From Comfortable Distances (24 page)

Perhaps the hardest
challenge was to be alone with yourself in silence rather than to keep your
faith amidst the chaos of society. She thought of herself in yoga class and how
when she was forced to be silent, to focus on her breath, she would begin to
panic and want to run away, and yet when she stuck it out, there was a benefit
to it, a freedom that she earned; a peace that surpassed understanding.

Cistercians are a kind of
Benedictine; Benedictines are a kind of monk. It is a question of different
ways of ways of being monks, of seeking silence, solitude, and discipline for
the sake of living the gospel well, for the sake of growing in love…

It didn’t seem so strange
to her—to seek silence and solitude, to be disciplined. After all, when she had
silence and solitude in her life, didn’t it make the most sense? And
discipline, wasn’t that the cornerstone of any successful person? If she hadn’t
been disciplined, then Best would have never grown to be what it presently was.
Her own mother was the most disciplined person that Tess had ever known, with
her waking up at the crack of dawn each day and meditating and praying. Tess
believed that in order to pursue a career, to be successful, it required a
certain amount of discipline. Maybe she hadn’t had that discipline in terms of
her love life, and maybe that’s why her four marriages had failed.

The search for God is the
goal of monastic life. A day composed of the opus Dei, lectio divina and manual
work. Cistercian life is basically simple and austere. Cistercians carry out
their search for God under a rule and an abbot in a community of love where all
are responsible. It is through stability that we commit ourselves to this community.
It lives in an atmosphere of silence and separation from the world, and fosters
and expresses its openness to God in contemplation, treasuring, as Mary did,
all these things, pondering them in her heart…

Tess grew still. It made
her think of teacher training, and how when she was with that group, it was
nice to be separate from the rest of her life, the rest of the world for that
matter. She was able to hear herself think when she was in the yoga studio,
able to make sense of things that she couldn’t seem to get to when she was
rushing around the office or out showing a house.

The fundamental
discipline is surrendering our will to God and submitting ourselves to the
guidance of another. This does not at all exclude a personal search for the
will of God, but it does mean we bring more important decisions to the superior
for discernment.

Tess paused over this;
was she operating as if she was the one and only power in her life? Did she
even look or listen for a higher power in her day-to-day life, or had she
believed all this time that she was the higher power in her life? Perhaps there
was something to letting go, surrendering, as her yoga teachers said, hearing
someone else in her life besides herself.

Celibacy was a permanent
choice made by those taking vows.

Of course she liked sex.
Although she’d had certain partners who she wouldn’t have minded being celibate
with. She hadn’t had sex for a year now, and truth was, she felt fine. Tess
remembered something her mother had said to her when she went off to college:
that we are sexual beings, but that we are also so much more than that. She had
told her not to make a big deal out of sex, which of course was easier said
than done for an eighteen-year old.

Friendship and affection
are encouraged. Community amounts to a network of friendships. Yet these must
be balanced with the need for solitude and with our radical commitment to
Christ…

Neal must have had many
close friends. Tess wondered what his leaving had done to the others, if they
were able to get on with their lives, if they had debated leaving, too, as a
result of his departure, or if they saw his leaving as a weakness. She wondered
what he had said to his friends, if he had said anything, or if his leaving was
a shock to them all, a scandal of sorts.

The pattern and
regularity of the daily schedule can be a searching discipline. When it is time
for the office or other community exercise, the monk goes . . . .

Vigils, lauds, terce,
sext, none, vespers and compline are the seven “hours” of the liturgy or the
hours or opus Dei (work of God) as St. Benedict called it in his rule. They are
common prayer service: the prayer of the Church as well as the prayer of our
community. None of these “hours” actually lasts an hour. All seven add up to
two and a half hours. The purpose of these seven times of prayer is to praise,
thank, and petition God as a community and to foster prayer throughout the day.
The monks and others who pray the liturgy of the hours do so on behalf of the
Church and of all humankind.

Vigils takes place before
the sun rises, when the monk is enveloped in darkness; Lauds takes place at
daybreak and asks for new beginnings; Terce is said at midmorning and it asks
for strength; Sext is said at noon and asks for perseverance; Nones is said at
mid-afternoon and it asks for more perseverance; Vespers is said at the day’s
end; it is a time when one sees beyond the struggles of the day; it is the hour
of wisdom and rest in thanksgiving. Compline is the last prayer of the night.
It foreshadows life's end and leads back to the darkness of night and the
darkness of God's mystery. This prayer is a gentle daily exercise in the art of
dying.

