Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  I like her so much.

  April 3

  I’ve read all my books! The Gita, the Upanishads, the Sutras. I am a sacred text–consuming machine.

  Now I’m going crazy without anything to read, so Baerbel took pity on me and lent me some of her books. She has the unabridged Upanishads, while I only have the paltry abridged versions. She also gave me some books on ancient Ayurveda, which is the medical science connected to yoga. And looky what I found, a recipe for the curing of insanity, demons, and epilepsy:

  “Cow’s urine is cooked in about three kilograms of ghee, together with about 200 grams each of asafetida, dark salt, and a mixture of black pepper, long pepper, and dried ginger.”

  If I had to choose between drinking my own pee or the pee of a cow, there would be no question about what I would choose. No question at all. I would choose to kill myself.

  Dream:

  Jonah shows up here in Bali and his face falls when I don’t recognize him at first. We sit down on the veranda steps, open on three sides to gales of wind and rain that whip through the trees and spray our faces. I get up and stand in the yard, in the rain, and Jonah says, “You’ll be too muddy to transcend. Your little feet will get stuck in the earth and you won’t be able to go anywhere.”

  April 4

  Jessica has had a breakthrough in her groin openers (she realized in Horse pose that breathing into her vagina wasn’t as powerful an image for her as breathing out of her vagina), and to celebrate, she wants to go shopping. She’s dressing for our outing right now, braiding her blonde hair in sections and wearing rose quartz drop earrings. She’s instructed me to wear my light pink linen sundress. She’s the boss, I told her. It’s her day.

  That said, I wonder if shopping is something we ought to be doing. I’m meditating about five million hours a day, and when I’m not meditating I’m in the wantilan exhausting every muscle in my body so that I can meditate. Do we really want to risk our mental clarity by filling our hearts with worldly desires?

  But no. I am not going to be disengaged, just detached. Gandhi engaged with the world and so will I!

  Jessica sees shopping very differently than I do. She told me this morning that the movement of fashion is a vein of feminine gold in the gray, masculine rock of society. Her gender-clarity teacher told her that femininity reveals itself in adornment. I told her that I felt like fashion was just another industry wanting to take our money. And besides, doesn’t it seem a bit crazy, the amount of effort and money it takes to keep up with the changing trends?

  “That’s the whole point!” she cried. She was standing in long black linen pants and a long-sleeved linen shirt, with a batik-print green scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. She said that it’s the ephemeral nature of fashion that makes it a feminine power. “Women are the true agents of change in this world—what changes the world more than bringing new life into it?” I was struck by how elegant she looked, with her delicate rib cage, small breasts, tiny little shoulders.

  I suddenly felt like a sausage in my pink sundress, white and fat and mottled, like a bratwurst, and the feeling made me want to shop for a whole new me. Jessica seemed to understand what I was feeling—she lifted her arms above her head, the thin sleeves of her shirt peeling back to reveal her two ruddy elbows: “Today is our day for transformation!”

  Jessica says that when we shop, we worship the goddess Kali, goddess of destruction and transformation. She says that when you have a major breakthrough in your life, it’s like you become a whole new version of yourself. In order to embrace this new version of yourself, you must destroy the person you used to be—and everything she ever wore.

  Evening

  What a day, what a day! We’re at Casa Luna, adorned and blissed out from a day of spiritual shopping.

  I would relive this day a hundred times if I could. I want to own this day, keep it in a pretty little sandalwood box, wrapped in silk, so I can pull it out and look at it whenever I want.

  I’m in love. It’s a problem. But God, it feels good. I am ENGAGING WITH THE WORLD!

  I’m detached, though, too, of course.

  We started in Campuhan, where those small red fruits had fallen from the low-hanging trees during this morning’s storm and had already been trampled by God knows how many feet. Their sticky pulp made our flip-flops cling to the ground. Campuhan is the last village before Ubud, and it’s lined with tchotchke shops. We stepped into one and emerged a few minutes later with batik scarves in turquoise and purple.

