The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2008

Impermanence

 Kate Swoboda

My mother once said that if life didn’t scar me, I would scar myself, what with all of my tattoos. One for every big love come and gone; one for the day I graduated from college; one for the day I got my first job; one for the day I quit the job and darted between spiritual centers: from Green Gulch Zen Center to the Lama Foundation to Esalon and Tassajara and back to Green Gulch again. One for the day I met Green, the man. Most of my tattoos were small, no more than an inch in size, but I’d begun to grow quite a collection. Now Green was gone—a car accident on I-80—and I was getting my left breast tattooed in his memory.

“I wouldn’t get a ‘tat there,” Burke told me.

“No, that’s the place,” I said, pausing to run my fingers for the last time over the unmarked skin.

Burke shrugged, snapped on rubber gloves. I lay myself down on the table. I’d already filled out all of the paperwork; the waivers were signed. Now there was nothing left but to have the design inked in. I’d chosen a series of waves for the design, spare, no color, just undulating lines of blue-black ink that disappeared into the crevice between my breasts as if it continued down the length of my body.

I breathed deeply every time the needle came down, thinking of Green and all of our hours sitting zazen, of the seven-day sesshin we had finished at the zendo right before he died. If I let myself be in the present moment right now, the pain of the needle and of losing Green would have hurt too much, so I let my thoughts wander, undisciplined. The day before Green died, we’d hiked to the top of a hill overlooking Muir Beach. We could see for miles on all sides—San Francisco in the distance, the ocean spreading flat like cooking oil in a pan, all the way up to the edge of the horizon. “This is a dharma gate!” Green had cried, because he was like that. He thought that anything that gave him pleasure—fried chicken, popping bubble wrap, cleanly clipped toenails—was a dharma gate. It was windy on the top of that hill, and he had snaked his arms around my waist from behind and held me, tight, as if he was the only thing to keep me from blowing away.

Burke asked, “How’re the kids?” He meant my other tattoos, the ones he’d inked on years or months before.

“Great,” I said. “Love ‘em.”

“Less drama, then?” Burke said. Every time he spoke his breath warmed my skin. He was bent down so close, intent on getting it just right. I nodded. He didn’t know about Green. In the past week I had grown exhausted with telling people, recounting details that were ultimately mundane but that everyone seemed to want to know: What time of day? What part of the road?

“Come, stay with us for awhile,” my mother had said when I’d called to tell her. Even in the middle of a messy apartment that now felt too big, I’d hesitated at her offer. My mother was a Midwestern homemaker, and my father was a tax attorney. Two years before, they had come to visit me at Green Gulch during a weekend of non-stop rain. When it rains in that little valley in Marin County, the cool air makes a mist that rolls over the hills and blurs the edges of the trees, making everything seem like a watery Impressionist painting. I was working the gardens that week, and when they found me I was covered in mud. Wherever we walked, they leaned against one another and carefully picked their way around the ragged puddles while I stomped through in my rubber farming galoshes, pointing out buildings or introducing people. My mother, especially, kept nodding and saying “Interesting.” After lunch I had shown them what was at the time my latest tattoo, to commemorate leaving my job and coming to Green Gulch. The tattoo was Chinese for “crisis.” In Chinese, the word is compound expressed by two characters: “danger,” and “opportunity.”

“Another one?” my mother had said, her brow wrinkled. I could tell that she wanted to understand me and that she was disappointed in herself for not being able to.

 “It seems like you want to remember every piece of your life, good and bad. Especially the pain,” my father had said. They were dark-haired, solid, and neat, like laundry folded in a basket. My father kept wiping away at his forehead, where a sheen of sweat would reappear.

“I’m going to remember it all, anyway,” I had said, and this was what I thought of when I got Green’s tattoo—how I would always remember him, even after the skin on my breasts had sagged, stretching Burke’s design with it—which was all that Burke, the consummate artist, really cared about, anyway.

“You take care, now,” Burke said as I left the tattoo parlor, tipping his hand off of his forehead in a mock salute. I stepped outside and waited before continuing down the sidewalk, letting my eyes adjust to the bright light. I put my hand over Green’s tattoo. It was growing warm.

A week after the new tattoo, I boarded a plane bound for Kansas City, Missouri. It was summertime. As we drew closer the landscape below stitched itself into patterns of blues and greens and browns. As soon as they opened the doors to the gangway, the humidity filtered into the plane. In Missouri, heat feels alive, tangible, like something that can be scooped from the air and held in your palm.

