The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  “How ’bout it?” Harry said, slapping a twenty-dollar bill on the ledge.

  He poured her a shot of Patrón, and Lindsey looked at it. Something in her suddenly wanted to prove her individuality, and although a drinking game wasn’t the most mature way to disprove stereotypes, it suddenly seemed like a good enough way to do so. She knew for a fact that alcohol didn’t make her red, so she downed the shot and placed the empty glass on the counter. With nothing to do except wait for the tequila to rush through her system, she downed another jigger, and then, eventually, another. The liquor at least made Harry’s monologue about tax shelters a little less boring.

  After a while she said, “See? I’m not red, am I?”

  Across the room, she gazed dreamily at Michael, and the butterflies in her stomach fluttered their wings. She couldn’t wait to kiss him later tonight.

  As she reached for the twenty-dollar bill, Harry grabbed her hand and said, “Wait! Sometimes it’s fine on an empty stomach, but as soon as you eat a little something you start getting red. Here, eat this.” He spread some Cheez Whiz on a cracker and handed it to her.

  Lindsey’s stomach was a little queasy, since all she had eaten that day was Auntie Shirley’s Hobbit stew, so she accepted the cracker, figuring it would be a good way to soak up the tequila and maybe settle her stomach. She chewed it and then had a few other nibbles from the picked-over snack table. She ate a pig in a blanket.

  Harry Poon scrutinized every inch of Lindsey’s face and finally admitted she was right. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You got me!” He picked up the money and handed it to her. He walked away, and Lindsey looked over to a couple of the SLABS. The blonds were turning red, and even under their heavy makeup she could see that their faces were the color of raw steak.

  Hmm. She was really starting to feel sick now. Where was the bathroom again? She stumbled over to where she remembered it was, and she saw a gaggle of girls waiting their turn.

  Downstairs. Maybe there was an extra bathroom downstairs. Lindsey slowly made her way to the staircase, her feet floating above the carpet, it seemed. She heard a slurring voice asking for directions to a toilet. Who was that sloppy drunk? She soon realized it was her. She didn’t see Michael anywhere nearby, which was fine, since she didn’t want him to see her like this.

  Swaying down the stairs, both her legs turned to mochi, and she suddenly tripped. She lunged for the banister but missed it by a mile. Wham! She felt her spine compress as she slammed hard against the stair, landing on her tailbone. Ow! Yang!

  She hurt like H-E-Double-Chopsticks. Her eyeballs spiraled in opposite directions, and she saw stars and tweeting birds circling her head. She sat there and waited for things to stop spinning. She tried to take a few deep breaths, but wait. What was that disgusting smell? What was that wet feeling down the back of her legs? Something was definitely not right.

  She had pooped her pants.

  Taking in the horror of her situation, a strange thought popped into Lindsey’s head. She recalled once when she had been in the dressing room at Old Navy, and she’d overheard a guy in the next stall ask for jeans in a loose-cut style. The attendant had had a heavy Asian accent and had asked, “Do you want loose, or hella loose?” The guy had replied, “Definitely hella loose, Bro.” As Lindsey sat drunk on the stairs, stinking like a baby’s diaper, this sudden memory may have seemed out of place, but she thought of this now because she knew if a medical examiner were to ask her the condition of her bowels at this very moment, she would be compelled to answer, “Definitely hella loose stools, Bro.”

  She felt a light touch on her shoulder.

  “You OK?” It was Karen.

  “Oh, crap!” yelped one of the blonds, who came running over.

  The girls lifted Lindsey up, and by their repulsed faces she could tell they had discovered her putrid mess. Lindsey prayed Michael was nowhere in sight.

  “I’m sorry,” was all she managed to say, over and over.

  Another girl came over, and they all helped Lindsey down the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  Karen spoke to her in a soothing voice. “Don’t be solly. Don’t wolly. We clean you.”

