From Comfortable Distances (14 page)

He shook his head as if he was having
a conversation with himself.

“In the light, I saw a rainbow in
your earring, and I couldn’t focus on you, but just stand there like a fool and
marvel at the colors—at how bright and true they were. And I thought about what
my mother had said about rainbows when I was a young boy: that when you saw
them, the other half was beneath the surface.”

The waves tumbled and retreated,
soft, slight. If she closed her eyes, it sounded to her as if whispering
children were tip toeing towards them then away.
The rainbow she had seen on
Neal
. Neal had no way of knowing that she had seen it, and a strange how
can this be, but it is feeling overcame Tess. His presence in the chapel had
silenced something inside of her.

“I'm a human being, Neal. I'm not a
sign from God. I'm just Tess.”

Neal watched her, his
eyes cutting her so that her thoughts fell away from her, like soldiers jumping
from a moving plane.

Neal reached for Tess’s
hand and clasped it in his own, and everything inside of Tess fought to hold on
to him while at the same time she contemplated letting go. NO. Tess was through
with these love-me-tender games, through with these illusory moments of
grandeur in her life. People fell in love, found their true loves as often as
people got hit by lightning. She didn’t want to be anyone’s damsel in distress.
She didn’t seek a knight in shining armor. No. She wanted to wake up each day,
drink a cup of tea, go to work, come home, relax. Simple pleasures with simple
rewards. No, no, no.

“You were a monk,” she
said, looking at their joined hands. What came to her were the moments she had
first held Prakash, her baby, in her arms. Otherworldly, yet in the flesh.

“Yes,” Neal nodded. “I
was.”

Random runners ran by
flicking mud with each imprint of their heels on the mud sand, and as they
pounded the earth

Tess thought about movement and the forward
motion of life. Tess had allowed herself to believe that she was destined for
so many things in life, only now, after all those years of working at
marriages, of searching for a way to live her life, of trying to shed her past
experiences as if they were skins she could step out of and leave behind, after
four husbands all of whom had been good men, but not one of them her one true love—her
knowing this because she had always been able to be with these men and also be
a ghost looking at herself being with men while she inhabited her own life
apart from them—after all of this, Tess didn’t know what lay ahead of her. 
What she did know was that when she was beside this man, this former monk, she
felt happy. If darker, more difficult times were to come, she would get through
them hoping for more of this lightness.

Neal clasped her hand
tighter and brought their clasped hands to his face, kissing the back of her
hand. His lips were faint and cold, like a snowflake on her skin. The waves
swam gently to the shore, retreating the moment they made their way towards them,
and what came to her was that regardless of her adventures and her fast-paced
life, she too had led a careful life, not so unlike Neal’s she supposed, if you
dug under the surface. She had thought out her marriages, deliberated her moves
from one of her little lives to another. She had weighed what she would give up
with each transition of her life, what she would gain. She had always been
cautious in real estate, too. She had made a career of moving people in, making
sure they were settled. She had not taken chances, but had calculated risks and
moved accordingly, always trying to see into the future, to predict what lay
ahead so as not to be unprepared.

The marriages—one after
the other—and her workaholic ways had helped pass the hours, the weeks, the years,
but in the darkness of her bedroom each night, she saw herself for who she
really was: a lonely woman who had started off her career by reading the
obituaries to see what homes were becoming available. A woman who liked to
drive with the windows open, taking in the trees and the sky, asking herself
who and what it was all for, as if one day she expected to hear a voice from
beyond answer
: it’s all for you, Tess
. It dawned on her now, though,
that she had given up on hearing that voice over time, as if she didn’t deserve
an answer, as if she had missed her turn somewhere along the way and nothing
would ever be for her again.

The wind blowing, Tess
imagined herself lifting up, propelling far and away from the earth, looking
down on herself as a piece of a whole, and repositioning so that she aligned
the world outside with her internal universe. She imagined herself coming in
for a landing, her position sure and steady, and the moment she clicked intact,
there was a strange sense of her being able to see everything and nothing all
at once. It was as if she were looking into a crystal ball whose images flashed
like road signs directing
come this way
.

Her hand in his, Tess
imagined Neal leading her into the distance. She was ready to take to the road;
whether it was the high road or the low road didn’t seem to matter.

“I’m glad to have met
you, Tess Rose.”

