From Comfortable Distances (26 page)

“What do you mean he showed up at
your house?” Dale asked. They were doing karma yoga, which consisted of an hour
or two a week of volunteer service at the yoga studio. Today their job was to
clean out the yoga mat storage shelves.

Tess looked up from her perch by the
bottom shelf, where she was pulling out yoga mats that smelled like un-bathed
feet.

“It's so gross that people don't
throw their mats away and buy new ones,” Dale said. She unrolled one mat that
was worn out at the back, presumably where the owner's feet would land in down
dog. “Look at that—it's almost worn down to shreds. Grab me a post it and pen
from my bag, will you, Tess?”

Dale wrote
time for a new mat
on a post it and stuck it on the worn-out part before she rolled the mat back
up.

“Dale!” Tess said.

“What? They need a new mat.” She
reached for another mat from her shelf. “Of course his mother put him up to
this,” Dale said.

“I’m sure that Michael or my son
would tell me it's some type of a hoax—that Neal is out to rob me of all my
stuff.”

“I didn't think of that,” Dale said.

“Dale, he's lived in a monastery for
23 years. I highly doubt that he’s a criminal. Although it did cross my mind
this morning that it could be a scheme.”

“Do you want to know my opinion?”
Dale said.

“Your opinion about what?” Stephanie,
the downtown yoga studio manager, asked.

“Nothing,” Dale said.

“About how the mats should be
arranged?” Stephanie said.

Dale looked at her like she smelled
rotten milk. Tess loved this bitchy, no-nonsense side of Dale.

“We’re not talking about the mats,”
Dale said. “Believe it or not, there are other things to talk about. Tess just
lost her mother—”

“And the studio was kind enough to
let her join the program late because of it. I’m well aware of what took place.
When you're all done with that little project, I have a few others for you to
do,” Stephanie said, smiling. “Karma hours—need to get them all in!”

“This is the only project we have
time for today,” Dale said. “Some of us have a life outside of the studio.”

Stephanie walked away, tossing her
long, black straight hair in their direction.

“Such a bitch,” Dale said.

“Behave,” Tess said.

“Look who’s telling who to behave,”
she said.  “So what are you going to do with your new roommate?”

“I am only letting him stay for the
day,” Tess said. “When I stopped to check in this afternoon before coming here,
he was sitting at the kitchen table reading. Do you think I’m nuts for leaving
him in my house?” Tess said.

“If you did it, you must have felt it
was okay.”

Tess sighed and shook her head.

“I guess,” she said. “What's going on
with Kyle?”

Dale pulled mats from the next shelf
down onto the floor. She unfolded them one by one before she folded them back
up, neat and tight, and fastened them with a wide rubber band.

“Things are fine. Sometimes I think
I'm just crazy.”

“Join the club, Dale.”

“I've come to terms this week with
the fact that I'm commitment phobic. You would think someone is asking me to
wear a strait jacket by getting married to Kyle.”

“Marriage isn’t an easy thing,” Tess
said. “But if you’re with the right person, you’re not giving up anything—in
fact, you’re gaining.”

“What am I gaining? More
responsibility? More accountability?”

“Yes, there’s some responsibility and
yes, you can’t always come and go when you please, but when I was happy and
married, I didn’t think about that.”

“Were you happy and married?” Dale
said.

Tess paused and met Dale’s eyes. She
was so young; Tess couldn’t remember being that young.

“I was. I had a lot of fun with my
husbands. And right or wrong, when I stopped feeling happy, then I said
goodbye. I don’t know if I did the right thing walking away, but I never
regretted my choices. My mother called it the flow of life.”

“The flow of life,” Dale said. She
studied a mat before she unrolled it and rerolled it tighter. “I’m beginning to
think that marriage is a bizarre concept and that people shouldn’t be wed to
one another in any formal way,” Dale said.

“Questioning your feelings for Kyle
is okay. It’s better to do it now than when you’re married and pregnant. Everyone
thinks it’s the jitters, that it will pass, but maybe it’s your intuition
guiding you.”

“Now you’re really confusing me. What
are you saying?” Dale said.

“I’m saying that maybe you’re not
crazy. Maybe your fears are grounded. Just because you're dating Kyle for over
five years doesn’t mean that you have to marry him,” Tess said. “Maybe he's
your best friend or maybe he's your lover, or maybe he's someone who makes you
laugh. Perhaps he's all of the above. Or maybe he’s the most amazing person in
this world for you to spend your life with.  The important thing for you to do
right now is to take the time to figure out who Kyle is to you and let him be
who and what he needs to be. There is no right or wrong answer, but you do need
to work at it a little—make sense of it all to yourself.”

