She smiles but I can tell she’s annoyed. She always smiles at me when we’re at the Center and there are students watching.
“Rebekah, I think we’re freaking out your son,” an
Indian woman says. She has dark, exotic features and a massive bulge in her middle.
Mom walks a few steps towards me and wraps herself around my back.
“Is that true, Sanskrit? Are you freaking out?”
“Not at all. What’s a little mucous between friends?” I say, and the women giggle.
Mom squeezes me even harder.
“All this will be yours in fifteen years,” she announces to the ladies.
“I’m sixteen,” I say.
“And I’ve been there for every moment of it,” Mom says.
She laughs and smoothes down my hair. I don’t see how it’s funny that she doesn’t know how old her son is.
“Alright, let’s get started, ladies,” Mom says. She presses a button on the sound system and the music of a Japanese flute fills the room. Mom hits a gong on a platform behind her. The sound swells, then drops away, the last bit of tone hanging in the air.
The women settle down on their mats. I told Mom I wasn’t freaking out, but the truth is that I am, at least a little bit. Not because of mucous, but because I’m in a room full of women barely wearing clothes. In the winter the Center is a little easier to take because the women wear full leotards with tights or long flowing yoga skirts. But as summer approaches, the yoga
clothes get smaller and smaller. Some women in the room today are wearing tights, others yoga pants, and some are wearing those stretchy shorts like volleyball players wear. They’re like the bottom of a bathing suit, only there’s no beach and no water. There’s only me sitting ten feet away while they stretch with their legs wide open.
Let’s just say I wear baggy shorts when I visit the Center. For my own protection and everyone else’s.
“We’ll begin on our backs in a relaxed pose.” The ladies lie back.
“My son is good at this one,” Mom says, earning another laugh from the ladies.
I’m so glad I can be here to help Mom’s comedy act.
I lie on my back. According to Mom this is called Dead Man’s Pose, but she doesn’t use that term today. I think it’s bad luck to talk about death with so many babies-to-be in the room.
I look across at the sea of bumps. Some are little and some big, some wide and some narrow. I’ve seen pregnant women before, but never lying down with so few clothes on. When you see pregnant women out in the world they can look fat, but in tight yoga clothes you realize they’re not fat at all. There’s something growing inside them, and it’s running out of room and wants to get out.
“Deep breath,” Mom says. “Let your worries and cares drift away on the music.…”
I try to let my worries and cares drift, but they stick to me. First I worry about what’s going on with school, then I worry about my deal with Sweet Caroline, then I worry about what Herschel said on the phone last night, about how I’m hurting people with my lie. Maybe even damaging my character.
Mom says, “Imagine there’s an empty space inside of you and it’s filling with warm, blue water. It is good. All is good.”
All is not good
, I think. Not for me, and not for these bumps, these babies-to-be. If they pop out into the world now, they’re going to find themselves in yoga class, trapped in Dead Man’s Pose with their obsessed mothers.
Because there’s no escaping when you’re a baby.
Wherever and whenever you’re born, you start getting brainwashed. Maybe you have a grandfather who desperately wants you to practice Judaism, or a mother who forces you to do yoga, or a father who’s spent ten years in a bedroom inventing something that still doesn’t exist and probably never will. And these are the adults in your life who are supposed to be teaching you how to do things.
I look out across the bumps, and I feel bad for them. As soon as they pop out, the world is going to start pushing them in different directions, and what chance do they have?
“Now let the water flow out of you,” Mom says.
“I’m waiting for my water to flow,” one of the ladies says, followed by giggles.
I imagine crawling up to the first lady’s stomach and telling the baby, “Don’t come out. It’s not safe. Pass it on.”
That baby passes the message to the next, and on and on.
“Roll over on your sides, ladies. Let me know if you need help,” Mom says.
But if I tell the babies not to come out, maybe there are going to be thirty stillbirths in the class, and they’ll blame Mom. They’ll say that all these women came to a prenatal class that killed their babies. Mom will have a terrible reputation, and it will ruin her life. If her life is ruined, my life is guaranteed to be ruined.
