Stealing Buddha's Dinner (10 page)

No one cared more than Holly Jansen's mom.

In the middle of the school year Holly started bringing her lunch in a tomato-red Tupperware container. It might have been totally not cool except for the fact that beautiful Melinda Smith, who ruled our class with her electric-blue eyes and spun-gold hair, finer than anyone else's in the entire school, also started bringing her lunch in a Tupperware container. These items, I learned, were not only expensive but rare. One had to know someone to get them. One had to be invited to purchase them.

I watched as Holly unlatched the Tupperware and drew from it her first course: a sandwich wrapped like a gift in wax paper. Holly's sandwiches were never limp or squashed, battered by books in a schoolbag. They were fresh and white, cut into matching rectangles. Slices of bologna did not hang carelessly over the bread; smudges of peanut butter and jelly did not mar the crust. After Holly ate her sandwich, mindful that crumbs did not fall on her clothes, she pulled out her second course, the one that always got to me: SpaghettiOs or Campbell's chicken noodle soup kept hot in a thermos, or a square of Jeno's pizza sliced into bite-sized pieces. The rest—Hi-C juice box, chocolate chip cookies—hardly mattered in comparison to the SpaghettiOs drowning in orange sauce, or the pizza that became, in Holly's hands, refined.

Such poise came to her as naturally as her powder-blue eyes and hair curled just so at her shoulders. Her wardrobe of monogrammed sweaters and lace-trimmed socks seemed to arrive straight from Rogers Department Store's back-to-school billboards. All the Hostess cupcakes in Grand Rapids couldn't measure up to what Holly had. I pictured a spacious kitchen, sunlit and Clorox clean, Mrs. Jansen standing at the counter tucking each lunch component into the Tupperware. Some days, she would slip a little note between the cookies and thermos.
Hope you're having a great day! Love, Mom.

Holly and I had become friendly because we had the best cursive in the class and were thus allowed to study quietly in the hallway while the other kids practiced their handwriting. From there we started playing together at recess and sitting together at lunch. One day she broke off a corner of her mother's banana bread and presented it to me. The taste filled my mouth with a nutty, sweet spice I wanted to capture again and again. I would never have dared to ask for more, but as our friendship increased so did her sharing: a sliver of pizza, a morsel of blueberry muffin, half a chocolate chip cookie.

At Halloween, Holly could be counted on to have a good costume: she'd be a cat with painted-on whiskers, wearing a store-bought costume that came with a headband of cat ears and a fuzzy tail. Or she'd be a princess with a tall cone-shaped hat that spilled a length of tulle around her hair. I had conflicted feelings about Halloween. The joy of free candy was mitigated by my homemade, pieced-together costumes; there was no pleasure in disguise when it only made people ask, “What are you supposed to be?” My parents thought spending money on costumes was ridiculous, so we would dress up as hobos or punk rockers. Once, Rosa borrowed someone's mortarboard and gown and sent me off trick-or-treating as a graduate. I would console myself by organizing my piles of candy and ranking them according to desirability (dead last were Necco wafers and the nameless peanut butter candies that came wrapped in orange or black paper).

Holly thought it wild that my siblings and I were allowed to trick-or-treat by ourselves after dark. She went with her parents around dusk, carrying a bag shaped like a jack-o'-lantern. I didn't tell her that we carried pillowcases shucked from our beds. Holly existed on a different plane; I believed if I offended her sensibilities, she might recoil from me in disgust. I don't know if she knew how fascinated I was by her impeccable manners— she never spilled, never stumbled, never crumpled paper napkins into balls. At age eight she seemed to me a practically full-grown person, completely sure of herself, confident of each bite she took, each step she made in the world.

Two years later Holly would fulfill a homework assignment— “Report on a Natural Phenomenon”—by describing how her mother made banana bread: how she stirred the ingredients together; how she bent to put the loaf pan in the oven. Holly watched the bread rise and grow brown and delicious-smelling. But the bread, it turned out, came from a Jiffy mix. Her blueberry muffins, too. When I heard that, I entreated my stepmother to buy me some Jiffy mix—it was about forty cents a box—swearing that I could follow the directions. Tired and annoyed, she gave in. Those Jiffy muffins, studded with artificial blueberries, baked up golden and petite, just like the pictures on the box. Laying the muffin tin on the stovetop, I marveled at their exactness and felt relief, a little mean gladness that I was finally able to have what Holly had every day. But the muffins didn't taste the same as her mother's. They were ordinary, far from a phenomenon. They were missing the element no one in my family could supply.

