Stealing Buddha's Dinner

by Bich Minh Nguyen

  Rosa walked into the room, and the stony look on her face said it all.

  “Well,” she said. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

  She made us go over to Jennifer’s that night, in our T-shirts and flip-flops, and mumble apologies. We stood in the living room, our faces cast down, and in spite of the humiliation I couldn’t help thinking how funny it was to be here at last, in the grown-ups’ room, where company sat. It was the first time my parents had been in the house. The Vander Wals sat on the plaid sofa with round tufted pillows, and Linda prodded Jennifer to say in a princess voice, “I accept your apology.”

  As we shuffled back home, the dew slicking our ankles, Rosa told Anh and me that we could have gone to jail. My father said nothing. We were scared he was going to take out his belt and spank us something serious, but he didn’t. Perhaps he felt bad for us; perhaps he understood what we had done better than we did.

  Within a week Jennifer and I were back to normal, meaning we both needed each other and resented each other, bound as we were by proximity and age. But for the first couple of days I stayed inside, afraid to face her. Jennifer had looked indignant the night of the apology, but there was something more: pity. I saw then that she had always pitied me and my unsaved soul.

  In my grandmother’s room I gazed up at the Buddha sitting on a high shelf. On a table below him lay arrangements of peaches, plums, and bananas; black-and-white photographs of my grandfather who died in 1956 and my uncle who died in the war; two urns filled with ashes. It calmed me to be in this room, to sit on the carpet and watch Noi light her favorite incense.

  I went into the garage to dig out my bicycle and ride around the block a few times by myself. The garage was stifling and dim, and smelled of motor oil and dust. Here were broken mattresses, a pile of bricks and siding, rakes with missing tines. Sometimes, after drinking too much, my father would tell the story of how we had arrived here with five dollars. By here he meant America. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1975. A world of cold and snow and people leaning down, saying, What? What did you say?

  My apology to Jennifer had been for her room. No one had noticed the missing cookies, and my sister and I had said nothing. As I pedaled toward Sienna Street I cherished that secret. I knew the cookies would stay with me forever, echoing with each successive one I might eat and learn to make, each chocolate chip a reminder of the toll, the price of admission into a long-desired house. How I wanted such entrance through cookies, through candy and cake, popsicles, ice cream, endless kinds of dinner. I wanted all of it, and hated to be hungry.

  6

  School Lunch

  THIRD GRADE AT KEN-O-SHA ELEMENTARY WAS LED BY Mrs. Andersen, an imperious woman who wore plaid skirts held tight with giant safety pins. She had a habit of twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger while she stood at the chalkboard. In Mrs. Andersen’s classroom, good grades and behavior manifested themselves in star stickers—consolation green for effort, gold for highest achievement—accumulating on a large board that loomed over us all. One glance and you could see who was behind and who was striding ahead. The percentage grades on homework assignments translated easily, but Mrs. Andersen had total control of the good behavior stars; in her cryptic system, one day you might get a gold and the next, demoted to silver.

  In pursuit of gold stars I became an insufferably good student, with perfect Palmer cursive and one hundred percents in every subject. I had something to prove—to myself, to Mrs. Andersen, to everyone in the class.

  At home, when my parents exhibited some of the typical immigrant strictness about grades, Crissy and Anh, as the older siblings, bore much of the burden. I saw my father glowering at their report cards, holding them like garbage scraps as he asked, “Why aren’t these better?” If Anh got an A-minus on an assignment he would say “Where’s the A?” Good grades weren’t praised; they were expected. While I was spurred to distinguish myself from my sisters, mostly I was just a natural-born nerd. (However, I couldn’t fulfill Rosa’s great wish for me: to become a classical violinist like the graceful Asian prodigies she saw on TV.)

  The trick I had learned was that the quieter I was, and the better I was in school, the more the teacher would let me alone. I might have aimed for middle-of-the-road, the blend-in average student. But my need for approval in the classroom overrode everything else. The good students had privileges, after all: they could escape notice; they could even do independent study at the back of the room or out in the hallway. Being good meant freedom from watchfulness.

  The worst thing was being called on or in any way standing out more than I already did in a class that was, except for me, one other Vietnamese immigrant, and one black student, dough-white. If, in the dreaded reading circle, I was told to read out loud, Mrs. Andersen would interrupt me, snapping, “You’re reading too fast!” “Speak up! Louder!”

  Privately I admired the rebellious kids, like Robbie Wilson, who always wore an old jean jacket, even in the winter, and would come to school looking bleary-eyed and pinched, like an adult with a hangover. Robbie and his ilk talked back at teachers, got sent to the principal’s office, and were even spanked with the principal’s infamous red paddle. These kids refused to settle down or do what they were told. They possessed what seemed to me marvelous nerve and self-knowledge, allowing them to question everything. During PE, when the gym teacher led us in aerobics to a song called “Go You Chicken Fat, Go!” they sang, “Go you chicken shit, go!”

