They were driving through a forest now. The trees, their lower trunks furred with moss, got thicker and taller and started to cut into the light while ferns stretched across the forest floor. There were enormous rocks, boulders really, that looked like they’d been placed by set designers around a fast-running stream.Show me an enchanted forest!the producer must have said.
“Your father wanted me to move all of us to Virginia when he left with Beverly, so we’d be close by. I didn’t even consider it, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have. It would have made things easier on you kids. I just couldn’t find it in myself to be that accommodating.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Holly said, foolishly taking her eyes off the road for a second to stare at her mother. “I never knew he said that.”
“Then after Cal died.” Teresa shrugged. “Well, you remember that. We sure weren’t moving to Virginia after Cal died, though I’ll tell you, it bothered me to have him buried there. It was just about going forward in those days, one step, one step, not falling all the way down into myself. I didn’t think about changing my life. My life had already been changed. I just had to get through it.”
“You got through it.” Holly took the car down to second. They were behind a truck, climbing and climbing.
“We all did, I guess, in our own ways. You don’t think you’re going to but then you do. You’re still alive. That was the thing that caught me in the end: I was still alive. You and Albie and Jeanette, still alive. And we wouldn’t be forever, so I had to do something with that.”
Teresa put her hand over Holly’s hand, felt the deep rattle of the gearshift. “Listen to me talking. I never talk like this.”
“It’s Switzerland. That’s what it does to people.” Holly stopped to reconsider. “I should say that’s what it’s done to me. Actually, most of the people I’ve met here are pretty quiet.”
Teresa smiled and nodded. “Well, it’s good. I like it.”
Zen-Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thun but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers. It occupied a large chalet that was built high into the slope of a mountain. The chalet had been the country home of a banker from Zurich. In the summer he and his wife swam with their five children in the lake and in the winter they skied, and in between, unbeknownst to anyone in Sarnen or Thun or Zurich, they sat together on zafu cushions, all seven of them, and closed their eyes and cleared their minds as surely as the bracing mountain air had cleared their lungs. The house was left with a trust to form Zen-Dojo Tozan, with the understanding that the family’s children and their children and all of the children to come would be welcome. Katrina, the fourth daughter, now in her seventies, lived there full time in the small back bedroom she had slept in as a child. Along with Katrina there were fourteen other full-time residents. Twice a year they hosted retreats, running a rented shuttle bus back and forth from the inn in Thun, but most of their income came from walking sticks.
All of the residents participated in some way in the carving or distribution of the sticks, either the art or the business, they liked to say. The sticks were highly sought after, especially by American and Australian meditators who knew that they would never make it to Switzerland. Holly, who displayed no talent with wood or knives, did the accounting. She had found there was virtually no ceiling on what could be charged for a long pole of Swiss stone pine with a carved fish for a handle. Drop a five-euro compass into the fish’s back and double the price, even though no one seemed to understand the basic tenets of orienteering anymore. They bought the wood from a mill in Lausanne, and while they could have had a cheaper and more compelling stock from Germany, they had made the decision to keep the sticks Swiss. That’s what it said on their website: Swiss walking sticks carved from Swiss stone pine by meditators in Switzerland. Every day after meditation and community chores, a few hours were devoted to the sticks: Paul whittled the wood into sticks, Lelia blocked out the crude bodies of the fish with a carving knife, and then Hyla began the delicate work of scales. These sticks, along with their modest endowment, kept up the roof and paid the taxes and put cheese and bread on the table. They had a wait list of eight months for walking sticks. The wait list for residences had gotten too long to be useful and was stuck in a desk drawer and forgotten.
“We’re lucky there’s a guest room open,” Holly said, taking her mother’s hand as she walked her up the steep wooden steps. Her mother, steady enough, would benefit from a stick. The wind could knock a person over some days. “People come as a guest for a month and then they refuse to leave. There are three guest rooms and the schedule is always messed up. People just stay and stay. They think one of us is going to leave and make a space for them.”
The chalet was ringed by a wide wooden porch that jutted out over the crystalline world. Heavy wooden chairs hewn by a careless axe were spread around so that a disciple might rest while taking in the view. The Alps looked like a drawing of the Alps on a candy wrapper, an idealized version meant to draw strangers in. Teresa had to stop and catch her breath, from the view, the thinner air, from the fact that she had actually done it and was there.
“It worked for you,” she said, huffing slightly.
Holly stood there, seeing it all again through her mother’s eyes. “Well, someone actually died while I was waiting them out. That’s when I came back to California and quit my job. He was a Frenchman named Philippe. The walking sticks had been Philippe’s idea years before when they were running out of money and worried they’d have to give the place up. He was a sweet old bird. I still have his room.”
“Do other people’s mothers come?” Teresa asked, trying not to sound competitive but feeling exactly that. She was so proud of herself.
“Sometimes. Less than you’d think.”
As soon as she saw the bed in her room Teresa took a nap. Then before dinner and the dharma talk and the last sitting of the day, Holly did her best to give her mother a crash course in meditation. Breathing in and out, following the breath, letting thoughts come up and pass away without judgment. “You just have to do it,” she said finally, fearing her explanation was doing more harm than good. “It’s pretty straightforward.”
So Teresa, wearing the track suit she wore in the mornings when she did her power walk with her neighbor, sat down on a cushion beside her daughter and closed her eyes.
Nothing much happened at first. She thought about the ache in her left knee. Then there was the thought that the other people seemed nice. She liked Mikhail, the Russian who she had called Michael. Did he run the place? Very welcoming. All of them with their hair cut short like Holly’s. And why not? What difference did it make? There was no one to impress. She could see that Holly was happy here, but was it a real life? And what would she do when she was Teresa’s age? Would they take care of her? She could ask the older woman, the one who’d grown up in this house. Imagine this place as ahouse, a home for a single family. How many servants must they have had to keep this up? Both of her feet were asleep.
She caught herself then. Such babble! Teresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper. She came back for a single breath but found herself reflecting on the bean salad they’d had for dinner, some kind of pink beans in there she hadn’t seen since childhood. She couldn’t remember what they were called. Her mother would ask her to pick through the beans before she soaked them, to look for little rocks, and she would be so meticulous until she lost interest, dumping the unchecked beans on top of the ones she had vetted, ruining everything. Did anyone in her family ever bite down on a rock?
One breath? She couldn’t manage that? Maybe a single inhalation that wasn’t burdened by thought? She tried. There. Okay. Her back hurt. Without warning her head dropped forward and for an instant she was sound asleep. She made a small, startled sound like a dog or a pig having a dream. She sat up straight again, opened her eyes slightly to see if anyone had caught her. She looked around at the peaceful faces of her neighbors, her daughter, as if she could see the clarity of their untroubled minds. She was ashamed of herself.
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 ofThe English Patientto 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.
