by Susan Dunlap
“But I need—”
“Maureen, you of all people know he wouldn’t keep you out without a good reas—”
She slammed out of the bathhouse.
Another time I would have gone after her, but exhaustion brings down the final curtain fast. She could pound on Roshi’s door, but she couldn’t get in. And she wasn’t likely to carry on about her “garden” through the door. Still, I veered past his cabin to make sure it okay, and before I stumbled into my own cabin. My feet were icy. I thought they would keep me awake. Life is illusion!
I didn’t wake up till Amber poked me after breakfast break, three luscious hours later. Her poke had been no gentle nudge, more like her skiing into me, but even with that I could have turned over and gone back to sleep for a day or two.
“Get up! Zazen’s in fifteen minutes!”
“Roshi told me—”
“Shh!” she hissed, bending over me and looking ridiculously righteous about the whole thing.
It wasn’t till I kneaded my eyes and sat up that I remembered this was the time I had agreed to leave Roshi’s door unlocked. Too soon! Way too soon. I couldn’t stand the idea of Roshi lying in his room at the mercy of whoever tromped in, whoever murdered Aeneas. If Roshi didn’t mention the lock, I was set to forget it.
I peeked in on Roshi—sleeping—and almost smacked into Rob as I hurried across the path from Roshi’s cabin to the zendo.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
I stopped where I was, surprised that he would break stride for that minor courtesy—to me, yet.
“Roshi wants me to follow the same schedule as yesterday?”
I nodded, even more surprised. I had told him that yesterday; there was no reason for him to expect change.
“If the weather holds we can do outdoor kinhin,” he went on, I realized, talking to let off steam. “That’ll take up the slack.”
“Slack?”
“Maureen!” he said, with a show of exasperation. “She can’t be bothered to plan. She isn’t even a good gardener if it requires planning. Look at that red maple!”
My stomach quivered with guilt. My nap had erased all thought of Maureen and how unstrung she had looked in the bathhouse.
“She caught me before breakfast. She hasn’t prepared her talk. No notes, no sources, nothing. I told her yesterday, but she did nothing. Now she’s going to ramble. Still, it’s going to run short.”
I sighed.
“That’ll be fine. People always get something from learning about senior students’ practices. Hearing that she’s screwed up will be a comfort to most of the new people. ‘If the work leader can mess up her talk, then maybe there’s hope for me.’ This should be the worst thing that happens to any of us,” I said, and actually patted him on the arm as I headed for the zendo.
Each block of sitting periods has its own feel. There’s a dark, mysterious cozy feel of promise when you enter the zendo for the first time at dawn. In the afternoon, there’s an ease, a re-quieting from the diversion of work period, and often it includes feeling your reactions to some illicitly spoken comment during that period, some hurt hugely magnified in the silence. The last block before bed when your knees ache from being bent, your spine has a dull pain and yearns for a chair with a back, is just endurance. But the mid-morning sitting, the one starting now, feels fresh, professional in its way. The jikido, assigned to straighten the cushions and do a quick sweep of the floor during the break, has given the zendo itself a fresh look. You’ve been fed, had a break in which to nap, had two or three cups of coffee, and you are as alert as you’re ever likely to be. There’s only one sitting before the lecture, and you’re ready to make the most of it.
At the end of the zazen period, we did kinhin outdoors, at a good clip. But when we got back in the zendo and settled on our cushions, this time facing into the room, the front seat was empty. We waited, eyeing the door. It didn’t open. Five minutes passed. Rob announced, “We will stay as we are, and just sit zazen.”
I knew the present zazen period was no longer than the previous one, but this was a glimpse of eternity. Since I was facing into the room, I managed, without moving my head, to eye Roshi’s door, and the front door alternatively, as if that would draw Maureen in here.
When the bell finally rang, she still hadn’t come. I hurried out of the zendo, put on my boots, and thought I was heading for her cabin, till I realized my feet were carrying me to the place I was most worried about, to Roshi’s cabin.
