Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

Greer had dreaded these words for so long. When they were spoken, and in the nightmarish context, he was surprised to see the effect they had, of making their speaker look ridiculous. Someone coughed. A couple of his students snickered.

All Ben had to do was adjourn the meeting.

My mom and I were in the apartment we shared in Seattle. It was summer. It was the middle of June. I was sitting on the couch looking out the window and my mom was in the kitchen making bone broth. She was going through a phase of making pho. She had made a pho and brought it into work, and it confused her that nobody ate it.

My mom’s cell phone rang. I held it up and said, “It’s Jim.”

She wiped her hands and took the phone out of my hands. She said, “What’s up?” into the phone. I heard Jim ask her how she was doing.

When she got off the phone, she was jealous. She said Jim told her Rinpoche had called him. Jim and Rinpoche had an hour-long conversation, according to Jim, whose wife, Eileen, was sick. He never talked about it. His wife was sick, and she’d had two knee surgeries over the winter, and she’d continued to work through most of it. She drove a school bus. It was a part of her job to put the chains onto the tires. Jim never told anybody about Eileen, really, and so people had decided she was going to be all right.

It was complicated because there were two sick people in Seattle. One of them, Carole, was dying. She had a tube in her stomach that drained the fluid out. Her face had changed. It had gotten thin, so that it looked like a skull. She went in and out of consciousness. I mean, she slept and woke up. When she was awake, she was never gone, but her conversation was confused and she was emotional. The emotion that she felt most powerfully was wanting. It was so powerful and so insane when it came over her that it riled people up. It came over them.

That was my impression at the time. Later I found out that people had donated money to Carole, and my mother had spent it on us. She hadn’t done anything extravagant, but she had used it for us. She reasoned that it was less than what she’d spent taking care of Carole, and that was true. Really, it was awful what was happening to Carole. She’d gotten cancer in a three-year retreat. She had travel insurance, but they denied her claim. She didn’t know — as many people don’t — that you can’t take no for an answer in a situation like that. She accepted it, for a while, and the cancer grew. Later she had trouble taking her medications. She was prescribed a medication that broke the cancer up, but it made her feel bad. She said it was poison. So she’d take it irregularly. That let the cancer spread. Then we had a big meeting coming up — something a lot of people would go to — and Carole wanted to look good. She took some psylium husk, and it collapsed her stomach, and that was how it happened, really. She was going to die.

A lot of people came to visit Carole now that she was dying, but my mom was the one who visited the most. For this reason, and because my mother had spent her money, though I didn’t know that at the time, Carole had come to hate my mother. There was also an iPad. Rinpoche had given Carole an iPad, and Carole gave it to my mother. But the story she told people was that my mother had taken it. This is how it is when people are dying. I barely ever visited. Once, I went with a couple of other people. One person massaged Carole’s feet and said, “How do reincarnation and emptiness make sense together?”

She meant, if it is a dream, if it is empty, then why do we die and turn into dogs. I was quiet and then I said, “They are one.” I meant reincarnation and emptiness are one. The woman who’d asked was about fifty. She was a powerful, intelligent woman. She nodded. She nodded in the way you nod if someone has said something stupid. I said, “What I meant was that it is like dreaming through the night — having all different dreams.” For some reason I was shaking. I was sure my answer was correct, according to Buddhist philosophy, but more recently I learned the correct answer, which is a bit subtler.

The woman made a little more conversation. We got onto the subject of Sikkim, in India, where Rinpoche had been taken after he was recognized in Bhutan. She said in his room, on the walls, you could see scratch marks from his tantrums.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and she said, “He clawed the walls because he didn’t want to have to study. He wanted to be an ordinary boy and go play with all the others.” Later I saw a still from a film by Satyajit Ray. It was Ray’s documentary on Sikkim. He had filmed Rinpoche at four or five. In the still, Rinpoche had a long face that came to the point of his chin, and he wore a five-pointed crown. He was scowling at the camera like an old man.

Rinpoche had asked to stay with Jim in Seattle, but Jim had told him that he didn’t have room. Also, Jim said his place wasn’t right, because of the floors.

Jim was an editor. He did carpentry as a hobby. Several years earlier, he had lifted up the floors in his condo, planning to lay down hardwood, but the job was too big. And then he had gotten accustomed to concrete.

He saw himself as the senior student in the Seattle sangha . My mother hosted all the get-togethers at her apartment — when we’d meet to recite a sadhana , or have a tsok —and she had been a Buddhist as long as Jim. She didn’t ever say she saw herself as the senior student, and she didn’t ever act like she ought to be the senior student, but if anyone else tried to act senior, it offended her, and she undermined them. Jim in particular. Probably because he didn’t like her, but also because the way he chanted was affected. People who have spent a great deal of time chanting learn the sound of their own voices. This sound is always different — sometimes it is very low, and sometimes it is sweet; sometimes it is metallic and sometimes it is sharp. Sometimes it is melodic. Often old Tibetan men chant very low, from their stomachs or below even that; often Western practitioners who have really practiced a lot pick up turns here and there that are melodic. This melodic sound, in the sangha of Jim’s first guru, had become a group quality, so that the students all embellished words here and there in certain ways. Jim chanted this way. He was the only one, and so rather than sounding beautiful, it was disruptive. It sounded aggressive. I don’t think that he meant it that way, or if he did it, was so subtle only some people could hear it. But really it doesn’t matter. It was how he chanted, and he was the chant leader. The proper etiquette was to follow him. But my mother didn’t like it. She chanted her own way — very softly and very badly, often tripping over the words. She was extremely sensitive to tone. Bruce thought tone — the way he said my mother’s name — was a silent weapon. He did not understand that his inflections stayed with her for weeks: he didn’t like my mother. It was primarily because he was not attracted to her. There are other ways to say that. He didn’t like my mother because she didn’t groom herself well, and her house was dirty. He was clean. His house was clean, and he owned several blazers, and his skin always shone, but to my mother, none of this mattered. To her, he didn’t have any taste. If my mom had cleaned, which she did not, then she would have cleaned better. My mom had once had money.

* * *

My mom, me, and my mom’s friend Louise were standing in the front bedroom of my mom’s apartment; we had begun to clean for Rinpoche’s attendants. We were in my bedroom, which had an ocean view. Sea lions swam in the water. They had a funny habit of coming up four times for air and then going under again, and sometimes they barked. Twice I saw orca whales swimming through the water out front. One had a massive, ragged fin. It was so different than at Sea World in Austin. But the apartment was full of a decade of clutter.