Buddha Baby (6 page)

All these pseudo-Asian books and trinkets flew out of the store at an alarming rate. Lindsey could just imagine a Hoarder Lady telling her husband, "Honey, ancient Chinese geo-mancers say it's bad luck unless I buy all new furniture." To them, the translation of
feng shui
was "the more you buy, the more you save your soul."

Never mind what Buddha actually taught about renouncing material possessions. Who needed spirituality when one could just wear a yin-yang pendant and eat an eighteen-dollar salad grown at the Zen Center by people who may or may not have been thinking enlightening thoughts as they sprinkled charcoal-filtered water on the radicchio?

The Hoarder Lady phenomenon was even alive and well in Hollywood. Just the night before, Lindsey had been watching
Phat Cribs
on television and it had featured a top actress's "Asian Splendor Den," which was basically a hootchy-kootchy sex dungeon decorated like a Chinese restaurant but with better fabrics and crimson candles instead of fluorescent panel lights.

These women and their preferences for Asian decorations were everywhere, and in the gift shop they bought up all the bracelets made of vintage mahjong tiles faster than Lindsey could restock them. Old Asian ladies certainly weren't buying them. Any old Chinese lady worth her salt would rather be playing mahjong and winning big bucks
than paying
big bucks to wear the tiles.

Which brought Lindsey to another matter. All this experience with older, upper-crust white ladies was doing nothing to help her understand one older Chinese lady in particular, namely, Yun Yun. An old white lady was a totally different kind of person from an old Chinese lady. One asked for ice cubes in her wine while the other never wanted ice in her drink, not even in water. Chinese ladies drank only hot, boiled water. Was it a habit left over from village days when everything needed to be sterilized? Or was it just to wash down greasy food?

For white ladies, grease was a night cream for removing makeup or erasing wrinkles. For Chinese ladies, grease was a main food group. For Lindsey,
Grease
was… a great movie.

At the museum, old white ladies took lemon and sugar in their tea and asked Lindsey to call taxicabs for them. In Chinatown, old Chinese ladies drank their
tcha
plain and took the bus. And Lindsey… well, she drank nonfat, decaf chai lattes and preferred to walk.

What did it all mean? Lindsey stood and wondered all these things as she cleaned the dead flies from the store's front window display. After "freshening up" the photography section, she replenished the artist monographs and hid from a couple of Hoarder Ladies. Maybe it was Lindsey's imagination, but it seemed she was a magnet for Hoarders, both male and female. Perhaps she sported psychic signage that advertised, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Asians but Were Afraid to Ask—Free Consultation," or, "I Live a Fabulous Asian-American Life—Ask Me How!"

Hoarder Ladies in the store were always asking Lindsey questions, and not just, "Where's the powder room?" or "Do these earrings make me look jowly?" Instead, they approached Lindsey when she was rearranging the Jackson Pollock action figures or touting the age-defying effects of the museum's new
Forever in the Black
mascara, and they asked, "Could you please give me a brief summary on the last two thousand years of Chinese painting?" or "What was the purpose of the Cultural Revolution?"

As she emptied a dustpan into the trash, she kept her eye on a couple of Hoarder Ladies who were trying on the Andy Warhol limited edition wigs. She dreaded the possibility of one more person asking her about the uses of ginseng or the efficacy of acupuncture, so she positioned herself behind the jewelry cases and braced herself for the hours ahead.

Tonight she would be performing one of her most vital duties as a Gift Assistant. Prepping herself like a surgeon, she straightened her apron and slipped on the snug white gloves she was required to wear. She sanitized the glass countertop with streakless spray and wiped the area with a dust-free cloth.

It was her job to clean the fabric-covered, severed limbs of the gift shop's mannequins. The limbs may have appeared to be casually strewn throughout the store like prosthetics for sale in a doctor's office, but in reality, they had been strategically placed to optimally display high-priced necklaces, bracelets, and rings. To Lindsey's left, right, and above her head, bejeweled limbs hovered and waited to be stripped of their dust and dander. She knew the saleability of the precious jewelry depended on pristine presentation, so she had learned to groom the mannequin arms more meticulously than even her own body parts.

