The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  But when I entered the main shrine room, there they were, corporeal and everything, seated in their usual corner. No one else had arrived yet, not even Shastri Dominique, and the room looked large and mouthlike. I hesitated. Janet waved me over and patted the cushion beside her.

  “We like to get to meditation early,” she said as I approached.

  “We are very particular about our cushions,” said Laurel.

  I looked down at her cushion and found it to be indistinguishable from the others.

  “Just wait until the sun clears the northeast peak,” Janet said. The other girls were filing in now. Shastri Dominique bowed low at the door, found her place at the front, and struck the bowl.

  After a few minutes, I turned my head to look out the window and noticed that Harriet was staring at me, her brow knit. I felt a flicker of pride, sour and dumb, like the sensation of stealing something small from someone deserving of theft. I flashed her what I imagined was a winning smile and focused my attention back on the front of the room. I didn’t understand Harriet’s problem. These girls seemed all right to me. Especially when, fifteen minutes later, our cushions were drenched in a yolky light, a light that left my limbs warm and loose for hours.

  If I had known what was going to happen that summer, maybe I would have paid more attention to Harriet. Maybe I would have left these strange girls alone, no matter what they knew, no matter how pretty the light on their cushions. If I had left them alone, maybe none of it would have even happened.

  No, here’s the truth: I would never have left them alone, even if I had known what was going to happen. Never. There are some things I simply cannot resist.

  Later that morning, the danger of fainting more or less behind us, the Garudas went on a hike. We assembled after breakfast at the flagpole on the east side of the lawn, and a nearly neckless white guy introduced himself as Colin and pointed up at the flag. This was called the dream flag, he said, so named because it had come to an important teacher in a dream: blue and yellow twisted together as if each were crashing on the shore of the other. He explained that yellow was the earth, and blue the sky, and the curl of the wave was the Buddhadharma penetrating them both. Janet reached over and poked Laurel at the word penetrating, and Laurel pinched her back, but they both nodded at Colin’s explanation, as if they already knew much more than he was saying. (The use of penetrate to mean “insert into” dates back to the 1520s, but the connotation of affecting one’s feelings dates only to the 1630s: a hundred years of being touched but untouched.)

  According to Colin, the trip up the mountain would really get our blood flowing, and all that blood flow was totally going to help us in our quest for ultimate warriorhood. Body and soul, you guys. Like, yeah, etc. Colin looked barely past his teenage years himself—that morning he wore a ratty t-shirt that read BUDDHIST FIST above, imaginatively, a picture of a dark blue fist designed to look as though it were emerging triumphant from his solar plexus. Janet routinely gave him the finger when he turned his back. When I asked if Serena was coming, the other two exchanged a look.

  “Serena doesn’t like Colin,” Laurel said.

  “Or exerting herself,” Janet said. She jumped up onto a rock. “Laurel likes Colin, though.” She gave him the finger again.

  “I don’t,” Laurel said. But then Colin clapped his hands once to call us to attention and she turned her face immediately toward his.

  Janet caught my eye. See, she mouthed. It was hard to tell how she meant it, since she never smiled. Everything could have been a joke. Everything could have been serious.

  “Girls, girls, girls,” Colin said. “Let’s, like, get started?” He produced a coil of bright ropes from somewhere, and swiftly hooked Nisha and Harriet together, looping one end around each girl’s waist and then clipping it to itself, like a snake eating its tail, and also its head.

  “The ropes are to remind you that we are all connected,” Colin said. “You are like, simply not possible without anyone else?” He clipped Samantha, a pretty petty thief and the only person I had ever met with a tongue ring, to Jamie, who that day looked nearly translucent, like a raw shrimp. Double-headed Evie was clipped to Paola, a girl who suffered from eternal baby voice, but was never mocked for it, on account of her cache of desirable pills and powders. Colin approached Janet and Laurel with a rope—then at the last second, he clipped Janet to me instead. Laurel he attached to Margaret, a broad-shouldered girl whose septum piercing made her look downright bovine.

