Commonwealth(89)

One breath? She couldn’t manage that? Maybe a single inhalation that wasn’t burdened by thought? She tried. There. Okay. Her back hurt. Without warning her head dropped forward and for an instant she was sound asleep. She made a small, startled sound like a dog or a pig having a dream. She sat up straight again, opened her eyes slightly to see if anyone had caught her. She looked around at the peaceful faces of her neighbors, her daughter, as if she could see the clarity of their untroubled minds. She was ashamed of herself.

At the end of the session Holly helped her stand. Everyone came to shake her hand, give her a small embrace. They were so fond of Holly. They were so glad Teresa had come to visit.

“Don’t worry about the meditation,” a woman named Carol said, her eyes as placid as a glacial lake. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense at first.”

“I meditated on my own every day for years before I came to this place,” Paul the stick-maker said. “But to meditate here for the very first time in your life? That would be like taking your first run at the Olympics.” He patted her shoulder. “You should be very proud of yourself.”

In the single bed of the guest room, Teresa, wide awake, looked at the ceiling, the regular notches around the crown molding like evenly spaced teeth. She’d flown halfway around the world for this? To sit? She had sat at her desk half her life. She sat in her car, on the plane. What could she have been thinking? She had wanted to see her daughter. Had Bert ever been to visit Holly here? Did Bert sit? Why hadn’t she thought to ask? Light from the enormous moon flooded her little room, painting the walls and covering her bed. She thought of all the women and men, mostly men, she had in her own small way helped the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office send to prison. All of the cases she had worked to prepare so that they would be prosecuted and spend their nights in narrow beds and spend their days in silence. How was it that she’d never really wondered what became of them before? There were hundreds of cases that had come across her desk over the years. There were thousands. Were those men staring up at their ceilings now in the cells where they lived, trying to empty their minds?

It went on like this for Teresa day after day, three times a day. She filed into the meditation room with the others and someone would stoke the blue ceramic stove with coal and then everyone would sit together in a circle on the dark green cushions and wait for Mikhail to tap the little gong that signaled the beginning. It was madness. She would have quit—taken her copy of The English Patient to the second-floor balcony or walked alone through the tall grass while the others looked for inner peace—had it not been for the fact that Holly was so proud of her. Her daughter kept an arm looped through her arm, dragged her cushion closer to be near her. The other residents gazed upon the two of them in deep appreciation—in the kitchen, at meals, while meditating (Teresa would sometimes cheat and briefly open her eyes, causing the others to immediately shut theirs)—other mothers did not visit, and if they did visit, they most certainly did not sit.

Teresa kept sitting.

Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism. Pretty Hyla, whose fine bones were beautifully featured by her lack of hair, took her for a walk and told her the name of every plant and every tree they passed. They saw an ibex in the distance. She rolled a piece of juniper between her palms and let Teresa sniff her open hands, the hands that found the fish inside the handles of the sticks. Hyla told Teresa her mother had died five years ago and that she was very lonely. After that she held Teresa’s hand as they walked back to the chalet. Okay, Teresa thought, I can be your mother today. They went back to the kitchen and sliced apples for a pie.

“I want you to cut off my hair,” she said to Holly before dinner.

“Really?” Holly leaned over and touched her mother’s hair. It was thick and gray and she wore it in a bob with the sides pulled back in barrettes for lack of a better idea.

“I’ve gotten used to the look, and anyway, I think it will help me fit in.” Teresa wouldn’t have done it had she been going back to work. At work her hair would have been a point of conversation, but when she got home it would be a signal of her new life. Her neighbors would see her, the checkers in the grocery store, and they would know she was different now.

Holly went and got the electric clippers out of the small plastic tub where they were kept in the downstairs bath. She took her mother outside on the deck and pinned a towel around her neck. They all cut one another’s hair. They could have done it themselves but it was nice, having someone else’s hands on your head every month or so.

“You’re sure?” Holly asked before she turned the clippers on.

Teresa gave a single nod of assurance. “When in Switzerland.”

And there went her hair, the thick gray tufts settling down around their feet like storm clouds dispersed. When she was finished Holly came around to assess her work.

“What do I look like?” Teresa asked smiling, running her hand over the velvet.

“Like me,” Holly said, and it was true.