Free S. by John Updike

supposedly a free country. Accredited lawyers among us stand ready to defend our constitutional rights. Defamatory and false information infringes these rights. Ashram Arhat holds out the hand of peace to its neighbors in Dorado County and the “city” of Forrest. Let us live side by side and strive to make our hitherto sadly neglected region the paradise it can become. The world is weary of the old agendas; let us welcome in the new agendas. Vindictive and mendacious editorials such as yours feed the atmosphere of hate that has grown up needlessly, and in his ineffable sorrow our Master has empowered me to compose this letter of friendly correction.
    Yours most sincerely,
Ma Prem Durga
Executive Director, Ashram Arhat
    /spw
    May 23
    My dear Charles,
    I was sorry to receive your letter. I am
so
sorry that Midge gave you my address, after I begged her not to. She is still, as I must not forget, very much of your world, very much attached. Even Irving, I fear, is just playing at dvandvanabhighata—the cessation of trouble from pairs of opposites. You and I, my dear, I see now, were such a pair of troublesome opposites.
    You speak of our bank accounts and stocks. You even writethe slanderous word “theft.” Were not those assets joint? Did I not labor for you twenty-two years without wages, serving as concubine, party doll, housekeeper, cook, bedwarmer, masseuse, sympathetic adviser, and walking advertisement—in my clothes and accessories and demeanor and accent and even in my body type and muscle tone—of your status and prosperity? How can you be so mired in prakriti as to care what numbers are printed on the bank statements that you never used to read anyway? Those numbers flowed effortlessly and inevitably from your work—you did not work to produce those numbers. I always did the accounts and the budgeting. For you as well as for us here at the ashram, work is worship—but you worship a stupid god, a stodgy pudgy god of respectability and outward appearance, a tin snob god of the “right” cars and shoes and country clubs, of acceptable street addresses and of acquisitions that dissolve downwards into démodé junk rather than, as for those who take the path of yoga and non-ego, dissolve upwards, into samadhi and the blissful void of Mahabindu. I pity you, darling. Your anger is like that of an infant who with his weak little rubbery arms beats his mother’s breast and produces no effect but her loving, understanding laugh.
    You dare drag in our daughter. You say Pearl is appalled. You threaten me with the loss of not only her love but all communication with her. You say she will renounce me. How absurd. One cannot renounce a parent. A parent can renounce a child, for purposes of future inheritance, but a parent is unrenounceable—a parent, however inconvenient, is a fact. Facts cannot be renounced, though they can be not known, through avidya, or, through vidya, transcended. A parent can be, if not transcended, survived—you have survived your own father but carry him with you like one of those fetuses thatin some unfortunate women turn to stone—every time you cleared your throat with one of those prissy little “ahem”s it was your father clearing his, fat old poker-faced Freddy Worth—you even had his supercilious rapid eyeblink when you were trying to put something over on one of us—me or some gullible misdiagnosed patient or one of those poor doctor-crazy nurses you persuaded to spread her legs in their grotesque white stockings—a parent
should
be transcended, I’m trying to say, as a snake sheds its skin. Pearl and I are women and on the same continuum, and, having contributed your microscopic ridiculous sperm with its bullet head and wriggling tail, you can stand there all you wish, clucking and wringing your hands and telling her to hate me. She won’t. I am her mother. I am she as she was once I. At the age at which I very immaturely married she is trying to become a free intelligent woman