13a. An Entire New Universe

“Few people had the awareness I now possessed. Because of my limitations an entire new universe had revealed itself to me, a benign and living hyperenvironment endowed with absolute wisdom.” —Philip K. Dick.

The sun was setting as they finally turned off the state road and onto North Middleton Road, which led to Main Street. Jen had spent the last hour falling in and out of a shallow sleep. Every time she opened her eyes, she looked warily out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of some more welcoming terrain: hills, forests, a quaint little town. Each time she was disappointed to find that the flat, bare fields persisted, appearing all the more ominous in the darkening twilight.

At first, North Middleton also looked like a barren field. The theoretically major road that they exited onto was so bumpy and worn that Jen thought it might not actually be paved. Leaning forward to peer through the windshield, Jen thought she could see something like a town looming ahead in the dim light.

“Welcome to North Middleton,” said Paula, yawning as she spoke.

“Stop it,” snapped Becky. “No sounding sleepy. I still have—” she squinted at the GPS screen—“four miles to drive.”

“And that’s just to the center of town,” Paula added. “Then the real driving begins.”

As they drove further down the road, the dark shape that Jen had seen grew closer and larger, until it formed into a gigantic cement wall on the right side of the car, which continued for what would have been blocks and blocks if there were any cross-streets.

“The Snail Plant,” said Paula, turning to look at Jen in the back seat.

“It’s huge,” said Jen, shocked that anything so large and solid could have appeared in the middle of so much nothingness.

“It has to be,” Paula responded. “They’re building giant machines in there—digging machines and dump-trucks and…backhoes.” Paula struggled to think of the names.

Once the factory wall ended, the surroundings changed to look more like a real town. Trees lined the streets, and Jen saw the lights of what appeared to be little shops and businesses.

“Turn left onto Main Street,” said the GPS. Paula reached up and clicked it off.

“We’re here,” she said. “This is the university.”

Off to the left side of the road, there was a grassy hill lined with mismatched stone walls and arches. Jen couldn’t see much of it in the dark, but she could make out figures, presumably students, trudging along the sidewalk.

“We’ll get the tour tomorrow,” said Becky impatiently. "How do I get to…” She stopped, uncertainly.

“Cone,” said Paula, adding a mnemonic to help Becky remember: “Like ‘cone.’”

Jen was tired enough to think this was funny. She began giggling uncontrollably, despite her nervousness, or perhaps because of it. Becky didn’t laugh, but stared resolutely ahead at the road.

Getting to Cone involved driving to the opposite end of Main Street, turning right, and following an actual unpaved road (it felt even bumpier than North Middleton Road, Jen thought) for about three miles. The lake house was on a little dirt road off of this main dirt road. At least the terrain had finally shifted, Jen thought; they were now surrounded by a dense forest that began as soon as they turned off Main Street. Jen marveled that this dark, shadowy woodland could exist just miles from the flat, treeless expanses of the state highway.

By the time they pulled in front of the house, Becky was as grumpy as Jen had ever seen her. She rushed them into the house, snapping at Jen to leave the luggage in the car. “We need to get inside and see if there’s anything to eat in there. Otherwise we have to go back out,” she said.

Luckily, the house was well-stocked with canned food. Becky and Paula heated up vegetarian chili and served it with toasted bread from the freezer. While they worked in the kitchen, Jen toured the house.

The first room from the front door was the living room, small and cozy with large windows and a fireplace. Behind it was the kitchen, which had a view of the backyard, and beyond that, the lake. It didn’t look like much in the dark, just a large, black void between the trees, but Paula assured Jen that it was very pretty in the day. Upstairs there was a loft and two small bedrooms, one of which also functioned as an office with a little desk and a bookshelf. She liked this room and thought perhaps it would be the one she would sleep in. The bookshelf made her nervous, though, positioned precariously across from the bed. She wouldn’t want it to fall on her in her sleep; no one would ever know to come save her out here.

She asked Paula about the room as they dipped their toast in the chili. “Is that bookshelf upstairs safe across from the bed?”

“You’re thinking like a Californian,” Paula responded bluntly. “There aren’t earthquakes here.”

“Oh,” said Jen, who had forgotten that earthquakes weren’t a universal phenomenon. But couldn’t other things knock a bookshelf down, she wondered? “What about tornadoes?” she asked.

“If there’s a tornado, you need to go in the basement,” Paula said. “By the time it gets here, the bookshelf is going to be the last thing you’ll need to worry about.”

Jen hadn’t realized that there was a basement. Paula showed it to her after dinner—an unobtrusive doorway opening up to a creepy staircase draped with spider webs. “It’s actually okay down there,” said Paula, seeing Jen’s frightened face. “I’ll dust those off later.”

Before bed, Paula and Becky decided to “ground” the house, a Groundbreakers ritual for initiating a new living space. Jen had seen the procedure before—it involved copper rods and energy-cleansing verbal affirmations—and she didn’t feel the need to participate. They started down in the scary basement, in order to build a solid foundation, and planned to work their way up through every room of the house.

Jen decided to check out the books in her new bedroom instead. She climbed the narrow staircase up to the loft and sat down on the bed across from the bookshelf. On the wall next to the shelf hung a collection of photographs, all featuring the same two people. One was a fit, tanned, middle-aged woman with light-brown hair, presumably Paula’s mother. The other was a light-skinned black man with long dreadlocks that were much neater than Paula’s. “Her husband,” Jen guessed, wondering how he felt about Paula’s unkempt hair.

Jen scanned the shelves, looking for which books she might want to read. She had finished Siddhartha a few weeks ago, and then reread it. Now she was reading another gift book, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, but she was almost done with that one as well. She hadn’t brought any other books but those two, and she planned to be spending a lot of time by herself.

As she scanned the shelf, Jen realized that she was not just looking for a book, but for an answer, a direction. Her life, right at this moment, was possibly the most radically unstructured that it had ever been. She had no plan; she did not know where she was; left to her own devices, she would barely be able to find her way back into town. And Becky and Paula would be leaving in a week—then she would be all alone, left to entertain herself in this creepy house surrounded by hundreds of miles of alien terrain. She scanned the shelf with the needy desperation of someone praying for an easy cure. Like a dieter trying to get full at a salad bar, like the frustrated men lining the floor of the dance club at last call, waiting for anyone at all to come along and save them from the lonely, humiliating drive home alone.

Looking at the bindings filling the top shelf, Jen noticed an array of thin, spidery letters and baroque flourishes. These were texts on spirituality, she realized, looking at the titles: Sun Worship: The Ancient Way stood next to a book about the Kabala. One deep blue book was called Zen Buddhism and Modern Sexuality; she shuddered, thinking of Skipper.

She scanned down the shelves, trying to identify the other subject groupings. The next shelf down had a number of travel books promising to guide readers through such disparate terrain as Bali and Java and The Dunes of North-Western Michigan. Next to that was a special section on physical activities. These were mostly yoga: Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, next to Yoga for Baby and You!. But next to that, a book about tai chi and another about sea kayaking.

Jen squatted down to look at the shelf second from the floor: bold letters and bright primary colors marked the bindings of the self-help books. Your Money and Your Life, shouted one. And Making Love Work. Jen was scandalized when her eyes fell upon Open Marriages Today—she quickly lowered her eyes to the bottom shelf.

Jen scanned this last shelf, puzzled by what joined the books here. Even their bindings evinced no clear trend—some were brightly colored, some light and modest. Many were worn by heavy use, so that it was impossible to read their titles. Jen pulled on of these from the shelf, a medium-sized paperback whose cover was held on with masking tape.

Diagnose Your Aura, the book’s cover exclaimed, in rainbow-colored letters.

“Hmm,” said Jen aloud, in a world-weary tone that sounded as though she were highly skeptical. She matched it with a suspicious facial expression, her eyes narrowed and her mouth pursed into a bit of a sneer.

And yet, she realized suddenly, she was acting. Acting for no one, since there was no one around to witness her honest curiosity as she flipped through the pages. She knew exactly what Becky would call this, she thought, with an unnerving jolt of recognition: mind-havoc. Lying to yourself to live up to an expected idea of who you should be.

Fine, she thought. I’m not embarrassed. I’m going to see what my aura is.

Her inclination was to stay near the bookshelf so she could put the book back if Becky and Paula returned. But instead she carried the book to head of the bed, where she could sit and read it in full self-acceptance of her own ridiculousness.

Sitting cross-legged against the headboard, she set the book in her lap. It fell open to a page towards the end that had clearly been read more than all the others. The heading on the page said “Amethyst.”

Whoever owned this book, this must have been their aura—probably Paula’s mother, Jen thought, trying and failing to imagine that dreadlocked man from the photograph obsessively studying his own aura.

The page opened with a short overview of the aura’s characteristics. She read the opening lines: “The Amethyst aura denotes charisma, flamboyance, and decadence. People with this aura tend to be performers such as musicians, dancers, and actors.”

Don’t let that be my aura, Jen thought, in a desperate, unconscious prayer. She flipped the pages of the book, looking for descriptions of the other auras. She passed the more detailed sections about each aura, with headings like career, money, and love. Towards the back of the book was a long list of questions; it was the test to diagnose one’s own aura, she realized.

Finally she found another page with a large heading, this time “Ruby.” The overview in this section said, “Ruby is the aura of action. People with Ruby auras are adventurers and world-travelers. They are often impulsive and don’t always think through their actions.” This sounded better than the amethyst aura, but not by much. Jen wondered if any of the auras had favorable traits or if they were all just subtly differentiated gradations of obnoxiousness.

She kept flipping, hoping to find an aura that she actually liked the description of. The next one she found was Sapphire. “This aura indicates someone who is brave, trustworthy, and principled,” the book said. Better, Jen thought, continuing to read. “People with Sapphire auras tend to work as school teachers, nurses, fire fighters or police officers.”

This aura sounded admirable, but Jen was pretty sure it didn’t describe her. She needed to find one that she wanted to be, so that she would know what to hope for as she took the test.

“Onyx,” was the next aura that Jen found. “An Onyx aura generally indicates one of two things,” the book said. “It may be found when the subject is at a very dark point at his or her life, such as a deep depression or rage. The other colors of the aura become muted as the Life Force is obstructed by negative emotions.”

Jen read on, intrigued to find out the other reason that someone might have an Onyx aura. Perhaps this was her aura, and some dark spell was hanging over her. Maybe the book would tell her some way to clear her energy and make her aura shine with a new, healthier color.

“However, some people purposely cultivate an Onyx aura,” the book continued. “These people are usually involved in the dark arts, such as sorcerers and vampires.”

All right then, Jen thought, trying to calmly withhold judgment, but her embarrassment was rising again as she flipped hastily away from this section of the book.

Jen worried that she had read about all of the auras without finding one that seemed to fit her personality. She thumbed hastily through the pages but kept finding the same auras: Amethyst, Ruby, Sapphire, Onyx. Finally, in frustration, she opened to the table of contents and found that there was one final aura described at the end of the book, right before the test: Jade. She turned hopefully to the listed page.

