Karma for Beginners (3 page)

I can't believe I'm going to live in a glorified motel room, with my mother, forever.

The latch clicks open behind me and my mom walks in. I hear her drop a suitcase or a box. “Tess?” she says. I don't turn around. She tries again, louder. “Tessa.” I still don't turn around.

“This is it, huh? Well, it's nice enough,” she says, and flops on the queen bed, kicking off her Birkenstocks. “Bed's good.” I finally look at her then; she grins at me like we're on some kind of adventure. Except that we are not. We are in an imitation motel room with a gray tiled bathroom and brown scratchy carpet. I guess I scowl or something, because she says, “What's that look for?”

I just say, “What.”

“That look. Like you swallowed something bad.”

“I didn't swallow anything.”

“Obviously I know you didn't swallow anything, I'm speaking metaphorically.”

“Whatever.”

And she says, “Don't ‘whatever' me. What was that look for?” sharper and kind of mad-sounding, like she's actually expecting me to explain to her what I was thinking. “Tessa?” It's like she's trying to reach inside my brain or something.

I just walk into the tiny gray bathroom and lock the door.

I turn the water on and I don't care if it's environmentally wasteful, I let it run while I sit on the toilet so she won't hear me crying. After a minute I hear the front door click open, and I think,
Thank god maybe she left
, but then there's a knock on the bathroom door heavier and slower than my mom's.

Ninyassa's voice says, “Tessa? Time for Lice Check.”

The fact that all kids that come to the ashram have to have a lice check isn't really comforting. Ninyassa seems to think it will be, because she keeps saying how it's a required part of admissions as she leads me back behind the main building and into the woods, down a trail made of wood chips to a little tan trailer marked “First Aid.”

A skinny woman sits on the trailer steps, her long stringy blond hair exactly the same color as her skin. Between that and her beige leotard and drawstring pants, she blends completely into herself. “This is Jayita,” Ninyassa says. Jayita motions for me to sit on the trailer steps in front of her, and goes through my hair with her fingers bit by bit. After about three minutes she says, “Oop,” and pulls away. “White speck.”

Ninyassa leans over and inspects it. My scalp doesn't itch at all, and when I lean over to see Jayita's finger I can definitely tell it's dandruff, but Ninyassa says, “Okay, Quarantine.”

Jayita says, “You know, Ninyassa, I don't really think that's lice. It just looks like a little flake. We probably can send her back, I think—”

“Jayita, it's imperative that we take precautions. The last thing we need here is an outbreak. You know, I would think you'd be more thorough in your attention.”

“Ninyassa, I'm plenty thorough. I just think there's no reason to isolate her when she's just gotten here, if it's so clear that it's not necessary.”

“Yes, well, isolating one child for one single night is much less of a sacrifice than risking the serenity of the entire community.”

Jayita rolls her eyes; Ninyassa scowls. “Ninyassa,” Jayita says. “C'mon, it's really my call to make. Lice Check's my
seva
, right?”

“Right,” Ninyassa snaps, “and my
seva
is to supervise and make sure everyone abides by the practices set out for us.”

This is making me feel weird. First of all, I'm not a child. Secondly, I don't know what
seva
is, although it sounds kind of like a job. And third, the idea of people getting in an argument about who's in charge of a white speck on my head makes me feel like it's my fault.

“You guys, I'm pretty sure it's just dandruff—” I try to say, but Ninyassa interrupts me.

“Yes, well, you know, you're new to our ashram community, and you're not familiar with the rules yet. So Jayita and I will have to come to some agreement.” And then she turns to Jayita again. “Respecting the rules is respecting the Guru, you know.”

Jayita looks at Ninyassa like she's tolerating her, and then says, “Fine. Okay. How long?”

“Oh, I'd say Phase One,” Ninyassa says, and smiles, smug. “Just follow Jayita”—and she looks at my name tag—“Tessa.”

