Michèle nudged my arm. “Wow, look at the rice fields.”
I lifted my head through four centuries. My eyes were glazed over. “Yeah,” I said.
“Do you want one of the bento boxes? Someone’s coming through our car.” She nudged me. “What kind?”
“What kind of what?” I saw the vendor. “Shrimp.”
She put the box on my lap, bent to my ear. “My little samurai, you need nourishment for all of your conquests.”
I sighed and closed the book. “This isn’t shrimp. What is it?”
“I don’t know. Try it.” Half the time in Japan we didn’t know what we were eating. In the monastery I let go of my picky nature, but back in ordinary life I ate only the recognizable rice and some ginger piled at the side. “You finish it.” I handed the rest over and charged back into the book. I’m normally a slow reader, but by the end of the day I was on page 208.
We arrived in Beppu in late evening and dragged our bags to the ryokan, a traditional inn, and flopped into bed. I reached my arm out of the covers and along the floorboards to feel for the book. I had a flashlight to read by.
Michèle grabbed my arm.
I hesitated. A moment’s battle raged in my head. I let go and turned toward her.
The next day at the medicinal baths, a woman in the pool screamed and hissed at me when I entered. I was gaijin, the white person who defeated her country in World War II. I grabbed a cup, scooped up the hot water, and poured it over my head. The angry woman heaved her body out of the shallow pool. The thick water dripped from her old thighs and sagging breasts. She grabbed a towel and slammed a door behind her. I wasn’t wanted here.
I dried and hurried back to the ryokan. I was now on page 431. No one could beat Musashi. His rivals were dumbfounded by his two-handed method. It was like meeting a hurricane gale in the void. All of their practiced techniques had no effect.
On Tuesday we went by bus to Mount Aso, the famous active volcano. All over the mountain were signs indicating danger: Don’t go farther. It erupts at any time. No saying when. We walked around, peering into pools. White cement shelters dotted the lower part of the volcano in case rocks began to fly or lava was spit out of the great mountain. The Japanese stayed far away from us. There were no other Western tourists. One old man pointed at us.
“The last bus is here,” called Michèle. “C’mon.” She waved her arms. She turned and ran to the line forming for the bus. The temperature was dropping. The last person was boarding. I tore after her.
In the last days of our trip, on a six-hour train haul across Japan, heading to Tokyo through Kyoto, Musashi faced his final challenge. He no longer wanted to fight, but this was destiny. Ganryu, the greatest of all Japanese swordsmen, was waiting for him on a small island. Musashi arrived two hours late, a completely unconventional act. Ganryu’s eyes shot fire; Musashi was quiet, but an unearthly fierceness settled in him. Both were free from conscious thought as they faced each other.
We had stopped in Kumamoto City to visit Musashi’s memorial place. I prostrated myself nine times before his statue. I read the plaque nearby, which had an English translation. Victory was not what ruled him. The Boundless Way, embracing all things, including the sea and the sands, were what moved him. Even his foes were his teachers.
Miyamoto Musashi’s actual burial ground was in close range. According to legend he had been buried in full samurai regalia clutching his faithful sword. The last line of the translation: He died lonely.
The Japanese liked loneliness. It had a different quality than our dreaded isolation. More like one with the void, alone with the Alone, no longer separate from anything. It was the final compliment to describe him this way.
Michèle nudged my shoulder. “Our stop’s coming up.”
I didn’t lift my head from the book. She nudged me again. I didn’t budge. Muscles, flesh, hair, nails, even eyebrows were united into a single force. An enormous shout shattered the instant, and Ganryu’s Drying Pole streaked through the air.
Someone above me reached for her suitcase and walked down the aisle behind the other departing travelers, all collecting near the back of the car.
Musashi does the unexpected. Instead of proceeding slowly, he strides boldly like an animal. This artless approach halts Ganryu. The wooden sword rises straight in the air. One huge kick and Musashi leaps high. Michèle looks over her shoulder as she stands in line. I don’t move a muscle.
The hell with Natalie. Michèle has her own destiny. Tokyo, here she comes.
