The Lightness: A Novel

by Emily Temple

  9

  Here’s something my father once told me, when I was ten or so and hated, violently and for no reason, a girl in my fifth grade class: that I should feel love and compassion for everyone, no matter who they were, because in the countless past lives and reorganizations of atoms, every single person on earth was at one time or another my mother. It could be in the past or perhaps in the future, but on some existential plane, some other incarnation just as real as this one, everyone was my mother, and had given me life, and fed me, and cared for me, and therefore I owed them my love and gratitude.

  “But I hate my mother too,” I said. (And why not? She was the one who chastised me, punished me, swore and screamed and pulled my hair when she was supposedly trying to braid it.)

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “But all right, how about this. You can remember that everyone you know, even the worst person you know, even Veronica, was once me, or will be me in the future. I’ll die, like I have a thousand times, and because everything is connected, at some point, part of me will be Veronica, and part of Veronica will be me.”

  I’d reached for him then, because the idea of his dissolution, his separation from me into millions of atoms and time and space and other people whom I hated, particularly Veronica, stupid Veronica with her ludicrous shiny unbraidable hair, was too much for me to bear. “I don’t want you to be anyone else,” I said. “You can’t die.”

  “Death comes without warning,” he said. He spread his arms. “This body will be a corpse.” Then he took me to get a cinnamon bun. The people at the cinnamon bun place all turned and smiled when we entered, and they all knew my father by name, and remembered his order, and this reassured me. If the cinnamon bun people know your name, I figured, death can’t be so near.

  Dentists are something like twice as likely as other people to kill themselves, of course. Everyone knows that, especially the daughters of dentists. Some years, more doctors kill themselves than dentists, but since dentists are much likelier to suffer from psychoneurotic disorders, that seems more or less down to luck. It’s stress, people say. Stress and access to drugs that’ll do the job. Plus, everyone hates going to the dentist. I can see how that would wear on a person. There’s no denying that the human mouth is a weird place to work. Teeth can readily alarm.

  So when he was a day late returning, when he was a week late, a month late, with no word, the papers piling up—of course I considered it. Death comes without warning. But it can also be planned.

  Later, though, we decided against the idea. I said that my father wouldn’t kill himself, that he wouldn’t do that to us, to me, that he was, essentially, happy. My mother said that if my father were going to kill himself, he’d have done it where everyone could see. It would have been a spectacle; he would have wanted a fuss. He’d have wanted to be cremated too. Buddhists are typically cremated. You can also cremate your pets, whatever their chosen faiths. By the time my father disappeared, I had a row of little tins, each lid adorned with a cheery still life of fruit or field, each one with the dusted bones of a rabbit or finch or guinea pig inside.

  Next, I developed a theory that he’d been kidnapped. That someone, someone who was unhappy with his veneers, say, had waited for him after work and jumped into his car and forced him to drive to a secret hideout, where he tied him to a chair and gave him filling after filling. Why not? Everyone hates the dentist.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. “He just ran away.” She was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, somehow taking up all the space at once. “Like a little boy. That was always his greatest dream, did you know? To be a little boy again.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said.

  “Remember that thought when your brain is fully developed,” she said.

  In the morning, the Garudas had Kyūdō. This was Janet’s favorite activity at the Center, and we never skipped it. Janet even did her rota with Sarah, the Kyūdō instructor, and apparently had for years, except for last year, when she’d had a broken arm and had to sit in the office with Harriet. You could still see a faint tan line on her arm from the cast. Bicycle accident, she said when I asked.

  We met Sarah at the Center’s simple archery range, which was set in a clearing at the end of a cedar-chip path. Three targets pinned to hay bales sat at the far end of the range, shaded under a green wooden canopy. Sarah went around to the back and came out with an armful of bows.

  “Remember, the object is not necessarily to hit the target,” Sarah said, passing out the bows. “The object is synchronization of body and mind and the present moment, okay? Hitting the target is just a plus.” When she reached Janet, she shuffled the bows in her arms and handed her the one with a faded purple ribbon tied to the tip.