She got to work. Removing a chunky gold choker from a black velour bosom, she meticulously dragged a strip of

Scotch tape across the knap to eradicate any dandruff flakes or other unsightly particles. She repeated the action with a new piece of tape, symmetrically de-linting the faux decolletage until it was flawlessly devoid of specks. On her resume she had boasted about her attention to detail, but she had no idea this would be her fate. She brushed the mannequin neck with one of those sticky rollers meant for pet-hair removal, lamenting the years she spent earning her college degrees in English and French Literature.

Moving on to the wrist and finger displays, she removed a few amber rings and gave the digits the Scotch tape treatment. A few minutes later, as she buffed the fake fingernails, her ears felt prickly and she sensed that someone was looking at her.

She looked up, and from a short distance she spied a set of eyes gazing at her from behind a book of nude photographs by David Salle. A giant ass was on the cover, and her admirer's eyes peeked over the top of the binding with arched eyebrows.

She watched the man inch incrementally closer until he abruptly dropped the ass-picture that was hiding his rosacea-blotched face. He thrust out his hand as if to shake, and said, "My name is Charles. I own a gallery in Big Sur and if you're an artist, I'd love to give you the opportunity to show me your stuff." At the word "stuff," his eyes looked down and lingered at her hoo-hahs.

She politely declined his offer and continued to de-lint a velvet arm with the pet-hair roller. But he was not deterred. Instead, he tried a new approach. Picking up a tube of lipstick from the nearby
maquillage
counter, he stroked the sides like it was a Vienna sausage-sized penis, and said,

"Is this what geishas wear?"

Lindsey ignored him.

He waved a hairy, Popeye-sized arm toward her and jerked his meaty hand in the air like he was catching a buzzing fly.

"Just look at you!" he said. "You'd be a good tea girl if you wanted to be!"

Lindsey opened a bottom cabinet and hauled out a box of extra mannequin limbs from behind the counter. Like an industrious beaver, she stacked a damlike barrier of miscellaneous body parts between her and the man.

He slid a business card beneath the thicket of velvet arms.

"Call me," he said, then made a puckering noise with his livery lips.

Lindsey felt dirty. Awash with cooties, she was unable to locate any Purell at the moment, so she sprayed herself with glass cleaner and patted her clothes and apron with her white gloves. Dismantling her makeshift dam, she knelt down to stow them back into their storage compartment under the jewelry case.

She heard a slightly Southern voice float down her way.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?"

She figured it was another randy retiree. Popping up from behind the counter, she stumbled back a few steps. As her arm flew back to catch her balance, her fingers got tangled in a display of chunky gold pendants suspended from leather cords.

"Oh," she yelped, then righted herself.

It wasn't an old guy. It was a young guy. Well, at least her age.

"Hi," he said. "We know each other, right?"

Lindsey looked at the smooth-faced, young Chinese man and was taken aback by his striking, "I play lacrosse" musculature and his remarkably hairless, smug beauty. Before she could say anything, someone bumped into him from behind and he turned his back to Lindsey, allowing her the brief opportunity to check him out quickly, yet thoroughly, without him seeing. She took in his sleek, healthy hair, suntanned neck, and fit body in profile. In mere seconds she speculated that he worked out at least three times a week, had expensive tastes in clothes, and had admirable personal grooming habits. He possessed a certain John-Lone-in-
Year-of-the-Dragon
coolness, but with his suede jacket and cowboy boots he also worked a Robert-Redford-as-Jeremiah-Johnson look. She found the overall effect to be sexy as hell, and was quietly alarmed.

"Uh, no. Um, I… I don't think so," she stammered, then turned and pretended to dust the computer keyboard. She kept her back to him and waited for him to walk away.

"Yeah, I'm sure I know you," he said, leaning his elbow on the counter and giving her a slow once-over.

"Um, no," she said, still avoiding eye contact. She tried to distract him by printing up a cash-register sales tape that made a lot of clicking noise. When he seemed undeterred, she left it turned on.

"Sorry, this register is closed," she said, then shimmied out from behind the counter and sprinted off. She pretended not to hear when he called out, "Hey, is your name Lindsey?"

