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Susceptible. That was the word Frank used, when I told him Deena was taking me with her to India. “You know how your mother is susceptible,” he said. “To things.” He cleared his throat awkwardly in between. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a fish.
I raised my eyebrows, which was unfair. I knew what he meant.
“You know how she—” He cleared his throat again. “How she gets carried away.”
When I didn’t reply, he added, finally, “I just don’t want you to get caught up in her mess.”
Which was kind of him, really. Fatherly, even.
We waited to check our bag behind a woman whose suitcase was ten pounds overweight. She argued with the airline representative behind the counter. Her double chins wagged. She was a medical missionary, she explained. She was bringing medicines, stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, expired sutures—every ounce was necessary. Sweat trickled into her eyebrows.
I nudged Deena. “Do something,” I muttered.
Deena shrugged. Her bra strap slipped down her shoulder, past the sleeve of her tank top. She did not pull it back up.
“All of that stuff is for a good cause,” I said. “It’s to save lives.”
“I don’t like missionaries,” Deena said. “They give me the heebie-jeebies.”
The woman was stuffing thermometers from her suitcase into her carry-on. One of them fell to the floor, its clatter echoing on the tiles, and spun in circles, spiraling away from the woman. She heaved a huge, gusty sigh that was nearly a sob, and bent over further to pick it up, pushing sweaty bangs out of her eyes.
“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.
Deena shrugged again.
We had tried this before, but never in India. It had been Amsterdam for Kabbalah, floating down the canals with red thread tied around our wrists. I still remembered the crepes with ham and cheese, and the uneven cobblestone under my light-up sneakers, bought on sale at Payless a week before that first adventure. They pinched my toes after only six months, when we made our way to China, to try Buddhism this time. I switched to noodles, and sandals. A cart rolled over my big toe during our visit to the Great Wall, and the nail turned black and fell off. We went back to the States in January, with Frank; he was a Mormon, he thought Deena would love Salt Lake, he wanted to teach me to ski.
After the divorce, Deena made it as far as Reno. She ordered me to stop talking to Frank, but he called every Sunday anyway, to make sure I had finished my homework. Deena pretended not to notice, but the day after I recited “Hiawatha” to Frank over the phone, Deena asked how I felt about moving to New Mexico, to live with the Navajo nation. It was not a genuine inquiry; the suitcase was open on the kitchen table.
“They’re really connected, down there,” she told me.
“To what? The Internet?”
Deena frowned. “No. To birds. The sky. The Great Creator.”
“I thought you were over God,” I said.
“No,” Deena snapped. “I am over Mormonism. I am over Christianity. I am over Frank.” She paused. “There won’t be any Internet with the Navajos, Laura. There may not even be any telephone wires.”
The Navajos lasted the longest, longer even than Frank, and we had stayed with Frank long enough for me to call him Dad. But even the Navajos, who did have telephone, and sometimes Internet, soured with time. That was when Deena decided we needed to visit “the real Indians.” Which was when Frank drove from Salt Lake to the reservation, to take me to coffee, and warn me that Deena was susceptible. It was the first time I had seen him in three years.
I looked like Frank. When I was twelve, I had been happy for salespeople at the mall to mistake him for my real father. He was balder, now, than when I was twelve, and fatter. He put his hand on mine and asked me, please, to come live with him again in Salt Lake.
“That must be illegal,” I told him. “You never adopted me or anything.”
“Taking you to India in the middle of your junior year should be illegal. What about the SATs? What about college?”
“They offer the SATs abroad, you know. For diplomats’ kids and stuff.”
“Deena is not a diplomat,” Frank said. “Deena is a nomad. Deena is a parasite. Deena—”
“Needs looking after,” I interrupted. “Besides, I’ve never been to India.”
We were followed. Onto trains, into buses, around street corners, through markets and villages and down dusty rural roads. Villagers fed us and fed us until I was sick outside of a temple, half-digested pav bhaji splashing across the pile of shoes by the entrance. In the markets the salesmen showered Deena with anklets and bangles until she could barely lift her legs and arms, and the farmers gave her the ripest fruit from their stalls. Everybody wanted a photograph. Deena was small and brown and dark-haired like them, and I was tall and blonde and unusual-looking, but everybody wanted a photograph with Deena. I sat tucked into the rickshaws and did not ask questions. Deena would never have given me answers, anyway.
