Buddha Baby (17 page)

Early in her seventh-grade year, Lindsey had noticed that Ms. Abilene wore a jade ring. The fact that Ms. Abilene favored the gemstone of Lindsey's people was very distressing. Ms. Abilene also liked to wear embroidered kung fu slippers with her stirrup pants, and instead of Sanka, she sipped oolong tea from a cup with longevity symbols.

One afternoon Ms. Abilene stopped to ask Lindsey if she liked her jade ring and slippers. Lindsey didn't say anything, but just shrugged. When she failed to respond favorably to her teacher's choice of body adornments, Ms. Abilene shot her a cold look and Lindsey knew she just made an enemy for life. She watched as Ms. Abilene walked to her desk and unlocked a drawer. The woman calmly scribbled a few words on an index card, then promptly locked it away.

Ms. Abilene's right-side drawer was the safekeeping place for an enamel box decorated with cherry pies and innocuous red letters in Betty Crocker-style writing that spelled recipes. The old-fashioned script suggested the box contained down-home, step-by-step directions for baking only the most dee-licious TexMex comfort foods. But Lindsey and the other kids suspected otherwise.

Sure enough, it was Ms. Abilene's treasure box of smack-talk.

Every time she moved more than five feet from her desk, Ms. Abilene always made a spectacle of locking the drawer that contained the enamel box. Naturally, childlike curiosity being what it was, it was only a matter of time before the kids' devious little minds started to plan the drawer's unhinging. The moment finally came one afternoon after Ms. Abilene left the classroom to take a phone call (no doubt to confirm a tryst with the part-time basketball coach for banana daquiris at happy hour).

Nelson Fong picked the lock. In seconds he had the enamel box out in the open and they all gathered around the desk to watch him lift the lid as if it was the Ark of the Covenant. Just like a regular recipe box, the tin was filled with index cards. But instead of ingredients, these cards recorded the kinds of things any grown person should've known better than to commit to writing. For instance, under "miscellany" they discovered that their third-grade teacher, Sister Ada, had not actually retired and gone back to Ireland, but instead had been a compulsive eater of laundry detergent and inadvertently poisoned herself with a midnight snack of Calgon and a Downy chaser. In her spidery handwriting, Ms. Abilene had written that Sister Ada "was no angel." This opinion was followed by a detailed transcript of how she and the nun had had a quarrel in the teachers' lounge regarding a bottle of Bushmills stashed in the hollow underside of the fiberglass Christmas nativity manger.

The recipe box revealed other school trivia as well. By perusing the cards, the kids also learned that Mother Frances had a pacemaker, and Mr. Prospect, the eighth-grade science teacher, had asked Ms. Abilene out for Harvey Wallbangers.

When they flipped through the alphabetized section, things got really juicy. On the top of each line was a child's name and a list of qualities that had nothing to do with academics. Each of the students took turns looking up his or her name and discovered Ms. Abilene's secret thoughts about them.

One kid's card read, "Stringy hair. Cliquish and degradingly flirtatious re: boys."

Another's read, "Just plain stupid. Unteachable with annoying Hispanic accent."

Before they all scrambled back to their seats, Lindsey shuffled through the cards until she found her name. At first she noticed just a big, blank space and she breathed a sigh of relief. But then, as she lifted the card completely out of the box she spotted three little words along the bottom line: "Arrogant Little Twit."

Lindsey looked around at the faces of her classmates, who all snuck peeks at their cards. The group sat and felt the collective heaviness of their crumbled little hearts. Allowing themselves to be stricken for just one moment, they quickly reminded themselves that they were no longer babies. They were seventh graders.

Cue the music. It was time for Ms. Abilene to die.

They had posted a lookout at the classroom door, and after a few minutes, he whispered, "Here she comes!" They all slid back into their places as the doorknob turned and their teacher, clad in fake Halston, entered the room. She strode directly over to her desk, turned her key in the drawer, and made sure her recipe box was safely inside. The kids had replaced it exactly as it had been. Silently they glanced at one another and quietly schemed how they might exact their retribution.

