SIX

. . .

You must shield the delicate web of inner silence from the influences of the world.

By seven we’re usually getting dressed for Evening Program, but tonight my mom still isn’t back. The sun sinks outside the window. I wait till it’s definitely too late for Evening Program, and then I put on my sneakers and go out for a walk.

The path by the main building circles around and tucks into the woods. The little lights along the sides make it so you can still walk there at night. I’ve never walked in the woods at night before. My eyes adjust and I feel like a raccoon, pupils wide, watching things through the black. The branches blur together into a blanket above me, rustling, and for once I’m not scared to be alone.

When the path pours me into open space again, I’m almost sad. A country road cuts through the ashram property; I look both ways. No cars for a long, long time. I cross into the courtyard, with the statues of Jesus and Buddha and the elephant god. Little lamps around them cast shadows on their faces. Clumps of lilies and chrysanthemums hide them, so all you see is the light beams floating up from below. I think how everything is like that: you only see the shadows that the light makes, you never see what makes the light.

I sit there for a long time, in the courtyard surrounded by gods. Crickets are the only sound. After a while they blur together with my breathing, and I’d stay out here all night except that the truck pulling by on the road, too loud, snaps me out of it. By now it’s probably ten; my mom will be worried, if she’s back. I wander over to the glass-walls-red-rug building, try the door. Everything is always unlocked. I remember if you go through that building, out the other side is the shuttle stand.

I do, and there is, and I sit down on the bench beneath the canvas tent. Sure enough, after a minute a bus engine rumbles through the silence. The shuttle driver, a gray guy with a grizzly beard and tie-dyed baseball cap, raises his eyebrow, but I climb on without looking, just like going to school. In my seat I watch the woods out the window with my raccoon eyes. He turns up the tinny speakers and the chant spills out, “Jaya Jagatambe,” same as Evening Program. I hum along.

Back at the room, Mom is mad. I open the door and catch her mid-pace on the thin carpet. She whirls around. “Where were you?” Her eyes flash; underneath the angry is a scared red softness. I look away.

“Look at me, young lady!”

Young lady. Wooh. With my mom, you have to do a lot to get a “young lady.”

My eyes are on her, but I’m trying to stay in my own head. I liked it out there, on the trail, in the courtyard, by myself. I don’t want to let her in to mess it up.

“Where were you?”

I shrug. “I went for a walk.”

She looks at me like it’s incomprehensible I could put one foot in front of the other without her assistance or permission.

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask her. I don’t expect an answer; it just feels good to say it.

She paces toward me. “What’s wrong with that, young lady, is that you are not to just run off unsupervised without telling me where you’re going! You didn’t even leave a note! And don’t look at me that way.”

“What way?” I’m not even looking at her, not really.

“You know the look I’m talking about. Don’t play games with me.” She’s annoyed I’m getting her to answer my questions and not the other way around. Ha.

She glares at me and exhales really hard.

“Why are you even trying to sound all bossy like that anyway?” I say, half under my breath. “You sound stupid.” I don’t really want her to hear me, except I sort of do.

She hears me. “What did you say?”

Right now it’s the part of the fight when I can back down and it’s over, or keep going and it isn’t. These last three years we argue often enough for me to chart the different moments that stay the same from fight to fight: where the exit hatches are, what buttons I can press to ratchet things up. I could say “nothing” right now and that would be it. I’d let her win, she’d leave me alone, and I could fold back inside myself where it’s safe. But I don’t. Instead I puff my chest up, make my face hard, square my shoulders. “I said, Quit it. Quit bossing me around.”

“You don’t tell me what to do! I will boss you around if I want to boss you around. I am your mother. That gives me certain rights. You think I like sitting here waiting for you and wondering where you are? You think it’s fun? You’re just so thoughtless. Jesus.” She yells like she can force her viewpoint into my brain if she says it loud enough.

Secretly I know I could have left a note, but I don’t care. I’m not going to say I’m sorry, and I’m not going to say I’ll “do it different in the future.” Even though that’s what I’m supposed to say, and even though it might make the whole thing end, and even though it’s sort of true.