“Roshi,” I said, bursting through his doorway, “Are you okay?”
“Was, till you woke me,” he grumbled, smiling at me.
“Maureen’s missing. Rob was looking for her; and then she didn’t show up for her lecture.”
“Pour me some tea.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes.”
He pushed himself onto his side and tried to sit up. I grabbed and hoisted him. My hands were shaking. As soon as he was up, he attacked his unshaven face with both hands, shaking the skin under his fingers as if he was massaging the bones beneath. He nodded toward the teapot.
“It’ll be cold,” I said.
“Still tea.”
“Right.”
I reached for the pot, annoyed. There was a point when this roshi business went too far. Had he missed what I was saying entirely?
“Roshi, Maureen was desperate to see you this morning.”
His gaze rested on the door. He meant that if I had left it open as he’d wanted she could have walked in, talked to him, and this crisis could have been averted.
“But then she ran into Rob and told him about not preparing for her talk,” I countered, trying to control my voice so the high pitch didn’t let him know how pissed off I was getting with him.
“Interchangeable?” he said, holding his hand out for the teacup.
“I didn’t mean you were!”
He made no response, verbal or otherwise. I turned my back to him to fuss with the tea, to get myself under control. I squeezed my hands into fists. Maureen was gone and he was blaming me. Dammit, what was I supposed to do?
“Was I supposed to let her in here to have another go at you?”
I had spun to face him and I was shouting. His hand was still out. I grabbed the teacup and poured, and it was all I could do to keep from slamming it into his hand. I took a deep breath, then another, and handed it to him exceedingly carefully.
He jostled the cup. I started to grab, but he shook his head.
“If I spilled it, it could be a mess.”
Then, in perfect control, he lifted the cup to his mouth and drank. But in my mind the room was morning dark, the day was Tuesday, and I was scrubbing up the cocoa off the floor. Now the room was light, the day was Thursday, the liquid was tea, and it wasn’t on the floor. The only thing the same was my fury. It burst through me, smashing at my skin from the inside. My hands shook, my head ached. I wanted to scream—again. I wanted to—
I glared back at him. I knew this was a lesson, like the cocoa. I knew if I let go of my anger I would see his point and learn something. But I didn’t care. I was too furious.
“If she’d walked in, you could be dead. Would that make things better? Not for you; not for her.”
He looked down at the tea.
“Could not be a mess.”
“Yeah, maybe you could have handled her fears. But you haven’t in six years. What makes you think you could now? You know what the Achilles heel of the roshi is, Leo? It’s arrogance.”
I’d gone too far. His features barely changed and yet his face was entirely different. He looked as if I’d punctured him. I hadn’t meant to hurt him, not to the core like that. I wanted to grab his hands in mine and tell him how sorry I was.
“Close the door on your way out. Leave me the key. Tell Rob he’ll have to double as jisha.”
He lowered himself to the bed and turned away.
Oh, right, kill the messenger! Tuesday I had been excruciatingly careful not to gi
ve him the satisfaction of slamming the door. Now I didn’t care. I plucked the key from my pocket, tossed it on the dresser, and slammed out.
I turned and walked across the muddy ground away from the cabin. I didn’t know what had come over me. I wanted to cry, to kick. Emotions swirled through me with no mooring. I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore.
“Darcy Lott,” I muttered, “stunt double, the woman who overcomes danger.”
Not one who becomes it. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t in the mud and in the boots. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t in the middle of sesshin. I couldn’t even just keep on walking because the damn trees walled me in. Bile gushed into my throat; up was down, green sky pressing the air from my lungs. I was lost.
Then I did the last thing I would have guessed. I stopped dead, turned around, walked at double-time to the zendo, bowed to my cushion, bowed to the room, and sat zazen. I was still so angry, so shocked, so desolate, so lost there was no way to think about anything, and I just sat, feeling the anger burst into my stomach and then my chest, realizing my teeth were clenched so hard my ears were ringing. Some number of times I was on the verge of leaping off the cushion, furious that I might be giving Leo the satisfaction of doing what he would have told me. There was no way out.
