Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Laurie expected to want the room all to herself, but she found that she rather liked it when others arrived, even when they talked, as long as they didn’t talk to her. She closed her eyes and listened to the words, or listened to them stir the water, and felt (as she assumed she was supposed to) that she was inside a womb. Maybe it would be possible after enough time in here to leave one’s rind of accumu-lated life in shriveled sheddings on the bottom of the pool, and emerge as pink and cleansed as a newborn.
Laurie opened her eyes just enough to see the bodies these new sets of sandal clacks belonged to. A mother-daughter team, she guessed. The daughter was immense, poor thing. The mother was a blonde with an open, unlined face. Her skin was shining and free of makeup. The mother dropped her towel and slid naked into the water; Laurie saw full breasts and just a suggestion of stretch marks on the belly. This one was healthy, but not a tummy-crunch nut. She looked comfortable in her own skin.
The daughter looked as if it really wasn’t her own skin, as if she’d found this uninhabited tent of flesh and moved in temporarily, until she could make more suitable arrangements. She looked to be about eighteen. She had beautiful liquid hazel eyes with long lashes, and a stylish haircut that said Big City. Laurie thought of her own girls, Anna grown recently lumpen in adolescence, and Cara, edging reluctantly toward puberty, still mostly tomboy. Laurie herself had been through both phases when growing up.
The large daughter had now survived her moment of indecision.
She hung her robe on a hook, turned her back, and stripped off her underwear. She followed her mother naked into the steaming water, making a little squeak as she did so.
“I love this room,” said Amy happily. She was glad Jill had gotten 8 / Beth Gutcheon
past shyness about being naked in front of that other lady. The other lady had kindly seemed to keep her eyes closed.
“It’s nice,” said Jill. Her mother had become a talking head on the surface of the water, a head and neck standing on a tabletop of blue.
Jill’s own body, even the great bulk of it which was submerged, remained attached to her head. Too bad.
At the other end of the pool, the thin lady opened her eyes and scootched down the bench to a tray of filled glasses someone had soundlessly brought. Jill watched as she drained a glass.
“What is that?” Jill called.
“Ice water with lemon,” Laurie said.
“Lemonade?”
“Not exactly.” Jill made her way down the pool, keeping her knees bent so that she was submerged to her shoulders. She fetched two glasses and floated back to her mother. They drank.
“What
is
it that makes this room so peaceful?” Amy wondered aloud.
“It’s a yurt,” said Jill.
“I
beg
your pardon?”
“A yurt, there are no right angles. Mongols or someone made them out of skins and poles. They were portable. You feel different in a space with no right angles.”
At the far end, Laurie opened her eyes again and looked around her. The girl was right. The lower wall tipped outward at a seventy-degree angle. At about hip level the walls tipped in toward the dome.
“Are they always open at the top?” Laurie called to Jill.
“Yes.”
“What happens when it rains?”
“The top is the smoke hole. The rain hits the hot smoke and steam from the fire and evaporates before it gets inside, at least in a Mongol one.”
Laurie stared upward at the sky. I like this, she thought.
“How do you know all this, Miss Smart Boots?” Amy asked.
“My anthropology class. We went heavily into dwellings of Stone Age peoples.”
Five Fortunes / 9
“Where are yurts from?” Laurie asked, in spite of her own wish to remain separate.
“The steppes, wherever they are. Siberia?”
“Do yurts work in snow too?”
“I would think,” said Jill. “I don’t think they, like, move into motels in the winter.”
Laurie laughed. “I think I want one of these. But it would have to work in snow.”
“Where are you from?” Amy asked her.
“Idaho,” Laurie said with her eyes closed.
“Are you?” Amy was delighted. “So am I! Coeur d’Alene.”
Laurie opened her eyes in surprise and said, “I’m from Hailey.”
You never met anyone from Idaho. You never even met anyone who had
been
to Idaho, except to Sun Valley.
“My grandma lives in Coeur d’Alene,” said Jill. “We go to visit, and then we go to Sun Valley.”
“Did you grow up in Hailey?” Amy asked.
Laurie nodded. “Hailey and Boise.” This was enough conversation for her. She reached for a towel from the stack by the steps, and abruptly climbed out of the pool. Amy watched the wan face, the long-waisted athletic body, the sleek, muscled legs. Laurie stopped suddenly at the top step.
