“take a Red Vine.”

  I plucked one from the side.

  “Only one?” Ana asked. “Don’t you want more than that?”

  I didn’t argue, so she plucked out three more, and without hesitation I took them. A flash of understanding seemed to pass across Ana’s face then—just a flash, so quick—and she blinked her big, serene eyelids, as if to mark her understanding, and I wondered what it was that she had just understood about me. And then I wondered why I felt like this woman I’d only just met somehow knew me better than I knew myself.

  She winked. “Don’t hold yourself back.”

  •

  What was it about her? In the hours that followed, I kept asking. It wasn’t until dark that I realized what it was.

  Ana reminded me of my mother’s friends: women who spoke their mind, women who were completely themselves all the time, even when it wasn’t beautiful. Women who lived without apology. They were brash and brazen and full of grace all at once. Hard edges and big hearts, hearts so big that if you stood close enough, you could hear the blood pumping. Those women, like Ana, were alive, truly alive. Every moment was lived full beyond the brim; every moment overflowed. Many of my mother’s friends had been drug addicts. Many had been their husband’s victims. There was always a chance of police. The police could appear unannounced at any time, like rain.

  That was one reason for the way they approached life with their arms outstretched and their legs spread wide and their chests cast forward, asking for their hearts to be ripped out or soothed or just heard. Asking for anything. They were ready for anything.

  I remembered these women fondly. Some of them I thought of as second mothers. Most of them, like my mother, had died too young. Bad choices stacked together, stacked high, stacked against them since before they’d been born.

  But the particular way they seized every second like it was about to tick by—Ana had that way about her. It was under the surface, but I could feel it from the start.

  4

  I started a new routine. After the boys left for school and Chuck left for work, I laid out my purple mat on the lanai and stretched. When I couldn’t remember the poses from class, I found pictures online and printed them out. I reminded myself to breathe. I came to know the sounds outside and then I came to expect them: the kissing noise of geckos, the rumble of the water heater, the cars on the road, the squawking birds and the singing birds and the one bird that seemed to be laughing. The hum of crickets was constant and soothing. I did an hour every day. I always wanted to stop early but I didn’t, and when the hour had passed I felt better.

  I made hot oatmeal for breakfast the old-fashioned way on the stove. I had been meaning to do this for years. I added tart apple and banana slices and a few of my raw almonds from the giant bag. I googled “Healthy food that tastes good” and got inspired. I bought kale at the store and actually cooked it. I also googled the name Ana had mentioned, Pema, and found out her last name was Chödrön and she was kind of famous. I bought her book about falling apart, which I hoped was about how to put yourself back together. Again.

  I bought spandex at Target and a yoga block I wasn’t quite sure what to do with, but I would figure it out. I switched the boys’ towels with our towels. They would have yellow now. We would have brown. We didn’t have enough money to throw everything we owned away and start from zero, but I did make a few smart purchases. I bought three green pillows for the couch, a stainless-steel trash can you could open with your foot, and a new bedspread patterned with luscious magenta hibiscus flowers for Chuck and me. Chuck liked its tropical look. He also liked the new healthy food I was cooking for dinner. The boys did not. “Can we have sloppy joes tomorrow night?” Cam asked, moving his salad around his plate with disdain.

  “If you want to cook them, be my guest,” I said.

  Chuck nodded enthusiastically at me then, as if to say: go, Team Parents!

  The biggest change I made was outside. I planted a garden in our yard. My new favorite health food blogger said that if you had good weather and enough room, there was absolutely no excuse not to grow your own food. I measured a rectangular space and tilled the soil. The soil was dark and rich and there were worms. I felt outdoorsy and adventurous. I added fertilizer to the rectangle. The guy at Lowe’s had told me to do that. I dug holes with my new shovel. I was having a whole fantasy in my head about sustainable living. The money we could save doing this. The quality of these vegetables. Our connection to the earth.

  I added my seedlings into the holes. All the healthy things I planned to eat: lettuces and broccoli and tomatoes and bell peppers. When I was done I stepped back and felt proud of my work. I was sweaty and accomplished. The birds were chirping. The crickets were humming. The sun was low in the sky. The boys would be home from practice soon.

  The Lowe’s guy had told me an orange tree would take years. I didn’t know if we’d be here for years, but I had bought the seed packet anyway. It was on sale. I took it out of my pocket then. Near the mailbox was a bald spot in the grass. I dug there. I thought: I am blessing this house by digging this hole. Or: I can use it as leverage later. “We can’t leave, Chuck, the orange tree needs us!” I filled the hole up and tapped the earth with the back of my shovel, and then I was filled with a thought that barely seemed like my own. Hope, Nancy, this is about hope.

  5

  I hadn’t returned Marcy’s calls so one day she just showed up at the house. “I was worried you might be a lonely little Nancy up here.” She held out the familiar pie in her hands. “Mulberry again. It’s really the best one they have.”