But after a while something changed, the fire of my fury died, and I just sat and listened to the wind on the windows, Amber’s little high-pitched wheeze next to me, the sound of my own breath. I realized then that I had stepped through a door, on my own I had trusted my Zen practice. I had, as we chant, taken refuge in the Buddha. I wasn’t lost; I was right here.
I also knew I needed desperately to find Maureen.
The bell rang. I thought it was to end the lecture period, when Maureen should have been giving her talk, but, in fact, it marked the end of the entire midday sittings. I had sat through the whole thing, including the kinhin walking meditations, and marked none of it in my memory. Now I could hear the servers racing up the porch steps with the lunch pots. My first impulse was to bow, leave, and find Maureen. But in my new clarity I knew that part of the reason I had snapped at Leo before was hunger. I had missed too many meals here. Cold, tired, and hungry were never a felicitous trio. Still, it was torture to know Maureen was out there somewhere, fragile and on the verge of I didn’t know what. And Roshi’s door was unlocked.
I should have beckoned Rob outside and told him he was now jisha. I . . . couldn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Maureen’s cabin was empty. The office, too. I hurried out, under the overhang and into the shed, and stood looking at the bottles lined up in front of the garden poison. It was cold here and damp. The earth floor sloped under my feet, and the place smelled of mold and chemicals. Even with the door half open the small room was so dark that bottles looked fuzzy and labels were merely colored paper on them. Just yesterday Gabe had startled me here. He had chosen this unlikely spot for a nap. It hadn’t struck me then, but now I looked around this unadulterated outbuilding and wondered what made him even imagine he could curl up and sleep in here. It sure wouldn’t have been my first choice. But he had been to the monastery before, and this time he made a beeline for this shed. That meant not only was there a big enough space for him somewhere in here, there was a known nook.
If the space was big enough for him, it would be ample for Maureen. I looked around for a flashlight. You’d think, in a place like this . . . You’d be wrong.
“Maureen?” I called softly.
No reply.
“Maureen?”
Nothing.
The wood was piled three logs high in the front and four in the back. I braced a foot, and leapt into the dark. Onto something soft. Forcing my hand down I felt beside me. I was on cloth. A sleeping bag. Ah, the soft thing. I could have laughed. Gabe would have been hiding out in comfort here if he didn’t mind spiders and whatever country critters inhabit outbuildings.
My eyes had adjusted but the shadows were still close to black. All I could tell was that my space was very small—high enough to stand up, but not wide enough to lie full out. That, and that I was alone. Then my hand hit something hard and smooth. A flashlight. Automatically I pulled it toward me. It stuck, then, with a snap, gave.
I flicked it on and flashed the light back to the spot where it had hung. A good-sized nail protruded from the wall, and when I looked closely at it I could see the clean line the metal loop of the flashlight had made on the nail. The flashlight had been there a while. Perhaps this was its permanent home.
I shone the light around the back portion of the shed. The space was akin to a monk’s cave, in size and accoutrements. Besides the sleeping bag I was on, there was a small trunk. It creaked like a horror-movie sound effect as I opened it. Inside was a floor pillow covered in tan print cotton, and a wool blanket; nothing else. I shone the light over the walls. In front of me the logs created a room divider of sorts. On either side were bare studs, and the back slanted out and down.
This part of the shed was a hideaway where Leo or Maureen or Barry or even Rob could come when he had to get clear of the rest of them in those long months when they were alone here; that’s why the flashlight was not in the front part with the cans and bottles, but back here to accommodate the user.
This last-ditch hideout, but Maureen wasn’t here!
I could so easily picture her standing here just as I was.
I understood how central Maureen was to everything here. She had come here as Barry’s girlfriend. She’d seen him through the Big Buddha Bakery affair. She was the one they all loved in one way or another. She knew about Rob’s ambition. She was closest to Roshi. When we outlanders arrived for sesshin it was Maureen who was in the kitchen weaving people into the preparations. She was the one who had made sure I knew how to find my cabin.
