How to be a Buddhist; Short fiction by Tess Canfield
How to be a Buddhist
Short Fiction by Tess Canfield
Photo by William Krause on UnsplashNicole was thinking about love when she slammed the brakes.
“What the fuck!” The words burst from her as she laid on the horn. The driver of the green Prius who cut her off gave a dismissive wave. At least it wasn’t the finger.
The rage passed through her as she took a slow breath in through her nose, out her mouth, working her heart rate back to normal. But she was still late picking up Gavin from school and the whole east side of Los Angeles was in gridlock. There was some sort of political convention downtown, wreaking havoc with road closures. At least everyone was dealing with the same thing, she told herself. She couldn’t be the only frazzled parent pulling up fifteen minutes late this time.
She turned her attention back to the podcast, the fourth installment of her latest obsession, HOW TO BE A BUDDHIST. The host was interviewing a monk who had discipled under Thich Nhat Hanh. They were talking about attachments, and the relationship between suffering and desire. She had been listening in earnest but couldn’t seem to understand how the spiritual practice of non-attachment was feasible for somebody like her. Job, kid, husband, dog and a rotating cast of goldfish—not to mention the student loans, mortgage, car leases and non-existent retirement fund. Although she fantasized about it, not everyone could sit around in some hilltop monastery, learning how to levitate above it all.
“So that new car you’ve been wanting,” the podcast host said, “it might make you happy when you get it. But you’ll get used to it, eventually. Once it loses luster, you just crave something else and become unhappy again.”
“Right,” the monk replied, his words calm and concise. “Wanting something nice is not wrong, but it’s the clinging, that Raga, as the Buddha taught, which causes suffering.”
The voices faded as Nicole’s thoughts took over again. She knew there was truth in their words. She could feel it. The constant hum at the center of her chest resonated in recognition, attuned to something more real than her hands gripping the wheel. But there was a hitch, a misconnection in her brain. Her eyes strained from the thinking, from the traffic, from the oppressive glare of the sun. She couldn’t help wondering, what about attachment to something objectively good, like Nature or another human being? The problem still was love. Living without attachment sounded like living without love. Perhaps this was the way of the universe. Suffering and love—two sides of the same cosmic coin.
Suddenly she was struck with a more terrifying thought: was her attachment to her family, her own son, preventing some sort of divine revelation? The question rained an intense helplessness down her throat. Her chest welled with depthless grief as her breath became shallow, unstable. The ridges of her knuckles went from white to red, as she fought back tears. She yearned for enlightenment, felt starved at her deepest core, but whatever reality she craved seemed several lifetimes away. She was a nobody, just a normal person, doomed to the thrashing waves of love and attachment like everyone else.
“Just stop it, Nicole,” she said, shaking her head as she waited for someone to let her change lanes.
She always did this. Always looking for a sign, an answer. Last week she’d bought a Kierkegaard book on a whim, feeling as though it called her name straight from the Philosophy section. That evening crawling into bed, she opened it with huge anticipation, prepared for its life-changing wisdom. She read the Table of Contents and had to Google panegyric. At page five, she gave up, shut off her reading light, and silently cried herself to sleep.
But she couldn’t get lost in that feeling now. She was arriving at the school, and Gavin didn’t need to see her in this state. He was such a sensitive kid and was having a hard enough time with the transition into first grade. She checked her mascara in the rear-view mirror and turned the air conditioning fan to its highest setting, pointing the vents directly to her face.
Pulling to the curb, Nicole rolled down her window and searched the crowd of children for her own thin, bird-boned boy. At last she saw him, standing alone, looking down at his yellow Nintendo Switch.
She tsked and sighed. She had just talked to him about taking that thing to school, hoping that without it, he would look around and actually talk to people. Maybe make a real friend. She planned to reprimand him once he got into the car, but couldn’t help noticing how the afternoon sun brought out the brown streaks in the curtain of jet-black hair hanging over his face. She was linked to his small body in a microscopic way and felt as though the ordinary motion of his breath, that near-imperceptible rise and fall of his chest, was powerful enough to make her laugh.
Nicole was about to call Gavin’s name, when she noticed something else. There was another boy behind him, with red hair and an Avenger’s t-shirt. She knew this boy. Luke. And she had a suspicion he’d been bullying her son these last few weeks. What was he doing now? Was he—unzipping Gavin’s backpack? She gasped, hand to mouth, while Gavin remained fixed on his game and Luke poured a whole bottle of Sprite straight into his bag.
It all happened movie-like, in slow motion. The bottom of the bright blue backpack bloomed into dark navy. The carbonation sparkled in the light as the soda dripped to the ground. Gavin’s soft lashes blinked in confusion, as the cold wetness seeped into the backs of his legs. Each moment, a terrible eternity.
When the adrenaline kicked in, Nicole tore herself from the car and everything happened lightning fast. The Nintendo crashing to the sidewalk. Gavin whipping around. The boys pushing back and forth. The crowd falling back. Luke tumbling to the ground. All a single instant.
