Women and Children First Read Free

monastery was on a mountaintop. During the break, people walked outside. It was early April, chilly. The Buddhists puffed out their cheeks and chafed their upper arms. There was a view of three states which everyone stood facing. Ceci admired it for a moment and then thought: What now? The sound of the loudest gong yet floated out over three states, and everyone filed back indoors.
    Windowless, draped in red and gold silk, one whole wall occupied by a multitiered altar holding dozens of brass Buddhas, vases of flowers, candles, and smoldering incense holders, the temple was surprisingly convincing. Even the incense smelled venerable and antique. On one wall was a large painting of an orange-robed lama, youngish and rather plump, with the beaming, cherubic face of those fish-riding babies in popular Chinese prints. There was nothing from modern life but a large canister vacuum cleaner, propped up in the corner—useful, no doubt, for the trails of uncooked rice on the carpet.
    Everyone found a pillow on the floor. When the gong sounded, Ceci closed her eyes, and, as Walter had suggested before the break, tried to meditate on her question for the Lama. But when everything settled down, the only thing she registered was her own perfume. That had been a mistake. She imagined a company stumbling onto an indelible perfume, forced to recall it after consumer complaints, leaving thousands, including Ceci, permanently marked. This was what she was thinking about when Walter hit the gong again and said, “You’ll see the Lama’s appointment schedule posted in the hall. But please, come half an hour early. Remember: Tibetan time.”
    According to the schedule, the Lama would be seeing someone every five minutes for two hours. Ceci thought: Why, he’s the Tibetan Dr. Ruth! When she saw her name at the bottom of the list—not near the bottom, but actually last—she lost all hope. She taught school. She knew how it felt to repeat yourself, day after day: Don’t hit. Share. Clean up. How the Lama must wish for a tape of himself saying, “Suffering is desire.”
    Ceci went for a walk in the woods but felt self-conscious, as if someone were filming her. She didn’t know when to start or stop or what to look at. After a few minutes she came back in and sat with the Buddhists waiting to see the Lama. They talked and talked right up to the Lama’s door. But afterward, they were silent and slinked away, avoiding eye contact like moviegoers after a film that has moved them too deeply to speak.
    Ceci was the last one in the lobby. She could have used this moment of solitude and peace to prepare; instead, she tortured herself wondering what airport she was in long ago when everyone else was called for a flight and the place emptied out and she realized that the plane she was about to take was a lot smaller than she’d thought. Finally Ceci heard her name, and she entered the Lama’s red and gold room.
    At the moment Ceci walked in, the Lama was looking at his watch. Ceci caught him at it, and he laughed. Ceci laughed too, then was amazed to discover that she was on the verge of tears. She was just so disappointed. But what had she expected? For one thing, someone older. Only now did it occur to her that she’d had no clear picture of the Lama. Now she recognized him from his portrait, the baby-faced one, but in some new adolescent stage—gawky, thin, with the skinny head, dark-rimmed glasses, and flattop crewcut of a guy in a fifties high-school yearbook. Some strain around the Lama’s eyes convinced her that she had been correct, that right now the Lama felt just as she did by this point in the school year: drained, longing for it to be over, unable to even fake interest when another child came for help.
    Ceci’s mind raced wildly over everything she had to tell the Lama—an exhausting story, she saw now, endless and impossible to get through. Walter had mentioned that if they didn’t have a specific question, they could simply