I definitely want to know what Phase One is before I follow anyone anywhere, especially because I am completely positive it's dandruff. If my mom would've bought Head and Shoulders like I asked her instead of Nature's Gate I wouldn't even have this problem. But before I can open my mouth, Jayita stands up and says, “Come on.”

“See you tomorrow,” Ninyassa says, and marches off down the wood chip path.

The inside is a combination of a hippie cabin and the school nurse's office. There are vinyl upholstered benches, glass jars of tongue depressors and cotton gauze, but there are also Indian paisley tapestries and candles. And more photos of that same old bearded guy, who I guess is this “guru” they were talking about. Jayita pulls the curtain back and watches out the window as Ninyassa walks away.

“Ech, she can really be a drag. But we'll have a good time here, okay?” Then she goes over to a boom box and turns it on. The radio is playing George Michael.

Cause I gotta have a-faith, a-faith, a-faith
. She smiles at me, sneaky.

“Sometimes the chanting gets a little old.” She moves her shoulders to the beat, liquid and slouchy, like a dancer or a yoga person.

Then she pulls a stool up by a metal sink. “Okay, come on and have a seat. And change into this.” She pulls out a T-shirt that says
NUCLEAR MORATORIUM
. I feel weird asking where I'm supposed to change, so I just turn my back to her, hunched over so she can't see my bra.

She reads some book while I take everything off and ball it all into a wad. “Okay,” she says, and pats the seat of the stool. I try to sit up straight. Jayita laughs. “Lean back,” she says. “I gotta wash your hair.” She takes out a blue plastic bottle that says NIX in thick white letters.

“This should do the trick.” She smiles; she reminds me of Janis from the Muppets, except paler. “Or at least it'll satisfy Ninyassa. For the moment, anyway.” She rolls her eyes and laughs like
nothing ever really satisfies Ninyassa
.

I've decided that I like Jayita. When she starts rubbing my scalp I get this weird good goose-bumpy feeling and I want to close my eyes. She's just washing my hair like I do every morning, but somehow the fact that it's someone else's hands makes it feel way different and better than when it's just me.

After she combs my hair she says, “All right,” and puts the comb in a glass jar full of alcohol. “So you've gotta stay in here for the night. In the morning we'll shampoo one more time, and then you're good.” The digital clock on the counter says 6:23. My stomach rumbles. I wonder 1) how I'm supposed to eat, and 2) what I'm supposed to do in here until 11:30, which is the earliest I can ever fall asleep. I didn't even bring a book.

There's a tinny knock on the thin door, and then it opens; all of a sudden, in one second, Jayita stops looking pale. This guy comes in, thirtyish, with a narrow face, kind eyes, and brown hair in tight curls. He's got a red V-neck T-shirt and peach drawstring pants. He's tall and skinny just like her; he looks like a yoga person, too.

“Hey,” he says, slinging an arm around Jayita's waist. She beams at me like:
isn't that the most brilliant thing anyone ever said?

“This is Chakradev,” she says, unsticking from his side, going to clean up the sink. “Dev, we're just getting Tessa finished up here.”

“Lice Check, huh?” Dev asks me.

“Yeah.”

He nods, sympathetic to the experience of Lice Check.

“So you just got here today, huh? From where?” He asks like I'm a person, not a kid.

“Well, we drove here from Akron.”

He squints at me like he's trying to see where Akron is.

“It's in Ohio?” I tell him.

“Right, right, Ohio,” he says. “That where you're from?”

I'm not sure how to answer that; I'm not really
from
anywhere. “Well, that's the last place we lived.” That sounds dumb. “We've lived a lot of places.”

A smile cracks over his skinny face. “Aaah. Travelers, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Suddenly it's like we're in a secret club or something: the Association of Wandering Hippies. I don't tell him it's really my mom that's the member.

Jayita finishes with the bottles and jars and comes over, wiping her hands. “We're heading out, okay?” she says to me. “Do you want anything?” I can't exactly say Yes, I would like to go back to Akron with my mom, please; or failing that, I'd at least like you guys to stay here and talk to me. I just shake my head.

