by Alice Pung
The final place we stopped that day was Spencer’s Event Specialists. It stocked everything you needed for a party except the food, but to call it a party store was like calling Barney’s Clint’s Crazy Bargains. Spencer’s was not a store for children. Everything was neatly packed on shelves with hand-lettered labels at the bottom, written using a calligraphy pen you could buy for $29.95.
There were fifty different types of invitations, for every occasion. Rolls and rolls of ribbons in every color and pattern. Balloons sold singly by theme (Happy 60th/Christening/Anniversary/Sweet Sixteen!). On one shelf were beautiful objects for the home, such as candle holders, glass bowls and plastic flower arrangements, and when I looked at the sign below, I could not believe my eyes. These were single-use decorations. I saw printed tape for $7.99 a roll. I took it all in while Mrs. Leslie and Amber went off to look for whatever it was they wanted.
Standing there, I thought about how my mother bought stationery—like a roll of tape or outdated journals for two dollars a third of the way into the year. She would never keep a diary or a scrapbook; she just liked having the stuff around and palming it off on me. She had no idea what I did in school—she must have thought my schoolwork required a lot of sticking or stapling.
“Never underestimate the power of a scented candle!” declared a sign beneath a display of colored candles.
Yes, I thought. Buy two and invade Russia!
I found Mrs. Leslie and Amber in front of the organza bags with drawstring ribbon tops like miniature party skirts. There were ones with “Sweet Sixteen!” printed on them, but Mrs. Leslie said she preferred the plain ones.
“Yeah, the gold lettering is so tacky,” added Amber.
“What color should we have?” Mrs. Leslie asked Amber.
Amber pointed to the fuchsia ones.
“Bit bright, aren’t they?”
“Well, you asked!”
“But, darling, they won’t match your invitations.”
“Why does everything have to match? It’s not like we’re living in the 1950s, bloody hell!”
“I’ve just about had enough of you!” hissed Mrs. Leslie as she went to pay for the bags. They came in packets of six, at twelve dollars a packet. She needed ten packets. I could barely watch as she paid, but luckily she did it with a credit card, so the transaction seemed kind of unreal. I supposed that was why rich people used credit cards so often: they didn’t need to painstakingly count out banknotes, as they’d reached a point in life when money was just numerical and not frustratingly finite and concrete.
“So, Lucy, you’ll come, of course, won’t you?” We were back in the car and Mrs. Leslie had turned on the engine.
“Sure, Mrs. Leslie,” I replied automatically. Then I added, “If Amber would like me there.” How rude of me to invite myself to Amber’s birthday in her presence, even if her mother had asked! But maybe my reply sounded passive-aggressive?
This was terrible. Hanging around the two of them had me forever doubting whether I was saying or doing the right thing, or wondering whether I was offending either of them.
“Good.”
Amber didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to, because whatever she said would have been a lie.
“Would you like me to bring anything?” I asked.
“Just your dear self!”
“What about food?”
“It’s all catered.” Then Mrs. Leslie paused, perhaps thinking that hiring catering for a party was obscenely indulgent, like her chocolate brioche. “Well, Lucy, are there any special foods you would like to bring?”
“Umm, my mum could make something.”
“That would be lovely, Lucy, but I don’t want your mother to go to any trouble at all.”
It was funny, the sorts of things Mrs. Leslie said, as if you could prepare some food without going to any trouble at all, as if it would magically materialize—like the pie Snow White “baked” for the dwarves, when really her animal friends had done all the work for her.
I sat in the backseat of my father’s Camry with two enormous white plastic trays of rice-paper rolls—one balanced on my lap and one in the empty space across from the Lamb’s safety seat—and wished you were coming with me. At the last minute Mum had wanted me to take the Lamb too.
“What are you asking, old woman?” my father demanded.
“Old man, I have work to do.” She pointed to the pile of pockets that needed interfacing ironed into them. There were several hundred. “And she’s just going to a party.”
