obviously a childish way of punishing the world. Consider me punished.
Consider me cheated of every woman's most harmless fantasy-to stage-manage a wedding, to be the mother of the bride. I suppose that the van Hertzogs and your father have the situation heavily in hand. By even the fifth month you might get by with an A-line tulle-and-satin gown, and if-it's only the fourth you could even have the dressmaker give you a bit of a waist. I love the look of a lace bodice, and a long stiff train, and a garland of real flowers that will wilt in an hour, and a veil with the bride's head obscured and vague like that of a goddess, a sacred statue, or a corpse-the menace of a bride coming down the aisle, to gobble up the quaking groom and, for dessert, his best man. It breaks my heart not to see my daughter married. But I disapprove so 'thoroughly of this particular ceremony whereby your lovely erect and shining womanhood bows low to this callow spoiled Dutch boy (his finger in quite the wrong dike) and his obese parents that my presence there would create a spiritual irritant if not a vocal objection ringing off the scandalized church rafters. You don't say what kind of church the vain Warthogs favor; my intuition says not the sturdy Reformed faith that gave us all those gorgeous Rembrandt blacks and tidy tiled interiors but sneaky snobby Catholic, so watered down by these Dutch theologians one reads about being nearly excommunicated all the time that you've never noticed your in-laws' Papism until now that it's too late, and no doubt they'll want you to convert, smilingly assuring you that it's just a formality and doesn't mean a thing. Thus the Old World reclaims the New and rescinds its beautiful promise of liberty. What Catholicism means to you, my dear, is incessantly more pregnancies-Jan is himself the baby of six, you told me-until by mutual understanding your husband wanders off to deposit his sperm in the famous red- light district or else in some querulous but spermicidal mistress whose progeny are no priest's business. And you, my poor Pearl, where will you find happiness then, as the little warthogs swarm around you and their paternal grandparents, smelling of rancid hops, lower over you like two rainclouds and all around you the air is thick with the ugliest language in Christendom? If you ever seek to vary your entertainment as Jan does his, you have a world of flat-headed Dutchmen to choose a lover from. You will be saddled with respectability-respectability more oppressive and muggy than any form of bourgeois self-enthrallment that has ever taken root in America, where at least one can always go west or make a wisecrack. No wisecracks in Holland -just boors and beers and burghers and bores.
Let's hope I'm quite wrong. Have a lovely wedding. At some point in life a woman becomes her own mother and you have reached it sooner than I did. Even if I could stomach the jet lag and Lowlands humidity I by no means wish to encounter your father, who might slap a subpoena on me before giving the blushing and bulging bride away. He imagines all sorts of legal wrongs from his helpless old helpmeet. So let this be his circus, while I watch my gallant circus here slowly fold its tents and put its elephants to bed. The ashram's days feel numbered. Do drop a note to your grandmother to tell her she's becoming a great-. She is being romanced by some antique fraud the Navy let out of mothballs and may have some rude news of her own. For the baby's sake, take lots of vitamin B-complex and zinc-zinc for all life-changes that involve metabolism.
See? For all your naughtiness I am still
Your loving Mother
Nov. 22 Dear Mother,
Your daughter has been most cruelly deceived! Thinking I was achieving vidya, I have been floating in a sea of avidya. My disillusion came about in this way:
There have been officials of all stripes and flavors hustling in and out of here legally picking the bones of our beautiful disintegrating Buddha Field. Prominent among them have been these men from the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice accusing us of immigration fraud. Our dear U.S., as you in South Florida know, has gone from being a global void that had to bribe people to come or else drag them here on slave ships to being a kind of last chance in a world of economic misery. Maybe the world has always been economically miserable-why would anyone work otherwise?-but people didn't use to know' it and now they do. Rather close as distances go out here is the border with Sonora in Mexico and apparently a number of our sannyasins were wetbacks of this utterly dry kind, since they've come in across the desert, smuggled in trucks and boxcars and some of them fried to death, poor souls. Also, from the India days, the ashram has a number of Europeans-mostly West Germans, Swedes, Danes, and Walloons-somehow Mediterranean Catholics don't need Buddha, maybe because they have the Virgin Mary with her sweet smile-who evidently pretended to be married to American sannyasins or who really were married but the INS claims insincerely, just to get by immigration. How they measure the sincerity of a marriage I'd love to know. So as all these people were being grilled and weeded out and tagged for shipment back to place of national origin I began to wonder why the Master himself, the Arhat, seemed immune from deportation even though he was from India, which I am sure is near the bottom of the list of the Immigration Service's favorite countries.
