I should pause here for just a moment and say this: I enjoy the variety of humanity. I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that? The Homogenists, I call them. Look at me! they say. I’m happy! I’m right! I’m law-abiding, productive, and pleasing to God! All you have to do is live like I do and we’ll have world peace!
And if you don’t live like them they’ll slaughter you.
I am the farthest thing from a Homogenist. I love my life but I’m not foolish enough to believe that everyone else would love it. Certainly not Cecelia. I just wanted some stable, long-term companion for her, someone the kids could call “uncle,” someone who wouldn’t disappear one day, leaving behind his greasy wheel sprockets, list of metham-phetamine customers, or broken viola strings. My parents had wanted the same thing for her, and it made me sad that they’d died without ever seeing it.
As I walked toward Cecelia and her new beau, I began to think that this time she’d outdone herself, eclipsed her personal record for the most unusual lover. Because, as my sister stood up, and then the man beside her stood up, I saw that he was wearing a dress. Or what appeared to be a dress. A gown perhaps. A robe. The robe was deep maroon with gold or saffron trim and wrapped around him in a mysterious way so that it seemed to hold itself up by magic.
My God, I thought, Aunt Seese is dating the Dalai Lama!
But not really. The robe was messier, and there was something in this fellow’s bearing that reminded me more of a long-haul truck driver than a peaceful monk. True, his head was shaved, but he wasn’t smiling. He was two or three inches shorter than my sister and built like a middle linebacker, with a wide rough face that could have belonged to a man of thirty-five or a man of sixty. It was almost as if he were a combination of all his predecessors: part yoga master, part biker, with a glint in his eyes like that slimy orchestra guy.
Cecelia swished toward me in her long hippie skirt and hugged me warmly but too long, throwing a little back massage into the bargain. When we finally parted, she hooked me by one arm and half-turned toward the World Wrestling Federation cross-dresser. “Otto,” she sang, “this is my guru, Volya Rinpoche. Rinpoche, this is my darling brother.”
Rinpoche bowed slowly, then brought a thick calloused paw out from beneath his skirts and gave me a crushing handshake.
Cecelia turned to me, cheeks aglow, and pronounced this memorable sentence: “Otto, sweetheart . . . Rinpoche is going on the trip to North Dakota.”
And I, of course, pretended not to hear.
SIX
I decided, as I sometimes do (I suppose I’ve learned this in business, I’m not particularly proud of the tactic), to delay. Though I had figured on losing only ten days, round-trip, to the North Dakota errand, and though—with the packed car, full tank of gas, and a driving schedule all worked out in my mind—I had an itch to get on the road and put some miles behind us, I decided it couldn’t hurt to linger for an hour or so at Cecelia’s and see if she’d let logic prevail. This was a tactic I often used with her. She would come for a visit all excited about teaching Anthony to knit (because such activities should not be, she said, “gender specific”), or instructing me and Jeannie in the fine art of Wanna-Panna meditation (because she’d just taken it up and it had deepened all her relationships), or training our half-Doberman, Jasper, to eat vegetarian (because it would speed up the “transit-time” of his digestion and help him live longer), and, over the years, Jeannie and I had learned not to confront these initiatives head on. Instead of getting into an argument, we’d slip Jasper a quarter pound of bacon just before his tofu treat mix, and so on. It was all harmless enough, and I’d figured out that while my sister was consistently wacky, her wackiness was inconsistent, her interests as fleeting as a bumblebee buzzing around your ears. Swat at the bee and you risked a sting; ignore it and let it do its buzzing, and soon it would be off to other pastures.
So, though I’d heard perfectly clearly when she said Volya Rinpoche would ride with me, I was pretty certain it was just another of the well-intentioned but odd ideas that twirled inside Cecelia’s gray matter for a few seconds or a few days at a time then dissolved into the ether.
“Show me your garden,” I said, because that was always a safe subject and a sure distraction. With the bare-armed, maroon-robed Rinpoche floating along somewhere behind us, we strolled down to the sunniest section of my sister’s pleasantly cluttered back yard and inspected her plot of vegetables. Cecelia is a world-class gardener, has been since my parents gave her dominion over a twenty-foot-square piece of tilled back yard when she was six. Until the wildest of her teenage years set in, she’d practically wallpapered her room with ribbons from the Stark County 4-H competition. Tomatoes, potatoes, onions, lettuce, four kinds of squash—she seemed almost to will bushel baskets of vegetables from our black soil, undeterred by the scorching summer sun and brief growing season.
“Magnificent,” I said, as we stepped single-file along the rows of yellow peppers and cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard and baby eggplant. “This reminds me of when you were a girl. You always had a magic touch with gardens, Seese. You still do.”
I turned and saw how happy and proud she was, her beautiful face giving off a summery glow. She plucked two cherry tomatoes and handed one each to Rinpoche and me.
“You don’t have to wash them,” she said. “They’re completely organic.”
“I expected nothing less.” The tomato was like a grenade of flavor bursting against the teeth.
“It’s almost lunchtime. I could make us a nice salad. I have some good bread. Okay?”
