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Mom didn’t want to stay at her house that night. So instead, Mondo drove home up the ninety-nine from Hekatchipac and back to our house where Marcus slept on the couch to make room for his grandmother. I watched Mom take pills after brushing her teeth and didn’t bother to ask what they were. I figured she deserved a tranquilizer and had a half-second thought of asking her if I could write her a prescription for something stronger for the weeks ahead. How I would survive the same I wasn’t sure. Mondo had been working so much at the job site out in the hills of Sacramento, an hour north of our house, that I hadn’t seen much of him in the last two months and he didn’t expect the house to be finished for another six weeks. I had grown used to his feast or famine schedule as a speculation home builder and sometimes even liked the solitude, the camaraderie between me and our two boys. Some nights Grey, a budding chef at just nine-years-old, made dinner with Marcus’s help as the sous chef. I’d rent a movie on the way home from the office—sci-fi their favorites—and we’d sit in the dark of the living room watching the television and eating from plates balanced on our knees. But given the previous days of dealing with Dad’s death and the service arrangements, it was hard to believe that normal life would return again.

I said goodnight to Mom, Mondo and the boys already sacked out, and sat at the dining room table having a drink. I often advised patients not to drink and I seldom did myself except at holidays with our relatives or when Mondo’s father, who liked a glass of sherry after dinner, was visiting from Mexico City. I drank a strange cognac we’d had for years, a gift from one of Mondo’s clients. I didn’t know if it was still good and I didn’t care. I wanted to sit there in the dark and sip something that would burn me, keep me in the present. When I finished the first, I had a second. By then it seemed as if I could hear everyone sleeping, as if the house itself were breathing, and that I myself would never sleep again.

Since Dad died, I had thought about things I’d never told him. Silly things and bigger things, and what kept coming up the most was the summer I joined the cult. The only thing Dad knew about that was picking me up at Tabitha’s house one Sunday morning and driving me home, silent, yet somehow comforting. Maybe he knew I’d get the third degree from Mom, so he was giving me space. That had been a strange year for me. I was about to move out of the house and into my own apartment. I had planned on leaving the community college for the state college before the swami intervened, and then, later, after I got my head together, I started chiropractic school instead. In the months leading up to the cult, I had begun to separate, as if I were breaking from reality, or maybe just my childhood. If it comes up in conversation now, which it sometimes does, I laugh about it with Abby or Patty or Mom, but when I think about the details, quiet and alone, it’s hard to keep from crying. It wasn’t particularly traumatic, but that phase in my life was a turning point and it all happened so fast.

First, there was Day on the Green. It was summer and I worked as a line cook at Grandma Standard’s Ice Cream Parlor from five or six in the morning until past lunch when I’d leave for classes at Chabot, the community college. As I drove to work each morning up the black Nimitz, the oncoming headlights and retreating red taillights reminded me of the birthday streamers at Standard’s, where my boss Wallace would tell me and my coworkers each morning, “We’re in the happiness business, that’s what we sell here.” Inevitably, a hangover from whatever I’d done the night before would be thumping through me and my red, white, and blue-pinstriped suspenders, while my hard foam hat chafed against my forehead. Wallace would go on to say that Grandma Standard’s was in the ice cream business, the old-fashioned candy business, the diner business, the kids’ birthday business, the weekly family meal business. “We’re in business,” he’d say to us as we stood around him in the kitchen before the breakfast rush. After he went through the daily specials and eighty-sixes, he’d clap his hands vigorously and then tip his corny hat to the staff and walk briskly to the glass-inlaid door made to look like a funhouse or a San Francisco Victorian, I was never sure which. Next, at the hostess station, he’d straighten the menus and wipe down the seating map before finally facing the dining room and flinging his arms wide as if tossing aside heavy curtains to reveal his palace to applause from adoring masses. But we were open twenty-four hours so there was never a crowd gathered at the door. All the same, the show went on fast and glamorous in Wallace’s mind.

