From Comfortable Distances Read Online Free Page B

The
movements were so familiar to her, so that with each upward motion of her arms,
she felt as if she were diving into her past, exhaling her face up to see her
mother smiling at her; in downward facing dog she could feel her mother’s
gentle hands easing her shoulders down her back, away from her neck. She heard
her mother’s voice in the teacher’s voice, everything blurring, so that each time
she looked at the girl on the mat in front of her, she realized she was one
step behind what the rest of the class was doing.
    “If you feel like you
need a rest,” the teacher was saying, “then by all means take child’s pose.”
After one more sun salute—arms coming around and up towards the sky, then
exhaling and folding down towards the floor, inhaling, her face up, and then
exhaling one foot back and then the other, lowering down towards the floor, her
upper body lifted as though she were at the top of a push up, her knees and
thighs lifted, and then exhaling into downward facing dog—Tess took child’s
pose. She needed to be quiet and small, to let go of everything that was going
on around her, shut down her mind. In a few moments, the rest of the class moved
onto standing poses, while the teacher bent down by Tess and whispered for her
to take rest, shavasana, on her back. The teacher massaged Tess’s neck,
loosening her up; the smell of lavender, on the teacher’s hands, soothing her,
helping her to further let go. There was so much tenderness, so much warmth in
the teacher’s fingers that Tess felt as if she were in mother’s care, safe in
her mother’s yoga room, her mother presiding over her. In this cocoon of the
present meshed with memory, it amazed her how easy it was to stop thinking, to
relax, to rest.
    “Nap time is over,”
Michael said. He was leaning over her, on his elbows, so that Tess jumped up.
He smelt like sour milk. Everyone around Tess was moving, folding up their
mats, sipping from water bottles.
    “I was asleep,” Tess
said. She popped up, not sure if she was back in her mother’s house or if it
was a dream.
    “Really? No?” Michael
said.
    Tess closed her eyes and
opened them. No, she wasn’t back at her mother’s. She felt as if she had slept
for days.
    “I feel amazing,” she
said, and it surprised her that she did. A feeling of joy, serenity, displaced
the dread and fear she had felt coming to the studio, of returning to yoga.
    “I’m glad one of us does.
I feel dead,” Michael said. “So much for me and yoga. While I was struggling
through one downward dog after the other, you were snoozing.”
     “You smell bad,” Tess
said.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    Tess folded up her mat,
placed it on the stack at the back of the classroom, and was about to follow
Michael out when the teacher stopped her.
    “I hope you come back,”
she said.
    Tess smiled at her. “I
will be back,” she said.
    “You needed the rest.”
    “I didn’t realize it, but
yes, I guess that I did,” she said. Tess felt as if she were floating.
    “Namaste,” the teacher
said and Tess repeated, “Namaste.”
    It was the way the girl
walking out in front of her swooped up her long locks in one instant and then
sorted through her bag, pulling off a chunk of something—from behind it looked
to Tess like a piece of cake— that caught Tess’s attention. When the girl
turned toward her, Tess could make out that it was a piece of a cookie that the
girl stuffed in her mouth. In a moment of mutual confusion and recognition,
their eyes locked.
     “The brownstone,” Dale
said and Tess nodded. Dale wiped her hands on her black yoga pants and smiled. “You
must think I’m awful,” she said.
    Her demeanor, her
smile—it was as if she were a completely different person. She stood upright
and tall and there was a softness to her, a humorous side that Tess would have
never guessed existed in her.
    “No, I don’t think—”
    “I’m sorry,” the girl
said catching Tess’s forearm. “I don’t usually