Buddha Baby (35 page)

Michael's marriage proposal still hanging sweedy in the air, Lindsey found she was all out of clever replies. Only one word came immediately to her mind and it rolled off her tongue and through her teeth with simplicity and mirth.

"Yes," she said.

Reaching down and gripping his collar, she pulled him close, never minding the fact that he looked dipped in dirt. She wrapped her arms around him as the rain suddenly began again, pelting them.

"Great!" he said. "Now let's get out of here!"

"Wait! Aren't we going to kiss?"

"I'll kiss you up there," he said sensibly. "Give me your hand."

Michael pulled her up and helped her steady her heel with each step on the slippery slope. They climbed slowly and deliberately until they eventually reached the top and she pulled herself up onto the other side of the safety rail. Michael hoisted himself up as well, and once they were both on solid ground, he pocketed the camera and grabbed her hand. They ran for cover into a tunnel carved out of the cliffside.

Michael held the box out to her, the velvet sullied with mud. A little out of breath, he said, "You said yes, but you haven't even seen the ring yet."

"I know I'll like it," she said, brushing wet hair from her forehead.

"I hope so." He teasingly rattled the box. Then with great fanfare, he slowly lifted the lid.

She gasped. They both stared at the bright, bejeweled thing nestled against a tiny cushion.

"You didn't have to," she said, not touching it.

"I wanted you to have exactly what you wanted," he said.

Lindsey couldn't take her eyes off the ring. It was a too-brassy-to-be-real-gold Hello Kitty head encrusted with tiny rhinestones and teensy-weensy fake-sapphire eyes.

"No, you
really
didn't have to."

Michael feigned devastation, then laughed. "Don't worry," he said. "The real one is below."

He lifted a false backing from the interior of the ring box. Plucking the prize from behind a miniscule satin pillowcase, he gently picked up her left hand. Onto her finger he slipped a gold band delicately stamped with a pattern of interlocking leaves surrounding a shockingly perfect, rose-cut ruby.

Lindsey stared in suspended amazement. Because she was Chinese and descended from a long line of jewelry-obsessed women, she instinctively recognized that the gem was something special. It was the kind of ruby one hardly saw in jewelry stores. It gleamed with richness and depth like the eye of a mythical beast, its color at once clear and flawless, but thick as blood.

"It belonged to my grandmother," Michael said. "Which? This one or the Hello Kitty ring?" He grabbed her by the waist and yanked her into his arms. He said, "Awright, Sassypants. Just kiss me."

The early summer storm had passed and the sun was shining bright on the morning of the St. Maude's reunion. Michael and Lindsey drove out to Thirty-eighth Avenue to pick up Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun, but when they arrived they faced a problem. Yun Yun had recently been having more difficulty walking and couldn't make it down the stairs.

"Just forget about me," Yun Yun said. "Leave me here. Too much trouble."

Lindsey noticed her grandmother was already dressed to go, her walker by the front door sporting extra-special, fluorescent pink tennis balls. She even had her hair done.

"We'll figure out a way," Lindsey said.

Yeh Yeh suggested tying a rope around her waist and lowering her out the window. Lindsey attempted holding Yun Yun on one side as she tried to descend the steps, but the old woman's legs simply wouldn't cooperate. Although Yun Yun explained nothing, Lindsey could see by her tentative movements that her grandmother couldn't quite feel her own feet touching the steps.

Michael said to Yun Yun, "If you wouldn't mind placing your arms around my neck, I think this might be easiest this way." Very slowly and gently, he leaned over and picked up Yun Yun as she hesitantly raised her arms.

For a split second Lindsey felt panicked, but Michael lifted Yun Yun with apparent ease. "Easy does it, here we go," he said as he maneuvered the curve of the steps. The way Michael held her it looked like she hardly weighed anything at all, as if her bones were hollow. It was strange to see anyone touching Yun Yun, let alone carrying her, let alone that person being Michael. It wasn't until he carefully set her down at the bottom landing that Lindsey could see Michael exhale with exertion. After setting Yun Yun down, he let her steady herself on his shoulder until she could feel her weight settle into her feet. Lindsey scrambled down with the walker and positioned it in front of her grandmother.

It took about ten minutes to get both Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun comfortably in the car, but Lindsey and Michael slowly and deliberately helped the old couple tuck in their legs and buckle their seat belts. Lindsey loaded the walker into the trunk, and soon they were off to St. Maude's.

Michael drove the car into the schoolyard so the old folks wouldn't have to walk far. He got out and helped them to a nearby bench while the caterers set up the tables.

Sister Constance suddenly appeared. After greeting Yun Yun she walked briskly over to Lindsey and said, "Can you drive out and pick up the
lumpia
donated by Mrs. Bantay?"

Michael sat with Yun Yun and Yeh Yeh and urged Lindsey to go ahead. "We'll be fine," he said. "Everybody else will be here soon enough, anyway," he added.

Lindsey slipped into the driver's seat, turned the car around and moved forward out of the schoolyard. Following the edge of the park, she turned onto Nineteenth Avenue, then onto the freeway toward Daly City.