I sometimes found it hard to take Wallace seriously, although I still respected that he got up and did it every day. He had a daily devotion, like Dad, that I admired. And for what? Ungrateful kids, or a staff in this case, who robbed the stockroom blind, lied on their time sheets, forged work permits, and stole away to the bathroom to smoke cigarettes or vomit up last night’s party. I had done all those things, worse, to Wallace, and Mom and Dad. I wondered if any of the parents who sat with their children in the dining room surrounded by oversized pinwheel lollipops and fake, stained-glass parlor lamps, had any idea what went on behind the scenes, and if they did, did they care? The assistant manager, Margaret, an overweight forty-something who wore fishnet stockings and a ring on every finger, supplied the Standard’s teenagers with all the pot they could smoke or bake in cakes, brownies, and even pasta, using Standard’s own recipes. I wondered if Wallace knew that. But maybe even Wallace, for all I really knew of him, was a child molester or a dealer that hung around the old downtown park late at night. Sometimes I felt the whole world was a sham, my classes at Chabot elaborate song and dances of mirrors and glass with wax instructors. That’s how Standard’s was. All the flatware “Made in Japan,” all the “homemade by Grandma” ice cream unloaded from trucks late Thursday nights, all the smiles coerced by Wallace and our measly paychecks, most of which went right back into the mall for new bell bottoms, belts, beads, leather purses, records, idiotic magazines, pick combs, and, of course, dope, which wasn’t, but might as well have been, sold in one of the mid-aisle kiosks between the Orange Julius and the movie theater. I was sick of it all. What kept me going were fantasies of Day on the Green and Steve Perry and knowing I’d be out of the house in another few months if I could just ease up on the dope and save my money. I’d be at the state college for the fall semester and sharing an apartment with Patty or Bettina.


Summer surprised me when it arrived. As the bay warmed, fog lay on the flats each morning thick as a quilt until the sun beat its way through, right about the time the Southland Mallers filled up the dining room with bellies hungry for lunch. I was working a couple of swing shifts a week, covering for Margaret whose father had suddenly died back home in New Mexico, and picking up other shifts when I could for extra cash. Somehow I still managed to make my two summer classes at Chabot, Intro to the East and Calculus, the single most interesting courses I had yet taken in college. It was a grand finale of sorts, before I moved over to the state college in September. Calculus ordered everything. I felt as if I were whipping circus lions through a fiery hoop as I puzzled out each problem. Intro to the East started in India and by the end of July, we planned to travel west through China and finally out to the island of Japan, an apostrophe to the mainland.

India was full of surprises. My textbook showed women swathed in shimmering fabrics picking rose petals in vast fields, boys and men leaning into each other in public places in ways I’d never seen before, and skyscrapers like the ones in the City. We had read part of something called the Vedas, and the Bhagavad Gita, which I’d heard of before the class because Bettina told me Dr. Harmod, the chiropractor she worked for part-time, had a copy of it in his office. Even some of Patty and Bettina’s stoner friends knew what it was at a picnic we’d gone to at somebody’s place out in Niles. An older guy promised I’d love it, but then waved his hands in the air before his face as if he were a snake charmer, so that I dismissed him as just another headcase in our scene. I didn’t know if there were so many more headcases nowadays or if I were somehow seeing them differently. I thought their spacey eyes and unkempt apartments—stuff I’d previously considered cool and deep—were just weird and gross, although Patty seemed more and more lured by it all. But the Vedas were complex. They read like fairytales or fables, but I felt sure there were lessons embedded in the stories of human creation and how the gods battled and loved. I used to find so much in the lyrics of favorite bands and now I tried to decipher messages from the stanzas of the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps they could explain what was going to happen after I left home, Standard’s—hopefully, college, maybe even the Bay Area. These were the things that neatly marked the boundaries of my life, but I had begun to wonder if there might be something more beyond what had begun to feel like fences.

I remembered the previous year’s Day on the Green when Steve Perry had raised his arm at the crowd and shouted, “We love you San Francisco!” It was silly, but I loved that Journey was from the City. It made things seem possible, within reach with hard work. I knew I’d scream again until I got laryngitis. I imagined floating over the crowd on a lip-smacking-good high courtesy of Margaret and Grandma’s Homemade Brownies to find Steve’s spirit, how he’d gaze at the longest, straightest, blondest hair he’d ever seen flowing out from behind me. I’d leave Patty and Bettina behind and skip away into the night with my future husband, a Steve Perry look-alike, his bangs framing strong eyes and his fingers calloused from playing guitar in a band.