A tornado of faith and
foolishness and knowing and fear and hope escaped when she sighed. Neal. His
hand was smooth, soft, and she wished that she could protect it, keep it
flawless, keep him safe—from her—while at the same time she wanted to dig in,
to bite him, to squeeze him so that she could feel him melding with her. For
the first time in a long time she felt the way she had felt when she was
pregnant—two selves in one.

“I’m glad to have met
you, Neal Clay,” Tess said.

He turned to face her now
and staring into her eyes, he kissed her, quickly, daintily, so that Tess felt
as if an ice cube had dabbed her lips.

In the distance, the sun
was beginning to peak out from the grayness, the damp morning fog clearing, as
if the sky was a mirror being wiped clean. Tess squeezed his hand tight and
hard, and for the first time in a long time, a prayer ran through Tess as she
held onto him—a wish that he may find freedom and peace, that he may be safe,
always. The sun was taking over the sky now, rapidly, as if it had been there
all along, hiding until they focused on it. A shower of birds up above parted,
flying in random, scattered directions and when Neal squeezed her hand back,
the birds congregated again, and flew off, beyond them, a unit. In a moment,
Tess and Neal were walking away from the water, their hands at their sides,
moving in the direction that the birds had gone. Tess looked back, once, and
locked eyes with the gold tabby cat. Her instinct was to tap Neal, to make him
turn around to see this cat that had begun appearing in her life, only she
didn't. The tabby watched her, held Tess's eyes, not moving, until Neal turned
to look, and the tabby fled as fast as it appeared.

The phone call came from
old Jim Creet, her mother’s neighbor, at 4:30 am, startling Tess from sleep.
Something about her mother taking a fall in the past hour when she got up to go
to the bathroom, her hip being out of whack, her calling him in pain, his calling
the ambulance and going with her to the hospital, them x-raying her and finding
it was just a bad bruise. “She insisted on returning home and shooed me out,
but I don’t think she can get around too well right now,” old Jim had said, and
Tess had thanked him and told him she would head up there in the next thirty
minutes.

Tess had called her
mother only to get her answering machine. She was probably resting, she
guessed. But her mind raced: what if something else had happened? Should she
call Joe back? More ringing and the answering machine again. She left her mom a
message that she was heading up to see her. She wasn’t going to panic. Her
mother was fine. She would keep her faith and see her soon. Only something in
Tess had shifted, so that nothing felt fine.

There was a call to
Michael downplaying her concern, a call to her assistant, checking her
blackberry to see about which meetings to cancel, and then she was packing up
some things and on her way. She knew that all of these things had taken place,
just as surely as she knew that her foot was now on the gas pedal of her car
and that she was moving past the exits on the New York State Throughway, only
she felt as if she were moving in a fog. Life was fragile and spontaneous: in
an instant, something could happen to her mother and Tess was powerless to do
anything but react.

There were times in her
life that she had loved this ride, had looked forward to it with its winding
roads and its picturesque mountain peaks rich with foliage, the never ending rows
of evergreen trees, stacked like people in a stadium. She had blasted the car
radio—Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young followed by the Rolling Stones—and climbed
into the mountains rushing full speed ahead. While she had enjoyed the journey
in the past, though, the thought of reaching her destination had generally
caused her unease. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother and being in her
company, it was that being there, in Woodstock, in the house she grew up in,
brought her back to complicated emotions of trying to be a good daughter,
trying to act the part of a Buddhist, while trying to figure out who she was as
a person. She was more than just her mother’s daughter, yet there never seemed
to be the time or space to be her true self, so that when she was in Woodstock,
under her mother’s roof, she had felt like a fraud.

Tess wasn’t sure what she
felt now as her car climbed the mountain, her hands firm on the steering wheel
as she switched from the left lane to the right lane and vice versa to bypass
the eighteen and thirty-six wheeler trucks that made her car buckle. Something
like nostalgia tinged with dread. Each time her mind lost thought, a feeling, a
premonition of sorts, rushed through her, insinuating that this was the last
time she would make this ride up to Woodstock to see her mother. She tried to
brush off the feeling and opened her car window, as if to blow it away. This
was how life worked, she reasoned. People got older; no one could outwit old
age.