  I thanked her and invited her in because I had to.

  “Oh, I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said when she saw my clothes strewn all over the couch. I was going through them to see what I could give to Salvation Army.

  I was polite. “No, no, it’s fine. I was just getting ready to donate this stuff.”

  She touched the pair of khaki pants I had just decided were hideous. “Can I look through it?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  I made sugar-free lemonade while Marcy picked through my unwanted clothes with such joy. “And this? You’re getting rid of this? Are you sure?” She held up a San Diego Zoo shirt I had bought in the ’80s. “This is probably a collector’s item. You could sell it on eBay.”

  “It’s all yours,” I said.

  When she was done making her pile—she’d taken almost everything I no longer wanted—she told me she was lonely. Well, she didn’t say that, but that was what I heard. She said that after six months of living in Kona, she still missed San Diego. She said Brad worked longer hours here, and she told
me unconvincingly that it was a good thing, maybe, because it had given her a chance to enjoy nature more. She told me about a trail near my house people called the Pig Trail and how she had walked it alone once. She had felt afraid doing that. “Because there’s no one else. It’s just you in the forest. I prefer walking down Ali’i now.” She said her new friends—all great people I had to meet—were so incredibly great but also incredibly busy. Which was why it was important to stay busy herself. Marcy talked almost the whole time and I barely said anything. As I watched her restless hands move around with every new thought, I understood that Marcy had not come here to check up on lonely little Nancy. Marcy had come here because she was a lonely little Marcy.

  When she’d said enough about herself, she moved on to the topic of the volcano—“Can you believe it’s going to destroy that town? I won’t go anywhere near that thing.” And then, after a long sigh, she said, “We should do something fun.”

  “Like what?” I was ready for her to leave.

  “Let’s get our nails done! I know a great place down near KTA.”

  I was about to say no, but then I remembered Sara Beth’s bright green polish. And Ana—her toes and fingers had been a sparkly purple. And then I thought of myself at yoga with my ugly naked nails, and I said, “Okay, I’ll follow you.” This way, we could take a little break from each other in our own cars.

  “Fun!” She sprang from the couch.

  “Fun,” I repeated, because she was waiting for me to speak.

  •

  The nail place was crowded, so we couldn’t sit next to each other. “That’s okay,” Marcy said, “We’re going to be spending so much time together soon anyway.”

  I chose a shocking red that was out of my comfort zone, and Marcy chose a responsible red. Afterwards I said no thanks to Orange Julius and thought about how it was going to be hard to avoid a person who thought coming to your house uninvited was an acceptable thing to do.

  •

  When I got home, Chuck and the boys were kicking a soccer ball around in the grass. It was dusk. The light was pink. The grass was green. Richly, fully, unbelievably green, and, again, I was amazed by just how beautiful it was here. I’d been living in a washed-out, dry land for so long and not even known it.

  I already had my plan, of course, because I always had a plan, and I’d already imagined myself carrying it out. I would park and go inside and make dinner and do everything gingerly so as not to ruin my nails. I had already decided Chuck wouldn’t notice my nails, and I had decided to use the black sesame seeds I’d bought at KTA. Salad with black sesame seeds? Brown rice with black sesame seeds?

  I don’t know what it was that made me stop. But for some reason, instead of getting out of the car, I sat there instead, watching my family kick this soccer ball around. They waved when they saw me and then kept kicking. They were barefoot. Their faces looked joyful. The boys are doing well here, I thought. Thank God, because I hadn’t been sure how it would go. Cam, in particular—he had trouble with change.

  And then, despite myself, and despite all my anger at him, my eyes wandered from the boys and fixed on Chuck. Chuck in his well-worn “hang-out shirt.” Chuck’s calves, which I had always liked. I was fighting myself a little. It wasn’t hard to find reasons to be angry. Shelly Shelly Shelly. Everything that had led up to Shelly—every imagined interaction between them—and everything after. And then all the other reasons I was annoyed, which had nothing to do with Shelly, but which, really, were all about her. Chuck’s drool on the pillow, which had never bothered me that much, was now a reason to spray my Shout with vengeance. Even the slow way he walked, which I used to think said something positive about how patient he was, had begun to piss me off. In the airport I’d wanted to kill him. Because in my head, I was thinking, You would probably walk faster with Shelly, you asshole.

  But in this moment he was very hard to hate. The soccer ball was new, which meant that he’d just bought it. My husband had bought a soccer ball to kick around with our sons after school.

  Even now, years into my suburban adulthood, scenes like this had the power to astound me. I had no memory of playing on lawns as a kid. And if I ever had a soccer ball, I’m sure it was stolen, and I might have been trying to sell it. Lawns during my teenage years, and after that too, and maybe also a little before, were a place to have quick sex with men who were probably in jail now. They were lawns that usually belonged to a golf course.