My parents stood outside of the glass doors of the arrival gate, my mother standing on her tiptoes to catch the first glimpse. She wore a floral blouse tucked into a denim skirt and held her purse in front of her like a schoolgirl. My father had his arm around her. He looked as if he had just stepped out of a men’s clothing ad—his khaki shorts were neatly pressed; the alligator on his polo shirt grinning, his posture erect and proud. Even from far away, I spotted them before they recognized me, and I was surprised by how much more grey hair they had sprouted since their visit to Green Gulch two years before.

I didn’t know my parents very well. Other people talked about the ways their parents damaged them. Mine, on the other hand, had never really understood me or how I could have turned out this way—rootless, no career path, trying on new religions each year until Zen was the one that fit. But at the end of the day, if they still didn’t understand their daughter, I knew it wasn’t for lack of trying. I knew they loved me, and so even when our lives seemed like two distant points opposing the other, I tried to remember their effort.

“How are you?” cried my mother, forgetting herself. She grabbed me hard and pulled me into her, kissed me on the forehead and then both cheeks while my father patted my back and asked about my trip in a deep voice that I found reassuring. He’d read me a thousand storybooks with that voice—Bernstein Bears, Amelia Bedelia, and one especially well-written Sesame Street book where, every time you turn a page, Grover screams, “How could you! How could you turn the page!”

“Let me carry that,” my father said, taking my bag off of my shoulder and hiking it on to his own. My mother linked her arm through mine and checked her watch.

“Reservations?” she said. “We’re thinking of lunch at Fedora’s.” This was their favorite restaurant, a white cloth napkin kind of place for which I would be woefully underdressed in my faded black yoga pants and white men’s tank-top, bra straps showing, tattoos peppered up and down my arms.

“Sure,” I said anyway. I tried to get a sense of my surroundings: the clean lines of the airport terminals, travel-weary smiles, middle-aged men and women with roly-poly bodies, most everyone wearing blue jeans—which in the Midwest were often referred to as “Levi’s” regardless of the manufacturer. People pretended not to stare at me or my marked skin while we waited for my bags at baggage claim. It had been years since I’d been to Kansas City. I’d forgotten. My parents kept up a steady commentary about the types of suitcases that circled the carousel and the heat.

In the car, my father did most of the talking—about work, about the corn he’d been trying to keep alive in his back yard garden, about the new deck he was planning to cut and build. He drove faster than he should have. We crested over hills and when we reached the bottom I felt inertia pulling me deep into my seat. When things got too quiet my mother spoke up. “So how are you doing, honey?”

I had planned to take Green to see them this summer—they’d never met him but my father had said, diplomatically, that he was willing to meet anyone who was enough of an individual to rename himself “Green”, of all things. Green would have loved Missouri’s rolling hills and the cows grazing in pastures near the airport, munching grass below the flight patterns. He probably would have tried to get my parents to find the dirt road leading to those cows, so that he could bow, hands clasped in gassho, before them. My mother, who actually grew up on a farm, would have laughed and laughed.

I was crying, but without making any noise, my hand tucked under my shirt and over Green’s tattoo, which had grown considerably warmer. It hummed, or perhaps this was the whir of tires and asphalt underneath me. My father glanced back at me in the rearview mirror, but he kept driving for another mile or two before he finally pulled to the side of the highway. As my mother climbed between the seats to get to me she tucked her skirts, always a lady.

We skipped lunch at Fedora’s—I just wanted to go home and see my old room. At the house, my father carried my bags up the stairs like a bellhop, while my mother smoothed down my old quilt and surveyed the room, satisfied with the cleaning job she’d done. Despite the afternoon heat the windows were open so that the room could air out. I liked that. The Midwest smells differently than California—more like earth and grass. My room smelled the way it always had, and if I closed my eyes, I could remember what it was like to be thirteen.

“Why don’t you get some rest?” my mother said, her hands tentative on my shoulders. I hadn’t been in this room since I’d left home to attend college. My parents were in their element when they could do something parental like tuck me into bed. Without that, their uncertainty was palpable.

“Sounds like a plan,” my father said.

Before I could agree I felt a sudden, strong buzz over Green’s tattoo. I clasped my hand over my shirt.

“What’s wrong?” asked my mother.