The tollbooth exit
towards Route 17 seemed to come up too soon in the journey for Tess. In less
than an hour she’d be in the quaint little town of Woodstock where people still
made and wore bright colored tie-dyed shirts and canvas-textured ponchos and
carved crystals to wear around their necks for healing properties. Now that
meditation, Buddhism, and yoga had become mainstream, it made the hippie
environment in Woodstock seem a bit more cliché.  Time had passed and yet the
town had kept its same old-world—Tess searched for a word—charm, she supposed.
Whenever someone heard that she was from Woodstock, they would always ask her
if she had been there in 1969, and seemed to be disappointed when she filled
them in that she wasn’t. She had been in her junior year at Brooklyn College
then, caught up in an internship. Her mother had invited Tess to bring whomever
she wished from Brooklyn back home with her for the concert, which would have
caused utter joy amongst her classmates, but the thought of bringing her city
life up to Woodstock made her uncomfortable. It seemed funny to her now—most
college coeds in the late 1960’s would have dreamed of having a bodhisattva for
a mother and yet, she had been embarrassed of it. The last thing she had wanted
to do with her newly acquired city ways was to take part in a glorified hippie
fest.

Tess pulled into the
freshly paved driveway of 56 Echo Lane as the sun was beginning to break
through the sky, and let the car idle a few moments. She had insisted and paid
for the driveway to be repaved in the last few years, reminding her mother that
one of her visitors could get hurt on the pebbled driveway and finally, her
mother had agreed. She admired the English Tudor design, the picturesque
cottage-style architecture of the house. It had been built in 1924. The house
was cozy and bright and spacious with its wood, brick and stucco details. Tess
had the glass doors all around the first floor of the house insulted just the
past spring to make the home warmer in the winter for her mother and to cut
down on heating costs.

Hearing the car, old Jim
Creet came out on his porch to greet Tess, while her mother stood at her own
screen door, touching the glass so that it looked to Tess as if she were trying
to reach her through a fish bowl. Tess waved to Jim and motioned that she would
call him later as she made her way out of the car.

“Contesta,” her mother
said, hobbling out onto the porch and then Tess was hugging her frail frame,
holding her and kissing her eyes so that her mother pulled her head away at
some point and held her daughter's face in her hands and whispered, “Contesta;
Metok Ladron.” Contesta had been her American name, while Metok Ladron had been
her Tibetan Buddhist name, meaning
Blooming Light
.

Brushing off Tess’s
concern, “I’m fine, just a little bruise,” her mother, overjoyed to see Tess on
this random day, insisted that they sit out on the front lawn and watch the
sunrise. She reminded Tess how they used to do that when Tess was a child,
before she left for school some days, and reluctantly, Tess helped her mother
out onto the grass, “be careful, please Mom, I don’t want you to make your hip
worse,” before she pulled blankets from her trunk. She draped one over her
mother, smaller now than Tess ever remembered her being, her thick wavy mane a
shiny, silver gray, and placed another blanket on the grass. Her mother held
her hand tight, and lying down on the blanket, closing her eyes to the sky as
if she was not yet ready to watch the new day dawn, she began to sing in her
sweet voice,
I never promised you a rose garden
.  Tess caressed her
mother’s grooved face with her fingertips, smoothing her hair back. It was the
first time she had ever touched her mother tenderly, and it surprised Tess how
it resonated in her soul. Her mother was under her control at that moment, and
it made Tess feel as she did when she carried her baby son in her hands for the
first time—the fragility of life, the complete surrender of one human being to
another.

Along with the sunshine
there's gotta be a little rain sometime

I beg your pardon I never
promised you a rose garden.

Tess had forgotten how
her mother loved to sing that song, how whenever life was not what a young Tess
had wished it to be, her mother had sat on the porch swing beside Tess and sang
it to her as she rocked the swing to and fro. Tess wondered when it was that
her mother had first heard that song. She would ask her about it at some point.
Caroline. Sweet Caroline, Tess thought as she smoothed her hair. That was the
American name she had taken when she came over to the United States, although
to her congregation, she had remained White Tara, the one who saves, associated
with long life and wisdom.

To her mother, Tess was
always
Contesta
, the answer; literally,
he/she/you answers
she
had pointed out to her mother once she learned to conjugate the verb
contester
in Spanish class. To Tess the literal translation had made the world of
difference. She was always listening to a person wondering if they were the he,
she, or you who was to supply her with the answer. Her name somehow was a cruel
joke to her, a title that would always leave her searching, although she was
grateful that her mother had given her what she had viewed as a normal name and
that she didn’t make her go to school with the name Metok Ladron.