  “It is a little like polishing a mirror, only the mirror is your mind,” Sarah said. “Make sense?” Everyone laughed, except Janet, who was stretching her shoulders, staring down the range as though it had done something to her. Sarah lined us all up facing the targets, and handed us each a handful of arrows and a special leather glove with only three fingers. She stood in front of us, demonstrating how to put it on. We’d done this before, of course, but something about the glove resisted learning; we had to be shown every time. “You must be like a tree,” she said. “Strong and flexible at once.”

  “You know what else is like a tree,” Laurel whispered. “Long and brown and with a bush at one end.” I concentrated again on things that weren’t Luke: knife, thermostat, packing peanuts.

  “So what you’re saying,” Janet whispered, “is that when a man and a woman truly love each other, his penis grows a canopy of thick roots into her body and spreads out and feeds on her nutrients and stays there until it dies of disease or old age or gets chopped down and sliced into pieces and turned into lumber?”

  “Exactly,” Laurel said.

  “Can’t wait.”

  Laurel rolled her eyes and started to say something else, but Janet turned crisply away from us, lifting her bow to her hip, and Laurel, for once, decided to shut up and follow her lead.

  It was only here, at the Kyūdō range, that I thought I finally understood Janet. She was a natural with the bow. As she pulled back the string, she seemed to relax rather than tense, and I could see how much she lived in her body—how she thought with it, almost, as if the color in her cheeks were pure mind, hovering there, red and ready underneath her skin. I saw the way the guided steps created space for that connection. And if Kyūdō could do so much, I thought, imagine what levitation could do. The ultimate physical control. The body to heel at last. No wonder she wanted it.

  Plus, she was really good. All of our arrows fell like ripe apples from our bows, or if we were lucky, glanced off the sand a few feet ahead of us. Jamie couldn’t even really get the glove on. It was too big for her delicate hand. Harriet and Nisha kept collapsing into laughter halfway through the steps. Even the arrow Margaret got off on sheer strength only skidded a few yards. But when I looked up, Janet’s was humming in her target’s golden pupil.

  “Our little toy soldier,” Laurel whispered as Janet made the long solitary walk to retrieve her arrow. She pulled her bowstring tight and then let it go, arrowless.

  “She went out again last night,” I said.

  Laurel leaned on her bow. “Here’s the thing about Janet,” she said. “Her father used to test her all the time. Make her prove herself. I mean, I think at the beginning it was supposed to be good for her. Like, you want an ice cream? Beat your brother to the end of the block. You need new clothes? Win them from me in a card game. You want to go to the doctor today? Fight your brother until one of you hits the floor. You need me to sign something? Hold your hand in the fire for thirty seconds without screaming.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. But: Janet, who hated to lose at anything. Janet, who was always pushing herself, always better, faster, stronger.

  “It’s different now,” Laurel said. “He can barely hold down a job, much less give
her anything she needs. Wet brain, you know.” She tapped her temple with one finger. “She’s the one keeping that family going. Though honestly I don’t know why she even bothers.”

  “What about her brothers?” I asked. “They must be old enough to help out.”

  “They’re old enough,” she said. “But they grew up mean.”

  I knew she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. When I didn’t say anything, she rolled her eyes. “She’s just doing what she has to do,” she said. “Wherever she goes, whatever she does, it’s not about you, so don’t get in the way.”

  I leaned my head back, and as I did, I noticed that Harriet was staring at me again, her expression inscrutable, while Nisha inspected her bowstring. I felt a small stab. I did like Harriet, despite the fact that I had ignored her warnings. I did wish, sometimes, that I could stand next to her and laugh at her jokes, and not be concerned with anything else, not levitation or Luke or my father or where my friends secretly snuck away to in the middle of the night. I smiled at her, and as I did, I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all. She was looking at Laurel.