“The Jade aura reflects contemplation, self-discipline, and an even temper,” it said. This sounded pretty good, Jen thought; maybe this was the one. “People with this aura tend to work in spiritual professions such as priests, rabbis, or monks. They might also be teachers of energetic practices such as yoga or martial arts.”

Okay, thought Jen, slamming the book closed in satisfaction. There’s my aura. She held the closed book in her lap for a moment, thinking pleasurably of the Jade aura and how it would confirm her new ascetic lifestyle, before remembering that she should take the test in order to consider herself fully “diagnosed.” Now she felt a bit nervous, as she realized that the book might not agree with her own self-assessment. Anything but Amethyst, she pled silently to the book. Even Onyx would be better than Amethyst.

Chapter 13b:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/13b-unfortunate-tendency.html

12. A Strange Life

“Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him.” —Hermann Hesse

For the first time in over a month, Jen was eating a regular breakfast. On the plate in front of her were two little crumpets that Becky had bought at the bakery. Becky was having hers with jam and butter. Jen wanted to eat hers plain, but Becky convinced her to spread a tiny bit of butter on the top. The crumpet tasted good with the butter, Jen thought, sort of comforting, but so rich that it made her queasy. She couldn’t imagine how her body would get used to eating food like this every day, not to mention more than once a day.

She sipped her tea between bites, thankful that breaking her fast did not require her to stop dousing all her food with lemon juice. The strong lemon flavor in the tea cut through the heavy flavors of butter and white flour, helping her tolerate just a bit more than she would have expected.

Becky finished her own crumpets quickly, then pulled another one from the small white bakery bag and lowered it into one of the six slots on Jen’s fancy bagel toaster. As Becky waited for it to brown, she sat across the high counter from Jen, watching her eat. Jen felt the instinctive urge, ingrained from years of photo ops at fancy parties, to put her food down the moment she perceived someone’s gaze on her. But realizing that Becky was judging her appetite, she instead took an ambitious bite out of her buttered crumpet. It was a lot to chew, and she found her jaw moving in that resolute way that happens when people are trying force down food they don’t like.

“Does your side hurt a lot?” Becky asked.

“Not too bad,” answered Jen truthfully, mumbling through her still half full mouth. Becky had given her a second pain pill to eat with breakfast, but, deciding it might be a bad idea to take pills, she hid it in the pocket of her sweatpants instead. Her side felt a little funny when she breathed regularly, and there was a sharp, shooting pain if she inhaled deeply. When she had undressed the night before, she had noticed a funny bump, like a small bone jutting out of her abdomen. Other than that, she just felt a bit sore and queasy. She had woken up in the morning feeling like she might throw up; still, she felt determined to eat a nutritious breakfast, both for her own body’s health and to help her get what she wanted from Becky.

Becky seemed to consider her answer for a moment, looking thoughtful and worried. “Is something wrong?” she asked after a moment.

Jen gulped the crumpet down. “What do you mean?” she asked. She wondered if her nausea was obvious to read on her face.

“If you’re still mad at me, you should tell me,” said Becky, leaning closer in over the counter that separated them. The stream of bright morning sun from the skylight hit Becky’s upper arm, which looked particularly wiry and well-defined by the angular light. Jen thought of how Becky’s arms looked when she did a low yoga pushup, the triceps flexed and held close to her body.

“Why would I be mad at you?” asked Jen, although she knew the answer.

Becky let out one little “hah” of a humorless laugh. “That’s very generous,” she said. There was a snapping sound as her crumpet popped up out of the toaster. Becky turned her back to Jen as she went to retrieve it. She pulled the crumpet out carefully, with two fingers, and tossed it onto her plate. “For ignoring you for the past month,” she said, carrying the plate back over to the counter across from Jen.

“No,” said Jen, “I’m not mad at you.” She thought of how guilty she had felt for causing Becky all that trouble by getting herself into the tabloids in such a degrading fashion. If anything, it had been a relief not to have to face her every day. She just hoped her own distance had made Becky’s job easier rather than more difficult. “You needed a break from me,” she said.

Jen popped the last large bite of her second crumpet into her mouth and chewed hard. She swallowed triumphantly, proud and excited to be finished with her first meal of her first full post-fast day.

“Do you want another one?” Becky asked. Despite all of her resolutions to eat heartily, Jen couldn’t bear the thought of a third crumpet. The other two were already sitting heavily in her stomach, which still felt bloated from her meal the night before. “No, thanks,” she said.

Becky surveyed her skeptically for a moment more “Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asked. “Did something happen?”

“No, nothing happened,” said Jen, trying to sound nonchalant. The truth was that Jen was not sure herself whether something had happened. She had a suspicion that she had not yet shaped into words, exactly, even in her own mind. Everything had changed since yesterday, and she needed to figure out exactly what this change meant. Or perhaps she knew already, but wasn’t ready to face it with certainty. She felt like she was keeping a secret, not from Becky, but from herself.

As she thought about secrets, Jen suddenly remembered how sullen Chase had seemed the evening before. He had been quiet in the car and downright silent at dinner. After dinner, instead of sleeping over like he so often did, he took off in the low black convertible that he usually only drove between his house and Jen’s because Becky preferred to drive the two of them around in her tiny, fuel-efficient car.

“What was up with Chase yesterday?” asked Jen, as much to change the subject as to find out the answer. “He seemed upset.”

Jen expected Becky to launch into a funny story about whatever Chase’s problem was: a bad audition, a job that hadn’t panned out. Or maybe some kind of frivolous fight between himself and Becky that Becky would want to complain about.

Instead, Becky was silent for a moment, frowning. Then she said, “He’s fine. Just stressed out.” Looking tense and distracted, Becky picked up Jen’s plate and carried it over to the sink. Jen hadn’t noticed until now that Becky’s face looked strained, with little wrinkles showing around her mouth and eyes.

Jen hadn’t been seriously worried about Chase until Becky gave her this evasive answer. Suddenly she felt panicky. Whatever was going on must be pretty serious if Becky didn’t want to tell her about it. Was he sick? She hadn’t paid much attention to his appearance last night; she had been too exhausted and focused on her own problems. Or maybe something was wrong with Becky, something bad that Becky wasn’t telling her. But then Chase wouldn’t have left, Jen reasoned, feeling only a little guilty at her relief. It must be something going on with him.

Jen decided that, at least on her end, this withholding of secrets would stop. If she couldn’t tell Becky what was on her mind, she could at least tell her what she planned to do about it.

“You know, I do have something I need to tell you,” said Jen.

Becky pivoted anxiously away from the sink and towards Jen, knocking the butter knife in her hand against the electric mixer as she turned.

“What is it?” said Becky, her upset tone showing that she was waiting for bad news.

“Well,” said Jen, unsure how to start. “You know Paula’s mom’s lake house in Michigan?”

“No,” said Becky. Jen was puzzled; how could Becky have forgotten?

“I mean, no, you can’t go there,” added Becky in an authoritative voice.

Jen hadn’t realized just how excited she was for her trip until Becky said this. She felt a sinking disappointment at the thought of not leaving, of not getting out of Los Angeles, of having to deal with everything she was about to deal with in a city full of actors and reporters and photographers.

“Is someone else staying there?” Jen said, realizing that she was ready to make a deal, to share the space somehow. Or else she would just have to rent someplace, to set it up on her own. That might be better, she tried to convince herself. That way she wouldn’t be restrained to northern-central Michigan. She could go anywhere she wanted. But in her heart she knew that the specificity of the lake house, and the lack of necessary decisions it provided, was what made the voyage so appealing.

“No,” said Becky. “No one’s staying there, and I don’t think you should, either. I don’t know what I was thinking letting Paula talk me into that. I thought somehow it would be good for you to get away for a while, but now I see that you shouldn’t be isolated like that, by yourself in the middle of nowhere, where you don’t know anybody.”

Becky’s face, which had looked pale and drawn a moment before when they had talked about Chase, now looked flushed and blotchy. Jen tried to interrupt her, but she continued, her voice rising considerably out of her usual calm yoga-teacher register.

“And now if you’re going to go off there and make yourself miserable in some kind of passive-aggressive attempt to get even with me, well that just seems like a really stupid decision and I’m not going to let you do it.”

Taking a deep breath, Jen utilized her own yoga-bred powers of restraint to keep herself from yelling a number of obvious facts back at Becky: I’m an adult. It’s my money. You can’t tell me what to do.

I could fire her, Jen thought, kick her out, sell the house, and move away on my own.

But of course, this was a ridiculous and impractical way to think because Jen was not going to do any of these things. It was a waste of energy to even indulge in such thoughts, to make fantasy plans for the mere sake of spiting Becky. Besides, without Becky, Jen wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about selling the house or moving out of state.

What I need to do, Jen realized, is direct my energy to get what I want. She took another deep breath and drew up all of her will from the farthest corners of her bodily extremities, from the smallest capillaries in each little finger and toe up through the veins and tendons of her arms and legs, and into the large, open cavity of her chest where it swirled through her lungs and organs, so that she could speak honestly, persuasively, and directly from her heart. She felt still and calm and assured when she spoke.

“Becky,” said Jen. “I am not angry with you or trying to upset you. I very much want to go away for a while. I would like you to buy plane tickets for three weeks from today. I am going to spend the next three weeks eating healthy, taking care of myself, and putting things in order here. At the end of three weeks, if you still don’t think I should go, I won’t.”

Jen felt something funny as she spoke. She looked straight into Becky’s gray eyes, the color brightened by the slanted light from above, and she felt that she was pushing Becky. She felt like she had crouched low with her legs and back, summoned all of her strength, and pushed hard into Becky’s stomach, and that, although Becky was stronger than her, she could not resist the force of the push, and instead fell straight over onto her back.

Becky must have felt something too, because she shook her head, as though to awaken herself from a trance. Jen saw then in Becky’s eyes that she would agree, but that she was sorry for Jen to go, that she would be lonely without her.

“Okay,” said Becky. “If that’s what you really want.” And she smiled a weak and sad smile at Jen.

Three weeks later, Becky, Paula, and Jen landed in Detroit. Paula hadn’t wanted to come, but Becky made her. “You can’t expect us to set up in your mom’s house without you,” said Becky reproachfully. “It’s just one week.”

Chase had not come with them. Whatever his secret problem was, it seemed to exempt him from Becky’s coercion. When Becky had booked the tickets, Jen wondered whether Chase was included, but she had been too scared to ask. After all, she was supposed to be on her best behavior, and there was no sense in getting Becky upset.

They had flown business class; it was Paula’s first time. She cooed in excitement at the reclining seat and the footrest. When the food came, she exclaimed, “It actually looks good!” But she was most impressed by the hot facecloths the stewardess brought after lunch. “It’s like being in a spa,” she sighed, pressing her face into the towel. Jen, who had flown on private jets plenty of times, shot a guilty look at Becky; Becky’s slight eye roll in return indicated that Jen shouldn’t feel bad about it.

