Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  Yogis are selfish. Christianity, Judaism, Islam—these are real religions where people make you soup and pet you when you’re sick. Yoga is a self-centered pseudo-religion and I hate it.

  I just really want to see some monkeys. It’s so unfair. I’ve wanted to see monkeys in the wild my whole life. It’s been my greatest dream, my dearest wish. But do they care? Do they try to hide their excitement? Do they, for once in their lives, think about others, and how they might conceal their excitement out of respect for the fact that I’m stuck here in this shitty cell, basically dying?

  No. They do not.

  There is no God.

  I miss Jonah. He would bring me soup or something. He would say something funny about this so that I kept my will to live. He would entertain me with gossip and stories, seeing as I have no television, no friends, and the boredom is killing me faster than the Bali Belly.

  Later

  I die a little every day.

  Later

  Maybe it isn’t the Bali Belly. Perhaps this is all a big mistake. I have this pain in my side, and I’m thinking it’s cancer of the appendix. Which has probably spread, by now, to my stomach, my intestines, my ovaries. If I don’t die, I’ll be sterile when this is over.

  I’ve always wanted a child. But I will be barren.

  If I live.

  Later

  They’re just about to leave. I can hear Lara and Jason out on the veranda with Jessica, talking about how much fun they’re about to have and how happy they are they don’t have the Bali Belly. Well—I’m sure that’s what they’re thinking, anyway. Everybody loves being alive when they’re not the one dying!

  Holy shit.

  I just looked in the mirror for the first time in God knows how long. The skin beneath my eyes is a silvery purple, the color of the inside of an oyster shell. This color bleeds into a gray mask that is the rest of my face. That discovery was disconcerting enough. But then I stuck my tongue out, and—oh my God. It’s not black, but it isn’t pink. It’s sort of greenish gray. Something’s happening to me. I feel like I’m transforming into another life-form, like Kafka’s cockroach or the Fly. Do metamorphoses start in the tongue?

  I’M IN A pickle.

  They left maybe an hour ago. Before they did, I showed Jessica my tongue. I was a little panicked. I just can’t take a black tongue, it’s too much for me to bear on top of everything else, the cancer, the barren womb, etc.

  She came in close, her hands on my shoulders, and peered into my mouth. “Oh, Suzanne,” she sighed. “You have to use urine.”

  “No,” I said. “No! We made a deal, and I’m going to find a way to get some antibiotics.” I could hear Jason’s and Lara’s voices on the veranda. I stood up. Jason would help me, he’d have to help me. I was like Winona Ryder in Dracula, mouth bitten and bleeding: Take me away from all this death.

  Jessica caught my hand. “Wait, how are you going to find antibiotics today? By the time you actually get a prescription from a doctor, your tongue could be black.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. I suddenly became very still. It occurred to me that this was not my fault. This was Jessica’s fault, Lara’s fault. I felt as if I weighed a thousand dense pounds, I was a block of cement. “What am I supposed to do?” It wasn’t a question; it was an accusation.

  Jessica paused, biting her lip. “You know what will help?” she said. “It will help if you think of urine therapy as a ritual.”

  I stared her down, unmoved. She looked back at me, kindly. “Before I have my first morning treatment, I like to say a prayer.”

  I refused even to nod. I wanted her to suffer for this.

  She cleared her throat and then sang, her voice ethereal and sibilant, “Bless me, Golden Tonic, as you cleanse my system and purify my soul.”

  I became a little less steely. This is all a dream, I thought. Soon Jessica will start juggling swordfish and I’ll eat my shoe. Then I’ll know I’m asleep. As I stared at my roommate, taking in her priceless little prayer, Jason popped his head in the front door.

  “Suzanne,” he said, “just drink a little urine and get on with your life! You can do it, love.”

  I heard Lara laughing and turned back to Jessica. My voice floated from my throat like a bit of dandelion fluff. “How?”