Life so completely did not resemble any of that. Instead, it was a daily struggle to keep my grease-spattered uniforms clean and my Styrofoam hat on my white girl’s Afro. My hat had slipped off my forehead so many times in the June heat that I’d developed a blister, and later, a pink callous, a kind of misplaced bindi, those red marriage dots above the eyes of the Indian women in my textbook or walking through the mall on weekends with their families. Instead I thought I should congratulate myself after every methodical round of “Happy Birthday” or “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” my coworkers and I singing like imbeciles around a humiliated guy who’d just gotten a promotion. I was grateful not to have to wait tables. It was amazing to think how much lower I could actually go if I wasn’t careful.

I already had two “lates” that month and Wallace had warned me he’d have to write me up officially if I got my third, even though we both knew how hard that would be for him. There had been something we liked about each other from the beginning, and since I’d been there for three years at that point, a real veteran, was stronger though left unsaid. Sometimes I thought it was just that we were both Virgos and recognized that loyalty and steadiness in each other. I thought maybe I could count on him if I ever got into trouble. Too bad I couldn’t talk the time Patty, Travis, and Bettina had taken me to the ER when my heart started pounding so fast and my throat began to swell. I could have used Wallace then. We didn’t dare call our parents. The doctor said it was PCP-laced weed. We sat it out until the next morning when the ER doctor, who couldn’t have been more than ten years our senior, said I could go home. Mom and Dad weren’t awake and I got up two hours later and went to my usual Saturday shift as if nothing had happened.

I didn’t talk much to Mom and Dad by then anyway. I used to like going to the clothing outlets in the city with Mom after she finally stopped sewing our clothes. My favorite was the Gunne Sax outlet. It was in a dirty gray building south of Market on the fifth floor whose entrance was an unmarked door in an alley that led to a stairwell. Mom liked the prices and the quality. Still, she’d stand in the long checkout line making sure all the seams and joints were solid. That was fun, but I had been buying my own clothes since I’d started working. Dad hardly ever talked at all and I just didn’t seem to have much in common with Mom anymore. Mostly I resented being at home because I was twenty and still had to cook some dinners and do chores around the house. I knew it was fair since I didn’t have to pay rent like some of my other friends, but I still didn’t enjoy it. I couldn’t wait to be out on my own, letting the dishes rot in the sink for all I cared.

In the weeks leading up to Day on the Green, I was still covering for Margaret. I was now doing work I’d never done before, didn’t care to be doing, and didn’t get paid more to do. In addition to my usual grill duties, I was now doing the numbers at the end of the shift—usually five in the morning when I trembled a little from exhaustion and nerves—the scheduling, which, granted, was a little easier than what Wallace had to put up with since the “swingers” were not in high school and were usually even in their twenties or thirties, and report stock and inventory counts to Wallace. The only thing I wasn’t doing that Margaret did was the ordering. Wallace had taken that himself and I often met up with him early in the morning, a couple of hours before his shift, as he listed items over the phone to vendors. No one was sure how long Margaret would be gone.

Two nights before Day on the Green, it had rained. Behind the grill that morning the oil popped as raindrops fell from my hair onto the hot metal. The rain had made me late again due to a pileup on the Nimitz and an official write-up went into my file. Worse, someone else had had to oil the grill, get the vat of eggs cracked and mixed, and my toppings station prepped. That day it had been Nicollette, a night-shifter with a bad attitude, who ignored me when I tried to make apologetic eye contact. What did it matter anyway, I thought to myself. I’ve been here three fucking years and three lates ain’t going to bankrupt subStandard’s. My problem is I’m too good at this crap. I show up, work my whole shift, and I come again the next day, which is more than anyone on the kiddie-crew can say and Margaret and Wallace know it. I should be making at least two dollars an hour more than I do, like the cooks over at Perko’s, and if they don’t like it… I had worked myself up to a point I knew I’d only stew behind the grill all day making myself even more miserable with each hour. It was better just to cool off and think of something completely different, like how I would finally see Steve Perry in a matter of days. I helped myself to a root beer float for breakfast.