A daily exercise in the
art of dying
. It seemed an awful thing and a wonderful thing, too—to practice
dying. To surrender and go to sleep acknowledging that you may or may not wake.
If Tess were to go to sleep with that thought in her mind, how differently she
would live each day and enter into sleep, she imagined.

The monk is a man like
other men, and his problems are basically those of other Christians. He is
present to the world insofar as he is able truly to experience and share the
anguish of his fellow man in the face of suffering, time, evil, and death. What
he does more than others is simply that he tries to face this anguish, not with
more subtle rationalizations, but with the greater humility and deeper
awareness of his own poverty, not in a climate of inner beauty (whatever that
might be) but with more intransigent and lucid honesty, not with more stoicism
or resignation, but with a conscience more determined because more firmly
rooted in the sense of God and in abandonment to him.

Tess sat very still,
trying to keep all she read intact in her mind. She remembered her mother
saying that Buddhism was the religion of the awakened one. It stressed
discipline and morality, meditation, wisdom, insight. You could not become a
Buddha until you realized your own nature. Perhaps Tess was never before awake
and that was why she had not accepted Buddhism. Or perhaps it had nothing to do
with being awake for her—perhaps it was a child’s rejection of something her
mother practiced.

Tess opened the calling
book to a random page and came upon the description of grace:
the gift of
God's life in our souls, which guides us toward right choices. The gift of
God's faithfulness to us
.  She tried to imagine what Neal had heard, felt,
known, when he walked away from the monastery
.

A gentleman approached
her table and with his eyes asked her if she was leaving and she shook her
head. Sometime in the past few moments, she had closed the books on the table.
Tess didn't know if she was headed in the right direction. So far what she knew
of life was that each road turned into a highway. She feared that later on she
would want to turn off this road and what would she do then? And yet projecting
into the unknown was what had always led to Tess's not being able to focus on
the here and now of her life, to be restless, seek change when it wasn’t always
called for. Her job was to find the strength and discipline to keep herself in
the present, come what may. What came to her was a quote from Ram Das that her
mother often shared:
Be there when it happens
. She had committed to many
things in her life—her career, her happiness—more often than not. But she had
never committed to seeing things through. Something broke and she replaced it,
whether it was a relationship, or an object. She had taken the easy way out.
Maybe here and now, Tess was done with running away. She wanted to be there
when her life happened.
The gift of God's life in our souls, which guides us
toward right choices. The gift of God's faithfulness to us
.

A sock in her hand
midair, Tess paused, focusing on her laundry sprawled out on the kitchen table.
There it was again. Was someone knocking at the front door?  They could ring
the doorbell. 9:15 am. His mother wouldn't arrive 45 minutes early, would she?
Then the dreaded thought came to her: Michael. But no, he was at the office.
She had just spoken to him. She peaked out her front window and strained to see
the porch. When Prakash was a child, she had taught him to look out the window
when she left him alone to see who was there when the doorbell rang, only
Prakash never got it. He would look out the window and then go and open the
front door regardless of who was there. No one on the porch. Strange. She heard
the scraping at the screen door again—it sounded as if someone was trying to
get in.

When she pulled open the
wooden door, there, hedged inside the screen door, was the cat, rangy looking
and more beat up than ever with fresh cuts all over its face. There was a news
flyer stuffed in the door, and she imagined that the cat had pushed his way in
through that opening. Their eyes met for a moment and then he was inside the
house, running up the stairs. Tess darted up the stairs after the cat, tripping
on the top step, falling forward into the kitchen’s entrance, so that she cut
her top lip with her tooth. “Shit!” She felt the bump on her lip and when she
took her hand away, there was blood.

“Here kitty,” she said,
looking under the kitchen table and then moving to her bedroom. “Here kitty;
where are you?”

She heard it sharpening
its claws on her living room couch and by the time she darted there to confront
it, the cat had run past her and up onto the kitchen table walking through the
laundry. Just as Tess was about to grab it, the cat struck out at her with its
claws and then whizzed away. “Damn!” Tess cried. She blew on the scratch; it
was already puffy and bloody.

“Okay, kitty, do whatever
you want. I don’t have time to look for you. Come out when you’re ready.”

