yoga glasses
Peter Fortunato
You don’t see anybody wearing glasses during yoga class. If they need glasses, then they can’t see anybody who might also need them badly enough to wear them because she can’t use contacts. She is the correct pronoun. Nobody but women in my yoga class, thought Lucy, who in fact had started to attend three classes per week at her health club. And if a guy turns up occasionally, usually he doesn’t come back. Even the cute young guy who knew all that stuff about correct breathing only showed up once. Unless, she said to herself, you didn’t notice him because you weren’t wearing your glasses!
Lucy doesn’t like to wear contact lenses during yoga, even if they’re the supposedly breathable kind. It’s okay, as a matter of fact it’s great, because when she lets go, she really lets go, and she likes to let her eyes to float inside their sockets under lightly closed lids, as one of her teachers always says. Always the same thing, the exact same words: float inside their sockets under lightly closed lids.
“Don’t forget your yoga glasses,” Lucy’s daughter Sarah called out, just as her mom was preparing to leave for class.
“What?” Lucy replied, searching for her car keys at the front door, her fingers rummaging in the tray that hung from the wall. She scraped something sharp and winced and looked up.
“You know: those old eye glasses. You always wear those for your yoga classes,” Sarah said, smiling.
“I don’t wear them during the class, silly. Just for driving over because if I lost them I wouldn’t care too much. At the gym you can misplace stuff and then they sweep it away or something.”
Sarah had just turned fifteen and had recently had to have braces attached to her teeth. She was, Lucy thought, making an effort to remind everybody that looks didn’t count and brains did. She hadn’t exactly become a smarty pants, but she had a lot to say to everybody about everything.
“Right. It’s just that without your eyeglasses, you can’t find where you’ve put things -- like these keys.” She scooped Lucy’s keys from the sofa cushions directly behind her mother. “See. If you at least had had your yoga glasses you would have noticed them. I noticed them. Just another piece of evidence proving that I’m old enough to drive!”
Lucy smiled at her, took the keys with one hand, and with the other produced from her bag the famous eye glasses: they were horn-rimmed, their lenses shaped perfectly round. The bridge was a semicircular piece of dark brown plastic. Some years earlier Lucy had believed she was making a fashion statement in choosing glasses that made her look so studious. Like a German schoolgirl, a friend had told her. They were functional and pretended to be nothing other than corrective lenses. That was why they had been hip, well, for a while at least. In those days -- not so long ago, really -- before her third child, Samuel, was born, Lucy had believed she could progress through her forties with fashion and flair. And a flat belly.
But that hadn’t lasted. Three children: the youngest, fully seven years junior to the eldest, Arthur, and in the middle Sarah, her precocious teenage daughter. That is what had consumed the energy that Lucy once imagined would continue to flare past middle age.
Even her eyesight had changed during her forties, dimming it seemed, and the old schoolgirl glasses, still useful, were now much weaker than her present prescription. Although she wore contacts most of the time, she also had a pair of sturdy, light wire-rims -- but to say that she didn’t really care if she lost the schoolgirls was untrue. They were a part of her.
Her thoughts continued as she was pulling into the parking lot behind the health club. She was trying to go forward in her life with new interests. Now that Samuel was in grade school and she had so much help from his conscientious older siblings, Lucy finally had time enough to think about herself. She was blessed with a husband who made money with a company that sold catalogues of office supplies on line. Joseph had been, if not visionary, at least prophetic about the way that the Internet would impact marketing. And he had always encouraged her to look forward to a future that included not only the loveliest of children -- he had wanted at least three, three was all that he was getting -- but also a life for herself, perhaps a career in medical records administration, which she’d studied in college but never applied in what he called “a meaningful way.”
They had married soon after a “wild time in California,” when, as Joseph puts it, “all the values we inherited from our elders were challenged.” Among other things, this was one way he avoided thinking about Lucy’s affair with a logger on San Luis Ridge. Joseph hadn’t really liked their California years, and he’d never been interested in subjects like yoga or Buddhism or devotional Hindu singing, but she had. In California she had studied them avidly, because she was then and believes she still is now “a seeker after freedom.” Joseph never replies when she says that, but instead smiles knowingly, which is one of the few things about him that she hates -- she also hates feeling that way about her husband, but it’s true, and she tells herself that therefore she has to honor it.