As I rolled sausages around on the grill, I thought about the highway that morning, how there was something about the darkness and the caution of other drivers that calmed me, made me feel safe. Rain reminded me of how Mom kept the almonds and walnuts she gathered every fall from Granny’s place out in the San Joaquin in a wooden bowl by the fireplace. Me and Patty and Mom would sit and crack them while we sat at the card table putting a puzzle together and Dad played his banjo. Travis would be working in the garage on his Trail 90 and Abby would be on her bed reading. But that happened so rarely now that I couldn’t even remember the last time I cracked a walnut by the fireplace. Mostly it seemed like being at home was a lot of Travis, a lot of just sleeping and showering and going to school or work. There wasn’t much else. I was still searching for whatever it was that would make me feel that safety again. At twenty I felt old, jaded compared to my Standard’s coworkers, high school kids who partied every night like it was still new and fun and wore stylish accessories with their uniforms. I seemed to live in my black polyester pants, white uniform top with the broad pockets, and nurse’s shoes. I kept my apron and suspenders crammed in my purse and wore a jacket to cover up my uniform when I went to classes. It was all I had the energy for and I hoped people had the impression I was in the nursing or cosmetology programs. But most days it really didn’t matter to me.

At the end of the shift, damp in every orifice, my forehead callous rubbed raw, I drove back home, showered, and locked myself in my room, intending to study. Instead, I pulled out Bettina’s textbook on chiropractice, lit up a joint, and sat back on the bed, exhaling through the window. I had scheduled my first appointment the next day with Dr. Harmod. I didn’t realize how much went on in one’s back—pain centers, happy centers, places where disease and joy hid. But when you took care of it, snuffed the bad and released the good, all sorts of peripheral benefits could be had. It read a lot like my biology and anatomy textbooks, complete with colorful diagrams and words I couldn’t pronounce, though I knew plenty of people who thought chiropractors were quacks. I didn’t know any chiropractors, but now that Bettina worked for one, it was thrilling to think I could try it for myself on the cheap. Maybe it could keep me from smoking weed, I thought, or help me with school, my job. Maybe, I thought, and started in on a lengthy, pot-induced giggle, it could straighten my hair. Then I’d believe all that other stuff.

The vinyl felt cool and sticky against my arms. I lay on my side with my legs scissored apart on the operating-style table. Bettina sat across from me smiling and raising her eyebrows and nodding slightly every time the doctor said “Bend” or “Push here” or “How’s that for you?” So far my “adjustment” had meant lying back and being molded into various positions by Dr. Harmod. His hands were ice cold. I wondered if he was due for his own adjustment to improve his circulation.

According to his brochure, Dr. Harmod had trained at a prestigious school in Arizona. His plaques and diplomas lined what passed for a hallway next to the makeshift appointment desk where Bettina worked in the afternoons. Since he was still getting his practice up and running, on her first day, Bettina had had to buy a desk over at the Salvation Army which happened to be across the street. She and the doctor had carried the pastel-blue-painted bamboo desk, really a kind of vanity table, all the way over before depositing it next to the door so “clients,” a new word for me then, could see Bettina’s smiling face first thing upon entering. Bettina had gone further by hanging macramé planters in the window and stacking a few old issues of Salvation Army National Geographics on the edge of her desk, which doubled as an end table, for waiting patients. Not that I had ever seen anyone actually have to wait.

My spine cracked, rippling from my tailbone to my neck as Dr. Harmod firmly pushed my hip forward toward Bettina and my shoulder back toward him. “Breathe,” he said. Bettina smiled and nodded as I breathed. Dr. Harmod continued massaging and contorting my spine, neck, and hips over the next few minutes while I continued to breathe. Just as I knew he was finishing up—Bettina had warned me he’d suspend both of my feet in the air and give my toes a squeeze—I burst into tears. I felt them fall down my cheeks and into my ears and hairline. Dr. Harmod continued rubbing my feet and Bettina stood up and stroked my forehead, both of them saying nothing. I covered my eyes with my hands and felt the heat burning from my cheeks. I had no idea why I was crying. I felt a cool, sizzling sensation along the backs of my legs and up my spine.

