by Emily France
They turned onto Arapahoe Avenue, and the traffic zoomed by them. Outside a large brick building, colorful flags read,
naropa university: discover the difference of contemplative education.
“I think my aunt told me about this place. Is it a . . . ?” Oliver couldn’t quite remember what Sophie had called it.
“Buddhist university,” Essa said. “I know people that go there. You have to meditate as part of your coursework. And go on retreats and stuff. Pretty badass.”
Oliver peered at the front lawns in front of the university’s main building. He expected to see monks wrapped in robes shuffling in and out of its doors. Instead, he just saw college kids. Backpacks. Ripped jeans. Yoga pants. The usual.
They continued down the street and the houses got larger, more stately. A few resembled the grand stone homes back in Chicago, up near Evanston. They all had antique-looking windows, large arched doorways, wrought iron railings next to broad front steps.
Essa stopped under the buzz of a streetlight. “We’re here.”
They were standing in front a large old home. It was red brick with white trim and was surrounded by beautiful wildflower gardens, a pond with a tinkling waterfall, a wide lawn filled with Adirondack chairs. There was a lighted sign that said, blue spruce inn.
“A hotel? We’re going to a hotel?” Oliver’s mouth went completely dry. He froze. Was she taking him to a room? He thought she didn’t date, let alone . . . this. After they’d just met? Micah had never finished his description of Essa back at Cheba Hut. Did he mean she didn’t date but just hooked up? And then bailed? His mind raced in a thousand different directions.
I’m a virgin.
I have no idea what to do.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.
And I think I’m wearing the same boxers I had on yesterday. The ones with a skunk and the words IT WASN’T ME on the butt.
“Not the Inn,” Essa said. “Behind it.”
It was a small, one-story wooden structure with a white door. Next to the entrance was what looked like a half-canoe standing upright, its pointy tip angling toward the sky. Sitting inside the canoe was a stone statue of Buddha, legs folded, eyes closed, an easy smile on his face. A group of people stood next to the half-boat, kicking off shoes and tucking them into a tall wooden cabinet.
“It’s a Zendo,” Essa said quietly, as if that explained something. She took Oliver’s hand again, pulled him through the gardens toward the little building. She kicked off her sandals and left them at the foot of the Buddha boat.
“You’re just . . . leaving your shoes out here?” Oliver asked, yanking at his own.
“Yeah, come on.” Essa was whispering now and motioned for him to follow her. He noticed all the people gathering outside the building were quiet. And moving a little slowly. They held their hands clasped in front of their hearts as they lined up at the door, bowing before going in.
Oliver grudgingly nestled his shoes next to Essa’s. He saw purses and handbags piled around as well. He couldn’t believe it. If he left anything outside like this in Chicago, it would be stolen in roughly three minutes.
“But why are we taking off our shoes?” he asked. But Essa was already in line, filing into the building. She clasped her hands together, held them in front of her chest, and bowed as she stepped on the threshold and disappeared inside.
Oliver wanted to bail. He had no idea what to do. When he made it to the door, he didn’t bow like the others had. He didn’t know how. And the thought of it freaked him out. He just stepped into the room in his socks.
In the dim light, he could see that it was one large room. There was an altar with a giant wooden arch over it. A golden Buddha statue, some bells, a bowl. A few flowers. Burning incense. The walls were white, and the floor was honey-colored wood without a scuff on it, it seemed. Lining the room were square black mats with puffy black round cushions in the center of each one. People sat along the edges of the room, each on one of the cushions, their legs folded like pretzels just like Oliver had seen his aunt do. And they were sitting a few inches from the wall, facing it.
And they weren’t moving.
At all.
Oliver felt like they were sitting perfectly, almost inhumanly still. There was something about the stillness he had never seen before. It was like another presence in the room, like these people had somehow commandeered the very air around them and ordered it not to move.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw Essa on one of the cushions, already in pretzel form, already staring at the wall. He wanted to talk to her, to sit close to her, to ask her a million questions. About her life. About Puck. About anything she wanted to tell him. What he distinctly did not want to do was sit in a dim room on a cushion and stare at a wall all night.
A guy in the corner struck a few bells. Oliver hurried to an empty cushion and sat facing the wall, his back to the center of the room like everyone else’s, his legs barely folded in front of him. The room fell back into the eerie, otherworldly silence. He guessed this was meditation. Just . . . sitting there.
That’s when the pain started. Almost immediately. Only a few minutes in, his foot went numb. He tried to move imperceptibly. He tried to shift without alerting the Super Quiet People to his right and to his left. Even the slightest movement sent burning sensations through his legs and up through his butt.
This sucks.
He felt someone watching him. He turned and looked. It was Essa. She was three cushions down. Smiling. She silently mouthed a few words: Count your breaths.
Good thing Oliver could read lips.
How long? he mouthed back.
Forty minutes. She smiled again, like she’d just delivered good news.
I’ll never make it, Oliver thought.
