From Comfortable Distances (21 page)

Dale continued to stare
at her before her face softened.

“I do love Kyle. Marriage
is just the next step in our relationship. I'm not selling my soul, just
sharing my heart with someone. When I listen to myself speak, none of it seems like
a big deal. It's when I listen to other people that I get all fucked up—
when
are you moving in together, when’s the wedding, where are you getting married
yada yada
. The more I have to deal with people, the more I wish I could
lock myself away and live in my own little world. Maybe I’ll go to an ashram
for a break, or become a nun.”

“Apparently people who
lock themselves away in their own little worlds are not the most carefree
folks, either,” Tess said.

Dale's brow creased. “Have you
interviewed any nuns lately?”

If Tess had a daughter, she hoped
that she’d be like Dale. There was something about her that was quirky and
offbeat—a mess and a charmer in one. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to
her actions, and yet something about her was calculated, as if she knew exactly
what she was doing.

Tess smiled at Dale and winked. “Let’s
just say I have my sources.”

“Okay, I’ll cross the ashram and the
convent off my places to escape to list. Remember, coming from a girl who can’t
leave New York City for Brooklyn, it’s highly unlikely that I’m going anywhere,”
Dale said.

Outside, the skateboarder kids were
jumping off their mock mountain again and again. For moments at a time, they
were airborne.

“Tell me something about you,” Dale
said.

Tess wobbled her head back and forth.
“My friend the cookie man, who I was starting to like, was a Roman Catholic
monk,” Tess said.

“What? You’re dating a monk?”

The skateboarders were all sitting on
the floor now, smoking cigarettes. The show was over.

“And here I thought I was the only
one with drama,” Dale said.

“He lived in a monastery in Canada
for 23 years,” Tess said.

“Wow,” Dale said.

“I took him to see the
Sound of
Music
a few weeks back, before my mother passed away—you know that it’s
about a nun leaving a convent and falling in love with a man that she marries,
right?”

“I know the story. He must have
thought you were trying to convert him!”

“I tried to kiss him after the movie
and he ran away.”

Dale laughed, slipping back on her
chair, the front two legs lifting off the floor so that for a moment, it seemed
as if she was going to topple over backwards, until she recovered herself,
crashing back down.

“Is he going back to the monastery at
some point?” she said.

“He says he left for good, that the
monastery wasn't for him anymore. Talk about leaving careers.”

“I had a professor in college who was
a Roman Catholic priest for over ten years and he fell in love with a nun and the
two of them ended up getting married. When he told my class, we thought it was
the coolest thing.”

“Well, I’m no nun,” Tess said.

Dale laughed. She was
picking at the lemon square crust again, breaking pieces off before she
contemplated taking a bite.

“Maybe you guys will just
be friends,” Dale said.

“We are just friends.”

“But you like him,” Dale
said.

“Like I said, we're
friends,” Tess said.

“But you did say you were
starting to like him,” Dale said.

Tess shrugged.

“Do you want to kiss him
passionately, Tess?”

“When I think of kissing
a monk, I feel like a criminal,” Tess said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t
turn you in,” Dale said.

Tess smiled, all lips, no
teeth. “Thanks,” she said. “Can we not bring this up for topics of discussion
when we lunch with Kim and Sara on Saturday?  Not that there's anything to
tell, it's just that I don't feel like making it our daily amusement, you know?
I think I just needed to hear myself say it aloud,” Tess said.

“Scout’s honor,” Dale
said. “They don’t need to know about my taking a leave from my job right now,
either. I don’t want to make a big deal of it and who knows—chances are I’ll go
back in a bit.”

“Deal,” Tess said.

As they walked out into
the night, Dale wove her arm in Tess's arm.

“Sometimes I wish I could
see a year into the future and know how everything will work out,” Dale said.

“The answers always come
at the right time and place,” Tess said.

“Amen,” Dale said.

The blackened sky
departed gradually at first, like a curtain lifting, until all at once the sky
was a shade of bluish-gray: the color of morning. The transition from darkness
to light was seamless, fluid, so that Tess could never pinpoint the moment when
a new day dawned. She wondered if that's what it was like when you reached
Samadhi—the blissful state in yoga—or if there were signs all along the way
saying,
you're almost there
. If there were, she hadn't hit one of those
signs yet.

The steam from her tea
drifted upwards, warming her face. Her mother had been gone for weeks now, and
still, no sign. She hadn’t come to Tess in a dream, hadn’t spoken to her.
Nothing. Void and silence.

