Yoga Bitch

by Suzanne Morrison

  May 4

  I’m so happy about today. I woke up early, and I wasn’t hungover because Jessica and I actually stayed home last night and drank water and tea. Sure, we ate about five pounds of sugary black rice pudding apiece, but that’s as bad as we let ourselves be. And we didn’t gossip, either. We practiced teaching each other our classes, because today was our day to teach.

  I was up early, and I meditated for an hour. I felt that familiar sinking sensation again. It occurs to me now that buying my handbag was the best thing I could do for my spiritual well-being, because now that I possess it, I don’t have to meditate on it anymore. It’s no wonder, really, that rich people can commit to spiritual quests. They’re not consumed by lust for things because they already have them!

  Maybe Su’s uncle was right.

  After meditating, I felt refreshed and ready to embrace the world again. And then we walked single file to class. En route, we passed three naked men who were bathing in the river, and they smiled at us and we smiled back, hello there, selamat pagi, wishing the men and their privates a good day.

  I was shocked, at the end of my class, to discover that I loved teaching yoga. I loved it. The view from above is so different from the view on the mat. I could see everybody working so hard to improve themselves, some of them struggling. I could see Marcy looking around the room to compare her Standing Forward Bend to her neighbor’s. I saw frustration on Jessica’s face in Camel pose; she’s been worrying that her heart isn’t open enough, so chest openers give her a lot of anxiety. I saw six people walk in with tight hamstrings and sand in their eyes, and walk out a brighter, more fluid bunch. Teaching this class felt like an act of love. How strange.

  I always thought I hated teaching. Probably because I’ve only ever taught kids. The last time I taught a class, it was to elementary school kids, and during an acting exercise I turned my ankle and, in front of a dozen eight-to-ten-year-olds, I said, “Oh, FUCK.”

  Yeah. Not so gifted with the children.

  Later

  I’ve packed up my things. How strange to see my suitcase so plump and the armoire so bare. Oh, but I am looking forward to being home. To laundry and tap water and lipstick and movies with my sister.

  While I was packing, I found the Sailor’s novel. Funny, I’ve hardly thought of it in the last few weeks. All of my dreams have been of Jonah. I’m so excited to get home and book my flight to New York. The Sailor is just a friend. It’s nice to have friends you’re attracted to, I suppose. Makes you feel alive. Especially when you’ve created this idea that their soul is like yours, that you both yearn for some kind of truth. I’d bet if we got too close, we’d be disappointed. Better to leave it unfulfilled.

  We’re off to the Jazz Café for one last night of debauchery before we graduate. Sweet Jesus, it’s almost over. If that isn’t an excuse for a little wildness, I don’t know what is.

  May 5

  My yogamates and I have graduated, and Indra and Lou are married.

  I feel like I’ve gone cross-eyed. Let’s see, what’s the tally for today?

  Last class, last two milkshakes (not in the same sitting, I’m trying to be good after all), one graduation, one wedding, and one NARROW ESCAPE.

  The trouble began last night, at the Jazz Café, when I tried to befriend SuZen and Marianne. I wanted to end our retreat as friends. Also, they were smoking, and I wanted to be near smoking if I couldn’t enjoy it myself. (It was shocking to see two yogis with cigarettes in their hands. Shocking in a good way.)

  Anyway, the singer last night was a woman who sang like she was Ella Fitzgerald reincarnated. This led us to talk about jazz music and our favorite singers, and I told them about a Rodgers and Hart song I’ve always loved.

  SuZen is pushy. The instant I mentioned the song, she started harassing me to ask the band to play backup so I could perform it for the entire club. Um, no. That was the last thing I wanted to do. She wouldn’t let it go until I told them I’d sing it for them on the way home.

  The song goes like this:

  I’ve married many men, a ton of them

  Because I was untrue to none of them

  Because I bumped off every one of them

  To keep my love alive!

  The singer goes on to describe how she murders each of her husbands when they start to bother her. It’s a great song. What women had to do before feminism, right?