Tess poured some milk
into a bowl and put it by the bathroom door. That way, she figured if the cat
stopped to drink it, she could trap him in the bathroom. She washed her hands
put some bacitracin on her scratch, and then rinsed her mouth to clean off her
lip. It stung each time it touched her teeth. Tess stuck a sliver of toilet
paper over the cut to keep it dry. She finished folding the laundry, put it
away, and still no cat. She imagined it peeing under her bed, or better yet,
shitting somewhere that she wouldn’t be able to find the shit for days, so that
her whole house would smell.

9:30. She hadn’t showered
yet and Neal’s mother would be over in 30 minutes. She glanced at herself in
the bathroom mirror. She wet her hair and moved her curls around a bit; damn,
the scratch on her hand hurt! There wasn’t time to shower and prepare something
to eat. She splashed some water on her face and then rubbed in some tinted
moisturizer. She slipped into a black linen A-line skirt and a black linen
button down which she tucked in and then pulled out. Neutral, unsexy, leisurely
clothes. Neal's mom wouldn't be able to judge her by what she wore.

What to make to eat? Tess
took out some orange juice and poured it into a pitcher; then she took her
fruit basket out from the refrigerator: apples, oranges, pears, and an avocado.
She put up a pot of hot water and took out her collection of herbal teas, some
sugar, filled a creamer with milk. What Tess really wanted was some cereal. She
took down the box, poured herself a bowl of Kashi, cut up a banana and set it down
at her seat. If Neal’s mother wanted cereal, she could have a bowl, too.

Tess had forgotten about
the cat when she heard a car horn beeping. The car backed up in front of her
house and beeped again. Tess could make out a woman in the driver’s seat. She parked
the car so distant from the curb so that it looked like she had abandoned it in
the middle of the street.

Tess straightened her
shirt and then held the door open for Mrs. Clay. She walked in carrying an
oversized brown leather pocketbook without glancing at Tess. She had on an
outdated burgundy pants suit. It looked as though it were polyester, with a
white and burgundy striped shirt. She could have been wearing an airline
uniform.

“Good morning Mrs. Clay,”
Tess said, motioning her up the stairs.

“I don't take off my
shoes,” Mrs. Clay said.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me correctly.
Your yogi ways won’t work with me. My shoes stay on,” she said.

“Sure. You don't have to
take off your shoes,” Tess said and Mrs. Clay was already traipsing up the
stairs, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She peered in both directions
as if she were about to cross a street.

Mrs. Clay moved to the
sink, looked out the window, then made her way to the refrigerator, opened it
and examined the contents. It was packed with condiments—old salad dressings,
mustard, jellies and jams, some peanut butter, but not much more.

“Can I get you something?”
Tess said, and Mrs. Clay closed the refrigerator door firmly.

There was a geometry to
her person, with her angular bobbed gray hair, bracket-like graying eyebrows,
sharp yet small nose. The arcs of her lips formed isosceles triangles. Mrs.
Clay sat down where the cereal was, so that Tess didn't know if she should move
it away or if Mrs. Clay thought it was for her.  Mrs. Clay pushed the cereal
away from her.

“Your house is cold,” she
said. Her skinniness was exhausting to Tess, like she was about to collapse on
the floor.

“I could shut the window,”
Tess said, and Mrs. Clay watched her now as if Tess were some strange specimen.
When Tess turned around from closing the window, Mrs. Clay took a toothpick and
a Tupperware container from her pocket book. She opened up the container, and
with the toothpick, she began to eat her egg salad, picking out the egg white
chunks and examining each one before she put it in her mouth. From what Tess
could see, it was not mixed with mayonnaise, just cut up eggs with carrots,
celery, and scallions. Goose flesh sprouted up Tess’s arms and legs; this woman
was creepy. Perhaps if she ate, too, it would be less awkward. The cereal no
longer appealed to her, and Tess remembered the tuna fish cans in the cabinet.
She would make herself an English muffin with tuna fish.

“Excuse me while I
prepare something for myself,” she said and Neal's mother looked up from her
egg bits.

Tess used a can opener to
open the can and then mixed the tuna with mayonnaise while she toasted an
English muffin.

“The smell of tuna fish
makes me nauseas,” Mrs. Clay said, so that Tess stopped and turned around. Mrs.
Clay peered at Tess, her toothpick tapping the table.

“Mrs. Clay,” Tess said,
moving toward her. “What is it that you want from me?”