“I have a new tattoo,” I said. Heat was emanating from the tattoo as if from a hot coal. Both of them looked at me, expecting me to show it off. Only the top bit of it peeked from above the rim of my tank top.

“I’d better get some rest,” I said.

When they left I closed the door and stripped in front of the full-length mirror, my body a collage of images on skin. Along the flank of my thigh, the bodhisattva Quan Yin clasped a medicine jar thin as a champagne flute. Around my belly button, a circle of uneven flames. Along my inner thigh, a small thorny rose pierced a scroll with the name of a long-gone boyfriend, someone I’d thought I could love before I learned to be more discriminating. Most of the early tattoos were like that—generic, childish, nothing a drunken sorority girl wouldn’t conceive of if put up to it by her sorority sisters. I’d had them inked in places easily covered by clothing, as if some older self knew that one day I might disown them. The newest ones were symbols or words, and those I placed up and down my arms. Long ago, after meeting Green for the first time, I’d had the word verde inked around my ring finger. I touched his latest tattoo again—there was the heat, and in a way that I’d never felt after a tattoo. In a mirror, I examined the skin. No redness, no signs of infection. In fact, this tattoo in particular had healed faster than the others, with no scabbing. And yet when I put my hand on it, the skin was as warm as wrapping fingers around a hot mug of tea. I held my hand there for a minute more, before the fatigue began to really hit and I decided the best thing would be sleep.

But an hour later, despite feeling exhausted, I knew that sleep wouldn’t come here any more than it did in California. That was the trouble with geography—a new location did not guarantee a new frame of mind. I closed my eyes and there was Green, biting into an apple and chewing thoughtfully as he looked out over Muir Beach, the crunch of the bite lost in the wind and the waves. Or—the time he was mad at me for nagging him at the grocery store. “Oh, get fresh vegetables,” I had suggested, “not canned.” This was enough to make him roll his eyes and there we argued, right in front of stacks of canned peas, to assess whether I was being bossy or helpful. Or—Green when he was just so damned boring, laying in front of the television on a Sunday afternoon, channel surfing and scratching himself.

We’re Buddhists, I’d think. How can you spend a whole day watching television? But then again—how could Buddhists get into arguments? How could we eat steak, smoke the occasional joint, try out anal sex? This was the human condition—to never know which decisions would factor into the big picture.

I rolled over and startled when I saw my father standing in the doorway, watching me. He jumped, too, embarrassed to have been caught. He thought I was sleeping.

“Sorry, hon—just checking on you,” he said, patting his pockets as if he was looking for lost keys.

He started to leave but I beckoned for him to come in. “Tell me a story,” I said once he was sitting on my bed. “It’s been a long time since you told me a story.” The request surprised us both, but in the past few weeks I’d noticed more nutty things coming out of my mouth. I didn’t take it back; it felt strangely right. He smiled, but I could tell from his face that this felt weird to him.

“Tell me the one about the eye patch,” I prompted. Given a task, he relaxed. He told me the story about when he’d ridden on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle.

“I fell off, and—pop!—my eyeball came right out of the socket! It was only attached by a thread. So I picked the eyeball up, dusted it off, and put it back into my eye socket, and then the doctors made me wear an eye patch for a week. About a week later, I was feeling much better, so I took off the eye patch. My family said it wasn’t such a good idea, but I was sick of wearing it. All of the kids were running up to me and saying ‘Ahoy, matey!’ and ‘Arrrr, I’m a pirate!’. So I take off the patch and that night, right in the middle of dinner, I’m sitting there and all of a sudden—whoosh!—I sneeze! And right there, my eyeball falls back out and lands in my mashed potatoes!”

The sneeze was my favorite part of the story, and he made it dramatic just the way he did when I was a kid and first learned to ride a bike.

“So what do we learn from this story?” he asked, because he always asks—this story, of course, was one of the first tall tale-meets-parables from my childhood.

“Not to ride the handlebars of other kids’ bikes,” I replied. It felt good to smile.

“Good!” he said, but then he looked down at his hands, and finally, at me. A moment of silence passed and the mood changed. He was struggling with the right words. He wanted a parable for this, some lesson on death and dying and what it all meant. “So what do the Buddhists say about this stuff?” he finally managed.

“Impermanence,” I said quietly, tracing a finger along the pattern of my quilt. “That everything’s impermanent.”

