Stealing Buddha's Dinner (16 page)

Those hazy, early eighties summers on Florence Street meld together in patches of shade and the sound of the ice cream man pushing through the neighborhood. It seemed like no parents were ever around. They simply let us kids loose as soon as we woke up and didn't see us until evening when we swept into the house, dusty and sweaty from a day of games. While Jennifer Vander Wal and I devised elaborate, exclusive clubs, Crissy and her friends rode their ten-speeds and played Capture the Black Flag.

One of Crissy's favorite things to do was explore the tangle of backyards and fences that made up the center of our neighborhood block of houses. Once, she allowed Anh and me to tag along while she and her friends trampled through people's gardens. We went right into their toolsheds if the doors were open. One shed, belonging to a neighbor no one knew, was locked and windowless, and Crissy said it might be haunted. Either that or the man kept dead bodies in there. We crept past it and circled the guy's house, always following Crissy.

At last, when she grew weary and hungry enough, she led us to someone's overgrown garden where rhubarb grew thickly among weeds. Crissy snapped some up and carried them back to our cement front stoop, where she pulled from her pocket a plastic bag of sugar. She licked a stalk of rhubarb to make it sticky, plunged it into the bag of sugar, and took a big bite. She passed the sugar and rhubarb around to Keri, Lisa, and finally Anh and me. By the time I got the bag it was damp with spittle; grains of sugar stuck to my hands. Up close, I saw that the stalk might have been celery, the green eclipsed by a scarlet hue that stained its way upward. In my experience, red things tasted good—red cherry Luden's cough drops, red Life Savers, red strawberries, but this rhubarb didn't look so promising. Still I ground it into the sugar and took a bite, startled when a bitter, sour taste filled my mouth. The sugar became grit between my teeth; the rhubarb broke into strands, refusing to dissolve. I stopped chewing, afraid Crissy would catch my reaction. But it was too late—she rolled her eyes. If the rhubarb was an admission test, I was failing it.

Then she jumped up and said, “Come on, guys, I wanna show you something,” and led the way inside to the kitchen. I followed, too, gathering with the others at the counter, where Crissy set out a loaf of white bread and a jar of honey. She said, “Watch this.” She closed her fist around a slice of bread, crushing it, collapsing its shape back into dough. Dimpled with her fingerprints, the bread looked like a ball of clay. She put it on a plate and doused it with streams of honey. “This is sooo good,” she promised us. She stuck her fingers right into the ball of bread, honey and all, and sank her teeth into it.

Anh, Keri, and Lisa all molded their own bread balls and ate them with honey, while the slice that Crissy had given me remained in my hands. There was something repulsive, something gruesome, about breaking down the bread. I wanted it to stay firm and spongy, a pallet for cheese and meat, jelly and peanut butter. I couldn't bear the thought of destroying its shape. Crissy took in my frozen stance with another eye-roll. “You're such a wimp,” she sighed.

Usually whatever she liked, the rest of us siblings liked. Canned mushrooms eaten straight from the can. Condensed cream of mushroom soup heated up with half the amount of water, to intensify the saltiness. Scrambled eggs with peas, eaten on a warmed-up tortilla. Avocados sliced and sprinkled with salt. French toast. Cheesecake. Anything with tomatoes. The only desserts Rosa made: warm chocolate pudding and flan, the thin caramel liquid spooned over the slippery custard. I was used to following Crissy's orders on what to eat, wear, watch on TV, or listen to. I believed in her knowledge of the world, but could not bring myself to eat what she offered that day.

It's such a small thing—a stalk of rhubarb, a ball of bread and honey. Yet it's stark in my mind as a moment of withholding. A moment of dissent, marking myself as the one who would not go along, into the club of girlhood.

During the summer that Rosa finished her master's degree in education at Grand Valley State, she sometimes took Anh, Crissy, and me along with her to campus. I must have been seven years old at the time. We would pull out of the driveway early in the morning, while Noi and Vinh stood at the living room window, waving good-bye. Vinh would be crying his eyes out, his red mouth wobbly with screams. The half-hour car trip to Allendale seemed endless, but Rosa talked up the greatness of college, where she said we would all go someday. The idea thrilled and intimidated us: a time when we would be pretty much grown-up, on our own. Walking across Grand Valley's campus filled me with awe—I, too, wanted to be one of the students striding past with such purpose, such determination in the gait.

