Outside the air was bright and cold despite it being the first of September. It had been ninety-six degrees when she left Los Angeles. Holly helped her on with her coat. Teresa was proud of herself for having brought the coat in the first place. At home in her living room she had put it on and then taken it off, locked the front door, gone to the taxi, gone back inside and put the coat on again. She could see the Alps in the distance from the parking lot now. She had seen them from the plane, the snow-covered peaks. Alps. She pulled the coat tighter. Who would have thought Teresa Cousins would ever see Alps?
The Zen-Dojo Tozan’s Citro?n that Holly drove was more like a soup can than a car. The flimsy metal shuddered as she downshifted around the curves, the gearshift a long stick coming up from the floorboard. Back home on the 405, such a car would be crushed by the blowback from a passing SUV, but on this perilous mountain road it felt like all the other tin cans. They could bump into one another without significant harm, like people brushing past on a crowded street. No one had upped the ante in order to save themselves, built a daily tank that would obliterate the competition. They were all in this together. The guard rail that separated them from the vertiginous drop off the side of the mountain seemed similarly unprepared to save a life, but what difference did it make? They were all going to die anyway, all of them. They weren’t even at the Zen center—whatever it was called—and already Teresa felt she was getting the point. Who needed air bags? The reinforced steel-cage construction that created a barrier to the world? Teresa rolled down her window—rolled it down with a hand crank!—and breathed in the bright Swiss air.
“So beautiful,” she said. They shot into a stone tunnel cut through the side of a mountain: light then darkness then pine trees.
“Just you wait,” her daughter said.
“I have to tell you, Holly, I didn’t understand until now. I mean, I’ve been happy for you, but in the back of my mind I was always thinking, What’s wrong with Torrance?” They drove past two shaggy mountain goats on the side of the road, their curled horns looking like crowns. No doubt they were waiting for Heidi and Grandfather to herd them back into the mountains. Teresa looked over at Holly. “Why would anyone live in Torrance?”
“There’s nothing wrong with home,” Holly said, feeling so pleased to receive her mother’s affirmation. “But it’s quieter here. It’s better for me.”
“I think about Jeanette in Brooklyn with Fodé and the boys. I think she likes all the noise, her tight little space. I think that’s what holds her together. And Albie, always picking up and going someplace else, always looking for something new. That probably works for him. He’s in New Orleans now.”
“He e-mails me sometimes,” Holly said, feeling such a sudden longing for her brother and sister, wanting them all to sit together in the same room with their mother.
“That’s good.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?” Teresa said, craning around to catch another glimpse of the view that receded behind them.
“Has staying in Torrance been good for you? Was it the right choice?”
They were driving through a forest now. The trees, their lower trunks furred with moss, got thicker and taller and started to cut into the light while ferns stretched across the forest floor. There were enormous rocks, boulders really, that looked like they’d been placed by set designers around a fast-running stream. Show me an enchanted forest! the producer must have said.
“Your father wanted me to move all of us to Virginia when he left with Beverly, so we’d be close by. I didn’t even consider it, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have. It would have made things easier on you kids. I just couldn’t find it in myself to be that accommodating.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Holly said, foolishly taking her eyes off the road for a second to stare at her mother. “I never knew he said that.”
“Then after Cal died.” Teresa shrugged. “Well, you remember that. We sure weren’t moving to Virginia after Cal died, though I’ll tell you, it bothered me to have him buried there. It was just about going forward in those days, one step, one step, not falling all the way down into myself. I didn’t think about changing my life. My life had already been changed. I just had to get through it.”
“You got through it.” Holly took the car down to second. They were behind a truck, climbing and climbing.
“We all did, I guess, in our own ways. You don’t think you’re going to but then you do. You’re still alive. That was the thing that caught me in the end: I was still alive. You and Albie and Jeanette, still alive. And we wouldn’t be forever, so I had to do something with that.”
Teresa put her hand over Holly’s hand, felt the deep rattle of the gearshift. “Listen to me talking. I never talk like this.”
“It’s Switzerland. That’s what it does to people.” Holly stopped to reconsider. “I should say that’s what it’s done to me. Actually, most of the people I’ve met here are pretty quiet.”
Teresa smiled and nodded. “Well, it’s good. I like it.”
Zen-Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thun but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers. It occupied a large chalet that was built high into the slope of a mountain. The chalet had been the country home of a banker from Zurich. In the summer he and his wife swam with their five children in the lake and in the winter they skied, and in between, unbeknownst to anyone in Sarnen or Thun or Zurich, they sat together on zafu cushions, all seven of them, and closed their eyes and cleared their minds as surely as the bracing mountain air had cleared their lungs. The house was left with a trust to form Zen-Dojo Tozan, with the understanding that the family’s children and their children and all of the children to come would be welcome. Katrina, the fourth daughter, now in her seventies, lived there full time in the small back bedroom she had slept in as a child. Along with Katrina there were fourteen other full-time residents. Twice a year they hosted retreats, running a rented shuttle bus back and forth from the inn in Thun, but most of their income came from walking sticks.
All of the residents participated in some way in the carving or distribution of the sticks, either the art or the business, they liked to say. The sticks were highly sought after, especially by American and Australian meditators who knew that they would never make it to Switzerland. Holly, who displayed no talent with wood or knives, did the accounting. She had found there was virtually no ceiling on what could be charged for a long pole of Swiss stone pine with a carved fish for a handle. Drop a five-euro compass into the fish’s back and double the price, even though no one seemed to understand the basic tenets of orienteering anymore. They bought the wood from a mill in Lausanne, and while they could have had a cheaper and more compelling stock from Germany, they had made the decision to keep the sticks Swiss. That’s what it said on their website: Swiss walking sticks carved from Swiss stone pine by meditators in Switzerland. Every day after meditation and community chores, a few hours were devoted to the sticks: Paul whittled the wood into sticks, Lelia blocked out the crude bodies of the fish with a carving knife, and then Hyla began the delicate work of scales. These sticks, along with their modest endowment, kept up the roof and paid the taxes and put cheese and bread on the table. They had a wait list of eight months for walking sticks. The wait list for residences had gotten too long to be useful and was stuck in a desk drawer and forgotten.
“We’re lucky there’s a guest room open,” Holly said, taking her mother’s hand as she walked her up the steep wooden steps. Her mother, steady enough, would benefit from a stick. The wind could knock a person over some days. “People come as a guest for a month and then they refuse to leave. There are three guest rooms and the schedule is always messed up. People just stay and stay. They think one of us is going to leave and make a space for them.”