The festive business-class mood of the airplane dissolved once they reached the Detroit airport. It was crowded and hectic, and even Paula wasn’t sure which direction to head from the gate to find the luggage claim. Jen felt nervous; she was in a new place, somewhere she had never been before, and she was staying for an unspecified amount of time. After a week, Becky and Paula would fly back to Los Angeles, and Jen would need to figure out how she was going to fill her time for the next few months. For the next few seasons, a voice in her head whispered. For the next year. Jen tried to ignore it and think of the present, the next week, a vacation with Becky and Paula, in a cabin by a beautiful, tranquil lake.

Unfortunately, Paula and Becky were not currently seeming like the most fun people to spend a week with. Despite her enjoyment of the flight, Paula seemed furious to find herself in Michigan. Once Becky identified the route to the luggage claim, Paula walked ten paces ahead of Becky and Jen. Becky was also quiet and preoccupied, following Paula’s lead with a grim, business-like gait. Paula stood cracking her knuckles and staring distantly at the far wall as she and Jen had waited for Becky to get the luggage from the carousel: three large suitcases full of Jen’s clothing, toiletries, and a few books, a smaller suitcase with Becky’s clothes for the week, and a duffel back for Paula, who liked to travel light. All in all, this was not looking like a promising week, Jen thought, suddenly feeling much less reluctant to see her two friends return to Los Angeles.

Before they left the airport, Becky said she needed a snack. Jen thought this was odd; they had been fed plentifully on the plane, and Becky had finished Jen’s leftovers. The food Becky chose from the little gift shop wasn’t exactly nourishing, either—a bottle of fizzy water and a pack of chewy ginger candies. Jen waited with her by the register while Paula stood outside, guarding the luggage. Jen stared resolutely at the area around the cash register, her back turned to the colorful wall of magazines behind her. But there was one magazine displayed by the registers that she hadn’t noticed, and, as she glanced idly at the display of Detroit key chains and hockey pucks on the counter, her eyes fell upon her own photograph. It was a particularly unflattering one; her skin was pale and ashy, her eyes were darting wildly to the side, and her cheeks were gaunt and sickly-looking. It was a small close-up, shot through a crowd of people and then enlarged.

“Jen’s breakdown,” the headline across her chest read, and below it, “Why the emaciated star was rushed from an Encino health club.”

For the first time in years, looking at her own face on a magazine cover, Jen smiled to herself. “Find me now, assholes,” she thought happily, turning to follow Becky from the store.

They rented a car with a global positioning system, which Paula said she needed to find North Middleton.

“Doesn’t your mom live there?” Becky, who had an excellent sense of direction, asked scornfully. She was sitting in the driver’s seat, and Paula was sitting up front with her to help with directions.

“Only in the summer,” said Paula. “It’s a lake house.” Paula’s mother and her husband lived in Toledo the rest of the year, but Paula had mentioned that she didn’t like visiting them there, either.

“How many times have you been to this lake house?” asked Becky skeptically, as they pulled out of the rental lot.

“Turn left onto East Airport Road,” said the gently assertive voice of the GPS.

“Not that many,” said Paula, defiantly. “At all. I told you, I don’t spend a lot of time in Michigan.”
No one spoke much as Becky drove. She followed the GPS lady’s directions out of the airport and onto the highway. Paula stared moodily out the window, now and then letting out a depressed sigh.

The back seat of the car was leathery and slippery. Every time Becky made a turn, Jen slid to one side or the other, restrained only by her lap belt, her right hand grabbing the handle above the window, and her left had splayed bracingly across the seat. Her rib was feeling much better than when she first injured it, but each time she gasped at Becky’s reckless driving a deep stitch of pain shot down her right side. And she was growing more nauseated with each turn, as though the insides of her stomach and head were spinning centrifugally into mush.

She tried to ease her growing carsickness by focusing harder on the view from the window. Near the airport, the scenery was gray and industrial, with high walls on either side of the road. Smokestacks peered up from behind the walls, pouring filtered white smoke into the air. Jen wondered what the landscape would be like in this mysterious new place she was headed to.

“Bear right onto exit forty-six,” said the calm voice, after five silent minutes. Becky turned onto a long exit ramp that followed the highway for a few hundred feet before veering more sharply to the right and joining a new, flatter, greener road.

This new flat road was lined with trees. The trees were tall and straight and planted close together. Behind the trees were green fields that continued straight through to the horizon. With no hills to break up the background, every detail of the landscape seemed scandalously exposed, like an oil painting unclothed down to its perspective lines. Jen could not remember being anywhere so flat and geometrical and green before in her life. In Los Angeles, the hills were brown and scorched all year long. Some people had green lawns watered heavily with sprinklers, but these looked so artificial in the heat that most residents had replaced them with draught-resistant native plants, sandy gray-green succulents.

“Continue for one hundred and ninety-two miles,” said the GPS voice. Paula sighed audibly in protest; Becky cleared her throat loudly in reply. Jen could see Becky trying to catch Paula’s eye to shoot her an irritated look, but every time she turned her face from the road ahead, Paula shifted her own face further towards the passenger-side window.

“It’s so green,” said Jen, leaning her head up between the two front seats so Becky and Paula could hear her.

“This is only spring,” said Paula. “It gets greener in summer.”

“Wow,” said Jen, who couldn’t imagine summer being a season of verdant health; in both LA and Manhattan, summer meant heat rising off pavement, dirty smells, sweaty bodies with ugly, sunburned shoulders.

Jen closed her eyes for a while. She was not sure for how long; she could hear occasional murmured comments exchanged between Becky and Paula, but couldn’t make out what they were saying over the whirring of the car’s engine and the air rushing past her window. She may have been asleep, or perhaps half-asleep, if such a thing actually existed.

When she opened her eyes again, something looked so odd about the scene outside the window that she had to rub her eyes repeatedly, and blink forcefully, to convince herself that she was not perceiving it incorrectly. What she saw looked like a map. Or perhaps like some sort of unfinished movie set. The road had become narrower, and it was stretched across the middle of one of the endless flat fields that had startled Jen earlier. There were no trees now, just one flat, grassy field that spread from one end of the horizon to the other. Jen could see other roads in the distance, like this one, with a few tiny cars traveling on them, and other roads even further past those.

“Is this what North Middleton looks like?” she asked, the panic evident in her voice.

“This is why I never want to come to Michigan,” said Paula, sighing again.

“Paula,” said Becky sternly.

“No,” said Paula, collecting herself and trying to sound a little perkier. “We’re still nowhere near North Middleton. North Middleton is a town. Mid-Northern-Central Michigan University is there. And the Snail plant.”

“Snail plant?” asked Becky.

“Snail Construction and Mining Equipment,” said Paula.

Becky became suddenly excited. “No way!” she exclaimed, happily. “They’re one of the major corporate sponsors of Groundbreakers.”

“Really?” asked Paula, sounding as animated as Becky. For the first time since leaving the rental car lot, they both seemed pleased about what lay ahead. “I never knew that. I’ve been seeing the factory every time I visit my mom out here, and I never knew they were a sponsor.”

“Yeah, you have to look on the back of the literature. There’s always this little Snail logo there.”

“I’ve seen it!” said Paula. “That little snail with the mining helmet. I never put it together that that’s what it meant.”

Becky nodded. “That snail is responsible for allowing Groundbreakers to grow into a national movement,” she said.

“And it like single-handedly sparked the growth of North Middleton into an independent town, back in the fifties,” said Paula. “I guess I never appreciated it before.”

“You know,” said Becky, “Nikolai Snail is really good friends with Vanto Hatch.”

“Nikolai Snail lives just outside North Middleton!” said Paula. “We used to see him walking his dog at the bar all the time.”

“He walked his dog at the bar?” asked Becky.

“Yeah, well he’d stop in while he walked his dog. Then he’d stay and have a few drinks, and the dog would sit on the floor. I heard he sometimes bought rounds for everybody in the bar,” said Paula in a reverent tone. “But that never happened when I was there.”

“Are dogs allowed in bars in Michigan?” Becky asked.

“Nikolai Snail’s dog is allowed anywhere Nikolai Snail pleases,” said Paula. “He owns North Middleton. I think two-thirds of the people in North Middleton work at Snail. The rest mostly work for the university.”

“Is the house near the university?” Jen asked, happy to change the subject. She felt relieved to know that there was some kind of civilization where she would be living. Looking out at the sparse Midwestern fields, which appeared to her about as desolate as the moon, Jen chastised herself for having craved isolation, and marveled at her own naiveté about what isolation really could be. You had no idea what you were getting yourself into, she thought, shaking her head silently. At least the she would be living in a town. The idea of a university, even of a factory, suddenly seemed remarkably comforting.

“The house isn’t actually in North Middleton,” said Paula. “It’s in Cone.”

“Where’s Cone?” Jen asked, getting worried again.

“It’s about three miles north of North Middleton.”

“Why did you tell me to drive to North Middleton?” asked Becky, sounding puzzled and a little irritated. “You even gave me an address.”

“That was a random address on Main Street. I know how to get to the house from there.”

This answer did not satisfy Becky. “But,” she said, followed by a long pause as though she were searching for the best way to formulate such a ridiculous question. “Why didn’t we just put the address of the house into the GPS?”

Paula sighed dramatically. “Well,” she said, “first of all, the house doesn’t have an address.”

“Hmm,” said Becky. “Okay, what’s second?”

“Second is that addresses in Cone don’t usually show up on maps,” said Paula. “It’s an unincorporated township.”

Jen didn’t know what that meant, but the words scared her. They sounded like she was about to fall off the edge of the continent, and into some strange wilderness that no longer counted as part of America.

“Unincorporated township,” repeated Becky, her forcibly enthusiastic tone threatening to break through into the darkest sort of sarcasm. “Doesn’t that sound relaxing, Jen?”

Chapter 13a:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/13a-entire-new-universe.html

11. The Result of What We Have Thought

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become." --The Dhammapada

Jen sat on a bench in a tiny staff office, holding an icepack against her right side with her left hand. Paula had spent the last ten minutes filling out injury report paperwork at a little desk that was crammed into the back corner of the room. The doctor, who had introduced herself as Camilla, sat next to Jen on the bench, flipping through a magazine about decorating houses that had been lying on one of the nearby treadmills. Jen wished that she had gotten a magazine, too, to distract her from the pain in her side, the throbbing in her head, and Paula’s officious interrogation as she filled out her form. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the page Camilla was reading. It said “Simplify your life” in large letters, and featured a number of hooks and cubbies that could be installed in one’s hallway. The colors on the page were soothing, turquoise and cream-colored, as though these were the only colors of jackets and sweaters owned by the residents of the hallway.

Bending intently over her paperwork and chewing on the end of a pen, Paula grilled Jen on the specifics of her accident. “You were doing the pose, and then what happened?” she asked.

