Zen and the Art of Faking It

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  She said, “Sure. Just try not to hide them behind my invisible flying saucer, all right? Never know when the mothership might call me home.” It figured—-everyone’s a wiseguy. As she shuffled away humming merrily, I shook my head and resumed my sandbox inspection. But there was just no way I could get the whole ensemble hidden in there without somebody finding it. Plus there was a distinct cat-pee scent emanating from the sand this evening, and there was no way that would be healthy. As I turned to go back home in defeat, I spied a half-buried drainpipe leading from the edge of the mulch area into a flood ditch thing. I couldn’t really see into it too well, but it appeared to go in at least a few feet. As an added bonus, the opening of the pipe faced into the ditch, so no one on the playground would be able to see my stuff.

  It wasn’t great, but neither was wearing the Bozo the Ski Clown outfit to school.

  With my mission accomplished, I hurried to get back upstairs before my mother called out the National Guard. She looked relieved that I didn’t have any obvious lipstick marks or hickeys, and gave me a nice bowl of rice soup to warm me up. Of course, she didn’t know that The Laughing Archer doesn’t feel heat and cold, but the gesture was nice.

  I said good-bye to my mom while she was brushing her teeth the next morning, and shoved my sandals in a black garbage bag before I left the house. I raced across the street, got my sandals out of the bag, switched them for my sneakers by standing on one foot at a time like a flamingo, and then stuffed my coat and gloves in there. The whole bag fit into the mouth of the pipe perfectly, and I pushed it in as far as my arm could reach.

  I felt a lot lighter as I turned and headed off to school. I figured, what could possibly go wrong?

  For a couple of days, nothing went wrong at all. The hiding place worked great, and I had lunch with Woody every day. Our project was coming together really well, and we spent about ten minutes of each social studies period huddled in a corner writing up our basketball results and the story of our soup kitchen experiences. I could have sworn Woody was sitting closer to me than she really needed to, and I kept thinking about the advice I had given Justin, but then I would tell myself that ELL was out there somewhere, and that I should try to concentrate on the work. My Wednesday plan was almost ready to be unleashed. I was memorizing quotes from my Zen books every night, and I was pretty sure my helpers were lined up. So Woody and I would still have our dishwashing time together.

  Things weren’t perfect, of course. Peter occasionally bumped into me and said, “Ask her yet?” And I couldn’t do anything but look down and away. Also, every once in a while my mom would remind me that sooner or later she wanted me to talk to my dad, or that she couldn’t wait much longer to meet my “special friend.” Oh, and I was still waiting for my past to pop up and ruin my whole deluded new life.

  But hey, you can’t have everything, right?

  On Tuesday at the rock, Woody greeted me with, “Hey, San, what’s the plan for tomorrow? I’ve been working on my stepmom for days, and she’s not budging. I even went to my dad, but he said, ‘Oh, you can’t go feed the parasites anymore? Good! One day you’ll see that giving handouts never saved anybody.’ Which I think means he’s not going to be overruling the Witch anytime soon.”

  “You know, Woody, there’s this cool new trend of saying good morning before you launch into the heavy stuff. Everybody’s doing it. Maybe you could, uh, join in?”

  “San Lee, neither one of us is a big joiner, in case you hadn’t noticed. So I repeat, what’s the plan? I really don’t want to let Sister Mary Clare down. And, um, I have fun there with you.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Don’t you have fun with me?”

  “Uh, yeah, of course I do. I was just, um, thinking. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. So why don’t you share your thoughts with the class?”

  She’s so cute when she’s sarcastic. Is that weird? Whatever. I told her the plan. And when gym period rolled around, it was launch time.

  I dressed as fast as I could and waited under my netless basket in the dark corner. Woody got to me first, and then four of the guys from the basketball B team gathered around, looking nervous. It was showtime.

  “Gentlemen,” I said in my quiet-yet-firm Zen master voice, “do you all have your parents’ permission for tomorrow afternoon?”

