“So, here’s this,” I say, handing Tina the brochure. The two of us are perched on the creek’s bank, soothing our feet in the icy water at the bottom of the hollow behind the house. Thankfully, I am considerably more calm and collected this time around, with nary a heckler in sight. “There are macrobiotic counselors all over the world. They’re like natural foods physicians. The closest one is the Village in Knoxville, Tennessee. Run by a husband and wife team, Justin and Marsala Rosen, it’s a base camp bed-and-breakfast nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains National Park. There are six other houses on the property. We can take the scenic route,” I say, trying to gauge her final reaction to my hard sell. “So. Are you up for it?”
Tina smiles and takes my hand.
* * *
I am standing with my mother on the sundeck of the expansive mountain home, nervous and energized by the alien surroundings. On the hill beyond the house, a handful of people are harvesting something green from neatly tended rows in a garden. A life-sized granite statue of a woman with a gigantic vulva stands on the far end of the sundeck. I feel as though I’ve stepped into the cover of a gorgeously illustrated box of raisins.
An older man, stooped and cheery with dyed auburn hair, answers the door, smiles, and greets us in a big, booming voice. “Weeelcome to the Village. My name is Justin. I’m the only Jew in a tri-county area. There will be time for pictures later. Ha!”
Tina looks at me with a big fake smile.
Justin eyes the harvesters and rings a dinner bell mounted on the wall next to the door before stepping aside. “Please. Come in. Kindly remove your shoes. It deposits all the outside chi on the doorstep.”
We enter and take off our flip-flops, leaving them next to a fat yellow cat snoozing in the sun. Justin smiles, nods, farts, and turns. Tina and I follow him to a cluttered desk in the corner of the rustic glass room overlooking the mountains. “One thousand for the weekend includes your own rooms on the property here and all meals prepared by us,” he says. A plain, barefooted woman enters, whisks away our flip-flops, and disappears. “It also includes a counseling session to get you started.” Justin trails off into another part of the house. Tina and I hustle to keep up.
* * *
Ten or so students of all ages, sizes, and ethnicities are standing at the long wooden dining table set with chopsticks and Japanese soup bowls. Everyone smiles at the two of us. We nod back nervously as the remnants of an early evening thunderstorm fire one last flash of electricity over a mountain that looks like a pyramid in the encroaching darkness. A gray-haired woman of seventy motions for us all to sit.
Justin stands at the head of the table, acknowledging the gray-haired woman on the other end. “This is my wife, Marsala.” Marsala nods as Tina and I take our seats on the benches. Justin introduces the assorted dishes on the table like Ed Sullivan announcing his enviable guest lineup: “This is brown rice with millet, adzuki beans with chestnuts, steamed kale, and,” he says, more playfully here, “hijiki sea vegetable. First, the grace.” Justin sits, farts, and bows his head.
Clearly, beans was Justin’s macrobiotic protein of choice.
Tina stifles a laugh and tries not to look at me as Justin begins. “O universe, we thank you for this well-balanced meal. For the farmers who grew it and the distributors who brought it to our table.” He nods at Tina and me through one squinted eye. “For friends in our home, and most importantly, for our teachers—Michio and Aveline Kushi at the Kushi Institute in Beckett, Massachusetts—for bringing this wonderful lifestyle into our midst. Amen.” Everyone smiles in agreement as they pass bowls from left to right.
Tina clears her throat to address our two hosts. “Well, I agree with the Bible that the Jews are God’s chosen people.”
Looking for something to do besides screaming “WHAAAT??” to my mother like a bug-eyed cartoon character, I attempt to change the subject. Glancing dramatically into a nearby pot with a tiny gasp, I raise both eyebrows in gleeful anticipation at the sight of something stewed and orange.
“Thank you, Tina,” Justin says pleasantly. “My wife isn’t Jewish, though. Marsala was raised Catholic.”
“But I consider myself Presbyterian,” Marsala says, offering Tina a bowl of brown, squishy discs. “Lotus ball?” Tina takes the bowl and looks inside as Marsala prattles on. “I’ve seen macrobiotics change so many people’s lives. Why, it’s brought Justin and me glory and riches beyond anything we’d ever…” Marsala is suddenly lost.
Everyone looks respectfully into their laps as Marsala attempts to remember the rest of her train of thought. She shivers and whimpers twice like a tired Chihuahua.
Justin interjects. “My wife had a mini-stroke some years ago. She gets lost, but never you fear, she’ll find her way back.”
And she does. “It’s really quite impressive, the things you see,” Marsala says. “People healing themselves of advanced stage cancers, like Gina, here.”
