Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [68]
The Baba had done well for himself. The parking lot was paved, the grounds of the Enlightenment Center beautifully landscaped, oases of jewel-green grass accented with fountains and manicured beds of flowers. I sat for forty-five minutes on a stone bench in the cool, tiled lobby of a little adobe building that I refused to call a yurt, listening to the tinkling of water into a basin, sipping tea that tasted like boiled twigs, and glaring at a young woman in a white linen caftan who answered the telephone in an annoyingly mellifluous voice. “Love, light, fulfillment,” she would singsong. When I pulled out my iPhone she used the same dopey voice to say that electronic devices were not permitted (“They disrupt your aura”).
Eventually, my mother glided in, dressed in white robes of rough linen, her familiar musky, sandalwood-and-patchouli scent filling the air. I felt my eyes burning, and I looked away, blinking, not wanting to let her see how much I still missed her, how jealous I was of the people who had their mothers there to help them through their twenties. A mother could help you choose and furnish your first apartment; she could listen to however much you chose to tell her about your love life; she could offer a loan or a sympathetic ear or even just a night when you could go back to the place you’d grown up in, sit in the kitchen while she made your favorite meal, and be a child again. All of that had been denied me, thanks to her selfishness, and to the Baba.
I clamped down on my fury as she led me to an empty yoga studio and handed me a buckwheat-filled bolster to perch on, explaining, as she arranged her own body, the importance of opening our hips. I sat cross-legged, awkward in my skirt and heels and sleeveless silk blouse (I’d taken off my jacket and left it in the car). My mother laid a woven Indian blanket over my lap, then looked me over with a tolerant and utterly infuriating smile.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just that we don’t see many women dressed like you are.”
I looked down at my clothing, my Ferragamo pumps, and didn’t answer, thinking that she used to dress this way, too, that I was just as she’d made me, which gave her no right to judge.
My mother took my hands in hers. “What’s troubling you?” Her voice, once a combination of broad midwestern and New York City lockjaw, had become as syrupy and singsongy as the girl’s behind the counter had been. Her silvery-gray hair, which she’d been wearing in ridiculous Pocahontas braids before she’d left, was clipped short now, almost a buzz cut that exposed the oval shape of her skull and her elfin ears. Her pale-blue eyes looked enormous in her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was freckled and rosy from the sun. There were no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers, not a single bracelet or bangle, and she was barefoot underneath her robe, her toenails unpainted, her small feet calloused and tanned.
“Dad was in the hospital. He had a blocked artery. They gave him a stent.”
She sighed. “He has so much stress in his life. He needs to slow down.”
Whatever. “His new wife . . . I found out some things about her. Some bad things.”
She nodded again. At least she was looking at me and not at her guru, whose framed portrait beamed down from the front of the room. The Baba had grown his long hair even longer, and was sitting cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face, like a white Jimi Hendrix in a bathrobe.
“They want to have a baby.”
This, finally, got her attention. She cocked her head at a quizzical angle, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. I remembered that expression from when I’d come home to tell her that another girl had stolen my bookbag at lunch, and from the time she’d been ousted as head of the annual diabetes dance (this was the year after she’d insisted that the passed appetizers be vegan). I heard her take a deep breath, inhaling through her nose, before she said, “The Buddha instructs us to welcome new life in the spirit of gladness and joy.”
“Mother.”
“Satya,” she corrected, touching my knee