On our first visit Rosa took us along paths that crisscrossed toward classroom buildings. All of the buildings looked like banks and insurance agencies. The prettiest spot on campus was a stone bridge over a narrow creek, lined with willow trees and plants I couldn't name. On each side of the bridge the banks of the creek sloped sharply. Rosa told us a story of a woman in a wheelchair who had pushed herself down the embankment to try to kill herself. I shivered at the conjured image—the back of a woman's head, her body bounding out of the careening chair and tumbling down the hill. But the woman had survived. What happened to her? I asked. Nobody knew.

Rosa did not want us wandering around campus while she was in class, and gave us strict instructions to stay inside the Student Union. She handed us each a couple of dollars to spend in the university bookstore and warned us not to leave the building. When Rosa went off to her classes, Crissy, Anh, and I went to the bookstore right away. I felt rich with my two dollars, and thought of all the candy I could buy. Four different kinds, I decided, at forty cents each, with a little left over to save. But once I saw that the bookstore had all kinds of notebooks, pads of paper, and pens, I reallotted the sum. After careful consideration I selected a blue-covered notepad, a red pen, and M&M's, for each individual piece could make the whole sack seem to last longer.

The Union had a large lounging area, with clusters of sofas and chairs for students to congregate, and here Crissy, Anh, and I waited. We pulled out our paper-bag lunches and nibbled away at our olive loaf sandwiches and almost-Oreo cookies. We played hangman and tic-tac-toe with my new pen and pad of paper. Anh broke into the Handi-Snacks Cheez 'N Crackers she had bought, which came with a flat red stick to spread the orange gooey cheese. She gave me half a cracker in exchange for a small palmful of M&M's.

Soon Crissy grew bored and wandered back to the bookstore. We followed her, of course, and there she made the discovery:
Playboy
magazine. The three of us huddled together to see gigantic breasts lunging toward us. Then Crissy picked up a copy of
Playgirl,
and gave me my first glimpse of a naked man. I remember the men in the photos as deeply unattractive. Some had grizzly beards, others looked slouched and round, with altogether too much body hair. One man sat with his legs splayed out, pulling on his penis, which he had somehow knotted into itself. Another wore a green football jersey and white athletic socks and nothing else. I remember thinking the whole arrangement looked uncomfortable. Feet covered, crotch laid bare. Then Crissy slid the magazine under her shirt. “You there,” a voice called—the store clerk. Crissy dropped the
Playgirl
back into her hands, casually, without fear.

At home, we would have gotten in trouble just for saying the words “naked man.” The images (naughty, we knew; bad, we knew) became a shared secret, a ripple of conspired rebellion, and I only wished that Crissy had been able to steal the magazine so the three of us could giggle together all over again. But when I mentioned this to her she just snorted at me. Whatever moment I had shared with my sisters in that bookstore had vanished.

I think it was that fall when Crissy's father reappeared. He had been a mystery, a white man whom Rosa had dated just long enough to get pregnant and earn the contempt of her family. This man's name, like my own mother's name, was never spoken. They were silent shames, aberrations that threatened to disrupt our household. Crissy hadn't seen him since she was almost too young to remember, and now he was going to take her to meet his parents in Mount Pleasant. She had never met them, or her half-sister. She had, it seemed, a whole other family out there. I wondered how the visit had been arranged: a hushed-up phone call; Rosa and my father concluding that they could not, after all, keep Crissy from knowing her real father. But they said nothing about it. The knowledge of this white man coming to sweep Crissy away simply absorbed into our minds as if through telepathy. So we waited, and swept and vacuumed, polishing the glass-topped table in the living room. We put on our favorite dresses and jumpers and patted down Vinh's little-boy hair with water. As we prepared, I pretended it was my and Anh's mother who was coming for a visit. It was she who was sending our household into a flurry of dusting and tidying. It was for her that I would choose my purple-striped dress and wait primly in the living room.

I imagined a huge, glamorous life for Crissy's father based on the facts of his whiteness and that he lived near the big city of Detroit. I imagined him dancing her away like Daddy Warbucks with Little Orphan Annie. Waiting for his arrival, I watched Crissy brush her hair extra hard. She parted it in the middle and clipped back both sides with matching barrettes. I was conscious of wanting to make a good impression, too, for Crissy's sake and for our own. I wanted to show her father that we were a good family.

When he arrived he made the living room small with his tallness, with his brown suit and striped tie. He was balding, and his ashen face had an expression I knew from my books to be a grimace. He stood near the entryway, clearly anxious not to linger. He had no interest in paying attention to Anh or me or anyone in our house. Our fresh dresses were an embarrassment of effort. Too soon, he and Crissy were gliding away in a dark sedan I couldn't identify from the living room window. All that weekend I summoned up images from the
Annie
movie. I thought of pillars, marble floors, glossy tap-dancing shoes. I had never been to Mount Pleasant, Michigan, but who wouldn't want to live there, on a mountain of pleasantness?

