World and Town (11 page)

A
delaide, the new yoga teacher, is quitting and moving to Nepal. Already! She’s sorry; she had planned to put down some roots, she says. But this friend has e-mailed her about a trekking outfit looking for guides and, well, she’s going. Sustainable tourism, after all, eco-sensitivity, the earth.

“Are you worried about the cold?” asks Hattie.

“I have down everything,” says Adelaide. “Down comforter, down sleeping bag, down jacket, down vest. Down mittens.”

“Well, send us a postcard. We’ll miss you.”

“I’ll put up some prayer flags for you,” she promises. “Send you good karma.”

“Thanks. Are you Buddhist?”

“Namaste,” she says, her hands in prayer position before her. Isn’t that Hindu? Well, never mind. Behind her red glasses, Adelaide has pink sparkles on her eyelids.

Hattie does wish she would stay.

Now people are looking at yoga tapes, trying to find a program they can stand. Every last one of them, though, has some kind of a problem. Too fast. Too much schmaltz. That sunset! That ponytail! Several members of the class do not like the word “abs,” especially Jill Jenkins, who teaches English at the high school. That’s not a battle they can win, though; there is no yoga tape that does not use the word “abs.” Finally, they put a “Help Wanted” sign up at the general store. And today at Millie’s—look—there’s an answering sign tacked right over it, offering a possible replacement teacher for the senior class, anyway. A temporary teacher. Not a professional, but a person with some experience and a willingness to try if the class members are. Hattie comes to class as curious as anyone.

Carter!

She tries to nod at him discreetly; it’s yoga class, after all. Meaning that people take their shoes off quietly. Stuff their fee into a coffee can quietly. Unroll their special sticky mats quietly. It’s a kind of church, in a way, and today they’re extra quiet—excited to be starting again, but wanting things to be right, never mind that they didn’t use to be so quiet. Before Adelaide, in truth, they were a whole lot more social. But Adelaide brought this hush with her from the city, and people liked it. They liked the idea that yoga was a way of life and not just exercise—a practice, Adelaide would have said. And they liked it that the first thing Adelaide did when she came was get the class moved out of the school gym and into her friend’s sculpture studio, next door to Ginny’s house. It’s an old barn, really; it smells of clay. There are cloth-covered who-knows-what lined up toward the back of the room—plastic- and canvas-covered presences, wheeled out of the way. Ghosts. No one much minds, though. They love the high, high ceiling; they love the massive chestnut beams from the days when there were chestnut trees around here. It’s the kind of setup hippies have made in surprising places, and that you have to know a hippie to get to see. Ginny, for example, has never seen this one.

But anyway, here the class is, anxious to be serious again. As is their habit, they say welcome to Carter, but otherwise carry on as if he is Adelaide. Carter, though, is nothing like Adelaide. Adelaide would start class by checking in with people—asking if they had any injuries or concerns, including spiritual concerns. There’d be a moment of silence; and then people would speak up like Quakers. Some of them complaining about their backs, of course, but some of the younger of the older people expressing desires—to be more open to experience, things like that. In truth, it took Hattie some getting used to; in truth, she could not help but feel that some bosoms were better left unbared. But after a while, she found herself touched by what people said: That they wanted to have more patience. That they wanted to have more compassion. That they wanted just to feel more. To know what they were living for. Hattie herself never said anything; even in this, the older-persons class, she’d thought of her classmates as somehow too young to address—too unacquainted, heaven help them, with life. Where would she even begin? Time—what time is. Place. Home. And death—death!
A story no one would ever believe except for its handy hammering corroboration
, Lee used to say.

As some of them must already know, anyway, in which case they don’t need reminding.

Now Carter sits cross-legged at the front of the room, hands on his knees, back straight, eyes closed. Asking nothing. Even balder, somehow, and all in black—black T-shirt, black yoga pants—he looks like an actor of some sort. A performer. He begins the class by simply opening his eyes—those intimidating eyes.

“Yoga is about our heads,” he says, with no preliminaries. “That great underutilized organ, most critical to our practice. Does anyone here know what the hippocampus is? Or, to begin at the beginning, why we call it the
hippocampus?
Besides Hattie, that is.”

No one answers.

“Hattie?”