I ate the brownie in the back of Patty’s bug as we sat in the parking lot of the Coliseum, a thermos of coffee wedged between my thighs. Day on the Greeners milled about the cars holding hands, cigarettes, booze, joints, empty roach clips dangling feathers, or sodas as if this were a high school tailgate party and the A’s or Raiders would be playing instead of several rock bands. But the crowd was different from the tailgates we’d gone to as kids. There was a swap meet, almost campground quality about the gathering. Kids from high school and young adults like myself who got the day off sat on lawn chairs or on top of sleeping bags since some had been there the night before and some, I’d learn later, even came from as far away as Oregon or Washington. Kids sat in groups playing cards, eating and smoking, or folding gum wrappers together into long chains. One girl with dark curly-cue eyeliner sat on the pavement clipping magazine photos and gluing them to cardboard buckets like the kind subStandard’s ice cream came in. The girl had lined her creations in a row atop a batik mat laced with rhinestones and sold them. Her sign read “Two bucks—for my Egyptian traveling fund.” These words were sandwiched between a hand-drawn ankh and a strange dark eye which matched the girl’s own eye makeup. Next to these were two more buckets—buckets—filled with red pills and the other with blue pills. It was impossible to imagine that many pills in one place, but there they were. The sign for these said, “Name Your Price.” When I pointed out the girl to Patty and Bettina they said, “Cool,” in unison and then giggled like twins from the bug’s front seat. Patty reached for the coffee we’d been passing around. We’d heard coffee sped up digestion and got the brownies working faster. Mom had made it for us as we’d showered and primped earlier.

As we emerged from the car, someone turned up a stereo and Don Henley’s voice sang out “I got a peaceful, easy feeling.” We smiled, wrapping our sweaters around our waists, and then checking our hair in the reflection of the bug’s windows. “A tour?” Patty asked. “Indeed,” Bettina answered in an English accent.

Walking up the aisles of the parking lot, I was reminded of a flea market. I could smell clove cigarettes, weed, and the sweet leftover whiskey smell of an all-night party. I’d never seen this many kids or this many drugs in one place before—even the previous year’s Day on the Green somehow didn’t compare. And it was so out in the open. Each person we passed carried something illegal. When we saw two policemen on the far end of the parking lot, they stood talking to two girls selling brownies, cookies, and cakes, all weed-laced we assumed, from a folding aluminum table. We’d stepped into the Age of Aquarius.

We stopped to talk to some people in a van. I realized suddenly that I was feeling the brownie. The van people said they’d come from their farm in Oregon where they “lived off the land.” As if to prove it, every time someone opened a door to retrieve food, a blanket, a baby, or hat, straw spilled onto the blacktop. I didn’t know people were still doing that kind of thing. The only people I knew who lived on farms were our relatives in the San Joaquin. And even then they were taking care of other people’s farms.

Coincidence—“call me Coin for short,” which fit her copper brown hair—sat back against the passenger-side front tire. She began stringing a cat’s cradle between her long, nimble fingers. As I watched Coin and thought about her funny name, her fingers began to grow, winding more and more twine into more and more intricate patterns. What started on her hands soon began to envelop the small boy sitting beside her and the other people standing around until, finally, the whole of them and the van were encased in one gigantic knot. I smiled to see us all dependent on one another, connected so that each movement pulled the next person a little this way, and the next a little that way. It was like life, I thought, only in life we don’t see the strings and we think we’re heroes. It reminded me of the villagers I’d read about in the National Geographics at Dr. Harmod’s office. Their lives were so real and so focused, every solution mattered. As I stood staring at the vast undulating web embracing and releasing our small crowd around the van, it suddenly metamorphosed into two enormous wings and flew off into the dusk, rising above the Coliseum like a butterfly.

“You’re high, aren’t you,” Patty said, more a statement than a question.