Outside the kitchen
window, two birds teetered on a high branch in the cherry blossom tree. In a
matter of weeks, the tree had bloomed into a captivating landscape of
pink-white flowers and petals that sprinkled the grass like velvet tear drops. 
The blossoms were flourishing, the branches brushing against the window glass
so that it sounded like waves rushing the shore. Late May. It was only a matter
of weeks before the tree would be in full bloom. After these 30-plus years, the
branches were sturdy and thick. The tree reminded her of a highway with its
various routes to follow. The routes that intertwined and overlapped all led
upwards. That was a comfort to Tess. No matter which route she traced, she
landed beside the others. As a young boy, Prakash had loved to lodge himself in
the tree and do a forward bend gripping the branches. She recalled how she used
to spy on him through the kitchen window and wish that they were close. Prakash
never seemed to tire of his little flip. To know what he had been thinking, if
only for a moment, to see what he saw when he turned the world upside down—that
was what she had wanted. Seeing him be his own little person, it had amazed her
that there had been a time when Prakash was a part of her. It had confounded
her that she was unable to enter his mind or heart; that she could no longer
hear life beating through him after had shared that rhythm with him for nine
months.  Prakash was hers to love and not hers, too, and when she was younger
and foolish in ways different than she was now, she had felt hurt and stunned
by her inability to possess Prakash—by the fact that he could walk and talk and
think on his own.

The first divorce, from
Prakash’s father, had been a rough one. Prakash's father had fallen in love
with another woman, and packed his bags. When Tess read the note he left her,
saying that he would be in touch, she had felt strangely relieved, as if
someone had rescued her from a cliff she was about to spring from. There was no
hate or anger, just questions that she wished answers to, so that the not
knowing transformed into a waiting period. Yet, she had encouraged Prakash to
love his father—she had wanted him to have his father, to see him if there came
a chance, talk to him if he should reappear in Prakash’s life.

Prakash had clung closer
to her than he ever had during the abandonment. Not needing her to speak or
hold him, so much as to reassure him that she was where she was supposed to be
and he was where he was supposed to be. He would come home from school and call
her at work to report that he was home. Courteous, dependable Prakash. And
somehow, she had resented that about him, because there were times when she had
felt like she was the child and he was her mother. While she made dinner,
Prakash remained alone on the side of the house, sitting on his perch while the
other children on the block played stickball in the vacant street by the Yacht
Club.

Years later, as a
teenager, he called her after school each day before heading to Strickland Park
to play handball, and let her know what time he planned to return home. If
Prakash had not been the conscientious child that he was, she didn’t know how
it would have all worked out.

When she had told him of
one divorce after another, shared the details with him, Prakash listened in his
calm and patient way. Husband number two, then number three. Then, with her
fourth marriage, it was as if Prakash had sprung a leak. He was done with
college by that time, living out in San Francisco, already establishing himself
as an architect. He had asked Tess when she was going to be through with this husband
phase.
A husband phase
. The words had stuck in Tess’s mind like a
splinter. What was true was that Prakash remained in her life when all else was
gone. She often wondered what her relationship with her son was at heart: what
did they talk about these days beyond trivial things?
Are you okay? How’s
work? What’s new
? It was such hard work to form a bridge into someone
else’s life.

Tess sipped her tea.
Silence and time and space to think was underrated. And yet there were moments
when she envisioned herself sitting at this kitchen table each morning for the
rest of her life and it made her feel hollow, as if something had been sucked
out of her. She had struggled with the paradox of wanting to be alone and the
fear of being alone for most of her life. When she had been a child, there were
days when she had hid in her closet safe from the crowd in the living room that
chanted and told herself stories about how her life would be when she was
older. She would live far away in a quiet house by the water and how she’d go
out in the early mornings to look at the world and how she would never let
strangers in. It would be her own home and to get inside others would need to
know the special password that let her know that they were safe, the password
that the universe had granted, offering them access to her world.

She remembered evenings
when the crowd in her living room was silent and all that Tess heard were her
own thoughts. She often grew fearful that everyone had left the house and had
forgotten her. Once, when the silence set in when she was home with a cold, worried
that her mother wasn’t around to take care of her, she rushed down the stairs
and into the living room to find her mother and her followers all sitting cross
legged with their eyes closed, their chins down, bobbing as they made subtle
noises that sounded like voices underwater. She had had the urge to wake them
all up. It frightened her to see people look dead while they were living, and
yet watching them intrigued her. There was something beautiful about seeing
people in their stillness—there was a peace that they exuded, as if they were
clouds. In her room, Tess had closed her eyes and sat cross-legged on the
floor, imitating the way the people in her living room had sat. She made the
breathy sound with her throat and within a few minutes, she grew sleepy. So
sleepy that she crawled into her bed and fell right asleep. The more she
practiced sitting that way—in her closet for fear that her mother would
discover her—the less sleepy she became and the more alert it made her. After a
few weeks of the sitting, she began to feel as if she were weightless when she
sat, no longer noticing her body, and instead tuned into her mind, which seemed
content to think about nothing. The first time the free floating feeling
overcame her, she panicked, wished to come back down, to sink into herself, but
once she was moving, there was no turning back. She never knew where she went,
but the feeling of drifting was enough to make her keep doing it. She meditated
in secret, never once sharing her experiences with her mother. It intrigued
Tess that the things that could have connected her to her mother were things
that she had chosen to keep them apart.