Gina, sixty-something, stops slurping her soup long enough to smile through questionable dental work.
Marsala plows ahead. “Careers turning around for the first time, relationships blossoming. You see, when you’re eating according to the natural laws, you experience a spiritual, mental, and physical clarity so that all the bullshit you’ve allowed in your lives is finally recognized and…” With another whimper, she’s lost again.
Justin takes over with gusto. “Seaweed fajita, anybody?”
* * *
“You okay?” I ask, entering Tina’s tiny brown paneled room. Japanese art with fat naked Japanese people wrestling and screwing adorns the walls; overstuffed pillows and warm-colored throws are tossed haphazardly in every available corner. Vaguely remembering some ridiculous Don Knotts movie I’d seen as a kid where he was a reluctant guru to a band of hippies, I’m suddenly wondering if it’s too late to get us both out.
Tina brushes her hair contentedly in front of a small vanity. “Well, I suppose they’re both very nice,” she whispers, “if a little excitable.” Holding back her hair from her face, she checks the effect in the mirror. “The view is breathtaking.” I’m taken aback by her apparent newfound narcissism until I realize she’s talking about the mountains. “I think I could live up here if it weren’t so far out in the wilderness,” she says, taking my hand, sitting me on the bunk bed next to her. “Hey, whoever thought I’d be eating with chopsticks, huh? But I suppose Justin is right, they are a more peaceful utensil.” Tina takes in a quick breath of astonishment. “And what about getting rid of all the electrical appliances, even the stove? I mean, I haven’t cooked on gas since…Oh, and giving up the television? What will your father do without Fox News?” She gets up and rummages through her overnight bag on the chest of drawers. “So. The consultation is tomorrow. Marsala said she would examine me. Do you know they can tell where your cancer is just by looking at you?” She glances out the window once more, this time like a kid pondering Christmas. “Yes, there’s definitely healing in the air here.”
* * *
While I am seated with the rest of the students on the sundeck atop the mountain, Marsala stands directly behind Tina on a sort of outcropping, a round, stage-like area over the steepest part of the canyon. I’m thinking if we were in L.A., this back porch in the clouds would be the last place I’d wanna be during a killer quake.
Marsala positions Tina so that she’s in full view of the group, her hands on either side of Tina’s face. “See this redness on the upper cheeks? That’s Tina’s lung cancer. As she continues on the diet, this will begin to vanish. Do you tend to hold things inside?” Marsala asks Tina.
“Well…” Tina clears her throat.
Marsala walks Tina around the sundeck, parading her in front of the rest of the eager students like a first-class specimen. “Most lung cancer patients do. I’m going to recommend you scrub your entire body from head to toe every morning with fresh ginger. This will rid your system of the chemotherapy when you begin your treatments. I also want to teach you how to breathe.” Marsala points to Tina’s diaphragm. “From here,” she says, “not from your chest. Now. Would you like your son to leave the area before we discuss your sex life?”
Tina glances sheepishly in my direction. Unlike all my friends’ parents, my parents’ sex life was still terrific. The bedroom was probably the one place where they still communicated and communicated well. I know this because my father has always insisted on giving me unsolicited booty call reports. “Well, I’m still liking that stuff a coupla times a week. And I usually get it, too. And half the time, it’s your mama’s idea!” Many were the nights when, home for the holidays, I would come home from a night of carousing to spy their bathroom light aglow as I drove into the carport, a sure sign since my youth not to come a knockin’.
I wave goodbye to Tina in haste, tripping over the fat yellow cat as I make my way awkwardly down the sundeck stairs.
* * *
With a new lease on life, we return to the Gulf Coast from this hallowed place where happy, skinny people in hemp wear and Birkenstocks spoke of spontaneous healings and miraculous conversions.
Two mornings later, Garrett and Sis watch frozen from the kitchen window as I direct an old pickup loaded with shiny appliances down the driveway and out onto Blue Cove Road. Jewel Ann Crenshaw, now eighty-five and looking every minute of it, studies me from across the road with two other blue-haired biddies, waving cheerily, their faces a trio of question marks. I wave good-naturedly and go back inside, barely catching the word “California” in a disparaging tone from their vicinity.
I recall a story I’d heard on the radio about an old dying man whose son comes home with a miracle cure he’d completely fabricated. But because of his faith in the boy, the old man actually got better and lived well for ten more years. Little did we know one of the biggest challenges lying in wait would be something as basic as sustenance, and where the devil to find it.
