I relaxed a little. This was something I knew how to do. I assumed the posture my father had taught me. The girls around me groaned. The girls around me sighed. The girls around me fidgeted and tittered and poked one another behind raised palms. But the three in the far corner sat as straight as Dominique, as silent as my father, their palms resting gently on their knees, their eyes on the floorboards in front of them. Even then I could tell they knew not only what they were doing, but why. Even then I could tell that they believed in all of this. For this reason, I couldn’t pry my eyes from their upright spines, their parted lips. For this reason, I knew I had come to the right place.

It was despite my mother’s protests that my father had taught me to meditate at all. I remember her standing in the doorway of his shrine room as he arranged me on the cushion, her arms crossed. I watched her, not without prejudice, but confident she wouldn’t enter unless invited. She wasn’t, she didn’t. But she didn’t leave, either. My father taught me to focus on my breath by imagining a little girl, my own age but in miniature, with silver, sparkling hair, who rode the air out of my body like it was a wild horse, her hands loose above her head, my out-breath squeezed between her thighs. I still imagine her sometimes, though meditation is harder now.

My mother rolled her eyes at this instruction. She did not approve of religion, of this kind or any other. But meditation was not religion, my father explained. “Nor is it relaxation, despite what people think,” he said. “It is preparation.” He and I sat beside each other on our cushions, the thin stick of incense turning to ash on the shrine. My mother had finally gone from the doorway. It looked smaller without her. I noticed for the first time that the clean white paint on one side was chipped, revealing a grimy taupe underneath, and I felt a small plume of anger, as if she’d broken something that was mine.

“Preparation for what?” I asked.

“For waking up to the true nature of things.”

But when I asked what the true nature of things was, he only smiled and held a finger to his lips.