Well, I was with my dear friend Alinga-I think I wrote to you or somebody all about her: from Iowa, lanky, spacy, pretty in a willowy pale way, very supportive to me back in the days when I was being promoted from the backhoe and the artichokes-and I mentioned this minor miracle to her and the corners of her lips turned up in a provocative way she has and she said she'd assumed I knew by now. Knew what? Knew that the Arbat's real name was Art Steinmetz, and that he was from Massachusetts – Watertown, to be exact. Water-town, Mother!
Actually I make it sound as if she told me on the spot but it' took several days of campaigning on my part, playing it cozy and not pressing until we were really relaxed together and it could kind of slide out. Evidently he did go to India and did learn Hindi and Sanskrit and some Pali and study yoga but this was all from about 1965 and then all through the Seventies, but before that he was just one more bright good Jewish boy, who even put in a few terms at Northeastern studying sales engineering and business administration before the peace movement got to him and he took off. Just think, all those times I rode the Green Line out to the MFA to be ravished by the Impressionists once more I might have passed him in that crowd of sullen-looking students always clustering there on Hunting-ton Avenue! Though I've always revered him as this ageless rishi he's actually not quite my age, a year younger if he was twenty when he went to India-the year after I was married, which might explain certain things about our relationship-the way he somehow looked up to me as well as down, and brought out my mothering instinct as well as being my Master. I'm all confused. He's not even Jewish, technically, since his mother was Armenian-you know there's that big Armenian community in Watertown, just as you cross the Cambridge line along Mount Auburn Street, past the Cemetery-and that might give him that Asiatic quality I was so sure he had. Unlike Daddy, I never was much good at identifying ethnic types. Remember how he could tell all the way across a ballroom an Irishman from a Yankee, and spot Jews where nobody else saw them, without really being nasty about it (Daddy) but just factual, by his lights? I'm truly confused but as Alinga says, Ko veda? The Arhat either opened us up and got rid of our ego garbage or he didn't, and if he did (and he certainly did in my case) who cares about race or place of national origin?-it's all maya anyway. I know she's right intellectually but still I feel deceived. I gave myself to him totally and where I thought there was this great everything, this mahat, there was nothing-sbunya. Of course one of the truths of the Eightfold Way is that the void is the plenum and vice versa, but you probably don't want to hear about that. Maybe thanks to you and Daddy I'm such an incorrigible snob it's simply the idea that he's from Watertown -if it were Newton or Belmont or even Arlington I might not mind half so much. But I can't believe I haven't burned away even that much petty prejudice in these seven months. I still love him, of course. Maybe it's the idea that in all our intimacy-I've been seeing him nearly every day, composing letters and consulting and lately just commiserating-he kept up this pretense and said everything to me in this funny high-pitched singsong accent. While I was responding with my whole heart, with my honest voice. I mean, how big a fool can your daughter be?
Now that I know, he does remind me a bit of Myron Stern, and that must churn up a lot of old rage and frustration in me. Not at you and Daddy any more-you were no more to blame for squelching that romance than a cat should be blamed for tormenting a mouse; it was just your creaturely nature, and I, I suppose, down deep wanted you to do just what you did. My anger is at myself, all the worse in that my recent attempts to squelch an infatuation of my daughter's have proved totally ineffectual, thanks in part to the transatlantic meddling of your groom-of-choice, the impeccable Charles. Did you and Daddy ever feel even the littlest bit guilty about nixing the love of my life? Maybe it would have been a sociological misfortune but a healthy cross of genes. You shouldn't interfere with natural processes-that's called pollution. Now that I look with vidya, the Arhat has Myron's wonderful little way of cocking his head back (I thought it was the itchy beard made him do it) and lifting off his heels like a bird preening and about to take wing: king of all he surveys, adding a cubit to his height, cock of the walk, whatever. And his hands-those subtle tapered fingers, formed by generations of watchmaking and counting gold and not being allowed to own land or farm-like trickles of warm oil on your skin. Though Charles had done all those million stitches and palpations, his hands felt always a little rigid and clumsy, and cold-I used to think in bed my skin would warm his touch in a few seconds but it would take minutes and by that time this anger would be rising in me and everything would be against the grain, as they say around here-there's even a word for it, pratiloman. It's what happens when you stroke a cat against the fur.