“I’ve been in too long.”
“Hold the rail,” said Amy. Laurie obeyed. Amy watched her, knowing that if she
had
been in too long, she could easily black out.
Laurie shook her head, trying to clear it. She took a deep breath.
She felt ridiculous and pathetically exposed, dripping wet and blind from the black roaring in her ears and eyes.
“You okay?” Amy asked after a minute. The woman, who had a deep Cesarean scar across her abdomen, had straightened.
“Yes,” said Laurie, “just stupid.” She took a robe from a hook and put it on. She reached into the pocket and found her watch. She put on some Chap Stick.
“See you,” she said.
“See you,” Amy and Jill answered.
10 / Beth Gutcheon
Laurie shuffled out into the cool evening wearing her sandals, naked under the robe. She walked along the pathway on the west side of the cloister, which was built around two swimming pools.
She walked quickly back to her room, hurried through it to the small railed porch on the back side with a view of the mountains. There she sat down in a deck chair and cried.
C
arter Bond was causing problems that Sunday. She had arrived with a suitcase full of tennis clothes and bathing suits. She had no aerobics shoes or hiking boots, and at six feet and 170 pounds, she was too big for even the largest size of sweat clothes provided for the other guests. She was sitting in the Fitness office with Sandra, who was trying to create her exercise plan.
“What would you say is your general level of fitness?” Sandra asked.
“I can bench-press one-fifty,” said Carter, sounding aggressive.
Sandra noted the number.
“Aerobic exercise?”
“You mean classes? Please.”
“Anything that gives your heart an aerobic workout. Jogging, walking, biking, swimming…?”
“I play tennis,” said Carter.
“Every day?”
“Lady, I work for a living!”
Sandra smiled. Sandra clearly worked for a living too, and was the first person Carter had met here who looked as if she’d had a decent meal in the last month. She wore stockings and high-heeled shoes, and had long beige-painted fingernails.
“How often are you able to play?”
“Couple of times a month.”
“Singles? Doubles?”
11
12 / Beth Gutcheon
“Either.”
“And at what level? Would you say?”
“Killer.”
Sandra smiled, and wrote that down.
“Any special health problems we should know about?”
“There’s smoker’s cough.”
“Back all right? Knees? Neck?”
Carter nodded. “I’m in a no-smoking room. Where
can
I smoke?”
Sandra had heard this before, and she knew to answer with sympathy.
“There is no smoking here at all.”
Carter stared at her. She shifted in her chair and crossed one meaty leg over the other.
“What about the guards? Where do they smoke? I’ll hang out with them.”
Sandra was genuinely puzzled.
“Guards?”
“All those Mexicans in blue overalls, lurking around the grounds.”
“Those aren’t guards—they’re gardeners.”
“You’re running a detox farm with no guards?”
Sandra almost laughed. She had never had a guest be so blunt about this before.
“We think of it as a health spa, Ms. Bond.”
“Is there an employee’s lounge somewhere? I’ll smoke there.”
“Nobody smokes here. It’s a condition of employment.”
Carter stared at her.
“Is that legal?”
“As far as I know.”
Carter was becoming seriously uncomfortable. She hadn’t had a cigarette since the smoker’s cell at LAX, a fascist development in California airports. All the smokers were herded into a glass cage so all the clean, pure nonsmokers could look in at the addicts, huddled together inhaling poison gas. Now this.
“How do you get people to put up with this? Why don’t they all just vote with their feet and hike out of here?”
Five Fortunes / 13
Sandra said, “The amount they’re paying seems to be an incent-ive.”
Carter hadn’t thought of that. She didn’t know how much this deal cost, it was DeeAnne’s idea. A fiftieth-birthday present. “You need a complete change,” DeeAnne had said, and Carter couldn’t have agreed more, but that was because she’d pictured a week on her back, poolside, sipping margaritas and reading Patricia Cornwell novels.
“Now. Is there anything you can’t eat, or don’t like?”
“Plenty. Most of it fish,” said Carter.
Sandra noted.
“We have a vegetarian meal plan. Would you like to try that?”
“No.”