  So Jessica gave me some pointers. She said to remember to collect only the midstream. When I asked why, she shrugged. “The first bit of urine cleans your yoni,” she said. “It sterilizes you, so the midstream is pure. And the last bit”—she giggled and absently twisted a lock of her hair—“well, it’s crunchy.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You know,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face. “It’s got a sort of sediment to it. You don’t need the crunchy bits.”

  There was absolutely nothing I could say in response to that, so I said good-bye and told her to give my love to the monkeys.

  Now I’m sitting on the futon, debating. I can’t believe I’m even entertaining the idea of doing this. Am I? Am I capable of doing it?

  God. I don’t know.

  • • •

  I’VE SPENT THE past half hour or so contemplating my tongue. I’ve studied it in all lights, from every possible angle. I tried scraping it with the side of a fork. I’ve visualized a pink tongue. I’ve made a mantra out of telling myself that I am feeling better. But I’m not.

  What’s the worst that could happen?

  The worst is that I will throw up. That would be bad, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. And it’s not so different from what I’ve been doing the past few days, anyway.

  No one at home will ever have to know.

  I JUST PEED into a glass.

  It proved trickier than I thought it would be. I’ve only peed in this fashion—collecting the midstream—at the doctor’s office, and then into short little plastic cups. I used a tall glass from the kitchen, just as Indra told us to.

  To say that it was unwieldy would be an understatement. It was a mess. I had to wipe up each side of the glass with toilet paper, then the seat of the toilet, and then my thighs. It looks like I have about two shots’ worth of urine in my glass. I can’t do the full eight ounces Indra and everybody recommend. A double shot of urine will have to suffice.

  Oh. Wait. Hold on. When did I go crazy?

  I’m not drinking this. No way, no how.

  HOLY GROSS. I just lifted the glass to my mouth to try and do it, and I felt a caress of warm steam on my nose. I put the glass down instantly: there’s no way in hell I’m drinking warm pee.

  Ah yes, I am crazy. I say no warm pee as if it’ll be deliciously refreshing cold. As if I should blend it with ice, make a daiquiri.

  I’VE BEEN LEANING against the door frame, studying my glass of tonic for crunchy bits. I don’t see any. Now the glass is sitting on the back of the toilet, waiting for me to do something.

  Here’s what I keep telling myself: I’m going to do a yellow Jaeger shot. Down the hatch, one fell swoop, like a double shot of Jaeger. I’ve made a big pot of tea and it’s sitting on the bathroom counter. That’ll be my chaser. I’ve never been good at shots, but I will channel every twenty-first-birthday party I’ve ever attended to get me through this.

  Down the hatch, one fell swoop, like a double shot of Jaeger with a ginger-tea chaser. Here we go, Suzie-Q, here we go …

  BLARF.

  HOLY MOTHERMARYJESUSJOSEPH. Oh my Christ. Oh my

  Sunset

  I’m sitting on the veranda.

  Oh, wait. Who’s sitting on the veranda?

  A pissdrinker is sitting on the veranda.

  Honestly? Can I be honest with myself? Well, Self, it was delicious. Rich yet refreshing, nutty yet sweet, with a dazzle of tannins that sparkled on the tongue before somersaulting into a long, smooth finish. Next time I’m going to pair it with cheese and wear high heels. Make a real party out of it.

  Okay.

  So maybe it wasn’t quite like that.

  My God, I wish my sister w
ere here. She would die. This might be the point at which she has to force-feed me steak and make me smoke cigarettes to bring me back to myself. Too late, though, dear sister. Too late. The Kool-Aid’s been drunk.

  I’ve never blacked out from drinking liquor, but I very nearly did from drinking pee.

  I did exactly what I said I would do. I chanted pharmaceutical conspiracy, pharmaceutical conspiracy, then I picked that glass up off the back of the toilet and downed it in one fell swoop. Down the hatch, like a shot of Jaeger. And then my vision went spotty, and I weaved a little, clutching the countertop with my free hand to steady myself.

  When my eyes adjusted, I caught my reflection in the mirror and cracked up until I started to gag. Oh no, I thought, clutching the countertop, you are not throwing this up. I grabbed my cup of tea and drank it as quickly as I could before pouring myself another cup. This was difficult, because I couldn’t stop laughing and sputtering and talking to myself.