Nicole was in a primal panic, yelling to everyone and no one, “I saw what he did, I saw the whole thing.” She ran to Gavin, clasping him into her side. He began to cry and she pressed her cheek into the crown of his head, “I know baby, I saw.”
Another woman stepped through the fray. Ms. Heywood, Gavin’s kindergarten teacher from last year. Nicole knew her, trusted her.
“I saw it too,” Ms. Heywood said, calm but firm. She helped Luke back to his feet and he looked at her with eyes of terror, shaken at being found out. Nicole felt herself fill with disgust and was shocked by an overwhelming urge to take a swipe at him.
“Now, you pick that up for Gavin,” Ms. Heywood said to Luke, nodding to the Nintendo.
Nicole would’ve felt some satisfaction at that, but as Luke held out the game, Gavin started to scream, begging to go home. She tried to remain composed, asking him to wait in the car, but he was inconsolable.
“Please,” Gavin wailed over and over, “I wanna go home. Home.”
“It’s fine,” Ms. Heywood said. “I’ll talk to Luke’s parents. Can you be here tomorrow? Seven?”
“Home, please,” he sobbed.
Nicole, overwhelmed, could only nod.
“I’ll tell Principal Tremiti,” Ms. Heywood said.
Nicole’s awareness turned to the crowd around them, the wall of gaping mouths and eyes. Gavin was right. She needed to get him out of there. She grabbed the Nintendo from Luke’s outstretched hand, pressing her thumb into the freshly gouged plastic, and led Gavin by the shoulders to the car. She kept a towel in the back seat and draped it over his soda-soaked jeans, fumbling with the safety buckle and feeling the heat radiating from his body. After snapping him into place, she tried to brush the unrelenting tears from his cheeks, gave up, closed the door, and got behind the wheel. It was agonizing, the traffic. Nicole wanted to take her son and speed away, forever and ever and never look back, but the best she could do was jerk the car, trying to weave into the lane. She cursed that stupid convention downtown. What were all those people even doing here? Sitting around, pretending to solve problems, making our lives hell on earth.
Turning the corner, the congestion eased for a moment. Nicole pressed a palm to her forehead as they rolled to another stop sign. She looked in the rear-view mirror.
“You okay, buddy?”
But Gavin, red all over, drenched in soda and snot, kept his eyes down. The tears rolled down his round cheeks in a steady stream. She could feel his confused grief, and her heart broke for him. What could she say? What could she do? Her eyes darted between his wet face and the road, brain spinning in her skull. She grabbed her thermos, opened it, and held it back.
“Water?”
He shook his head and sniffed.
Something seized in the back of her throat and a coughing fit took hold. She guzzled the water herself until a cool thread of relief slid into her center. When the fit finally subsided, Nicole’s whole body felt heavy, depleted. She left the top off the thermos and shoved it into the cup holder. The fingers of her right hand came to rest at the bottom of the steering wheel, as her left hand propped up her head, elbow jutting into the car door. As they came to another standstill in traffic, she cleared her throat again and loosened into defeat.
Only then did she realize what was playing through the car speakers.
“By releasing attachment, we can then develop unbiased compassion,” the Buddhist monk said, “Infinitely and universally. There’s no loss of compassion for those we love.”
Nicole shook her head, grabbed her phone, and muttered, “Oh, who even gives a shit?”
At that, the hum inside her chest rang out like a bell.
She opened the audio app and thumbed to the playlist of Gavin’s favorite songs. Bubble gum pop—bright, meaningless, fun. She hit shuffle and turned the volume up loud, the way he liked it. Halfway through Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” his tears came to a halt. She opened the sunroof and rolled down the windows.
It took ages to get home. The traffic never let up. By the time they pulled into the garage, their throats were sore from singing.
# # #
Tess Canfield is an emerging writer with work published in WePresent and forthcoming in The Santa Monica Review. She's a graduate of Emerson College and the Chapman University Community Workshop with Richard Bausch. In her spare time, she co-manages a small literary non-profit called 50 Free Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and dog.
Inquiry
Thoughts on How to be a Buddhist provided by the author:
Like the main character of this story, I always found the concept of non-attachment difficult. Why and how should we detach when we know the benefits authentic connection? Nicole asks herself similar questions, fearing that loving her own son is preventing her from finding spiritual peace. Ironically, she fails to see the attachment causing her the most suffering is her intense and irrational desire to “achieve” enlightenment.
I think many of us are walking around with that same longing—an abyss inside of us that yearns for nothing less than a complete oneing with Nature, God, The Universe, Goodness.
That’s why we turn to things like podcasts and books, and we commit ourselves to spiritual practices or religious institutions. These can certainly be beneficial, but it’s worth investigating anything in which we invest our time. When do these resources help, and when do they create guilt or feelings of failure? Where’s the line between healthy self-improvement, and tying too much of our self-worth to an ideal? Can our good intentions get in the way of our inherent goodness? What if that feeling of everything actually requires very little, like singing with someone you love, or even nothing at all?