Patty’s face was a curious brown and red in the twilight. It looked like a potato. Her freckles marched like tiny bugs across her nose and cheeks. I wondered for a second what was in the brownies, then tried to remember Patty’s question.

“Ginger?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. It required superhuman energy to speak one word.

Patty took my hand and led me back to the car where we found Bettina in the back seat making out with a guy with a large hoop earring poking out from his shaggy hair. I hadn’t realized Bettina was no longer with us. Patty tapped on the window and, somehow, it seemed in seconds, we had gone from the van and the butterfly, to Bettina and Hoop Earring, to now threading our way through armies of people in the dark inner corridors surrounding the stadium. I realized I was singing, badly off-key, to the band—some one-hit wonder whose name I couldn’t recall—that played deep inside the Coliseum, a lifetime away, yet I could feel the bass thumping inside me, disrupting my heartbeat.

I spent the rest of the night lying on the afghan we’d brought, Patty sitting next to me rocking back and forth as she grooved to the music. I could see a few stars and remembered watching them from those campgrounds of our childhoods near cold, clear lakes in the high country east of Hekatchipac, places I realized only now Mom and Dad thought sacred, although they would never use that word to describe their feelings. I sang all of Journey’s songs as they played but found I could not open my eyes or sit up. Just lifting my head was a dream. Hoop Earring rubbed my ankles for what seemed like hours as I flew over the high country. Finally, he took off my shoes and rubbed the soles of my feet for several more hours.

When I came to it was still dark. Dew covered the afghan and every inch of my hair as if it were a molecular model from biology class, all spheres and connectors. I had no idea what time it was. I lay there a long time listening. I could hear a couple making love a ways off, dogs barking, the walkie-talkies of security guards whom I guessed had given up, outnumbered and overwhelmed. Crickets in the grass sang and the breathing of everyone on the afghan felt like waves on the ocean. I could see the back of Patty’s head and what was probably Bettina’s elbow. Others may have joined us, I wasn’t sure, and who knew where Hoop Earring had gone. But the crickets’ sawing and the breathing and the smell of the grass made me think of Dr. Harmod’s office. How I wanted to be there now, listening to a cassette tape and watering the plants or reading a chiropractic textbook. I tried to move but ached in every joint. My knees felt as if they’d rusted in place from the night’s dew. I felt myself crying again, from the pain in my knees or the thought of being happy at Dr. Harmod’s, I wasn’t sure. But this time I could let it go and I did, sobbing quietly until it built and built like the sound of the crickets, until finally I woke Patty with it. She yawned, and then braced herself on her elbow, irritated. She nudged Bettina and tossed me my sweater and carpet-bag. We wound through the roaming dogs, piles of garbage, masses of kids like ourselves passed out on blankets in the dawn and the few listless security guards, slowly making our way to the bug.

I kept up with my spinal adjustments and started filing for Dr. Harmod a few hours a week in return for the work. I had Bettina to talk to and the adjustments really were giving me more energy—without them, I didn’t think I could manage the swing schedule at Standard’s. I noticed, however, that while they gave me more energy, my moods had swung wildly from up, up, up to down, down, down. When I was down, I stopped talking. I was terrified I might say the things I thought—little but vicious things about the kids I supervised and the parents I watched in the dining room placating tantrum-throwing brats. How I fantasized about stuffing them all with Grandma Standard’s Sensational Strawberry until they choked or turned blue, anything for some quiet. That’s what I got at Dr. Harmod’s, peace and quiet. Bettina played his strange cassettes, things we’d never heard before and had no idea where he got them—an hour of someone breathing and an occasional ting-ting that sounded like someone gently tapping the tines of a fork against a fancy glass. There were tapes of jungle birds, ocean waves, and something that sounded like the rinse cycle of a washing machine. Dr. Harmod was a big believer in these tapes. He said they relaxed his patients, and Bettina and I could attest to that. Sometimes we’d space so far out listening to them and staring out the window or thumbing through old National Geographics that Dr. Harmod would poke his head around the Japanese screen separating his “workbench” from the waiting room—really just one big room—and whisper, “Tapes, girls, tapes,” when the tape had stopped and needed flipping over.

