Stealing Buddha's Dinner (9 page)

My heart ached when Jennifer's parents finished the rest of their basement and created a new room and next-door bathroom just for her. “Too bad,” she said, “you'll always have to share a room with Anh.”

The bedroom had fawn-colored carpeting and pink floral wallpaper, a white dresser with brass pulls. A new desk, too, with drawers for paper and pencils and markers. Jennifer even had her own matching bookcase. There were pictures and photographs in her room, Precious Moments figurines, Bible study notebooks. Everything gleamed, right down to the glass eyes on her stuffed animals, and Jennifer had dominion over it all. “Be careful,” she said when I looked at her books. On a sheet of poster board she had stenciled flowers and curlicues, making a sign for her door: THE JENNIFER ZONE.

I was glad when she and her family flew off to Florida for a Disney World vacation. I had endured her gloating for weeks: the prospect of Epcot; how their hotel had two different swimming pools. While they were away, carpenters were finishing work on their screened-in back porch. The house was unlocked in the afternoons, and on the day before the Vander Wals' return, Anh and I broke in.

I don't remember how the idea formed, or who suggested it, but it was instant agreement and action. We didn't know what we were after. But we knew where we were headed, down the basement steps to the Jennifer Zone. As we moved in swift silence, I felt a heady, dizzying rush, the thrill of the trespass.

In Jennifer's room my sister opened the dresser drawers and balled up the clothes. She opened the closet and pushed every dress off its hanger. I went to Jennifer's desk and crumpled papers in my fist, then gently put them back. I threw her markers into the trash. Anh found a canister of baby powder and sprinkled it all over the room, dusting Jennifer's clothes and shoes, pulling back the bedcovers to get at the pillows and sheets. When she handed me the can I doused the desk drawers, the toy animals and dolls on the bed. We seemed to work in tandem, our focus methodical—there was so much, I realized, we could do.

At last Anh hissed that we should get out of there. We crept up the stairway and into the kitchen. Instead of hurrying out, I went toward the living room. Anh grabbed my shirt and shook her head—the workers were on the back porch, too close. But I had only one more thing to accomplish: I lifted the lid of the ceramic blue cookie jar. As I pulled out two cookies one of the workers said, “Did you hear something?” Anh and I flew out of the house and I put a cookie in my mouth. It was thick and heavy, Toll House chocolate chip.

The next night we got into the oversized T-shirts we used as pajamas and went to bed early. All day we had traded furtive glances, and I felt closer to her than I had in a long time. Together we had delivered payback for the funny looks, the polite no-thank-yous that signified,
You're different. You're strange.
You
people.
We had shown the Vander Wals they couldn't mess with us.

At the same time, though, the rush of satisfaction was edged with guilt. I did not hate Jennifer, who was my summer friend. But I hated, more and more, how I felt around her: how I dreamed of Shake 'n Bake; how she shook her head at the chilled lychees that Noi brought out to us on the hottest afternoons.

Rosa walked into the room, and the stony look on her face said it all.

“Well,” she said. “The cat's out of the bag.”

She made us go over to Jennifer's that night, in our T-shirts and flip-flops, and mumble apologies. We stood in the living room, our faces cast down, and in spite of the humiliation I couldn't help thinking how funny it was to be here at last, in the grown-ups' room, where company sat. It was the first time my parents had been in the house. The Vander Wals sat on the plaid sofa with round tufted pillows, and Linda prodded Jennifer to say in a princess voice, “I accept your apology.”

As we shuffled back home, the dew slicking our ankles, Rosa told Anh and me that we could have gone to jail. My father said nothing. We were scared he was going to take out his belt and spank us something serious, but he didn't. Perhaps he felt bad for us; perhaps he understood what we had done better than we did.

Within a week Jennifer and I were back to normal, meaning we both needed each other and resented each other, bound as we were by proximity and age. But for the first couple of days I stayed inside, afraid to face her. Jennifer had looked indignant the night of the apology, but there was something more: pity. I saw then that she had always pitied me and my unsaved soul.