  So yes, Chuck had failed me, but it was, compared to what it could have been, a small failure. It was also a failure that one couldn’t see just by looking at him, and this was comforting: how virtuous and clean he looked there on the grass with his sweet and dapper boys. And then there was me, the responsible mom, coming home to make dinner. No one looking at this family would have thought we were anything but innocent.

  6

  “Good morning, yogis.” She yawned. Her face was dewy and pale and glowing, and an orange scarf hung loosely over her shoulders.

  “Normally, now,” she said, sitting taller, “I’d ring the gong, but I don’t have it with me today. I left the house in a rush. I don’t have my books either.” Her eyes landed right on me when she said, “We are creatures of habit,” and I wondered if this meant something, which of course it didn’t—we were all creatures of habit.

  “Even the way you guys have organized yourselves—you’re sitting in the same way you sat last time.”

  We looked at each other and smiled because it was true. Patty, Sara Beth, Kurt, and me had laid out our mats in the exact same order.

  “Habitual momentum,” she said, “dictates of our lives. It’s hard to change our patterns. And it’s easy to get stuck.” She nodded at that thought, and looked almost a tiny bit worried for a second, gazing beyond us at the ocean. And then she yawned again. “Excuse me. I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said, patting her lips with her fingertips a few times before going on. “The point of yoga is not toned arms. Maybe that’s a nice side effect, but it’s not why we’re here. We’re here to open up. We’re here to change. I know it sounds lofty. But I promise you, it’s very real. When you come here and you stretch and you feel different afterwards, that’s because you are different. You’ve created a new space for yourself. You’ve opened the door to a new room.”

  She rolled her shoulders back. “What’s in that new room? Love? Gratitude? Fearlessness? Who is in that new room? Your dog, your partner, the guy who works at Stop and Shop? Let’s set an intention. Dedicate your practice to someone or something that feels important to you today—whomever or whatever you want in that new room.”

  What came to mind, and I don’t know why since I rarely thought about her, was my mother. But I didn’t want to dedicate the practice to my mother. Did I? Next was Chuck, which would have been fine, but it felt like a default setting—choose your husband—and not completely right for me today. The boys—that always felt right; they were my children. I settled on “family” and in my head I said, I dedicate this practice to my family, even though really I knew it was for my mother because I couldn’t stop picturing her swollen face.

  •

  Despite being tired, Ana was present and attentive during class. We focused on hip openers, which looked easy but which were not. The hips, she told us, are where you hold your anger.

  She left us in pigeon for ten long breaths. I thought I might die; it was so uncomfortable. “Deep, even breaths,” she said. “Your bones are made of jade. Heavy. Jade bones. Breathe.”

  A never-ending pause, during which the feeling that I might die intensified.

  “Feelings will come up. Think of it like you’re walking through a loud party. That’s your brain talking to you. You can say, ‘Hi, crazy brain, how’s it going today?’ But you don’t stay there. You pass through the party and go down to the basement. That’s where we are, deep down here with all the gunk. Exhale, exhale, go deeper. Ungunk. We are ungunking now.” She chuckled at herself, maybe because ungunk wasn’t a real
word. “Every time you exhale, you’re going a little bit deeper into how you really feel. The feelings underneath the chatter.”

  She told us to imagine the energy below every living thing like a light. She told us to undulate like seaweed. She asked us to picture our bodies just as bones, just as skeletons in an X-ray. She said, “You are bones and water in movement and that’s it. Don’t make it complicated. It’s not complicated.”

  As the sun rose higher in the sky, I thought about many things, both complicated and not. What would I make for dinner? If my mother were still alive, would we be speaking? What time did Target close? How many times had I googled Shelly since the affair? Fifty times? Eighty?

  At the end Ana said, “Peace to all beings, no exceptions.” She bowed. “And that means no exceptions.”

  •

  We waited in line for the basket in the same order as last time. I pretended not to watch Kurt pull his shirt down over his abs, which looked like an eight-pack of those Pillsbury biscuits I was no longer eating.

  I was spilling over with my post-yoga energy, which apparently included verbal spilling as well, because out of nowhere I said to Kurt, “Ana is such a good yoga teacher!”

  “The amazing thing,” Kurt said quietly, looking at her, “is that Ana has had a pretty rough go of it, but her take on life is still very positive.” He looked somber for a second. “She’s an old soul.”

  When everyone had left and it was just me and Ana, she said, “Sorry, I forgot the Red Vines today.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m sorry you didn’t sleep last night.”

  She shook her head. She seemed upset. It was the first time I’d seen her be anything but completely confident.

  Automatically, I was consoling. “That was a wonderful class. Thank you so much!”

  “Thank you,” she said, really meaning it. “I appreciate you saying that.” She touched my arm. Her fingers were somehow cool and warm at the same time. “You’re doing a fabulous job. You’re showing up, really showing up. It’s great, Nancy, really.”