“The room started spinning,” said Jen. It was still difficult to get a deep breath, so she spoke quietly. “And I guess I fell.” She tried to give the most feasible, and shortest, version of the story possible. She hoped Paula and Camilla wouldn’t probe further, because she herself wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. She didn’t feel that she had lost consciousness; in fact, she still felt fairly certain that she had floated, as unlikely as that sounded. Floated like Icarus, and then like Icarus, failed to reach her goal and crashed to the ground and broke her body. She had almost been there. But where was she going? What had she been about to discover? What was her mind and body about to give birth to? She felt overwhelmed by these questions, restless and anxious to know what was happening to her.

The room seemed to speed and blur like a spaceship launching into warp speed. She was disoriented now, but she had the strong perception that she was about to emerge into some great realization, some moment of clarity.

“Did you faint?” Paula asked.

Jen had never fainted before, so she didn’t know what it felt like. Still, she was fairly certain that she hadn’t fainted.

“I guess,” she said, remembering that the simplest explanation was usually the most persuasive.

“Okay,” said Paula. She leaned over the paper, muttering the words aloud as she wrote. “Client saw room spinning, then fell. May have fainted.”

“She fainted,” said Camilla matter-of-factly, confirming Jen’s hunch that this was the simplest and most feasible explanation. In fact, Camilla sounded so certain that for a moment, Jen began to doubt her own version of the story. Perhaps she had in fact fainted. And if so, why would she faint? What was her body doing?

Lifting her head a little further from the sheet of paper, Paula began to read a series of easier questions aloud to Jen. Jen tried to answer in whatever way would get her out of this office the fastest. Becky was coming to pick her up, and Jen wanted to leave as soon as she got here.

“Do you have any medical condition that you have not disclosed on your membership forms?”

“No,” said Jen, who didn’t remember filling out any membership forms; Paula must have done it for her to simplify things when Jen first started attending her classes.

“Do you feel light-headed or dizzy?” Paula asked.

“No,” lied Jen, not wanting Paula or Camilla to know how the room was spinning and whirring around her.

Paula checked a little box on the sheet. “Not dizzy,” she said to herself. She looked up at Jen kindly. “Well, that’s good. You’re feeling better,” she said, finally sounding more like a friend than a triage nurse on the late shift.

“Uh huh,” said Jen.

Paula lowered her head back to her sheet and squinted at it. “Um…” she said, searching for her place. “When was your last menstrual period?” she asked.

There was a moment of silence as Jen tried to remember. When had it been? She had a vague memory of some time that seemed like at least a couple of months ago. Jen couldn’t remember any landmarks that would allow her to map time. The last major event she could remember was…

It was finding out about Skipper and the sex parties. Since then, time had been a succession of similar days, broken only by the daily routines of yoga and not-yoga, fasting and not-fasting. She couldn’t remember any dates, any specific events since then.

Abruptly the spinning in the room stopped, and Jen felt she had arrived at her destination. The room, which had seemed so dingy and dark and vague a moment ago, took on the intricate and surreal detail of a Chagall painting. Jen could see not only the colors of the adobe pink walls, the gray stainless steel desk, Paula’s moss-green pants and tawny matted hair, but the secondary colors that lay behind them, the underlying pink in the green pants, and the deep red tones buried in the peachiness of Paula’s arm as she held the pen poised above the paper. It was beautiful, she thought, but scary.

She needed to think now. But Paula and Camilla were both staring at her and she did not want to betray her thoughts to them.

“What’s today?” asked Jen, stalling for time, although truthfully she only had a vague sense of what month it was.

“May tenth,” said Paula.

“Then it must have been…April twenty-fifth,” said Jen, trying to choose a date approximately two weeks earlier.

“You sure?” asked Camilla skeptically, turning to look her up and down, as though Jen’s lie were somehow obvious to read on her body.

“Uh, not exactly,” said Jen. “I could be a few days off.”

“April twenty-fifth,” Paula muttered as she wrote. She turned to look at Jen. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This is just to cover their asses.” She waved dismissively towards the door, indicating the rest of the health club outside. “Just don’t sue me,” she added, in a tone that was jovial on its surface but hard and serious below.

“So we’re done?” asked Jen impatiently. She was hoping the two of them would leave her alone to wait for Becky, as unlikely as that seemed. She suddenly had things that she needed to think about, and she needed to be alone.

“Not quite,” said Paula, wheeling the rolling chair around to face Jen. Camilla closed her magazine with a decisive slap and placed it on the floor next to the bench.

Oh no, thought Jen, sensing a joint sense of purpose between the two women that could only mean they were about to launch an intervention. Oh not now, please, she prayed to herself silently. She remembered the talk Becky had given her about moving to Michigan, and she had the feeling that this one would be even less pleasant. I need quiet, I need to think, she wanted to tell them, but she did not want to be rude to the people who had been helping her for the half-hour since her fall.

“We were talking while you were in the bathroom,” said Paula. “And I’ve been thinking, and Camilla was saying the same thing I was thinking, which was…” Paula’s voice was nervous and shaky. She turned to Camilla. “You’ll say it better,” Paula said.

Jen turned towards Camilla, who was so close to her on the tiny bench that Jen could see light makeup glistening on her eyelids. The position made Jen feel that they were about to kiss, or share an intimate secret. Hesitantly, she turned back towards Paula, feeling impolite to not face Camilla as she spoke.

Camilla didn’t seem to mind. Her tone was dispassionate and businesslike. “It’s not normal to break a bone from a small fall like that,” she said in the sanctimonious voice doctors use as they tell you that something is very wrong with your body. Jen remembered her gynecologist checking up on the STD Bradley had given her just before she kicked him out: “This infection isn’t clearing as fast as it should be,” she said, her scolding tone indicating how bitterly Jen’s immune system had let her down.

“I’ve seen you on TV, not too long ago, and you already appeared underweight. But you’ve clearly lost a lot of weight even since then, and it’s weakening your bones,” Camilla continued. “I would expect you’re experiencing early stages of osteoporosis.”

Jen’s sickly feeling of shame at this speech reminded her distinctly of being a teenager. It was the feeling of exposure, of scrutiny, of feeling your body as something you were always failing to control properly. She was surprised to find that someone could provoke this emotion in her adult self, through the same means, telling her that her body was wrong. The funny thing was, Jen was feeling increasingly certain that she wasn’t going to have this body much longer; that it was going to change drastically and very, very soon.

She wanted to tell them to stop their speech, because things were going to be different now. There would be no more fasting for her; she would eat, every day, three meals with lots of protein and vitamins. She would even eat fat; she would find out what those “good fats” were that people were always talking about and she would eat them even if their greasy smell made her want to throw up. She would need to figure out how to get some exercise that wouldn’t hurt her rib.

Thinking of Camilla’s words, she decided that one thing she would not do was go to the doctor to hear another lecture. At least not now. She would wait for a few weeks, a month, until her body was strong and healthy.

“You need help to return to a healthy eating regimen,” said Camilla. “I can recommend a dietician and a psychologist, and you should probably be in some kind of support group as well.”

Noting Jen’s silent reaction, Paula chimed in to support Camilla.

“Groundbreakers has a group all about eating disorders—‘Sturdy Foundations,’” she said. Jen cringed inwardly at most of the words in this sentence. “It’s about mind-havoc, about not having to live up to someone else’s idea of what your body should look like.”

Like what you’re doing to me right now, Jen thought, but she lacked the motivation to state this obvious point aloud. It must have shown on her face, because Paula’s voice came to a halting stop and she looked embarrassed.

“Listen,” she said, wheeling her chair closer to Jen. Paula leaned in close and put her hand on Jen’s knee. Jen stiffened at the touch, then winced as this movement shot a pang into her tight, throbbing right side.

She looked up, annoyed. Then as her gaze reached Paula’s face she saw that her eyes were red and sad, and she was biting her lip. Jen waited for what Paula was going to say.

Before Paula could speak, Becky burst through the office door. In her tidy leggings and ballet-dancer top, she made a striking contrast to Paula’s untamed clothes and hair. Jen felt a sudden wave of relief that Becky was here to take care of her, as she always had. Becky was used to her, would know when to speak and when to be quiet, would leave her alone with her thoughts so she could sort through the ideas that were spinning through her head. Paula wheeled her chair away from Jen and back towards the desk to make room for Becky in the tiny office; even so, Becky’s legs remained outside the room as she leaned her torso into the doorway.

“Oh honey, are you okay?” exclaimed Becky, bending towards Jen as though she were about to hug her. Seeing Jen tense, Becky seemed to remember Jen’s injury, and she lifted her back to its usual impeccably straight posture, scooting her legs just inside the doorframe.

“Hey Becky,” said Paula, her conversational address seeming too casual for the situation at hand. “Do you remember what happened when I first came to L.A. and I wanted to lose weight?” she asked.

Preoccupied with Jen’s condition, Becky didn’t seem to register the oddness of this question. “Of course I remember,” said Becky, a distracted note of distain in her voice. “You almost killed yourself with nasty diet pills. You were in the hospital for two weeks and your mom had to fly out from Michigan and they were feeding you through a tube in your nose.”

Jen looked over at Paula, trying to shoot her a look of apology for her earlier sullenness. But Paula had stood up and was introducing Becky to Camilla, who also rose to shake Becky’s hand. As Jen sat eye-level with their stomachs, the three women began to discuss Jen’s rib. Above her head, Jen heard Camilla recommend a little clinic that could see Jen immediately, a low-profile place for Jen to get an x-ray.

As she stared at their stomachs and listened to their conversation, Jen began to panic. I can’t go to the doctor, she thought to herself, frantically. And worse, she couldn’t get an x-ray. She needed to go home, to think, to figure out what was going on with her body. She couldn’t bear to speak to one more doctor until she had sorted things out in her own mind. She began to devise a plan. It would all depend on how Becky responded to her once they were alone in the car. If Becky was angry, Jen would distract her. If Becky was sorry, Jen would guilt her.

Becky threw Jen’s bag over her shoulder and led her by the hand through the crowded health club lobby. Paula and Camilla followed them to the front doors, huddling close so that the three women formed a tight, protective circle around Jen that only drew more attention to her. Holding the icepack to her right side with her left hand and stumbling a bit from dizziness and pain, she noticed identical health-club women turning their heads, men with gelled hair looking and then looking again, startled expressions on their tanned faces.

Becky’s tiny car was parked at the red curb just outside the sliding doors. Jen saw something large and fleshy pressed against the rear window, and realized that Chase was filling up the entire back seat, his arm and shoulder crammed into the inside wall of the car.

“We were getting pedicures when you called,” Becky said, as though by way of apology for Chase’s presence.

“Hi,” said Chase in a concerned tone once Jen had lowered herself awkwardly into the low front seat, balancing on her left hand while she pinned the ice pack protectively under her right elbow. Becky was talking to Paula and Camilla out on the sidewalk. Jen could just see their legs and abdomens through the open car door.

