“I’m Clara,” I said.
She tilted her head to one side, then the other, searching my face, her own face expressing increasing bewilderment. “No, the Clara I’m looking for is an older woman, though you look something like her. Are you a relative?”
“Martha,” I said firmly. “I’m the Clara you’re looking for.”
Her jaw dropped. She stared. “Clara? What happened? You look… Is it really you?”
“It’s really me.”
“But…”
“I know I’m changed. But it’s just my looks. The rest of me is the same.” Which wasn’t quite true, but I needed to reassure her.
“What happened? What have you…? You look young! Like a thirty-something kid.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said in a firm old-woman voice. “I just turned eighty.”
“That’s right. You were going to the mountains to celebrate… then got lost. But how…?”
“I had an altering experience,” I confessed. “But I can still give a massage. Come on in. How are you doing?”
My attempt to turn attention to her was only partly successful. I led her into the studio to sit in our accustomed places by my desk and took up my pen to take notes. She seemed eased by these familiar routines.
Still she stared. “You look beautiful. But you always were. I didn’t think you were into dying your hair, though.”
“I didn’t exactly.” I floundered, realizing the makeover story wouldn’t fly with Martha; she knew me too well. “Look, Martha,” I said. “It’s very hard to explain, but I’m still me. Please trust me. Tell me how that left hip is doing.”
She let it go for a time and told me about her various pains. We set to work easing her chronically tight neck and shoulders. I was only ten minutes into the session when I realized how seriously lack of energy had dulled my work in recent years. It had often been hard to get through a session. I was a good massage therapist and my basic competence had served my clients well, but I had forgotten what it was like to be creative, intuitive, inspired. With my newfound energy, all that came rushing back.
My fingers were strong and unhindered by arthritis, my vision clear. I soon found new angles to approach the troubled body of this friend I had worked with for so many years. When she stood up at the end of the session, she was easier and more balanced than I had ever seen her.
“I feel incredible,” she told me.
She dressed, then turned and looked deeply into my face. “Clara, talk to me. What really happened? An ‘altering experience,’ I guess so! It seems more like a miracle from God.”
I hesitated, shaking my head. “I don’t know.”
“What can it be then?” She reached out and touched my cheek. “You’re clearly all new—and inspired! That was an incredible session. And you don’t even look tired, the way you used to at the end of a session.”
I felt briefly embarrassed that she had noticed that in the past. “I’m not,” I admitted.
“Can’t you tell me? I know so many people old and in pain. If they could access… It’s so amazing. Everyone who sees you will want to know how you were changed, to have what you have.”
“I know.” I shrank away from her. “And I can’t tell them. I’ve been hiding, afraid of just that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because… I can’t explain it. It happened because I was dying. I stayed too long above tree line and was hit by lightning.”
“They said that in the newspaper and that you had amnesia.”
“I don’t remember everything.” I was lying; my memories were vivid, but the amnesia provided the perfect excuse. “It was a miracle. But… please don’t ask anymore. Believe me, if I could give it to you, I would.”
“You have,” she said softly. “God must have a high purpose for you to renew you like this.” She embraced me, started to go, then turned back. “Now you have more energy, would you consider taking a new client? I know someone who really needs help.”
“I don’t know.” A struggle awoke inside me. No. I’m retired. I don’t want new clients. But look what you just did for Martha. You’re inspired again and have plenty of energy. How can you not serve when you have skill in your hands and there is need?
Martha watched me with her kind eyes. “She could really use your help.”
“Yes. Well. Okay. Yes. Give her my number.”
The experience with Martha opened the door. I realized I couldn’t hide out forever. I was lonely and needed my friends. That Martha had accepted my awkward explanations, decided it was a miracle, and not pressed further gave me courage.
The next day I picked up the phone and called my closest friend, Anne. Although she was twelve years younger than I, we had shared most of our adult lives. We met in the late sixties, and had supported each other through marriages, children, divorces, relationships and separations. We were also colleagues, both massage therapists, and often traded sessions. She’d called me several times since I returned, but I’d been afraid to have her see me, unsure whether I could tell her the whole story. She was fascinated with the paranormal, always trying out a new healer, a new psychic, and had a wide circle of friends who shared her interests. I feared she would be so excited by my story, it would be impossible for her not to leak it in some way. But I missed her and longed for her company.
“How about a walk?” I said when she picked up the phone.
“That would be great. Are you feeling well enough to walk? I’ve been worried about you, the lightning and all.”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. I’m excited to see you. I’ve got a client until four-thirty this afternoon. How about five o’clock? Where shall we go?”
“Five o’clock would work. I was thinking of the trail by the old ranch.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you there. Okay. All right. Okay. Bye.” I chuckled. Anne always said okay a lot at the end of her phone calls.
She was already there when I drove into the parking lot at the trailhead, leaning against her car, tall, elegant in her slim jeans, the late afternoon sun glinting off silver streaks in her straight dark hair. I felt a rush of love when I saw her.
