Karma for Beginners (6 page)

But the other women glare at Vrishti too. Just like my mom, she's lonely from too much attention, and the two of them stick to each other like magnets that finally entered each other's field.

Vrishti finishes her zucchini, and then she gives my mom a secret smile. My mom secret-smiles back. I watch back and forth like Ping-Pong. I wonder if they're going to let me in the game.

My mom says, “Sooo . . .”

Vrishti says, “Tessa . . .”

They secret-smile again.

“We have news.”

“Okay,” I say, with trepidation. I don't know what this news could be, but the possibility exists that it isn't good. Since we've gotten here, my mom's perception of what's good seems to have strayed away from mine, far enough that I'm starting to stop trusting that something is a good thing just because she thinks it is.

Vrishti squirms in her seat. “We've been invited to the Guru's kitchen!”

My mom beams into Vrishti's eyes. I have to say, I don't know what the big deal is.

“Cool.”

“Tessa, it's an incredible honor,” my mom explains. “I don't even know how they picked us or anything, they just came into the kitchen today—”

“And said,” Vrishti chimes in—

“We would be honored to have your
seva
in the Guru's private kitchen!” they finish in unison. Then they actually giggle.

“So we'll be working up the hill, over at the Guru's quarters; we'll be helping with the prep for all his meals,” my mom says. “It's such an incredible opportunity to be near the
shakti
of the Guru.”

I've decided that if people use weird words around me, they're going to have to tell me what they mean. “What's
shakti
?”

“Oh, it means like spiritual energy?” Vrishti says. “The life force of the universe.”

“Cool.” I nod.

“After dinner, let's go celebrate!” my mom says.

“Yes!” Vrishti says.

Celebrate means have dessert at the Amrit, which means Snack Bar. At the regular cafeteria there's no dessert— apparently it's not yogic—but at the Amrit there is lots. Cobbler, cookies, cake, pie, all made with brown rice syrup and whole wheat pastry flour. I get a yogurtgranola parfait and we sit by the window. Vrishti has blueberry rhubarb crisp. My mom just gets a tea. Music pipes from tinny speakers like in the shuttle buses. My mom and Vrishti do a short version of their chant, holding both my hands, and then we eat.

As I'm scraping out the final dregs of yogurt, those kids tumble through the Amrit door. The brother and the sister and the other guy all laugh at something, stand near the jars of cookies, and pick some out. Peanut butter, from what I can tell. Vrishti nods toward them at my mom, small, like she thinks I won't be able to see. My mom nods back. I roll my eyes, but neither of them notices.

“Tessa,” Vrishti stage-whispers, trying to be inaudible and failing, “do you know those kids?”

“No.” I don't try to whisper.

She and my mom do their attempting-to-be-subtle nod at each other again. “Maybe you should go and say hello.” Vrishti smiles.

My mom really likes that idea. “Tessa, I think that would be wonderful.”

“Nah, it's okay.”

“You can't have new adventures if you don't take risks!” She looks at Vrishti meaningfully.

“Really, I don't feel like it.”

“Why? I'm sure they're perfectly nice.”

I want to tell her that they're pale and weird and I never know what they're laughing about, but I don't want Vrishti to think I'm mean. So I just shrug.

“It'd be great for you to meet some kids your age!” Vrishti chimes in.

“Yeah, Tessa, it really would.” My mom gives her that nod again.

Oh, for Christ's sake. This is clearly going to end in disaster, but it doesn't look like I have a choice. I get up and go over to the peanut-butter-cookie jar. My heart is thunking and my cheeks are hot.

“Hi.” I say it to the littler guy, the one who hasn't gone through puberty, forgetting that sometimes the little guys are the worst: they have stuff to prove. He raises his eyebrows at me like some kind of challenge. Brother and sis look at each other.

“I'm Tessa,” I keep going. I don't know why. I really should have already turned around and gone back to my mom.

“Hi,” the girl goes. “I'm Avinashi.” She sucks on the side of her cookie till it's soggy. “That's Sanjit.” She points at her brother. “And that's Meer.” She points at the short guy. He raises his eyebrows again.