While they're gone I go through the cabinets to see if there is anything interesting, but there's just Q-Tips. And paper towels, and more pictures of that bearded guy. I'm starting to get curious about who this guy is, but I have this feeling that nobody is going to give me a straight answer.

. . . . .

After a while there's a knock on the door that sounds weirdly familiar, and then my mom comes in. She's holding a tray of tofu and bean sprouts and carrot salad with tahini dressing, and then she gives me a little travel toothbrush and some Tom's of Maine toothpaste. “Hey,” she says. “I hear you're in Quarantine.”

“Apparently,” I say. “Ninyassa said I have to.”

“Sorry.” She frowns sympathetically. “But I guess they have to be careful about all the residents, you know. Lice can spread.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I don't think I have lice.”

“Well, it's probably good to just make sure.”

“Right.” I wish my mom took Jayita's side and not Ninyassa's, but I guess she's too excited about learning all the rules.

“Listen,” she says. “Here's a good meal, at least. And I'll come back to get you in the morning. You'll probably fall asleep pretty quick after you eat. Plus you're almost outside in this trailer, so it'll be easy to sleep with the dark and rise with the sun.”

“Okay.” I also wish she wouldn't use words like “rise.” It's called “getting up.” “Thanks for the food.”

“No prob! Oh, Tess, tomorrow when you can walk around and see it here, you're gonna be so excited. It's so great.” And then she breezes out the door.

. . . . .

I try the radio for company. The DJ screams to
CALL IN YOUR DEDICATIONS FOR THE TOP EIGHT AT EIGHT COUNTDOWN!!!
His voice is obnoxious. He talks and talks, reading out the dedications, Jenny for Bill and Bob for Rachel, and I start feeling like the only person on this earth who doesn't have someone like that to think about, someone to think about me. I switch it off.

The Guatemalan blanket scratches my thighs, heavy and too stiff to keep me warm. I could close the windows, but without at least the crickets, I think I'll feel so by myself that I won't be able to stand it. I hate this feeling. It's the same feeling I get when my mom stays out at night and leaves me home. She says the extra quiet will help me rest, but it's just the opposite; the air gets so still that every noise is deafening and I spend the night scared, tracking every creak and crack. I'm more used to it now, at least. When I was six or seven it used to keep me up all night and I would fall asleep in school.

I notice Jayita's paperback on the counter by the tongue depressors. It's called
The Supreme Journey
, and on the back is yet another picture of the bearded guy. I open to a random page. It says:

It is only by renouncing our own desires that we may destroy the illusion of our thoughts. Then we may achieve the true peace of solitude. Not separateness, but the bliss of true connection with all the other solitudes in the universe.

Then it goes on to say a bunch of other stuff in another language that I guess is Indian. I read the paragraph again. “Destroy the illusion of our thoughts?” I don't think my thoughts are an illusion. How else are you supposed to know anything besides by thinking about it? I
like
thinking about stuff. Understanding things makes me feel more connected to them, not less. Plus, “destroy” sounds awfully mean.

The solitude part I do get, though. I certainly can feel my universal solitude right now, trapped in this trailer, crickets creaking through the screens. I don't understand how that feeling would be something that anyone would want. To me it doesn't feel holy or sacred or peaceful, it just feels lonely. I think about Jayita and Dev, holding hands down the trail in the crickety dark, headed up the stairs to their room. I think about those people on the radio, liking each other enough to dedicate a song. I think about my mom, up late like me, in the huge soft yellow cotton T-shirt she always sleeps in, and I think about my dad, out there somewhere in the big open empty of America, wondering where I am, or maybe not. I fall asleep crying with nothing but the scratchy cot to hold me.

. . .

Purity of Being is attained by delving wholeheartedly into the community of seekers.

Jayita comes back at sunrise, hands me my clothes, and washes my hair again. When she finishes combing she pats me on the shoulder in her stoner-yoga way and says, “You're good. You can go ahead and meet your mom.”

“Wasn't she going to come get me?”