On the way home from the museum, Lindsey stood on the bus and still felt shaky from her little encounter. That tall Chinese guy with the Diesel jeans, immaculately polished skin, and bare ring finger was not just any handsome stranger with bleached teeth and an adorable scar on his chin. She knew exactly who he was, and wanted no part of him.

Dustin Lee. For all of sixth grade she sat in the desk directly behind his. How could she
not
recognize him? She knew the back of his head like the back of her hand.

As a twelve-year-old newcomer to St. Maude's, Dustin had been noticeably different from the other Chinese boys in the class. For one thing, he had that funny way of talking. Not a Cantonese, fresh-off -the-boat accent, but a stretched-out way of speaking, a way of taking time with his vowels and an innocent persuasiveness that charmed the teachers with its suggestion of lemonade, barbecues, and rodeos.

The beginning of that school year had come on the heels of a particularly freezing and wet summer in San Francisco. When the shivering and bored captives of St. Maude's first laid eyes on their new classmate, he was wearing a Western-style shirt with pearly snap buttons and stitched boots peeking from beneath his flared Wranglers. He didn't have his uniform for the first few days, and to Lindsey and the other kids, no one seemed more fascinating than this boy who hailed from exotic Houston.

Who knew they even
had
Chinese people in Texas? When the kids all questioned him on the playground during that first recess, Dustin insisted he wasn't Chinese at all, but a direct descendant of the great general, Robert E. Lee. No one was quite sure what to make of the slender boy in his Tony Lamas, but Lindsey took his delusional claim to be a sign that he, too, was as ambivalent and confused as she was about being Chinese. With sixth-grade dreaminess, she fantasized that they were kindred spirits, maybe even soul mates.

As the bus swayed, Lindsey recalled how Dustin quickly got himself ostracized by the entire sixth-grade class. He was freakishly obsessed with robots and the television show
Mork and Mindy
, spending recess, lunch, and after school talking like Mork or pretending he was one of the members of Kraftwerk or Devo. He was downright bizarre from the get-go, and as a newcomer who refused to conform, had set himself on a oneway trajectory to getting pummeled.

Lindsey had overlooked Dustin Lee's eccentricities, secretly hoping for a love connection. She suspected that he liked her, too. Frequent swipings of her various vanilla-scented Hello Kitty erasers were his main display of affection, and when he returned them later in the day mutilated with his teeth marks, she was fairly certain that someday they would marry. On the playground she claimed to despise him, but she harbored secret affection for his Southern drawl and silly spurs.

And today, Dustin looked much the same, except with less baby fat on his handsome face, a more self-assured demeanor, and not a single trace of his spastic freakiness of yore. She had recognized him right away, especially when she spotted that crescent-shaped scar on his chin.

It was near the end of the sixth-grade school year, after eight long months of Dustin ruining upwards of ten of Lindsey's Hello Kitty erasers and breaking her Little Twin Stars pencil sharpener. Despite her secret affection for him, several times she asked that her desk be switched away from his. But her pleas went unheeded. Sister Constance liked him smack-dab in the center of the room, where she could see him, so Lindsey's only recourse was to stare for hours directly at the back of Dustin's head and wonder what it'd be like to touch his hair.

As it was, the class of pimply-faced pubescents was fraught with enough sexual tension. But to complicate matters, Lindsey wasn't the only person in the classroom to have a crush on Dustin Lee. While Lindsey's feelings were a secret, everyone knew for months about the other person's infatuation with the preteen Texan. Being subjected to the sight of daily public displays of affection toward Dustin made all the kids despise him even more.

It was Sister Constance who was deeply in love with him. On the first day of school, she took a fancy to the lad, and although his cowboy boots showed blatant disregard for uniform rules, she allowed the infraction, she said, as a special favor to the great Lone Star State. From that day on, every morning after recess, she sought out the opportunity to lavish particular attention on the boy. The students all eventually came to expect the commotions, and sometimes even looked forward to Sister Constance's bouts of inappropriate behavior as a break from the monotony of their schoolwork.

One day Dustin turned around and said to Lindsey, "It's a well-known fact that Chinese people eat rats. Do you eat rats?"

She tossed her eraser at his face and he yelled out with surprise when it bounced off his forehead.