The following day was the kickoff for many strange classroom happenings. All chalk was suddenly "misplaced." Textbooks disappeared and whole lesson plans needed to be reworked because the teacher handbooks were all of a sudden missing random pages. The manual pencil sharpener was booby-trapped and broke apart, raining dusty shavings down onto Ms. Abilene's Easy Spirit pumps. On Wednesday, Terence the turtle was set free, and on Thursday Ms. Abilene's favorite African violet plant, with the dainty blossoms of which she was so proud, mysteriously shriveled to paper wisps, poisoned it seemed, by an overdose of strawberry Yogloo.

On Friday the most horrifying thing of all happened. Dur-ing recess someone snuck back into the classroom and took a shit on the floor behind Ms. Abilene's desk. Its brownish mass could best be described as fetidly defiant.

Ms. Abilene forced them all to kneel on the linoleum floor with their hands on their heads until the defecator revealed himself. (Face it. It had to have been a guy.) As they kneeled in silence, Ms. Abilene paced the aisles like a death-row prison guard and swatted thighs with a yardstick anytime anyone sat back on their heels or tried to lower their akimbo elbows. They stayed that way for one hour and twenty-two minutes.

Ms. Abilene tapped her cloven hoof on the floor and threatened, "We have all day. Even after school." The minutes ticked by. Lindsey's kneecaps ached, but it was worth it to see Ms. Abilene so pissed. Her eyes sweeping from kid to kid, Ms. Abilene resembled a komodo dragon slithering through the aisles in search of her prey.

Finally, an arm was raised. Muscle-free like an uncooked strip of bacon, it quavered in the air and immediately grabbed the attention of the entire room. The arm belonged to Nelson Fong. With abject fear, he opened his mouth and managed to let out a peep of a noise. Then he cleared his throat and said, "I did it."

Ms. Abilene hadn't given anyone permission to move, but all the kids—all except Nelson—dropped their arms and began to straighten their legs. When the bell rang, all the kids ran out of the room, leaving the two adversaries alone—one kneeling with his grimy hands clasped over his head in contrition, and the other in strappy seventies heels, rubbing her chin as if unable to decide which excruciating punishment in her extensive repertoire she might exact on the fellow. Lindsey turned back for one last look, and stretched across Ms. Abilene's beige-glossed mouth was a vengeful smile, the grimace of a Southern, trailer-raised she-devil who knew whuppings more exotic than the likes anyone had ever seen west of the Rio Grande.

Even now, so many years later, Lindsey didn't like to think of whatever must have happened to poor Nelson Fong that afternoon. All she knew was that the following Monday the shit was gone, and the following year they all advanced to eighth grade, minus one Chinese boy.

Still meticulously detailing the preserved reptile, Lindsey wondered if Ms. Abilene still kept a tidy box of trash talk in her desk. She was suddenly desperate to know. Hmm… it occurred to her that she did have in her current possession a giant steel ring full of the school's master keys. Reaching into her pocket, she grasped the jangled mass of metal.

It was the eighth key that tripped the lock on the desk. With an easy click, she had the drawer open. A few Erasermate pens, rubber stamps, thumbtacks, a confiscated beeper, two broken staplers, and… well, now. There it was. A box. Not the same box, but a blue, cloisonne one with pink peonies. She quickly stopped and listened for footsteps. Hearing none, she made a mental note that the door was securely locked. Convinced that she was safe, she opened the box.

She didn't recognize the names of Ms. Abilene's current students, but the same wispy writing detailed their offenses. She read a few:

Anna: Gaining weight. Will be fat by eighth grade. Taylor: Spoiled brat, but cute father. Kristen: Eats boogers. Needs Ritalin.

Lindsey felt triumphant in her devious discovery, but then a mild worry struck her. "What am I doing?" she asked herself. Realizing she had better get out of there, she crammed the index cards back inside the box. Having trouble shutting the lid, she rearranged a few cards and saw one with an asterisk and a notation:

See Permanent Record, Basement Room 6.

Aha!

So, the Permanent Record was a real, physical thing. Maybe it was a massive, corroded filing cabinet locked away in a top-secret chamber. Naturally, she would have to investigate, and there was no time like the present. Who knew what she might find in the dank depths of the St. Maude's basement? She gave the alligator a final spritz, left the seventh-grade homeroom, and flew down the stairs.

"Leaving for the day?" asked Mrs. Grupico. She was wearing one of her typical outfits, red polyester pants and a black blouse with huge white polka dots. With her bloated neck, she looked like a gigantic chicken with a thyroid problem.