I decide I sent the wrong message. So I imagine going up to the first baby and saying, “Come out, but don’t believe everything they tell you. Pass it on.”
Then I think that might also be a bad message, because all these kids will be born not knowing who to trust. That’s a terrible way to go through life, being surrounded by adults you can’t trust.
That’s when I decide I’m not the best person to be giving advice to fetuses.
“Mom,” I whisper.
She shushes me.
“Bathroom.”
She gives me a disappointed look.
“All this talk of water,” I say, pulling at my shorts.
“Go ahead,” she whispers.
I stand up. The ladies look at me.
“Mucous break,” I say, and they giggle as I head for the door.
“Sat nam.”
That’s a mantra, a phrase you repeat over and over again in meditation. Mom told me it means something like,
Truth is my identity
. But truth is not exactly my strong point these days.
It’s playing on a meditation CD piped into the bathroom.
Sat nam. Sat nam
.
Anyway,
Sat nam
sounds more like,
Sit down
. Which is a pretty good mantra for the bathroom.
It’s like the bathroom is inviting me to do my business.
So I open a stall and avail myself of the invitation.
The nice part about the men’s room at the Center is that it’s rarely used because there aren’t many men to use it. There are guys who take yoga, but the female to male ratio is something like a hundred to one. While this is easy on the eyes, it’s also easy on the men’s room.
Privacy. When you share a bathroom with two women at home, you look for it wherever you can get it.
Sit down
. The mantra beckons me.
I’m about to let rip when I hear the men’s room door open.
I’m hoping this person is going to pee and get out of the bathroom fast so I can enjoy some quality time. But that’s not what happens. I hear the sound of fabric moving, and then whoever it is joins the
sat nam
chorus with his own
sat nam
s.
I clear my throat a couple times to make my presence known, but the chanting doesn’t stop. The guy actually starts to harmonize with the CD. The sound is beautiful and eerie, filling the bathroom with a spiritual chorus.
The stall next to me opens. Fabric rustles, and a man groans and sits down next to me.
Blue fabric spills under the wall of the stall, a robe or something that’s coming into my stall. I try to discreetly shuffle the fabric away with my foot, but there’s too much of it.
With another groan, the person lets go a fusillade, so loud and uncensored that I let out a little shout.
I kick the blue fabric over, and I stand up and fight to get my pants up.
There’s another burst of body noise followed by more groans.
It’s too much for me.
I flush my toilet fast and push out of my stall. I’m washing my hands when a voice says, “Excuse me.” I ignore it, turn the water up.
“Have you any tissue?” the voice says in lightly accented English.
I don’t want to talk to a stranger in a men’s room stall. I turn off the water and head for the bathroom door.
“Excuse me,” the voice says more urgently.
“What?” I say. Now I’m annoyed.
“Tissue. To clean oneself.”
“You mean toilet paper?”
“Please.”
I look around for a roll of toilet paper, but there’s nothing. Damn it.
I go into my stall and figure out how to remove the toilet paper from the holder. It’s that scratchy recycled stuff that Mom buys for the Center and the house. You wipe yourself, and it feels like your butt survived the Six-Day War. I yank on it until I free the roll from the holder.
“I’ll throw it over the top of the stall,” I say.
“Don’t throw it,” the man says.
The stall door swings open.
A strange man with a giant beard sits on the toilet, fabric spilling around him in every direction. I scream and drop the toilet paper. I race out of the bathroom.
“Mom!” I shout as I run through the Center. I throw open the door to the yoga studio and it smashes against the wall with a loud bang.
The pregnant ladies scream.
“Mom!”
“What is it?”
“There’s a strange man in the bathroom. He might be homeless. I think he broke in there or something.”
“He may have wandered in,” Mom says calmly. “The homeless are not bad people, Sanskrit. They’re suffering. We’ve had this conversation.”
“He opened the stall door, Mom. While he was on the toilet. That’s not right.”