“Fine, sure,” I said. The bread would taste like compressed sawdust, but I consoled myself with the idea that we could stop for something soon after we got on the road. I love to eat, love everything about food—the growing, the preparation, food photography, restaurant design, the history of the menu in various parts of the planet—and, despite a regular exercise regimen, I have the modest bubble of a belly that testifies to my passion. One of the promises I’d made to myself about the trip was that I would indulge Cecelia’s culinary quirks but not at the expense of my own. There are lines one does not cross.
She picked a handful of vegetables, lifted her skirt into a kind of bowl in front of her, and carried them into the house that way. For a moment the man I thought of then as Volvo Rinpoche and I were face to face in a faint gust of patchouli. He was giving me a direct look from out of his rough face. “Nice tomato, eh?” I remarked, and he lifted his eyebrows and smiled widely, as if I’d said something very clever. It occurred to me—perhaps because he hadn’t yet spoken a word—that his English might be weak.
The house was messy but in a welcoming way, mismatched vintage furniture, some kind of Nepali or Indian tapestries on the walls, statues of deities from various traditions, crystals, candles, bird feathers, potted aloe plants. It felt more like our North Dakota farmhouse than my own suburban home ever did, and I experienced a twinge of memory about Mom and Pop. It occurred to me then—just the most fleeting of thoughts—that my return to North Dakota on this particular errand might not be such a simple matter after all.
We sat in Cecelia’s kitchen at her wonderful old white metal table with its chipped porcelain top. She served Rinpoche first, and generally looked at and spoke to him as if she were the county chairwoman of the Catholic Daughters and he was the Pope. But we all had equal portions of an exquisitely fresh salad, mismatched mugs of iced green tea, and two slices of pressed sawdust . . . and to my great relief there were no prayers said over the food, no hand-holding, no chants, no blessings of any kind. Rinpoche nodded and smiled a great deal but said nothing. Cecelia asked about Anthony, Natasha, and Jeannie with so much genuine affection in her voice that I forgave her three-quarters of her oddities in the time it took to chew and swallow a bite of bread.
“They wanted to come,” I told her. “The kids wanted to see their Aunt Seese. For a minute there I though
t I could convince them to just load up the minivan and all of us make the trip together.”
As she listened to this small lie, a flicker of something not-so-good touched Cecelia’s features. It was quick as a hummingbird kiss, just a momentary dimming of the smile, but of course I noticed. We were, after all, brother and sister. I had noticed, too, walking from back door to kitchen, that she did not have any suitcases stacked up on a chair, ready to go into the trunk of my car. They could be in the bedroom, I told myself, but, as we finished the meal, as Cecelia turned her back and took our empty salad bowls to the sink, I began to have a sense that an unwelcome surprise was floating in the air above the kitchen table.
My own psychic abilities, heretofore undiscovered, were soon confirmed. Cecelia paused for a moment with her hands gripping the front edge of the sink, then turned and marched resolutely back to the table, maintaining eye contact with me the whole way. She sat down very deliberately. She said, “Otto, we have to have a conversation.”
I said, “I noticed you haven’t packed.”
She said, “I’m not going.”
“Not going? Since when? You have to go.”
“I don’t have to anything.”
“Right. Good. I just took off two extra weeks from work, lost half my time at the Cape with my wife and kids, packed up, planned the whole trip, and why? Because you said you wanted to be there to ‘say good-bye to the land’ and because you are . . . uncomfortable . . . flying. And you wait until I get to your house to tell me you’re not going!”
I could feel the Rinpoche next to me. In my peripheral vision he seemed to be smiling. I had an urge to punch him, and this was a big deal because I had not punched anyone since a fine day, twenty-two years earlier, when Michael Redgewick put a hand on Jeannie’s ass at a UND graduate-student dance to which I had brought her.
“Something has changed,” my sister said mysteriously.
“Right. Good. I appreciate it.”
“Otto,” she reached out and put her hand on my arm. “I know you think I’m a nutcake. You’re nice, you try to hide it, but I know you think that.”
“Nutcake is as nutcake does,” I said stupidly. It had been one of Mom’s sayings when we were kids, and eventually turned into a family joke. “You couldn’t have called me, at least, before I left home?”
“You wouldn’t have come.”
“You’re damn right, I—”
“You wouldn’t have met Rinpoche.”
“I realize that. And I’m pleased to meet . . . does he speak English?”
They both nodded.
I turned to face the man. “I’m pleased to meet you, really. You seem like a very pleasant man, but,” I looked at my sister, “Cecelia, what means more to me than meeting Rinpoche, nice as he is, is—”
“You never would have come. You never in a million years would have agreed to go to Dakota with Rinpoche.”
“I’m not. I haven’t agreed. I’m not doing it.”
“It’s important that you do, Otto.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m giving him my half of the land, and the house, too, if you’ll let me. Or you can take more of the land to make up for it. The land is worth some money, isn’t it?”