“Well, being a part of the brain shaped something like a seahorse,” she answers dutifully, “we call it that.
Hippo
meaning ‘horse.’
Campus
meaning ‘of the sea.’ ”

“Thank you,” he says. “You know, one of the things for which the hippocampus is responsible, besides memory, especially declarative memory, is route-finding. So that scientists have found, interestingly, that cabdrivers have enlarged posterior hippocampi, apparently from all their time finding the best route to the airport. And in similar fashion, Buddhist monks have enlarged left prefrontal cortexes, lucky beings, apparently from meditating. Does anyone know what the left prefrontal cortex is associated with? Or perhaps I should say what a differential between the left and right lobes is associated with, with the left being the larger of the two. Hattie?”

“Happiness.”

“You’ve been keeping up.” He smiles so spontaneously that for a moment she can see him completely bald and a monk himself. “Precisely. I bring all this up because it is impossible to do yoga, I find, without asking what this is doing to our brains. No one has done the study yet, to my knowledge. But I am confident that in engaging in this practice, we are shaping ourselves—generating synapses, altering our very brain structure, maybe enlarging that left prefrontal cortex the way the monks do. And, of course, increasing our strength and flexibility in the bargain. So let us begin. Legs in lotus position. You all know what this is, yes? Cross-legged is fine. Hands palms together. Spines pulling up to the ceiling and down to the floor, extending. Let’s lift the tops of our heads even higher. Shoulders down, long neck. Think Modigliani. Longer. Inhale, exhale. Elbows a little more forward, please; this is yoga, not church. Did you ever see
The King and I?
You are wearing gold brocade, your costume is so stiff you have no choice but to stick your elbows out. There. Good. And of course you must keep your chin up; otherwise, that thing on your head will fall off.”

Hattie steals a glance around the room. People are smiling.

And here they thought they could only love Adelaide.

Carter is not as flexible as Adelaide. Hattie is surprised, though, at how expert he is, and how limber—almost as limber as Jill Jenkins, who is fifty-two and a former gymnast, and only taking this class because she couldn’t schedule Advanced. If Hattie had to guess, it would’ve been someone in the lab who got Carter started; those grad students do burst with interests. Still, his command is a thing to behold. Where Adelaide was all questions—
Have you tried it this way? Is that better?
—Carter is all directives.

“Spread your fingers. Pull up through the hips. Turn this.”

And, disarmingly: “It’s hard, isn’t it. I’ve always had trouble with that myself. But here. Look.”

And: “You need a block under that.”

And: “I’ll get you a strap.”

Think about now
, Adelaide would say.
Think about where you are now. What you have control over and what you don’t. What is it that’s bothering you? Can you make a picture of it? Can you ball up that picture and throw it far away?

Carter does none of that. Instead, he says, “There. Good.” Or: “No. Like this.” “It is important to do this correctly,” he says. And, “We are never too old to get things right.” And, “We must try to connect things up.”

He expands: “In yoga, our toes speak to our fingers speak to our spines, yes? The relationships between which may not be apparent in our everyday lives. But here our every part acknowledges its connection to the next. Here our heads speak to our hearts speak to our lips.”

Did he say
lips
or
hips?
He stops in front of Hattie as he says it, in any case, and touches one hip, gently—pressing it back with two fingers.

“All in one plane, as if you are a slide specimen,” he says. “There. Yes. Perfect. Now we can put you under a scope and see what became of you.” He fixes his eyes on her; and though they both know how her image projects back from his macula to his lateral geniculate nucleus to his primary visual cortex, that path does not much describe, it seems, what is happening.

“Miss Confucius,” he says. “Hattie.”

Tears start to her eyes.

“Don’t,” he whispers. And, more loudly, “Spread your toes.”

The class goes on forever.

“As I understand there is resistance to the term ‘abs’ in this class,” says Carter finally, at the end of the hour, “we will employ their proper nomenclature, namely, ‘abdominals.’ We can also ban, if you like, the word ‘washboard’ unless it refers to a laundry aid or, metaphorically, a winter road.”

Applause and cheering. Jill Jenkins is so overcome with joy, she misrolls her mat.

Next, headstands. Jill and some other class members join Carter, while the rest lie back, eyes closed, arms wide. Opening up their hearts to the sky. Hattie breathes. Relaxes. She feels her pectorals stretch, the muscles of her neck; the muscles of her face go slack. How heavy her head is. Her thoughts are starting to slacken, too—to unwind, like denatured proteins—when she senses a presence; and sure enough, there stands Carter, looming over her in principal investigator fashion. He offers her a hand to her feet, which she accepts. His hand is warm and a little papery, like a potato jacket.