It was only an overnight visit, but a part of me felt afraid that we would not see Crissy again. Wouldn't I, if presented with the option, choose Daddy Warbucks's mansion over Florence Street? But Crissy returned as scheduled on Sunday afternoon, dropped off by her father in front of our house. She looked tired and listless and she volunteered little information. Anh and I pestered her with questions. What were her grandparents like? Old. What was their house like? Nice. What was her half-sister's name? Danielle. What was she like? Nice but kinda hyper. What did they have for dinner? Here Crissy perked up a little as she described green peppers stuffed with ground beef and tomatoes. Was it delicious? I asked. She said it was. It certainly sounded fancy to me—maybe one of the fanciest dishes I had ever heard of. A vegetable doubling as a receptacle, a shell—food within food. I pictured a green pepper arranged in the middle of a floral-edged plate, the ball of ground beef tucked inside and drizzled with tomato sauce. I pictured an old white woman in a flowered housedress, mounding the raw meat with her pink, wrinkled hands. Crissy explained how her grandmother placed the peppers in a large, shallow baking pan; while they baked she set the table with a tablecloth, and place mats, and a full set of utensils at every place. I felt I knew exactly what those stuffed peppers tasted like, though I had never heard of such a thing until that moment. They were access to a new concept of how real people lived.

While I was dreaming of stuffed peppers, Anh wanted to know what Crissy's father thought of us. Crissy shrugged, indicating,
Nothing.
But then she laughed to herself. “Oh,” she said, pointing at me. “He said you were homely.”

I didn't know what the word meant, exactly, but I felt it lodging into the center of my chest. Crissy's laugh, the derision in her voice, made plain the meaning. When I looked it up later in the dictionary at the school library, angry tears sprang to my eyes. Why did I care what this white man thought of me? And more importantly, why did I have to be homely? I had failed to present a pretty household, and that failure was my own face. Innate, unchangeable. I
was
homely. A sad, spectacled spectacle, a sorry excuse for a stepsister. For years that word stayed with me, keeping me in my place when I ached to join the club of girlhood. I struggled to accept it. I had not, after all, typical princess goals of being the fairest of them all. I had never been good with putting makeup on dolls. I had never thought of myself as even passably good-looking. I was not in denial about my ugly, thick glasses and helmeted hair. My goal had always been to be the smartest, and I knew that smart and pretty didn't go together. Anh and Crissy, on the other hand,
were
pretty, and in that common bond grew an entire adolescence. They weren't just in the club; they were the club. They could do each other's hair for hours on end. They both seemed to know exactly which top matched with which skirt, how to apply eyeliner, how to paint nails, and, as they grew older, how to dress as near to Madonna's style as possible. If I attempted to braid my hair like theirs or tried a new combination of T-shirt and pants they would laugh in my face and literally shut me out, closing the bathroom door with a bang.

Fast-forward two years to 1984 and Crissy's fourteenth summer. She had a crush on Jeff Timmer, who lived just up Sycamore Street and was a junior in high school. She and Lisa (Keri and her family had moved out of state) spent all day walking past his house, hoping he would emerge so they could watch him mow the lawn.

Back at home, two boys started hanging out in our front yard, waiting for Crissy. Bobby, a comedian, was chubby and wore glasses, while Kenny looked and carried himself like Matt Dillon in
The Outsiders.
They both adored Crissy and she got a kick out of making fun of them. One time she accidentally ran over Bobby's glasses with his own bicycle. He didn't seem to mind. He cradled the broken frame in his hands, squinting his way back home. I liked Bobby and Kenny because they were nice to Anh and Vinh and me. They often accompanied us the mile and a half to Gas City to buy candy. Once in a great while, if I had enough funds, I would splurge on an ice cream sandwich pulled from the frosty freezer case. Crissy would nudge Bobby and Kenny to buy her Gobstoppers and Skittles. She had a ruthless attitude toward money and had no compunction about taking any that she found. By found I mean stole. She regularly sneaked money from Rosa's purse. And she knew all of my hiding spots: my coat pockets; an envelope shoved between my sheet and mattress; the hollowed-out space on the underside of the white unicorn statuette I kept on the dresser. I sometimes threw a fit when I discovered a stash of money missing, but mostly I just accepted my fate: powerless. Even my parents didn't seem too concerned whenever I tattled. “Stop doing that,” was all they said to her.