* * *
Tina and I peer skeptically through a dingy window on the backside of Fairlane Plaza, a near-deserted shopping center in Mobile long past its prime. Healthy Way Foods, one of the only natural foods stores in a sixty-mile radius, hunkers down between Oasis Bible Book Store and an abandoned establishment quietly heralding Adult Videos across a blacked-out door. We brace ourselves for the worst and step inside.
Tina follows me down a row of sad-looking bulk items: dried lima beans, a paltry mound of wheat flour, a few sad grains of brown rice. As I pull a package of mystery noodle from the shelf and blow off a cloud of dust, Tina wrinkles her nose.
A wormy manager changes a fluorescent bulb from a wobbly stepladder at the end of the row.
“Excuse me,” I say, “do you have any quinoa?”
“Quin-what?”
“Quin-oa. It’s a grain.”
“Not that I know of,” he says, uninterested.
Tina looks at me and shrugs. “Let’s just go.”
“You’re not sure,” I say, spellbound by the dense dusting manager who’s already forgotten us.
The manager mumbles over his shoulder. “You can look around. Some of this stuff has been here for years.”
“Well, that much is clear,” I snort.
Tina tugs on my shirt sleeve. “It’s okay, Bo Skeet, let’s go.”
I watch the manager for a moment longer, dusting his little cans in a miasma of ignorance.
Tina motions once more for me to come along, but something deep inside me breaks. I feel like I can scrape all the indifference in the world off this pinhead with my fingernails. Tina looks worried.
“Let’s try this again, shall we? Hello. Phillip Stalworth.” I say my name like it’s a hallowed celebrity handle, holding out my hand for him to reach down and shake, which he finally does. “What’s your name?”
“Glen,” he says, like he’s not quite sure.
“You know, Glen, there’s not a lot here for a health food store. I mean, where’s the seaweed, huh?” I ask, hauling something off the shelf I’m not certain how to pronounce. “I mean, sure, here’s some out-of-date kombu,” I say, tossing the package back on the shelf, “but where’s the nori? That’s standard for any macrobiotic diet.”
Making my way back to the manager, who has made no move to continue his bulb-changing, I come in for the close. “Now. We’re not gonna be your run-of-the-mill customers who come in once a month for a jug of vitamins and a carton of soy milk,” I say, looking over at Tina, who has planted herself invisibly next to a rusty display rack of lo-fat carrot chips. “We’re gonna be in here on a daily basis, understand?” I say with a nod to Tina before looking back to the manager. “We’re gonna be needing everything, okay? We will be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars, okay?”
The manager finally offers up a firm “Okay.”
“So,” I say, crossing my arms across my chest, “how long you think it’ll take you to get some of that seaweed in here?”
* * *
My family gathers around the rambling cherrywood table in the anodyne dining room, a place still reserved solely for birthdays and Christian holidays. The most Tina and I have gotten from my father on the TV front is for him to agree to turn off the set at mealtimes. The table is laden with an impressive array of fresh grains and vegetables, the colorful spread bathed in the glow of nontoxic dinner candles. Garrett and Sis look on impatiently as I enter with another dish. Wiping my hands on my apron, I skirt past their backsides and take a seat next to Tina, who grins at me in approval. Sis crosses her arms across her chest as Tina passes a bowl to a suspicious Garrett.
“I still don’t know why we have to eat seaweed,” Sis says.
“Does smell kinda like cat pee,” Garrett says, sampling a taste with his fingers. “But it’s really not so bad.”
Tina takes a whiff of the sea veggie. “I told you all if you wanted to go by Kentucky Fried, then—”
“So the seaweed thing is just what?” Sis says.
“It’s supposed to be full of nutrients and vitamins,” Tina says.
“Well,” Sis grins, “so is field dirt but you won’t see me making cornbread out of it.”
Sis tries to get a fellow rise out of Garrett, but he’s already on his second helping of dulse. Sis raises a finger. “And another question—”
I drop the dish I’m currently passing with a thud. “For God’s sake, you don’t have to eat the seaweed!” I say, my voice getting too high for comfort. “Just—God. You know, I’m not your little brother anymore. That was a long time ago and now I’m just—”
“Calm down,” Sis says, like I’m the one who started it.
Tina grabs my hand and bows her head. “Oh, God,” I begin like there’s a gun to my head. I remember to loosen my shoulders and breathe. “We thank you for this well-balanced meal, for the farmers who grew it, for the distributors who brought it to the table, and most importantly, for our teachers—Justin and Marsala Rosen, at the Village in Townsend, Tennessee—for bringing this wonderful lifestyle into our midst. Amen.”
Sis leans in my direction and whispers. “And you will always be my little brother. Pass the seaweed, please, Garrett.”