Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Past the cowpen, at the edge of a wood, we found a downed trunk the length of a love seat and settled on it, a cool breeze whispering through the trees. Our thighs touched. We turned to face each other. With the dark for a cloak, we risked our first kiss.

A kiss I owed to Zendik.

If not for my adopted tribe, I would not have sought Eric out. I would not have known how to draw our bodies close. But my learning harbored certain poisons—among them the beliefs that I must drop any man who slowed my evolution, and that love was doomed beyond the Farm.

My first kiss with Eric, I would learn later, was his first kiss ever. I did not promise he would not get hurt.

Mounting the tandem behind him, the afternoon of our cherry harvest, I admired the swell of his shoulders, the sun-bleached hairs arrowing up his sun-browned neck. Had the warmth of California coaxed him into his own? It seemed that he, like the fruit splitting open in his basket, had ripened under the Central Valley’s searing rays.

Being with Eric while clinging to Zendik meant stretching the story I’d spun when leaving the Farm: Maybe I’d convert Eric and bring him back with me. Maybe our affair would break me, once and for all, of desiring Deathculture men.

In the meantime, my link to Zendik needed tending. I couldn’t risk letting it fray.

Shortly after my arrival in Davis, I called the Farm from a pay phone. I wanted to be ready to return, but I wasn’t. And I’d used up my two weeks.

The phone rang once, then twice. My sweat beaded on the receiver. Then—“Hello?” It was Lysis. A relief.

Of all the Zendiks, Lysis was best at empathizing with outsiders. So it often fell to him to negotiate between the Farm’s core and its fringe. He listened as I spilled out a summary of my trip so far, then responded with the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Let us know if you get married or something.”

But I couldn’t rest my case; I craved judgment. Was I on the right track? If not, how could I find my way back?

“I’ll talk to Arol about it,” he said. “Call at ten tomorrow morning.”

The next morning, early, I took Eric’s phone out to his patio and set it on his picnic table, inches from my chest. Following me outside, he sank onto the couch against the back wall of the house. He pulled on a string dangling from a seat cushion. I watched the clock on the phone creep toward 7:00 a.m.

I’d told Eric about the tension I felt between my tie to him and my tie to the Farm. I’d explained why it was futile to seek true love in a culture built on lies, without the guidance of an insulating tribe. If he challenged me, he did so gently. Maybe he feared scaring me off. Maybe he saw the allure of my story, despite its gaps. Or maybe he, like me, excelled at supplying coherence to a ragbag of notions promoted as facts.

At the edge of the yard, sunlight dappled a garden bed through the leaves of an apple tree. Honeybees buzzed from clumps of cherry-tomato flowers to sprays of apple blossoms, sipping from both. Was there any way I might combine interest in Eric with commitment to Zendik? Draw nectar from more than one source? Might Arol zap my tension in a flash of wisdom?

As 6:59 flipped to 7:00, I dialed the number I knew by heart. Again, Lysis answered, with an upbeat “hello!”

Through the receiver filtered laughter and chatter, footfalls on stairs. Probably he was in the Addition office, just two doors down from Arol’s kitchen. Was she within earshot? Would others in the room pause to listen to his end of our conversation? Did they care what I was up to? Did anyone miss me?

“Hi, Lysis. This is Helen.”

His tone flattened. “Yeah. Helen. Um…”

I dug my thumbnail into the picnic table. I wondered if my banana boxes full of stuff were still under my bed in the Potato Shed. I waited, half-hoping he’d finish his sentence, half-hoping he’d suspend it. I heard only the puff of his breath.

“Um, sorry, but I can’t really talk except to let you know that Arol said don’t call and don’t come back until you wanna be a Zendik.”

I remained silent. Tears rose in my eyes. My only defense.

Lysis cleared his throat. “Okay, well, gotta go, Helen. Maybe we’ll see you again sometime. Bye.”

I dropped the receiver into its cradle. The numbers on the clock blurred. I turned to Eric. He was leaning toward me, alert for a verdict. “Arol said don’t call and don’t come back—”

My voice broke. I pushed the phone away. I nested my face in my forearms, as sobs racked my body.

I still believed I’d gone out to renew my commitment to Zendik. I could no longer pretend Zendik agreed.

I didn’t take comfort in Eric’s move to the table to put his arm around me.

I didn’t revive when we hunted fruit that afternoon or drove to the redwoods a couple days later.

Parked in a lot by a radiant glade, we stared through the windshield at a world thick with fog.

He glanced at me, then back at the windshield. “So, why’d you come here, anyway?”

I turned to look at him. He squinted into the mist. I turned away.

“Because it felt right. And because I always thought of you as someone who was just as frustrated as I was with all the superficial bullshit.”

Fog drifted over us, obscuring both rear view and mirror.

“But is there any chance you could stay and we could have a relationship?”

“There is a chance we could have a relationship—but only if we both lived at Zendik.”

Blood rushed to his cheeks. He swiveled toward me. I forced myself to face him. My gaze scraped against his.

“Are you serious? Is that what you really think?”

I nodded.

“So, you came all the way out here to see me and get my hopes up, and the whole time you were sure it was never gonna work.” His lips tightened. His hand made a fist. “It’s like… it’s like this was some kind of experiment . Right? Except you already knew how it was gonna turn out.”

I stared into my lap, at my own curled fingers. I looked back up at him. “Yeah, I guess,” I said, tears blurring my vision. “I’m sorry, Eric. I try to follow my heart, but right now I can’t feel it. I thought we could try to be honest with each other on our own, and then maybe you’d wanna go back to the Farm with me.”

“I’m not going back to your damn farm!” He punched the padded ridge dividing his seat from mine. “But I don’t understand why we can’t try to be together, just the two of us, right here!”

I dropped my eyes back to my hands—clenched into claws, hunting a grip.

“I can’t, Eric. I just can’t. I feel like if I did, I’d… I’d shrivel up.”

Back at my brother’s place in Boise, I learned I’d been admitted to the September visitor group at East Wind—the Missouri commune over which I’d chosen Zendik in October 1999. I was to arrive at East Wind no earlier than the end of August.

To kill a few weeks—and a couple more dreams—I hitched to Alaska by way of Glacier National Park.

In Glacier, from the backseat of a sleek rental car, I watched a husband on honeymoon release the wheel to clasp his wife’s gold-banded hand. Twisting his innocent gesture into a death grip, I imagined him hissing, You’re mine, all mine —and took this as a good sign: maybe I’d finally iced my desire to mate in the wild.

In British Columbia, a trucker hauling timber to Alberta pushed me repeatedly to take a nap in the back of his cab. After refusing half a dozen times, I lied that I had to pee and asked him to stop at a gas station. Instead, he dropped me off, after midnight, on a desolate street at the edge of Prince George. I made it till morning with the help of a cashier at a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven who unlocked her minivan so I could sleep a few hours in the backseat.