“Does it hurt a lot?” Chase asked.

“Not so bad,” said Jen. Her side was numb from the ice but throbbing, and it seemed to be radiating a piercing ache down the side of her hip and up into her shoulder.

“That’s good,” said Chase. The two of them sat silently, waiting for Becky to get into the car. It was unusual for Chase to be so quiet, but Jen was glad to finally have a moment to focus on her game plan. Distraction or guilt, she repeated to herself, hoping that the unforeseen complication of Chase’s presence wouldn’t mess things up for her.

After a minute, the three women’s torsos all began to move. Becky circled the front of the car, while Paula and Camilla walked up to Jen’s open car door. Paula bent down to lean into the car and squeeze Jen’s free left hand. “Take care,” she said, giving Jen a little worried smile. “I’ll call later and see how it went.”

“Take that ice off when you get to the clinic,” Camilla called, lowering her head a bit to aim her voice into the car.

Paula shut Jen’s door as Becky was securing herself in the driver’s seat. She pulled away from the curb, swerving aggressively around a corpulent sports utility vehicle that was also parked illegally.

“So the clinic is in Beverly Hills,” said Becky, looking over at Jen with a sheepish smile that seemed to serve as an apology for ignoring Jen for the last month. She’s sorry, thought Jen. I’ll use guilt.

“I don’t want to go to the doctor,” said Jen.

“What?” said Becky, looking over her shoulder as she pulled out of the parking lot and onto the wide boulevard, which looked like unadulterated lifeless pavement and stucco despite the palm trees growing up a hundred feet out of the center divide.

“I just want to go home,” said Jen.

“God damn it,” yelled Becky, as a pick-up truck swerved in front of her. Jen heard Chase gasp in the seat behind her. A sharp pang shot through Jen’s right side like a seam ripping. She focused on keeping her breath even and shallow, and the pain retreated back to its earlier dull throbbing.

“Sorry, honey. What did you say?” Becky asked.

“I want to go home,” Jen repeated, gasping a little.

“Paula and that doctor lady said you’re supposed to get an x-ray,” Becky said.

“They said that it’s broken and that there’s nothing they can do for it. The doctor is just going to tell me to rest it. And I’m so tired. I just want to go home and sleep. I think that would be better for me.”

“I don’t know,” said Becky, hesitantly, clearly torn between her desire to follow Paula’s directions and her own inclination to avoid going to doctors. Despite the pain and fatigue in her body, Jen mustered her strength to exploit Becky’s moment of weakness.

“We can go the clinic tomorrow,” said Jen. “We can make an appointment and then it won’t be so crazy.”

“That might be easier,” chimed in Chase, who was clearly more of a pushover than Becky. His voice sounded tired and less enthusiastic than usual. Jen wondered for a moment why he was so subdued, before reminding herself that she needed to focus on the task at hand.

“I think it’s too much to go the doctor right now,” Jen pressed on. “I just want to go home and have dinner and go to bed.”

“You want to eat dinner?” Becky asked, sounding shocked. “What have you been eating, anyway? You’re never at home. I’ve been buying you salad stuff but you’ve hardly eaten any of it.”

Jen felt the urge to argue. But she realized that she should instead try to capitalize on this new, and hopefully distracting, train of thought.

“And honey,” Becky continued, “You look so skinny. It’s not healthy. Paula and the doctor said that’s why you broke your rib.”

“I was doing a fast, but I’m going to stop now,” Jen said. This was the precise moment to stick the knife in. “I’m actually pretty hungry. We should go home and make some food.”

“Okay,” said Becky, in her let’s-make-a-deal voice. “I’ll take you home if you eat a decent dinner before you go to bed. I get to pick what you’re eating.”

Jen felt a wave of relief wash over her. This was why she loved Becky so much, she thought to herself. Becky always knew what was good for her. Becky was going to take her home because she could tell that what Jen needed was not a doctor but a nutritious meal and a good night’s sleep. Of course, now Jen would have to actually eat said meal; hopefully it would be something her stomach could tolerate after her long fast.

Within an hour, Jen was back home in her kitchen, watching Becky and Chase cook dinner as she sat on a stool, wrapped in a designer quilt that Becky had brought from one of the guest rooms. Jen had removed the ice pack as soon as she arrived home, but her insides felt impossibly cold. She could feel her teeth starting to chatter, and she pulled the blanket tighter around her.

“You need to start out with something light if you’ve been fasting,” Becky said to Jen, lecturing while she chopped as though she were on a cooking show. “But you’ve got to have protein and calcium to help your bones heal. And since your body is chilled, it should be something warm.”

Chase was also chopping vegetables, but his back was turned to Jen; she could see his giant trapezius muscles shifting under his t-shirt as he worked. Jen realized that she had never seen Chase speak so little, and she wondered again if something might be bothering him. But the stress of worrying about him made her stomach hurt, and she was going to need every ounce of appetite she could muster for the meal that Becky was describing to her as she prepared it.

“So I’m making whole wheat couscous with vegetables and chick peas. It’ll be warm tonight but then you can eat it cold tomorrow, too. I’m going to put just a tiny bit of chicken in it too, but not too much because it’ll be heavy on your stomach. And there’s a yogurt sauce, which I want you to eat a lot of because that’s where most of the calcium is, but there’s some in the vegetables, too.”

This description, lovely as it may have been on an objective level, made Jen queasy. She was going to have to eat all kinds of things that had been off-limits for the last month. Not just tonight, but all the time, for as long as her body needed it. Jen sighed in resignation, thinking of the piles and mountains of food that lay ahead of her and the chore of eating it all.

“Can you put some lemon in the couscous?” she asked.

Lying in bed that night, Jen had to try a number of positions before she could rest comfortably. After trying her back and then moving to her side, she finally decided that her back would be best, but only if she kept her right arm spread at a right angle from her body. Her side still throbbed, despite the little oval-shaped pill Becky had fed her with her meal. And her stomach felt heavy and sick from so much food. Becky had served her almost a full plate, and would not let her leave the table until she ate two-thirds of it. But at the same time, Jen felt oddly warm, happy, and excited. Her bed felt surprisingly soft and comfortable, like a warm cocoon that would nurture her body back to its full strength. Maybe even more than her full strength; maybe she would emerge stronger than she had ever been, tougher and more resilient, a warrior. She pulled her left hand over her stomach, being careful not to jostle her ribcage. There were new things happening inside of her, new things growing inside of her. She wanted to be in a new, fresh place where she didn’t know anybody and where nobody would bother her. She wanted to make decisions on her own, to focus on herself without anyone else’s judgment and scrutiny.

That was it! To punctuate her realization, Jen’s right arm involuntarily slapped the sheet below it, causing her to wince in pain. “I’m going to Michigan,” she said decisively to herself, aloud.

She must have said it loudly, because she heard Becky’s voice answer her from the hall. “What’s that?” Becky yelled through the closed door.

In defiance of the pain in her side, Jen mustered all of her limited breath to yell back. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she shouted at the door.

Chapter 12:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/09/12-strange-life.html

10. Consciousness Makes Such a Noise

“It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.” —Carl Jung

During Jen’s second yoga class the next Monday, she felt like she was experiencing a breakthrough. She arrived early, while Paula was still fiddling with the sign-in sheet. Carefully, Jen unrolled her mat and straightened it until it was perfectly aligned with the floorboards. Then she pulled her water bottle out of her oversized designer purse and placed it on the side of the mat. The water inside was cloudy, flavored with lemon juice from a bottle. She was saving her fresh lemons for salads and tea.

Normally she felt restless waiting for the class to start. The yoga classes were the highlight of her day; she would have gone three or four times a day if it were socially acceptable. But today, her patience felt boundless. She took great pleasure in setting up her little area, which, she thought pleasantly, would be her home for the next hour and forty-five minutes. What a comfortable place to spend this time, Jen thought. She leaned her bag against the wall, centered her feet on the mat, and lowered herself into a loose, comfortable forward bend.

Looking between her legs, Jen could see the upside-down image of a girl entering the room and setting her bag down next to Jen. Jen pulled herself deeper into the stretch and passively observed the girl as she unrolled her own mat. The girl’s manicured fingernails clicked against the wooden floor, and Jen caught a flash of the large, sparkly diamond on the tapered finger. She was an engaged girl, Jen thought, just like she herself had been not so many years ago, at probably around the same age. But she didn’t think any of her usual bitter, spiteful thoughts towards the girl. Thoughts like, any man who needs to mark you with such an enormous diamond will never be satisfied with just one woman, especially when you get older, and angrier, especially when you’ve had a few of his babies. Any man rich enough to buy you that diamond can afford to arrange feigned “business trips,” to spend weekends at such classy hotels that the other woman would never feel the least bit like a hooker.

Jen didn’t think those things now. The shadowy suggestion, the merest wisp of these thoughts entered her consciousness, but she knew from so much daily meditation to just let them float by, unrealized.

The girl turned her head towards Jen, showing a face lacquered in heavy but tasteful makeup. The girl was new to the class; still, Jen wondered whether she had seen her at the health club before. All the women at the club looked fundamentally the same. Some had light hair, some dark, some were white and others were Asian or Latina, and a very few were black, but all of them seemed to share the same expensive haircuts, fashionable workout clothes, tidy groomed fingernails and shiny, well-moisturized legs.

Until recently, Jen would have fit in well with this crowd. During the last month, however, her grooming habits had diminished considerably. Her haircut, when it wasn’t hidden in a ponytail, was shaggy and overgrown, and she had stopped wearing makeup, which seemed unnecessary for days filled with nothing but yoga and reading. Her perfect workout clothes from the fancy yoga boutique, designed by a former supermodel turned devoted yoga practitioner, no longer held the crisp, flattering shapes that had justified their high price. Now, with twelve classes to attend each week, she could never manage to find enough clean, dry workout clothes in her closet. She had resorted to washing the clothes in her sink between laundry days and hanging them over the shower curtain rod to dry. Her cute capri pants were becoming baggy and shapeless, her stretchy tank tops frayed around the neck and armpits. Pulling her body against her legs, she could feel the stubbly hair growing on her calves, and she could not remember the last time her private waxer had visited.

Noting this change in herself, which she hadn’t recognized consciously until now, Jen felt quietly satisfied. The outer changes paralleled changes that she was making internally as she became more focused and detached. Raising herself out of her forward bend and squatting low to the floor, she counted the things that she no longer needed: haircuts, manicures, cute new clothes, leg waxings. She had simplified her food needs to lemon, maple syrup (which she was needing less and less of each week), cayenne pepper, spinach, tomatoes, brown rice, and, once a week, hard-boiled eggs. Everything was balanced and effortless, and there was absolutely nothing she needed. Reflecting on this balance, Jen felt wonderful, as though she were floating lightly above the earth, touched by nothing, more physically dirty but spiritually and ethically cleaner than she had ever been.