One night, years later when I was in college, I drove to Chelsea, Michigan, to see the home of the Jiffy Corporation. The giant Jiffy grain hotel faced me from the middle of Main Street. It towered, monstrous, creamy white, surrounded by a wisp of chain-link fence. As I crossed an empty lot toward it the word “Jiffy,” bright blue and serifed with its trademark quotation marks, expanded. I remembered so clearly the taste of those blueberry muffins, of Mrs. Jansen's banana bread, and I stopped walking. I didn't know where I was going. I imagined the grain hotel filled with muffin mix, all those dried blueberries stifled in flour and sugar. The town was quiet and small, hushed but for the hum of electricity and this building, its sustaining presence. Something about the moment filled me with fear—as if the grain hotel would fall down, smother and erase me.

In the gold-star race I was neck and neck with Holly and Melanie, a towheaded girl with heavy bangs and endearingly large feet. My behavior stars weren't as great as theirs, but my homework stars shined just as bright. Toward the middle of third grade Mrs. Andersen introduced a stuffed lion to the reward system: each week the best student, the one with the most gold stars, would earn the privilege of having the lion sit on her desk. How I craved that stuffed lion! He was tawny and plump, with a mane like a sunflower wreath. But week after week the lion went to Holly's desk or Melanie's desk.

Meanwhile, the class spelling bee came, and it threw me into conflict: on the one hand I hated everyone watching me; on the other hand I wanted to be the best. And I loved spelling. It came easily to me, part of my obsessive need to know the right words for things. When I won the spelling bee I accepted the prizes—a scalloped-edged certificate and a Mr. Goodbar—with a relief and pride that transcended my usual reticence. That afternoon as I started toward home I remembered that I'd forgotten my rain boots in my locker. I doubled back to school and overheard Mrs. Andersen in the classroom talking to another teacher. “Can you believe it?” she was saying. “A foreigner winning our spelling bee!”

I waited for the stuffed lion the rest of that year, but he never did perch at the edge of my desk. In June, on the last day of school, Mrs. Andersen gave the lion to Holly to keep forever.

The next year, when Vinh started kindergarten, Anh was in fifth grade and I in fourth. We walked him to school each morning and took turns taking him back home at lunchtime. I liked the in-charge feeling of being an older sister, and during our walks I made him listen to a long story I made up as I went along, each installment ending with “to be continued.” The story started with a boy and meandered through forests, meadows, and castles— there were wicked enemies and wise animals, kindnesses and violence, triumphs and tests, royal banquets with heaps of food. Vinh endured this patiently, remembering characters I'd abandoned, at times pointing out a storyline I'd already used. He was a happy, thoughtful five-year-old, generous with his time and toys. If he had a candy bar he would split it with me right down the middle. I often envied his birth and automatic U.S. citizenship (he could run for president someday, Rosa pointed out), which seemed to confer upon him an ease of mind, or so I imagined. But mostly I felt protective, for he was regarded as a gift by everyone in the family. The youngest one. The only son. The only child of my father and Rosa.

While none of my siblings seemed to feel the intense shyness that wore me out daily, Vinh at least also lacked the toughness that Anh and Crissy had. They had fierceness, the kind that didn't need to find expression in good behavior and careful cursive; if we played Office with them they would always be the bosses. And Vinh was a little boy, exempt from the anxieties of wanting to look pretty, something else my sisters had already conquered. Taking on the role of older sister allowed me some release from myself, allowed me to throw off the mantle of classroom self-consciousness and not mind so much, because Vinh didn't, the thick, chunky-framed glasses I was cursed to wear.