Like the summer heat in Missouri, Green’s tattoo had a heat that was its own animal. As I spent my days in Kansas City watching television or following my mother to the grocery store to buy far too much food, I noticed that the warmth never died down. None of my other tattoos had felt like this. I began putting one hand over Green’s tattoo and then elevating another over something else that was hot, to compare. While not painful, I had determined that the tattoo was warmer than the heat over grocery store deli cases that harbored slick Cornish game hens turning on a rotisserie; it was hotter than the leather car seats after sitting in the sun; it was hotter than the heat wiggling over a penny I found on the sidewalk.

At night, I put a cool cloth over it, spoke to it. “Shhh, now,” I said, cooing as if the tattoo were a distraught child.

By day five there was no change. I made the mistake of mentioning it to my parents and at their insistence, I was taken to a local doctor’s office, where a tired doctor about my father’s age leaned in close to my breasts for an inspection.

“It only feels warm if you touch it,” I said when he asked me to describe exactly what was going on. There were no other strange symptoms—no redness, no swelling, no pain coming from the tattoo. You couldn’t see anything wrong—still no redness, no swelling. I didn’t have a fever; I didn’t ache.

“I don’t see evidence of an infection, but your body is obviously having an atypical reaction to the tattoo. I think it would be best to prescribe a round of antibiotics, perhaps follow up with a cortisone shot, just in case,” the doctor said.

“In case of what?” I wanted to know. He was already scribbling away in my chart, and I felt a helpless feeling that I often did in doctor’s offices—they had sized me up and were committing my diagnosis to paper before I even knew what was going on.

My parents were waiting right outside my door when I emerged, dressed. My mother had brought an umbrella, even though there was only a slight chance of rain, and she clutched it. This was my mother, always prepared. It occurred to me to wonder more about her, about what might have happened to make a person that way.

I told them what the doctor had said. “So nothing’s wrong? Just antibiotics?” Everything in her tone sounded hopeful. If a nuclear bomb were about to drop, I thought, she’d probably say, “Just total annihilation? That’s all?’

“Just antibiotics,” I repeated, and I didn’t want to wait for him to write me a prescription, but they insisted on that as well. They wouldn’t let me leave without it.        In the car, I was resentful and pouting as I stared out the window. The sky had darkened theatrically, validating my mother’s choice to bring the umbrella. It matched my mood. I wanted an acupuncturist, not some quack doctor. “Western medicine is shit. I don’t want antibiotics polluting my system,” I thought, daring myself to say it aloud.

“We could make another appointment, in about a week, if the antibiotics don’t work,” my father said. “Or if something changes.”

I reached under my shirt and put my hand over Green’s tattoo. “I don’t want to see him again,” I said, allowing a bit of pout into my voice. My parents exchanged a glance. If we weren’t in the car, this was one of those moments when they would have discussed what to do about me from behind a closed bathroom door, forcing me to press my ear against the wood and make out their muffled voices. Wha-wha, whaaaa, wha-wha-wah, just like the teacher on Charlie Brown.

“Why not, then?” my mother carefully asked.

“Because he’s a crap doctor and I don’t even know why I let you guys talk me into this. I feel like shit, everywhere. My life hurts.” Silence descended over the car.

At home, I closed the door to my bedroom harder than I should have. I stood in the center of the room. For the hundredth time, my mood shifted from anger to sadness, my body bent with tears. Why had I been such a bitch? They were trying so hard; they just wanted to help me feel better.

I realized then that grief had no time limit, no guarantees for relief. This could go on forever. This could consume me. How much longer could I live like this, with sadness pressing into me like a needle? No time limit had been set for my return to California, either. Stay until you feel okay again, my mother had said.

I sat down on the bed and looked at the spackled ceiling. “How long will that take?” I was talking to Green, of course, wondering if he was watching me from above and rooting for me. I couldn’t go back to California. Mail would still come in Green’s name; people would call for him.  I would have to tell the story again and again. I would have to be functional, walking among people as if everything was all right. I wouldn’t be able to visit the zendo and stare at blank walls without Green next to me, his chest rising and falling in my peripheral vision. It scared me to think of how much of my life I might have lived only because Green was there.

The tattoo’s warmth began keeping me up nights. The bed sheets were soaked with sweat and needed changing after only a few hours. I soaked in cold baths and this helped until the heat of the tattoo warmed the water and made it steam, and that was when I began drawing ice cold water and dumping ice cubes in, too. My parents worriedly watched me carrying ice trays from the kitchen to the bathroom, so I began to wait until they fell asleep.