“No!” My father took the Lamb from her. “He stays here. I’ll look after him.”
“But I need you to help me with these shirts! They’re due on Monday.”
Suddenly I felt very guilty and weary. All this fuss for a party I didn’t even want to attend. “I don’t have to go,” I began.
“But your mother’s made all these rice-paper rolls for you to take!”
My mother had originally suggested frying up some Teochew rice cakes. I had talked her out of it, not because they weren’t delicious but because they were fried in oil; a party with bespoke napkins was not the right place for them. Then she suggested boiling an enormous pot of pho for the girls to try.
“No, Mum, no one drinks soup at a party!”
“But it’s not just soup—there are rice noodles too.”
“Mum, I think they want finger food.”
“Since when do sixteen-year-olds get to demand what food their guests bring to their birthdays?” my mother muttered, but she spent two hours wrapping the rolls anyway, making sure all the prawns were lined up on their beds of mint and lettuce, so they would show through the transparent pastry skin.
“Don’t you think you’ve made too many?” I asked.
“We don’t want to come across as stingy.”
“Hey, Mum, these look just like the ones at the restaurants,” I said, because I knew it would make her happy. It was pretty easy to make my mother happy, whereas with the girls at Laurinda and their mothers, you had no idea.
“Do you want to take a jar of nuoc mam too?” she asked.
I imagined opening up the jar of fish sauce in front of all those girls and their finger sandwiches, and it spilling right on their white linen and blush floor rugs. “No, Mum. It’s okay.”
“Don’t forget this.” She handed me the present I had asked her to make for Amber: a Coast & Co. skirt from their upcoming catalog. My mother was a one-person birthday party dynamo, but unlike Amber and her mother, she had done it all so quietly.
—
When we arrived, my father got out of the car to help me carry the second tray of rolls. In the middle of the bright day, the Leslies’ house looked more majestic than ever.
I noticed Chelsea coming up the driveway, holding a small plate with a dozen cupcakes. She was dressed in a frock that had little blue and green flowers all over it, and a cardigan made of a soft material that I somehow knew wasn’t rayon or polyester.
“Dad, this is Chelsea,” I said.
“How do you do, Mr. Lam?”
My father smiled at her and rang the doorbell.
Amber appeared. In her blue dress and sandals, she looked like a woman from a Botticelli painting. Her hair was washed and shiny, and the mascara on her eyelashes made her eyes look larger than ever, like a cat’s. “Hello, Mr. Lam,” she said. Then she squealed, “Chelsea! Lucy!” and gave each of us a fake hug, one of those ones where you loosely grab the other person’s shoulders and lean close.
The house was filled with fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls and a handful of boys, standing or sitting, eating sandwiches or out on the lawn drinking sparkling water. The scene reminded me a little of The Great Gatsby—Daisy Buchanan and her afternoon teas.
My father was taking it all in. I hoped now he would understand why his McDonald’s party would not have made the cut. But the moment I thought this, I also felt sad and guilty to see my father standing there like a prewar Southeast Asian man, watching the colonizers sip French
champagne in their villas. There was a heartbreaking innocence about the way he believed these girls had taken his daughter under their wing.
He found Mrs. Leslie and thanked her for having me over.
“Our pleasure,” she enthused. “We love Lucy. She’s a darling. She’s almost become part of our family!” Then she noticed our rice-paper rolls and made such a noise about them that you’d think they had become new members of the family too.
When my father left, I stood there awkwardly for a long while as the other girls chatted about each other’s frocks, about how beautiful Amber was, and about the girls who weren’t at the party. Aside from politely saying how nice I looked, they didn’t know what to do with me. I was a charity invite.
I noticed the little organza bags on a table. They were now filled with coconut cookies half-dipped in chocolate. A few bags had already been opened, and I saw cookies with halfhearted bites taken out of them. The Lamb would love these, I thought, wishing I could collect them for him.