  Laurel followed my gaze. “Classic,” she said, and slipped her fingers around my wrist. I waited for her to say something else, but then Sarah came and stood beside us, and we both turned back to the cleared range. Not, in Laurel’s case, without flashing Harriet the brightest of smiles and running her tongue along her red red lips.

  Luke wasn’t in the garden that day, though I did find Ava, sunning herself on his bench. When I reached to stroke her head, she jumped away, and I saw that she’d been sitting on a folded piece of paper. I snatched it up: it was a note from Luke, but it said nothing, only that he wouldn’t be there that day, and which beds to weed and water, and a firm instruction to not come looking for him. His handwriting was loose and elegant, like a girl’s. I wondered if he was angry with me. I folded the note carefully and put it into my pocket. I would give it to Serena later, I promised myself. I wouldn’t keep it under my pillow and read it at night, tracing the loops with a finger, trying to determine secrets of personality and desire from the slant of consonants. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth. What would be the point of that?

  I’ll say this for fasting: I did feel lighter. In the days that followed, consuming nothing but nettle soup and tea (of which we had plenty, Tenzin having apparently decided to turn a blind eye to our culinary experiments), I would often go into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, carefully checking for cheekbones. I didn’t find them, but I did find that my stomach felt small and void, and yes, light. I have never in my life been skinny and romantic. For a while, I fancied myself tragic, like a consolation prize. But I had always felt that I was missing some essential experience of youth by never being nubile, thin and limber. By never having long brown legs and a flat, tympanic stomach. I didn’t want to grow old and never have had those years of beauty, to have only ever been this moist, lumpy thing. Or worse, to lie to myself and remember an invented pretty youth, just to have something to sigh over when a storm was coming and my knees were bothering me and the folds of my fat were sticking to one another and also to the back of my chair in all the humidity. Because there is something terrible about a girl not neatly zipped into her own skin, or so we are repeatedly told. There is something rude about it, something offensive to all who see her, especially her friends, who would like her to be beautiful, as beautiful as a mirror. While we fasted, I felt worthy of reflection.

  But of course, we had other reasons to thin out our bodies. “When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, anything can fly,” Sister Bertrille explained. Yes, the Flying Nun. She weighed a mere ninety pounds, I’ve heard—not counting the cornette, of course. And you see what she accomplished. It’s right there in the name.

  We knew we were doing the right thing the first time we went up to the rock palm after beginning our fast. Our new emptiness elevated everything. The lack of food made us faint quicker, stay out longer, though I still had to choke Serena to make her fall. It unmoored our meditations, intensified the lightness games. It even made the Feeling more intense—or at least it did for me. Serena had been looking for her comb for days. “Nothing else works,” she said. “And I need to dream. The blackness is driving me mad.” I helped her turn over her tent, shake out her blankets. I raked my fingers through the grass around places we’d been, the back of my neck growing hotter and hotter. I felt guilty, of course, when the rest of us threw back our heads and Serena only stared, but I told myself it was simply too late. I couldn’t say anything now, even if I had been willing to surrender my prize.

  Once during this time, I stood next to Laurel in the bathroom, both of us squeezing our stomachs between our hands, turning to the side, then back again. “Smaller,” she said. When she spoke, I could smell something clean and high and corrosive.

  “Smaller,” I agreed. It occurred to me that my body was beginning to look ever so slightly more like my mother’s. I wasn’t terribly disappointed about this.

  “Lighter, you mean.” Janet had come in behind us.

  “It’s the same thing,” Laurel said.

  “Not always,” Janet said. She walked out of the bathroom and, as she passed through the doorway, paused and flicked off the light. Girls squealed in the stalls.