She recognized my car and ran to meet me as I parked, but stopped short when I got out.
“Anne.” I opened my arms to hug her.
“What…? Wait.” She held me away from her, her hands on my shoulders, staring. “Who are you?”
“I’m Clara.”
“No—” Her eyes moved across my face, my throat, the curls sticking out from under my hat. “You can’t be.”
“I am.”
“No way. Clara’s an old woman; she’s eighty. I know. I’m a close friend. And you are young—very young.” She gripped my shoulders tighter. “Who are you anyway? Why are you telling me you’re Clara? What are you doing with her car?” Her glance swept my hiking skirt and shirt, the blue hat I always wore. “Wearing her clothes.” Her voice rose with an edge of panic. “Where is she?”
“I’m right here.” I felt my lips tremble and pressed them together to hold back tears that threatened. I had thought surely Anne, of all my friends, would know me.
“Anne,” I said, trying to control the shaking in my voice. “I’ve been through an extraordinary experience. I know it’s changed the way I look, but I’m still me.”
Anne was shaking her head.
“Remember what I looked like when we first met? In 1969? When you were still married to Mike and I to Dan? In the meditation workshop at Esalen?”
She softened then. Frowning, she studied my face more closely. “An extraordinary experience?” That had connected for her. “But your eyes are different.”
I realized with relief that she finally believed me. “I know. They changed them along with everything else.”
“They?”
“Let’s walk,” I said
. “Will you walk with me?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
The path was wide and smooth, with plenty of room to walk side by side. We walked a while in silence, enfolded in the peace of tree and meadow. Anne kept turning her head to look at me. She dropped behind me for a moment, watching my gait. “You’re walking really well. That limp you’ve had ever since your hip replacement is gone.”
“I’d sort of forgotten about it,” I said.
She caught up with me again, stopped me, standing in front of me. “Who are ‘they’? What extraordinary experience? What in the world happened to you?”
I wavered a moment, then decided. I had to tell her the truth. She was the one person in the world with whom I had always shared everything, and I couldn’t bear for that to change. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But you must promise, absolutely promise, to keep it a secret. You’ll understand why.”
“I promise.” Her face was alive with curiosity.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I thought I was going to die after the lightning strike—”
Anne interrupted me with a fierce hug. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’ve been so worried about you. After reading the paper I thought you’d be in the hospital. Then when you didn’t want me to come over…”
“Let’s sit down.”
We climbed up the bank on the side of the trail and sat on the dry prairie grass. Before us wide meadows spread out to the reservoir, blue in the late afternoon sunlight.
I took Anne’s hand and held it while I told her the story. She listened, her eyes wide with amazement, occasionally interrupting with exclamations. When I finished, she sighed with wonder.
“There really are intelligent beings on other planets. I’ve always thought there must be. Remember all the media reports about flying saucers a couple of decades ago? But you’ve actually been in their ship, they’ve touched you, communicated with you.” She smoothed my cheek. “And healed you. You look gorgeous. What a blessing.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“It’s disorienting. I don’t know who I am anymore, and I’m afraid to meet people. When I first came down from the mountain even Robin and Greg had trouble recognizing me.”
“I can see why.”
“And the mountain rescue team—” I told her about them and the woman in the hospital, hamming it up, and we laughed. Anne was always fun to laugh with.
When our laughter subsided, she said, “I understand what you mean about being disoriented. But it’s only been two weeks. You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t know. I’m eighty, and I look and feel as if I’m thirty. Not so young as twenty. But inside I’m still eighty. I’m uncomfortable being so beautiful. The man at the driver’s license place who took my picture was hitting on me.”
“Did you go get a new driver’s license?”
“I had to. You need a picture ID everywhere and my old one doesn’t look like me anymore.”
“Oh, my God. How’d you pull that off? They want your birth date and everything.”
“Sheer luck.” I told her about the zombie clerk and the guy with the mustache and we laughed some more.
Anne took her water bottle out of her pack and we both drank. “Are you ready to walk?” she asked.
As we continued along the trail, Anne said, “I love the idea of the ulada. Just think what our planet would be like if all of us were born with a special task to create harmony, and knew it and did it. I bet everyone on earth asks at some point what the purpose of their life is, and most of us don’t know, or spend our lives trying to figure it out. What do you think your ulada is?”
“At this point in my life, for better or for worse, I’ve done most of it. Bringing up the children is certainly part of it. My work—massage, teaching dance and yoga and meditation. Maybe what I’ve learned from all my relationships.”
“I think my ulada is similar—kids, massage, relationships. But you—now that you’re young again, maybe you haven’t done most of it. Maybe you have a whole new ulada.”
“That’s a daunting thought. I still think of myself as old, that I’ll die sometime in the next ten years. I’ve felt my ulada was almost complete. When I thought I was dying I was upset, because I didn’t feel quite finished. But I don’t want another whole lifetime.”
“Why not?”
“Because… It’s hard to explain. I’ve had a long life already, full of joy and suffering, love and loss. I don’t feel I can hold much more.”