I looked at her. I looked at Rinpoche. Every story I’d ever heard about softhearted single women preyed upon by con artists came honking around me like a gaggle of geese. I said, “Rinpoche, would you mind leaving us to fight in private for a few minutes?”
Rinpoche smiled and nodded—a bit too vigorously, it seemed, almost as if he were somehow making fun of me, but he stood and went out the back door without complaint.
When I heard the latch click I said, “Are you . . . is he . . . are you sleeping together?”
“Otto!”
“Is he trying to con you?”
“Con me? You are so off base that—”
“Mom and Pop’s property, our property now, is two thousand acres of prime North Dakota wheat land. Do you have any idea what that is worth?”
She shook her head.
“Five hundred dollars an acre.”
She reached up and put the fingers of her left hand to her throat, a gesture straight out of her earliest years. “You’re kidding. A million dollars! Our little farm in the middle of nowhere?”
“Plus the house.”
“I had no idea.”
“Plus the mineral rights, which we’ll retain, just in case. Still want to give it away?”
“Of course. Even more so. If you take, I don’t know, say, fifteen hundred acres and leave Rinpoche five hundred plus the house, that would be fair, wouldn’t it?”
“To whom?”
“To you. You have children getting ready to go to college. That’s $750,000 for you! That would be enough, wouldn’t it? Even after the taxes and the commission and everything?”
This stopped me, I have to say. She was squeezing my arm excitedly, and I felt a quick rainshower of shame on my face. “Seese,” I said, “I make . . . I make a fair amount of money. Jeannie makes some, too, and she had a tidy inheritance when her mother passed on. You . . . you get by on what?”
She waved this question away as if it didn’t matter any more than a cutworm in a row of carrots when, in fact, I knew that she had a sizeable mortgage on her ramshackle home at the edges of a city where property values were not exactly soaring; that her rusty old car had 200,000 miles on it; and that she couldn’t remember the last vacation she’d had. Everything that spells success in our society, all the little ego props that get you through a bad patch—job title, authority, important phone calls, expensive clothes or house, even just an office with a computer—and all the extra pleasures like a membership at the tennis club or a meal at the Zen Garden once a week, all this was missing from Cecelia’s life. She didn’t even drink wine, for heaven’s sake!
Her face was positively glowing. “Rinpoche has been searching, over a year now, for a quiet, pretty place where he can have a retreat center—he has four of them in Europe, you know—but he needs space, and some way for it to be at least partly self-sustaining. This is perfect! It’s Mom and Pop’s gift to him through me!”
Gift, all right, I thought. I said, “How long have you known Rinpoche?”
She was beaming. “Many, many lives!”
I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese’s back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.
I looked into Cecelia’s pretty eyes, then away. At this point I felt like I was tiptoeing along the edge of a Badlands cliff. One wrong step and over I would go. When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.
I felt, at that moment, a scream of sibling frustration rise up in my throat, a tirade. Your whole life, the tirade would have begun, one guy after the next has done this to you! This is your last chance for some security—how many more six-figure inheritances do you expect to receive? And you want to GIVE IT AWAY TO SOME RINPOCHE GUY! WITH FOUR CENTERS IN EUROPE! LET HIM GIVE SOMETHING TO YOU!
But—and this was a first, the kindness in Cecelia’s voice took most of the angry impulse out of me—I managed only: “This might be your last chance for some security, you know.”
She tilted her head and looked at me and it was almost a look of pity. “Oh, Otto. There is no security, sweetie. Didn’t the way Mom and Pop moved on, didn’t that make you see?”
“All right then, relative security,” I said. “And the term is died, not moved on. What I mean is, something more secure than waiting for the next ten-dollar customer to ring the front doorbell and ask for a tarot reading.”
“Don’t mock, please, Otto. The monks in Buddha’s time stood out i
n the road with a rice bowl. If someone put food in the bowl, they ate. If not, they didn’t. If you live in good faith like that, with an open heart, God provides.”
“This isn’t Buddha’s time, for God’s sake.”
“Of course it is! That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you, but you won’t let me.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore—the smiling eyes, the joyful condescension, the absolute certainty in the face of contrary facts—I’d seen it five hundred times. To keep from yelling at her I had to get up and pace the kitchen and clamp my teeth together. Outside, the mooing continued unabated. “Look,” I said at last, “you’re a grown woman. If you want to throw away your half of the inheritance, I can’t stop you. But spare me, could you? I came here to take you to see the house and the land before we sell it, not some monk, some guru, some . . . oddball.”
“You don’t see who he is, do you.”
“No, I do not. But now it’s you who isn’t listening: I came here to take you to North Dakota, not some guy I’ve never—”
“I can’t go, I have a regression going on with this old client and we’re at a very key juncture and if I left her now it would be just horrible.”
“Fine, regress her all you want, then. . . . How about this? How about I give Rinpoche airfare and he can meet me out there and we can get a signed document from you as to what you wish to do with your half of the property, and we’ll sort out the details that way? I’ll race out there—it’ll only take me two or three days. I’m kind of excited about seeing the countryside, on my own, you know?”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 3