In fact, Lucy doesn’t look back at those California days as being especially wild: she was young, she liked the sunshine, the seaside, the tall pine trees of the Sierra Nevada mountains. If Carl Jensen, that was his name, was also offering something new to a long haired girl from Redding, then she was glad to have that experience too. Her memories of him were mixed with his scent especially, his raw body odor and the flavor of wood smoke, as well his “chainsaw cologne,” as he called it, that clung to his flannel shirts and his blond hair after a day of work in the woods. Carl would have understood why you started to take yoga classes three times a week and began to burn incense before a tiny bronze statue of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. Carl would encourage you, Lucy thought.
At the gym, she had trouble finding a parking space. When she did, the Volvo was too big and she had to squeeze out of the passenger side door. She was running late; she knew it without looking at her watch. Having three children had taught her about being late, no matter how much good planning went into things for a “successful” event, as her husband would say. Being a mother gave her a certain amount of grace time, but, oh, she hated coming into classes late. It disturbed the other students and it seemed so unyoga-like: imprecise and graceless.
Lucy pushed through the swinging doors of the club, smiled at the receptionist, a sweet college girl named Kathy in a tight blue tee-shirt sporting the club’s logo. She walked directly to the yoga studio still in her coat, her big bag slung on her shoulder. Fortunately she had learned to wear her loose fitting, middle aged woman yoga clothing to class; but when she’d hung up her coat in the studio’s anteroom and was about to join the group, she saw herself in a mirror. My God, she thought, although she knew not which God she was invoking, how have you become so sloppy, fat and tired? She took one long, slow, yoga breath – and it did in fact help her to relocate her center.
The faint scent of a joss stick came to her like a balm, and it too reminded her of those long ago days of fragrant wood smoke from cook stoves that wafted down through the Ponderosa pines on damp green mornings. Life is good, she had learned back then. We have everything we need here on Earth to be happy. The closer we are to nature, the more likely we are to experience our own Real Nature. She still believed that. One of her missions now was too learn what was natural about this aging, forty eight year old body of hers.
Lucy felt as if each of her three children had simply passed through that body: each one in turn had from two cells joined within her womb, a sanctum whose mysteries she herself was not truly in charge of. Sometimes she’d felt as if she were only the housekeeper for that place, and that her children were not hers at all, but a series of souls whom she’d been entrusted to clothe with flesh and then learn to love. Yet she’d never had any doubt about the mother love she might feel at any moment for those three bodies and souls.
The incense was lovely, and tambura music was playing from a machine while Lucy looked for a place to roll out her mat. There were at least a dozen people near the front of the room, girls actually, barely old enough to be called women, although of course they were, she reminded herself. They reminded Lucy of swans, stretching their elegant necks and rolling their hips in time with the subtle beat of the tabla drums playing under the tambura’s silken strings. At the head of the class today was Cindy, a woman in her late twenties, the mother of Tyler, a boy that Lucy’s son Samuel knew from school. Lucy and Cindy made eye contact, and Cindy put her palms together in the yoga greeting, namaste. Lucy reflected her gesture and bowed her head slightly.
It was then that she became aware of the eye glasses, when they slipped forward on her nose. She looked up suddenly and the glasses jumped heavily back into place. Cindy seemed to be beaming a thought to her: don’t you want to remove them? Then Cindy pointed one of her pink lacquered fingertips up toward her own eyes, tapping against her sharp cheekbone, as if Lucy hadn’t yet realized that she still had on her glasses.
Her schoolgirl specs might not be the correct prescription for her aging eyes, and yet she could see with them adequately. In fact, going all the way back to her very first yoga classes a year ago when she was still wearing contacts, it seemed that today was the first day she was able to see so clearly. For one thing, sexy Cindy in her pink and navy outfit looked more like an advert for yoga fashions than a serious seeker after freedom. And when Lucy looked around the room she could tell most the women were about Cindy’s age or younger, all of them they dressed in approximately the same manner: chic yoga clothing or dance tights, their lustrous manes of hair held back with specially designed colorful ties.
Then there were the others: a few older women, who, like Lucy, were beyond the illusion that their bodies were theirs to control. Of these, she knew two or three a little and knew what they’d been through -- breast cancer, spinal surgery, the death of a life partner -- and what they were probably anticipating about the years ahead. Yoga is good medicine, Lucy was fond of saying. A preventative. A tonic. It stretches you forward and leads you back to your Real Nature.
My God, she said to herself, realizing not only that she believed this, but also actually feeling the presence of that One who could take any form, and did, and then outlived them all.
She removed the eyeglasses and placed them carefully near her mat at the wall of the studio. She happened to glance at the big mirrors on the far side of the room, but the images in it looked blurry, as usual. When she settled down on her firm pad with her hands holding her bare feet, soles together, closing her eyes as she stretched, something bright and very clear remained open inside of her.