In my grandmother's room I gazed up at the Buddha sitting on a high shelf. On a table below him lay arrangements of peaches, plums, and bananas; black-and-white photographs of my grandfather who died in 1956 and my uncle who died in the war; two urns filled with ashes. It calmed me to be in this room, to sit on the carpet and watch Noi light her favorite incense.

I went into the garage to dig out my bicycle and ride around the block a few times by myself. The garage was stifling and dim, and smelled of motor oil and dust. Here were broken mattresses, a pile of bricks and siding, rakes with missing tines. Sometimes, after drinking too much, my father would tell the story of how we had arrived here with five dollars. By
here
he meant America. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1975. A world of cold and snow and people leaning down, saying,
What? What did you say?

My apology to Jennifer had been for her room. No one had noticed the missing cookies, and my sister and I had said nothing. As I pedaled toward Sienna Street I cherished that secret. I knew the cookies would stay with me forever, echoing with each successive one I might eat and learn to make, each chocolate chip a reminder of the toll, the price of admission into a long-desired house. How I wanted such entrance through cookies, through candy and cake, popsicles, ice cream, endless kinds of dinner. I wanted all of it, and hated to be hungry.

THIRD GRADE AT KEN-O-SHA ELEMENTARY WAS LED BY
Mrs. Andersen, an imperious woman who wore plaid skirts held tight with giant safety pins. She had a habit of twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger while she stood at the chalkboard. In Mrs. Andersen's classroom, good grades and behavior manifested themselves in star stickers—consolation green for effort, gold for highest achievement—accumulating on a large board that loomed over us all. One glance and you could see who was behind and who was striding ahead. The percentage grades on homework assignments translated easily, but Mrs. Andersen had total control of the good behavior stars; in her cryptic system, one day you might get a gold and the next, demoted to silver.

In pursuit of gold stars I became an insufferably good student, with perfect Palmer cursive and one hundred percents in every subject. I had something to prove—to myself, to Mrs. Andersen, to everyone in the class.

At home, when my parents exhibited some of the typical immigrant strictness about grades, Crissy and Anh, as the older siblings, bore much of the burden. I saw my father glowering at their report cards, holding them like garbage scraps as he asked, “Why aren't these better?” If Anh got an A-minus on an assignment he would say “Where's the A?” Good grades weren't praised; they were expected. While I was spurred to distinguish myself from my sisters, mostly I was just a natural-born nerd. (However, I couldn't fulfill Rosa's great wish for me: to become a classical violinist like the graceful Asian prodigies she saw on TV.)

The trick I had learned was that the quieter I was, and the better I was in school, the more the teacher would let me alone. I might have aimed for middle-of-the-road, the blend-in average student. But my need for approval in the classroom overrode everything else. The good students had privileges, after all: they could escape notice; they could even do independent study at the back of the room or out in the hallway. Being good meant freedom from watchfulness.

The worst thing was being called on or in any way standing out more than I already did in a class that was, except for me, one other Vietnamese immigrant, and one black student, dough-white. If, in the dreaded reading circle, I was told to read out loud, Mrs. Andersen would interrupt me, snapping, “You're reading too fast!” “Speak up! Louder!”

Privately I admired the rebellious kids, like Robbie Wilson, who always wore an old jean jacket, even in the winter, and would come to school looking bleary-eyed and pinched, like an adult with a hangover. Robbie and his ilk talked back at teachers, got sent to the principal's office, and were even spanked with the principal's infamous red paddle. These kids refused to settle down or do what they were told. They possessed what seemed to me marvelous nerve and self-knowledge, allowing them to question everything. During PE, when the gym teacher led us in aerobics to a song called “Go You Chicken Fat, Go!” they sang, “Go you chicken shit, go!”

On our first foray in school my sister and I had encountered kids who laughed and pointed at us, pressing back the edges of their eyes with their palms while they chanted, “Ching-chong, ching chong!” At first I didn't understand what those noises meant. Ching-chong? For
me
? I saw how the other kids, the different, black-haired ones, stared at the ground or ran away. “Chop suey!” white kids would yell. “Hi-
ya
!” I was afraid to ask my parents what “chop suey” was; they had yelled at me when I had asked what “bitch” meant. So it wasn't until a few years later, when I saw a can of La Choy at Meijer Thrifty Acres, that I understood, and wondered at being called a mix of noodles and vegetables.