The train slides to a stop. The rush of unloading; new people fumble for seats. The whistle blows. The doors close.
Sealed in the power of speed, barreling through the dark, the tip of the Drying Pole cuts through Musashi’s red headband. It flies through the air. A smile flits across Ganryu’s face. He mistakes the headband for his opponent’s head. The next moment his skull is shattered under the blow of Musashi’s sword. The island is silent. Only the sound of a winged bird overhead.
Musashi walks the ten paces over to the prone body and kneels. No sign of anguish or regret on Ganryu’s face. Only satisfaction at having fought a good fight. This man is the most valiant of all of Musashi’s adversaries. Never in his life would he meet another opponent like this. He bows. The battle is over.
I am crying uncontrollably. Nose running, I grope for a tissue I do not have.
But Musashi’s victory proves nothing. More people want to challenge him. His only resolve lies in the depth of his heart. He knows the confused mind is a shadow that people beat their heads against.
My head jerked up. Where was Michèle?
My mind ran the distance back to the vague voice—“It’s time to get off.” The heavy book fell between my knees and dropped to the floor. I couldn’t read or speak in this country.
I didn’t dare panic. Next stop I’d get off, cross the platform, and board the next train going in the opposite direction. What if it didn’t stop where she exited? I couldn’t think of that. What hotel? I had no idea. I had to find her.
Musashi never married his lovely Otsu. He was too busy with the Way. Be Zen now. Get back to that station. Do what you have to.
With my right hand, I grabbed my bag from the overhead rack. With my left I clutched the book the way Musashi clutched his sword. I joined the line for the stop.
I stood out on the platform among a thousand strangers. Numbers flashed; Japanese was spoken over speakers. I leaped on the next train going in the opposite direction, sat in a seat near the exit. I gauged that it must have been fifteen minutes ago—maybe twenty—since she got off. I held my breath, hoping I hadn’t jumped on an express to the heart of Tokyo.
There was an announcement. The train doors slipped open. I jumped off, frantically looking around. Was this even the right stop? I dashed down the stairs, bumping into people, stretching my neck.
There was someone in a green jacket in a row of seats. I ran over and practically jumped into the person’s lap. It wasn’t her. I backed away from the astonished man’s stare.
I was turning in circles. Someone was standing by the cans of tea. Another green jacket. A red bag at her feet. I screamed, “Michèle!”
Her head turned. I flew over and grabbed her.
“I waited. I waited for you,” she said against my chest.
“I’m here. I’m here,” I cried back.
2
Tennis
(for Katie Arnold)
When I cannot sleep I relate the old story in my head—tennis, my first taste of no mind, living on the edge of instinct. I include Jane Makowski, who did not play tennis but beat me every summer in the freestyle swim. I was repeatedly second. I accepted this and went to the courts.
Jane from Queens—short, dark skinned, white smile, curly brown hair, with a bracelet on your left wrist—where are you now? If you hadn’t beat me, I wouldn’t remember you. I hope you are well. I hope you never smoked, never got breast cancer, had as many children as you wanted, and married a good pe
rson who loved you.
It is 3:00 A.M. in a hotel in the Dordogne Valley, where at 5:00 P.M. the evening before, against all reason and instead of dinner, I had ordered a glace liégeois avec glace café. The French, when they make coffee ice cream, are serious. The rich, tawny dessert is full of caffeine. I had cursed myself to another sleepless night. Mostly I can’t get over the feel in my hand of the dark tape wound around and the heft of the handle, how the grip went down and rooted to my very feet, through the soles of my sneakers, through the asphalt of the court, down to the earth itself.
At twelve I went to summer camp and walked on a court for the first time. All first times after that didn’t matter. I held the racquet at an old-fashioned angle—straight arm, muscle bulge hardening below my unbent elbow, open swing, chest undone. Step into it, step back away, come to me, come away, unfurl the white Spalding ball, thumb and four fingers, steady wrist, my age, a dozen years. Camp Algonquin, the only camp I ever went to. My wood Slazenger, bought for twenty-five dollars at the hardware store on Hempstead Turnpike. So long ago, so young.
