She reads:
“You are either Now Here or Nowhere”
—Baron Baptiste
“I especially like your bed,” Felix says with a devilish smile, and kisses her.
Her bed once belonged to a woman named Mildred, the sister of their neighbor Mrs. Murphy. Mildred actually died in this bed. Katie had been completely skeeved out by the prospect of inheriting Mildred’s bed, but she’d been sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, and Mrs. Murphy was offering it to her for free. What? You gonna turn down a perfectly good free bed? Katie’s mother had said. Katie had wanted to argue that a woman had just died in it, so it wasn’t exactly perfectly good, but Katie was broke and in no position to argue. She smudged it with incense every day for weeks and still prays to Mildred each night, thanking her for the comfortable place to sleep, hoping she’s happy in heaven and that she won’t be visiting for any naps or slumber parties. She’s surely rolling over in her grave right now if she can see the naked black Protestant in her bed. Katie kisses Felix and chooses not to tell him about Mildred.
“I feel bad that we skipped class this morning,” says Katie, carting out her guilt.
She learned guilt right along with her manners. Please. I want something. Guilt. Thank you. I have something. Guilt. I’m kissing a beautiful naked man in Mildred’s bed while my oblivious parents watch TV two floors below me. Guilt. The ability to attach guilt firmly by the hand to any positive emotion is a skill cultivated by the Irish, a fine art admired even more than Meghan’s pirouettes. Katie’s been fully awake for about five minutes, and guilt is already sitting wide-eyed at the table, grinning with that shiny crown on its head.
“We had some spiritually enlightening exercise last night,” Felix says, smiling, flashing the dimple in his left cheek that she’s crazy for, hinting at another go.
“I’m starving. You hungry?” she asks.
“Ravenous.”
“You want breakfast or lunch?”
“Either. Whatever you’ve got.”
Oh. She was thinking of getting out of her apartment, maybe going to Sorelle’s. Last night in the safety of the late, dark hour and with a few martinis at the helm of her normally tightly navigated ship, the possibility of bumping into her parents seemed like a faraway continent. But now it’s well into the next day, and her mom could easily pop by to say hello or to have a cup of tea or simply to remind her that it’s Sunday and supper is at four o’clock, as it always is. Her dad could be out on the front stoop, walking Yaz. Shit.
Katie looks over at her alarm clock. Her mother probably won’t come up. She suppresses the urge to hustle Felix out before they’re caught and instead dresses in underwear and a Red Sox T-shirt. Felix throws on his boxers and follows her down the narrow hallway into the kitchen.
Her apartment has the same footprint as her parents’ unit, the house she grew up in, and it’s similarly lame. Worn, dirty-looking-even-after-mopping linoleum floor, a Mr. Coffee on the avocado-colored Formica counter, a secondhand kitchen table, and two mismatched chairs. No stainless steel, no soapstone, no espresso machine here. Not like Felix’s place. His bedroom, kitchen, and living room feel so mature, so independent, so real.
He’s a bit older, twenty-five. JJ’s age. He has an MBA from Sloan and works in business development for a start-up company that turns trash into fuel. He makes a lot more money than she does.
She stands in front of two open cabinets, not finding much, wishing she’d grocery shopped yesterday.
“Granola and bananas okay?”
“Sure,” says Felix, having a seat at the table, tipping his head to examine the pictures magnetized to the fridge door.
“Herbal tea or coffee. The coffee won’t be any good.”
“Tea is good. Those guys your brothers?”
“Yeah, that’s JJ on the left, Patrick on the right.”
She wishes she had the money to fix this place up. Yoga instruction, she’s realized, is an “in-debt career.” She teaches five classes a week and makes six dollars a head, capping at seventy-two dollars a class. Even if she manages a handful of Toonie privates or a bachelorette party here and there, she barely makes enough to pay rent and eat. She still waitresses on the side, but it doesn’t change her life. Plus there are the expenses—yoga clothes, music for class playlists, books, attending workshops and retreats. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to put her in the red when she makes only four hundred dollars a week. She could never afford health insurance. Thank God she’s healthy.
“Which one’s the firefighter?”
“JJ.”
