A Single Eye by Susan Dunlap Page B

the building, the wind smacked our faces. It was one of those damp winds that chill you so slowly you don’t realize it till you’re iced to the bone and you feel like you’ll never be warm again. The down jacket that had been a burden as I pushed the wheelbarrow was now barely adequate, but she, in tan drawstring pants and a black short-sleeved T-shirt, seemed oblivious. Goose bumps bloomed on her arm but they might as well have been body paint for all the attention she paid. She turned toward me and the fading light showed spidery lines around her eyes and mouth, sun scratches. She wasn’t as young a gazelle as I had assumed. A bit older than I. Forty probably. And yet, as she bounced from foot to foot, she seemed years younger, lithe, free.
    â€œTell me how things work here.”
    We headed across the knoll. “Parking lot, where you arrived, is down there to the right. Meditation hall—zendo—is that round dome up to the left. Whole place is like a baseball diamond, only much bigger. Cabins are first base, zendo’s second, kitchen’s third. The office is home, and the parking lot, well, imagine the shortstop between third and home. When we built the zendo having it at the top of the quad, near the top of such a steep hill, seemed wonderful. But I’ll tell you, uh—”
    â€œDarcy.”
    â€œMaureen,” she said, apparently not registering the number of times I’d heard it. “There are plenty of mornings when I’m headed up there in the dark and rain at quarter to five, that I wish we’d had the humility to put it in the middle.”
    â€œSo you live here all the time?” Don’t they ever let you off the Styx, Charon?
    â€œThe whole six years, since the beginning. I was here the first summer, before the Japanese roshis came for the official opening.”
    Dusk was edging toward night and a heavy mist was beginning to gust. I pulled my down jacket tighter around me, glanced over at Maureen shifting foot to foot, blond hair tossing, the wind flapping her T-shirt over her pert nipples. Clearly she had plenty still to do before sesshin started and no time to chat.
    â€œYou’ve been here since the beginning,” I said. “You must have known everyone then, Rob, Leo, and, well, Aeneas—”
    She jerked back, looked down at her T-shirt, yanked at the hem. “And Barry, too. You’re wondering about Barry’s kitchen, right? How come the rest of the place looks like a scout camp and Barry’s chocolate kitchen could be in the Saint Francis Hotel?”
    Aeneas was sure a sore spot. She hadn’t seemed jumpy until I mentioned his name. I was dying to ask what she thought his disappearance meant. But she wasn’t likely to tell me any more than Leo had. So I made do with seeing where she’d go with her detour about the kitchens.
    â€œYeah, how come the differences?”
    â€œBecause Barry’s gourmet chocolates sell for a bundle and he gives the money, at least most of it, to the monastery. At that level of ‘gourmet,’ his old world machinery makes a big difference. Rob paid for those machines, plus the generator in the kitchen and the running water in the bathhouse, which was probably way more important to him.” She laughed awkwardly, and I silently added: Tight ass that he is .
    My silence seemed to unnerve her even more and she said quickly, “That’s okay. Rob can laugh about it now, when he has to. Early on, one of the students went into town and made six copies of his picture, framed them in those cheap paper frames and hung them in the place of honor over each toilet. We all bowed to him before and after.”
    One of the students? Aeneas? Or herself? I didn’t ask what privileges Rob got in return for his money, but there was just enough of an edge to her voice to make me sure there were some. Life in a monastery is like a family and “Mom loves you best”