I’m emphasizing words so she’ll understand this is a crisis, not another opportunity to practice kindness and compassion with the less fortunate, particularly the less fortunate she’s not related to, which is her forté.
“I’ll take care of it,” Mom says.
I’m a little surprised. This is a Mom I don’t know, the strong and in-charge one who only appears at work.
“Don’t go in there alone,” one of the ladies says.
“We’ll go with you, Rebekah,” another one says.
A group of about ten of us edge our way down the hall. More ladies come out of the other yoga studio and join us.
“He was in here?” Mom says. She points towards the men’s room.
“Right in there.”
“How did he get past reception? Where’s Crystal?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Do we need a weapon?” one of the women says. She’s a young Asian woman, I think her name is Sally. She grabs a rolled-up yoga mat from the rack and grips it like a baseball bat. It seems an ineffective choice given the situation, but I’m thinking the homeless man can’t overpower me and two dozen pregnant women. He’s probably going to back down and run out of the place. But you never know.
“Maybe we should call the police, Mom.”
“We don’t need the police. We can take care of this. People are people, Sanskrit.”
That’s when I realize Mom isn’t in charge; she’s naïve. People are not people. People are dangerous. Not everyone takes deep breaths and eats organic. Some of them bring bombs onto buses in Jerusalem or stand you up at your parent-professor conference. Not that those two things are equal, but you know …
We approach the bathroom door with Mom leading us forward. She reaches out to open it, when it suddenly swings open on its own.
The ladies scream.
The homeless man steps out. He looks a little less homeless in the daylight. His hair is too long, his beard unkempt and scraggly. He’s wrapped in bright blue fabric that hangs all the way to the floor.
He looks up, surprised at the army of pregnant women glaring at him.
“That’s him,” I say.
Mom gasps.
“Guru Bharat,” she says. “You’re here!”
“Namaste.”
That’s what this guy says to my mother.
Namaste. The god in me recognizes the god in you
. He presses his hands together at chest level.
“Namaste,”
Mom says, returning the greeting.
“My dearest Rebekah,” the guru says.
I can hear his accent now. It’s that light British accent you hear in people who go to British schools in foreign countries.
“I am most honored to be in your presence,” he says. He bows from the waist and stays there, his head towards the ground.
“Guru!” Mom says, and she falls to her knees.
The ladies follow her lead. Women are dropping like flies all around me. The really pregnant ones have to struggle their way down. The less pregnant women just plop.
I’m the only one still standing. The guru comes out of his bow, and we’re looking at each other face to face.
I feel a tug at my pant leg.
“Down,” Mom whispers.
“No.”
“Bow down.”
“Jews don’t bow down, Mom. We have a long history of not bowing down.”
Mom is persistent. It’s not like I can kick her, but I shuffle my leg around to try and get her hand off of me.
“Sanskrit, please!” Mom says, still tugging at me.
“Sanskrit?” the guru says.
Finally, somebody who can pronounce my name correctly.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” the guru says. “You have? From who?”
“From your mother. We spoke on the computer. What do you call it?”
“Chatting?”
“Yes. We chatted. She’s very proud of you.”
“She is?” I say.
“Enough, ladies. Get up, please,” the guru says.
The women rise as the guru walks over and stands in front of Mom.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says.
“I’m here,” he says, and smiles at her.
“May I—” she says, and holds out her arms.
“Please do,” he says, and they embrace, a long, tight embrace, so intense that Mom all but disappears into his robes.
It goes on for way too long, to the point where the ladies and I are standing around, looking at one another uncomfortably.
“What the hell, Mom,” I say.
She emerges from his robes, her face glowing.
“Thank you,” she says to him.
“No, thank you. It’s not often I get to hug a beautiful yogini.”
I clear my throat loudly.
“I’m sorry I scared your son earlier,” the guru says.
“You didn’t scare me,” I say. “Why did you run from me?”
I want to tell him that we keep the stall door closed in America, especially when we look like crazy homeless men, but I glance at Mom and decide it would be better to keep that to myself.