The Vegan

“You mind not smoking?”

It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze. I looked for a NO SMOKING sign. There was none.

She said, “It kills my eyes.”

I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.

She said, “That stuff is poison.”

Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, “They say peanuts cause cancer.”

She grinned vengefully at me and said, “Pumpkin seeds.”

I turned away.

“And these are almonds.”

I considered relighting my pipe.

“And this is cashews.”

Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at 20. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round shouldered.

“What do you study, Wendy?”

“Eastern philosophy? I’m into Zen.”

Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about the Hole, or perhaps the Whole — it still made no sense to me. She hadn’t read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did — it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world — like, that was Buddhism, too.

“Not politics,” I said. “That’s not Buddhism. It’s just crooked.”

“That’s what everyone says, but they’re wrong. I’ve been reading Marx. Marx is a kind of Buddhist.”

Was she pulling my leg? I said, “Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It’s the opposite of thought — it’s selfish, it’s narrow, it’s dishonest. It’s all half truths and short cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things, but in Burma, where…”

“Take this,” she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. “I’m a raw-food-non-dairy vegan. You’re probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong — I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!” The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. “They’re just destroying themselves and they don’t even know it. They’re smoking themselves to death! Look at the smoke in this car.”

I said, “Some of that is my smoke.”

“It kills my eyes.”

“‘Nondairy’,” I said, “that means you don’t drink milk?”

“Right.”

“What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you’ve got to have calcium.”

“I get my calcium in cashews,” she said. Was this true? “Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.”

“A box. That’s quite a lot.”

“It was the milk. It made mucus,” she said. “My nose used to run like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Is that why people’s noses run? Because of the milk?”

“Yes!” she cried.

I wondered if she had a point. Milk drinkers’ noses run. Children are milk drinkers. Therefore, children’s noses run. And children’s noses do run. But it still struck me as arguable. Everyone’s nose runs — except hers, apparently.

“Dairy products give you headaches, too.”

“You mean, they give you headaches.”

“Right. Like the other night. My sister knows I’m a vegetarian. So she gives me some eggplant parmesan. She doesn’t know I’m a nondairy raw food vegan. I looked at it. As soon as I saw it was cooked and had cheese on it, I knew that I was going to feel awful. But she spent all day making it, so what else could I do? The funny thing is that I liked the taste of it. God, was I sick afterwards! And my nose started to run.”

I told her that, in his autobiography, Mahatma Gahndi stated that eating meat made people lustful. And yet at 13, an age at which most American children were frolicking with the Little League team or concentrating on making spitballs, Gandhi had got married — and he wasn’t a vegetarian.

“But it wasn’t a real marriage,” said Wendy. “It was a kind of Hindu ceremony.”

“The betrothal took place when he was seven years old. The marriage sealed the bargain. They were both 13, and he started shagging her — though I’m not sure one should use that term for describing the Mahatma’s lovemaking.”

Wendy pondered this. I decided to try again. Had she, I asked, noticed a falling off of her sexual appetite since her conversion to raw vegetables?

“I used to get insomnia,” she began. “And sick — I mean, really sick. And I admit I lost my temper. I think meat does cause people to be hostile.”

“But what about sexual desire? Lechery, libido, cravings — I don’t know quite how to put it.”

“You mean sex? It’s not supposed to be violent. It should be gentle and beautiful. Kind of a quiet thing.”

Maybe if you’re a vegetarian, I thought. She was still droning on in her pedantic college student way.

“I understand my body better now… I’ve gotten to know my body a whole lot better… Hey, I can tell when there’s just a little difference in my blood sugar level. I can sense it going up and down, my blood sugar level, when I eat certain things.”

I asked her whether she ever got violently ill? She said absolutely not. Did she ever feel a little bit sick?

Her reply was extraordinary: “I don’t believe in germs.”

Amazing. I said, “You mean, you don’t believe that germs exist? They’re just an optical illusion under the microscope? Dust, little specks — that sort of thing?”

“I don’t think germs cause sickness. Germs are living things — small, living things that don’t do any harm.”

“Like cockroaches and fleas,” I said. “Friendly little critters, right?”

“Germs don’t make you sick,” she insisted. “Food does. If you eat bad food it weakens your organs and you get sick. It’s your organs that make you sick. Your heart. Your bowels.”

“But what makes your organs sick?”

“Bad food. It makes them weak. If you eat good food, like I do,” she said, gesturing at her pumpkin seeds, “you don’t get sick. Like I never get sick. If I get a runny nose and a sore throat, I don’t call it a cold.”

“You don’t?”

“No, it’s because  I ate something bad. So I eat something good.”

I decided to shelve my inquiry about sickness being merely a question of a runny nose, and not cancer or the bubonic plague. Let’s get down to particulars, I thought. What had she had to eat that day?

“This. Pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds. A banana. An apple. Some raisins.  A slice of wholewheat bread — toasted. If you don’t toast it you get mucus.”

“You’re sort of declaring war on gourmets, eh?”

“I know I have fairly radical views,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call them radical,” I said. “They’re smug views, self-important ones. Egocentric, you might say. The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time is that it can turn you into a fascist. My diet, my bowels, my self — it’s the way right-wing people talk. The next thing you know you’ll be raving about the purity of the race.”

“Okay,” she conceded in a somersault, “I admit some of my views are conservative. But so what?”

“Well, for one thing, apart from your bowels, there’s a big world out there. The Middle East. The Panama Canal. The Balkans. Political prisoners having their toenails pulled out in Iran. Families starving in India.”

This rant of mine had little effect, though it did get her onto the subject of families — perhaps it was my mention of starving Indians. She hated families, she said. She couldn’t help it; she just hated them.

I said, “What does a family make you think of?”

“A station wagon, a mother, a father. Four or five kids eating hamburgers. They’re really awful, and they’re everywhere — they’re all over the place, driving around.”

“So you think families are a blot on the landscape?”

She said, “Well, yes.”

She had been at this college in Ohio for three years. She had never in that time taken a literature course. Even more interesting, this was the first time in her life she had been on a train. She liked the train, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

I wondered what her ambitions were.

“I think I’d like to get involved in food. Teach people about food. What they should eat. Tell them why they get sick.” It was the voice of a commissar, and yet a moment later she said dreamily, “Sometimes I look at a piece of cheese. I know it tastes good. I know I’ll like it. But I also know that I’m going to feel awful the next day if I eat it.”

I said, “That’s what I think when I see a magnum of champagne, a rabbit pie, and a bowl of cream puffs with hot chocolate sauce.”

At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterward, when I remembered our conversation as I wrote it, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom’s love of “the faint tang of urine” in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism in the Kalahari and Gandhi’s early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalizations in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candor of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.