Traipsing home in the winter, my brother and I pretended to be explorers. We took shortcuts through the block to see if we could walk on backyards of iced-over snow or if our weight would send us crashing through to the ground. As soon as we got home we yanked our moon boots off inside out and left them in a damp pile. We never washed our hands or bothered with napkins. We raced each other to the kitchen counter for bowls of shrimp-flavored
mi
soup, sliced steaks seared with onion and garlic, and french fries that soaked up the juices from the meat. Noi would keep frying the potatoes as we ate, sliding them onto our plates. All the while, an extra serving sat at the dining table for the spirits of our ancestors. Their food was always cold by the time Noi ate it for her own lunch. She would wrap the potatoes in lettuce and dip them in vinegar. Afterward, she whittled us apple wedges or cut a cantaloupe into bite-sized pieces.
Ngon quá!
Vinh and I exclaimed, our voices tilting up on the second-syllable accent.
So delicious!
We were safe for a while, cocooned in Noi's kitchen, and at such times I never missed my friends in the cafeteria.

Before heading back to school I followed Noi back to her bedroom, where she would watch her afternoon lineup of
Days of Our Lives
and
Another World
on the television Chu Cuong had given her. I loved the calmness that radiated from Buddha, positioned on his high shelf, while the oranges clustered below him grew ripe with waiting. Noi settled on her bed with her knitting bag and Vinh gathered his books for the afternoon. I always wanted to stay with them, skip out on the rest of school, admire the tenderness of Bo and Hope and drowse in the warmth from the radiator. But I never did. Mindful of gold stars and how they stretched across the classroom, I hurried back to Ken-O-Sha, taking the shortcut so as not to be late.

I WAS NINE WHEN I LEARNED HOW TO USE A KNIFE.
Everything my grandmother cooked or fed us came in bite-size pieces, whether in a bowl of fruit or a plate of stir-fry, so there was never any need to know how to cut a T-bone steak. But I pretended to know American meat as well as anybody: prime rib, pork chops, meat loaf. If the girls at recess talked about these things that they had eaten the night before I would simply chime in, “Me, too.”

By the beginning of fourth grade Holly Jansen and I had become BFF, best friends forever, and she made it official by inviting me for a sleepover. I never would have invited her to my house. I didn't have my own room, for one thing. And I was afraid, both of how my family would act around Holly and how she would react to being around them. I could imagine her startled glance at Buddha and the altar for the ancestors. I had already seen Jennifer Vander Wal shrink away from it. If Holly came over, she would have to eat my grandmother's strange food for dinner; she would have to deal with everyone talking over the TV and the barking dog. I knew such things didn't happen in other households. Almost none of the kids I knew, in all of my school years in Grand Rapids, had any cats or dogs. It was some kind of Dutch obsession with cleanliness, Rosa said, some hatred of things other than human.

On the day of the sleepover I rode the bus home with Holly. She lived in a subdivision called Princeton Estates, which was about the fanciest name I'd ever heard. Her house rose up two stories, with tan vinyl siding and a prominent two-stall garage in front. Inside was as pristine as the Vander Wals' house and smelled the same—faint reminders of clean laundry, Lysol, and early morning baking. It was apparent that the real mothers in Grand Rapids knew exactly how to run a house, how it should look and smell. They were in on some code that my stepmother had been left out of. Their rooms possessed remarkable calm, as if no one had ever raised a voice there. Arguments didn't happen; chaos never ensued. The house was free of all bacteria, dirt, and excess noise. I felt that I could lie down and sleep comfortably, forever, on the creamy carpet that blanketed the second floor. The look-but -don't-touch living room had fresh vacuum marks on the same pale carpet, and a grandfather clock ticked in one corner. The sofas were plaid, to match the drapes, and bore pillows that Holly's mother had cross-stitched.

On the outside Holly and I were polar opposites: she was tall, blond, and kempt; I was short, black-haired, with clothes that knew no iron. In some ways my friendship with Holly was another version of the one I had with Jennifer Vander Wal, but instead of resentful envy I mostly felt admiration. Holly and I were drawn to each other not just by proximity but by our shared desire to be orderly and perfect. To me Holly had already achieved this through her inherent being, but maybe she didn't believe it. We both worked so hard to be good. Teachers often let us study in the hallway by ourselves—advanced reading or independent math, they called it. But once in the hallway Holly and I played word games and devised an elaborate
Wheel of Fortune
board. We were also the only ones in our class whose parents voted Democrat. The following year, in the weeks leading up to the 1984 presidential election, the other kids would stand together in the courtyard at recess and chant, “Reagan! Reagan!” In response Holly and I alone would feebly call out, “Mondale, Mondale!”