A year into the Big Sad epidemic, Emmy decided to take up meditation again. She had developed a regular meditation practice when she was a child, and her grandmother Lorraine took her to a course taught by a guru in Sonoma. Her grandmother retired to Kenwood, moving into the family’s large estate next to a vineyard, and hosted Emmy for a month the summer after 7th grade, when her parents needed a break from her. Emmy didn’t particularly like her grandmother, and she understood the feeling was mutual. In any case, she had freedom in Sonoma and she didn’t mind uncomfortable conversations when Lorraine would take her into town or to luncheons with her other girl friends who also left San Francisco for wine country. They were all either widowed or divorced, and all wealthy. Not wealthy like Emmy’s family. But wealthy enough. Her grandmother let Emmy ride her bike around after it was dark, and eat dinners in the pool house that was turned into a small apartment. She let Emmy drink wine with dinner, and gave her money to get her nails done and go to the country club, where she swam and ate chicken fingers. She had her first kiss with a sweet townie boy that summer, and also got fingered.
Her parents called to check on her twice during the entire month she was there. Her grandmother lied to them and said she and Emmy were getting closer. She apparently wanted to give some credence to this ruse by inviting Emmy to accompany her to see a guru her friends told her about. He lived on a compound with his most fervent devotees an hour away, and his spirituality seminars were shockingly expensive. But her grandmother was curious, and she figured she’d bring Emmy.
“Your mom says you get distracted in school,” her grandmother said while driving to the guru.
Emmy nodded.
“Well, what’s the problem?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Emmy said. “I get anxious.”
Her grandmother scoffed.
“Anxiety isn't real,” she said. “It’s just what silly people use as an excuse for their silliness.”
Emmy said nothing.
“Don’t be a silly person,” Lorraine said, stealing a glance at her granddaughter.
Emmy nodded, then, after a moment, looked over and watched her grandmother as she drove. She was beautiful. Emmy tried to picture what she would look like at her grandmother’s age but couldn’t. Her grandmother had gotten extensive 1980s plastic surgery, so she still looked vaguely natural. A kind of elegant uncanniness. Her own mother had begun her journey into botox only a few years before, so Emmy had no real sense of what aging looked like as a woman in her family. Just some framed photos of her ancestors in the 1800s at the San Francisco Superior Courthouse, and a terrifying oil painting of her great-great grandmother that hung in her home in Pacific Heights.
Emmy found it easy to meditate. She found it easy to be both inside and outside her body. The only thing that was hard for her was to empty herself out. She tried to see herself as a can of cranberry sauce—her insides a cylinder of fruit paste to be shaken out. That didn’t work, so she just sat there in the two 90 minute classes—the youngest person by at least 30 years—and kept still with her eyes closed. Her grandmother got up twice to use the bathroom. The guru only came out at the end of the workshop. He said something about retreating into the self, and complemented Emmy on being such a young seeker. She was embarrassed, and kept her head down when the other adults looked at her encouragingly. Her grandmother didn’t mention the comment on their drive home or at dinner or during the next few classes.
Emmy received more praise from the instructor, a thin woman in her 40s who looked like she’d tried to be an actor, for her beyond-her-years ability to reach a place of oneness. That Thursday during lunch, her grandmother met with the same instructor to inform her that they wouldn’t be returning for the second week of the workshop. Emmy sat by, eating a salad that her grandmother’s chef had prepared for her that morning, and tried to pretend she couldn’t hear what was being said. Lorraine was frustrated with the class and felt like it wasn’t benefitting her or Emmy. The instructor tried to dissuade her, trying to convince her that progress isn’t something to be quantified.
“That’s stupid,” her grandmother said.
Emmy didn’t care either way. She could do whatever she learned at home. But she did worry that her grandmother was mad at her. She only had two weeks left in her Sonoma stint and wanted her grandmother to keep letting her do whatever she wanted. Emmy had more to do. She had more bike rides to take alone, wine to drink at dinner. And she told her townie boyfriend she would jerk him off. Soon it would be August, the ugliest month.
The next morning, though, the guru was already there with the class instructor. He asked if they could speak to Lorraine and Emmy. He told them that it was important they come back for the second week of workshops because he believed Emmy was a spiritual prodigy and needed her talent to be nurtured. Her grandmother suddenly became excited. Even proud.
“I was wondering why she was so good,” her grandmother said. “She has ADHD, you know.”
The guru convinced Lorriane to sign up for another two week intensive towards the end of August and for after school classes Emmy could take at their workshop in San Francisco. That weekend, Lorraine told all of her friends about Emmy channeling the divine, and how the guru had given Emmy “homework” to take a vow of silence until the following week ended. The women were intrigued, asking Emmy questions she couldn’t answer, except for shrugs, and head nods. It was pretty easy for Emmy not to talk. She didn’t believe she was a wunderkind but she figured she’d give herself a break from having to make conversation with people she didn’t want to. Emmy smoked weed for the first time with her townie boyfriend. She didn’t get high and never said a word. The townie boyfriend called meditation gay, but said it was cool Emmy followed through with not speak.
“Maybe you’re the Dalai Lama or something,” he said.
Emmy shrugged.
He then told Emmy he was in love with her and wanted to stay together when the new school year started. Emmy took another drag of the joint he had prepared while he watched and waited for her to respond. She coughed some smoke up, and then sat back on the grass in the field they were sitting in and stared up at the sky. She thought she saw a UFO.
That was the last time she ever saw him. Emmy and her grandmother finished out the workshop. That weekend her parents picked her up and took her back home. Her mother told Emmy that she was too young to be spiritual.
“It’s just a weird grey area,” her mother said.
“What’s a grey area?” Emmy asked.
“It’s not real,” she replied.
A few weeks later, the guru was arrested for wire fraud and the compound was shut down. Her grandmother never invited Emmy back to Sonoma. She died of a heart attack the next year.
***
Gimme more
Loved this Carey!