“You’ve done some yoga over the years,” she says, pulling on a sweatshirt.

“I have.” He’s put a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt. “A hobby?”

She crosses her arms; he crosses his arms in answer—their mirror neurons at work.

“I needed to do something,” he says. “My back. My sanity. One of my postdocs got me started.”

As she guessed.

“You’ve had some tough years,” she says.

“We all have.”

“And you’ve always taken your hobbies seriously.” She raises her chin.

“Too seriously, some would say.” He raises his.

“Your father, you mean.”

He gives a half-laugh. “Am I growing predictable in my old age?”

“You’ve always been predictable,” she says. “Except, that is, when you’re predictably unpredictable.”

It’s a kind of joke she hasn’t made in decades, and comes out stumblingly; she is surprised when he laughs, and encouraged enough to ask, then, “May I ask what happened the other day?” Taking a tone she hasn’t taken for a while, either—a restrained tone, with some cross-exam in it.

“I could see perfectly well you were not coming back.”

“Could you.”

A half-beat. “Would you like to see my boat?”

To which she has to smile—how agile—even as she answers with an aplomb of her own, “I’d love to. But—excuse me—what boat?”

“I’m building a boat.”

“Of course you are. Though some people, you know, thought you were writing a book.”

Her locution turning crisp like his, she notices.

“I have come to realize I have nothing to say, actually—that I am done saying things, if you can imagine the relief of my publisher and the reading world,” he says.

“No more mindless deforestation on your behalf.”

“Precisely. In fact, I am thinking of mounting an anti-writing campaign.”

“That others might follow your fine example.”

He laughs, his eyes lit. “Are there not too many books as it is? What we lack, it seems to me, is silence, especially attentive silence. Think what the world would be if one could get tenure based on the quality of one’s silence.”

She laughs, too.

“I should draw up a proposal for that,” he goes on. “What with the advent of fMRIs, an appropriate metric is not altogether beyond our reach, you know. But first, my watercraft.”

“A boat.”

“A boat, yes.” He smiles once more and—unusually for Carter—tilts his head.

• • •

T
he Turners’ cottage is down the hill from yoga, on the lake path; they walk in a silence of some beauty. For here they are, after all these years—so much has happened, even as nothing has. They are walking, and that alone seems more than they could have asked for in this world. How well they would get along, probably, if they never talked at all—if they had no history. If instead all they had was this, their warm familiarity. It’s been a while since Hattie’s felt how the boundaries between people can go soft, but she feels it now, in the shortening of his gait to match hers, in the relaxing of his gaze. She doesn’t remember his offering his arm to her, but somehow she’s taken it. He’s tightening the crook of his elbow around her hand, though that elbow’s a little high; they’ve forgotten the difference in their heights, which is, as he used to say,
not negligible
. His hand digs into the pocket of his yoga pants now—old-fashioned ski pants, actually, she sees, with a raised seam down the front. His forearm drops, adjusting; and there—she can feel, between each two of her fingers, a creased-up fold of his shirt flannel. Joe and she used to walk like this, once upon a time; and wasn’t it one of the best parts about being married, really—always having an arm to take when you felt like it?

Come back
.

She’d forgotten.

“Look,” says Carter.

Wildflowers! There, under some pine trees—a drift of purple hepatica—and not far from them, a patch of white bloodroot. Which, once upon a time, the Indians used for war paint, Hattie knows—having told her kids about it in school—those roots running with just what you’d expect from a thing called
bloodroot
. And beyond the flowers shine some new-leaved trees—those leaves
qīng qīng
, she wants to say—a fresh green with no translation she knows of, who knows if native English speakers even see it. And beyond the trees—the lake light, winking. It’s late afternoon; the clouds are live and orange, burning and brooding. They move low and restless over the water—patrolling for something, it seems, by what’s left of the day. But everything else is at rest. The light’s gone soft; and the wind’s a stir—a no-account conveyor of music, mostly: the chirp and caw of the birds; the rustle of the leaves and grass; the
glap, glap
of the water. And now a weird, warbly tremolo—a loon flying by with its mouth open, even as a brown weasely thing shoots across the road.