Enticement

after a painting by Ginger SlonakerIt is dusk in the field: uncanny, those calls,the way that voices carry just before the air goes dark....

—Eleanor Wilner, "Transaction in a Field That's Overgrown"

I

In our yoga class, Alexis starts us off by "doing three Oms together." We could listen to Alexis all day—a voice that carries the same delicious crackle as her name, a sound like biting into a ripe pear; that voice coaxes us to do things with our bodies we would never consider on our own. "Breathe in for Om," she says, and we do, our bellies, our chests expanding, then we wait a half-beat for Alexis's voice to set the pitch—sometimes a deep "ah," sometimes higher, but never what you think of as that rounded "oh" of Om, never the intonation of bearded male yogis in a sonorous chant. No, this seems more an energetic sigh, or a heraldic call, the hymn of women (we're all women here), and when we all follow with our own voices to join with Alexis, it's impossible to know where our own voices end and a compatriot's begins.

We enter each other this way: our voices expand into a collective oscillation, electric (as if we enact the homonym for Om: "ohm," a unit of electricity, the nanosecond required to create a current of energy). Our small, charged Om keeps expanding—each voice spurring the others—and our throats vibrate, our vocal cords grow supple and lithe. We feel—immediately and inexplicably—filled with the voices of every woman in the room (I don't mean this as metaphor; it's a physical thing, as if the throat has become nothing but a conduit). Eventually, it all closes down in the hum of "Om," and we're quiet, in a silence that throbs.

My friends Hannah and Sarah, when they were about nine and five-years-old, used to do a perfect imitation of Om, either sitting in my meditation room, or in the back seat of my car on long road trips with their father. Their small hands bent into perfect mudras, thumb and forefinger connected and upright on their knees. They would shut their eyes, their lashes long against their cheeks, and intone "Ommmmm," their necks swooping forward and elongating like cows in a pasture, confusing, perhaps, "moo" and "Om." Or maybe they had it right all along, maybe "moo" and "Om" are more than the palindrome they seem at first glance, those bovines in continuous intonation of what the yoga poster in the studio says is "the sound of everlasting awareness, the ultimate reality, the merging of past, present, and future."

The children, surely, were making fun of me (they couldn't help but crack grins as they mouthed their Oms, their eyebrows raised, their cheeks quivering with pent-up giggles), but they still looked beautiful doing it. I watched them from the front seat, my gaze falling on Hannah first, who sat with remarkably good posture. Her face lost, for a moment, the shy wariness that always marked it and kept me just a body's length away. I shifted my gaze to Sarah, saw her peek at her older sister and then she looked right at me, her face alight with goofiness, always the child ready to be hugged, without enticement.

II

In a painting by Ginger Slonaker, a large woman fills the foreground; she sits breathing children in and out. Seated, with a pear in hand, her body looks pear-shaped as well: full at the hips, yellow, ripe. She is the only ripe one in this field: a ghost of a girl hovers at her left knee, and a little bit in the distance, drawn by her gaze, or perhaps by the smell of that pear, two girls approach; they are holding hands but also holding back; still, they find themselves drawn along in the ripples of this undulant landscape, a field brisk with greens, reds, ultramarines. The woman has her head twisted to the side so that we see only her stern profile, her long nose, her...