Tess wondered if she had
played that game with her ex-husbands—keeping from them the things that could
have connected her to them. Had she ever asked them if they were afraid of
anything? Had she ever truly known them? Other than what they liked to eat and
the hours they worked, and the trivial things that would make them happy or
annoy them, there wasn't much else that she knew about them.  It perplexed her
that you could live alongside a person and not really know them, that you could
be related to someone, that you could give birth to them, and not be able to
read their minds and hearts. She knew nothing after all of her son’s daily life
other than the things they told one another during their phone calls. Unless
you were to become another person, and that, in this lifetime at least, was
impossible, it seemed unlikely that you would ever get to know another person.
The truth was that no matter how many people you surrounded yourself with, you
were always alone. Tess wondered if a monk ever felt as if he was alone or if
he always felt as if he was with God. She breathed in deep and let it go: the
fear, the worry, the wishes that lived in her that she was not yet ready to
articulate, as if no words could communicate this new song of her soul which
had been forming in her during the last few weeks of her life. She felt empty
as of late, as if someone robbed her and left her a note:
nothing left to
take.
And yet the emptiness left her feeling free and renewed somehow, as
if she had to empty out, had to let go of all that was in order to begin again.
That was the thing with changing your route in life—it seemed that once you got
on a new road, there was no end to all the directions you would travel.

Tess wondered if Neal
felt the same way since he had left the monastery. Perhaps his life away from
the monastery felt small. To walk a day in his life. Tess wished that she could
see out of his eyes, if only for a moment. Tess imagined the halls of the
monasteries: dark and cool, mysterious and eerie, safe from the world.  She had
a desire to walk in a monastery—to smell it, hear the sounds, eat the food,
look at the monks. Neal had done the unthinkable by leaving the world behind
and finding his own separate peace.

She yawned deep and wide,
her hands reaching toward the sky. Outside, the crickets’ throaty hum filled
the air. This spring was certainly different from the other springs of her
life. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt as if she
was living each of her days instead of passing through them. At random moments,
such as this one, it seemed bizarre to her to spend her days walking in and out
of houses, opening and locking them up, balancing check books, holding staff
meetings.

The cloud looming outside
brought a flash of winter to her mind: deep and dark and cold. She tried to
imagine entering life on that late December day so many years ago, over half a
century back. Arriving in the world one day late for Christmas—December 26
^th
.
Her birthday seemed an afterthought. Winter. The coldness that seeped into her
bones. She always felt as if she was on the verge of cracking during December
and January, but by the time February set in, she would feel herself melting.
She thought of those mornings in December and January over thirty years back
when she had been pregnant with Prakash. The loneliness of those days, knowing
that her whole life would be different the moment the creature in her decided
to show his face. Those February days prior to Prakash's birth, and the few
weeks after his birth were probably the only times in her life that she had
ever lived as she was living now— apart, and yet connected to the world around
her, aware of its movement, aware of the metronome within her beating to the
metronome without her.

The doorbell’s ring sent
Tess from her reverie. Her heart raced. Who would be calling for her at 6:00
a.m.? She peaked out the living room window and saw Michael.

“Yes, it’s me, your
favorite intruder,” he said when she opened the door.

She hugged him close;
there was something about the way her and Michael's bodies melded together that
always caused her a moment of doubt whenever she was that near to him. Maybe it
was just that she hadn’t had sex in a while.

“What a treat,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows at
her and in a moment he was past her and climbing the stairs up to her kitchen.

“The crazy Israeli
neighbor lady is out there screaming at her son, while he runs down the block,
full speed,” Michael said.

“She’s not Israeli. Her
husband, who’s never around, is Israeli.”

Michael was filling the
teapot and turning on the stove when Tess reached the top of the stairs.

“Would you like some tea?”
Tess asked.

“Thank you, I would,”
Michael said, taking out his favorite oversized ivory mug.

“What do I owe this honor
to?” Tess said.

“I knew that if I called,
I would be stuck talking to your answering machine, so I decided to pay you a
visit.”

The teakettle, still
warm, whistled quickly, and after he filled his mug, he joined her at the
table.

“Did you come to tell me
something?” she said.

“I've been thinking of
joining you on your new found morning walks, but I don't know how your
boyfriend would react to me tagging along.”

“My boyfriend?”

“The weird guy.”

“For your information,
dearest, I haven’t been out walking with him for weeks, as I’ve been spending
my mornings reading for the yoga program and then getting into the office by
7:00.”

“Don't start with me,
Tess.”

“You come to my house at
6:00 a.m., and tell me not to start with
you
?”

Michael sipped his tea,
his eyes lowered, before he picked them up and glanced at Tess.

“Don't look at me with
those puppy eyes, Michael. Jealousy doesn't become you. Neal is just a friend.”