Free American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen Page A

was like practicing being a ghost.
    The mechanism of Bardo activities is that they require total focus, but they also blank you out. I know these exercises sound stupid, I say to the girls, but they seem to work. Or at least to do something. The van ride home after the grocery store, for example, was very peaceful. Although one girl started crying. But in a very unobtrusive way. The girls in the program are—I wouldn’t say they are “difficult.” It is more that they have difficulties. Most of them are referred to GRLZ from the nearby pediatric clinic and have lupus, or eating disorders, or severe asthma, or early run-ins with alcohol and drugs.
    That day we were staying close to home for Bardo. The local Mormon church provides GRLZ with a free space: a large, open-layout basement with pantry shelves holding gallon jars of peanut butter, vats of pickles, costumes from past Christmas pageants, cartons of colored pipe cleaners, hanks of yarn, reams of colored stationery, boxes whose labels cannot be trusted but that purport to contain Life cereal. I opened the Bardo notebook to a random page and began to read aloud from Activity #14: “‘Walk quietly around the space, touching nothing except the floor with your feet—’”
    “We’re all touching air all the time,” interrupted Alina, the most frizzy-haired and isolated of the girls. “Air is a thing.”
    “That’s true,” I said. “Very good. OK, ‘As you quietly walk around the space, pause to take note, almost like you’re a camera taking pictures, of perspectives or places or things that remind you of being dead.’”
    I did feel a slight jet stream of having stumbled into an “advanced” exercise. “Take special note of the particular words, OK?” I went on, following the script. “It’s not about what reminds you of death . Or of dying . It says specifically: things that remind you of being dead . We can think about what that might mean.”
    That’s when Brandee, who has lupus and nice manners, said to me, “You look sideways pregnant.”
    “I’m not pregnant, but thank you for asking.”
    “I didn’t say pregnant, I said sideways pregnant.”
    “Do you guys have any questions about the exercise?” I asked. “Listen to your instincts. I’ll set the egg timer for forty-five minutes. Then we’ll regroup and discuss. Just try to relax into it.” The setting was ideal for the exercise, really. The fluorescent lighting glanced off the steel refrigerator in a way that was like not being in Kansas anymore.
    “That’s what happens when you’re a bulimia,” another of the girls said. “The sideways thing.”
    “No,” a third said. “When you’re a bulimia, your teeth are black and you cough blood. That’s where the idea of werewolves comes from, these hungry creatures with bloody mouths—”
    “That’s not true. In bulimia you explode out your ribs—”
    “That bleeding mouth stuff is about being inbred, it’s not bulimia—”
    “I didn’t mean to start a thing,” quiet Brandee said.
    I acknowledged to the girls that their curiosity and speculation were normal, even admirable. I made a simple announcement that it was a breast, what they were talking about. My hope was that we could then quickly move on.
    “I think it looks hot,” said Lucille, the one GRL who herself was especially “hot” and who, when she arrived two weeks earlier, had unsettled the group dynamics just by looking the way she did. She was of the physical type, already full and curvy, of whom I’d heard men say that she was so ripe that one had to take her now, before she was rotten. Lucille snapped a photo of me with her phone. I asked her nicely to please not do that. She took several more photos. At least I liked the navy color of the fitted long tee I was wearing. My face looks best against dark colors. I would need more of these longer shirts, I noted to myself. Lucille went on: “You know those models, they’re all so, so flat, they have no