  “Gross,” said Laurel.

  “Tell me about it,” said Margaret. She jiggled the rope. “There’s a reason I never had a Barbie.” But what that reason was, we were not to discover, because Colin clapped his hands again and we started up the trail.

  The mountain, Shastri Dominique had warned us, was full of cracks. Big cracks, smaller ones. Gorges, craters, chasms, crevasses, fissures, abysses both literal and figurative. A girl could easily fall down. A girl could easily be lost. Some cracks had water at their bottoms, some rock. There were cliffsides too, and holes, and ghastly animals with gnashing teeth, ready to pull you into their hidden caves, suck you into their jagged mouths. This in addition to the many twisting, interlocking trails that were thrown over the mountain like a knotted net, a skullcap sewn by a madman, enough to busy any wanderer for years. The mountain had a thousand ways to keep you, Shastri Dominique had said. This was why we were only to be in the woods when accompanied by a staff member. The staff members knew the mountain. They would protect us.

  What a ridiculous idea. Girls like us cannot be protected, we swore into one another’s palms and shoulder blades. Girls like us cannot be saved. It’s the mistake everyone makes.

  We climbed. At first, the trail was wide and gradual, sloping upward. I liked this: the birds’ layered song, Janet’s smooth breathing at my side. The filtered light made the wildflowers that grew along the side of the trail look somehow brighter. We take flowers for granted, though they are absurd things: little sex-crazed jewel boxes. The reason for a flower is to make another flower, my mother used to say.

  The trail may not have been particularly demanding, but Janet walked fast, and soon I was struggling to keep up. She had insisted we be at the front. I had the impression she liked to be first at most things. The rope bobbed between us. I slapped a mosquito off my arm, leaving a small red smear.

  “This is a nonsense interpretation of the notion of interconnectedness,” Janet said. “Don’t tell Serena. She’ll have a field day.” She wrapped her fingers around the rope.

  “It seems like Serena knows a lot about Buddhism,” I managed.

  “She’s been coming here every summer since she was a kid,” Janet said. “At this point, she’s probably read every book in the place. She’s been to about a thousand lectures, too.”

  “She doesn’t come to activities very much,” I said.

  “It is difficult to get Serena to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Janet said mildly.

  “What about you?” I asked her.

  “I like the activities.”

  “I meant—do you believe in all of this? Interconnectedness?” I hesitated. “Levitation?”

  The path was getting steeper, but Janet didn’t slow down. I was breathing hard now; I felt both annoyed and relieved that she didn’t seem to notice. “I think most of it is bullshit,” she said. “In the way that most of everything is bullshit.” She kicked a rock out of our way, and it tore a hole in the bushes on the side of the trail. “But also, Serena walked up to me on my very first day here, all of twelve years old, and told me hello and that she liked my face and that she had decided she was going to change my life forever. It wasn’t entirely false advertising.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You have to admit, it would be pretty interesting.” She squinted upward. “And it’s not like we have anything else to do.”

  There was a crash behind us. Paola had pushed Evie into the bushes and then, inevitably, been pulled in with her.
This was followed by a period of elaborate cursing. Colin, who was somewhat out of breath himself, ran over to haul them out and untangle their rope and lecture them again on the whole interconnectedness thing.

  I took advantage of the commotion to rest my legs, until, after only a few moments, Janet tugged me forward again. “What about you?” she said. “How’d you wind up here, of all places?”

  “My dad’s into Buddhism,” I said. When that didn’t seem like enough, I said: “And I don’t get along with my mother.” I don’t know why I didn’t simply tell her that my father had abandoned me without a word, or that I had—let’s admit it—run away from my mother’s house, if you can really call it running away when you leave plain tracks and credit card receipts and no one bothers to come after you. Janet would have understood perfectly, I know that now, but at the time it all seemed raw and terrible, a wound too new to let breathe.

  “What about Laurel?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  It wasn’t, or not to me, but I nodded anyway.

