“No.” I found my voice. It was surprisingly forceful. “I’m not ready for...” My knees felt locked together.
The doctor sighed. “All right,” he said, “then we’ll just have to get out the alien probe.”
Gabrielle quickly shot him a look. “He means the sonogram.”
At that moment, nobody appreciated his weird sense of humor.
*
The only reason I was willing to lie back down was because they assured me that I didn’t have to spread my legs.
A lady came in to set up the sonogram. She was very nice and wearing patterned scrubs, which I started fixating on. The shirt had these colorful little teddy-bear angels and clouds and hearts all over it.
While she pulled in the cart and got the computer running, Gabrielle and the doctor debated. At first I could only catch bits of their conversation. A lot of it sounded straight out of science class. “Can capillary action do that?” Gabrielle didn’t sound convinced.
“Maybe if it were transmitted through sufficient mucus?” The doctor didn’t sound convinced either. They tried to keep the conversation down. They didn’t want me to hear.
“With a hypodermic?” Gabrielle was asking later.
“Sure,” the doctor replied, “semen can be introduced through a regular 21 gauge.” I shivered. I hate needles. I couldn’t hear the next bit, something about mandatory reporting, but then Gabrielle was arguing that the sonogram screen should be positioned away from me so I couldn’t see it.
“Look,” she was speaking in a murmur, “she has absolutely no memory of conception. You can’t imagine that she’s going to want to continue the pregnancy?”
The doctor turned to me and raised his voice. “What do you want, young lady? Do you want to see the fetus?”
I thought about it for a minute. I still didn’t believe there was one. “If anything really is in there,” I said, “you had better let me see it.”
*
So there we were, five people crammed into this dark room, all staring at the glowing screen, holding our breaths while the sonogram lady rubbed my belly with gel, and then this thing that, to be fair, did look an awful lot like a probe.
In the movies, when you see a sonogram, they manage to make it look like something that might actually be a baby. In real life, the picture isn’t that clear. But you can see this flicker.
It’s the heart, beating way faster than you’d think.
16
Of course I lost it and started blubbering uncontrollably. Amanda did her best to comfort me while the sonogram was still happening. But then the sonogram lady and the doctor and Gabrielle cleared out and I had a good cry.
The funny thing was, I wasn’t crying because I was upset. If it had just been a matter of trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I was pregnant, I think I would’ve mostly felt numb.
I was actually crying from relief. There had been so many things I couldn’t even hardly acknowledge, not even to myself. I hadn’t had any morning sickness yet, but for weeks I’d been fighting the tiredness, and the weird twinges, the lightheadedness, the tenderness in my breasts, and just this, well, this feeling I had.
I’d spent all this energy trying to ignore it, and now it all came crashing down on me. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t have to deny that something was happening to my body.
I might go insane trying to figure out how I’d gotten pregnant, but in a way I felt saner finally knowing that I was.
*
Once I pulled myself together and got dressed, Gabrielle came back in the room. They had figured that the fetus was ten weeks along, so I didn’t qualify for the abortion pill, and if I wanted to “do anything about it,” I needed to do it soon.
It was Thursday, and there was a huge retreat at the monastery that weekend. It was a fund-raiser, and I really felt like I had to do anything I could to help them raise funds. So it needed to wait until the following week.
I scheduled the procedure for Monday. It might’ve been more convenient to wait until closer to the next weekend, but once I knew what I was going to do, I wanted it to be over with. Gabrielle said it would be fine to do the hymenectomy right before the procedure.
I knew it was my choice what to do at that point. I didn’t have to have an abortion, but the other options seemed pretty much unthinkable.
For one thing, I didn’t know any girls who’d ever actually stayed pregnant and had a baby. I knew there were girls who did that, but they were either on reality television or went to the high school on the other side of town.
For another thing, I had no idea who the father of the thing that would become the baby was. It was definitely creepy.
I just wanted the whole weird nightmare to end. It wasn’t something I wanted to keep dealing with.
Looking back later, I realized that Gabrielle was especially focused on making sure I would be there on Monday. She kept making sure I understood what the address was, and what time I was supposed to be there. She wanted to make sure I had transportation. All this seemed somehow like more concern than she would’ve normally shown.
But at the time, it didn’t really register.
I
After that August afternoon, I learned just how many emotions a body could bear.
*
Elation, first. Delirious elation. She was mine! She loved me! Though she had not said so, how could it be doubted? All my work, everything I had braved, all my doubts—they were as nothing.
*
And then? Loss. It was almost before I left her that I began to feel it. I began to feel her coming absence, the dark cold shadow cast beyond her incandescent presence. I became anxious for her to call me back again before I was gone.
How could that body live without her arms around it, without her lips on its mouth? I asked myself this, though she had never touched them. That’s how disoriented I was.
She will beckon me once I am home, I thought. She will bid me come when it is time for her to sleep. She will Call to me in the morning, to lie with her when she wakes.