  They carried her to the downstairs bathroom and helped her step into a tub that had a nozzle attachment. Someone turned on the shower as everyone held their noses. Throwing aside her sweater, they tried to strip off her pants but had to hose them down before they even dared to touch them. Lindsey wondered how she had gotten here, suddenly nearly naked.

  “I’m sorry,” she moaned again. She was too wasted to care that her pants and underwear had been peeled from her body and were now in a ball at the end of the tub. When she had trimmed her pubic hair the day before she hadn’t imagined any moment like this being the grand unveiling.

  She was crying now. Nothing could be as wretchedly embarrassing as this moment. The girls pointed the shower nozzle at her soiled bottom and fussed over her like bridesmaids fluffing a wedding gown. But Lindsey wasn’t a bride, and she for sure was not decked out in Vera Wang. She was a total loser, and the only white she was now wearing was her socks.

  Socks!

  “Don’t take off my socks!” she suddenly screamed.

  “We have to, they’re wet,” the blond said, tugging one down just past her ankle.

  “Noooo!” Lindsey screamed like the hysterical drunk she was, then she began to sob, “You can’t…please…you…caaan’t…”

  Even in her lowly, vulnerable state, she knew the last shred of her self-esteem would be ripped away if her midget toe was suddenly, unceremoniously exposed.

  “Don’t hurt him…the poor elephant man,” she sobbed.

  The girls all exchanged baffled looks, then shrugged. “Okay,” the blond said. “The socks stay on.”

  The girls continued to spray Lindsey’s bare rump until she was relatively clean, and then one by one, each of them seemed to realize how awkward the situation was. One girl excused herself, and then another, until Lindsey and Karen were left alone. Karen turned off the water and helped Lindsey step out of the tub. She handed her a towel.

  “Can you dry yourself?” Karen asked, and Lindsey nodded. As Karen stepped outside, she pointed to a hairdryer near the sink.

  Alone now, Lindsey toweled off and tried to sober up. She gulped some tap water from the faucet and passed the hairdryer over her pants and undies for a long while until they were merely damp. She was glad her pants were lightweight cotton, but she was dismayed that they were also white. She pulled them on over her damp underwear and tried to hide the panty lines by yanking her sweater down over her butt so at least she looked decent. She dried her drenched socks as well as she could, then slipped her feet back into her shoes.

  She had been in the bathroom for over an hour, and when she came upstairs she immediately saw Michael.

  “I’ve been looking for you. Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Oh…” She hesitated. “Just downstairs, with some girls.”

  Michael smiled. “I hope you didn’t think I was neglecting you,” he said. “Some guy over there just wouldn’t stop talking. He had serious diarrhea of the mouth.”

  At the word “diarrhea” Lindsey felt another gurgling fissure trying to make its presence known.

  “Um, I think we should go,” she said, slightly panicked.

  Michael seemed taken aback by her sudden insistence but said, “Uh, all right.” He patted his pockets in search of his keys as they headed downstairs to the front door.

  Lindsey was fairly certain she could make it home before she had another butt-tooting episode. Sitting in the car, she thought back to the day when Michael was wet in the passenger seat of her car, and she thought it ironic that the situation was now reversed. She was grateful that he was unaware of her current condition.

  Glad to be in a sitting position, she tried yanking her sweater further down past her rump to keep the seat as dry as possible. As she pulled at the hem of her cardigan she was hor
rified to notice a tiny blop of poop that had gone undetected near the lower stitching of her sweater.

  As Michael’s eyes were concentrating on the road, she stared at the offending bean, which resembled one of those discontinued, light tan M&Ms. Aghast, she hoped to God that Michael couldn’t smell it. She clenched the blop and the surrounding fabric in her fist and looked ahead, willing the streetlights to turn green so she could get home as swiftly as possible.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Michael said, breaking the sound of light pattering raindrops on the windshield. Watching the quivering drops of water on the glass made Lindsey nervous.

  “Just tired,” she said. Then she attempted merriment by adding, “But I’m just fine.” She tried to sound like she was a happy little thing, instead of a damp-bottomed, midget-toed freak clenching a blob of poopie.

