THREE

. . .

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.