  They nodded, except for the huge kid who’d been the rebounder at my contest with Peter. He asked, “Can you remind me what working in a soup kitchen has to do with becoming a better foul shooter?”

  I looked around at the little assemblage of second-rate jocks. They looked at me. “Karma. Now, are you in or out?”

  He clearly had no clue what I was talking about, but on the other hand, what did he have to lose? After a few seconds, he gave the tiniest little nod I’ve ever seen, but it was enough. Bison Boy was in. Woody smiled big and lined the guys up. She gave them a whole pep talk about proper form, and being the ball, and yada yada. They looked sort of doubtful—well, totally doubtful—but the Bison got set to shoot. Woody kicked his feet apart a bit, and he bent his knees. Then, just as he was about to release the ball, I shouted, three inches from his ear, “HAI!”

  He missed by a mile and a half, and turned to glare at me. But everyone else was cracking up, and the tension was broken. “Why’d you do that?” he spat at me.

  “The obstacle is the path.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like saying the path is the obstacle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know, the reverse side also has a reverse side.”

  He still looked mad, and now his brain was all jammed up too. He was suffering from a clear case of mental constipation. Woody threw him the ball. “Just shoot again, OK, Mike? Trust me. Just shoot again.”

  Mike the Moose set. I wiped the sweat from my palms while everyone was watching him. Woody kicked. Mike crouched. But just as he was about to release the ball, he flinched away from me. And missed by a mile. The rest of the team giggled, uneasily. Was this too much? Were we losing them?

  Mike said, “Why’d you ruin my shot again?”

  I said, “What do you mean? I did nothing.”

  “Yeah, but I was waiting for you to yell.”

  “What does my yelling have to do with your shooting?”

  “You distracted me by, uh, not yelling.”

  “OK,” I said. “I didn’t realize my not yelling was so loud. I won’t not yell at you this time. I promise.”

  He set. Woody kicked. His legs sprang into action. I shouted, “HAI!”

  The ball hit the rim and bounced off to the left. “Better,” I said. “Try again.”

  We went through this whole thing maybe three more times before Mike’s first shot went in. Then he missed two more before sinking three straight. Within fifteen minutes or so, Mike was shooting maybe eighty percent no matter what I did.

  Woody took the ball from him and said, “Next!”

  As some short, stubby kid stepped into place, Mike came over to me. “I don’t understand what you did, but it actually worked. How did you do that?”

  I gave him the half smile. “I did nothing.”

  “Oh, come on! I just want to understand.”

  “If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.”

  He groaned. “So you’re saying there are no answers?”

  “Mike,” I said gently, “there were no questions.”

  The short kid bent his knees. Mike jumped in his face and yelled, “HAI!”

  service for seven, and a hundred feet in the air

  You know what? Some jocks make great waiters. Mildred and Sister Mary Clare were overjoyed to have the basketball guys helping out and put them to work right away serving food in the dining hall. For weeks, everything was perfect: The team’s shooting was improving dramatically—although that would turn out to be almost a bad thing later—and they were all very happy
with Woody and me. After that first day of training, enough other members of the team got involved so that, even with the usual life stuff going on, we always managed to get five helpers to the soup kitchen. I asked Mildred one week why the hoops guys were always out front, while Woody and I were always in a back room alone, and she winked at me. “Why, Mr. Lee,” she said, “I’d think a smart boy like you might figure out that being left alone with a pretty girl week after week is its own reward. Now stop asking so many questions before I send in a couple of sweaty athletes to help out in here!”

  Now that there were so many other kids helping out, Woody’s stepmom was allowing her to continue at the soup kitchen, and was even still driving me home every week. One day in the car, Mrs. Long asked me if my mother would perhaps like to come to their house for a monthly PTA tea meeting, “If she speaks English well enough to feel comfortable.” I said that yes, my mom’s English skills were sufficiently well-developed for PTA tea purposes, but that unfortunately, she worked full-time. When Mrs. Long replied, “Yes, I’d imagine it’s terribly hard for immigrants to get ahead in this country nowadays,” I had to bite on the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. But I kept quiet, and the rides kept coming.

