Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

Not long ago, the Buddhist government had won their war against the Tamil Tigers by bombing the shit out of the Tamil-populated north. In preparation for my trip, I read articles about the thousands of civilians killed, the emergency laws overriding civil rights, residential land seized by the military. I wanted to believe my attraction to other people’s suffering was compassion, but more likely it was a twisted need to justify my own unhappiness. Either way, Sri Lanka was perfect.
    It also appealed to me because it’s a Buddhist country, and Buddhism had helped me in my childhood, although I didn’t realize it was helping me at the time. I thought it was some desperate New Age nonsense my mother clung to now that her dancing career was over and she had no choice but to teach Pilates to sixty-year-old women with platinum hair. Her friend Sharon gave her some meditation tapes that she swore were totally life-changing. Throughout elementary school, I often found Mom lying on her back on the living-room rug, bound in a silk face mask, listening to a dude with an Irish accent asking her how it felt to be clothed in her particular biochemical garment at this particular moment on this particular planet. The tapes made me want to puke, and I told her so. Once when my father and I were joking and laughing in the kitchen during one of my mother’s solitary séances, she marched into the kitchen and asked us to please keep it fucking down, she was fucking trying to meditate. “Just notice, just feel,” the Irish dude intoned. “Free of desire, free of judgment.” Mom slammed the kitchen door as she rushed back to his voice.
    Part of my mother wanted to be quiet and sacred and take up as little space as possible. But her needs of the moment were always louder than her will. The quiet part of her brought me to a Buddhist temple every Sunday—a schoolhouse-like structure painted bright reds and yellows and adorned with gilded statues of beaming fat men, filled with dark-skinned people carrying fruit offerings and clutching long bead necklaces in their palms. My mother and I would sit in the back of the temple on flat, lumpy cushions while a man at the altar spoke a language we couldn’t understand in a singsong hush that reminded me of
Goodnight Moon
, and the people around us—most of them wearing white—rocked slightly on their heels, their palms pressed together at their hearts. My mother was different at the temple. She never wore lipstick, she didn’t laugh for no reason and touch strangers on the arm. She sat cross-legged—back straight, eyes closed. I watched her with a concentration that felt like magic. Our knees touched. Sometimes I would jiggle my leg so that I could continue feeling the contact, whose sensation had been numbed by stillness. Only by agitating my body could I feel it clearly. I didn’t realize that the point of stillness was to
stop
feeling the body and feel something else instead. Mom was so still that she didn’t even tell me to cut out all the jiggling.
    After I booked my flight to Sri Lanka, my mother told me the temple she’d brought me to was Cambodian. But what did that matter, she was just
so
happy that I was following my inner light and she didn’t mind saying she was proud of herself for raising a daughter with such
important
interests in shit that really matters, not like some Wall Street asshole trying to finance his third yacht, but anyway she had to go, she and Rick were going for a sunset hike, there was really nowhere better in the world than Phoenix, why didn’t I visit more often? My father also thought it was terrific I would be leaving the daily grind of America’s corporate machine to get to know myself on my own terms. He must have been secretly happy I was getting away from a boyfriend who sounded unstable at best, but Dad rarely allowed himself to criticize my choices.
    —
    It was almost too simple to get to Sri Lanka, nearly nine thousand miles away. Twenty hours on