Because it isn’t fair.

“Why?” I ask her. “You don’t ever leave a note. You always leave, and I sit there waiting, wondering where you are. That’s what you did tonight!” I don’t flinch. I want an answer. “Where were you?”

And then her chest deflates; her face relaxes. She folds her arms and shakes her hair. Her chin juts up. “I was with Vrishti.” All of a sudden she’s the teenager. “We went and had a chai.”

I just look at her. She looks at me. It should make me feel better, her realizing that she did the same thing I did; but instead it scares me, seeing her look young that way. She’s supposed to be the mom.

After a second she folds me into her arms like she forgives me. “Oh, Tessa, I’m just glad you’re back.” She squeezes my floppy arms against my sides; my elbows poke my ribs. I think about the crickets and the shadows and the trail, how good I felt until I came back here and she got mad. I want to be alone again, quiet and contained inside my skin, away from her yelling and her leaving and the red soft beneath them both. I wish I had a door to close, a room to go away to. I stand there and let her hug me.

The next morning I stop at the front desk on the way to seva. My heart thuds hard as I ask the lady if there’s mail for me, harder when she goes in back to check. A little bright space opens up inside me in the moment before she comes back, a little space of maybe, and I have to remind myself not to let it open all the way wide to yes. Not yet.

When she comes back empty-handed, that space seals right back up, like a Ziploc baggie. On the way to seva I tell myself: It hasn’t been that long. Maybe his record company hasn’t sent it to him yet. Maybe he’s on the road. I know how to say those things; it’s what I always do. It opens up the seal a tiny bit, just enough so that little bit of hope won’t suffocate.

Devanand’s not at the shed, so I grab a trowel and some marigolds and head back to the lot, try to forget the letter and focus on my plan.

The guy’s there again, beneath the bus. This time I go over and kick his boot. “Hey,” I say, ignoring the law of inertia. He pulls out from under, looks up at me, surprised. For a second I hang there, wondering what I’ve just done. But he’s out now, staring up at me, and an object in motion will remain in motion, and I have to say something. “What’re you doing?” I ask.

“I was fixing the transmission on this bus, till someone came up and kicked me.”

My throat goes down into my stomach and I blush. I did the total wrong thing. I pissed him off. Why did I do that? Crap. Should have just stayed still. I’m about to turn around and go back to my stupid marigolds when he grins.

“Hey, I’m just joking.”

“Oh.” Right. Of course. Joking.

“I could use a break, actually. The air’s kinda thick down here.” He wipes his face with his arm to get the sweat off. A big black smudge smears his forehead. “What’re you doing back here anyway? They got you on garden duty?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I glance back at the flat of marigolds.

“Seems funny they’d waste ’em back here, there’s nobody ever in this lot except me. But I suppose I should be flattered.” Flattered why? It’s hard to tell exactly what he means by things. At least he’s not using any weird words, though. So far.

“I suppose.”

He grins again. It’s like he thinks I’m funny. “So where’re you from?”

. . . . .

His name is Colin. We talk for almost a whole hour. He’s not an ashram person; he lives over by town. They bring him in to fix the shuttles. He’s good at fixing stuff. He’s twenty. He doesn’t come here every day; only when there’s something broken. He has green eyes.

I’ve never had a crush before, not really. I mean, okay, Erik Estrada from ChiPs when I was eight. And Almanzo when he married Laura on Little House on the Prairie. But those don’t count. They’re not real people. The only real human person that’s any kind of crush equivalent was Randy Wishnick, and he doesn’t count either because it wasn’t my idea, plus also because of how it turned out. As far as I was concerned, Randy was just another nasty dirtball boy atVolney Rogers Junior High when I showed up there halfway through the seventh grade. I was used to those boys: they wore jean jackets and had the short-long haircut—short in the front and long in the back— and freckles, little beady eyes. They weren’t popular but they were never nerds either; they had their own kind of outcast power, and they were mean. Especially to new kids, and to quiet girls who read too many books.