But her centrality was more than the result of being the only woman on the permanent staff. The key was not her position, but herself. What I had seen as a sort of sprightliness and Rob viewed as ditzyness, was more basic than either. There was a porous quality to Maureen, like the lightest of sponge cakes that a cook yearns to ice or to fill on the way to making it his signature confection. She was a helium balloon waiting to be tethered, with a quality that led everyone to think they were the proper tethering post. Her porousness, her lack of protective skin, made her alert to the danger in the air here.
Oh, what I would have given to change my decision in the bathhouse this morning. Instead of telling her no, if I had only taken her to Roshi. I wouldn’t have left her alone there, of course. But Roshi was right. He had needed to see her, to keep her from cutting her tether altogether. Again I thought of Aeneas in the only convenient, camouflaged burial place, and wondered if Maureen was close to joining him.
A cold finger of wind traced the side of my neck. Pales stripes of light shown between the boards, but rather than light the shed they made the dark darker. I had never been in a ramshackle shed like this. We don’t have outbuildings in Manhattan, nor did we when I was growing up in San Francisco. Locations where old dirt-floored sheds were common were spots I had avoided. And yet something felt familiar.
It wasn’t the shed, I realized, but Maureen. Maureen was like my second sister, Janice. Not in appearance. Janice had coal-black hair like most of the family. Like Maureen, Janice was the one the others confided in. “The nice one,” aunts called her. She was the second girl, the fourth child, and, more importantly, the central one of the three middle children, there to hear year-older Gary’s exploits, there to comfort, protect, and often have to find excuses for year-younger Grace. Because they were all so much older than I, I probably wouldn’t have made the connection had I not stumbled in on Janice, scrunched in the back of the closet behind the stairs. I was five, so she’d have been fifteen. She’d put her finger to her lips, made me promise not to tell, and proclaimed our secret a sacred bond. It was the importance of sharing that secret that etched her words in my memory. She had said, “Sometimes I can’t take it
any more. Nice people pay a price. Other people would be hurt to know how big that price is. So you can’t ever tell.”
What Janice didn’t say, and I learned only much later, was one time when Gary and Grace got to be too much and Janice couldn’t hide out she had attacked them with a shovel.
I had to find Maureen before . . . before?
She hadn’t taken the truck. Was that a good sign, or a terrible one? She’d still be somewhere around here. Barry was already worried. He’d know where she’d be.
I ran along the paths, skirting the trio of women friends walking slowly, silently savoring their after lunch break. At the chocolate kitchen I flung open the door, and nearly fell over the packed boxes.
“Barry!” I panted.
“Wish me luck,” he said lifting another large, insulated box onto the counter.
He looked so different it stunned me. He looked like he’d stepped from the Redwood Canyon Monastery to the L.L. Bean catalog. Gone were his plain black monk’s robes. Now he sported loose wide-wale tan corduroy slacks, light-blue work shirt, and navy V-neck sweater. All he needed was a pair of tassel loafers.
“You’re leaving now?” I said, horrified. I’d forgotten all about his chocolate contest.
“I know, I should have been on the road an hour ago. I had to spend an hour making sure the truck wouldn’t conk out again. Now it’s going to be dark before I get as far as Santa Rosa. I’ve got the chocolate in cooler boxes; it should be all right. But I’m skirting the edge. I should be transporting it in a temperature-controlled truck and—”
“Barry, Maureen’s gone!”
“Maureen?” he said blankly. He’d already forgotten about the monastery here. It was a moment before he pulled his attention back from his packed chocolate and road worries and demanded, “Where’s she gone?”
I shook my head. “Don’t know. Just gone. I checked everywhere here.”
As cook, of course, he wouldn’t have been expected to be in the zendo in the mornings. He was too busy to be at lecture so he wouldn’t have noticed Maureen’s absence. And nobody would have thought to tell him.