*
Agony when she did not. Days went by, and weeks. I could not linger near her dwelling, not since I had taken on that form. I tried once in the dark, lying next to the wall where I imagined her bed. But the neighbors came and went at strange hours. The threat of detection was too high.
Had she forgotten how to summon me? Was she shy of me without a storm? Why did the rest of that summer have to be so clear?
*
I waited then for September, when I knew that I in my form would find her in hers. Surely she would remember then? Surely she would be overcome as I was, and rush to greet me. There were times I thought, Oh, what will the bystanders think, to find us so embraced?
*
What is beyond agony? She did not greet me. She did not even brighten at the sight of me; there was no hint of a smile. Disbelief, it must have been. The sight of me brought anxiety to her face! She looked away!
*
And then. Horror. Doubt. Self-Loathing. What had I done? Was I a monster? Had I forced myself upon her? Were the impulses of that body more than I could harness?
I searched my memories. I was sure she had invited me. The pull had been so strong. I could remember her smiles and her sighs as I lay over her. Had I invented them to fool myself? Had I misunderstood her moans? Did she shudder now, at the thought of me?
Had I been struck by the family curse? Was I no longer a Being? Had I followed the two who had Turned before me, even without knowing?
How could our every caress have felt so pure?
*
And then, when the child cried out within her? The child to whose presence she was so obviously innocent? What was my terror then? Had I behaved like an incubus? Who was I, if I had fathered a nephel?
Had I, impassioned beyond reason, forced apart that lone round ovum and defiled it? Had I torn it so violently that it tore its own self in response, and kept on, inside her, tearing and tearing? No wonder her anatomy found my touch all but
lethal. Thank God I had not killed her.
*
I needed counsel. I needed a wise one to look into my soul—if I still had one—and tell me the truth of what I was.
*
If I failed the test, if I had become one of them, I had no choice. I would have to destroy myself.
17
After PP Amanda and I took the rest of the day off and hung out until I had to go to work. We went for a walk at the reservoir, and then we went back to her house, which we had to ourselves. Both of her parents had these high-powered jobs: her dad was a professor, and her mom was a lawyer.
Amanda asked me did I want to play iPod Tarot, but I wasn’t in the mood. She said, come on, we’ll ask it if Lilli Delaney’s had her nose done again. Although you never saw any scars, Lilli’s face did have a strangely plastic quality.
I didn’t want to play, though, ’cause I knew I couldn’t ask it the question that mattered. I couldn't ask whether or not I was doing the right thing because I couldn’t handle getting any other answer than the one I’d already come up with.
So Amanda did my nails while we watched Persuasion for probably the millionth time. Amanda liked those movies because of the costumes. I liked Persuasion because it was so dang depressing for so long that it came as an enormous relief when it was finally happy at the very end.
I usually went for something dark on my nails, you know, something that looked like it should be called Clotted Blood, but Amanda insisted on pale pink to “cheer me up.” She even put a Hello Kitty decoration on my thumb until I noticed that, with its big head and all, it kind of looked like a baby. I made her take it off.
*
At work I stood in front of the chopping board and watched my hands and the knife. The green beans would start in a pile on the left side. They’d meet the knife in the middle. The little stem nubs that were cut off would go to the right. The trimmed beans went in a bowl on the upper edge. The pile of untrimmed beans got smaller. The pile of trimmings got bigger. The bowl got fuller.
Then I moved on to the mushrooms, and something similar happened. I watched the vegetables move across the board because I couldn’t really form a thought. I was still pretty much in shock.
*
The event that weekend was going to be huge, much bigger than most events we had at the monastery. The reason it was going to be huge was that Thay was going to be there. “Thay,” which was pronounced “Tie,” like as in neck-tie, is what everyone called him, but that wasn’t his name. It was just the Vietnamese word for teacher.
When Buddhists say someone is their teacher, it’s not like your teacher in high school. More like your guru.
His real name was super hard to say and to spell. You couldn’t even tell which part was his first name and which was his last name. So I called him Thay too, even though I didn’t consider him my teacher. In any sense of the word.
Thay was this little old man, more than eighty years old, although you would’ve never guessed he was so ancient. A lot of people thought he was like a saint. For one thing, he had won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Technically, you’re not supposed to worship anything or anyone in Buddhism, but people did seem to worship Thay.
In the meditation hall, the visitors fought to sit in the spots closest to the platform that he gave the talks from, as if he were the source of some kind of energy, and the closer you sat to it, the more enlightened you’d become. Even though, of course, fighting with other people to get a good seat is not a very enlightened thing to do.
I never stayed and meditated after his talks like you were supposed to. I thought it was pretty clear that my mind didn’t have a calming mechanism, so what was the point?
*
There was no way my mom and me and Coco could cook enough food for seven hundred visitors, so starting on Friday, they got a bunch of college students to come in and help too. Which was hilarious because they spent the whole time they were working talking and laughing and listening to loud Reggae music on a player they brought with them and generally having a great time. Which, since the nuns were theoretically meditating during every waking moment, was definitely not how we usually did things in the kitchen. This, along with the pressure of cooking for all those people, made Coco extra grumpy.
