Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

Ema understood. The married man’s old phone was cutting her single long text into twenty-one parts, of 144 characters each. She was powerless to stop it. She watched in a panic as another text rolled through, another 144 characters from her long text, to the married man in France.

In a panic, she turned off her phone to make it stop. She went to the oven, opened it, and leaned against the door. She could see into the bathroom and contemplated dropping her phone into the toilet. She turned it on, and waited.

She watched the screen as it loaded. She said, “Please. Please. Please.”

Then the texts really started to roll.

Ganges River, which she finds completely boring, and she’s just been coughing in the incense smoke and body odor, and then she

sees this adorable homeless kitten, like a stick with some fur, and she’s with the married man, and they look at each other and

know they have to take it — even though that’s completely crazy. And the kitten is so skinny and it’s actually in a puddy? so

they don’t even realize till they get it back to the very expensive room which they splurged — and they’re in this five-star

hotel, and have to bribe the man at the door, because they don’t think to hide this mud-covered CAT — that the kitten’s arm

is broken in three places. So they take it to the veterinary college the next day, and each of these darling, sweet Indian medical

students comes to feel the kitten’s broken arm, you know they’re studetnts right, and you can tell when they’ve found the break because

the kitten goes, “Mewl mewl mewl melw mewl mewl mwl mewl” and cries! So after about the fifth medical student squeezes the poor

thing’s arm, Sloane steps in and tells them to stop it, absolutely enough, and of course it stops. And there are all these diagrams of cows

right there on the wall, and a surgical theater, harness for the cows. But the diagrams are like colored in by a kid, and most rudimentary

things, but she realizes these students actually use them to navigate inside a cow. That these young men in coats go inside and surgeons

and so they have to shave her cat to the skin to amputate its arm because it’s an old broken. And to shave it they ask her to hold the kitten

down, and he’s terrified. She has him by his back, and the scruff of this is the worst thing that has happen, and when they’ve shave

the animal of his fur they ask if he has eaten any food at all in the past twenty-four hours, and Sloane and the man she is in love

with do not know, of course, so the cat can’t have his surgery, and they take him home to the hotel, but he won’t let them hold him

any longer. And then his arm removed, and he can make it through that, and she sneaks him home in this case, and he can make it

through that, but when**a month lateR**she has to go on assignment to Haiti, it is the last thing the poor little animal

can take, she can’t just leave him ALONE< and he goes off into the woods to die. Like Jesus into the dessert, she writes, and I was just crying,

crying, crying, and all this time there’s the mouse in my house, chewing the stove, the one I told you about, so it’s like sometimes life can be so

beautiful.

* * *

In the morning, Ema woke up on the sofa. She had her shoes on. She woke up innocent, then remembered the night before. She lunged for her phone.

At 5:15 a.m. the married man had answered all of her texts with two words, “Good times.” And then, several hours later, he had texted: “While I’m out of the country, email is best. I’m sorry. Roaming rates are insane. x”

Ema put a listing on Craigslist, to sublet her apartment, and she registered for a monthlong meditation program in the mountains of Vermont. The program began in three days, and her apartment was sublet by noon. This struck her as a sign.

* * *

Just after dawn, Ema rolled up her sleeping bag. She stored her foam mattress in the attic above the shrine room. Still in her pajamas, she went down past the lower living room, where several people sat in armchairs drinking tea, and an old woman with the body of a classically trained dancer did her morning stretches. Ema paused for a moment and watched her. The woman looked familiar. Out in the rock garden, a bearded man ran a rake in a circle through the pebbles around a large rock. Ema went to the service area off the dining hall and poured herself coffee.

At six they met in the main shrine room. There were forty of them. They sat overlooking a valley. At the bottom of a nearby hillside was a manmade turtle and lotus pond. The pads were flowerless in the muddy water, which was golden in the morning light. The umdze rang the gong and they stood and walked in circles around the shrine room, their right hands in the palms of their left.

* * *

Bill was the dhathun leader. He had a long face and gray hair, and he was tall. He had put on a shirt and tie. They were in the dining room, and it was just after 2 p.m., and he sat on the meditation cushion on the floor. “Is this anybody’s tea?” he asked. “Can everyone see me okay?”

“I can’t see,” Ema said. She stood up. “I can see now.”

“Okay.” Bill clacked two pieces of wood together. “So, when you hear that sound, that means you bow, and you untie your set.”

He bowed.

“You might want to follow along,” he said, and he looked at Ema.

Ema sat down. She said, “Are we supposed to come up after the bow? Or do we just go straight down.”

“Just go straight down.” Bill made the gesture again. He bowed, bent down farther, and untied his oryoki set. He said, “What’s nice about this knot is, if you do it right, it just pulls apart. It’s a slipknot.”

“How do you tie that?”

“You start out like this.” He laid his left hand, palm up, on top of his set.

“Wait. Can you do that again, this time so I can see it?”

“Well, you might want to stand up.”

“I can’t stand up and do the knot,” Ema said. “That’s what I said at the beginning, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Okay, okay.”

He untied and retied the knot for her twice, then moved on to the second knot, and then he stopped short.

“I made a mistake. I’m sorry. Okay, now, actually, I forgot. The first thing we’ll do is, you’ll hear the ding, and then you’ll go and get tables. Now, there’re a lot of variations on that, and you’ll hear a million different ways, so let’s just say that the fourth member of the quadrant gets up, goes to the head of the quadrant, bows, and walks down the line to the back of the shrine room.

“Do you bow first?” Ema asked.

“What do you mean first?”

“Before you go and get the tables.”

“You bow first,” Bill said.

“I know that, but where do you bow? At the front or at the back?”

“At the head. Now,” he said, lifting the wipe serviette, “you want to take this ratty dirty thing here and fold it in half, then fold it in a trifold.”

“I can’t see,” Ema said.

Bill extended both arms high above his head, and he repeated himself, demonstrating the fold.

“But normally, of course, you’re going to want to do this with your hands held a little lower.”

“A comedian,” Ema said.

“What?” The dancing-stretching woman gave Ema a look that struck to her core. She said, “Some of us want to learn.”

“I was just kidding.”

“Some of us have dexterity issues,” an elderly woman said.

“Some of us have just plain issues,” the dancing-stretching woman murmured, and everyone laughed, except Bill and Ema.

Bill said, “So once you’ve got your wipe serviette folded, you’re gonna want to take that in your left hand and set it down before you. Then you’re gonna want to pick up your setsu case with your left hand and rotate that forty-five degrees, and set that down under your wipe serviette.” He shook his bowl out as he went on. “We always want to pick up bowls with our two thumbs,” he began. “Tell me if you can do that.”