  So I sang it for them as we walked home, and SuZen went crazy. She thought it was the most hilarious song she’d heard in her entire life. “You should sing it tomorrow for Indra’s wedding.” she said. “She’ll laugh her ass off!”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t think it was appropriate. A wedding is kind of a serious thing—I would think my teachers wouldn’t want me to make a joke of it.

  I told SuZen that I could teach it to her so that she could perform it, if she thought Indra would like it so much. That made more sense—SuZen is one of Indra’s oldest friends, someone who could get away with an irreverent wedding offering.

  “No,” she said, “you have to do it, you’ve got it nailed! She’s going to love it.”

  She went on like this all the way home, and by the time we parted ways, I had agreed to think about it.

  “Then it’s done,” SuZen said. “You’re going to be great.” She waved good-bye. “It’s going to be amazing. It’s too perfect!”

  I was still debating it with Lara, Jason, and Jessica this morning, when Marianne stopped by our house. She sat down at the table on our veranda, looking concerned. “I don’t know what SuZen’s thinking,” she said. “I hope you aren’t planning to sing that song today?”

  I told her I didn’t think I should, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she said. “I think it would be very rude, considering how many times Indra’s been married.”

  I found this a little annoying, to be honest. Marianne acting like she was Indra’s protector. “Well, a second marriage isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” I said.

  Marianne shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m pretty sure this is her sixth.”

  !

  !

  !

  Holy Hell in a Handbasket!

  So I was about to sing a song about a woman who kills off her husbands in order to remarry at the wedding of a MANEATER.

  At first we were all sort of stunned. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “Six times, she’s married?” Jason said.

  “But … but …” Jessica looked from Marianne to me and shook her head.

  “We’d better get ready,” I said to Marianne. I hope it wasn’t too obvious that I was trying to get rid of her, but we couldn’t respond as fully as any of us wanted to, so long as she was there.

  As soon as we saw her head disappear beyond the pool, we freaked out.

  Jason looked dazed. “SuZen set you up,” he said. “What exactly was she trying to do, telling you to sing that song?”

  Lara was pissed. She said she never really thought Indra was enlightened, that now that she thought about it, there had been so many signs … Jason and Lara started comparing notes to see who could have guessed it based on anything Indra had said over the last two months. Everyone agreed that this was the proof we’d all been suspecting, in one way or another: Indra was no god, no avatar, no prophet. She was no better than any of the rest of us, apart from her extraordinarily flexible spine.

  “But she’s made us think that she’s so much better than us,” Lara said seriously, “more enlightened, more evolved. And when you make yourself superior to others even though you’re not enlightened, not truly superior, well, then—I think that makes you a worse person.”

  “A fraud,” I agreed.

  “A false prophet,” Jason said.

  Perhaps we were being unfair. I don’t know. All I know is that our words made Jessica tear up. “You guys,” she said, sniffing, “that’s not the point. Indra is perfect as she is.”

  “Perfect?” I said. Now, writing this, I
can hear how bitter I must have sounded. “Perfect, are you kidding?” I didn’t want to listen to her. I was too angry. And if I’m honest with myself, it felt amazing, this anger. It felt righteous and invigorating, like I was pumping twice as much blood as normal. How liberating to kick Indra off her pedestal, and then kick her! And kick her! And stomp on her head!

  I mean, my God. This woman had me believing that I should change everything. Drop my life off a cliff and go looking for something like her relationship with Lou. That if I took the kind of chance she once took, I might discover for myself the authentic life I thought she was living.

  But how many lives does one have to drop off a cliff to get to that authentic life? How many Jonahs are left behind as she drives away? What’s bothering me now is that I can’t remember the exact words she used to tell me that story. Did she lie to me about her first husband, making it sound as if he was the only man she’d ever been married to? Or did I just edit out other statements because I loved this one narrative so much? I only have my own accounting of this story written down. Not hers.