  Janet was from New York City, a place I could only imagine as an endless series of sharp edges and hard surfaces. Her mother had left her father when she was six, and now lived in Cincinnati with an accountant and a set of twins, half siblings Janet had never met. Her father worked long hours, and she had more or less raised her two younger brothers in their small Brooklyn apartment.

  When I told her that my parents were divorced too, she shrugged. “It’s very popular,” she said, but after that I thought her movements were a little looser around me.

  Janet couldn’t afford the price of the program. It was an aunt who financed her stays at the Center every summer, she said, a mostly estranged sister of her mother’s with herds of cats, an addiction to incense, and a hefty inheritance (courtesy of not one but two suspiciously deceased husbands), who had visited her family’s apartment in the city once and had sent her a registration notice and a plane ticket that summer and every summer since. But she’d never visited again, and when Janet called one night to ask if she could come live with her, her aunt pretended she didn’t know who was calling. Janet did a very funny impression of this. She was almost able to keep the bitterness out of it.

  We stopped after an hour in a grassy clearing flanked by two oblong boulders. Most of the other girls immediately sat down, taking off their shoes or splaying themselves theatrically on the ground. I was desperate to splay along with them, to explore what I was sure was an epic series of new blisters, but Janet showed no signs of fatigue; she just stood there, at the edge of the clearing, as if waiting for instructions, so I stood too. Samantha began poking her finger through a hole in the bottom of her sneaker, steadily widening it but apparently unable to stop. Paola spat repeatedly into a bush, while Evie patted her shoulder absently, looking up into the branches, their squabble at least temporarily forgotten. Harriet had been carrying Nisha on her back, their connective tissue unrelated to the physical rope; now they leaned against each other to stretch. Margaret and Laurel were sitting under two separate trees, their own physical rope a trip wire between them.

  This was as high as we would go—any higher and the paths became murky, the ground less stable, Colin explained. As we unclipped, he began taking peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from his button-covered backpack and passing them around.

  “Oh,” said Laurel. “Luke’s jam is like magic.” Breathlessness suited her, I thought.

  “Or like chemistry, even,” Janet said.

  “Why is everyone so obsessed with him?” I said, too loudly. I was sure I knew the answer, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hear them say it.

  Laurel curled her lip. “You know, Janet, I think this one’s dumb,” she said. She licked some jam off the side of her wrist. “Why is she so dumb?” Cruelty suited her too. But before either Janet or I could say anything, Laurel shifted her attention over Janet’s shoulder. “Harriet!” she called, smiling widely. “Hi. Did you want something?”

  I turned to look. Harriet had her mouth set. She shook her head.

  “We haven’t even talked yet,” Laurel said. “How was your year?”

  All of the other girls suddenly seemed to be watching us. “Pretty good,” she said.

  “Good,” Laurel said, slinging one arm around Janet’s shoulders and coiling the other tight around my waist. “Now mind your own fucking business.”

  Laurel was from Virginia. Her house, Janet informed me, had wings. Her father was some kind of financier, and her mother was an ex-socialite heiress who spent most of her time at various teas. They first sent Laurel to the Center while her mother was on an Eastern medicine kick, and even after she’d kicked her kick—the guru had turned out to be a fraud, the turmeric hadn’t agreed with her stomach—they kept sending her.

  “I thought I was going to hate it, the first year,” Laurel said. “But turns out the girls here are very amusing.” She reached out and managed to pinch Janet’s arm before she could pull it away. “Anyway, my parents still think it’s good for me.”

  “Shows what they know,” I said, and at this, she threw back her head and laughed, and I was almost shocked by the warmth that spread through my body. Laurel had a quality about her that I’ve noticed in well-liked people my entire life, but have never been able to emulate: when she focused on you, she made you feel like you were the most attractive, interesting person in the room. She pleased by making others feel pleasurable. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was attractive. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she radiated wealth. You could see the wealth in her cheeks, clear as anything. Day. Crystal. Vodka. My own parents managed, but things were harder for all of us after the separation. Corners and coupons were cut. Laurel was going to be a debutante in the fall.