“Cool,” I say. Neither of the guys says anything. They just stand there being weird and pale. “Okay, see you later,” I say. When I turn around to walk away I hear them laugh. My face flushes redder.

Back at the table my mom and Vrishti titter like popular girls, then stop and look like moms when they see me coming back. It's official: what my mom thinks is good or smart or fun has diverged permanently from the truth. Or at least from my experience of the truth. The swamis say that's all I've got anyway: there's no such thing as objective truth, at least not on the human perceptual plane. And who knows, maybe they're right.

. . .

To attain the new, you must abandon old relationships and forms.

Devanand gives me a stick with a spike at the end and tells me to pick up garbage. I can do it wherever I want.

When I get to the lot, Colin's finishing up the school bus. He must hear me crunching gravel because as soon as I'm in the lot he's up and out, wiping off his hands. His T-shirt says THUNDERCATS. “Hey!” he says. “You again!”

I blush.

“It's totally perfect you showed up.”

I'm not sure what to say to that. “Cool.”

“Are you busy? I could kind of use a hand with something.”

“Okay.” I don't even ask him what it is.

“Don't you want to know what it is?”

“Okay.” What am I, a robot?

“Okay.” He says it like I said it, and grins. He's laughing at me, but it doesn't seem mean. “So here's the deal. When I finish this bus here”—he points at the school bus—“I get to work on that one.” He nods toward the red VW bus with white trim, the cool one. “The shuttle guys said if I fix it up I can use it during the week, and they'll just use it on the weekends when the extra people come. Sounds like a good deal, huh?”

I nod. “Sure.”

“Yeah. Only problem is,‘fix it up' means rebuild the engine. I can do most of it myself, but there are parts where you gotta have two sets of hands. Think you'd be up for helping out a little?”

I've never done anything remotely mechanical in my entire life, and I normally have zero interest in that stuff, but he said “two sets of hands.” That means: my hands and his hands. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he says again, and laughs. “Come on down here, and I'll show you about the tools.”

Here is what I learn that afternoon: there is more than one kind of screwdriver. The oil pressure switch is located on the crankcase underneath the distributor. Gravel hurts your butt almost as much as your knees. Socket sets are kind of cool. Throttle positioners are fairly easy to remove. An engine is a complex organism.

It's hard to hold a flashlight steady when your hands are shaking.

The next day I don't even get marigolds or the trash spike or check the mail; I just grab my vest and head to the lot. Colin's under the bus, his jeans already smudged. He must hear me coming, because right away he comes out from under. Today it's a YES T-shirt. It has a space landscape with huge red polka-dotted mushrooms. “Hey, it's my right-hand lady,” he says. I blush. First of all: “lady.” And second of all: his.

He pats the gravel. We get to work removing the battery, and then the wires on the voltage regulator. For a while it's quiet, just birds and leaves rustling, squeak and clink of the engine parts. Just as I'm starting to wonder if I'm supposed to say something, he talks. “So how'd you get here, Tessa?”

“We drove.”

He laughs at me again, in that same way that's not embarrassing, just funny. It makes me laugh too. “Duh, right?” I wipe black grease onto my jeans and start over explaining. “My mom wanted to come. I guess she went to some workshop or something and got into it.” I wonder if I should explain about when she sat me on the futon and told me that she'd finally learned that you can't ever count on men. I wonder if I should explain about my dad. “She said it was a new chapter and an adventure.”

“Well, definitely an adventure, huh?” The way he asks it makes me feel like he already understands everything I think about this place.

“Yeah, I guess so. It's pretty weird.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

I snort. “Have you
met
any of these people? They like speak some whole other language.” It comes out meaner than I meant it and as soon as it's out of my mouth I worry that he's maybe friends with them or something. I start to take it back, but he laughs.

“What, you mean after
seva
at the
Amrit
with the
Guru
?” His eyes sparkle at me and suddenly I stop feeling mean.

We laugh so much my stomach aches and by the time we pull out the last hose the trees are dark against the sky. The sun sinks down below the branches and everything turns orange and I might have missed dinner but I don't care.

