I'll Be You(18)

I didn’t find this very reassuring. “Well, I met Elli’s neighbor and she said it was very culty.”

My mother laughed. “Culty? That’s ridiculous.”

I looked to my father. “Do you know anything about it, Dad?”

My father remained staring resolutely at the television set, as if determined not to weigh in on the situation. He gave a half-hearted shrug. I supposed he’d been burned by similar conversations in the past.

“Oh, you know your father,” my mother interjected. “The Catholic in him still thinks that anything that isn’t old-fashioned is a cult. That’s why he refuses to go to Esalen with me.”

“I never said Esalen was a cult,” my father muttered. “I just don’t like getting naked with strangers.”

“Anyway—I think that’s where Elli is right now,” I said. “Not at a spa. At some kind of retreat run by GenFem. And I think she’s given them over a hundred thousand dollars.”

This finally got my father’s attention. He looked away from the screen and frowned at me. I noticed an ancient mustard stain on his top, which made me ineffably sad. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Right? Don’t you think we should look into this? I could go to the center and scope it out, maybe.”

My mother sank back into the couch. A furrow settled in between her eyes as she surveyed me with a sudden mistrust. “I asked you here to help with Charlotte, not to play detective. I’m sure that’s not necessary. You saw the text Elli sent me. She’s been looking for answers and she apparently is finding them, and that’s a good thing. The last thing she needs is us intruding on that. I can certainly relate, Sam, even if you don’t find that kind of thing important.”

Was that judgment in her voice? Of course it was, a dark little singe of snark underlining her words: Who was I to take issue with my mother’s golden child, the good twin, the one she could brag about in her yoga classes?

What I wanted to say was I have no issue with finding answers, but I know that when it costs a small fortune it’s probably a scam; but then I remembered that Elli had spent a small fortune on my personal growth (because what was rehab but a kind of personal growth?) so I figured I had no leg to stand on.

I left my parents watching The Bachelorette and drove back to the church for another AA meeting, where I sat in the back and barely listened to a word that was said, not even the hopeful ones.



* * *



—

When I got home later that night, my parents were asleep. They’d left a light on in the hallway and in the semi-gloom I wandered through the rooms of my childhood, looking at the familiar knickknacks that my parents had accumulated over the years. A set of painted porcelain boxes that had once belonged to my maternal grandmother. An amethyst cluster the size of a goose egg on display in the fancy china cabinet. The silver tea set that my parents had received for their wedding. A bronze Buddha. A jade incense burner.

My mother had been an aspiring hippie for a time, before she met my father. She was the eighth and final child of a middle-class Catholic family, and had decided the best way to get her exhausted mother’s attention was to drop out of college and follow the Grateful Dead to Southern California. Her tour ended abruptly when she ran out of money just two months later. She ended up finding work as a receptionist at an accounting firm, which is where she met my father, a nice Catholic boy just like all the ones she’d left behind. They were married within a year, much to my grandmother’s delight. It’s impossible to fully escape the world in which you were raised; it beats inside you, a muted pulse, always waiting for the opportunity to rush back to the surface.

All throughout our childhood my mother dabbled in spiritual movements—Buddhism and goddess studies and a brief flirtation with transcendentalism—before settling on her current mélange, a sort of New Age suburbanism: crystal energy and casseroles. Her friends found her quirky; my father seemed amused by it, even as he refused to let himself get dragged into each new obsession. My sister and I had mostly found her exhausting. It was as if she were trying to grasp something she couldn’t quite see, some hidden meaning that could only be found in an elusive arrangement of constantly evolving patterns. Our mother was never quite there, never quite capable of addressing what was right in front of her face; there were always more compelling abstracts to be pondered, things that were much further away and therefore far less scary than confronting her daily truth.

Now I wondered whether all that seeking had somehow seeped into my sister, too. Whether the same impulse that compelled my mother to get hugged by Saint Amma and do group meditations at Esalen had sent my sister looking for emotional guidance from someone named Dr. Cindy Medina. Maybe this was the legacy Elli and I had inherited, the pulse that thrummed silently within us: the desire to look beyond ourselves for meaning.

And yet I mostly felt compelled to close my eyes, to not look at all. I had always preferred oblivion, blankness—even now that I was sober. I didn’t want to see at all. Because what if I looked and there was no greater meaning to find? No God, no inner peace, no miraculous epiphany that knitted life together into something far greater than each individual thread. How disappointing would that be?

I reached for the china cabinet latch, wanting to feel the heft of that amethyst in my hand, wondering if it would impart some of the healing power my mother so willingly believed in. But the key to the hutch was not in the latch. The cabinet with all my parents’ valuables—the silver and the china, my grandmother’s pearls and a gold commemorative coin my father had had since he was a child—was locked for the first time that I could remember.