I loved tennis with every cell, and the amazing thing was I couldn’t do it alone. I had to have a partner. I tried the squash walls: the ball answered wrong, came back too fast, too low, too artificial, too alone. I needed others before I knew or could pronounce loneliness.
Alone on the court, I’d play with anyone who arrived—bunk 6, the nine-year-olds; the waiters at sixteen; it didn’t matter. Just play with me, hit the ball and I’ll hit it back—high fly, low slam, curve, slice, skidding, pop—pouring the life out of me.
Did I play with Melvyn Greenspan or Freddie Kornbluth or Irwin Berger at camp? I don’t think so. I kissed them through my thirteenth and fourteenth years. Irwin with the long straight nose and red freckles covering his whole body; Freddie, who is probably in jail now; and Melvyn, probably in the gambling racket. But Irwin I bet is a dentist, like his uncle Ira.
In the middle of the night I remember how I visited my grandmother in Miami Beach in December and walked away from the ocean four blocks to where a tournament was being held at Flamingo Park, sat on a green bench between the high iron fences separating the eight courts. I closed my eyes, feeling the paaa paaa paaa around me in all four directions from the felted yellow balls hitting in the magnificent center of the strings. I could tell from the sound who could play and who was faking it, who drank too much, who had wrong sex the night before, and whose wife didn’t love him. It was all men playing that afternoon, and soon my grandmother would be looking to serve me her boiled plain chicken. To return to family, I tore myself away from the hum in my body, the central hunger in my breath.
At home I grew wan in front of the television. Too easy to use the word depression. I was disappearing. At home I didn’t care about winning; I gave that up at birth—out of my mother’s belly in 1948. At home I surrendered to sadness: my mother shopping at Loehmann’s to ameliorate whispers of Auschwitz, my father split open with rage by the taste and excitement of war, and my grandparents with their immigrant dream of American success. But come each green of July and August at Summit Lake in the Adirondacks, electricity bolted through my right hand, all the way down my legs. Against Camp Ticonderoga, Camp Iroquois—the little white savages from the suburbs—I could beat them all.
Whoever invented tennis, thank you.
Who put this aspirin on my tongue? Uncle Venty, who went into partnership with Bob Shurr and a woman from Canada, who insisted on Shabbat, taught us the McGill marching song that I can still whisper some nights when all else fails. The G stands for grace and gallantry, sons and daughters of the world to be. My relative owned Camp Algonquin—the only reason I could go.
I found an opening there, not to fame and fortune but to a clarity outside the weight of history and my mother’s aggravation. The only thing playing on the field of thought was the swing, the lob, the eye narrowed on the net, the follow-through, the bounce, the splash on the other side. Far away the other campers were playing volleyball, softball. I wore my navy-blue shorts and white T-shirt.
I did not play at home, ever, until my junior year of high school, when I was dying inside. After dragging myself through the unforgiving halls of ninth and tenth grades and into the spring of my junior year, I finally tried out for third singles. The short gym teacher, Miss . . . Miss . . . Miss . . . ; I thought I’d never forget her name. Late in the season she turned in the green seat of the school bus, headed for another game: “And you, Natalie, have never missed a practice.” How could I? I had nothing else to do. I’d never go to the junior prom, never have a boyfriend, only two friends—Phyllis Di Giovanni, whose father was a garbage man, and Denise Hodges, whose mother cracked her gum while frying hamburgers over the stove.
I’d come home from games late, everyone at the table eating. I stood at the entrance of the kitchen, green linoleum spread out like an ocean between us. My father paused for a moment, a pickle in his right hand, noticing for the first time that I wasn’t there. “Where were you?”
“Tennis.”
Head nod. “Eat.”
And I joined the onrush of food.
But when Miss What’s-Her-Name had turned in the seat of that bus, even more important than tennis, she recognized me. Someone else considered me. The lost girl had a place. She held her own on the court.
I had played Massapequa that afternoon. I won the first match six-love and the second, six-one.