The only way out of this financially strapped existence is to open her own studio. But she’s friends with Andrea, the owner of Town Yoga, and Charlestown already has two studios. There aren’t enough bodies in this small neighborhood to support a third. Plus Andrea would be pissed. But Katie sees this as a sign rather than an obstacle, because it gives her the perfect reason to marry her dream of running her own studio with her other, bigger dream.
Moving out of Charlestown.
It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate having grown up here or love many aspects of living here now. She’s proud of being Irish. She’s proud of being stubborn and tough and street smart. Her cousins from the suburbs always seemed so spoiled and sheltered with their scheduled, supervised play dates and Martha Stewart summer camps. Charlestown is real life in the real world. There’s no Pollyanna bullshit here, and Katie’s grateful for that.
It’s just so insular. Everyone knows everyone here, and no one ever does anything or goes anywhere outside of a few square blocks. Seriously.
Every weekend before Felix, she was either at the Warren Tavern, Sullivan’s, or Ironsides, and really it’s always Ironsides. Outside of her immediate friends, she’s JJ’s little sister or Officer Joe O’Brien’s daughter or the dancer’s sister or even Frank O’Brien’s granddaughter, God rest his soul. It’s the same people week after week, complaining about the same things—parking spaces, the Yankees, the weather, the revolving-door drama of who is hooking up or breaking up, and they’re always talking about the same cast of characters, guys they’ve all known since they learned how to tie their shoes. If she doesn’t do something drastic, she’s going to end up like everyone else here—married to an Irish Townie, saddled with a handful of freckled, copper-headed kids, still living upstairs from her parents.
The teachings of yoga have opened her eyes to concepts and possibilities beyond St. Francis Church and this tiny Irish neighborhood—Buddhism, Tibet, the Dalai Lama, Hinduism, India, Bhakti, Sanskrit, Shiva, Ganesh. The philosophies of a vegan diet and Ayurveda introduced a new mindfulness around health and eating, choices other than bangers and mash and blood sausage. She grew up with the Ten Commandments, a list of Thou Shalt Nots that insisted on obedience motivated by a fear of hell and God’s wrath. The Eight Limbs of Yoga offer a gentler code for living soulfully. Unlike the domineering Thou Shalt Nots, the yamas and niyamas are reminders to connect with her true human nature, to live in peace, health, and loving harmony with everyone and everything. She mumbled along to the hymns in church as a girl because she knew the words and her mother insisted. Now she attends kirtans instead of mass and her heart sings.
And the people within the yoga community, hailing from all over the planet, are so exotic to Katie—Asian, Indian, African. Hell, Californian is exotic to Katie. There are mala beads instead of rosary, Krishna Das concerts instead of Mumford and Sons, tofu instead of hamburger, kombucha instead of Guinness. She’s intuitively drawn to what she isn’t, naive and enthralled.
She knows she’s only scratched the surface. She’s tasted a small sample of thought, tradition, and living foreign to the way she was raised, the way everyone here lives generation after generation without questioning, and her curious soul is hungry for more.
She remembers being young, around seven or eight, and standing on the Freedom Trail, each sneaker on a brick, following the red line with her eyes as it snaked along the ground, out of Charlestown. To freedom! She didn’t know then that the trail simply went over the bridge and into the North End, another small ethnic neighborhood in the same city. In her imagination, the redbrick line was constructed by the same mason who designed the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz, and so it obviously led to somewhere magical. When she was little, this magical place had houses with farmer’s porches and two-car garages and grassy yards with swing sets. It was a land with trees and ponds and open fields and people who weren’t Irish and who didn’t know her since birth.
She still dreams of living somewhere over the rainbow in a different zip code with the space to breathe and create the kind of life she wants, a life not predetermined by where and how her parents or even great-grandparents lived. A life she chooses and freely defines, not one inherited from her parents. Someday.
She’s a big “someday” talker. Someday, I’m going to own my own yoga studio. Someday, I’m going to live in Hawaii or India or Costa Rica. Someday, I’m going to own my own house with a yard and a driveway. Someday, I’m going to leave this neighborhood. Someday something great is going to happen.
“Am I ever going to meet them?” asks Felix.
“Who?”
“Your brothers, your family.”