The flyer had said something about inner harmony and breaking through desire. It was posted outside the classroom where my Intro to the East class met. At the fairgrounds I felt silly looking for the lecture amidst the throngs of people like my parents hauling new vacuums back to their cars and little kids walking foam alligators on wires. But the Swami was even more than I expected. Beneath the orange tent and in the circulating air from enormous fans propped at the tent’s edges, his eyes seemed to bisect each face in the crowd. I imagined my anatomy models and the cross-sections of brains cleaved in half like a cabbage as we were relieved of our distractions, pressure dissipating from the blossom the Swami had sparked in our minds. It had started in my forehead, a cool, peppermint ice cream sensation. It spread from there into my neck and down my spinal column, like Dr. Harmod finding a secret nerve, a spinal G-spot, opening me wide, a lotus receiving a ray of sunshine. I was rooted. I knew it after that first eye contact just before the chanting began. The chanting drew the root I saw clearly at the base of my spine down through the overlapping rugs and mats of the tent and into the summer-baked earth of the fairgrounds. Finally, I had connected all that I had seen and felt, all the things that shimmered without substance, all the innuendos and misunderstandings or lost connections I’d had with Mom and Dad, Patty, Wallace, really everyone, I suddenly realized. All these turned to lifelines rooting my spine to the earth as if a question I had begged to be answered now traveled from the stars to the crown of my head, lighting me up like no brownie high ever could. I was stone sober. And I was free. I was everything all at once and to know this made me laugh like everyone else around me.

I didn’t leave that day. When I awoke the next morning tucked next to the tent’s makeshift kitchen and remembered where I was and what had happened, I knew I’d never leave.

But in the ashram two weeks later, things were different. I still felt that joy, could sense in meditation those spaces created in my spine that allowed me to understand bliss and universal love, but after that, in the normal comings and goings of our day, meals, community work, and study, things teetered close to normal, almost like at home. The women cleaned, the men did manual labor, and I’d heard rumors of how difficult the fundraising service was. I’d heard of disciples leaving. It had occurred to me in the days following that initial breakthrough at the fairgrounds that perhaps this wasn’t for me. Maybe it was just summer coming to an end and I needed some excitement. Perhaps I had had a spiritual awakening—everything had changed and I felt great for days—but how the Swami had constructed his community was flawed. Could people really escape the boundaries of everyday life—gossip, greed, inequality? When you gave two minutes to trying to be all the things you wanted to be—kind, compassionate, generous—you discovered just how difficult that was. The answer in the ashram was to pray about it. Not that that was said in so many words, but one had to believe that answers would come through “service and meditation,” the Swami’s favorite words, and in their own time. Again, I felt these were lofty goals. Service only went so far and where it went, I thought cynically, was likely to the accounting department. I had volunteered for that service since I’d had so much experience doing the numbers at Standard’s, but it wasn’t an option, and soon, I knew, my fundraising training would begin.

That’s when I met Piper. He was the service mate of Katy, who’d recruited me the day after my awakening at the fairgrounds and had been all smiles and information. Since then, Katy was nice but removed, aloof. She was mostly out fundraising. Piper had driven the van that took Katy, me, and three other kids from the fairgrounds deep into the hills near the coast until I had no idea where I was. With all the redwoods it was even sometimes difficult to figure out where east and west were—it was hard to track the sun through the trees. On a cold night after dinner and away from the lighted tents, Piper asked me abruptly and as if he had run hard down a long road to hear my answer, how happy I was.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he said, sounding like a two-year-old.

I wasn’t sure if he meant in my life in general or now that I was in the ashram. I measured the words of my response since I’d begun to notice other people did when they spoke, that no one seemed to talk like the kids we were, spouting things we’d later regret or revise or tease each other about. Each word mattered here.

“I’d say six. And, yes, I am very happy.” I imitated the smiles of the initiate trainers. I realized then, suddenly, that I wasn’t happy, especially there.

“Katy and I are leaving, tonight,” Piper said, the sweat on his forehead picking up the lights from the dining lanai.