  You foul, disgusting pissdrinker! Jonah will never kiss you again!

  It’s the strangest taste. Buttery and metallic, as if I’d stuck my head under the fake-butter dispenser at the movie theater and filled it all the way up, then gone over to the cash register and grabbed a bunch of pennies, added them to my butter-filled mouth, and gargled the whole concoction. It tastes like verdigris.

  Oh, who am I kidding? It tastes like pee.

  When I finished all the tea in the pot, I moved on to bananas. I ate a whole banana, the most fruit I’ve eaten in days. But the taste would not be washed out. Like a buttered nickel sitting on my tongue. I have been branded, and I don’t think there’s a revirginization ritual to give me back who I once was.

  I curled up on the futon, trying to think of what else I could eat to clean out my mouth. It’s baffling that I didn’t think to just brush my teeth. I bet that would’ve helped. Maybe I had Bali Belly of the brain. Anyway, I curled up on the futon in the heat of midday, and when I woke up, the sun was going down. That’s more than I’ve slept in one stretch in days. And now I’m sitting here, listening to the evening gamelan, and I have to say—I feel pretty good. I checked out my tongue in the mirror after I woke up, and it’s a bit better, too. I was afraid I’d look in the mirror and it would be as black as sin, as if I’d been drinking shoe polish. But there it was, not some gleaming new perfectly pink tongue, but maybe a little less green.

  I really am feeling better. It was probably the nap that did it. Or, I don’t know—a miracle.

  April 14

  It is a miracle. The Bali Belly is gone. I mean, it’s really, truly, one-hundred-percent gone. I’m cured. I haven’t returned to my garden cell in hours. I may never go back.

  I can’t believe it. Last night I thought I was just feeling more rested. But then I went to bed and slept through the night, and I ate a regular breakfast of bananas and rice and then went to class and I am fine. I am cured!

  I keep thinking about what this could mean for me. If I could do this every day, like my yogamates do, what would my life be like? I mean, besides the social ostracism?

  The flu, cramps, migraines: gone forever. No need to worry ever again about cancer or meningitis or osteoporosis or any of the conditions and diseases I worry about constantly. The hair on my legs will grow at a slower, healthier speed. My cheekbones will be higher and I’ll never, ever break out on my chin or have PMS again.

  My days of cowardice are over. I have done the one thing that has terrified me since I arrived here. Show me a cliff face, and I will scale it. Show me a shark-filled sea, and I will swim it.

  The only thing is, I don’t know if I can start doing it every day. Not yet. I didn’t drink any today, and I kind of just want to enjoy being well again. So I’ll start up regularly tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow I begin!

  April 15

  I plan to send an e-mail to my sister and to Jonah:

  If they could see me now, that little gang of mine

  I’m eating greens and rice and drinking my u-rine.

  I really can’t wait to read their responses.

  That said, I must confess that this morning I forgot all about my new morning routine until I went out onto the veranda and saw Jessica there with her Starbucks mug.

  I’m going to have to be very disciplined about this, because I can tell I’m losing my resolve to actually become a practicing pissdrinker. I keep wondering if just doing it once will suffice—if I’ve coated my organs in uriney protection, like a sealant or a topcoat. That would be nice.

  • • •

  It was a bit shocking to get back to class yesterday. Turns out I missed only three days. Felt like an eternity. But three days was enough to find myself in a new world order.

  Two women have arrived to take part in the final stretch of our teacher training. One is a student, Marianne, and the other, SuZen, is here to teach us anatomy.

  Indra clearly adores them. They’ve both studied with her before, and when she introduced them as “my dear, dear friends, Marianne and SuZen,” she sounded positively giddy. Marianne is my age and she looks like she should be on the cover of Yoga Journal. Small-boned but strong, with glossy red hair and polished skin. She is the epitome of the placid yogini—she speaks as if she once did a lot of acid and is still enjoying the flashbacks. “It’s so … wow. Yeah. It’s so good, you know?” she said in check-in. She shivered her thick hair down her back and flashed a surprised smile at all of us, as if she’d just noticed where she was. “So good. To be … here.”