  When Michael slowed the car to a stop in Lindsey’s driveway, he set the brake and leaned over to kiss her. She felt the very tip of his tongue on hers and felt the butterflies in her stomach. Or was that her lower intestines? Her posture tightened, and she recoiled a bit. Michael pulled back and looked at her as if he worried that he’d done something wrong. He moved further away, and they smiled stiffly at one another.

  After a tense moment and some lame, forgettable words, Lindsey bolted for the door. And that was the end to what was supposed to have been a terrific evening.

  Not a Chinaman’s Chance

  The night had not been a complete disaster. The following week Michael stopped by Lindsey’s desk to chat, and he smiled at her across the conference table during a staff meeting. Lindsey figured he wouldn’t have wanted to get anywhere near her if he had actually smelled her Saturday night. She was in the clear.

  Over the ensuing weeks, they each slowly and carefully released small bits of information about themselves and found things in common, such as their mutual admiration for Alfred Hitchcock movies and their disdain for Volvo drivers. They were surprised to find that they both followed the flocks of wild parrots that flew through the city, and they swapped information about the nesting sites they’d separately discovered.

  One day after work Michael helped Lindsey carry some parcels down to the FedEx office, and she was pleased when he asked her over to his place. As they walked briskly down Montgomery Street, the December air was unusually balmy, prompting her to remove her coat.

  “Want me to carry that for you?” he offered, his own shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows.

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said, swinging it toward him. He gathered it under his arm and folded it carefully.

  They climbed Chestnut Street from Powell, and as they went up the rickety stairs to his apartment, she tried to act like she was in a place she’d never seen before, as if she hadn’t stalked his sister Cheryl a few weeks ago.

  “I’ve got Rear Window if you want to watch it,” he said as they entered the door.

  Inside, she quickly surveyed his living quarters. His furniture was somewhere between post-college and public library, with a Craftsman-style bureau, swivel oak chairs, and a makeshift table assembled from file cabinets and a wooden plank. A utilitarian sisal rug covered the hardwood floor.

  “How come your apartment is so clean, but you leave candy wrappers all over the office?” Lindsey asked.

  He smiled and lightly touched his index finger to the tip of her nose. “I just like getting you all riled up,” he said.

  As they toured his apartment, she peered into a small kitchen, and then they approached the bedroom. Numerous times she had imagined him late at night, snuggling alone in sanitary and tastefully decorated conditions. Now she did not want to see anything that might mar her image of him; she did not want to discover Playboy playmate posters, Star Trek sheets, weeks-old laundry, or anything else that might threaten to disqualify him as a mature and hygienic person.

  Michael walked to the far corner of the room and adjusted the matchstick blinds to let in the last minutes of the early evening twilight. A television set and VCR supported a stack of books, and an unpainted pine dresser, a full-size bed, and an oak chair made up the remaining contents of the room. She was charmed to find that what appeared to be an overstuffed plush pillow was actually a full-figured Abyssinian cat snoozing blissfully in the center of the bed.

  “Oh, that’s Larry,” he said, flopping down to pet the portly, declawed feline, which was the size of a small Butterball turkey. She sat on the edge of the bed and scratched under his chin.

  “Watch out,” Michael warned. “Unfortunately, he’s basically a flea-transport system. He belongs to the downstairs neighbor, but he gets in through there.” He pointed down the hall to a cat door, installed by the previous occupant, he explained.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, springing up and heading toward the kitchen. She followed and hovered in the doorway as he searched his refrigerator for snacks.

  “How about this?” he asked, retrieving a pint of Cherry Garcia from the freezer. He pulled off the lid and searched for a spoon, but she began to worry about bits of cherry skin getting stuck between her teeth. “Oh, none for me, thanks,” she said.

  He tempted her, but she shook her head again. “Virtue untested isn’t virtue at all, right?” he said.

  She thought for a moment. “Are you quoting Paradise Lost?” she asked.