Even as Jen suddenly made eye contact with the engaged girl and realized that the girl was openly staring at her, her mouth open in a dumb look of surprise, she was not troubled. Let her stare, Jen thought. She can’t see me. I don’t exist to her; she is only seeing a façade, constructed in her own head, that she imagines is me. It seemed ridiculous that Jen had ever been troubled by people’s stares, by the photographers, by the lies and misrepresentations in the magazines and on TV. That world, the world of people who observed her, was in a different stratosphere from the one she inhabited, and they were as baffling and unknowable to her as she was to them. Jen had always thought of herself as the fish in the bowl, but there was no reason that it shouldn’t be the other way around. To demonstrate this point Jen felt tempted to mirror the girl’s gaping expression back at her, but she knew this was unnecessary, since, funny as it would be to Jen, it would hurt the engaged girl’s feelings and thus bring unneeded ugliness into the world.

Jen looked around and saw that the room had filled now. Seven other students had set up their mats, five prissy-looking girls, one young guy with long hair whose tank top showed off his enormous muscles, and a black woman in sensible sweats and t-shirt who was probably Jen’s age but whom Jen would have called “older” next to the exaggerated youthfulness of the other students. This woman was such a relieving contrast to the other students that Jen found herself beaming at the woman, who caught Jen’s eye and then looked away, an embarrassed expression on her face.

Paula was already welcoming the class, giving a little speech about injuries and working within your limits that Jen had heard so many times that it had started to merge with the Sanskrit yoga terminology in her mind. But today, Paula added something new at the end, startling Jen out of her comfortable trance.

“Yoga is about self-discipline,” said Paula. “But it’s a common misconception that self-discipline is the same as self-deprivation. That might mean overtraining, like if you do a sport or work out in addition to your practice. It might mean holding your body to unreasonable standards. You might not believe it, but your yoga teacher does not expect you to be an olympic athlete or a fashion model.” A few of the students laughed indulgently at her joke; Jen noted that these were the class regulars. The new students, like the engaged girl next to Jen, didn’t laugh. The black woman, whom Jen also hadn’t seen in class before, smiled politely, reminding Jen that she should do the same.

“It might even mean believing that there are certain foods that you must never eat, or thinking that you must maintain a very rigid diet. But of course, this kind of self-deprivation is bad for your physical and spiritual health, just like any form of extreme behavior. It makes your health and your yoga practice into something you have to do, that you force yourself to do, like taking bad-tasting medicine.”

Paula wasn’t looking at Jen; in fact, she was facing the opposite direction. Jen recognized, however, that these words were directed at her. She felt embarrassed, but also oddly pleased to think that Paula cared about her enough to make a special speech. Her face felt warm, and she could imagine herself turning red at the unexpected attention. She lowered her eyes forcefully to her mat so that in case Paula turned around, Jen would not appear to be paying special attention to these words.

“Remember,” said Paula, “depriving yourself in the name of spirituality is as vain as pampering yourself for the same reason.”

That’s not what I’m doing, Jen thought indignantly, her embarrassment quickly overtaking her flattery. But she was able to calm herself quickly. I was being vain, Jen thought, with a rush of peaceful understanding. Vain to think that everything is about me. That speech had nothing to do with me; that is just how I interpreted it. I’m sure everyone in the class had some personal connection to that speech. She suddenly couldn’t believe her own hubris to think that Paula would make a speech just about her.

That’s my problem, Jen thought. I’m too self-centered. And she felt it deeply in her heart, and she wanted to spend this yoga class, and all the yoga classes in her future, curing herself of this shortcoming, which was the source of so much pain and humiliation.

Watching Paula demonstrate the opening poses for the class, stretching her arms high above her head so that her biceps pressed into the sides of her dreadlocks, Jen returned to her earlier state of tranquility, comforted by the familiar pattern of the sun salutations. She remembered how, when she started doing yoga, the beginning of each class was a horribly uncomfortable transition from her stiff regular life into the series of stretches and poses. Now, she realized happily, that boundary had blurred, had disappeared, so that there was no distinction between her yoga body and her regular body. She could have fallen into any of those stretches at any point in the day, sometimes did so in the hidden back aisles of the library as she waited for her next class.

As she relaxed into the final downward-facing position, focusing on rotating her arms, on pressing her heels down, on keeping the lowest part of her back curved, Paula appeared behind her, pressing on her lower back to force her deeper into the stretch. This was the best feeling yet; the tendons in Jen’s calves and ankles seemed to be opening up, melting into the air around her so that the boundaries of her own body no longer held and could not restrict her.

Paula lowered her head next to Jen’s ear as she pressed. “Your vertebrae are hurting my hands,” she whispered. She paused for a moment before adding, in an even lower whisper, “He’s not worth it.”

“Which one?” asked Jen, in a regular speaking voice, but Paula had moved on to the engaged girl, who had turned her head sharply in response to Jen’s question.

Jen thought about Paula’s words as she jumped lightly forward out of the pose and began the series again. Did they mean that Paula’s speech really had been directed specifically at Jen? And what was Paula implying? Jen felt her face flush again, this time in anger, to think that Paula was connecting anything about Jen’s body, Jen’s behavior, to a man. That was the last thing Jen was thinking of; in fact, except for her recurrent dreams, Jen had not thought of any man, of any romantic or sexual part of her life, for weeks and weeks. Paula had it all wrong.

But Jen’s newly honed yoga skills would not allow her to remain annoyed; a yoga class, after all, was an exercise at not getting annoyed at all manner of annoying things, including prissy, show-offy, or smelly classmates, ringing cell phones, loud farts, and most significantly, teachers who often seemed more judgmental than compassionate. Of course, Jen reasoned, Paula was just trying to help her. And Jen had been rejecting her friendship for a month, turning down her invitations to spend time together between classes. I should go to lunch with her this week, Jen resolved. On Wednesday. Jen was anxious to clear up this misunderstanding sooner, but not so much that she was willing to break her fast.

She returned her focus to the standing poses. If she thought about how Paula was viewing her, it made her feel anxious and queasy, so she did her best to empty her mind.

“Parsvokanasana,” said Paula, walking between the students as she talked, the bottoms of her flowy pants dragging on the floor. “Take a longer stance and lower your right hand inside of your right knee. Try the clasp if you’re more advanced.”

Jen lowered herself into the deep lunging position, extended her arms, and reached them behind her. Instead of locking her fingertips together, as most of the students did, she stretched just a bit farther and grabbed her left wrist with her right hand. She remembered how difficult this position used to be for her in Becky’s class, how angry and impatient she would get waiting until it was time to let go. Even now it challenged her balance a bit, and she felt her ankles wobble as she stretched her top arm farther and farther down her back. She remembered how she used to always look at her toes in this position and, for old time’s sake, she shot a glance down at her feet. This time, she thought with an internal laugh, her pedicure really was ruined; traces of the burgundy paint clung to the center of each toenail, and old dirt from the floor of the yoga room had permanently darkened the calluses building up unchecked on the tips of her big toes.

Suddenly she felt herself tottering and beginning to lose her balance. From somewhere nearby, she heard Paula’s voice: “Don’t look at your feet, Jen,” it said, in a quiet, concerned tone.

Jen’s resolution not to fall suddenly became unshakable. “You’re floating,” she said to herself, pulling her back straight and looking at the wall ahead of her. “You’re floating and you can’t fall.” Jen really did feel like she was floating, like her body had become weightless as her skeleton aligned itself into the perfect manifestation of this posture. Her left shoulder was rising straight above her right one, her left hip was pointing up towards the ceiling, the top of her head stretched as far as physically possible from the bottoms of her feet. In a moment her feet would lift off from the floor and she would begin to rise like a balloon, slowly up towards the ceiling.

And then, in a transcendent moment of release, Jen did begin to float. She saw the ceiling flash in front of her, and then the room began to spin and turn like she was tumbling out of a cloud, except upwards. She laughed to herself, wondering what Paula’s hair would look like from up at the top of the room.

Then there was a loud crash and a snapping noise. It broke the spell that was holding Jen off the floor, and she landed hard on her side. She tried to look around for the other student who had fallen, the one whose crash had caused her to fall as well. It hurt to turn her head, though, because her arm was pinned under her in a funny way.

Paula was kneeling next to her. “Don’t move,” she said, quietly but emphatically, as though she had said it once already.

“It’s okay,” Jen said, embarrassed that Paula would be fussing over her. She raised herself up onto her elbow. Something felt sharp and stingy in her side, but she didn’t want Paula to know. “I almost had it. My balance is getting better.”

“Lie down,” said Paula, in a louder, more commanding tone. Paula looked odd; her deeply tanned face had turned pale and sweaty. Jen lowered herself back to the ground, not wanting to draw any more attention. She could see the engaged girl standing above her, her eyebrows furrowed and her painted lips pursed in an expression of concern.

The black woman appeared next to Paula. “I’m a doctor,” she said.

“I think it was just her rib,” Paula said to the woman. Paula stood up, giving the woman more space.

“What was my rib?” asked Jen, getting scared. Why was everyone hovering over her?

The doctor kneeled down next to Jen and placed her hand lightly on Jen’s side. Pain shot through Jen’s lung, and the room spun again, as it had when she had been floating. The doctor was so close over her that Jen could smell her spicy perfume. She coughed, and pain shot through her lung again. She wanted everyone to back away, to give her air.

“Did you faint, honey?” asked the doctor.

Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head up to face Paula. “Yeah, her rib,” she said. “There’s probably nothing to do for it, but she should get an x-ray just in case.”

“What,” said Jen, still having trouble getting a decent breath. “What’s wrong with my rib?”

The doctor turned back to face her. Her face bore a look of deep concern, or even pity, as though looking at Jen made her very, very sad. “It’s broken, honey,” she said. “Jennifer,” she added. “Didn’t you hear it snap?”

Chapter 11:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/08/11-result-of-what-we-have-thought.html

9. The Extra Ounce of Power

"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."
—Muhammad Ali

The lamp on the table wasn’t red, but it had a red scarf thrown over it, so that red was the color it projected out the window and into the street below. Everything else in the room was also red—the walls a deep burgundy, the mirror framed in fiery teakwood, the bedspread a seductive plush red satin. Jen looked down at her legs, thin white sticks against the bloody color of the bedding. Her corset was black and lacy and left her shoulders, arms, and legs bare. On the table under the lamp sat the one item in the room that wasn’t red: a bowl of bright, cheerfully yellow lemons.

A ceiling fan spun overhead, stirring the hot, steamy air around the room. Overhead, through the roof, she could hear the whirring sound of a helicopter. She knew that someone was arriving. She waited expectantly, fluffing up the satin bedspread and ruffling her hair.

She heard footsteps in the hall, growing closer and closer. A sudden wave of stage-fright came over her as she realized what was about to happen. She looked over at the bowl of lemons and had the sudden awareness that, instead of waiting for a man to walk through the door, she should be juicing the lemons, turning them into cool, satisfying lemonade. But before she could rise from the bed to grab the bowl and leave, Bradley threw open the door, looking every bit the cowboy in brown leather pants and a western-style shirt. She had seen him dressed this way once before in a movie. It was a bad movie; all the critics had agreed.