“Their food looks beautiful and takes a long time to prepare,” my mother had told me once, seeing a Hollywood wedding on television, “but it doesn’t taste so good. It’s the sort of thing you can only eat a little bit of before you are full.” She was right, I thought as I looked at the sandwiches without crusts, the refrigerated hedgehogs and the cherry slices cut into smaller-than-normal portions and arranged on three-tier platters. The chocolate cups filled with champagne cream were sickly sweet when you bit into them.
Suddenly I had an ingenious idea. I picked up one of my mother’s huge white plastic trays, fleetingly wishing that she had used black platters instead, so that they would seem less like conference catering trays. (Linh, sometimes I can understand why you found me so insufferable.) But at least the plate in my hands gave me the ability to go up to anyone at this party, and it got me out of having to make painful, polite conversation. I could be useful, which was better than being stuck.
“Would you like a rice-paper roll, sir?” I asked an elderly man in a navy suit who was talking to Amber’s father. The man turned toward me, his gray eyebrows gathering in the middle of his forehead like two dueling moths.
“No, thanks,” he muttered, and turned back to Mr. Leslie. “I didn’t know our Amber had Jap friends.”
Brodie arrived. She wore a green hat that matched her dress exactly because it was cut from the same cloth, an elegant kind of half cloche thing. She noticed an object Mrs. Leslie had on display. “Is this new, Dianne?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Leslie replied. “Tell your mother I finally found it! This Toby jug I’d been awaiting for ages. Apparently only two hundred were made with the face of Anne of Cleves.”
For the first time, I felt resentment toward Mrs. Leslie. When I’d been interested in the jugs in that cabinet, all she had said to me was, “Oh, Lucy, that’s my William Shakespeare cup, and the one behind him is my Charles Dickens mug, and the one next to him is Emily Dickinson. I just collect them for a bit of fun.”
I held my plate of rolls out to them.
“Lucy,” Mrs. Leslie exclaimed, “you shouldn’t be doing this! Walking around at Amber’s party serving the guests.”
“I don’t mind, Mrs. Leslie.”
“These look beautiful, Lucy. Your mother is an excellent cook.”
That plate gave me the freedom to walk around in areas of the house I never would have dared go alone, because I would have looked like a snoop. So wherever I heard voices or laughter, I wandered.
I came across a room with casement windows, and about seven little kids running around. This looks like the heart of the party, I thought. The Lamb would fit in here for sure, if his nose wasn’t so runny. I wished that I had brought him along now. That room was where I spent the remainder of the afternoon.
—
“Where are my trays?” Mum asked when I arrived back home. She was sitting at the kitchen table, which was covered with white cotton shirts.
“They were still using them,” I replied.
“You’d better make sure that they come back,” Mum told me. “They cost me three dollars each.”
I picked up the Lamb. “Look what I have for you!” I dangled the bag of macaroons in front of him, and he made a grab for them.
“Put him down,” Mum ordered, “and help me finish this batch.” She was carefully opening up buttonholes with a seam ripper. After doing the buttonholes, we had to attach the cardboard labels: COAST & CO. CLOTHING, Size 10, Designed and made in Australia, $119.95. Mum had already stapled the small bags with the spare buttons onto the backs of some of the cards, to be hand-fastened to the inside label of each shirt with cotton.
I sat in a vinyl chair next to her and picked up a shirt.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Robina wanted to hire you as a tutor?” Mum asked me.
“What?”
“I saw Robina today and she asked why you haven’t gone over to visit Tully and help her with her English.”
“Mum, that was months ago!”
“I was so embarrassed. You never told us!”
“Come on, Mum, it’s not like Tully needs my help!”
“You never tell us anything now,” Mum said. “I don’t know what that rich school is teaching you, but you’ve become secretive.”
We sat in silence for a minute, doing our work. Inwardly, I seethed. Ever since I won the scholarship, my mother had been watching me to see if I would pick up all the vices that accompany wealthy private schools. My worst fear was that my mother’s suspicions would be proven correct.