  He shut the freezer. “Um, I don’t know, maybe. Actually, I thought I was quoting a Billy Bragg song from 1988, but he was probably quoting Milton, so yeah.”

  She was enticed by his combined knowledge of eighties pop music and seventeenth-century epic poetry. She followed him back to his bedroom.

  A few minutes later, they lay on a cozy blue quilt as the credits for the Hitchcock thriller rolled on-screen. Larry spread out like a blob between them, making any subtle touching nearly impossible. Gentle nudges to the tomcat’s thigh area elicited mere twitches of the whiskers.

  “I don’t have the heart to move him when he looks so comfy,” Michael said, awkwardly trying to put his arm around Lindsey. As she tried to lean closer to him, her eyes wandered toward the open closet door. It was here where atrocities were spotted.

  Exhibit A: Tan jeans hanging next to beige corduroys. Yes, they were acceptable thin-wale cords, and perhaps the shadows could suggest a hint of olive or moss in the color of the trousers, but there was definitely something greige lurking there.

  Exhibit B: On the floor of the closet, were those desert boots??! Wallabees? The suede, sand-colored footwear of the seventies?

  And the Kiss of Death: She could have pretended not to see it. Behind a pair of gray running shoes, which were in themselves totally unacceptable, was a shoebox bearing the brand name of Satan himself, the footwear of Beelzebub: Rockports.

  She sat upright and stared at Michael.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied. She gazed slack-jawed into the depths of the closet.

  “Did you see something?” he asked. “The tenants before had mice. And, as you can probably guess, Larry’s not much of a mouser.”

  “Tube socks!” she yelped, jumping up. For some reason, despite her own dependence on knee highs, she considered tube socks with striped bands of color across the top to be really creepy, like something a child-molesting priest might wear with roller skates on the weekend. As she sprang off the bed, a blizzard of cat hair billowed up around her and she swatted the air with crazed, compulsive energy. She frantically slapped the Larry-fur away from her arms and legs.

  “Where did you…where did you get that stuff?” she asked, wagging her finger toward the closet as if she had just discovered a severed human head.

  “What? The socks?” he asked, confused.

  “Everything—the socks, the seventies beige shoes…”

  She smoothed down her Marimekko-patterned skirt and tried to get a grip on herself.

  “You have desert boots,” she said disdainfully.

  He frowned. “Well, you have Hello Kitty stuff,” he said.

 
Lindsey was mortified. “No I don’t!” she yelled.

  “Yeah, right. I was looking for a calculator one day and saw all that stuff in your drawer—the pink stapler, the scented erasers, and the teeny pencil sharpener. You’ve got a Hello Kitty manually operated paper shredder, and you think I’m weird because I have tube socks?”

  She was both flattered and flabbergasted that he had noticed her personal belongings. “I don’t even like…Hello Kitty,” she said. “Besides, I can’t believe you went through my desk without asking!”

  She fumed for a second longer, then lied, “Besides, those were all gifts that other people gave me.”

  “You were at the dentist that day, and my brother gave me those socks. Who cares?”

  “They were probably on sale at Ross. What a cheapskate.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “You’re a Hoarder!” she shot back, as if he’d know what that was.

  She gathered up her backpack and coat. “I’m sorry, I have to go now.”

  She headed for the door, and left Michael standing in a cloud of cat fuzz, wondering what had just happened.

  Scaling Filbert Street, she tried to calm down. She had to take inventory of a few things. Perhaps she had to revise her theory.

  If someone was part-Chinese himself, was he automatically exempted from Hoarder status? Michael had dark hair and was not at all pasty, so could these attributes cancel out the dastardly implications of his Rockports and tan pants? Were tube socks really that bad, or merely a fact of life for the American heterosexual male? Could those desert boots be forgiven because his hands showed no trace of amphibian fingers?

  She just didn’t know.

  The next day at work, her boss informed her that the magazine planned to host a special luncheon in attempt to solicit donations from left-leaning millionaires with a penchant for Tofutti.

  “I want to serve really spectacular food,” Howard proclaimed.