  But, even so. The tone she imparted was always that Lou was The One—not The Sixth. Good Lord, how did I fall for this woman? How did I lose my skepticism? I know that one must jettison skepticism in order to have faith, but it’s my skepticism that protects me from these self-elected spiritual charlatans roaming this earth, ensnaring young and old when we are most lost, when we are searching.

  Maybe this is Indra’s final lesson for me. Jessica says that Indra is perfect as she is. That’s what she kept trying to say, even though Jason and Lara and I ignore her. She said that the role Indra has been sent to play in our lives has been to disillusion us, to remind us that we must listen to our own hearts and souls, that we must walk our own paths to find God and love. She said Indra’s on her own winding path, too, and that we should be grateful to her.

  “Grateful?” Jason said. “What a lot of crap, Jessica. I’m sorry, love, but I’m not buying it.”

  “Think of the prayer we say at the end of every class,” Jessica said, her eyes wet and full of conviction. “We say, Om bolo sad-Guru maharaj ji ki. ‘We bow to the Guru of our own heart and soul.’ That’s the whole point, you guys.” She looked at us, desperate, it seemed, for us to understand and agree with her. Her voice broke. “That’s what this is all about.”

  I don’t know. Sounds pretty Pollyanna to me. Here’s what I think: I think I’m going to go home the same person I’ve always been. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe I’ve always been fine, apart from this urge to transform myself, this urge to worship something beyond myself. Who knows? Maybe it’s in disillusionment that we find ourselves.

  May 6

  Everybody’s downstairs packing up Made’s car to leave Penestanan. We head out in just a few minutes. But I want to write one last entry before I go.

  Yesterday’s ceremonies took place in the wantilan, of course, and we all wore special sarongs and sashes for the occasion. Indra and Lou looked beautiful, both of them dressed in white and gold sarongs, Lou with a white linen shirt over his, Indra with the traditional Balinese camisole and lacy blouse. She had taken her braids out so that her blonde hair fell down her back again.

  Noadhi lit the candles on the altar, which overflowed with offerings. And then, just as he had done at the blender purification ritual, he took a bowl of water in one hand and a lotus flower in the other, and splashed each of us in turn. He pressed rice kernels on our foreheads and temples, and at the base of our throats. I tried not to laugh as Baerbel turned to me, blinking earnestly at the rice kernels stuck in her eyelashes.

  I would have liked to hear the women’s gamelan play, but it was several men from the village who played the women’s instruments for the ceremony. The music began with a hoarse wooden flute, then six mallets struck a deep, broad chord. One by one we stood to go to the altar and collect our diplomas from our teachers. When we were all seated once more, clutching our certificates in our sweaty hands, Indra and Lou turned toward the altar, gesturing to Baerbel, SuZen, and Jason to come and stand up with them. They formed a protective crescent around our teachers, looking on as Noadhi sprayed them with water, pressed rice on their foreheads and throats, and spoke his prayers in a low, muted voice.

  As Indra and Lou followed the balian, I was struck by their attitude of deference toward him. Noadhi stands almost a foot shorter than my teachers, but his bearing made him seem larger, somehow. Powerful. He blessed them and bound them to one another, wrapping their wrists together in a white cloth stitched with gold. He chanted and they responded. With their chins bowed and their hands gathered in prayer, Indra and Lou looked like supplicants.

  I knew so much more than I wanted to know about Indra, and I willed myself to see her wedding with my mind, not my heart. But the ritual overwhelmed everything my mind was screaming at me. It snickered, thinking Maybe the sixth time’s the charm. It lamented, telling me I’d been betrayed by a false idol. But seeing them bound together, their heads bowed, I couldn’t help but cry. We all did. We cried as if we were saying goodbye to teachers we loved, who loved each other. As if all of this had meant something.

  Good-bye, Bali. I’m homeward bound.