“I knew I’d find you here,” he said, leering at her from the doorway.

“Don’t talk,” said Jen. “Just get it over with.”

She lay back on the bed, lifting her bare legs in the air. Her thighs were huge. They looked like fat white sausages. They were swelling, growing bigger each second. She reached out to stop them from growing, and they puffed out around her hand like rising dough. The room was growing darker, the light blocked by her legs, which would surely suffocate her in a moment. She cried out, but her voice was muffled by her own flesh, which was filling her mouth and blocking her nostrils. She tried to scream, but her inward breath only sucked her skin more tightly against the back of her throat.

As she lost consciousness, Jen could hear the sound of the helicopter again, circling and circling in the sky above. And she could hear Bradley’s voice, from somewhere far away behind her legs.

“I always knew you’d get fat,” he said.

“Jen,” called Becky, entering the room with a cordless phone in her hand. “Your mom,” she said, holding the phone far away from her own body as though it were something she had pulled out of the garbage. Jen took it from her, opening her eyes wide to demonstrate her incredulity that Becky would deliver such a call to her. Becky returned an exasperated eyebrow raise and displayed her empty palms to indicate that the matter was out of her hands.

Jen had been sitting by herself in the TV room, cross-legged on the couch, holding a book in front of her as though she were reading. The book was Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It was the most spiritual book that she could find on her little bookshelf. All of the books on the shelf were gifts, and she had only read a few of them. Siddhartha was an old gift from Becky. Jen had been reading it for the last few days, very slowly. Halfway through a paragraph, she would find her thoughts wandering to the recurrent dream she’d been having almost every night for the last three weeks, ever since one tabloid had reported that she was a prostitute and the other magazines had started calling, calling at all hours, circling the house in their helicopters, looming outside the front gate in their dark-windowed mafia cars, like patient but determined hunters following the scent of blood.

The dream was a little different each night, but a few features remained constant. She was always on a movie set. She was always a prostitute. Bradley was always there. And every night the dream ended the same way, with her body inflating like rising bread. The sound of helicopters was also there each time, but since she could actually hear them in her sleep, they didn’t really count as part of the dream.

Becky had barely spoken to her in weeks. She’d been busy deleting phone messages, sending out statements to the press, meeting with Jen’s lawyer. Jen didn’t want to bother her any further by showing up at yoga, so she had started going to Paula’s classes instead. Paula taught at a health club in the valley, but Jen didn’t mind driving out there. It was nice to get away for a while. She had started going twice a day, once very early in the morning, before most of the photographers had arrived at her house, and once in the afternoon. Usually she would stay in the valley in between classes, reading and drinking unsweetened herbal iced tea at various cafés, switching often to avoid word of her location getting out. Still, people stared at her, and took pictures with their cell phones, like she was some kind of tourist attraction. Yesterday she had gone to the public library instead; it was filled with homeless people sleeping on chairs, and no one had seemed to notice her.

Paula must have been wondering what Jen was doing between classes, because she had asked Jen to lunch several times. “Can’t—got an audition,” Jen would say, smiling in polite regret. The truth was that she had increased her fast to five days a week. On Sundays and Wednesdays, she would eat salads and brown rice. But all the other days, she limited herself to her fasting drink, along with as much herbal tea as she wanted. After the first week, the sticky sweetness of the drink began to annoy her, so she had been cutting down the proportion of maple syrup to lemon juice. The lemon tasted clean and bitter and purifying, and she felt light when she drank it. She was becoming obsessed with lemon; her appetite for it couldn’t be satisfied by just her fasting drink. She began adding it to her herbal tea, and even sprinkling it over her Sunday and Wednesday salads.

The prospect of dealing with her mother just now made her feel dizzy. In fact, Jen did not want to deal with anything at all. She just wanted to do yoga, and drink tea with lemon, and sit and read and think, quietly. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Jen put down her book and held the phone to her ear in silence for a moment, enjoying the last seconds of peacefulness before the conversation began. Becky smiled weakly, her face revealing the slightest flash of reluctant sympathy, before rushing back out through the doorway.

“Hi mom,” Jen said, when she felt it would be too rude to wait any longer.

“Jenny,” said her mother, in a tone that somehow combined worry and relief together. “Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?’ Her mother’s voice sounded distant and tinny, like music projected through bad speakers. It sounded like a dream. She wondered for a moment if this were a dream, if everything had been a dream. The last few weeks were fuzzy, difficult to remember. This thing about prostitution, Skipper in his flamingo shorts. And further back, Bradley’s new girlfriend, her marriage ending. It all would make more sense as a dream, she thought.

“Jenny, did you hear me?” said her mother. Jen had forgotten that her mother had asked her a question. Now she remembered but she couldn’t remember what the question was exactly.

Luckily, her mother repeated it. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she said, enunciating clearly and putting heavy emphasis on each syllable.

Jen realized that she hadn’t seen her cell phone in quite a while. That seemed odd; she usually carried it with her when she left the house. Where was it, she asked herself, beginning to panic, not because she cared about where the phone had gone but because it was scary to have lost track of something that used to be important to her.

Then, from amid the swirl of images and events from the last few weeks, the memory sharpened into focus. “Becky has it,” said Jen. She remembered Becky taking the phone, telling her not to take any calls or talk to anybody. Jen hadn’t spoken on the phone since then. Her mother must have really laid into Becky to have gotten through, Jen thought, suppressing an urge to laugh, which she thought might be rude.

“Hmm, Becky,” said her mother, with mild disdain. For reasons that Jen couldn’t remember right now, Jen’s mother and Becky did not get along. Jen didn’t have any reply, so she waited silently for her mother to say something else.

“Are you okay?” her mother blurted out.

“Of course I’m okay,” said Jen. “I’m fine.”

“I mean, whatever you want to do with your life is all right with me,” said her mother. “I’ve always supported you, right?”

Jen suddenly remembered why her mother must have called. “Mom,” she said, trying to interrupt.

“It’s just, I know I’m not supposed to read the tabloids, but sometimes they say things on the cover and I just can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read, ma,” said Jen. Her accent was sounding New Yorky, like her mother’s. It sounded strange and remote to Jen, as though her voice had joined her mother’s at the other end of the bad microphone.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me about this, but I’m your mother, and besides, I know what you’re going through.”

Oh no, Jen thought. She had a good idea what her mother was going to say, or what kind of thing, and she didn’t want to hear it. She felt flushed and grumpy and too impatient for this. “Listen, ma,” she said, in a final, half-hearted attempt to stop the speech.

“Don’t let them call you bad names, Jenny. Hold your head high,” her mother said. “You know, when I first joined the Order of the Beckoning Lily, people said horrible things about me. They called me a slut and whore and all the chauvinistic, vanilla bullshit you can imagine.”

Jen hated when her mom used this kind of language. Now there was going to be a long speech, Jen felt sure. She didn’t want to hear it, but she felt too vague and unfocused to try to stop it. She remembered to use the same strategy she used when Becky started on a long rant: breathe and wait for it to be over.

“People just don’t want to confront the mystical aspect of sexuality,” her mother continued, sanctimoniously. “People like your grandmother. It frightens them, Jenny. I know you used to really react against it.”

Yes, Jen, thought, bitterly, her mind sharpening again as a rush of unpleasant memories appeared in clear focus. She remembered high school, and her mother’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, and her grandmother coming to stay for two-and-a-half months because her mother had run away. Run away to be initiated into a sex cult. “It’s not a sex cult,” her mother would say. “It’s an erotic occult society.” Whatever you called it, it was completely humiliating. She’d gotten used to hearing about it now, nodding politely at stories of nude mud wrestling rituals and religious ceremonies held in giant, inflatable kiddy pools foaming with sacred oils and bath bubbles.

“Honey, I’m just so proud of you. It’s like you really are my daughter. I had no idea…” Her mother’s voice trailed off, constricting as though she were trying to stop herself from crying. “I’m just really proud.”

Jen was startled. She had never seen her mother so emotional about something she had done. She didn’t know what she should do. She had been planning to tell her mother that the whole story was a lie, but now she felt unable to disappoint her.

“Mom,” she said, noncommittally.

“Some of the younger people in my chapter know about this guy, Skipper,” her mother went on. “They said him and his friends are doing some really radical stuff out there, with the big parties. It’s just another kind of ritual. I mean, it’s not my generation’s type of thing, but I know you have to do things in your own way. This is path of the future, and I think it’s wonderful that you’re embracing it.”

“Um,” said Jen, hoping her mother had finished now. “Thanks.”

“Jenny, just tell me a little about it,” said her mother, eagerly. “Are you up in San Francisco all the time? Are there any other famous people?”

“Ma,” said Jen, plaintively. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Oh, I know, you’re embarrassed to talk to me,” her mother said. “Fine, we can talk about something else.” Her voice took on a haughty, confrontational edge, and Jen knew immediately what the new topic would be.

“Have you spoken to your father?” her mother asked.

“Mom,” said Jen, “you know I don’t talk to him.” Jen’s father lived in Europe with his third wife. Since he had moved abroad, they had spoken only once a year or so. It wasn’t that Jen couldn’t afford the phone charges; she just didn’t feel motivated to call.

“Well, I’ve been trying to reach him,” said her mother. “I can never get him on the phone. That woman is even worse than Becky!” Jen’s mother still called Elsa “that woman,” even though she had been married to Jen’s father for six years.

For the remainder of their conversation, Jen’s mother launched into a lengthy invective about Jen’s father that, according to the clock, which Jen watched fastidiously as her mother talked, breathing in for five seconds, then out for five seconds, and inserting an “uh-huh” every time her mother’s speech paused, lasted exactly nine minutes and forty-five seconds.

Chapter 10:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/07/10-consciousness-makes-such-noise.html

8. Intimate Knowledge of its Ugly Side

"The price we pay when pursuing any art or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
—James Baldwin

Jen was surprised to discover how much she could hear from upstairs. The TV room seemed to be right above her head, although she couldn’t quite picture how the layout of the house corresponded to the ceiling of her basement. Over the swelling sounds of movie montage music, Jen heard Becky rousing Chase and Paula from their stupor. “Did you hear that?” she asked. Evidently getting no response, she became more specific. “Did you just hear Jen scream?” Simultaneously, Chase and Paula burst out laughing.

“Turn it off,” said Becky, presumably referring to the movie. The music stopped abruptly. Jen could hear footsteps moving from just above her head off to the right. One well-defined set of foot-strikes came first; then a second, shuffly set followed. “Where the hell is she?” asked Becky in a panicky, agitated tone.