Forgive me, you don't want to know any of this. This is my garbage and you have your own life. Somebody said to me the other day that at some point a woman must become her own mother. But it's hard when you still have one alive and well. That is amazing about the Visage buyout by Revlon, and your making all that scrumptious money! But now do put it in some safe securities-utilities pay the best dividends of-course and are not apt to go down unless the company over-commits to nuclear power-or CDs and don't listen to another word the admiral whispers into your ear. You were lucky. It seems to me that if the SEC were to investigate you could both go to jail for that tip and his son. too. How old is his son? Forget I asked, I'm not on the market, but I can tell you entre nous it's only a matter of time until I am disparue from this place. The only people left are those with nowhere else to go, or those who did attain near enough to vairagya and samadhi not to give a hoot about their surroundings. Almost all the stores in the mall are shut down, and the Karuna Pharmacy is under a heavy indictment from the narcs, and even the sweet little Sachchidananda River has dried up-I guess we were depleting the water table, with the irrigation and all the flush toilets people insisted on having. It used to be called Gritty Creek and now we can see why. Even the days have turned unfriendly-the sun is bright but not warm and the nights are viciously cold and somehow frighteningly enclosing, like being inside a black crystal or a cage of stars. So many stars!-an impossible dust of them that you never see in the misty polluted East.
If you and your voracious boyfriend are going to keep eating out at Polynesian, Mexican, and Cajun restaurants every night you shouldn't be surprised by an irritated duodenum or even diverticulitis. What you need is bran and raw iron-rich vegetables (dark-green leafy ones-not iceberg lettuce) and eggs in moderation, and to cut out all grease and fatty meats, except maybe liver once a week for the iron. Don't tailor your diet to the Admiral's-he is a man and has altogether different needs, since he has a prostate and you don't and you have smaller bones. Men can absorb much more calcium than women, and you should never drink milk for a pre-ulcerous condition-milk, it turns out, is rather bard to digest. Try Gelusil-Maalox somehow has a bad aura, a faint vibrating violet glow like those public toi: let seats that supposedly sterilize themselves. Please don't tease me about your marrying this sailor-boy-it would be much kinder to the heirs and save a lot of legal fees if you would just live in sin. Couldn't you find another condo, with an elevator and a peek at the sea? Or get used to the pool view from his, and ignore the rattle of the diving board and the sound early in the morning from the sprinklers? If you wouldn't wake up at four in the morning you wouldn't hear, the sprinklers. Have you ever tried wax earplugs? The best are made in Europe, Oropax-little fuzzy balls that go deli-ciously soft from your body heat-but Flent's from any old American drugstore might help you. Warm them in your hand before poking them in, otherwise you could break an ear drum. I'm sorry your know-it-all swain thinks the real-estate action is moving inland and that your place is depreciating. In Florida housing may be more like cars than in the North-new is best and almost-new is second-best and then it's all downhill. Also I suspect there's a subconscious pull away from the seaside now with the icecaps melting from these holes in the ozone. But what would the two of you do with a view of a golf course? Balls through the window, and electric carts being driven right through the yard. As I remember, you never liked men having fun by themselves. And think how you'd miss the little shops at the Palm Royal Plaza -you know you didn't like Del Mar Village near as well. We Price women need to see the sea. That was a rather funny cartoon from the Miami ^ Herald but men never wear those dots (tikkas) on their foreheads, and he never claimed to be a Brahmin, only an honest Shudra (the artisan caste).
Happy Thanksgiving, and even Merry Christmas. I don't know what will be happening to me. I have to confront the Arhat and do dread it. I waited twenty-two years to confront Charles and then it was by being out of the house when he came home from work.
Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder about Wa-tertown, etc. You were a good mother, given the vik-shipta (scatterbrained) style of your generation. I guess that's all any of us can do, follow the fashion and trust biology to override culture-if we try to be better parents than our peers, our children will feel uneasy. I mean, children aren't entirely the point of a woman's life, are they? But if not, what is5 Tell me if you've learned.
Addled love,