  SuZen is actually one of Indra’s oldest and best friends. She looks like some of the white women I once took African dance classes with at home. Short, shaggy blond hair, Native American tattoos on her lower back and ankles. But where those women earnestly carried handwoven bags from Guatemala or Nepal, SuZen carried on her shoulder a yoga bag that cost hundreds of dollars—the one I saw Christy Turlington model in a magazine Lara was reading—out of which she pulled a matching yoga mat. We eyed her as she unfurled her designer mat and proceeded to spray it down with some sort of aromatherapy antibacterial mat spray. Tea tree and eucalyptus oils from the spray spread through the thick wantilan air, mingling with the lavender from her scented savasana eye pillows. She and Marianne had fancy towels, blankets, and a collection of other yoga toys that accumulated by their mats as they prepared for class.

  Jason and I exchanged looks. I caught Lara raising an eyebrow at the display of yoga accoutrements. Only Baerbel spoke out loud, “It seems as if you have brought an entire toy store with you to Bali,” she said, her dimples showing. “I never knew yoga required so many toys!”

  My yogamates and I look a little shabby by comparison. Our mats have been through nearly eight hours of yoga a day for weeks, so they’re all a bit dingy and pockmarked from dirt and sweat and friction. We’ve been hand-washing our yoga clothes, so they’re always a little funky looking, and none of us brought anything like the clothes these women wear. Their clothes look like money.

  I thought of the higher and lower birds, and what Indra said about how indulging in those things that give us pleasure, like milkshakes, means that we will also have to feel pain or disgust. I was considering this—how much pain I’d be willing to experience in exchange for a pair of Marianne’s yoga pants—when we did our final three Oms for the day.

  Later

  I’m at Casa Luna for dinner with Jess, Jason, and Lara. We’re creating our own classes. We’re supposed to give our class a name—it can be anything we want to call it, even a made-up name—and then think of an image that represents our class, and a few words to describe it.

  SuZen says we should be thinking about creating our own brand of yoga. She says that, for instance, right now there’s a lot of marketing out there for something called doga, which is yoga for your dog. She said the types of yoga are going to keep proliferating until you can find a yoga class for any need you can come up with. She says we should get in the game early.

  Over dinner we spent a long time talking about t
his doga thing. Lara hated it, and her hatred seemed to extend to SuZen for suggesting it. “That is just too much,” she said. “I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but it’s people like SuZen who are ruining this practice. I mean, doga? Really? It’s exactly what everybody’s doing in London, taking their expensive dogs in for expensive yoga classes as if they need yoga in addition to their doggie antidepressants. What’s next? Parakeet yoga? Yogakeet?”

  Jason kept his eyes on his plate as he used a piece of bread to nudge brown rice onto his fork. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with teaching your dog yoga.”

  “Depends on your definition of wrong,” I said.

  “Jason, it’s people cashing in.”

  “Well, but what if the little doggies like it?”

  Lara shook her head and pulled out her notebook.

  Now we’re all writing away about our classes. I’ve decided to call my yoga Complete Yoga. It’s yoga that makes you complete. We’re all walking around in our lives with parts of us missing, either because we live away from our friends or our families, or because we’ve lost our ability to be both a mind and a body at the same time. That’s my pitch, anyway. So, Complete Yoga.

  Words to describe it? Wholeness. Oneness. Complete … ness.

  And an image. Huh. I don’t know. Something complete looking.

  Maybe I’ll be the image. Me, standing in Mountain pose, which is a pretty complete sort of pose. I’m wearing long, slim black trousers. Very slimming. Nice pointy-toed black leather boots. A black shirt with a great collar. And tucked beneath my arm, just sort of taunting you with a little splash of color, is a vision of pistachio-green leather Prada, the real deal. No fake bag in my yoga image! That little splash of color is just what the image needs. It completes the outfit! Get it? Complete Yoga?