At home, on warm days after rain when toadstools bloomed in our yard, my grandmother went to dig them up. When the kids in the neighborhood saw this they screwed up their faces. “Are you gonna eat them for supper?” they called out, laughing, their Kool-Aid mouths wide. My sister dealt with the matter by telling them that they'd get a knuckle sandwich if they didn't shut up—and made good on it. I did not have Anh's fierceness and glow; I became self-conscious to the point of being, at times, unable to speak. Words like
stranger
and
funny-looking
ran loose in my mind.

At Ken-O-Sha, whatever academic success I had was completely eroded at lunchtime. Here, a student was measured by the contents of her lunch bag, which displayed status, class, and parental love. I didn't tell anyone that I packed my own lunch, but the girls in my grade figured it out. “My mom
loves
to pack my lunch,” said Sara Jonkman, whose hard blue eyes emitted a vicious spark.

The anxiety of what to pack weighed on me every school week. The key was to have at least one shining element: a plain sandwich and baggie of potato chips could be made tolerable with the right dessert snack. If the planets and grocery sales aligned in my favor, I might even have a Hostess Cupcake. All morning I would look forward to peeling away the flat layer of deep chocolate frosting decorated with one lovely white squiggle. This I set aside while I ate the cake, licking out the cream filling, sighing over the richness, the darkness of the crumbs. Then at last I could focus on the frosting, taking small bites around the white squiggle, which must always be saved as long as possible. I imagined careful bakers hovering over each cupcake, forming the curlicue design with unerring precision. Beneath the status of Hostess Cupcakes were Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Devil Squares, Zingers, and Little Debbie Fudge Brownies. The lower tier, just above generic cookies, included the cloying Oatmeal Creme Pies, SnoBalls, Star Crunches, and Twinkies.

Not long after third grade started I ditched my banged-up Scooby-Doo lunch box, which smelled faintly of deli meat no matter how much I washed it, for the brown paper bags that everyone else was using. Luckily they were inexpensive, so my stepmother didn't object to buying them. The bags provided little protection for my sandwiches, which always got smushed before lunch hour. Rosa bought whatever white bread was cheapest— sadly, never the Wonder Bread my friends ate, which I was certain had a fluffier, more luxurious bite—and peanut butter and jelly, olive loaf, or thin packets of pastrami and corned beef made by a company called Buddig. The name drove me crazy, the way it sounded like a stuffed-up nose, and I wanted to rewrite every package to make it Budding.

Whenever Rosa got sick of buying lunch items she signed me and my sisters up for the school lunch. She was always angling to get them for free, but our family fell just above the qualifying level. This relieved me to no end; everyone knew about the kids who got free lunches because their names were on a separate checklist.

Each month a new lunch menu was posted on a bulletin board outside the gym-cafeteria. Reading it over and over, to the point of memorization, became one of my pastimes.

Their words sent me dreaming; every day seemed a promise. Most provocative were listings that mentioned choice, the word itself conjuring possibility: “choice of hamburger or cheeseburger”; “choice of whole milk or chocolate milk.” In reality, hot lunch meant soggy cheese sandwiches encased in steamed-up plastic pouches; perforated boxes of greasy, chewy fried chicken; elastic potatoes; canned fruit in heavy syrup. Still, I imagined potatoes churned into clouds and slicked with gravy, served alongside the mysterious but elegant-sounding Salisbury steak.

I knew better than to admit this fascination to anyone. School lunch was unanimously described as gross, for one thing, save for the passable rectangles of cheese pizza that sometimes appeared; any cold lunch was preferable to the degradation of styrofoam meal trays bearing fish sticks and baked beans. The implicit judgment was that if you had to get lunch from the cafeteria, then your mom obviously didn't care enough.