Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Revived by the coffee and the rest, Teresa stuffed her feet painfully back in her shoes and beat a slow path to her gate. Maybe she would stay in Switzerland forever, maybe she would become a Buddhist. She couldn’t imagine doing this again.

Holly had neglected to go into the tiny room that had once been a broom closet beneath the kitchen stairs to check the computer for the status of her mother’s flight from Paris. It was only now that she was at the airport in Lucerne standing in front of the arrival board that she could see the plane was three hours late. True, she didn’t have occasion to go to the airport very often, but what kind of an idiot forgets to check the time before making an hour-long drive? Because it was a rule that whoever took the car also had to take the phone, she was able to send a text to Mikhail and explain the situation. She knew he wouldn’t care. He told her they didn’t need the car but still, she felt like she was inconveniencing the community by keeping it for so long. Assuming that the time now listed was in fact correct, they would not be returning until after two o’clock. She had told her mother to take the train from Paris. No one flew from Paris to Lucerne. The train was a snap. But her mother had despaired at the thought of taking a train from the airport to the Gare de Lyon and then finding the train to Lucerne. And maybe it would have been impossible, with the jet lag and the luggage. Holly could have taken the train up and met her in Paris but she never suggested that. She didn’t want to be away that long.

Holly had completed her morning kitchen work early, washing and peeling ten pounds of potatoes, cutting them into chunks, and leaving them covered in cold salted water while at every moment striving to remain present in her task. She had gone to the guest-room where her mother would be sleeping to make sure there were towels and a washcloth beside the basin and a bottle of water and a glass beside the bed. She excused herself from morning meditation early, stepping around the cushions of others as quietly as possible to leave for the airport, though of course now she realized she hadn’t had to do that at all. She could have stayed. Her sense of irritation with herself was so ridiculously disproportionate to the event that she had to wonder if the problem wasn’t really that she didn’t want her mother to visit. While she understood the importance of letting all thoughts rise without judgment, to see them and to let them go, she decided it would probably be best just to squelch this one.

Holly bought a Toblerone bar at the news kiosk and then looked around the waiting area for discarded newspapers, as chocolate and news were the two things her life was lacking. And sex. Sex was lacking but she had enough sense not to look for that in the airport. She found copies of Le Matin, Blick (but she didn’t do so well reading German) and, wonder of wonders, a complete Tuesday edition of the New York Times . Suddenly she was soothed. The idea of spending three hours in the airport with three newspapers and Toblerone was nothing short of a miracle. She peeled back the tinfoil and broke off a piece of candy, resting it on her tongue to melt before she read the science section of the Times : Tasmanian devils were dying of oral cancer; there was reason to think it might be better to run without running shoes; and children living in poverty in the inner cities were as likely to suffer from asthma as children in war zones. She tried to figure out what she was supposed to do with the information. How could she save the devils, get them to stop biting one another, which appeared to be how the cancer was spread, and why was she worrying about a small, vicious marsupial in Tasmania and feeling next to nothing about the asthmatic children? Why had she read the entire article about running when she wasn’t a runner but skipped the piece about geothermal energy? Exactly how shallow had she become? She folded the paper in her lap and sat with the information for a moment. She thought that she should leave Zen-Dojo Tozan more often, or maybe leave it altogether, and she thought that she should never leave it under any circumstances, like Siobhán, whom Holly had never seen go farther than the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

When Holly remembered her life in California, she remembered seeing everything in terms of who had less than she did and who had more, who was prettier, smarter, who had a better relationship (everyone, usually), who was getting promoted faster, because as much as they had praised her at the bank there seemed to be people they preferred. She was constantly trying to figure out how to do it better, how to get it right, and in doing so she had started to grind her teeth at night. She had chewed a soft crater on the inside of her left cheek, and was picking at the cuticles of her thumbs until they bled. She made an appointment with an internist, told him her problems, and then showed him the inside of her mouth. He peered around her tongue and teeth with a penlight, looked at her hands, and then suggested meditation. Or that’s what she thought he had said, “You’re going to need meditation.”

The instant she heard the word she felt her heart surge, as if her heart had been waiting for this exact moment. Finally! her heart said to her. At last! “Where can I learn to meditate?” she asked. Just the word in her mouth brought forth joy.

The doctor looked at her as if wondering how crazy she might actually be. “Med-i- ca -tion,” he said again, slower and louder this time. “You’ll need medication for your anxiety. I’m going to write you a prescription for Ativan. We’ll work with the dosage. We’ll have to figure out what’s right for you.”

But Holly dropped the white slip of paper in the trash can after giving the receptionist a twenty for her co-pay. However unwittingly, the doctor had told her how she would be cured. She didn’t even understand exactly what meditation entailed at that point but she knew she was going to find out. She read a couple of books, listened to some dharma talks on cassette tapes in her car, and then found a group that sat on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. She started a sitting practice at home, getting up early before she went to the bank in the morning. Six months later some people from the Wednesday group invited her along for a weekend retreat. Later, she sat in silence for a week at a spirituality center just north of Berkeley. It was there she saw a notice on the corkboard about Zen-Dojo Tozan. She felt the same acceleration in her heart that she had felt when she first misunderstood her doctor. There I am , she thought, looking at the picture of the chalet balanced on a soft sweep of mountain flowers. She pulled the push-pin from the brochure and let it drop into her hand.

Things like this happened to Holly. At times she had a sense of being guided, and when she did she attributed it to Cal.

For years after Cal died, Holly was rocked with regret that they hadn’t been closer (and there was regret about other things as well). But since coming to Switzerland, she’d started to see that for a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl in a stressful living situation they’d done pretty well. They yelled at one another but carried no grudges. They shoved but never slapped or pinched. They threw couch pillows at one another, not dishes. Holly corrected Cal’s homework without condescension, and Cal, in the shining memory of her childhood, had once yanked two girls off of her in the hallway at school, one by her ponytail and the other by her shirt collar, as they were attempting to stuff Holly into her locker. “You bitches get off my sister,” he had said as the bitches stumbled backwards and then ran down the hall in tears. He had hurt them, scared them senseless. Holly, who made it her business to look after everyone else, was for that one golden moment protected. By her brother.