The wind's speckling goose bumps on my arms when Colin stands up and stretches, grease-smeared T-shirt pulling across his chest so the space landscape mushrooms spread out wide like a fun-house mirror.

“See you tomorrow,” he says, and for the first time since we got here I'm impatient for morning.

At Evening Program my mom pulls me past the pillow piles and the people searching for a seat, and we head straight for the front. On the way we pass the kids. My mom doesn't notice them, thank god. The sister, Avinashi, starts to smile at me and I start to smile back, but then Meer steps in front of her and glares. I can feel his mean prepubescent gaze stick to my back as my mom yanks me past them.

Three rows of people ring around the Guru's chair, a special section like the best seats at a concert. Vrishti smiles when she sees us, pats the cushion next to her for my mom to sit. The people up here are mostly all good-looking, with pulled-together clothes and fancy scarves, silk meditation cushions instead of canvas, beads made out of jade or amethyst. They all look at me like they know me already, though we haven't ever met. I only recognize one of them: Ninyassa. She glares at Vrishti and my mom.

It's like a special club up here. My seat's just half a space, wedged between two others, and I know it wouldn't be there if it weren't for my mom. It's weird being in a club that you know wouldn't invite you if you hadn't come attached to someone else. There's a line that separates this group from all the other people, and I'm inside the line and outside it at exactly the same time.

We're closer to the musicians here, though, and the drums thump in my stomach, liquidy and round. I breathe around the beats; my mom and Vrishti and Ninyassa go away and so do clubs, compartments, and special sections. The inside-outside line thins until it disappears, and I keep picturing space landscape mushrooms, red and white dots against a rainbow background that keeps stretching out and out and out.

Our room door creaks open; in the mirror I see myself jump. I slowly lock the bathroom door so she won't hear.

“Tessa?”

“Just a minute,” I holler, turning on the water. Mascara sticks to my eyelashes like glue, and her lipstick leaves a pink stain on my mouth even when I wipe it hard enough to hurt. The soap tastes like incense but it gets things back to normal; when my face looks regular again I twist the faucet and come out.

Usually when my mom comes back from
seva
she takes off her clogs and earrings right away, but she's still wearing all her jewelry and her shoes. Her hair spills out from underneath a Guatemalan wool hat. “Grab a sweater,” she says. “It's getting cool.”

She takes me out and down the stairs, fast and wild, like on one of our road trips. She's always a few paces ahead of me, but she keeps turning back, scooping me up with her grin and pulling me along. It's nice, her turning back to check on me.

We make it through the lobby without her saying hi to anybody, even guys; then we barrel past the entrance and the courtyard to the woods. Tonight's the first night you know fall is coming, the way the air gives up the loose sprawl of summer, sharpens into the smell of cold and burning leaves. The sweatshirt I put on is enough, but barely. She keeps me moving fast enough to stand it, though, and we duck under the canopy of green and yellow. She points at a twisted tree at the entrance to the trail; its leaves are delicate like shadow puppets, red already, deep and rich. “Japanese maple,” she says. “No leaves that color in Ohio, huh?”

Once we're on the path, she slows down. She keeps my fingers clutched inside hers; I wrap my sleeve over my other hand so it can stay warm too. We walk for a while, watching branches cast shadows on the forest floor, tangling till you can't see the spaces between them. It's a relief. I could walk like this for a long time, without weird words I haven't heard and places I don't know the names of and strange foods and rules. Without boyfriends or dates or skirts that I don't want, guys elbowing in front of me. I could walk like this for a long time, holding hands between the trees, quiet, me and my mom.

Pretty soon, though, she asks me what I did all day. I don't tell her how I almost peed my pants laughing at Colin's Devanand impersonation, how the quiet parts filled up with butterflies beating high up in my stomach, almost in my throat. I don't tell her about grease between my fingers and gravel in my back and how I kind of get it now when people talk about working with their hands. I don't tell her because she doesn't really want to know. I can tell by her voice that she's asking me about my day because she really wants to talk about hers, and so I say, “Nothing much, just
seva
. How about you?”

