From Comfortable Distances (39 page)

There was a faint feeling
of panic in her for a moment: she would not let him destroy his life. No, she
wouldn’t allow that. She sat back up and took a few deep breaths. But that was
not happening. No one was destroying anyone’s life. No. She laid her head on
her pillow, turning one way and then the other, trying to get comfortable. It
would all work out as it was meant to work out. It would all work out, she told
herself, before sleep overcame her.

Buddhi purred and nuzzled
up to her, his wet nose rubbing her forearm. She was in down dog on her yoga
mat but paused to stroke his fur and glanced out the living room window before
she positioned herself back into the pose. She had never practiced in this spot
before, beside Buddhi’s windowsill perch. She had drawn the blinds semi-shut
for privacy, which was fine with Buddhi, as he chose to watch her today rather
than look out at the street. His cuts and scratches were beginning to heal, his
hair growing in over his wounds in patches that looked like hair transplants.
The way he looked at her with his yellow tiger-eyes made her feel as if there
was a person inside of him that was trying to communicate with her.

“Scoot,” she said gently
pushing him away from the mat and he meowed, lingering.

She did a few sun salutes
to wake her up before she made her way down onto the mat for some forward
bends. Clouds lingered above with light blue peeking out here and there. She
could tell that when the sun broke through the haze it would be a warm day.
Tess was ready for the summer to officially end—for the clocks to fall behind,
the foliage to make its appearance, the cooler air to settle in. There never
seemed to be any downtime during the summer. The more hours of daylight, the more
she felt that she had to accomplish each day. She was ready for fall, only a
few weeks away now, and yet the approaching season induced a sense of
melancholy.  Fall: back to school time, crunchy used-up leaves tumbling to the
ground, cool nights. The thought of Halloween and then Thanksgiving unsettled
her. She imagined costumed children ringing the doorbell for candy and big
family dinners and the thought, the possibility of having to tackle those
events alone, induced a heaviness in her chest. She breathed into the forward
bend, moving her fingers from grasping her big toes to the sides of her feet to
stretch deeper. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t be okay if Neal returned to the
monastery, it was just that it was hard for her to know that decisions that would
affect her life were being made behind the scenes and that she wasn’t the one
making them. She wondered what he had been thinking, doing, in the week since
they had last seen each other. Had he thought of her? She imagined he did. She
thought of him. She could go by his house, ring his doorbell. Only no, she
wouldn’t do that. He would come around when he was ready. Or maybe he had—who
would know with her schedule the way it was, between work and yoga.

Tess squatted and then
sat down and lay back on the mat for a moment, taking in the shifting sky. What
did she seek in this great big universe? Some moments, she wanted to fast
forward life, to see what was around the bend for her, while other moments, she
was grateful that she didn't know what would happen next. She sighed. She felt
impatient with life, impatient with herself. She felt defeated that she
couldn’t make sense of what was brewing in her mind and heart, or maybe it was
that she didn’t know what was brewing in Neal's mind and heart. It would be so
easy for her to ask him, and yet she couldn’t, or didn’t.

Tess closed her eyes and
focused on her breath. Small, shallow breaths. Her insides were racing.  She
wanted more than anything to want what she had in life, nothing more or less.
Yoga
chitta vritta nirodaha
:
yoga stills the fluctuations of the mind.
Only
her mind didn’t feel like being still just then. Tess wondered if she wanted to
be a yoga teacher- if that had ever been an option for her and yet if she
didn't want to teach yoga, why was she devoting so much time and energy to the
training? She could always continue to focus on Best, although her passion for
her business was shifting. Sitting in an office doing paper work and answering
calls and then running around to show houses seemed silly to her. She sat up.
Silly? No. She didn’t want to think that all of those hours and days and months
and years she had devoted to her career were silly. And yet, here, now, what
did any of that matter? Where had it gotten Tess? Sure, it gave her nice
possessions, but beyond that?  Buddhi meowed and rubbed up against her arm. It
was ridiculous to think that moving people in and out of houses was anything
more than silly.