But Randy wasn’t mean to me. Instead he came over to my desk during fifth-period study hall and asked me, “Whatcha readin?” It was sort of embarrassing because it was Judy Blume, but at least it was Deenie and not some book about periods like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I showed him the cover and he said, “Cool.” I could tell he’d never heard of it. After that he started trailing me through the hallway on the way to lunch. He’d strut around hyper in his Quiet Riot T-shirt, brag about shoplifting Nut Goodies from the Piggly Wiggly. I never really knew why he talked to me, except that he didn’t have any other friends that I could see.

He kissed me for the first time on the hill behind the cafeteria, and it was nice. The tongue part was a little gross, but afterward he looked at me like I was someone who made him feel things. Up close I could see his hazel eyes had freckles in them, too, little flecks of green and gold. He leaned in and bumped my forehead with his, soft, and then this big grin spread across his skinny face and he started laughing, but not at me, and I started laughing too.

After that, lunch was always on that hill; he would give me half his Tater Tots so I could throw my six-grain sandwich away. Then we’d kiss. We both tasted like ketchup.

Then the second Friday he felt me up. He didn’t even really kiss me first, just shot his bony hand up my shirt without asking and squeezed hard enough to hurt, pushing me back onto the ground with his weight. My eyes flew open but his stayed shut, and he made his tongue fill up my mouth and it got hard to breathe beneath him. All of a sudden his body felt like rocks pressing into my ribs, and I said, “Hey,” but he didn’t look at me or stop, and finally I pushed up on him and threw him off and stood up and headed down the hill. When I looked back he was standing up in his Motörhead T-shirt, wiping grass stains off his jeans and yelling, “What’s your problem?” after me.

So that’s what I had till now: Almanzo, Ponch, and Randy Wishnick. The good ones weren’t real and the real one was mean. I was starting to think the whole “guy” thing was just for banana-clip chicks and girls on TV and my mom, given who was available to choose from. I never knew whether anything else was out there.

Now I know.

I leave seva early to go and take a shower. I’m not that dirty, but I want to do something to separate this afternoon from tonight. This afternoon in the parking lot with Colin was mine, like my walk the night before was mine, and I don’t want them blurring together with my mom.

When I come out toweling my hair off, she’s sitting on the bed. I see her see the cloud of steam, start to say something about wasting water, but she stops. She’s trying to be nice. “Come on, get dressed; we’re going to meet Vrishti for dinner.” There’s a lot of this Vrishti all of a sudden. She seemed okay the other night, but we’ll see if she talks to me or just my mom.

At the dining hall, the two of them put exactly identical amounts of shredded zucchini and beets on their trays, identical tahini and identical sprouts. They also are the same height, both pretty, and both have long hair. One red and one brown. Like salt and pepper shakers. We come up to the table and everyone says hi to them.

Vrishti takes a chair on my left side and nods for my mom to sit on my right. She closes her eyes and says some long complicated chant before she eats; my mom does too. I don’t know the words, so I just sit there between them and feel weird. But when they’re done, Vrishti turns right to me and asks how old I am and what I think of the ashram. I just shrug. “It’s cool.” It would take way too long to really tell her. But I’m glad somebody asked.

My mom’s never had a friend before. In Ohio the women were always scared of her, the other single ones who worked in offices and drank Tab and went to the bar on the weekends. She was so much weirder than even the “wild girls” who smoked pot and had affairs with Bill in Marketing; she was so much prettier that no one ever expected she’d be lonely. Dayton and Venice, Big Sur and Akron: all the women were just variations on the same weird mix of judgment and envy. The only people she ever had to talk to were her guys and me, and even I felt the same way as those office girls sometimes.

But the other women glare at Vrishti too. Just like my mom, she’s lonely from too much attention, and the two of them stick to each other like magnets that finally entered each other’s field.

Vrishti finishes her zucchini, and then she gives my mom a secret smile. My mom secret-smiles back. I watch back and forth like Ping-Pong. I wonder if they’re going to let me in the game.

My mom says, “Sooo . . .”

Vrishti says, “Tessa . . .”

They secret-smile again.

“We have news.”