“Oh, she was? I don't know, I guess maybe she was thinking she'd come later? But I gotta get First Aid cleaned up by eight. You can just head over to Sadhana Mandap to find her.”

Everything has weird names here and everyone expects you to already know what they mean. I'm starting to suspect that the weird names exist just to make people who aren't part of it feel stupid, like the popular girls who make up their own words for stuff and speak it like a secret language and then laugh. “What's Sadhana Mandap?” I have to ask her.

She doesn't laugh, at least. “Oh, that's where meals are served. It's breakfast now. It's over in the main building; you can't miss it. Just don't forget your name tag.” She nods to the counter where she left it last night, right next to
The Supreme Journey
. I hope she can't tell I was reading her book.

It rained during the night; the wood chips are damp deep dark reddish-brown. They crunch soft under my sneakers and the leaves glisten above, red and yellow and green all dotted with little silver drops. It's only sunrise. After a while the trees thin and the path keeps going, finally snaking around to the entrance. As I come up to the doorway I pray Ninyassa won't be there. She isn't, thank god or whoever, and I make it through the pink marble without having to talk to anyone.

The double doors swing open when I push them, like a saloon entrance in a TV Western. The room is huge, at least twice as big as the cafeteria at school. And it's filled with hundreds and hundreds of people. I don't know how Jayita thought I'm supposed to find my mom.

One of the guys from the lobby yesterday stops me at the entrance. He's bald, with a collarless shirt. Up close he looks like this guy Ed from the lumberyard that my mom used to go out with. He still isn't smiling. “Name tag?” he asks, peering at my chest. I hold the tag out from my body to show him, so at least he won't be looking at my boobs. Lumberyard Ed used to look at my boobs.

“Extended Retreat,” he says. “Okay. Go on over to that line.” I grab a tray and some silverware and shuffle toward the steam tables. Each of them is filled with a different kind of glop. There are little cards in front. One says “Amaranth,” another, “Millet”; then there is “Sweet Cereal” and “Savory Cereal.” Savory Cereal has flecks of stuff in it and smells like an Indian restaurant. I ask the lady with the ladle what it is. She says, “It's the Guru's special recipe. Try it!” I'm skeptical, but she seems so enthusiastic I let her scoop some into my bowl. It lands with a splat; a little gets on my shirt. I walk out into the sea of tables to look for my mom.

It really is kind of amazing how much like the school cafeteria it is: balancing a tray of food, trying to find a familiar face in a sea of chattering strangers where everyone knows each other except me. The only different thing is the huge painting of the beard guy surrounded by peacock feathers that takes up the entire back wall. Eventually I give up on my mom and settle for the next best thing, a table where there's extra space and people aren't talking to each other much. Just like school.

Nobody looks up when I sit down, which I guess is good. My Savory Cereal's cold by now; I can tell just by looking. Halfway through the first bite I am very sorry I didn't argue with the ladle lady. It's oatmeal, bland and thick, except with spices like Indian food, and no salt. It wants to be dinner but it can't stop being breakfast, and it is gross. Washing it down with orange juice sort of helps and sort of makes it worse.

I think maybe Savory Cereal will be more manageable with salt, and I know they won't have salt, so I ask the lady who's sitting nearest me, “Do you know if there's any soy sauce?” She jerks her head up fast, fixes me with a sharp look, then goes back to her amaranth.

I try the guy on my other side, a short-haired man with a checked collared shirt who looks like a normal person's dad. “Do you know where the soy sauce is?” He turns toward me slow and calm, takes three deep breaths, and then keeps eating.

So I lean across the table. “Excuse me,” I say to a skinny woman with long hair and a longer face, dressed all in white. “Can you tell me where I'd find some soy sauce?” The lady next to me starts saying,
“Om namo Bhagavate”
over and over in an annoyed whisper. Long Face looks at Checked-Shirt Guy, lips pursed in a sort-of smile, and then she nods at a laminated card in the middle of the table. It says:
THIS TABLE IS RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO OBSERVE MEALS IN SILENCE. SAD GURUNATH MAHARAJ KI JAY!
I am never going to get soy sauce. I hold my nose and eat my Savory Cereal in silence.