On her back, she exhaled,
and tried to focus on her breath. No one knew what was to come—that was the
mantra that she repeated over in her mind. That's what living was: filling in
the blanks.

Ow! Buddhi’s claw
penetrated her skin as he attempted to climb up on her chest, and Tess jolted
up only to catch a glimpse of Neal running by, right in front of her house.  Was
he looking up at her window? Did they exchange a glance at that moment? She
certainly saw him, but did he see her and keep going? No, she was imagining
things. If he saw her, wouldn’t he wave, stop? It was Neal. Sweet, kind Neal,
who would surely stop for Tess even though she hadn’t seen him in a week. Six
days to be exact. And yet she could have sworn that their eyes met at that
instant. He moved efficiently down the block, a lithe figure in his black
running pants and his deep purple windbreaker. She wondered what he thought of
when he ran, what his internal dialogue was, where the running took him
emotionally. She wondered what he would ordain her now, what she would ordain
him.

She lay back down on the
floor, pulling her knees into her chest. If he wanted to run, that was fine. So
what if they no longer walked together. He was his person and she was hers and
it was a free country and he was allowed to do as he chose. Soon, after she
settled down from yoga, she would go out to walk. It was fine. He was doing his
thing and she was doing hers and sometimes that's how life was and it wasn't
good or bad, it just was. Her job in life was to take care of Tess.
Lokaha
samasta sukhino bhavantu: may all beings everywhere be happy and free
.
Buddhi crawled onto Tess’s chest now, kneading her with his paws and she gasped
from the weight of him. His purring grew louder and she tried to breath in line
with it.
Ishvarapranidam
: surrender to a higher power. Her mind was
noncommittal, passing by topics, thoughts, like a train en route. It was hard
work to live in the moment, not to seek the future, not coast to the past. If
she let go of all she had to do and what she had done, what was left in her
mind and heart? This moment.

Neal’s mother was waiting
for her on the corner of 66
^th
street and Indiana Drive in her new
black Nike warm-up suit. It tickled Tess that their morning walks had been
reason for Lyla to invest in new gear. When their eyes met, Lyla stared
straight at Tess. Tess understood now that there was a harmlessness to her, an
eccentricity that governed her actions. When they stood together, Lyla didn’t
offer any salutation, just started walking with Tess alongside her, their feet
falling in line. Lyla knew Neal’s morning route (she had trailed him in her car
on multiple mornings to make sure she had it memorized) and led them down
blocks so that they wouldn’t intercept Neal. It was understood that Neal didn’t
need to know about their daily tête-à-têtes.

“So when will you be a
yoga teacher?” Lyla asked. She said
yoga
as if it was a dirty word.

“There’s two months left
in the program. We have to take some tests in November.”

“You have to take yoga
tests?” She kept looking straight ahead, so that if Tess didn’t know she was
talking to her or having a conversation with herself.

“There’s a comprehensive
exam and also a practical exam—we have to teach a class in front of the
mentors,” Tess said.

Lyla glanced at Tess as
if she were trying to figure out if Tess were perhaps making fun of her.

“That’s ridiculous. Tests
to become a yoga teacher.”

“It’s like becoming any
other type of teacher, I suppose. You need to be qualified to teach. We’re
working on people’s bodies.” The moment Tess said
bodies
, she wished she
hadn’t. She imagined Lyla immediately thinking of Tess working on Neal’s body
and cringed.

Lyla was crossing the
street now, moving in the direction of Mill Avenue. Tess followed closely at
her side, looking both ways more than once as they crossed. Lyla seemed
oblivious to traffic. Lyla's failure, or maybe it was her resistance, to
realize that the rest of the world existed at times, fascinated Tess.

“Where will you teach
this yoga?” Lyla said. Tess couldn’t tell if she was genuinely interested or if
there was a motive behind her questions.