“You’re forgetting your old friends,” my mother added—but when she said this I felt my guilt lift somewhat. She was totally wrong about Tully, so wrong that I knew I shouldn’t trust her judgment about my friendships ever again.
“You don’t even like Tully yourself,” I retorted.
Although Tully was always polite to adults, my mother was of the view that school had not made Tully any brighter, only more sycophantic and lost.
“What if Ivy tells Tully about the time that she came around for help with her English and word gets back to Tully’s mother?” Mum asked. “How unfair would that seem to Robina, like I was trying to ignore her daughter while letting you help everyone else’s?”
The one big thing I respected about my mother, the thing that set her apart from almost anyone else I knew, was that she was always level and fair. Currying favor with anyone was not on. If I had been invited to Yvonne’s party instead of Amber’s, she would have prepared me for it in exactly the same way. She always made me buy meat from Mrs. Cho’s butchery, and never considered other places that might be cheaper.
But she was so stuck in her ways, so worried about being unfair, that she’d sacrifice my time to do all the things she couldn’t. I began to see things from my father’s perspective, and began to feel that I had a right to be annoyed.
“Hell!” I had been stabbing at the buttonhole too hard in my fury. Instead of opening it up so a button could fit through, I had made a nasty gash in the fabric that extended to the edge of the shirt.
“What have you done?” cried my mother, as if I had stabbed the Lamb. Grabbing the shirt and shaking it at me, she yelled, “Do you know how long it took to make this? Do you? Two weeks ago, you were putting buttons into the bags when I was hemming the cuffs. Last week you were ironing the interfacing on the collars. And this week, just when I’d finished all the pockets, you’ve gone and wrecked one! This is coming out of my pay! You’ve wrecked everything!”
She was almost in tears. “What am I going to say to Sokkha? He comes tonight after dinner. I can’t make an entire shirt before then. You might not think this is important, because you have a different life now, but this shirt buys your bowl of rice every night.” Now she really was crying.
After a while, she picked up the phone and dialed Sokkha. “I have some bad news,” she told him. “Our baby got hold of some scissors and cut one of the shirts. I know. I’m sorry. No, no. I know I should have
been looking out for him. Yes, I know, I know. But there’s only enough to make new sleeves. Please. Please, if you have some to spare, just about a yard. Just the front panel. I know I won’t be paid for it, but I don’t mind. It was my fault anyway….Thank you, thank you, brother. I just need a yard. I promise it won’t happen again.”
I felt so ashamed that my mother was groveling to Uncle Sokkha.
I used to have more time for Mum when I was at Christ Our Savior. I could easily finish my homework and help her with the sewing. But it seemed now that I never had time for anything except Laurinda.
—
I woke up around one in the morning. Somehow I knew Mum was not in bed. I went into our kitchen. The kettle was still warm. I knew she was in the garage.
“Argh!” she yelped when I came in. “You scared me! What are you doing up? You should be in bed. You have school tomorrow.”
“Do you need some help, Mum?”
“No, I’m almost done.”
And she was. I handed her a Coast & Co. label.
On the Monday after Amber’s birthday, I was sitting in the library again, reading E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. It is infinitely better not to know anything about art than to have the kind of half-knowledge which makes for snobbishness, I read. The danger is very real.
I was staring intently at a photo of a statue, Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, when Mrs. Leslie interrupted me. “Lucy! What are you doing here by yourself?”
I wanted to be by myself, and this was what I preferred to do in my spare time. Was she going to drag me outside to where the Cabinet sat and tell them, “Girls, this is Lucy. You may remember her from the weekend and most of your classes. She will be playing with you”?
“This is a good book,” I told her.
“Indeed it is.” There was a long pause. She was probably thinking that a book is not a friend. “Those rice-paper rolls your mother made were delicious, Lucy.”