Eat, Pray, Love

the tourists, a brassy older broad from Australia, was loudly asking if Wayan could please
help cure her “godawful constipation.” I was thinking, Sing it a little louder, honey, and we can
all dance to it...
“I will come back tomorrow,” I promised Wayan, “and I’ll order the multivitamin lunch spe-
cial again.”
“Your knee is better now,” Wayan said. “Quickly better. No infection anymore.”
She wiped the last of the green herbal goo off my leg, then sort of jiggled my kneecap
around a bit, feeling for something. Then she felt the other knee, closing her eyes. She
opened her eyes, grinned and said, “I can tell by your knees that you don’t have much sex
lately.”
I said, “Why? Because they’re so close together?”
She laughed. “No—it’s the cartilage. Very dry. Hormones from sex lubricate the joints.
How long since sex for you?”
“About a year and a half.”
“You need a good man. I will find one for you. I will pray at the temple for a good man for
you, because now you are my sister. Also, if you come back tomorrow, I will clean your kid-
neys for you.”
“A good man and clean kidneys, too? That sounds like a great deal.”
“I never tell anybody these things before about my divorce,” she told me. “But my life is
heavy, too much sad, too much hard. I don’t understand why life is so hard.”
Then I did a strange thing. I took both the healer’s hands in mine and I said with the most
powerful conviction, “The hardest part of your life is behind you now, Wayan.”
I left the shop, then, trembling unaccountably, all jammed up with some potent intuition or
impulse that I could not yet identify or release.
Eat, Pray, Love