We were looking for an ashram—not just any old ashram, but a particular one, a traveling one. Every year the guru moved his meditation center to a new village or city, so only his true followers could find him. Deena had no doubt that she was one of these followers, but also no idea where the ashram was. We saw a lot of India that way, those first few months. Deena refused to stay at hotels, or buy bottled water. I got well acquainted with the feel of dirt beneath my cheek after I could no longer squat over the Indian toilets, my legs like rubber after voiding the entirety of my stomach in one steady, brown stream. Deena promised there would be real bathrooms when we reached the ashram, and that I could buy McDonald’s in the next city. I called Frank from a payphone outside the fast food strip in the train station, and asked him how much an airplane ticket to Utah would cost from Mumbai.
“Actually,” Frank told me, his voice more vague than usual through the cracked plastic receiver, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea anymore, Laura. I’m actually, um. Actually, I’m seeing someone new.”
He was kind enough to tell me he hoped everything would work out, and that I was a bright girl, and would go far. He said to send his best to Deena. Then he told me goodbye, not unfeelingly. Then he hung up.
My hands shook as I put the phone back on the hook, and my French fries spilled across the ground. A little boy darted forward and began to eat them, crouched like a stork, knees bent and wobbly from hunger. I handed him the whole cardboard container and went to find Deena in the Pizza Hut. She had cheese on her chin.
Pascale was expecting us. He showed us to a musty room with thick red curtains and a yellow bedspread on the lumpy double bed. A gecko crawled across the windowsill, and chanting wafted up from the courtyard through the open windows.
“Those are the sounds of morning meditation,” Pascale explained. He had a faint French accent, teeth stained from betel juice, a neatly-trimmed beard. He was handsome—more so when he smiled. “Normally I lead the meditations,” he said, “but I have been waiting for you.”
He looked at me when he said it. I blinked. He did not.
Deena laughed. The sound rippled across the room and sun streamed in the windows, flooding the small space. The air was suddenly stifling. Pascale tugged at his collar. Then he cleared his throat, and the room cleared with it; he was not smiling anymore.
“You and your daughter are most welcome,” he said to Deena. She beamed, and he paused, his fingertips pressed together; then he opened his palms, cupping his hands in greeting.
“But, of course, the minimum age for my ashram is twenty-five. I hope you understand.”
His hands fell away to his sides, now, fluttering like torn ribbons, apologetic, pathetic. I felt myself stand up straighter, and open my mouth.
“Not a problem.”
Deena said it. She clapped her hand on my shoulder; she had to reach up to do so. Her head bobbled away below my line of sight as she continued, “Laura’s not the spiritual type, anyway, she doesn’t have the gift for it.”
There was a long silence.
Then Pascale said, “I see,” and I could tell that he did not believe her. “In which case—shall we leave Laura to do the unpacking? And I will introduce you to your fellows downstairs.”
Deena waltzed out of the room right away, her scarf flapping behind her. Pascale lingered a little longer, looking at me. He was short, shorter than me, even if he was taller than Deena. He crossed his arms and drummed his fingers on them.
“We will make use of you, I think,” he said, finally, and then he turned and walked out.
I opened the suitcase, and started to unpack.
I cleared tables, washed dishes, hung laundry on the line, while Deena smoked shisha and sat cross-legged on the warm stones in the courtyard and chanted until she was hoarse. The ashram was a crumbling, haphazard facility, with one woman who did the cooking and a man to watch the gate. My arrival was, in many ways, propitious; had I not been there to do the rest of the household chores, Pascale would probably have moved the ashram again, which he did, usually, by leaving in the middle of the night and informing no one of his next destination.
Rachel told me this. She was Pascale’s former lover, which was why, she said, she held the record at having found Pascale no fewer than thirteen times. The next best was Desmond, a South African man, at six. “It’s because I slept with him,” she said. “Once you’ve had a man’s penis inside you, you have a pretty good idea where he’s headed next.” She said penis in a French accent: pen-ees. She looked at Deena when she said it.