His fear and dread about sitting there for an entire forty minutes were broken when he heard someone come in the door. Essa quickly turned her head and looked back at the wall in front of her. Oliver was afraid to turn around to see who came in; he’d make too much noise. So he just listened. Whoever it was walked slowly and made their way around the room. As they passed each person, he or she bowed to the wall. Then Oliver heard the shuffling of fabric. Lots of it. The person was sitting, but it was taking a long time. But finally, they settled down. The room was silent again.
Oliver remembered Essa’s instruction to count his breaths.
He couldn’t even count five. His breaths were like butterflies—no, the ghosts of butterflies—just as soon as he thought about breathing, the thought was gone, a specter that faded into the herd of a million fluttering thoughts.
Is someone outside stealing my shoes?
Did a college kid take off with Essa’s purse? Is he already down at the Conoco station buying gas and beer with the money in her wallet?
Can you die from boredom?
Am I really that into this girl that I followed her into this weird room?
The forty minutes seemed to take seven hours, and just as Oliver thought he was going to lose it and run out, the guy in the corner rang the bells again. People turned on their cushions and faced the center of the room. Oliver turned as well, and saw the mystery man who had come into the Zendo. He was sitting on a cushion, his legs folded beneath him, his back perfectly straight. Oliver saw the source of all that shuffling fabric: the man was wrapped in a black robe. It was draped and tucked around his legs, making him look like some sort of statue. A Zen priest?
Before Oliver could mouth the question to Essa, people stood, formed a line, and walked slowly around the room. Very slowly. Oliver watched Essa, trying to figure out what to do. She peeled a heel off the floor like it was glued down, and she was gently freeing it. Then she peeled the rest of her foot off the floor just as slowly and stepped forward. Over and over again, everyone in the room walked this way and made it around the room in a strange slow-motion march.
Essa looked over at Oliver. This is kin-hin, she mouthed.
What?
Walking meditation, Essa replied.
Finally, the walk was over and everyone settled back on their cushions and the priest back on his. He rewrapped his robe around his folded legs and started talking. Oliver could barely follow. The priest talked about the breath. Being the wheel of your ship. The port in the storm. How it was a place of safety. Solidity amidst the groundlessness of life. The constant flux. He talked about turning the wheel of the Dharma. Then he told a story.
“Buddha was surrounded by his students,” he said. “He held up a white flower and twirled it, saying nothing. No one understood the meaning of this wordless sermon except Mahākāśyapa.” The priest stopped and looked up. “Whose only response was a smile.”
Oliver waited for more. For a punch line. A summary. Something that made some sort of sense.
“Buddha responded that Mahākāśyapa understood the Dharma gate, the mind of nirvana that does not depend on words.”
Which didn’t help at all.
Oliver looked over at Essa, wondering if she was just as confused as he was. But she wasn’t. Instead, he saw what he’d been hoping to see all night: Her eyes were lit up, just like at the campfire. Her face looked happy again, like whatever weight had been dragging her down had been lifted. Like whatever happened with her mom and her sister the night before had been forgotten somehow. She was smiling like the priest, this happy, super calm smile. And she was nodding, too.
She caught him looking at her, and he tried to hide the confusion on his face. But all he could think about was how mysterious Essa was. How deep. How she wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met or seen or even heard of before.
And how there was no way on earth this hippie, hiking, trekking, mysterious Buddhist girl would ever like him back.
15
OLIVER
Essa lived within walking distance of the Zendo. Oliver had two fears about this. One, he worried that she wouldn’t let him walk her home. Two, he worried that she would. If she wanted to say goodbye here, just outside the Zendo, in the stream of calm meditators flooding out of the gardens around them, what would he say?
Nice meditating with you.
No.
Maybe next week we can try the Robert Plant at the Cheba Hut.
No.
I think you may be the most beautiful and fascinating person I’ve ever met.
NO.
On the other hand, if she let him walk her home, they might get to her front door. The place where everybody always kissed in the movies. He’d never walked a girl home before. He’d kissed two, but barely. There was Cheryl at the sixth grade dance who dared him to kiss her behind the cardboard cutout of their school’s mascot—a giant muskrat. Then there was Edie in the tenth grade during a really awkward game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. They were crammed in her dad’s closet next to a bunch of shoes that smelled roughly like rotting cottage cheese, and she lifted up her shirt and everything. But he didn’t touch anything under there, and when she tried to French-kiss him, she pretty much just ended up licking his teeth.
Plus, the blood still hadn’t returned to Oliver’s feet after an hour on those tiny cushions in the Zendo. He worried that even if Essa let him walk her home, he might not really be able to walk at all. He tried to shake out his legs without being too obvious.
“What did you think?” Essa asked as they slipped on their shoes beside the Buddha boat.
“It was . . . cool.”
Her face fell a little. “It’s okay if you don’t want to come back. This stuff isn’t for everybody, I—”
“I do. I do want to come back. It’s just . . . different. That’s all.”
In the dim garden lights, they walked past the tinkling waterfall and down a stone path that crisscrossed among waist-high wildflowers. A warm, dry breeze began to blow, lifting the scent from the blossoms and sprinkling it all around them.
“That last part. About Buddha twirling the flower,” Oliver added. “Was I supposed to get that?”