She breathes in deep like she's winding up, getting ready;then she turns to me. “Oh, Tessa,” she says. When it's an Experience she always starts with “Oh, Tessa.”

“Today at the end of lunch-cleaning
seva
, Swami Anantananda came in and told us all to find a place to sit down. Right in the Guru's kitchen! He said just sit on the floor or a counter or whatever, and once we all did they brought the Guru in. For
darshan
.”

“What's
darshan
?” I was wondering how long it'd take for her to say a word I didn't know. Ten seconds.

“
Darshan
is when you spend a few moments together. Just you and the Guru and the energy between you. It means to share presence.”

The new language makes us separate, a space of words I have to cross to get to her. But clearly she's not going to notice that or stop, so I have to find a way to deal. I decide to try to apply the words to normal things, like me and her taking a walk, or eating food, or talking. If I can do that, maybe they might not seem so weird.

“Like right now, are we having
darshan
?”

She laughs. “Oh no, Tess, this isn't
darshan
.
Darshan
is like a special audience with the Guru. It's not the same as just spending time with a regular person.”

“Oh.”

When I was little and she didn't have a boyfriend, my mom would play hooky from work and pin tapestries to the insides of our windows, pile up pillows and drape them with cloth till we were surrounded by the most amazing blanket fort in the whole entire world. We'd spend hours inside, ignoring the phone when work called, drinking strawberry-apple juice and laughing. It doesn't seem fair that that doesn't have a name, but there's a special word for the time she spends with this weird beard guy she's hardly even met.

I don't know how to explain that, though, so I just ask, “Then what happened?”

“It was so amazing. As soon as he walked in the room it was like my whole body turned into electricity.” I feel kind of embarrassed, but I don't interrupt. “One by one he called us, and by the time it was my turn, there was so much energy running through me I was afraid to stand up. I thought I was going to fall down! My legs and my arms and my chest and everything, it was like there was this
light
in them, pressing out from the inside.”

“Wow.” I've never felt anything like that before.

“I was vibrating and vibrating and the swamis brought me up to the Guru, and I just fell at his feet. I can't even explain it. This incredible silence came over me. Bigger, and more, than any sound you ever heard. It was like . . . ” There's no special word for it, so she's looking for her own. “It was like a
sea
of silence. Like an ocean. And I was the ocean, and at the same time just a teeny little dot in it. And the Guru was the ocean too.”

She's got this look on her face, eager, like she wants me to say something, take a turn, tell a story to match hers. Like she wants me to understand. But I don't understand. When the beard guy walked into the room, all I saw was a little man with the face of a beatific imp and Hawaiian flower garlands. When I strained my eyes I could see how he was beautiful, okay, and the chanting makes me feel stuff; but not like my whole body being taken over by electricity, vibrating, when five minutes earlier I was chopping beans and wiping counters. Nothing that would make me fall at someone's feet.

She's still watching me and I stare down, shuffle gravel on the path. By now it's dark; the lights along the trail glow just enough to see three steps ahead. I want to ask her how you learn to feel all that stuff, but she already said she couldn't explain. And even if she could, it wouldn't make it cross over from her into me. It's not just all those new words that make that space between us; it's something happening to her, something I wish that I could feel.

She keeps looking at me, eyes wide and expectant, like I'm supposed to say something. It makes my ribs clench up; I want her to stop trying to get inside them. I feel hard toward her and too soft at the same time. I wish she'd just leave me alone.

Finally I let out a weird snort that's half a laugh. “So what'd he do next? Turn into Jim and Tammy Faye and ask you for your money? Praise the Lord!” I say the last part in a televangelist accent. It's supposed to be a joke, I guess, but I can see from the corner of my eye: her face scrunches up. For a second it looks like she might cry. I open my mouth to say something else, but I don't know what it is and it catches in my throat.

She drops my hand and turns around. “Come on, Tessa. I have to get up early to chant.” We walk all the way back to our room without talking. But not the same way as before.