I was glad the students were there. It was a good distraction for me. Eventually things got so stressful for Coco, though, that she started itching to chop stuff. That’s how she got out her frustration. Right in the middle of “One Love,” she came up next to me and basically pushed me out of the way. “Mei Mei, you go fix cushions,” she said, her hand on the knife practically before I had let go of it.
*
The meditation hall was the only nice building on campus. They really did have a private donor for that. It was a massive adobe, but real adobe, not the horrible fake stuff. And it was like a church, but not too much like a church. I think they probably didn’t want to set off anyone who’d had traumatic church experiences. I could definitely sympathize.
I took my shoes off on the porch before I stepped inside the door, the way you were supposed to. The cushions had to be arranged so that there was absolutely no space in between the big flat mats, the zabutons. You had to cram them all in. They were to keep people’s knees and ankles from falling asleep since the floor of the hall was these polished terracotta tiles that were as hard as rock.
Once the zabutons were arranged, then you put a zafu on top of each one. The zafus were the thicker cushions that people actually put under their butts. A junior nun from the group that was touring with Thay was already at work on the front part of the hall when I got there. I started helping her, working from the back.
There were a few people who had gotten there early and who were sitting in the hall, even though the registration sign-in hadn’t started. It was dim and peaceful in there.
I got more and more relaxed and fell into a groove. There was a guy on one of the cushions, sitting by himself toward the back, who seemed to be deep in meditation, so I only just glanced at him as I went past, arranging the mats around him. Then I looked again.
It was Elias.
18
There he was, with his eyes closed, just a foot or so from my face. He had—I noticed, despite my alarm—the most amazing eyelashes. They were super dark and long, the kind most guys would not have been able to carry off.
If I hadn’t been in such a calm place, I probably would’ve yelped and jumped back, but as it was, I managed to start breathing again after a second, crept quietly back from the zabuton I was on, and slowly moved to the back of the hall so he wouldn’t see me in front of him when he opened his eyes.
I took another look from behind. He was wearing a powder blue button-down and chinos—with a belt, a woven leather belt. Total geekwear. Except that, because there was nothing else geekish about him, he ended up coming off like aristocracy. This was only enhanced by the way that his wavy brown hair was getting longer and beginning to curl around his ears and on his neck.
Normally, noticing that sort of thing would make me sigh and get all stupid, but instead I stood there panicking. It seemed so unfair. The person I was usually the most eager to run into was the last person I wanted to see.
Probably it was a sign that I wasn’t capable of clear thinking, and probably it was a sign that I was a totally frivolous person, but one of the few things I’d been able to fixate on since we’d gone to PP was how my plan to repair my reputation in Elias’ eyes had totally blown up in my face.
Never mind that I was about to have a major medical procedure and possibly take an innocent life. Never mind that I had apparently been impregnated without my knowledge or consent.
Nope. I was fixated on my fantasy boyfriend. Oh, and the fact that I’d finally be able to use tampons. In moments of stress, my brain tended to focus on the insignificant details. I wasn’t proud of the fact.
But it was also weird to see someone from my school. No one, besides Amanda, knew that I worked at the mon
astery, and no one else had ever been there—well except Lilli, and she was focused on other things at the time. Seeing someone from school suddenly made the monastery seem strange to me all over again.
So for a moment after I saw him, I was worried that Elias would think I was a freak if he saw me there. And then, of course, I realized that he himself, technically, was the freak for being there and medi-friggi-tating and all.
He definitely seemed to know what he was doing. His spine was perfect. He could’ve been posing for a Buddha statue the way he sat with his legs folded. Go figure.
I wasn’t going back to doing the cushions. He’d see me for sure. I slipped out of the building, noticing a pair of really classy loafers that I’d ignored earlier, right next to where I’d left my shoes. I made a beeline for the registration table, trying to look casual.
One of the brothers was putting out the lists of people who had signed up to come to the retreat. I looked through the one marked M-Z, but there was no Zimmer listed. Elias or otherwise. I relaxed.
I told myself it was just someone who looked like him. Probably stress, or maybe wishful thinking, had made me imagine I’d seen him in the hall.
19
At ten o’clock that night the kitchen was still ablaze with light and bustling with activity. The abbess had come over and made the students turn off the radio and keep the talking down, since there were a bunch of people trying to sleep in tents nearby, but there was still a lot going on. Some of the nuns were setting up breakfast for the next morning. Most of us were chopping like mad. It’s amazing how many vegetables you need to make vegetarian meals.
It wasn’t easy keeping my eyes open. That fall, what with being pregnant and all, I often ended up in bed by nine-thirty, so it was past my bedtime, and I was getting tired. Tired wasn’t really even the word for it. Being tired when you’re pregnant isn’t the same as being normal tired. Normal tired is just something that happens to your body and you can usually pretty much handle it.
Pregnant tired feels like someone has injected a drug into your veins that makes you even more tired than you ever thought you could be, and then they just keep shooting more and more of it into your system until you have to give in and lie down. Really. It’s almost scary.