Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling. Pamela Browning

and my sisters here when we visited as children. I guess I came by my liking for Kosher food naturally, since my mother was Jewish.”

      He welcomed the chance to know more about Karma’s personal life; he couldn’t imagine what could produce a woman like this.

      “With a surname like O’Connor, your father was Irish, right?”

      “Mmm-hmm. He and my mother married in college. Both families predicted the marriage’s immediate failure, but my parents had four daughters, including me, and lived happily for years. Until my mother took up cake decorating, that is, and they split up. She changed her name to Saguaro, like the cactus, and moved to Arizona.”

      “They divorced because she became a cake decorator?”

      “Kind of.” Karma seemed reluctant to elaborate.

      “I’ve heard of many reasons to divorce, but that one takes the cake.” He grinned at her, pleased with his play on words.

      The corners of her mouth twitched as if she were suppressing a smile. “Dad didn’t approve of Mom’s new occupation. You see, she worked for a bakery that specialized in cakes that look like body parts.” She looked embarrassed and seemed as if she expected him to be shocked, but he was still operating in the dark.

      “You don’t mean—”

      “I do mean,” she said. “The body parts weren’t arms and legs, if you get my drift.”

      He did. He tried to picture in his mind a cake that looked like a pair of breasts or—well! He cleared his throat.

      “So, uh, what does your father do?” he asked, sensing that they had reached a conversational cul-de-sac.

      “My father found a new life after Mom left. He works on a cruise ship, plying wealthy widows with booze and blarney while pretending to enjoy teaching them the tango.”

      Slade chuckled. “We should all be so lucky.”

      Their food arrived, and they dug in. Once the corned beef sandwich had taken the edge off his hunger—and it was a delicious sandwich—Slade managed with some difficulty to overcome his aversion to the subject of his chakra.

      “Suppose you tell me more about my second chakra. Like, where it is, for example.”

      “Your second chakra is located in your abdomen.”

      “Why would it have problems?”

      Karma inhaled a deep breath, and looking as if she doubted the wisdom of explaining, she plunged ahead anyway. “Well, you know how these days we store information on disks—with computers, I mean? I told you that chakra means ‘disk.’ So it stores information, too. If a chakra is blocked, it needs reprogramming.”

      “Reprogramming,” he repeated, thinking that this was worse than he thought.

      “The issues of the second chakra are change, movement, pleasure, emotion. If the chakra is blocked, it can be difficult to form attachments, difficult to experience the right emotion. I can match you up with the perfect person,” she said, “and if you can’t change, or get no pleasure out of the relationship, or can’t emote—”

      “Emote?” Slade said, wary about this new direction she was taking. All he wanted was a wife. He didn’t expect to have to change, and he wasn’t sure where movement fit into this whole thing, and he wanted to feel pleasure, but wouldn’t that come naturally when he found the right person?

      “You want to run that by me again?” he said.

      “Emotion is a building block,” Karma explained before she took the last bite of her sandwich.

      “I see,” he said, turning this over in his mind.

      “Are you sure you don’t want one of these tomatoes?” Karma said, shoving the dish across the table at him.

      “No, thanks. And just between you and me, I think this whole chakra stuff is a bunch of nonsense.”

      Karma stopped conveying a tomato from the dish to her plate and let it drop with a weary thump back into its dish. “Great,” she said. “Fine. See if I try to help you any more.”

      “You’re supposed to find me a wife,” he said, losing patience.

      Karma started to slide out of the booth. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you understand that this is what our conversation is all about? Don’t you think the fact that you haven’t managed to turn up a likely candidate so far might have something to do with some kind of—of mind block?”

      “I don’t see the connection,” Slade said honestly and a little desperately as he slapped a large bill on the table and followed Karma as she charged out of the restaurant.

      “You wouldn’t, since your chakra has for all intents and purposes shut down,” Karma said. Her long legs ate up the sidewalk as she barged her way through bunches of blondes and a gaggle of tourists all gawking and talking excitedly.

      Slade caught up with her. “You told me that I’m supposed to express emotion. Wouldn’t you say I’m expressing emotion by telling you how I feel about all this chakra-babble?”

      She slanted a look toward him. “What do you think emotion is?” she shot back.

      He had to think about this for a moment, but the answer seemed clear enough. “Well, I’d say that emotions are instinctual reactions,” he said.

      She seemed taken aback, surprised at his response. “Okay. At least you know one when you see one,” she conceded. “That’s a start. To take it a bit further, our feelings are our unconscious reaction to situations or events. We organize our feelings through emotion. We can choose the way we react to emotions, but the feelings themselves are quite separate.”

      Karma had slowed her pace was now walking almost sedately at his side.

      “My emotional response to all this is that you and me should go in one of these bars and discuss this over a drink or two.” Karma looked at him with rank skepticism. “So I can learn more about this,” he amended.

      Ahead of them, a group of people spilled out onto the sidewalk from a neon-lit doorway. “How about here?” he said.

      He thought he might be becoming more sensitive to others’ emotions when he recognized a whole raft of them flitting across Karma’s mobile features. Confusion, distrust, sheer terror—not to mention a brief blip of yearning over-laid with what he thought might be desire. But desire for what? For a beer? For his company? For more, even, than that?

      “We can stop for a drink,” she said. “I don’t want to be out late, that’s all.”

      He took her elbow, and she tensed as if she might shake his hand loose although she did not. They made their way into the club, where hot salsa music accompanied scantily clad bodies gyrating on a minuscule dance floor. Karma slid into a booth, and he slid in beside her.

      “How do you know so much about all this chakra stuff, anyway?” he asked her after they’d ordered drinks.

      She smiled at the waiter as he slid her glass of white wine toward her. “I guess you could say I was born into the territory. My parents met on a commune in the late sixties. My sisters and I were raised on soybeans, sprouts, tofu and a lot of other things that you’ve probably never heard of. Chakras, yoga, the freedom to be you and me, and so on. Commune life ended when we all had to go to school and they moved us to Connecticut where my father got a job in an aircraft factory.”

      “That sounds normal enough,” he allowed.

      “Oh, but there’s more. Life in suburbia was modified by my parents’ history. Jewish woman married to an Irish Catholic and spending their marriage’s first years grubbing around in an organic garden equals not just your ordinary family.”

      “Are your sisters like you? Do they have unusual names like yours?”

      “My oldest