Detouring through a residential neighborhood she drove past pink and green houses interspersed with
carnicerias
and
pupuserias
. A few blocks later she approached her destination, the Fil-Am Snack Shack.

Parking, she actually thought the run-down building was on fire because she saw huge clouds of smoke spewing from the roof, billowing so thick and heavy that it obscured the auto repair station next door. Opening the car door, she was immediately accosted by the intense odor of burning meat.

At the entrance, customers were crammed every which way. Waiting on the sidewalk, she noticed hundreds of wads of old, black gum that covered the cement like a hard, rubber carpeting of bubble gum paillard. Dodging past a Filipino man wearing dress slacks and a tucked-in Forty-Niner jersey with letters on the back that spelled bad boi, she finally nudged her way inside. She waited her turn near the front counter lined with cases of soy and fish sauce, boxed mango drinks, and netted bags of onions. Over the glass partition she watched men without hairnets grill hundreds of pieces of chicken and ribs.

Finally, she reached the front of the line and explained that she was there to pick up the pre-ordered
lumpia
. Two women speaking fast in Tagalog yelled back over their shoulders, and through a cloud of dark gray smoke Lindsey could see a cook smoking a cigarette over a wok filled with bubbling oil. The man used a gigantic, Flintstone-sized spoon to heap the piping-hot
lumpia
into several aluminum trays that were lined up on the scrap-covered floor. As Lindsey watched, she wished she had a cell phone to call the health department right then and there.

After several trips to and from her car, the trunk, back and front seat were loaded down with enough
lumpia
to build a small, deep-fried igloo. She drove back toward St. Maude's with the air-conditioner on because the heat from two thousand
lumpia
in the car was making her sweat.

Finally arriving back at the jubilee, she unloaded the
lumpia
at the food station, then headed across the schoolyard that had been transformed into a huge picnic area with rented tents and tables. A parquet floor had been assembled for dancing, but Lindsey couldn't take her eyes off the huge, overhead banner that read, "Welcome Back, Sheep!" Over by the hopscotch, an elderly woman from Catholic Services Abroad held up a sign that urged, PLEASE PRAY FOR A MISSIONARY POSITION.

Lindsey observed the crowd. People seemed to have naturally separated themselves into Italian, Irish, and Asian groupings. The benches on the east side of the schoolyard appeared to be a desegregated zone where a multicultural smattering of old ladies fanned themselves in the shade. Little kids in dress-up clothes lolled about, seeming not to know what to do with themselves. On the yard's west side, some thirtysomethings played basketball. Meanwhile, over by the rectory, Monsignor Rathburn glad-handed a few senior parishioners.

The whole melange of St. Maude's past and present Marauders was a little overwhelming for Lindsey, and she hadn't even spotted her family yet. Sister Constance caught her standing by the water fountain doing nothing and said, "Are you daft, lazing about here? Go assist the name-tag table."

Lindsey was glad to be assigned a specific task with which to busy herself while her mind conjured an endless number of potential disasters that might befall her. She wondered how she would respond if she saw any of the Lost Chinese Children, and she hoped Yun Yun wouldn't say anything too embarrassing. Since current students were also invited, she wondered if Mrs. Clemens would show up with Jilan, and if so, would either Yun Yun or Yeh Yeh recognize the old lady?

And lastly, if Dustin actually showed up, what would she do if and when he and Michael came face to face?

Lindsey organized the name tags in neat little rows and helped alumni and their spouses as they approached the table. Some attendees gave either their married or maiden names, which resulted in brief confusion, and as Lindsey sifted through the alphabetized labels, she couldn't help but notice the peculiar results of a few of the Chinese hyphenated names. There was Dixie Dang-Long and Fanny Fat-Chin in the first row, and farther down the line, someone named Willemina Wang-Goo and then, unbelieveably, Virginia Poon-Tang.

As she separated the labels from their backings, her friend Franklin Ng approached.

"Hey Lindsey, why are you stuck here working?" he said. "Come over to my table. I'm sitting with all our old classmates." He pointed to the near distance and everyone looked over and waved. Grabbing her by the arm, he dragged her over, assuring her that people could find their own name tags.

Stumbling toward the picnic table she saw them all. They were grown up now, and although some were fat, some were prematurely gray, and some bald, they looked staggeringly the same. But instead of blue plaid uniforms, the clothes of regular, everyday people made them look, well, like regular people.

Nelson Fong, a.k.a. "The Shitter," was a genial lad who was a computer programmer now. John Goon, a.k.a. "The Barfer," was a banker with a pretty wife. Jefferson Lee showed everyone the scar on his head from where he smacked his skull on the water fountain. Nellie had plumped up quite a bit since the second grade, and Gina Fang introduced herself as Gina Wilson now, clutching the arm of her Caucasian husband with white knuckles as if she desperately feared that one of them would at any second utter her schoolyard nickname, Vagina Fangs.

Lindsey was relieved that none of her Chinese brethren and sistren had been killed by the nuns or turned into guinea pigs after all. (Hmm… but then again, she didn't see Beethoven anywhere.) Spotting her parents a few tables away, she quickly excused herself from her former classmates and made her way toward her family.