"Yes. See you tomorrow," Lindsey replied, retrieving her things from the cloakroom. She waited until Mrs. Grupico left, then pocketed a flashlight from the utility closet.

Instead of heading out the front door, she detoured across a short hallway to a narrow staircase where she'd seen many a nun appear and disappear. As she descended the dark stairwell she began to detect a mildew smell, the same odor that permeated the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. But this was no amusement park. This was her old grammar school, and she was headed into unchartered territory equipped only with a pink sweater, a flashlight powered by the weakest of batteries, and lip gloss. She was determined to find the Permanent Record, but what would happen if she was discovered? If any emergency arose, she would have to think fast. If worse came to worst, the only weapon she had against certain doom was… charm.

She tiptoed down the snaking stairwell. Her path was illuminated only by her dim flashlight and the small, stained glass windows that shone amber and ruby light on each landing, every fourteen steps or so. At long last she came to a hallway that was so quiet it seemed a vacuum for all sound, including her own breathing.

She clutched the keys so tightly that her fingers began to cramp. As noiselessly as she could, she tried a few keys in the brass lock of a heavy wooden door with iron fittings. None of the regular Schlage or Medeco keys worked, so she inserted one of the spooky old skeleton keys at the end of the ring. It fit perfectly.

Opening the door a crack, she reached one skinny arm into the black space and felt around the ice cold wall for the light switch. She found a thin chain. She pulled it.

A high
lightbulb plinked
on and illuminated the room. Broken church pews. Stands for sheet music. An old upright piano. She didn't see any file cabinets, so she turned to leave. Just as she was about to turn off the light, she noticed some dusty picture frames stacked against the wall in the far corner. Stuffing the keys into her coat pocket, she walked across the room for a closer look. Kneeling down, she dusted off a pane of glass with the palm of her hand.

She secretly hoped she might find some old class photos of her and Dustin, but what she discovered was far more intriguing. Along the bottom of the photo was a caption, "St. Maude's Rescue Mission, 1907." Lindsey saw three withered nuns standing behind about twenty girls. Twenty
Chinese
girls.

Flipping through the other frames, she discovered similar posed photos, except with different girls and different years up through the 1940s. The girls' ages ranged from about four to fifteen, and in that particular Chinese way, no one was smiling.

Lindsey had read about rescue missions for Chinese girls. In the late 1800s, women like Donaldina Cameron had helped girls escape poverty and prostitution. Some girls were given away by their own families, or kidnapped from China and sent to San Francisco on boats. Others had been promised prosperous lives only to be sold on arrival as slaves. Lindsey didn't know that St. Maude's had been a place of refuge. Who were all these Chinese girls anyway, and what had happened to them?

She sat on the floor cross-legged and took a moment to study the photos. In 1908, the girls had short pageboys or hair pulled back in buns with a few Chinese hair ornaments like satin headbands. In 1918, the girls wore matching white smocks and plain skirts. A 1934 photo showed bland facial expressions and one girl with finger curls. The nuns all looked the same from year to year, wearing nurselike uniforms and black veils covering their hair. Except for crucifixes around their necks, they resembled the fuddy-duddy matrons who worked at See's Candies.

Lindsey scooted across the cold floor to a different row of frames. "Oh, here are the twenties," she thought to herself. She flipped through, looking to see if any of the girls had Josephine Baker hairdos. She scanned 1924 and then moved on to 1925, and then 1926.

The photos transported her to a different time, same place. In some pictures she recognized the stained-glass window of St. George slaying the dragon from the landing on the northeast stairwell. She looked at the next frame, and as she scanned the faces of the 1928 girls, a creepy, twilight-zone chill slowly traveled from the top of her head down to the small of her back like an invisible finger tracing the curve of her spine.

Her eyes fell upon one girl's face in particular. Time slowed down for a moment as she studied the girl in the third row, second from the left. Her eyes were transfixed by the image. It was a girl who looked not just a little, but exactly, uncannily, precisely, unmistakably like Lindsey.

She knew her own face. She knew that rabbit-in-the-headlights expression she sometimes got when she was tired. The girl in the photo had wide-set eyes and particularly sparse eyebrows, just like Lindsey's—well, exactly like Lindsey's—each morning before she gave them the MAC eyeliner treatment.