“You mean deserting?” I asked, worried. “Deserting” was the code word for escaping, which I had heard about but had no idea how to do. I wasn’t sure if it was dangerous or not. I hardly knew these people I now realized. I hadn’t talked to Mom or Dad since my first phone call to them the day after the fairgrounds. I’d told them I’d met the Swami and was going to be away for a while.

“Think of it like vacation Bible school, like when we were little.” Mom cried and Dad said he was going to call the police. I assured them I was there by choice, that the police wouldn’t do any good. Katy had told me to say that.

“I’ll see you at Christmas,” I said, cheerful, before hanging up without saying goodbye.

I thought now they must be worried sick. Nevermind Wallace and my job. And my classes. I wondered, panicking, what the hell I had done.

“We’re sneaking out tonight after prayers,” Piper said quickly. “We’ll take the trail behind the intake cabins. That leads out to a stream. If you follow that stream nine miles it leads to the road. From there you can hitchhike back to the city. People that live around here are used to it, believe me.” He was talking so fast I could barely keep up with him.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I knew from the first time I saw you, when you were in the van on the way here, that you’d never make it. This place is for lost kids and you’re not. Your head’s on straight, even if you don’t realize it.”

I nodded. Suddenly all I wanted to do was see our house, crawl in bed and wake up the next day and go to work. It felt odd, but I knew it was true—I wanted to go home. I’d made a mistake.

When I reached the road I was cold, scared beyond my wits. Every tiny pore of my arms and legs swelled with a chill. Twigs and leaves stuck in my hair. I sat on a soggy log next to the pavement to rest. A light rain had begun to fall through the trees and there was no moon. Piper and Katy, stunningly, had turned back. I had tried to convince them to stay with me, that together we would be fine, but they were terrified. The two of them reassured the other it was okay to turn around. We argued, but in the end I left them on the hillside and kept going, telling myself I would make it. I had always survived, hadn’t I? As I walked through the trail, slipping here and there in the rain, having to backtrack when I took a wrong fork and ended up in a bramble of young trees and fern thickets, I replayed in my mind the scenes from my life, everything that had made me who I was. There was my first memory, of being over at Uncle Yang’s and held up next to the Doughboy pool so I could see the water and a pink floating elephant on the surface. There had been going to school the first day with my leg braces and how the kids pointed and stared. There had been the time our cousins took me and Patty out into the strawberry patch behind Granny’s and held us on the ground, what I wouldn’t come to think of as rape until I was in my thirties and people started talking about those things. There had been all the shit with Travis, how he had robbed us all, stolen my gold necklace with the “G” charm that Dad gave me for graduation that had meant so much to me.

I sobbed on the side of the road that night. The sound of myself in the dark woods was like an animal. I heard owls. I started to pray. I prayed to the god Mom and Dad had taught me about when we were little, not my new god. How long it took me that night to get from the ashram down to the road and how long I sat there on the log sobbing and praying, I have no idea. What happened was I started to hear music, a bass beat far off traveling through the winding hills. It was the lead-in to Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.” As it grew louder I knew a car was approaching. I stood up and walked into the road. I was drenched from head to toe, my hair flat against my head as if I had stepped out of the shower. As the headlights rounded the corner I waved my hands above my head.

That’s how I met Denny and Tabitha. They had been partying out at the beach and were on their way home. They were terrified to see a white girl in the middle of the road. They had heard all kinds of stories when they were growing up about ghosts on that road, and then of course the ashram was in the hills, filled with cultists and pagans as far as they had been told. They were spooked, but they stopped. They were young too and I looked like I was in trouble. They’d take me to Fremont and drop me off, but Tabitha had to use the bathroom so we stopped at her house near the Dumbarton. When Tabitha’s mother, up all night waiting for her to get home, peeked through the window and saw a white girl in the back seat of the car, she demanded to know what was going on.

Dad came and got me. I never saw Piper and Katy again. I got involved in the A.M.E. church there in East Palo Alto for a while. Chiropractic college. Denny and Tabitha’s marriage and their aunts and uncles going off with Jim Jones in South America. Tabitha’s mother inconsolable at Dad’s service.

Now everything has changed again and life is not what it seemed.

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