  School was going great, my mom was leaving me alone, I was semi-famous as the “Zen Guy,” I was getting to spend tons of time with Woody—for a while there, it all seemed too easy. Well, duh. Of course it was too easy. Life is suffering, remember?

  Everything started to unravel the day I finally got up the nerve to ask Woody how she got the name. We were supposed to be putting the final touches on our project for social studies, but ours had been done for days. So we were pretending to color our poster masterpiece, titled “Zen and the Art of Free Throws,” but were really talking about personal stuff. “San,” Woody said. “Did you ever notice that you never tell me anything about your life?”

  “No, I, uh, never noticed that. What do you want to know?”

  “Like what does ‘San’ mean? Is it some kind of mystical thing?”

  “Nope. It means ‘three.’”

  She looked at me and waited for more. When I didn’t continue, she asked, “That’s it? Just ‘three’? Not ‘three pandas running’? Not ‘three blind mice’? Not ‘shoots for three, and scores! The crowd goes wild! And there goes the buzzer—we’re into overtime!’”

  “Nope. Just three.” I couldn’t tell her what my mom had once told me: that San was a name typically given to third children in China, so I was probably given up for adoption because my real family couldn’t keep a third kid. That wouldn’t be a good line of conversation at all. “How about you? Why Woody? I mean, you already told me why not Emily—but not why you chose the name Woody over every other name in the world.”

  She must have known I was changing the subject away from myself again, but she let me, for the moment. “Well, my mom’s family dropped us completely when she left, so I didn’t want to be associated with my grandma, right? But I still wanted a connection to my mom. And just before Mom left—when we didn’t even know she was going to leave—she bought me a present. I walked home from the school bus stop one day and found her wrapping up something at the kitchen table. My snack was sitting out waiting for me; I still remember, it was vanilla pudding with Oreos crumbled on top and half a glass of milk. Anyway, she was sitting there cutting the ribbon for the gift, and when she looked at me, it looked like she’d been crying. I asked what was going on, and she told me I’d get the present in a couple of days—not that she’d give it to me in a couple of days, but that I’d get it in a couple of days. That was a Monday, and when I got home on Thursday the box was on the table with a note that said she couldn’t do this anymore—whatever ‘this’ was—and that the present was her favorite music in the world. So what was I going to do? I opened the wrapping and found a set of Woody Guthrie CDs inside. She used to play folk music around the house all the time, so I knew a lot of the songs. When Dad got home three hours later, he found me sitting there at the table, crying and listening to Woody Guthrie.

  “So when I started guitar lessons the next year, I asked my teacher to show me how to play a bunch of the songs. And here we are. I used to think that my mom would be so impressed with me when she came back if I could play all of her favorite songs. But I’ve been playing these songs for a couple of years now, and she hasn’t come back yet.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry, Woody.”

  “Yeah, me too. I actually…can I tell you something really dorky?”

  “Nothing you could tell me would seem dorky to me.”

  “Well, I recorded myself playing a bunch of Woody Guthrie songs three weeks ago, and mailed the DVD to my mom. You inspired me to do it, San.”

  “I did? How in the world did I inspire you to do something so fearless?”

  “Oh, come on. It was the day after you beat Peter in the foul-shooting contest. We were on the way to the shelter and you said that thing about the fire burning in your hair. Remember? ‘All that matters right now is what you do right now’? So even though my mom hadn’t come back or gotten in touch, I decided I could send her a message right then. You kind of, I don’t know, showed me I could forgive her, in a way.”

  Wow, Woody really believed in me. Nobody had ever believed in me before, nobody had ever given me that kind of power. Thank God I hadn’t told her to jump off a cliff or eat yellow snow, or something. And the funny thing was, I believed in her too, but my belief was right and hers was wrong. She was forgiving, and I was hiding.

  “That’s not dorky, it’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

  “Yeah, well, Peter didn’t think it was so amazing. He said I’m crazy and that I should just shut up and be happy with the parents I have. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I was insane to do it. But I sent the package anyway.”