“Hah,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Tess said.

“I know you,” Mrs. Clay
said, quietly, as if she didn’t want other people to hear.

Tess shook her head. “You
know me?”

“You're a fancy lady.”

“I beg your pardon?”

His mother looked up
towards the ceiling and made the sign of the cross.

“You have a lot of other
pardons to beg, lady.”

“Mrs. Clay, people who
insult me are not guests in my home.”

“What do you want with my
Neal?”

“I don’t want anything
with him—we’re friends.”

“You think I’m stupid.”

“Neal and I are grownups.
I refuse to be treated as a criminal.”

Mrs. Clay laughed a
thick, throaty, laugh that made the cat peer into the kitchen as if it was
aroused by an animal call. Tess kept her eye on the cat:
go away, kitty.
Stay away
.

“You’ve led a big life,”
Mrs. Clay said. “Neal has not. He is not part of the world that you live in.”

“You make it sound as if
he's an alien.”

“If you were a religious
woman you would understand,” Mrs. Clay said. “You're poison for him.”

“You know nothing about
me.”

“Hah,” his mother laughed
again.

“Neal and I care about
one another,” Tess said.

“Neal is horny,” Mrs.
Clay said and at that moment the cat jumped onto the table so that the bowl of
cereal splattered. Mrs. Clay let out a scream when she saw the cat. For an
instant, she and the cat stared up at one another until the cat hissed,
growling at Neal’s mother before it fled.

“What a disgusting
creature,” Mrs. Clay said. She wiped the sides of her mouth with a tissue she
pulled from her bag.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said,
looking down the hallway to see where the cat had fled. “He wandered in today.”
There was cereal all over the table. “Can I clean this up for you?”

Mrs. Clay was studying
her.

“Would you like some
napkins, Mrs. Clay? I’m so sorry.”

“After all of those years
cooped up without sex, then he meets you,” Mrs. Clay said.

“You're wrong,” was all
that Tess could say. She stood, as if paralyzed, the cut on her lip stinging;
she touched it and felt the toilet paper there, still intact.

“You don't know Neal,” his mother
said.

She felt powerless with his mother
watching her like that, accusing.

“Neal is a monk,” she continued.

“He left the monastery,” Tess said.

“He took vows.”

“Your son left that life behind. He's
here now,” Tess said.

“A person can never leave the
monastery behind. It's everything he is,” Mrs. Clay said.

“Neal and I are friends. I’m not
keeping him from anything.”

“Hah!” she screeched again. “You must
be delusional.”

Neal's mother watched her so
intensely that Tess felt as if she was looking inside her mind, the mess of it.
Then, suddenly, his mother seemed to lose interest in her and resumed to
picking the egg white chunks out of her salad.

“Neal is devout Catholic,” his mother
said, studying the tip of her toothpick. “There is no place for someone like
you in his life.”

Tess opened her mouth to speak, but
no words came. If she stared at the tiles long enough, the white gave off a
blue gleam so that the floor looked surreal, as if it might part at any minute
and provide an escape route for Tess to vanish. Mrs. Clay’s face was blank now,
like a cloud, and Tess tried to imagine how she would react to this situation
if it were about Prakash. She had an urge to reach out to her, mother to
mother. Mrs. Clay’s life was falling apart. Her son had set her spinning years
back when he joined the monastery and he had set it spinning again upon his
return, only now Mrs. Clay had found a scapegoat in Tess. Tess wanted to tell
her that she was sorry, but the truth was that she was not going to be able to
put Mrs. Clay’s life together again.

“Neal is confused and trying to find
his way and then you showed up, willing and able, to manipulate him with your
flirtations.”

“Mrs. Clay, I am not manipulating
your son.”

Mrs. Clay picked at her front teeth
with her toothpick for a moment, and then sealed her Tupperware container. She
dabbed at the sides of her mouth with her tissue and cleared her throat before
she stood up and stared beyond Tess’s eyes, as if at a spot on the wall.

“I don't see you,” she said.

“Excuse me. Mrs. Clay,” Tess said, grabbing
her arm as she walked past Tess. Swallowing was becoming unreliable.

Mrs. Clay pulled her arm away.

“Let go of me,” she said, and Tess
moved back. “You haven’t seen the last of me,” she said. “You go on and have
your fun, but you remember what I told you. Don’t play with a man of God.
You’ll regret it,” and with that, she hustled down the steps and out the door.