Dale sat staring at Tess as if Tess
had just filled her in that there was a choice D after she completed an ABC
multiple-choice exam.

“I don’t mean to preach, Dale. God
knows I’m not one to preach about marriage with all my divorces,” Tess said.

“I wish that someone would tell me
this
is what you need to do
,” Dale said. “But I probably wouldn’t believe that
person anyway.”

Tess reached over for Dale’s hand and
squeezed it.

“I know it sounds lame and cliché,
but you’ll figure it all out, Dale. You will. You probably have all the answers
already, but with all the noise in your head, you can’t hear them.”

“Maybe,” Dale said. “I’m getting
tired of driving myself crazy, which means that change is brewing. I keep
wondering if I’d be commitment phobic with everyone that came into my life, or
if it’s just with Kyle.”

“The good news is that you don’t have
to worry about everyone that comes into your life today. Right now, you just
have to concentrate on Kyle.”

“You like him.”

“Kyle? Sure. I don’t really know him,
but what I know of him I like. He’s young and handsome and cocky, but you only
get to be 28 and successful once in your life, so what the heck,” Tess said.

“Conversations like this make me wish
that I was working and had all my work nonsense to focus on,” Dale said.

Tess laughed. “It’s healthy to detox
from your professional life now and then. It helps you reassess your life,”
Tess said.

“You don’t detox from work,” Dale
said.

“I did for a few weeks when my mother
passed away, and it got me here in teacher training.”

“And the jury is still out on whether
that’s a good thing or not,” Dale said.

“Good or bad, it’s reality,” Tess
said.

“Yup,” Dale said. “A few weeks ago
Neal was just some guy you knew and now he’s in your house. No dull moments,
huh?”

A few weeks ago her mother had been
alive and she had just started doing yoga. It was fascinating the way life
unfolded, ready or not.

“No dull moments,” Tess said. She
stopped folding mats. “I hope my house is okay,” she said. “I’m going to take
him home tonight,” Tess said.

“That sounds like a plan. And you
never know. You may end up falling madly in love with Neal and the two of you
will live happily ever after,” Dale said.

The image of him in his monk robes
came to her clearly.

She smiled. “Unlikely,” she said.

Tess held her breath as she pulled
into her driveway. 7:00 pm and the sun was still bright. As much as she wished
Neal would be gone, there was something in her that hoped he was still there.
She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until she saw his bike by
the side of the porch and the air seeped out of her. She nodded hello to the
wild Israeli boy and his mother, who was pleading with him to get in the car while
he shook his head no. It was a matter of moments, Tess imagined, before the
mother would be chasing him around the driveway.

“Hello?” Tess called climbing the
stairs into her kitchen. The house was quiet so that her heart began to
race—maybe he was up to no good, hiding out—until the aroma of fresh baked
cookies filtered through her and everything in her slowed down again.  She
opened the oven and there was a batch of cookies on a tray. They were cool.

Tess picked up the pages propped
sideways on the table, held up by the silver Tiffany salt and peppershakers,
thinking it was a note for her.

It was in a garden that I tended to
that I began to unravel the mysteries of my heart and soul. For a long
time—over 20 years—I had thought that I was living my life from my heart and
soul. But as the seasons came and went, and I watched seeds bloom into flowers
of different colors and sizes, I would wonder what would happen if I planted
the seed of my soul: would I bloom in vibrant colors or would I be black and
white? Would I grow tall and wild, or would my stalk be stumped? And so I began
to sprinkle seeds of my soul here and there and what bloomed startled me. There
were parts of me that I had never seen
—
parts that I never even knew existed. How could it be
that there was so much more to my life that I had yet to uncover?

For a while, I believed that it was a
miracle that I had left my hometown of Brooklyn, New York and migrated to the
northern countryside of Canada, where there was endless space for my garden.
Slowly, though, I began to realize that a garden is not about the space or
climate outside; rather, it is about the space and climate within oneself. We
can keep searching for a better situation, but it's not until we stop looking
outside and venture inside that we begin to find what we are looking for.

In writing this, I hope to share with
you what I have learned from spending time in my own garden. My hope is that it
helps you find your way back to the land in which you bloom.