Going home, flushed with victory in the last seat on the bus, I sat quietly looking out the window, seeing my reflection in glass.
Two days later, Farmingdale High played Bethpage. The girl across the court with two long braided pigtails and a cracked front tooth could not return my serve, which seemed as sharp as a broken mirror. Even I was surprised by its speed. My opponent never had a chance. This time I sat behind the gym teacher in the bus going home and noticed the part in my teacher’s black hair and how the strands dangled above her shoulders.
In my freshman year in college in Washington, DC, Mark Plotkin, a future boyfriend, saw me on the courts. It was my smile, he said, when I made a good shot, swung hard, the swirl below the right toe of my rubber sneaker deepening.
How did I dare leave tennis behind, drop that true poetry for the one of words? What other things have I left? Minnesota, Ann Arbor, college, graduate school, two literary agents, a dozen houses and apartments, sex with men (though that too was a fine thing), believing Norfolk, Nebraska, was the center of America.
Not so many years from now I’ll leave the body behind. Hover unencumbered the way I did in puberty. Only then I had a fine body to reenter when I put the racquet in its wood frame, twisted the screws tight so it wouldn’t warp, tucked the two balls into my back pocket, and walked off the court into the scream of summer.
3
A Long Relationship with Zen
More than four decades is a long time to be engaged in one activity. Have I managed to do meditation every day no matter what? No. Have I often experienced states of bliss that kept me going? No. Did my knees hurt? Yes. Did my shoulders ache? Yes. Was I sometimes filled with anger, aggression, tormented by old ragged memories? Yes. Did I burn with sexual desire, crave a hot fudge sundae so bad my teeth ached? Yes.
Why did I do it? What kept me going? First, I liked that it was so simple, so dumb, so direct, so different from the constant rush of our human life. When I sat I wasn’t hurrying toward anything. The whole world, my entire inner life, was coming home to me. I was tasting my own mind; I was beginning a true relationship with myself. This was good—and it was inexpensive. All I needed was my breath, a cushion or chair, a little time.
Over the years I have heard much instruction on how to meditate. Recently I listened to someone tell students that it is better to sit for five minutes every day than for an hour three times a week. I thought, That’s good advice. Then I smiled to myself. There are no prescriptions for a long relationship. Things change. Five minutes every day might work beautifully for three months.
But then what if you miss a day or a week? Have you failed? Do you quit altogether? I hope not. But sometimes our minds set up stiff expectations, and when they’re not met, we drop the whole thing. This is just the opposite of softening the mind, which we hope will be the result of meditation.
So maybe the first rule we should begin with, if we want meditation to be in our life for a long time, is: Don’t make a rigid structure and then chastise ourselves when we don’t live up to it. Better to keep a limber mind and develop a tenderness toward existence. We missed a day? We’ll begin again the next day. There’s no race. Where are we going anyway but right where we are?
But I also want to encourage having a structure. Perhaps this is the second rule: Structure is a good thing. It’s easier to return to something solid than to an amorphous intention. So let’s begin with that five minutes—that time structure—and even clarify it more: When will I sit those five minutes? First thing in the morning? Right before I go to sleep? When the clock says noon, no matter where or what I’m doing? If a time is picked, it sturdies the practice.
And if we pick a regular place, it deepens the intention. Where will I do it? At my desk before I begin work? In front of the altar in my bedroom? Under the sycamore in the yard?
Structure allows us to drop in more simply without giving monkey mind a lot of space. What is monkey mind? You know. It’s the person in us that wiggles around a lot, that is indecisive, changes its mind, never settles, tries to talk us out of whatever we plan to do. It says: Not today, I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m worried about my exam. I can’t sit still.
Look around. Is there anyone sitting still except the floors, the walls, the mountains? Monkey mind will have a hundred reasons not to meditate. Structure helps support our urge to do it anyway. A fluid mind keeps the structure from getting rigid. A structure that worked fairly well for three years may suddenly collapse. We have a new job with different hours; we’re traveling for two months; our wife just gave birth to a second child and the house is endless chaos.