Ann Patchett: Commonwealth

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.

Sometimes Holly came into the guest room at night, the same room she had slept in when she first arrived twenty years before. She liked it in there. Teresa scooted over as far as she could in the little bed to make a place for her. The two lay together on their sides, the only way there was room, and talked, two women who hadn’t talked in bed with anyone for years.

“Do you think you’ll stay here?” Teresa asked, pulling up the blankets over their shoulders. It was freezing at night. Holly was forty-five, and while this life was all very beautiful, if she was ever going to want something else, a husband or a job, she had to think about that.

“I won’t stay forever,” Holly said. “I don’t think I will. But I’ve never come close to figuring out how I’d leave. It’s like I expect destiny to throw open the door of the Dojo one day and say, ‘Holly! It’s time!’”

“Call me when that happens,” her mother said.

“You should see how pretty it is here in the snow.”

They were quiet for a while, maybe both of them nearly asleep, and then Holly said, “Do you ever think about staying? You could be one of those people in the guest room who we think is going to leave and never does.”

Teresa smiled in the dark, though she realized then she couldn’t exactly imagine leaving either. She put her arm around Holly’s waist and thought of her body as something she’d made, something that was so completely separate from her now. “I don’t think so,” she said, and then they did both fall asleep.

On the eighth day of her eleven-day visit to the Zen center, Teresa went to morning meditation, sat down on her cushion next to Holly, closed her eyes, and saw her oldest son. He was so clear it was as if he had been in the room with her all this time, as if he had been with her in every room she’d ever been in in her life and she had simply failed to turn her gaze in the right direction until now. She wasn’t having a dream or an out-of-body experience. She understood that she was still in the chalet, still sitting, but at the same time she was with Cal and his sisters. She was with the Keating girls, Caroline and Franny. She saw the five of them going out the kitchen door of Bert’s parents’ house, the door that she had gone through countless times when she and Bert were dating, when they were planning their wedding.

Ernestine, the cook, is telling them not to be a bother to Ned down at the barn and to do what he tells them, and the girls say yes ma’am. She gives a half bag of withered carrots dug out from the bottom of the refrigerator and two small apples to Jeanette, who in return gives her a grateful smile. No one ever gave things to Jeanette. Cal is already across the porch. He doesn’t say anything to Ernestine. He doesn’t wait for the girls.