The Beginning

Although you may have strayed from
the path of your life, it's never too late to change your direction and find
your way back to your home. My goal is to help you to navigate through the
weeds of your life to your very own garden, where new seeds are always being
planted and flowers are always blooming.

Once you enter your garden, though,
be prepared— that's where your work begins. It's no small task to plant seeds,
cultivate them, let the sunshine in, weather the storms, and become inch by
inch. It takes patience and persistence to be a gardener, just as it takes
patience and persistence to grow.

Regardless of your commitment, there
will come times that your garden will be barren. If you have faith, however,
the barrenness will lead to rebirth. For in life, before we plunge into the
future, we need to live today. Remember always that it is out of the barrenness
that you will bloom again. 

You must actively commit to take time
for you each day if you are to find yourself in your own garden. You must also
accept the fact that you are exactly where you need to be at this very moment
of your life. To keep wandering in search of some better plot of land is to
keep traveling away from yourself—the farther you journey, the longer the trip
back home.  It is in the silence and stillness that you will see that you
already are in the garden of your life. Always, your garden is blooming, dying,
and regenerating.

Committing to be yourself

It's up to us to own up to our jobs
in life. We need to acknowledge who we are when we arrive in each phase of our
lives. We need to celebrate our evolving identities: one moment we are a child,
the next a son/daughter, a parent, a grandparent, an accountant, a teacher. The
list is unique for each of us, bearing the stamp of ourselves.

Why shouldn't we be ordained who and
what we are for each and every occasion? After all, aren't we always all
wearing different hats for the different things we do in life? Too often who we
are and how we identify ourselves is disconnected—people ask us what we do and
we say: “I'm a lawyer.” Yet to answer with such a statement is to ignore all of
the other things you do in life—it's to ignore the fact that you are also a
father and a son and a husband.  To ordain yourself what you are in life—each
and everything thing you are in life—is to free yourself, to say to the world “I
am a multitude of things,” and allow yourself to devote yourself to each of the
things you are, instead of hiding behind your job or the title that your
friends and family and neighbors have given to you. It allows you to celebrate
all of yourself: to become a more holistic version of you.

You are your own
religion. That is, what you believe in and what you wish and hope and dream is
your religion. You are your very own lost and found bin and each time you lose
yourself, it's up to you to dig in and find yourself. It is only when
everything inside of you meshes with everything outside of you that you achieve
grace. To know yourself, to be yourself, to practice and celebrate your own
religion, to appreciate yourself for all you are, all you strive to be, is to
travel the road of freedom. You are only bound if you let yourself be. In order
to fly free you must commit to be who you are and celebrate the many selves
that live and breathe within you.

“Neal,” she said. The cat was beside
him, watching her.

“I didn't mean to startle you.”

Tess placed the pages down on the
table as if she were caught reading someone’s journal.

“I wanted you to read them,” Neal
said. “To see if they made sense. I've accumulated a lot of different openings
by now.”

He looked like a professor in his
narrow oval-shaped reading glasses and his charcoal grey wool cardigan. Tess
smiled at him.

His preaching was a bit corny by her
standards; something a new age freak would write.

“I'm looking forward to reading more,”
she said.

“And so you will,” Neal said.

“Tea?” she said, and with that, she
was taking off her blazer and filling up the teakettle with water and opening
the cupboard to take down teacups.  She stared incredulously when she opened
the cabinet: teacups all lined up and shiny, their stems facing the same
direction. Coffee mugs in one corner, espresso cups dead center, neatly stacked
on top of each other, resting on their saucers. In all her years in this house,
she had never recalled such order in her cabinets.

“I hope that you don't mind,” Neal
said.

His hands were clasped on the table,
his eyebrows arched. “I reorganized a little.”

“It's so…efficient,” she said.

In the cupboard adjacent, cans of
beans and soups were neatly lined up, stacked in neat rows one on top of the
other. It looked to her like a mini-army had congregated inside her cabinets.
Next she pulled open her silverware drawer—spoons, forks, knifes, all polished
and stacked on top of each other with precision.

“I suppose I should have asked you
first,” Neal said.

“No. It’s fine. It’s just…unexpected.”
She cleared her throat to get the lump that had lodged there down. “It’s great.
Thank you, Neal.”