. . . . .

What I really want is my mom, but at least being around our stuff makes me feel a little better. I curl up with her yellow sleep shirt. I wish there was a TV I could watch like in a real motel, but on top of the dresser there's just an altar my mom set up with rocks and twigs from places that we've been, some crystals, a candle, and a soapstone statue of an elephant this blond kayaker guy Billy gave her in Big Sur. She worshipped that guy, till he took his kayak to Australia. She said they had a “soul connection.” I always thought he was kind of a tool.

I tell myself what I always do: she has to come back eventually, all her stuff is here. I want to fall asleep so time will pass by faster, but my mind's too busy thinking. Even though our bedroom is silent and the window is closed, it's still noisy. Sometimes the quieter the room is, the louder it all seems inside your head.

I sit up, grab some paper, and start that letter to my dad. I tell him everything: getting pulled out of my school and then the road trip and the hamburger; Savory Cereal and Lice Check; Ninyassa and the Silent Table. I tell him that even though I'm completely pissed off at my mom for dragging me to this weird place and leaving me for breakfast and about a million other reasons, I still wish she was here right now so that I wouldn't be alone. I'm about to ask him if he ever feels that way when the doorknob turns and clicks.

I jump, crush the letter into a ball, and stuff it into my waistband, all in the split second before she opens the door. She would kill me. Oh my god she would kill me.

When I was twelve I asked her if I could visit him. If he ever said he missed me. If I could go to where he lived maybe for a summer sometime. I spent a week planning how I would bring it up and finally asked her at dinner one night, when she'd just gone out with this new guy named Bob and she was telling me how close she felt to me. We were having homemade hummus and she was drinking wine. It was way worse than when I asked her what he looked like yesterday in the car. That night she screamed at me that if I wanted to leave her behind to go and visit him, then maybe she should just leave me on his doorstep and let me experience his hostility and abandonment for myself and then I could go live on the streets because that's what he practically left her to do. Then she went in her room and locked the door, and the whole night I could hear her crying. I can still remember what it sounded like.

Now, in our bedroom, I squirm to hide the lump in my waistband that the letter makes. The paper scratches against my back. My heart thuds in my throat and my skin gets hot and when she asks what I was doing I just say “Nothing” and ask how she's feeling today.

It works: her suspicion melts away. I lean back against the wall, smush the letter flat.

“Oh, Tessa! It's so caring of you to ask. I am
wonderful
.” She plops down beside me on the bed. “How was the rest of your night? I bet it was very peaceful.” She pulls back and beams at me. “Tell me about your adventures!”

“Yeah, well, it wasn't really an adventure. I stayed in the trailer and after a while I fell asleep. I thought you were coming to get me this morning. Where were you?”

“Oh, Tess, I was gonna come right after breakfast—”

“I went to the cafeteria to look for you and I couldn't find you.”

“You mean Sadhana Mandap?”

“Yes,” I say, even though I mean “the cafeteria.”

“Oh, well, there was a quick chant afterward in the meditation room down the hall. But I was coming after that.”

“Oh. Well, at the cafeteria there was nobody to talk to. And my cereal was gross. And when I asked for soy sauce I couldn't get any, because I was apparently sitting at the Silent Table.”

“Oh yes! Tebala Saanata!” she says, ignoring all the other things I just told her. “It's a powerful practice to take your meals in silence. What was your experience of that?”

“Uh—it kind of sucked?”

A few sparks fall from her eyes. “It sucked?”

“Well, I didn't know where the soy sauce was, and nobody would help me—”

“Oh!” The sparks light up again. “You had to face your attachment. Yes, that's part of taking silence. It's important to abide by the practices set out for us.”

I don't know who took my mom away and replaced her with Ninyassa.