“What are you doing?” my father asked when he caught me at two a.m.

“Nothing,” I said, balancing the stacked trays against my chest, which caused them to begin melting. The truth was, I’d started to sort of like how the tattoo was so warm. There was still no problem anyone could see, just a heat that could be felt emanating from the ink. I didn’t feel sick. My forehead never grew warm.

The next morning over breakfast, my mother urged me to go to the doctor again. “See what he thinks,” she said.

“At least take the antibiotics,” my father said. “Get this taken care of. You’ll be better in no time.” They watched me the way you’d watch someone who’s liable to snap at any moment.

“What exactly is ‘no time’?” I asked, tilting my head up to consider it. It was the kind of question we would have been asked to contemplate at the zendo, perhaps as part of a koan. I spooned cereal into my mouth.

“Come on—this isn’t a joke,” my father said, putting down his newspaper. “Something’s wrong with you.”

I wanted to lean into their concern, to be the girl on the after school special. What was it about losing someone that made everyone around you think the answers were simple? I shook with anger one moment and felt at peace in the next, and whenever I thought of Zen—some nice quote on the intransigence of our emotional states—I felt angry that anyone, whether my parents or a religion, thought they had figured it out. Instead of saying this, I got up and left.

In the cool quiet of the bathroom, I stripped down to nothing and sat on the toilet seat, lid down. The silence and the dim light reminded me of the zendo. Breath goes in, breath goes out. Present moment? Yes. Breath goes in, breath goes out.

“You are really handling things wonderfully,” I told myself in the breaks between each breath. “Truly, you are.”

Breathe in, breathe out.

My mother knocked. “Can I come in?”

Above the sink, a large mirror spanned the countertop, reflecting the tub and me, sitting on the toilet, naked. What I saw shocked me: my cheekbones hollowed, my long, dark hair limp and greasy, clinging to my neck and shoulders. My breasts exposed to the mirror, Green’s tattoo prominent.

You’re falling apart. That’s what Green would have said, his brow furrowed, voice gentle as the Moonlight Sonata. Undulating. A rare moment of seriousness.

The door handle turned and my mother poked her head in. “Oh, sweetie, it’s really warm in here,” she said. I stood. She froze, taking in the sight of me.

In the mirror her gaze moved over the curve of my rounded back, my breasts, and all of the assorted tattoos. Finally, her eyes met mine in the reflection. She slipped through the door and closed it behind her. She was beside me, facing the mirror, and it was then that I realized that this woman beside me would not always be beside me.  Her hands resting on the countertop gave it away. Her veins were larger, the skin less taut. The lines around her eyes had deepened, making her face seem even more kind. The longer we stood there, the easier it was for me to see that I had come from her, and that one day my body would look the way hers did right now. I felt a surge of love for her, and with it a comfortable certainty that while I didn’t know this woman, and she didn’t know me, we were bound to each other as surely as the ink of Green’s tattoo was etched into my skin.

She reached forward and with her index finger she traced Green’s tattoo. Her breath caught when she touched the skin, surprised by the heat, but she didn’t back away until the design was lost in the cup of my breasts. Then she turned, and drew a tub of cold water. When the tub was full, she took a wide tooth comb from the medicine cabinet. I sank my body into the water, leaned my head back, and let her shampoo my hair and comb each strand.

“This won’t kill you,” she whispered. “The grief won’t kill you. One day, it’ll leave.”

I swallowed hard. “How do you know?” I whispered, and she turned me to face her. She didn’t speak, but I recognized the expression on her face. She did know. Her face was weighted down by a memory of grief.

“I just know,” she said. “You wait and wait, and then one day…” She shrugged.

I didn’t say anything, so she repeated herself. And when I still didn’t say anything, she said it all again. She repeated the words in a kind of singsong voice until they blended together. She stopped combing and touched my shoulder when I began to cry. I put one hand over my heart, wishing that someone could have told me that life could do this to you. Perhaps then I would have been prepared.  I’d been assuming that my parents hadn’t told me because they didn’t know what this kind of pain felt like. Now I knew—my mother might have told me. It was strange to see her differently, as this woman with an entire history of her own.

“What was it?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

Breath goes in, breath goes out. Be here now.

When I opened my eyes, I realized that Green’s tattoo had started to cool down.