Essa smiled. “It’s a koan. A sort of puzzle that points to prajna, or wisdom. To truth. The idea is that if you think you understand it with your rational mind . . . you don’t. Truth and reality are beyond all that. Beyond the concepts our minds create.”
“But you were smiling. I thought you understood it.”
“That one makes me happy,” she said. The campfire light was back in her eyes.
“Cool,” he said, even though he didn’t really understand at all. He looked at her as the breeze kicked up again, at the sanctuary tattoo just below her collarbone. “Is that . . . from a koan, too?”
She nodded. “Case Four. But you’ve probably got to get—”
“I’m in no rush,” he interrupted. Venturing.
Essa looked just beyond him at the group of Adirondack chairs huddled under the giant elm in the middle of the garden.
“Buddha was walking with a group,” she began. “He pointed to a place on the ground and said it would be a good spot to build a sanctuary. Indra picked up a blade of grass, stuck it in the ground, and said, ‘The sanctuary is built.’”
She stopped and looked at Oliver again.
“And Buddha smiled,” she said. She ran a finger over her sanctuary tattoo. Over the blade of grass.
Oliver didn’t get that one, either. But he felt something. A little moment of lightness he didn’t understand.
“And getting a tattoo of it is ironic,” Essa continued. “It’s me trying to grasp the story. To hold on to how it makes me feel. Which is antithetical to Zen and part of the whole problem of duhkha—”
“So you must know what that one means?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But I know what it feels like.”
Oliver raised his eyebrows, asking.
“It feels like . . . home,” she said. “Like I’m safe. Exactly where I am. Without having to change anything.”
It hit him, what she said. About being home. “Your eyes look so beautiful when you talk about it.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that. But he had to. He just had to. “Crazy beautiful.” This was what Essa did to him. Made him forget things. Forget to think. He felt horrible for saying the word crazy.
Essa noticed. “Thanks,” she said. “But . . . are you okay? You look a little . . . something.” They’d reached the end of the garden and stood at a large wooden gate.
“I just don’t like that word. Crazy. I try not to use it.” He looked beyond the wide slats of the wooden fence, at the traffic hustling down Arapahoe Avenue. He looked at the flags waving in the lawn of the Buddhist university. At a group of a drunk college guys going the opposite way. Loud. Careening.
“It’s okay,” Essa said. “I’m not offended. I think I know what you meant. Plus, I tell Puck she’s crazy smart all the time. Crazy annoying, too.” She grinned.
The mention of Essa’s little sister made Oliver sad. It made him miss Lilly. It made him want her to be better. It made him feel lonely. He didn’t want to leave Essa. “Can I walk you home?” He couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but he thought she blushed. She straightened the butterfly clip in her hair.
Essa looked at the rushing traffic. “It’s sort of like . . .” She stopped. Gazed up into the branches of the trees looming over them.
“It’s sort of like . . . what?” Oliver dared to step close. He could smell the incense from the Zendo rising from her hair. It mixed with the wildflowers from the garden. He was perilously close to her again—to the smooth skin of her shoulders, to the waves in her hair, to that light in her eyes he wanted to somehow capture and take with him. “You can tell me.”
Moonlight glinted in her blue-gray eyes, and heat started to travel up his back. He could hear her breathing. Was she leaning in? He thought she was. Closer and closer. The urge to put his arms around her
came suddenly. He wanted nothing else in the world but to hold her. And even though he’d never held a girl before in his entire life, suddenly he felt like he’d know exactly how to do it. He’d know just how to hold her, just how to put his hand next to her cheek, just how to kiss her . . .
She stepped back.
“You see, the thing is . . . I don’t date.” She took a deep breath. “And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea or anything.”
Oliver felt like one of the drunk guys from the street had stolen into the garden and given him a swift kick in the gut. Even though Micah had told him that Essa didn’t date anyone, he couldn’t help but believe it was just because she hadn’t found the right guy yet. And obviously, he wasn’t going to be it.
“It’s not you or anything,” she said, as if she’d read his mind. “It’s because of Puck.”
“Puck?”
“My mom has a different boyfriend every week. And it upsets her—and me—so much. It’s so gross, and they’re all so creepy, and . . . I just can’t have Puck see me take off with guys, either. You know? I’m, like, the stable one in the family. It’s my job.”
“I get it,” Oliver said. “I really do.” The ache for his sister Lilly returned. That feeling that he should never have left Chicago. The guilt over what happened the last night he saw her. How she almost . . .
“When Micah told me your sister was sick,” Essa went on, “I just thought you could use a friend in Boulder.”
So this was a pity date. I knew it.
“Totally cool of you,” Oliver lied.
“How is she? Your sister?” Essa looked back into Oliver’s eyes. “If it’s okay for me to ask.”
“Good. She’s good.”
Actually, he had no idea.
Essa leaned in and gave Oliver a little half-hug. Oliver could tell she wasn’t going to press the issue. “See you in the shop,” she said. “When do you work next?”
“Not sure,” he said. Essa was already through the wooden gate. Oliver followed. “But Anish invited me to go to the mountains next weekend? Some sort of wilderness game?”