  And you know what? Suddenly I was right back in a state of spiritual bliss. It was like my kundalini breakthrough had just happened this morning. I’d forgotten that you can get virtually the same high from handing over cash for clothes. Jessica’s right about the transformational possibilities of shopping. In a jewelry store, I imagined myself in New York wearing all this fabulous silver jewelry and chopsticks in my hair, decorating my urban treehouse with masks of Shiva and Shakti. When people visit my house they will say, She is a world traveler. She is worldly. She has exceptional taste in phallic sandalwood sculptures. She doesn’t just go on vacations: she goes on sacred vacations.

  I did buy a carving of a man sitting in Forward Bend with an enormous erect penis and his hands covering his eyes, as if he’s saying, “I just can’t believe it’s so big.”

  Conversation piece!

  Walking into Ubud, the sun was in our eyes even as rainwater from the storm rushed down the flood drains. We passed pavilion after pavilion of men in shorts and T-shirts building creatures out of chicken wire and papier-mâché for an upcoming festival.

  Jessica’s voice climbed higher and higher up her vocal range as she pointed out all the colors in my new moonstone ring. I complimented her on her choice of silver arm cuff. We were best friends.

  Until Jessica found her shoes. Then I had to escape for a minute. See, Jessica’s idea of haggling is to name her price very low and then never budge. So when she found the shoes—beaded thong sandals, white and sparkling and the shoes she says she’ll be married in someday—she offered five thousand rupiah, about five dollars, and the saleswoman countered with twenty thousand, and then moved down to eighteen, then sixteen, and Jessica stayed at five thousand. I tried to stay out of the way, lurking next to a hanging mobile of scarves, but pretty soon I realized it was going to be a long time before Jessica had herself a new pair of shoes. So, just as Jessica reluctantly upped her bid to six thousand, I stepped out onto a busy Monkey Forest Road to see where we should go next.

  I walked past a skinny, shirtless man crouched on the corner selling skewers of chicken and beef that smelled delicious and forbidden, poked my head into a couple of shops, and then stopped in front of a glass-fronted store that couldn’t seem more out of place in the land of batik scarves and sandalwood sculptures. PRADA.

  The store was clean, bright, minimalist. Three sides were lined with thin black shelves upon which purses, backpacks, and wallets waited for admirers like sculptures in a museum. Carousels of lightweight T-shirts spun around the floor.

  A small collection of shoes was displayed near the entrance, one pair to a shelf. Pointy-toed leather pumps, three-inch stilettos. Lovely, all of them, but shoes are not my vice, so I quickly lost interest. The same wall bore the weight of a few dozen wallets, satchels, and fanny packs in the black nylon design that is ubiquitous in certain suburbs of Seattle where the women are tan and blond and the men drive Jaguars. I’ve never understood the appeal of those bags. Especially when I found out they cost as much as half my rent.

  I made my way toward the door to return to Jessica’s shoe crisis, but something held me back. This something wouldn’t let me leave.

  I have this vice. Well—I have several vices, or I did before I came to Bali and got all transcendent and kundalinified. But this one is my most girly of vices. Handbags. I adore them. So it was the power of the handbag—the prana of the Prada, you might say, if you were prone to saying such things—that made me turn around and walk to the b
ack of the store where variations on my addiction lined up like an exceedingly attractive Greek chorus, chanting to me in unison.

  One voice distinguished itself from the others, low and husky. My breath fell short. My face warmed. I was in thrall to Eros.

  Pistachio green leather. Its strap is like a belt buckle, so that it can be adjusted to fit snugly under my arm, or hang loosely if I want it to. Slightly rectangular, slightly cylindrical, I reached for it; I pulled my hand back. We flirted with each other until I couldn’t help myself; I had to hug it to my side, my perfect purse, my one true love. I stroked the leather, I smelled it, I wanted to wear its perfume. I looked at myself in the mirror in a variety of positions. From the side, the bag tucked deliciously under my bare arm, the leather rubbing gently against my skin. From behind, its backside round and perfect.