Jen couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit of satisfaction listening to them scrambling around in a panic, looking for her. At least it meant that somebody was going to come help her, and help, although she wasn’t sure what exactly would help in this situation, was what she desperately needed. She sat staring at the screen, meaningless words jumping out at her through her blurred vision: pimp, prostitute, playboy, Michigan. Her chest felt tight and strange and she couldn’t get enough air in through her nose when she breathed. She needed help, right now, or she was going to have to scream again.

Upstairs, she could hear Becky, Chase, and Paula searching the many rooms of the house, all through Becky’s suite downstairs and then upstairs to the guest bedrooms and Bradley’s old office. Finally, Jen heard the basement door fly open, and footsteps on the stairs. “Jen?” Becky’s voice called from the hallway above.

“Yes,” Jen replied, but her voice was faint, and she was still facing towards the computer and away from the door, so she was sure Becky couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t muster the strength to turn her head, but she tried to gather her voice to call out more loudly. “I’m here,” she said, but again her voice was barely more than a whisper.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Becky exclaimed breathlessly as she reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Jen sitting at the desk. “Why did you scream?”

Jen could hear Chase and Paula descending the stairs. She tried to tell Becky that she didn’t want them to come in, but again her voice did not emerge properly. “No. I don’t want,” she said in an almost-whisper that was powerless against the invading forces.

“Oh honey,” said Becky, leaning over Jen’s shoulder and looking at the computer, as Chase and Paula came to stand behind them. “Not the internet.”

Jen didn’t say anything. Becky leaned in closer to the computer, squinted at the screen, and then gasped loudly. “No,” she said, as she read silently. And, “No,” again, as though she were about to launch into a heated argument with the words on the screen. Instead, she wheeled her body around abruptly, drove her full momentum into Chase ending with what sounded like a punch or a hard shove, and began yelling furiously at him. Jen stared into her lap, listening to them argue. Becky was mostly yelling, “What…what?” at him, seemingly unable to finish her thought. Chase was responding with his own indignant, “What?” so that the two of them were just yelling the same word back and forth at each other.

Finally, Becky said, “Look!” evidently pointing at the computer. Chase appeared over Jen’s shoulder, leaning in to look at the screen. “So, it says that she might move to Michigan,” Chase said, dismissively. “Big deal. We’ve got that all cleared up now.”

“Read the beginning,” snarled Becky through her teeth.

“Oh,” said Chase. “Oh god,” he said, after a moment.

Becky suddenly found the words she had been looking for. Now she had no trouble forming complete sentences. “I can’t believe you let this happen!” she yelled. “He’s your friend and you said he was okay and I trusted you! You said there was nothing wrong with him. I heard you, you said it.”

“Becky,” said Chase.

“And now they’re saying Jen is a hooker, and it’s all your fault,” Becky continued. Jen cringed at the word “hooker,” curling up in the desk chair and lowering her head further towards her lap.

“No,” said Becky. “No, it’s my fault, for ever listening to anything a man says…even if he seems enlightened, even if he seems dependable, even if he’s gay…”

“Becky!” said Chase, in a commanding, authoritative tone. Becky fell silent immediately.

“Skipper is not a pimp,” said Chase, in a quietly angry voice.

“Then why did they say he was?” asked Becky.

“Because he hosts sex parties,” said Chase.

There was silence for a moment as Becky took this in. Finally she exclaimed, “Sex parties? ‘He hosts sex parties.’” Becky’s tone was incredulous as she quoted Chase. “You said he’s in some kind of business. You know, ‘buying things, selling things.’”

“He is in some kind of business,” said Chase. “And I really don’t know what it is, exactly, but it funds the parties.”

“What the hell is a sex party, anyway?” asked Becky. “Some kind of orgy?”

“With DJs,” said Chase. “And you don’t necessarily have sex at it if you don’t meet anyone you like. But yeah, sort of an orgy.”

“I thought you said he was a Buddhist,” said Becky.

“Buddhists don’t have anything against orgies,” said Chase. “Anyway,” he added, “Jen’s an adult. She can decide for herself who to sleep with.”

Becky seemed to have forgotten about Jen until this moment, as though the insulting comments on the computer screen had been pointed at Becky herself. Jen hunched quietly in her seat, hoping Becky would continue overlooking her and yelling at Chase. But she had no such luck.

“Jen,” Becky said. Jen sat still, waiting. “Turn around,” said Becky, sternly. Jen turned in the chair to face Becky, whose face was drained of its normal healthy color, and Chase, who was ruddy and flushed. She was surprised to remember that Paula was still in the room, a few feet away, leaning with her butt on the top of a file cabinet.

“Did you know that Skipper hosted sex parties?” Becky asked her, as though Jen were her teenaged daughter. Jen felt an uncomfortable flash of her own mother’s presence in the room.

“I thought they were raves,” said Jen, quietly.

Becky rolled her eyes dramatically. “And you thought you were making a good decision?” she asked, sarcastically.

Jen wasn’t sure what to say. She hadn’t seen Becky this mad in quite a while. She had hoped Becky could help her figure out how to deal with this, and instead she was making her feel even worse.

Luckily, Becky switched quickly from her unusual chastising mode back to her more normal attitude of crisis management.

“Okay,” she said, brushing past Jen to the desk and kneeling to unplug the computer. “This is coming with me.” She clicked the laptop closed and tucked it under her arm. “I can’t deal with this any more tonight, honey,” she said to Jen, in a weary but business-like voice. “I’m exhausted. I’ll work on it first thing in the morning.” She made it sound like Jen’s personal life was just another item on her agenda, between taxes and dry-cleaning. But Jen didn’t currently have a P.R. person, so she supposed Becky really would need to handle whatever fallout came from this scandal. Now she felt guilty, hoping this wouldn’t give Becky too much extra work.

With the laptop held firmly to her side, Becky stormed up the stairs. “Goodnight,” she said, in a voice that was forcibly cheerful. Jen could hear the door to the basement close, and then the door to Becky’s suite slam firmly. She must be really angry at me, Jen thought glumly.

Jen was left alone with Chase and Paula in the basement. She saw them both look at the empty staircase where Becky had just exited the room, then shoot each other understated looks of disbelief. Both of them seemed to be suppressing smiles. Jen wondered whether their veiled amusement was directed at her predicament or Becky’s response to it.

“Well,” said Chase, after a moment of awkward silence, “I guess I should go check on her. She seems really upset.” He turned and headed up the staircase after Becky.

Jen had hoped that Paula would follow him. But instead, she grabbed a small folding chair from a stack leaning against the wall and unfolded it. She set it down next to Jen, who was still sitting at the computerless desk, which was looking very blank and sad with its circle of dust outlining where the laptop had been.

“I know you probably want to be by yourself right now,” said Paula, seating herself in the rickety chair. Jen nodded, hoping Paula would go away. But she just leaned in closer, so that Jen could see the intricate lines and pores of her face. From this distance, in the glaring light of the bare bulb overhead, Jen could see that the two nose rings were in fact slightly different colors; one was a straightforward silver, while the other, which appeared to be the same shade under softer light, was in fact a very pale gold.

“You seem like you’re in a lot of pain,” said Paula. Jen wanted to roll her eyes, but she resisted. She didn’t nod or agree, either; she just sat staring blankly, trying to patiently wait for Paula to finish talking and leave. Paula didn’t seem to notice Jen’s remoteness as she plowed ahead with her speech.

“And I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but there’s a path that could help you heal from this bad experience,” Paula said.

Groundbreakers, Jen thought. She was already nodding politely in response.

“Celibacy,” Paula said.

“What?” Jen asked, startled out of her self-pity by this unexpected suggestion.

“I’ve been practicing for six years,” said Paula. “Well, I fell off the wagon a couple of times. Once for about a year.”

Perhaps Jen’s brain wasn’t functioning correctly due to its recent trauma, but she was having trouble taking this all in.

“People are really resistant to trying it,” Paula continued, leaning forward earnestly so that her dreadlocks fell forward over her face, then brushing them back over her shoulder. “I was at first, too. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I mean, if you reflect on all the greatest heartache and misery in your life, what does it come from? Love and sex.”

Jen couldn’t help but see the logic in this, despite her annoyance at the pungent wave of sandalwood that hit her nose as Paula moved her hair. She nodded half-consciously, but this time in earnest.

“When I was younger, I thought it was just men in the Midwest who were assholes,” said Paula. “So I moved to L.A. and started studying yoga. And then I thought it was just yoga guys who were assholes. So then I started dating normal guys who didn’t have any spiritual practice or anything. And they were assholes, too. Then I switched to women.”

Jen looked at her expectantly, waiting to hear if this strategy had worked.

“They were assholes, too,” said Paula. “Here’s what I learned: whoever you want to sleep with is an asshole.”

“Hmm,” said Jen, thinking about whether this applied to her own experience.

“I slept with my first yoga teacher in L.A.,” Paula said. “And my second one. Most yoga teachers in L.A. are just in it for the pussy.”

Though she would never have spoken that word out loud, Jen had often thought the same thing to herself, so often that it seemed dissonant to hear it in Paula’s voice.

“But my third teacher was the one who taught me about celibacy,” Paula said. “We shared a very deep spiritual connection that was purely platonic.”

The thought of Paula sharing a deep but platonic spiritual connection with anyone still kind of grossed Jen out, even though she was becoming less disgusted with her overall. Out of politeness, she suppressed a grimace.

“My teacher had been practicing celibacy her entire life,” said Paula. “She was a virgin.” Paula emphasized this last word as though it were something very rare and sacred, like a unicorn.

“Wow,” said Jen, feeling it was expected of her to be impressed.

“Well, actually I’m not really sure she was telling the truth about that. I think she’d slept with some women when she was younger and not counted it,” Paula added. “But anyway, I believe her that she’d been celibate for many, many years. Her energy was intense.”

Based on Paula’s facial expression, which Jen could identify in no other way than as recollection of sexual pleasure, she began to wonder how far one could go, exactly, within the bounds of celibacy. And of yoga instruction, come to think of it.

“So you’re saying I should be celibate,” Jen said.

“I don’t tell people to do things,” Paula said. “I just provide information.”

Something about this comment reminded Jen of her conversation with Skipper, back at the bar. She had been distracted for a moment, but now she remembered again what had happened, why she was having this conversation in the first place, and what she was going to have to deal with in the morning when Becky commenced her damage control. Her depression must have shown on her face, because Paula shifted back in her chair as though drawing the conversation to a close.

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry you slept with Skipper,” Paula said. “That guy definitely was an asshole.”

“But they all are,” said Jen.

“No, but I mean he was actually an asshole,” said Paula. “Why don’t you go to bed for real, now,” she added. This seemed like a good idea to Jen, who felt even more exhausted than she had the first and second times she had woken up this morning.

She followed Paula up the stairs, the discrepancy in elevation giving her a perfect view of Paula’s buttocks shifting loosely under her floppy, structureless pants. It seemed significant that Jen wasn’t even annoyed at this sight.

Chapter 9:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/07/9-extra-ounce-of-power.html