  Listen, I know what you’re thinking, but the Buddha was never fat. He was first a handsome prince, and later an ascetic—well, you’ve heard the story. For six years, he lived on a single grain of rice a day. He gave up his fast only when he realized that if he didn’t, he would die before reaching enlightenment. I’m saying he was pretty trim. That fat, laughing man whose belly you rub for good luck and whom Westerners call the Buddha is not the Buddha at all, but a Chinese folk deity whose name—Budai—means “Cloth Sack.” Some traditions do identify Budai as an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, who will only appear on earth when the dharma has been utterly forgotten, but I don’t know about that. It has always seemed to me that Budai is only Maitreya in the sense that any of us might be.

  As the days passed, I began to dream about food. I found that I missed the sensation of eating even more than I missed the taste or nourishment. The fact that we had to fill our plates to fool the staffers didn’t help: we stared at our rolls and pads of butter and slices of quiche, and then slowly transferred them into our napkins, and our napkins into the trash. In the mornings, Laurel would bring over a bowl of sugar cubes and we would dip them into our tea, watching the smooth white squares soak up the liquid, become warm and delicate. We sucked the tea from the cubes; they dissolved in our mouths. We didn’t tell Serena. It was cheating, yes, but it was only cheating a little. I still felt light. I still felt empty. Fasting was like living in a series of tiny victories, with the feeling of building toward something—every meal we missed was like a coin saved, a moral claim on the future. Our fortune would buy us nothing but lightness.

  Luke missed three more days of rota. I pocketed three more notes. When I finally showed up to find him on the bench, waiting for me, my heart flounced maniacally. Yes, flounced: flounced is a perfect word for itself—extravagant, absurd, a little embarrassing, like feeling. While we’re on the topic: thronged, fluttered, quivered. Being hungry made it infinitely worse. I tried to make it stop as I approached. I was lighter now, I reminded myself. I was closer. I wasn’t here for Luke. I was here for levitation.

  “I want you to forgive me,” he said by way of greeting. He pulled up his knees and hugged them with his arms. It was such a childish posture, like a little boy fitting himself into an even littler hiding space.

  “You kissed me,” I said. Oh, but how could I believe in anything but this? It was right in front of me, and I could touch it.

  “I am trying to be tender,” he said. “I am trying to be open to everything I can, to let myself be utterly raw, barehearted. My teacher says this is the way to true fearlessness. But I shouldn’t have let things go so far. Even though we both k
now it was you who kissed me.” He smiled and took my hand and held my fingers almost to his mouth. I imagined them inside of it, all five in a fist. “So, Buddha Hands. Forgive me?”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “If you help us.” For once, I remembered where my loyalties lay.

  He let my hand drop, the brute. “Listen,” he said. “I know levitation pays the bills around here. The Levitation Center, right? That’s what the tourists call it. Dominique encourages it. But levitation is a trap. It’s what we call relative siddhi, as opposed to absolute siddhi. It’s only a side effect, a marker on the path to liberation.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s bad,” I said.

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “It just doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

  It was then that Serena appeared yet again, this time wearing a bright red dress. I saw that she had let Laurel do her makeup. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes lined. She looked as though she were wearing a mask of her own face. The ends of her hair, usually lank and long, were curled, as if curious. How much had she heard? How had she known he would be there today? But she smiled at me.

  “Stay back from the fence,” Luke said.

  She took a step forward. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t come any closer.”

  Serena laughed. She blew a kiss at Luke and rested both her hands on the fence, but then immediately shrieked and pulled them back into her chest. The sharp electric snap made the whole fence shudder.

  “I told you,” Luke said. He was smiling, and I thought of a boy I’d known, one of the neighborhood scrum, who in the height of one dissolute summer caught a fat, lazy bumblebee and tied her to a string. He patrolled the sidewalks, whistling and swinging the bee in circles around his head. You could hear a faint buzzing when he came close, the complaint of hot air forced through those cellophane wings. You could hear the girls screaming as he lassoed them with his bee-tipped lariat, layering one small torture on another. When no one was around, he let the bee walk dizzily over his knee, and told her jokes, and petted her fur with a finger. He didn’t untie her until she had been dead for days.