  On my knee, genuflecting, its length perpendicular to my thigh, I unzipped it slowly, tantalizingly, and then slid my fingers inside as if to retrieve a compact.

  From the street, I heard the screech of tires and someone yelling. I shook my head, caught my breath, and remembered that I was in a Prada store, a place I had never been, for one simple reason: I am not rich.

  I put the bag back on its little altar. But first, just to make myself feel better, I looked at the price tag.

  The handbag that would complete me as I’ve never been completed before could be mine for one hundred fifty thousand dollars.

  Relief. Of course I couldn’t afford it. I turned away, I said good-bye.

  But wait! One hundred fifty thousand dollars? No! One hundred fifty thousand rupiah. Which is more like one hundred fifty dollars.

  I have that many dollars.

  But then something struck me as wrong, as terribly wrong about this whole scenario. I looked around. I was at Prada, in Bali. Is this for real? I know most fake bags are made in Asia—could this be the fake Prada store? I eyed the saleswomen in their chic black outfits. I envisioned them leaving the store through the door behind the register and walking into a windowless room of long tables at which nimble-fingered toddlers made hundreds of handbags a day in exchange for a spoonful of formula and a diaper change.

  But one hundred fifty dollars? That’s too much to be a fake.

  But it’s also too little to be real. Could these be last season’s purses? International prices? But if I spent one hundred fifty dollars on a Prada handbag that turns out to be a fake, what would that make me?

  That would make me a chump.

  I’m not ready for this leap of faith, I thought. I was standing with my arm outstretched, the purse dangling like a drop earring from my hand, when Jessica appeared in my peripheral vision. I didn’t know what to say to her, especially when I noted that she didn’t have a shopping bag in hand and therefore must have put the shoes back for costing one or two dollars more than she was willing to spend.

  We tilted our heads at the purse as if it were a painting. “Beautiful, huh?” I said.

  Jessica sighed at the purse and then gave me a look that told me everything I wanted to know: she could see that we were meant for each other. That we had a connection. That I had found my soul mate.

  We walked out slowly. I turned back twice, but made it out to the street without my leather companion. Back in the sun and air, I remembered who I was, and who I wasn’t, what I needed and what I didn’t, and I told myself I had made the right decision. I am in Bali for other reasons. I’m on a path, and that path doesn’t go through Milan.

  As we walked toward the restaurant, Jessica said, “You know, women experience their purses as an extension of their uterus.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Do they?”

  NOW WE’RE SITTING at Casa Luna, drinking tea and thinking about getting some dinner. And I’ve got to say there are some scary places your brain can go when you want something. I’ve been thinking about the idea of dharma. Sweatshop dharma. If we’re supposed to accept the world as it is, then maybe it isn’t a bad thing to own a purse with potentially sinister origins? Jessica says that this is a bit of a stretch, BUT! She did say that it was true, as far as she could tell, that sweatshops are just a part of life, and that the people working in sweatshops are living with their own karma and dharma and all the same things we live with. Dharma doesn’t stop at the sweatshop door.

  As Marcy sometimes says, Everything works out perfectly. In India, she says, the people are singing in the slums. She says that in this world there’s just enough happiness, and just enough suffering.

  When she said that, I looked at the giant diamond studs in her ears and thought, And I guess there’s just enough bullshit, too.

  Hmm. Well, shoot. I don’t want to be a Marcy, so I’d better put this business out of my mind. We need food.

  I want nothing, I need nothing, I am free of all desire.

  Oh, but I wants it. My precious.

  April 5

  Ohhh, we’re in trouble. Big trouble. I wasn’t going to write about this, but Jessica and I did something very naughty last night, at the end of our day of shopping.