It's not that my mom has never said weird stuff before. She's always coming home from journaling workshop, movement class, Whole Food Cooking, with new favorite words she'll practice on me. “Process,” “experience,” “lacto-ovo,” “emotional-word-picture.” Some of them stick around and some don't; I'm used to that. But this isn't just words, it's entire sentences; a whole other way of talking, like a different person.

“I guess.” I don't really want to talk about silence anymore.

“Well, do you want to hear what my adventures were?”

“Okay. I mean, if you feel like you need to talk about it.”

It comes out in a burst, like the water has been storing up and she just turned the spigot on. “I met the Guru!”

“Cool,” I say. Cool is a good word for when someone else is really excited by something and you don't know why but you don't want to hurt their feelings.

“Oh, Tessa, it was amazing. Last night after I left First Aid, they had a welcoming ceremony for new arrivals, but there were only a few of us, it was so intimate!” That word makes me feel sort of dirty and weird, like she's telling me too much about some date she had. “The swamis sang the most beautiful chant, and then he came in, and we all bowed, and he bopped each of us with a peacock feather, and the energy was so amazing! We all just started crying. And then I was laughing at the same time, and—oh, Tessa, I wish you could have been there.”

“Cool.”

I mean, I can see why she's excited by music and laughing and stuff, but I still don't get it. Why would everyone cry just because some guy hit them with a peacock feather? And if you were crying, why would you start laughing too? I don't really want to ask her, though; she's happy like she was in the car, that kind of happy that washes over you and wipes everything else away. If I make her explain, it might stop it. She just sits there on the bed with me and grins into my eyes, bright and shiny. “Oh, Tessa. I'm so glad we're finally here.”

At ten, it's time for
seva
. I thought
seva
meant a real job, like the kind that you get paid for, but actually it means “selfless service,” and is another word for chores. You do it from ten a.m. till five p.m., with an hour break for lunch. My mom got her
seva
assignment when I was at Lice Check, so for today I go with her, and tomorrow I will get my own. My mom's assignment is the kitchen, a huge stainless-steel universe behind the cafeteria in Sadhana Mandap. And guess what my job is once we get there.

Savory Cereal.

Turns out that that bald collarless-shirt guy is named Avtar, and he's in charge of kitchen prep. My mom doesn't seem to notice that Avtar looks like her ex-boyfriend Ed from the lumberyard. Which is fine with me. Once my mom and I went over to Ed's and he fed me Swanson Salisbury steak and droned on for an hour about his favorite TV show, which was
CHiPs
, while my mom put her hand on his leg beneath the table and he stared at me. All through dinner I was sure I was going to get in humongous trouble with my mom for eating meat. But she never said anything. Not even in the car afterward. It weirded me out.

Unlike Ed, however, Avtar is a vegetarian. He likes to bark things. “Ten tubs of turmeric!” “Three pounds of grated beets!” “Tahini! Tahini! Tahini!” After he sends my mom off with organic dandelion greens, he comes over to where I'm standing. “Savory Cereal!” he barks, thrusting a recipe card into my hand. I have to chase after him to ask where to find the ingredients. I tap on his linen-covered shoulder. “Excuse me?” He turns around. “Could you tell me where this stuff is?” I point at the card.

He says, “Yes, the walk-in freezers in the basement,” like I'm supposed to already know. “Ah, where
everything
is?”

Here are the new things I experience at kitchen prep
seva
: standing in a huge refrigerator imagining the door locking me inside; industrial-size casks of flaxseed oil; meat cleavers (used on vegetables); sauteed mustard seeds; group chopping chants; silent chopping time; bleeding fingernails from peeling garlic; the importance of praying while you grate; cayenne in my eye; the names Avtar, Amrita, Chandi, Tikala, and Bhav; repetitive stress injury; how stirred liquid mimics the spiral pattern of universal DNA.

Most of the time that I'm experiencing, my mom is at the other end of the kitchen by the sinks, thrusting bunch after bunch of greens into tub after tub of water. When it's time for lunch she comes up grinning, humming the last chant through her teeth. She holds up her pruney hands like prizes.