  A shadow fell over us. Dowd rumbled, “Hello, Miss Long, Mr. Lee. I’m overjoyed to see that you are enjoying a bonding moment, but perhaps you could get back to pretending your project is still in progress?”

  His eyes were in full twinkle. “By the way, Mrs. Romberger at the public library has been raving about your research skills, San—and your volunteer efforts at the soup kitchen, as well. Keep up the good work.”

  He strode away to stop two kids who were playing catch with their model Chinese pagoda project, and Woody looked at me. “Research skills? What are you researching?”

  “Long story.”

  She leaned on the desk between us and put her chin on both hands. “I’d love to hear it.”

  Yikes! I had to say something. But what? How was I going to weasel my way out of this one?

  Apparently, with a little help from Mother Nature. All of a sudden, Woody pulled back in horror, made a little squeaking noise, and pointed to my right. There was a centipede on the arm of the girl next to me, who saw Woody’s gesture and looked down. The girl screamed. Her partner screamed. The girl whipped her arm up over her head, causing the centipede to tumble high in the air and down toward her partner’s hair. The partner fell backward in her chair, and her feet whacked the edge of their desk. Their huge papier-mâché Buddha flew about a foot off their desk and landed on the floor with a sickening crunch.

  They both looked right at me for a split second, and the partner said, “Oops. Sorry, San.”

  I said, “No problem. The great master, Lin Chi, said, ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’ Although, come to think of it, I’m guessing that was just a metaphor.”

  They both looked puzzled and relieved at the same time, at least until Woody said, “Oh, my God! There it is!”

  And there it was, all right. The centipede was now on the partner’s purse. The screaming started up again, and Woody said, “San! Take care of it!”

  I couldn’t help it. I shouted, “ME? I can’t kill that thing!”

  She looked at me like I was Prince Charming. “Oh, I know, San. Your Buddhist reverence for all living things, right?”

  No, I thought, my wussy disgust for poisonous things with
way too many legs. “Uh, right.”

  “You’re not the only one who knows how to do research, San Lee. Now take that bug outside before someone steps on it.”

  Sure enough, about five different guys, including Peter, were closing in on the revolting creature at an alarming rate. If I didn’t act fast, this girl’s handbag was going to have a thin coating of crunchy special sauce—and Woody was going to think I didn’t revere the centipede.

  Isn’t it funny how life sucks a lot?

  “OK,” I said commandingly. “I’ll get him. Stand back, everybody. We, uh, don’t want to scare the little guy any worse than he already is.” Or, you know, than I already was. I crouched down so the bug bag was at eye level and gingerly lifted the bag’s strap off the back of the girl’s chair. I looked at the centipede. The centipede waved its loathsome pincers at me. I looked at Dowd, who was standing behind Woody.

  “Um, Mr. Dowd? May I please take this insect outside and set it free?” I held up the bag, and Dowd said, “Sure, San. I think that’s very noble of…” He didn’t finish, because he was distracted by the sight of the centipede doing a kamikaze backflip off the bag’s zipper, caroming off the girl’s cell phone, and landing on the hardwood floor at a dead hundred-foot run. This caused a whole lot of frenzied activity. All the girls were jumping up on chairs like I wanted desperately to do, but all the boys started cheering, “Go, San!” and “Get him, Buddha!” Some kid even called out, “Kill the bug, San!” Which was pretty entertaining, because maybe ten people instantly gave him dirty looks, like, “Don’t you know about San’s Buddhist reverence for all life? Moron!”

  Ah, fame. Well, my fans wanted a show, so I had to give them one. With the speed and dexterity of a bird of prey—well, a vegetarian bird of prey—I snatched up an oversized piece of construction paper from a desk and started chasing that little sucker around the classroom until he fled under Dowd’s desk. Just as he was about to disappear into the safety of Dowd’s briefcase, I swept the edge of the paper under him from behind, tripping at least sixty of his little legs. I had the centipede! I folded up the edges of the paper so that it was like an upside-down pup tent, and Mister Bug was at my mercy.