The Silent Treatment
Mary Kay Feather
Word Count 529
Pat and I met in a local bar called Sgt. Pepper's. Underage, she was tending bar and playing jukebox songs with a sad girl theme. I was drinking away a broken heart. We've been friends for almost fifty years, five husbands between us in six or seven different towns. In 2009, we did something different from our biennial spending frenzies and drove up winding roads to a day-long silent retreat at Spirit Rock, a spiritual training institution grounded in the Buddha's teachings set among 411 acres of oak woodlands in the hills of Marin county in Northern California.
I do not know why we thought the two of us, who gab at every rendezvous, would enjoy a silent retreat, but there we were, dressed in black tights and oversize linen shirts clutching our sack lunches for our quiet day. Would we be more introspective and closer from this experience? I think of our intimacy as high energy. We were not sure we could handle not speaking all day, but we managed muteness well until the afternoon session where the leader Jack Kornfield had us sit across from each other and look into each other's eyes for fifteen minutes. " I invite you to align yourself with kindness and goodness,” he explained, “by seeing what is in the eyes of your friend. Think about what they have experienced in difficult times and connect with their history."
I wanted to talk with her in this grave-silent room filled with strangers. What was going through her mind? She looked so sad, what in my life was that tragic? Or was she thinking about her own? About her first marriage in which her husband left her for another? Maybe she was pondering the impending death of her mother or the inadequacy of her father. Or perhaps she was regretting her newest conquest and wondering whether he would leave his wife. Or was it just the idea of "kindness and goodness" that brought up the times we might have been better behaved? Suddenly, a tear slid down her cheek, then more tears and she was weeping. Non-stop tears. Later we agreed it was the intimacy of the gaze that made her tearful, not sad recollections.
My Swedish grandma used to sit in silence at the kitchen table, hands folded, her blue eyes fixed on me. She may have looked at my sister as well, but I felt she focused on me. I complained to my mother who brushed it off. "She is just seeking family resemblances, looking for her sisters, her daughters, her husband." But as an adolescent, I fretted over her fixed stare.
Pat and I wrapped up the day by going to the Olema Inn for champagne, thankful we did not have to make a habit of silence or the deep gaze. I want to say it made us closer and more spiritual, but I think we bonded more by enduring silence rather than growing from it. We did not test our closeness. In my will, I've left Pat my gold heirloom bracelet. She's left me her silver jewelry and her tempered wooden salad bowl. But none of it will matter when the other is gone.
Mary Kay is a Seattle native, an acknowledged bibliophile, and former bookseller. She can be found curled up most anywhere with Jenny Diski, Helen Garner, Ali Smith, and other wordsmiths. Known as Fun Girl Feather in her youth, she is writing a memoir called The Trouble with Fun: a bookworm looks back at sex, drugs, and rock'n roll.