  On our first foray in school my sister and I had encountered kids who laughed and pointed at us, pressing back the edges of their eyes with their palms while they chanted, “Ching-chong, ching chong!” At first I didn’t understand what those noises meant. Ching-chong? For me? I saw how the other kids, the different, black-haired ones, stared at the ground or ran away. “Chop suey!” white kids would yell. “Hi-ya!” I was afraid to ask my parents what “chop suey” was; they had yelled at me when I had asked what “bitch” meant. So it wasn’t until a few years later, when I saw a can of La Choy at Meijer Thrifty Acres, that I understood, and wondered at being called a mix of noodles and vegetables.

  At home, on warm days after rain when toadstools bloomed in our yard, my grandmother went to dig them up. When the kids in the neighborhood saw this they screwed up their faces. “Are you gonna eat them for supper?” they called out, laughing, their Kool-Aid mouths wide. My sister dealt with the matter by telling them that they’d get a knuckle sandwich if they didn’t shut up—and made good on it. I did not have Anh’s fierceness and glow; I became self-conscious to the point of being, at times, unable to speak. Words like stranger and funny-looking ran loose in my mind.

  At Ken-O-Sha, whatever academic success I had was completely eroded at lunchtime. Here, a student was measured by the contents of her lunch bag, which displayed status, class, and parental love. I didn’t tell anyone that I packed my own lunch, but the girls in my grade figured it out. “My mom loves to pack my lunch,” said Sara Jonkman, whose hard blue eyes emitted a vicious spark.

  The anxiety of what to pack weighed on me every school week. The key was to have at least one shining element: a plain sandwich and baggie of potato chips could be made tolerable with the right dessert snack. If the planets and grocery sales aligned in my favor, I might even have a Hostess Cupcake. All morning I would look forward to peeling away the flat layer of deep chocolate frosting decorated with one lovely white squiggle. This I set aside while I ate the cake, licking out the cream filling, sighing over the richness, the darkness of the crumbs. Then at last I could focus on the frosting, taking small bites around the white squiggle, which must always be saved as long as possible. I imagined careful bakers hovering over each cupcake, forming the curlicue design with unerring precision. Beneath the status of Hostess Cupcakes were Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Devil Squares, Zingers, and Little Debbie Fudge Brownies. The lower tier, just above generic cookies, included the cloying Oatmeal Creme Pies, SnoBalls, Star Crunches, and Twinkies.

  Not long after thi
rd grade started I ditched my banged-up Scooby-Doo lunch box, which smelled faintly of deli meat no matter how much I washed it, for the brown paper bags that everyone else was using. Luckily they were inexpensive, so my stepmother didn’t object to buying them. The bags provided little protection for my sandwiches, which always got smushed before lunch hour. Rosa bought whatever white bread was cheapest— sadly, never the Wonder Bread my friends ate, which I was certain had a fluffier, more luxurious bite—and peanut butter and jelly, olive loaf, or thin packets of pastrami and corned beef made by a company called Buddig. The name drove me crazy, the way it sounded like a stuffed-up nose, and I wanted to rewrite every package to make it Budding.

  Whenever Rosa got sick of buying lunch items she signed me and my sisters up for the school lunch. She was always angling to get them for free, but our family fell just above the qualifying level. This relieved me to no end; everyone knew about the kids who got free lunches because their names were on a separate checklist.

  Each month a new lunch menu was posted on a bulletin board outside the gym-cafeteria. Reading it over and over, to the point of memorization, became one of my pastimes.

  Grilled cheese sandwich

  Fried chicken

  Whipped potatoes and gravy

  Choice of corn or peas

  Fruit cup

  Their words sent me dreaming; every day seemed a promise. Most provocative were listings that mentioned choice, the word itself conjuring possibility: “choice of hamburger or cheeseburger”; “choice of whole milk or chocolate milk.” In reality, hot lunch meant soggy cheese sandwiches encased in steamed-up plastic pouches; perforated boxes of greasy, chewy fried chicken; elastic potatoes; canned fruit in heavy syrup. Still, I imagined potatoes churned into clouds and slicked with gravy, served alongside the mysterious but elegant-sounding Salisbury steak.

  I knew better than to admit this fascination to anyone. School lunch was unanimously described as gross, for one thing, save for the passable rectangles of cheese pizza that sometimes appeared; any cold lunch was preferable to the degradation of styrofoam meal trays bearing fish sticks and baked beans. The implicit judgment was that if you had to get lunch from the cafeteria, then your mom obviously didn’t care enough.

  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 homewor
k 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.