Tess’s mother had been super
organized—mindfulness was what she had called it. Attention to all things. Tess
had spent her entire life trying not to be as orderly as her mother—to mess
things up a bit. And yet as Michael and the others had pointed out, she was all
about order, structure. Michael had joked with her that he was going to buy her
a to do list with the slots filled in for each day: wake up at 5 am, drink tea,
get to work, work through lunch, leave work late. Her home was perhaps the only
place where she had managed not to be so stringent, or so she liked to think,
and now here was Neal, imposing order. Did she mind? She supposed not. At least
she wasn’t willing to mess it all up now that he had put everything in place.

Just then a car horn sounded outside
her window. It beeped again and again, so that Tess went to the living room
window.

“It looks like your mother, Neal,”
she said.

Neal was on his feet, rushing down
the stairs to open the front door.

“The alarm,” Tess said. “Be sure to
hold in the alarm button.” 

“Yes, I’ve been in and out all day,”
Neal said.

Here it was: his mother coming to get
him. All that worry about what to do with him was for nothing. Tess took out
tea bags and placed them in the mugs. When a few minutes passed, she peaked out
the living room window. Neal was sitting in his mother's car. The hiss of the
kettle made Tess jump so that she bit her bottom lip again. She wiped it with
her top finger—blood. When he moved from his mother’s car, Tess ran out of the
living room the back way, through the dining room, and into the main bathroom.
Her lip was now full of blood. She dabbed it with toilet paper.

“Tess?” Neal called.

“Be right there,” she called back.

“What happened to your lip?” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “It was already a
scab and I bit it.”

Neal put a cup of tea in front of
her.

“Everything okay with your mother?”

“Yes,” he said.

Tess nodded. His mother hadn’t taken
him away. He was still here. He was staying. She could still ask him to leave;
it was her house. Asking him to leave would be reasonable.

“It's such a beautiful night,” Neal
said. “Should we take our tea out to the backyard?” he asked.

Tea in her backyard. She couldn’t
remember the last time, if ever, she had sat outside in her backyard at night.

“Sure,” she said. They could have
their tea and she could still get him home by 8:00 or 9:00 pm.

Neal led the way downstairs and had
apparently already been out in the backyard, as he had the drapes parted and
the back door unlocked; she supposed he had figured out how to shut off the alarm
on that door.

He held the sliding door open for her
and as she made her way outside, she gasped. Tall candlesticks were scattered
about her wood deck railing, and the backyard table was covered with an off
white lace table cloth on which there were four candlesticks and an array of
flowers—all sorts and colors of flowers: red, pink, yellow, peach, white
daisies and tulips and roses—situated dead center. Dishes covered with saran
wrap scattered the table. There was a large wooden salad bowl filled with greens
and tomatoes, plates with all sort of grilled vegetables: zucchini, carrots,
eggplant, corn on the cob, and two bottles of red wine. Off to the side there
was a bowl of fruit and a platter of cookies. Everything was arranged with what
she imagined was painstaking care and order, down to the ivory cloth napkins
and silverware. She couldn’t recognize if these were her settings—it had been
so long since she had put out any sort of formal spread.

“Neal,” she said. “I don’t know what
to say.”

“Say you’re hungry,” he said,
lighting the candles on the table. He pulled back a chair for her at the table
and Tess sat down, Neal taking a seat beside her, so that they were nestled
close. He reached for the wine and poured her a glass before he poured one for
himself and then handed her a glass.

“To relaxing after a long day,” he
said, raising his glass to hers.

“To relaxing,” she said, clinking
glasses, following him in taking a sip.

“So what were we talking about?” he
said.

She shook her head. “You’re
surprising,” she said.

“I hope that surprising is good,” he
said, facing her. The way his eyes lingered on her, she wasn’t sure if he were
about to lean in and kiss her. Instead, he brushed a wisp of hair away from her
eyes and then his attention was diverted to serving her food, but she was
hungry for his kiss. She sipped the wine slowly: getting drunk would not help
her feelings at this moment.

“Good?” he said as he watched her
taste one vegetable after another.

“Delicious,” she said. “You’re quite
the chef.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying the food,”
he said.

“So what else don’t I know about you?”
Tess said.

“Lots of things,” he said. The way he
watched her now, his chin pointing toward her, head cocked, his eyes taking her
in, as if he was appraising her, made her pause, put down her silverware. She
sipped her wine slowly, meeting his gaze.

“I don’t let strangers into my house,”
Tess said.