“Just so you know, there is also a liquid diet that some of our guests enjoy. It’s a fast, really. We don’t recommend it for more than three days, though, with the level of exercise you’ll be doing.”
“Pass,” said Carter, rolling her eyes.
“Now, what about your calories? How many a day?”
“About five thousand would be good.”
Sandra moved right along. “We don’t recommend less than a thousand. The nutritionist advises twelve hundred, but you do have the option of fourteen hundred a day.”
“I’ll take it.”
“There will be a name tag, which we ask you to wear all the time, on your breakfast tray. Terri will be your personal trainer; your meetings with her will be on your schedule. A shopper will go into town first thing in the morning to get you some exercise clothes and shoes. She’ll bring them to your room. The morning hikes leave at six from the Saguaro Pavilion. What time would you like your wake-up call?”
“Eight.”
“I’ll put down five forty-five.”
“You mean we’re supposed to hike on an empty stomach? Don’t people faint?”
“I can arrange to have a glass of juice for you in Saguaro, if there is a blood sugar problem.”
“Do it.”
14 / Beth Gutcheon
“There is coffee and tea there in the morning as well, and herbal tea and our special lemonade.” Carter made a face. She had tried the “lemonade” in the Saguaro Pavilion while she was looking for the bar. They had a big iced crock of it in there, and ladies were swilling it down like mai tai mix. She was relieved to hear they at least allowed coffee and tea. A week without cigarettes or gin was bad enough, but caffeine would have nailed it. She’d have gone over the wall no matter what DeeAnne had paid.
“Do you have any questions?” Sandra asked her.
“I can’t find the TV in my room.”
Sandra sighed. “I’m afraid Lalou considers TV one of our modern addictions. The only one here for the guests is in the Saguaro Pavilion. You can watch the news in the morning after your hike; many guests do that. Will you be wanting a newspaper?”
“Who the hell is Lalou?”
“Oh, she’s the Founder. The Cloisters is run according to the principles of Lalou and her mother, a famous leader of the health and spirit movement in the twenties. You’ll find copies of Lalou’s favorite books in your room, and Lalou recommends that for maximum benefit, you just close the world out for the whole week and allow your spirit to heal. Read Zen koans at breakfast, or better yet, let your mind be empty.”
“How many newspapers can I have?”
“We offer the
Arizona Republic
.”
“I can’t get the
New York Times?
”
“We could probably send someone to town for it, but you won’t have it until lunchtime.”
“Do it.”
“I think we’re all set, then. Happy hour is at six in the Chapter House, and dinner is at six-thirty. Do you know how to find it?”
“I’ll manage.”
Carter strode out, feeling silly in the bathrobe that didn’t cover her knees. Her craving for a cigarette had grown so bad that she was thinking of ripping one open and putting a plug of tobacco in her cheek. But she decided instead to swim some laps, as many as she could. Maybe she’d bliss out. Or drown.
T
he Chapter House was a cozy room in which a baronial fireplace warmed the cool desert evening. By six o’clock ladies of varying ages and sizes sat chattering or staring into the fire, and more arrived every few minutes. A few, fresh from traveling, wore street clothes. Most wore the bone-white linen cassocks they’d found in their closets. These were vaguely suggestive of monks’
robes, and gave even the most jaded guests, stripped now of makeup, jewelry, and other social markers, an air of freshness and purity.
Amy and Jill sat together, their faces scrubbed and clean after the bathhouse. Jill’s hair was wet. Her mother looked around with a welcoming expression, in case anyone should like to make conversation with them. Jill had knocked back her “cocktail,” a small cup of some spicy tea flavored with cranberry juice, and was powering down her share of the fingers of jicama that served as hors d’oeuvres.
Amy saw their friend from the Japanese tub, the woman from Idaho, come in. Laurie’s hair, now dry, formed a soft ash-gray halo around her face. She had deep circles under her eyes. Amy would have signaled her to join them if she’d caught her eye, but Laurie took a cup of spiced tea and went to a deep chair in the corner.
Laurie hoped no one would speak to her. She felt like a new girl on the first day of camp, watching old-timers greet each other. This whole idea was a mistake. She thought, I wish I hadn’t let them talk me into it. I can’t explain myself to new people. I miss my children.