We walked on. It was so good to talk with her, to share my confusion, the wonder of my healed body, all my experiences since coming home, to laugh together. We stayed out until the last glow of sunset faded from the hills.
After my walk with Anne, I began to emerge, connecting one by one with my few close friends. It was a challenge each time, but I held to my story that I didn’t remember what had happened. After a while they stopped asking, though I would often find them looking at me when they didn’t think I saw, question and awe in their eyes. For a while a story circulated about a miraculous healer roaming the tundra to assist those in trouble; but soon the first snow fell closing the high country to all but the most intrepid, and the story, always improbable, faded away.
Martha’s friend did call, and I began to work with her. As if some mysterious grapevine had sprung into action, I began receiving other calls, former clients wanting a tune-up, my new client referring her friends. Soon I was seeing three or four clients a day. My old skills came flooding back, enhanced now with the wisdom of my quiet years. I wondered if having Elirian eyes had given me some of their perception. It seemed I could see into a body in a way I’d had moments of in the past, but now more clearly and reliably.
It was exciting—I had always loved my work—but I often felt bewildered by my changed life, a life like the one I had enjoyed for many years, that now felt strange, misplaced somehow.
I missed the quiet days, easy mornings sleeping late, lying on my pillow watching the sun touch the leaves of the cottonwood, meditating as long as I wanted, practicing yoga with no time limit. Solitary walks, hours dreaming in my garden, reading, writing in my journal. Now everything was on a schedule again. I found myself hurrying—and I didn’t like it.
Sometimes I sat in my garden between sessions. The season was moving on, though we had not had frost yet. One afternoon I cradled a spray of snapdragon in my hand. The flowers had passed. Round brown seedpods dropped tiny black seeds on my fingers when I touched them. Another snapdragon was still blooming, bright purple-pink flowers, the color of Kiria’s iridescence. I spoke to the blooming plant. “It’s time to be making seeds, don’t you know that? Frost will come soon now.” Then I thought that I was like that plant, foolishly blooming in the fall of my life when it was time to be withering and creating seeds for the next turn of season, whatever that might be.
It was a month before I had the courage to go back to tango. Of all my social connections, I knew my tango friends would be the most avid to learn how I had changed and how they could access a similar transformation.
There was a paradox of intimacy and superficiality in the tango community. We danced a most intimate and sensuous dance, we greeted each other with hugs and kisses, yet we knew little of each other’s lives outside tango. It was considered ill form to talk while dancing; the communication was all in the connection. I knew the men by the quality of their embrace, the way I fit in their arms, their favorite steps. The women would cluster and visit while waiting to be invited to dance, but our talk was most often about our clothes or shoes or the skills of the men we danced with. Sometimes the conversation would dip deeper, but we all understood that it would be dropped between one word and the next if one of us were asked to dance. Our intimacy was based mostly on the fact that we spent so much time together. Before I had aged and stiffened, I danced two or three times a week. Others danced ta
ngo every night.
I had gone seldom during the last year, but now, with my vitality high, I was eager to dance again. My email was full of announcements of tango events. I decided on a Sunday night milonga—a tango social dance—at the Avalon Ballroom.
What to wear? My dance clothes were clingy, sparkly, low-cut. Slit skirts, lace, velvet and satin. I stood in front of my closet, sliding the hangers, and looked them over, torn between the fun of dressing up and my recent reticence for revealing my beauty. Finally I said, “Hey, it’s tango,” and pulled out a pale pink lace top, low cut, and a pink satin skirt.
They still fit, except that the skirt was a little loose around the waist. A quick tuck in the skirt was all that was needed. I gathered my curls into a soft knot, put on long earrings and a necklace of black pearls. In the bathroom I applied eyeliner, though my eyes hardly needed accenting, a glossy neutral lipstick, and a few drops of the rose-lavender perfume I always wore for tango.
As I dressed, I thought about how I had come to tango, going to a class on a whim, twelve years ago, how, from the first moment, I had loved it, the music, the elegance of the dance. My touch-hungry body drank in the nurturance of close embrace, and my sensuous nature reveled in the opportunity to express itself in a safe container. I delighted in the costume part, going all out to be as beautiful as I could. Of course, I was already old then, but that made it somehow safe.
Not so safe now, I thought as I surveyed myself in the mirror. I shied back from my reflection, then pulled myself together. You’ve been given a gift, I told myself. Enjoy it. Tango is the perfect place to let it shine.
The milonga was in full swing when I arrived. I scanned the floor for potential partners. There was Tim, who always danced with me, often two or three times in an evening; Steve, who was my first tango partner when we were both learning and now, in my opinion, the best dancer in the community; Roberto, a warm Mexican man with a delicious embrace; and five or six other favorites. It would be a good night.
Marco whirled by me with a lovely young woman in his arms who wasn’t following very well. He was a good dancer and looked as if he’d be fun to dance with, but although we’d shared the dance floor for countless evenings, he’d never invited me.
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