  Epilogue: The Healer

  Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  Lou once said that your injuries can be your greatest teachers. An injury can teach you compassion for your own mind and body, and if you suffer well, it might endow you with compassion for others. Eight years after leaving Bali, I know he’s right.

  A friend and I were having drinks a while back and got to talking about what, precisely, makes breaking up with someone you love but can’t be with so agonizing. We weren’t talking about those breakups where the love is dead, or was never there to begin with, or where one partner has so injured the other that there can be no future. We were talking about the saddest kind of breakup, the one where you simply aren’t right for each other, no matter how much love there is between you.

  The trouble, as we saw it, was that the moment you break up, the entire relationship distills down to that first essence you fell in love with. Gone are the irritations, pressures, anxieties. You don’t fixate on their hypocrisies or failures, or how they didn’t understand you. You’ve broken up—there’s nothing left to rail against. All that remains is the memory of that first, purest love you felt for the other person, and that, we decided, sucks balls. It hurts. When all that’s left is that first love, the loss is so much greater—you didn’t lose the person who, late in the relationship, made you feel trapped or duped or diminished. You lost the person you first fell in love with, who you went to bed dreaming about and woke up dying to see, the one who felt like the kind of home you’d always wanted to make.

  You try to make sense of the end, but it makes no sense. For every moment that pointed toward our demise, I could name another that said we were soul mates, the stuff of forever, till death do us part. Trying to understand how such a pure, sweet love could become polluted and confused is an exercise in futility, like trying to understand the Trinity, or why so many people bought The Secret.

  It took a long time and several journals’ worth of agonizing before I understood the meaning of the word futility, and tried to move on.

  The funny thing? I’m not sure who I’m talking about—Jonah? Or Indra?

  Maybe both.

  I wasn’t in New York long. Less than three years. Long enough to make things work beautifully with Jonah and then for it all to fall apart when I finally admitted I didn’t want to marry him, or live in New York, or live a life I wouldn’t choose on my own. We parted as friends, sweetly, sadly, wishing each other well.

  I flew home to Seattle to live with my aunt for a while, and soon found myself doing the same things every day: I read books about failed love affairs (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, all of which seemed to suggest that I should
be considering suicide) and at night I did penance. All of those unsaid Our Fathers and Glory Be’s poured from my pen as I tried to understand what went wrong, what I failed to do, how I could make things feel right again. I replayed over and over again the morning Jonah and I said good-bye, how we told each other good-bye, good luck, I love you. I watched him in my mind, again and again, his posture strangely stiff as he walked out the door that day.

  I told myself I was being narcissistic, thinking I was the pole on which Jonah’s happiness turned. I told myself he would be fine, I would be fine, that we were both allowed to seek our own happiness. That was what we had promised each other.

  But one night, on my aunt’s deck, I looked out at the fresh, clean rain and the green trees of home. I smoked cigarettes and remembered how, in Bali, I had wanted to drop my life off a cliff and watch it break into a million pieces. Now I had done just that, and what kind of person would wish for such a thing? Had I really believed I could get away without regrets? I thought of my family of friends in New York, of the way my parents and siblings tiptoed around me and tried not to mention Jonah. Oh, I was so flawed. I was so fucked. I smoked as if to punish myself for still breathing, drank enough coffee to give an ox insomnia, and then stayed up all night writing journal entries like this:

  I suck.

  I suck.

  I am a Sucky McSuckerson.

  Not as flowery as a Hail Mary, perhaps, but to my eyes there was nothing truer.

  After I’d finished reading yet another book in which order is restored when a woman kills herself, my sister told me she’d had enough. “Read something else,” she said. “Women don’t have to kill themselves over men anymore!”

  So I stopped reading entirely, to better focus on my penance. I didn’t read for weeks, just wound myself around the same spool every day. But then, one misty gray afternoon, looking out at the mountains from my aunt’s back deck, I heard the young voice from Saint Augustine’s memoir in my head, the voice that changed everything for him, that brought him to Christ. Pick it up and read, it said.