  There we were, at Casa Luna, singing songs to each other about our day’s purchases. As always, we were surrounded by the spiritual tourists that crowd Ubud and fill up every table at what we think of as our restaurant. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis and eating all of the foods we’ve long since renounced: Artery-clogging steak. Shrimp in sickly sweet sauces. Pork that’s been marinated in Balinese rice wine. By now we’d eaten our green leaves and rice, and I was feeling pretty good about my ability to be detached from my handbag. Soon I found myself feeling sorry for these poor tourists—I know their trials and tribulations well. After all, I was once one of them. Fourteen days ago, I, too, longed for the worldly pleasures these tourists enjoyed, like food that tastes good, for instance. For cigarettes and cocktails.

  But then I noticed the table next to us. A brunette and a blonde, just like us, only these women were wearing gorgeous designer vacation wear. Flowing silk sarongs with matching halter tops that showed off their spectacular and line-free tans. They sparkled all over with jewelry: diamond studs in their noses, diamond rings on their right hands. They looked like they spent every morning in yoga and every afternoon at the spa. In comparison, our purchases looked cheap and handmade. I wished I had bought the purse.

  I want nothing, I need nothing, I am free of all desire.

  I was about to say this to Jessica when she froze, staring at something in her menu. “Oh no,” she said. She looked at me with crazy eyes. “Oh Suzanne!”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it’s bad, bad, bad!”

  “What?”

  She lowered her voice to a giddy whisper. “It’s a milkshake. A coconut. Vanilla. Milkshake!” And then she started giggling again, shaking her head. “Oh no, no, no.”

  I looked at her, not smiling, not joining in her giggle fit. “We have to have that,” I said.

  “No!” she cried, “we can’t!”

  “Can’t we?” Suddenly I wanted this milkshake more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, including enlightenment.

  Jessica’s laughter was starting to get a little panicked. “But, Suzanne, it’s full of sugar! Sweetness! Attachment! Milkshakes are bad!”

  Now, as I saw it, this was a health shake. It was probably fresh vanilla mixed with fresh coconut, probably from the trees right outside. Back home they’d sell it at Whole Foods for twelve bucks a pop. I explained my thinking to Jessica, but she looked skeptical. “Come on, Jess. You only live once!”

  Oops. Jessica looked at me as if I was the crazy one in the relationship. I tried to backtrack. “I mean, until the next life.”

  Ten minutes later it arrived.

  And it wasn’t a milkshake—I could tell from the little corona of heavenly light hovering above it. It was ambrosia. It was a milkshake for the gods. It made me believe in God, in fact, in a loving God that wants us to be happy. I thought of my siblings for a second, and laughed. “Jess,” I said, “this is the p
roof that there is a God.”

  She nodded happily. “This is about as God as God gets,” she said.

  Not too thick, not too thin, a subtle blend of coconut and vanilla. It tasted like an ice cream cone. The wafer kind, not a waffle or sugar cone, but the cheap kind my parents bought when we were kids, when ice cream cones were symbolic of the weekend or summer or anytime when we were liberated from the dictatorial anti-sugar regime of the house. I sipped my milkshake, five years old again.

  How something that makes me feel loved by God can be bad, I don’t know.

  Well.

  Lest we forget: certain things are forbidden in the yogic lifestyle, including meat, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and joie de vivre.

  This morning, before class, we were being good karma yogis, moving the gamelan instruments to the side of the wantilan, and Jessica and I couldn’t help telling our yogamates about our brief rebellion last night. Our impulses were good, I swear. We weren’t trying to corrupt, we were trying to enlighten.

  Jessica was explaining that this milkshake was like a coconut-vanilla orgasm when Indra and Lou arrived. Our yogamates looked nervous at the sight of our teachers, and their nerves must’ve made Jessica repent, because as soon as we were seated for check-in, something terrible happened. Jessica confessed.

  Lou looked up for a split second and then returned his gaze to his heels, where he was digging around with his thumbs. But Indra stood up a little straighter, her head tilted as her eyes traveled from Jessica to me, and back to Jessica. “A coconut-vanilla milkshake,” she said.