“I don’t know yet if I’ll
actually teach. It’s all kind of random that I signed up for the program,” Tess
said. It was too long a story to share with Lyla. “I took it to learn more,
deepen my practice,” she said. The mentors loved to throw around the concept of
deepening one’s practice. Tess smiled to herself. Dale would have laughed if
she heard Tess say it.

“Humph,” Lyla said. She
was leading them through Strickland Park now. They passed by the gated
aboveground pool and then the monkey bars enclosure, empty now that the
children had gone back to school. How Prakash used to love to swing on those
monkey bars. They moved past the sea saw and Tess remembered the days when she
and Kash had played together on the sea saw, since replaced, her keeping him
suspended in the air until he pleaded with her to let him down, giggling and
screaming all the while in his excited five-year old way. It seemed impossible
to her that those moments had existed in the same lifetime as the one she was
in now.

“What did you want to be
when you grew up?” Tess asked. Lyla didn’t slow down, but the way she looked at
Tess, sideways and fast and then back at her again, made Tess wonder if anyone
had ever asked her anything personal.

“I wanted to be a
business woman,” Tess offered.

Each time they got to a
corner intersection, Lyla held out her arm, as if Tess was about to rush out
before her.

“No one in the community
I grew up in was a business person,” Tess said. “Except for my father, and he
bolted from the community when I was two, and went back to his home in the
Midwest. I suppose I was just looking for a way out, too, and being a business
person seemed to be the way out.”

“What did your mother think?”
Lyla said.

“My mother kept all the
doors open for me. I didn’t realize that until much later in life, though.
Maybe even just this year. I had always thought that she wanted me to be like
her, but that wasn’t the case. In fact that was counter to all she believed in,”
Tess said.

“I wanted to be a nun,”
Lyla said.

Tess stared straight
ahead, trying not to show any emotion. Of course she had wanted to be a nun. It
made perfect sense to Tess.

“Were you ever?” Tess
said.

“No,” Lyla said.  “No. My
mother wouldn’t hear of it. Once, when I was a teenager and I tried to tell her
that I wanted to be a nun, how I liked being with the Sisters, she went on and
on about how the sisters were a big facade. How they sat around praying all day
and trying to convert people and win them over while she had to cook and clean
and take in work as a seamstress and do other people’s laundry to help support
her family. She was intent on me marrying someone with money so that I wouldn’t
get stuck like her.”

“Was she a single mother?”

“My father died when I
was young and she never remarried. Said she didn’t have time to date with me
being around to care for.”

Tess nodded. “So you
abandoned your dream and got married.”

“He was a local boy—we
grew up together in Bensonhurst. His family owned a few hardware stores that
became a chain. We got along well, Neal’s father and I. He did his thing for
the most part and I did mine, with raising Neal and being active in the church
and volunteering and whatever else it was that I did to pass the time,” Lyla
said.

“Did your husband have
any idea you had wanted to be a nun?” Tess said.

“No. I never told anyone.
Except for one of the Sisters and she’s long gone now. She wanted to help me
run away—send me off to a convent outside of Brooklyn.”

“You wouldn’t go?” Tess
said.

 “I was never much of an
adventurous spirit. I suppose you would have run off,” Lyla said.

“I did run off—to college
in Brooklyn,” Tess said. “It’s never too late to be a nun, is it?” Tess asked.

“Surely you’re kidding,”
Lyla said.

“I’ve never been more
serious,” Tess said.

“Dreams change,” Lyla
said. “Just because I wanted that then doesn’t mean it’s what I want now.”

“And yet you don’t want
Neal to walk away from what he once wanted,” Tess said.

“We weren’t talking about
Neal,” Lyla said. She stiffened up, clearing her throat, her lips forming a
straight, stern line. “Besides, it’s different with Neal. In my heart, my
mother’s instinct, I believe that the monastery is the place for him.”

“You’ve made that clear,”
Tess said.

“The way Neal talks about
the monastery makes it clear to me that he belongs there,” Lyla said.

“That’s all he’s ever
known, Mrs. Clay. He spent 23 years there. That’s half of his past; the other
half he lived with you and his father,” Tess said.