Commonwealth (32 page)

“We're lucky there's a guest room open,” Holly said, taking her mother's hand as she walked her up the steep wooden steps. Her mother, steady enough, would benefit from a stick. The wind could knock a person over some days. “People come as a guest for a month and then they refuse to leave. There are three guest rooms and the schedule is always messed up. People just stay and stay. They think one of us is going to leave and make a space for them.”

The chalet was ringed by a wide wooden porch that jutted out over the crystalline world. Heavy wooden chairs hewn by a careless axe were spread around so that a disciple might rest while taking in the view. The Alps looked like a drawing of the Alps on a candy wrapper, an idealized version meant to draw strangers in. Teresa had to stop and catch her breath, from the view, the thinner air, from the fact that she had actually done it and was there.

“It worked for you,” she said, huffing slightly.

Holly stood there, seeing it all again through her mother's eyes. “Well, someone actually died while I was waiting them out. That's when I came back to California and quit my job. He was a Frenchman named Philippe. The walking sticks had been Philippe's idea years before when they were running out of money and worried they'd have to give the place up. He was a sweet old bird. I still have his room.”

“Do other people's mothers come?” Teresa asked, trying not to sound competitive but feeling exactly that. She was so proud of herself.

“Sometimes. Less than you'd think.”

As soon as she saw the bed in her room Teresa took a nap. Then before dinner and the dharma talk and the last sitting of the day, Holly did her best to give her mother a crash course in meditation. Breathing in and out, following the breath, letting thoughts come up and pass away without judgment. “You just have to do it,” she said finally, fearing her explanation was doing more harm than good. “It's pretty straightforward.”

So Teresa, wearing the track suit she wore in the mornings when she did her power walk with her neighbor, sat down on a cushion beside her daughter and closed her eyes.

Nothing much happened at first. She thought about the ache in her left knee. Then there was the thought that the other people seemed nice. She liked Mikhail, the Russian who she had called Michael. Did he run the place? Very welcoming. All of them with their hair cut short like Holly's. And why not? What difference did it make? There was no one to impress. She could see that Holly was happy here, but was it a real life? And what would she do when she was Teresa's age? Would they take care of her? She could ask the older woman, the one who'd grown up in this house. Imagine this
place as a
house
, a home for a single family. How many servants must they have had to keep this up? Both of her feet were asleep.

She caught herself then. Such babble! Teresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper. She came back for a single breath but found herself reflecting on the bean salad they'd had for dinner, some kind of pink beans in there she hadn't seen since childhood. She couldn't remember what they were called. Her mother would ask her to pick through the beans before she soaked them, to look for little rocks, and she would be so meticulous until she lost interest, dumping the unchecked beans on top of the ones she had vetted, ruining everything. Did anyone in her family ever bite down on a rock?

One breath? She couldn't manage that? Maybe a single inhalation that wasn't burdened by thought? She tried. There. Okay. Her back hurt. Without warning her head dropped forward and for an instant she was sound asleep. She made a small, startled sound like a dog or a pig having a dream. She sat up straight again, opened her eyes slightly to see if anyone had caught her. She looked around at the peaceful faces of her neighbors, her daughter, as if she could see the clarity of their untroubled minds. She was ashamed of herself.

At the end of the session Holly helped her stand. Everyone came to shake her hand, give her a small embrace. They were so fond of Holly. They were so glad Teresa had come to visit.

“Don't worry about the meditation,” a woman named Carol said, her eyes as placid as a glacial lake. “It doesn't make a lot of sense at first.”

“I meditated on my own every day for years before I came to this place,” Paul the stick-maker said. “But to meditate here for the very first time in your life? That would be like taking your first
run at the Olympics.” He patted her shoulder. “You should be very proud of yourself.”

In the single bed of the guest room, Teresa, wide awake, looked at the ceiling, the regular notches around the crown molding like evenly spaced teeth. She'd flown halfway around the world for this? To sit? She had sat at her desk half her life. She sat in her car, on the plane. What could she have been thinking? She had wanted to see her daughter. Had Bert ever been to visit Holly here? Did Bert sit? Why hadn't she thought to ask? Light from the enormous moon flooded her little room, painting the walls and covering her bed. She thought of all the women and men, mostly men, she had in her own small way helped the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office send to prison. All of the cases she had worked to prepare so that they would be prosecuted and spend their nights in narrow beds and spend their days in silence. How was it that she'd never really wondered what became of them before? There were hundreds of cases that had come across her desk over the years. There were thousands. Were those men staring up at their ceilings now in the cells where they lived, trying to empty their minds?

It went on like this for Teresa day after day, three times a day. She filed into the meditation room with the others and someone would stoke the blue ceramic stove with coal and then everyone would sit together in a circle on the dark green cushions and wait for Mikhail to tap the little gong that signaled the beginning. It was madness. She would have quit—taken her copy of
The English Patient
to the second-floor balcony or walked alone through the tall grass while the others looked for inner peace—had it not been for the fact that Holly was so proud of her. Her daughter kept an arm looped through her arm, dragged her cushion closer to be near her. The other residents gazed upon the two of them in deep appreciation—in the kitchen, at meals, while meditating (Teresa would
sometimes cheat and briefly open her eyes, causing the others to immediately shut theirs)—other mothers did not visit, and if they did visit, they most certainly did not sit.

Teresa kept sitting.

Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can't do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can't do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I'm afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism. Pretty Hyla, whose fine bones were beautifully featured by her lack of hair, took her for a walk and told her the name of every plant and every tree they passed. They saw an ibex in the distance. She rolled a piece of juniper between her palms and let Teresa sniff her open hands, the hands that found the fish inside the handles of the sticks. Hyla told Teresa her mother had died five years ago and that she was very lonely. After that she held Teresa's hand as they walked back to the chalet. Okay, Teresa thought, I can be your mother today. They went back to the kitchen and sliced apples for a pie.

“I want you to cut off my hair,” she said to Holly before dinner.

“Really?” Holly leaned over and touched her mother's hair. It was thick and gray and she wore it in a bob with the sides pulled back in barrettes for lack of a better idea.

“I've gotten used to the look, and anyway, I think it will help me fit in.” Teresa wouldn't have done it had she been going back to work. At work her hair would have been a point of conversation, but when she got home it would be a signal of her new life. Her neighbors would see her, the checkers in the grocery store, and they would know she was different now.

Holly went and got the electric clippers out of the small plastic tub where they were kept in the downstairs bath. She took her mother outside on the deck and pinned a towel around her neck. They all cut one another's hair. They could have done it themselves but it was nice, having someone else's hands on your head every month or so.

“You're sure?” Holly asked before she turned the clippers on.

Teresa gave a single nod of assurance. “When in Switzerland.”

And there went her hair, the thick gray tufts settling down around their feet like storm clouds dispersed. When she was finished Holly came around to assess her work.

“What do I look like?” Teresa asked smiling, running her hand over the velvet.

“Like me,” Holly said, and it was true.

Sometimes Holly came into the guest room at night, the same room she had slept in when she first arrived twenty years before. She liked it in there. Teresa scooted over as far as she could in the little bed to make a place for her. The two lay together on their sides, the only way there was room, and talked, two women who hadn't talked in bed with anyone for years.

“Do you think you'll stay here?” Teresa asked, pulling up the blankets over their shoulders. It was freezing at night. Holly was forty-five, and while this life was all very beautiful, if she was ever going to want something else, a husband or a job, she had to think about that.

“I won't stay forever,” Holly said. “I don't think I will. But I've never come close to figuring out how I'd leave. It's like I expect destiny to throw open the door of the Dojo one day and say, ‘Holly! It's time!'”

“Call me when that happens,” her mother said.

“You should see how pretty it is here in the snow.”

They were quiet for a while, maybe both of them nearly asleep, and then Holly said, “Do you ever think about staying? You could be one of those people in the guest room who we think is going to leave and never does.”

Teresa smiled in the dark, though she realized then she couldn't exactly imagine leaving either. She put her arm around Holly's waist and thought of her body as something she'd made, something that was so completely separate from her now. “I don't think so,” she said, and then they did both fall asleep.

On the eighth day of her eleven-day visit to the Zen center, Teresa went to morning meditation, sat down on her cushion next to Holly, closed her eyes, and saw her oldest son. He was so clear it was as if he had been in the room with her all this time, as if he had been with her in every room she'd ever been in in her life and she had simply failed to turn her gaze in the right direction until now. She wasn't having a dream or an out-of-body experience. She understood that she was still in the chalet, still sitting, but at the same time she was with Cal and his sisters. She was with the Keating girls, Caroline and Franny. She saw the five of them going out the kitchen door of Bert's parents' house, the door that she had gone through countless times when she and Bert were dating, when they were planning their wedding.

Ernestine, the cook, is telling them not to be a bother to Ned down at the barn and to do what he tells them, and the girls say yes ma'am. She gives a half bag of withered carrots dug out from the bottom of the refrigerator and two small apples to Jeanette, who in return gives her a grateful smile. No one ever gave things to Jeanette. Cal is already across the porch. He doesn't say anything to Ernestine. He doesn't wait for the girls.

“Cal!” Ernestine calls out through the screen. “Where's your brother at?”

He doesn't stop. He doesn't turn around. He shrugs his shoulders and lifts up his hands, keeping his back to her.
Cal
, Teresa wants to say,
speak to her!
But she says nothing. She is watching a day that happened thirty-five years ago, a half a world away. She cannot correct his behavior. She cannot change the outcome. She is only allowed to sit and watch, and that is miraculous.

The five of them walk down the blacktop drive out the back, then turn onto a dirt road that eventually becomes not a road but two rutted tracks, the grass growing up in between the two halves to form a median. Holly and Caroline are chattering while Jeanette and Franny listen. Cal is off in front, walking fast enough that from time to time the girls have to break into a trot to keep up. They want to stay together without staying with him, and all five of them have a sense of what is close enough. Cal is tall and blond like his father, his eyes the same blue, his skin brown from the summer spent outside. His expression is one of simmering fury, but then it always is. He doesn't want to be in Virginia, doesn't want to be with his sisters, with the Keating girls, with his stepmother, with his grandparents. He doesn't want to curry the horses, to be bitten by the flies and mosquitoes, to stand in the stink of shit and hay, but there is nothing better to do. That's the trouble with being fifteen—all he can think of is what he doesn't want. He's wearing a UCLA T-shirt and Levi's though the day is hot. If Cal's wearing long pants it means he's taken the gun again. All the children know that.

Jeanette had told Teresa that Cal kept the handgun tied to his leg with bandannas. Jeanette had told her mother everything a long time ago, in that year they lived alone together in the house in Torrance. Without Holly and Albie around she was free to talk about the day Cal died, how they'd wasted the Benadryl to put Albie to sleep, the route they took to the barn, how they had ignored Cal while he was dying, thinking that he was playing a game so that
they would come close enough that he could hit them. They had waited a long, long time, sitting in the grass making daisy chains to show him they weren't falling for it. Jeanette had told her all of this but Teresa didn't see it then. She had never seen anything before.