Across the road, neighbors
came outside one by one to fetch the newspaper in their robes and pajamas and
take in the new day. In Woodstock no one slept past the break of day. Tess
wondered where, if anywhere, the townies went for their morning meditation
session in the past few months since her mother had become more reclusive; they
had still come over each morning through her Leukemia and Tess believed it had
kept her mother going in between chemotherapy sessions. Tess had spent many a
long weekend sleeping at her mother’s home during the chemotherapy months,
although she couldn’t remember those much. Contrary to all the doctor’s
warnings about what chemotherapy would be like, her mother had been relatively
fine, laughing and cooking dinners as soon as each session was over.

An old man across the way
waved to Tess and then there was a man and woman standing beside him in track
pants and sweatshirts—their names were on the tip of Tess's tongue—and as they
began to make their way towards Tess, she held up her hand to keep them off and
put her pointer finger to her lips. She wanted this time alone with her mother.
She bent down and kissed her smooth cheek. Her mother was so beautiful with her
silken, gleaming skin. It was funny that it wasn't until she was a grown up
herself that Tess began to realize how beautiful her mother was, and then came
the realization that all of those men who had hung around their home as she had
been growing up, trying to win Tess over, buying her trinkets—books and
miniature statues of Green Tara, the savior, and Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of
compassion—had loved her mother. It made Tess feel silly now thinking about all
those men loving her mother, trying to win Tess’s affection as a way of getting
to her mother. Her mother had never married after Tess's father walked out of
her life; it wasn't until Tess divorced Michael that her mother had explained
to Tess that the reason she had never remarried was because her life was not
about marrying any one person, but about being married to herself first and then
to the people that she shared her life with. She had reminded Tess of the
second of the Four Noble Truths: “The origin of suffering is attachment.”
Nirodha
,
her mother had said to Tess, as if it was the first time she was sharing the
word with Tess, while in fact her mother had instructed her in the Four Noble
Truths and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism again and again.
Nirodha
: the
unmaking of sensual craving and conceptual attachment. No clinging and
attachment. It had made Tess feel foolish that she had submitted to the various
men that had loved her, that she had clung to others, formed so many
attachments and brought suffering upon herself.

Her mother continued to
sing and Tess watched her lips form the words, the sound coming out of her
mother too beautiful for Tess to interfere with.
Contesta
—that was who
she was to her mother: an answer, a voice in the night, a house for her to move
into. But as her belly grew, her mother had told her, she had realized that the
blooming within her provided her with more than shelter. The life within her
was an answer to the questions her heart and soul tossed her way each day: the
whys and when and hows of her life could be stilled by her hand caressing the
expanse of her belly. Her mother had told her that throughout her pregnancy,
she had loved becoming familiar all over again each day with the boundaries of
her flesh. 

Tess massaged her mother's sturdy,
slender fingers. Although the rest of her hands were covered in wrinkled flesh,
her fingers hadn’t aged.

“I'm sorry,” Tess said, and at that
moment she was. It wasn’t regret or nostalgia, but sorrow, for not adoring her
mother, for failing to know her earlier in her life.

“Never apologize for your life,” her
mother said as if she were speaking from a dream.

“I never understood that you were my
ally,” Tess said.

Her mother brushed Tess’s cheek with
her hand.

“You always knew that I was your
ally—that's what gave you the strength to lead your own life,” her mother said,
putting the pad of her pointer finger to Tess's lips so that Tess kissed it.

“Listen,” she said, moving Tess’s
hand to her heart, and Tess heard life pumping through her mother amidst the
distant sound of the birds' chattering songs.

What came to Tess was the reality
that all of those years living alongside her mother, and later, her husbands,
she had never known what the beat of their hearts sounded like. The realization
overcame her, so that waves of nausea bubbled up in her. Tess had lived her
life at a comfortable distance from the people closest to her, and if they knew
that she was always apart while she was with them, none of them had ever let on
to it. Now, she wondered if there had ever been any truth to her relationships.
So much distance between people. So many routes leading into a person, so many
routes leading away. Tess believed that there were choices in life that one
couldn't go back on. After so many years of keeping a person far away, pulling
them in seemed cruel and selfish. A person pulled in would discover that they
had been kept away and then the wonder and unrest in them would unsettle them.
Endless questions whose answers were irrelevant. You could visit the past, pick
up a souvenir or two, but you couldn't undo it. Her mother squeezed her hand,
shifting Tess up from her reverie, and Tess held onto her mother, wondering how
with this woman whom she both knew and didn't know, she felt so connected.