Read Online Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much by Carol Lea Benjamin - Free Book Online

medium length, thick, lush fur, the splash of white at her front like a bib of pearls. Her feet were white, too, as if she had delicately dipped them in gesso. Her tail was tossed majestically over her back, the white tip resting lightly on her flank. A symbol of good health in the breed’s native country, she radiated her own vigor. She stood above me, her head cocked to the side, her brow wrinkled, her intelligent brown eyes alive with light I loved heron sight
    I looked at Dashiell. He had fallen hard and fast for the Akita , too. His eyes were absent of all intelligence. He had moved, lock, stock, and rawhide, into pheromone city.
    As if on a signal from each other, the dogs turned, taking the stairs at a speed I couldn’t even aspire to, and disappeared. I climbed to the fifth floor at my usual pitiful, human pace. Because Lisa never took the elevator.
    “She’s called Ch’an ,” Avi said. At the sound of her name, the Akita turned and looked at him. She was large for a bitch, probably about eighty-five pounds. “Outside,” he said, waving his arm toward the windows, “they call her Charlie. But of course Lisa did not name her Charlie Chan.”
    “You mean she gave a Japanese dog a Chinese name?” Ch’an , I had read recently, was the Chinese term for Zen, or meditation.
    Avi’s eyebrows went up. “You’ve been studying. You are so like Lisa.”
    “It’s just that I’m walking in her shoes, trying to understand her life so that I might, one day, understand her death.” Avi winced. “I love the t’ai chi, Avi , but I don’t know much more about Lisa now than I did the day I met you, certainly nothing that would explain in the slightest what happened.”
    “In China ,” he said, “if one wants to study t’ai chi, seriously study it, the way Lisa did, it is necessary to be accepted by a master. You cannot go to a school, pay your money, and be taught t’ai chi, the way you can here. Every family guards its secrets,” he said. “They will not teach just anyone.”
    “I—“
    He raised his hand to stop me. Both dogs, thinking his gesture was meant for them, lay down.
    “In China ,” he said, “tradition dictates that the student follow the teacher, and that is how he learns. Here we place great emphasis on education. It is different. But even the way we teach here, giving our students helpful images and patiently correcting postures, we still count the time of study in decades instead of years. Even that may be optimistic. So we try to find peace and beauty along the way. Now, about Lisa”—he pointed to the black shoes, their toes touching the wall—“a few days, Rachel, would be on the optimistic side in this study, too, wouldn’t it?
    “Twenty years or forty years, there isn’t enough time in the world to know someone after they are gone. It’s just not possible to get a true portrait of a human being from the detritus of his or her life and the opinions of others.
    “Zen teaches you who you are, Rachel. Once you know that, you will know everything you need to know.”
    Then why, I wondered , had Alan Watts said, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth”? Or was that my grandmother Sonya, the night her false teeth fell into the split pea soup?
    “And t’ai chi—” I interrupted him.
    “ Yeah , yeah , Zen in motion .”
    So what else could I do? I took off the pink high-tops, put on Lisa’s t’ai chi shoes, and silently, standing behind my mentor, I practiced the form. Afterward Avi asked me to do a silent round, and this time, instead of working with me, he watched.
    Something was different. Perhaps the study now had foiled a link with the past, with the t’ai chi I had studied so long ago and thought I had forgotten. Or perhaps concentrating on what I was doing rather than on watching Avi was what made the difference. Now when I placed my foot in an empty step, it felt as flat as a sheet of paper. I felt at ease, my body remembering everything,