“Okay,” I say, with trepidation. I don’t know what this news could be, but the possibility exists that it isn’t good. Since we’ve gotten here, my mom’s perception of what’s good seems to have strayed away from mine, far enough that I’m starting to stop trusting that something is a good thing just because she thinks it is.

Vrishti squirms in her seat. “We’ve been invited to the Guru’s kitchen!”

My mom beams into Vrishti’s eyes. I have to say, I don’t know what the big deal is.

“Cool.”

“Tessa, it’s an incredible honor,” my mom explains. “I don’t even know how they picked us or anything, they just came into the kitchen today—”

“And said,” Vrishti chimes in—

“We would be honored to have your seva in the Guru’s private kitchen!” they finish in unison. Then they actually giggle.

“So we’ll be working up the hill, over at the Guru’s quarters; we’ll be helping with the prep for all his meals,” my mom says. “It’s such an incredible opportunity to be near the shakti of the Guru.”

I’ve decided that if people use weird words around me, they’re going to have to tell me what they mean. “What’s shakti?”

“Oh, it means like spiritual energy?” Vrishti says. “The life force of the universe.”

“Cool.” I nod.

“After dinner, let’s go celebrate!” my mom says.

“Yes!” Vrishti says.

Celebrate means have dessert at the Amrit, which means Snack Bar. At the regular cafeteria there’s no dessert— apparently it’s not yogic—but at the Amrit there is lots. Cobbler, cookies, cake, pie, all made with brown rice syrup and whole wheat pastry flour. I get a yogurtgranola parfait and we sit by the window. Vrishti has blueberry rhubarb crisp. My mom just gets a tea. Music pipes from tinny speakers like in the shuttle buses. My mom and Vrishti do a short version of their chant, holding both my hands, and then we eat.

As I’m scraping out the final dregs of yogurt, those kids tumble through the Amrit door. The brother and the sister and the other guy all laugh at something, stand near the jars of cookies, and pick some out. Peanut butter, from what I can tell. Vrishti nods toward them at my mom, small, like she thinks I won’t be able to see. My mom nods back. I roll my eyes, but neither of them notices.

“Tessa,” Vrishti stage-whispers, trying to be inaudible and failing, “do you know those kids?”

“No.” I don’t try to whisper.

She and my mom do their attempting-to-be-subtle nod at each other again. “Maybe you should go and say hello.” Vrishti smiles.

My mom really likes that idea. “Tessa, I think that would be wonderful.”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

“You can’t have new adventures if you don’t take risks!” She looks at Vrishti meaningfully.

“Really, I don’t feel like it.”

“Why? I’m sure they’re perfectly nice.”

I want to tell her that they’re pale and weird and I never know what they’re laughing about, but I don’t want Vrishti to think I’m mean. So I just shrug.

“It’d be great for you to meet some kids your age!” Vrishti chimes in.

“Yeah, Tessa, it really would.” My mom gives her that nod again.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. This is clearly going to end in disaster, but it doesn’t look like I have a choice. I get up and go over to the peanut-butter-cookie jar. My heart is thunking and my cheeks are hot.

“Hi.” I say it to the littler guy, the one who hasn’t gone through puberty, forgetting that sometimes the little guys are the worst: they have stuff to prove. He raises his eyebrows at me like some kind of challenge. Brother and sis look at each other.

“I’m Tessa,” I keep going. I don’t know why. I really should have already turned around and gone back to my mom.

“Hi,” the girl goes. “I’m Avinashi.” She sucks on the side of her cookie till it’s soggy. “That’s Sanjit.” She points at her brother. “And that’s Meer.” She points at the short guy. He raises his eyebrows again.

“Cool,” I say. Neither of the guys says anything. They just stand there being weird and pale. “Okay, see you later,” I say. When I turn around to walk away I hear them laugh. My face flushes redder.

Back at the table my mom and Vrishti titter like popular girls, then stop and look like moms when they see me coming back. It’s official: what my mom thinks is good or smart or fun has diverged permanently from the truth. Or at least from my experience of the truth. The swamis say that’s all I’ve got anyway: there’s no such thing as objective truth, at least not on the human perceptual plane. And who knows, maybe they’re right.