  “They’re even making me perform at the ceremony,” she said.

  “Perform what?” I wanted to know.

  “My parents gave me a choice when I was a kid,” she said. “Piano or violin. I, of course, crossed my arms and said harp.” She stuck out her bottom lip, now and, presumably, then. She got a harp. The orchestra at her school didn’t know what to do with her. They kept giving her piano parts, and no one ever heard her angelic glissandos over the chorus of slammed keys. Not wanting to waste their investment, her parents signed her up for a nearby harpists’ ensemble. Harpists are strange people, Laurel informed us. One woman in the group was in her fifties and had never once cut her hair; she looped it around her waist when she played. “Her ends,” Laurel said, throwing a hand over her eyes. “They haunt me.” There was only one man in the group. He had a kind face, nearly handsome, and he wore old-fashioned wire glasses and vintage three-piece suits. He was Laurel’s favorite, and she liked to sit beside him and watch him play.

  “I used to dream about him,” she said. “He had the most magnificent harp I’ve ever seen. And he played so delicately with those large hands. But he never once even looked at me.” She closed her eyes, picturing—what? His hands, his harp, his ability, his inattention? Whatever it was made her hum two low notes to herself.

  Such small obsessions, I would find, were typical of Laurel, who was delighted by beauty in all its forms and abhorred ugliness, especially when it constituted, as she put it, a “missed opportunity.” Why would anyone ever choose to have her world be ugly, she wondered aloud once. Because ugliness is the truth, said Janet. Because beauty costs more, I said. Neither ugliness nor beauty exists on an absolute level, said Serena. At this, Laurel flung her legs out in front of her, traced her fingers along her smooth calves. If we’re all living in a constructed, illusory reality, that’s fine, she said. Mine’s going to have a chandelier. And cake. Easy for her to say, I thought. Her house already had a chandelier.

  My mother would have agreed with Laurel, for what it’s worth. She always refused to watch horror movies or documentaries, arguing that paying good money for bad feelings was the absolute height of insanity. I once found her position silly, irresponsible, even. But now I agree with her. Now i
t’s plodding historical romances or old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or nothing. I don’t want to feel anything anymore. I want only comfort. I want only to forget what we did.

  When everyone had finished eating, Colin stood, cleared his throat, and pointed at the rock face opposite the place where we were standing. The mountains were so close together we could count the individual branches on the trees on the other side, but it would have taken hours to climb down and around to touch them. Two smooth furrows sloped down the rock, maintaining a parallel stance until they disappeared into the brush.

  “The Sweet Sorrows,” he said. He cleared his throat again. It was an annoying tic he had. “As the story goes, long ago a handsome boy and a beautiful girl from a settlement at the bottom of this mountain fell in love, but each was betrothed to another.” (He really said it like that. Betrothed to another. He had completely dropped his displaced surfer-dude style for a sweeping storytelling voice. Janet groaned and gave him the finger again when he said it, even though he could see her, but he only winked.)

  “They would climb the mountain to meet every night, right in those very bushes, but as their respective weddings approached, their families became suspicious. Finally, the night before the wedding, the girl broke off her engagement, unable to face life without her one true love. The scandal was incredible. She was ostracized from her family, driven out of town for her disobedience, and left to survive on her own in the woods. The boy, seeing his lover’s punishment, quickly married the girl to whom he had been promised. They say his lover, thusly spurned”—(ibid.)—“stood alone at the top of the mountain, waiting for him in their old meeting place, sobbing uncontrollably until her tears grew so large and numerous that they carved those two tracks in the stone. Even then she kept crying, harder and harder, hoping he would come to her, and after some time her body twisted and spread, her unmoving feet grew into the ground and her untouched, unloved skin crusted over and she became an enormous tree. You can see her from here, girls: the weeping willow that still hangs over the cliff ’s edge.”