Buddha Baby (2 page)

In their two years together, Michael had held her hand as they swam against a tide of cultural differences. And like every couple, they had to work some shit out. At first she was reluctant to show him her world of Chinese customs, organ meats, and odiferous ointments. But as time passed, they stuck together and she discovered there was no mountain of chicken feet too high for them to climb.

Of course, there had been bumps in the road. He once pinned Chinese couplets to the wall with the characters upside down, and on her dad's birthday he served a short-noodled pasta instead of the kind that would have represented long life. In an attempt to speak Cantonese when ordering crab in a restaurant, he once used the wrong intonation for
hai
and ended up asking the waitress for the cracked "pussy" smothered in black bean sauce.

And Lindsey hadn't been perfect either. She was hyper-germ-phobic as only an Asian girl could be, and sometimes drove him nuts with her refusal to touch public doorknobs unless her hand was mummified in swaths of paper towels. In spite of herself, she was superstitious, and when they changed to a new phone number they had to pay extra because she insisted on plenty of eights and refused their neighborhood's exchange of 664 because her dad had told her that in Chinese that number sounded like "roll over and die."

In learning to accept Michael's background, Lindsey eventually got off her multi-culti high horse and opened her mind to the fact that "white" was not really an ethnicity but a general catchphrase that didn't begin to describe the various cultures as proud and distinct as her own. In honor of Michael's Irish side, she reluctantly yet gradually accepted the lowly potato as a culinary staple.

These details aside, she knew that all her Chinese New Year lucky envelopes had done their job. She had hit the loverboy jackpot. Michael wasn't one of those lousy, just-pretending-your-ass-ain't-fat, rm-throwing-out-this-damn-Anthropologie-catalog kinda guys with a channel-changing finger glued to the TV remote control. Michael Carrier was a you-look-great-with-no-makeup, let-me-hold-your-hair-back-while-you're-sick, should-I-run-out-and-buy-more-toilet-paper kinda dreamboat.

Still lying in bed, Lindsey craned her neck and peered across the hall. She could see him now, innocently scrubbing a bicuspid. Scooting to the far edge of the bed for a closer view of him, she watched him with a blend of admiration and deep affection. But then her relative calm was disrupted when her pulse quickened. She suddenly felt a surge through her blood and sat bolt upright. An urge to protect Michael overcame her, and she was gripped with the feeling that she would instandy kill someone with her bare hands like a trained ninja if they ever tried to hurt him.

It happened sometimes, this protective feeling. She readily admitted it bordered on the psychotic. She loved Michael so intensely, nonsensically, and possessively that sometimes she felt murderous. Not that he was ever in danger, or even de-fenseless. Nor was she particularly skilled in martial arts. It's just that she loved him so much that she wanted to be the only person privy to his stupid jokes, Christopher Walken impersonations, and retro stash of Bjorn Borg era hosiery.

Yes, it was official. She was twitterpated.

She knew that sounded pathetic, sickeningly cutesy, and
Fatal Attraction-
esque. When she was single, if anyone had ever told her she would fall so hard for a guy that she'd be willing to wear his tube socks, she would have balked. But hey, here she was.

She felt her face get hot as her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. Looking across the hall once again, she watched Michael as he finished up his various grooming rituals. Overcome by the enormity of their domestic happiness, her tear ducts and sinuses began to feel prickly, and without warning she began to weep. What followed were not big sobs, but almost worse— the kind of crying where there was no sound at all, just hot tears and swollen, puffy eyelids, the kind that would require ice packs and teabags to look like a normal person again.

Michael came in and found her scrunched in the bed's corner, mashing Kleenex into her eye sockets.

"What's wrong?" he said, pulling the blankets up over both of them and wrapping his arm around her.

She didn't know how to explain her feelings. Instead of trying, all she could think to say was, "I forgot to tape
Zoolander
."

He hugged her for a moment, then said, "C'mon, we don't want to be late for your grandmother's party."

About an hour later, Lindsey found herself sitting in her parents' living room, staring at the prominently displayed statue of Buddha atop the television set. No Chinese home was complete without a fat-bellied, porcelain Buddha with children clamoring over his legs and shoulders, clutching his sacred love handles. But wasn't he supposed to be an ascetic who survived on only one grain of rice per day? This porcelain figure looked less like a holy man and more like Re-Run from
What's Happening
! She imagined if there was a pull-cord on the back of the statue's head, rather than, "
Om Mani Padme Hum"
he'd say, "Was happenin', Raj!"

Then he'd breakdance.

Lindsey's older brother, Kevin, suddenly emerged from one of the bedrooms, came down the hall and wandered over. He looked at the figurine and said, "I hate Buddhas. They scare me." Meandering away, he left Lindsey alone in the living room.

As she waited for Michael to come up from the garage, where he was replacing a washer on a sink at the behest of her mother, she slouched in the La-Z-Boy recliner. Fully sunken into the fake leather, she wondered what to expect this evening, not having spent time with her Owyang side of the family in quite some time. Her dad, Earl, was retiring and quiet like her grandparents, Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun, but her Auntie Geraldine and Uncle Elmore could always be counted on for entertainment.

Tonight being the occasion of Yun Yun's eighty-eighth birthday party, there was sure to be a certain amount of drama as relatives she hadn't seen for years would be coming to pay respect, offer lucky money, and devour all their
arare
crackers. Also, Yun Yun could always be depended on to spice up any occasion with a handful of well-timed, persnickety barbs, and Lindsey wondered which innocent bystanders would be stung this evening.

The first guest to arrive was Auntie Geraldine. Notorious for stealing food at parties, she scanned the room as soon as Lindsey opened the door, as if deducing which handy-sized hors d'oeuvres might fit conveniently inside her Louis Vuitton purse.

When Lindsey was younger, her aunt had looked like a Chinese Elizabeth Taylor circa 1973, and she hadn't been as obvious in her thievery. At family get-togethers she wore chiffony dresses and head scarves and took home regular portions of leftovers like everyone else. When Lindsey's parents hosted summer barbecues and roast beef dinners during the holidays, Auntie Geraldine used to politely ask, "Are you sure you have enough?" before taking small portions on a Chinet paper plate covered in foil.

Then one Fourth of July a whole platter of fried chicken disappeared, and shortly thereafter, on Labor Day, a clove-spiked ham evaporated, leaving just an ironstone platter with a puddle of rapidly coagulating gravy. Lindsey had quietly noticed a trail of crushed pineapple bits that led from the tablecloth to Auntie Geraldine's Le Sportsac.

Over the ensuing years Auntie Geraldine became quite adept at creating diversions to hide her culinary stockpiling. She would breeze into parties covered in jade and gold baubles so exquisite that everyone was fooled by her dazzle camouflage. They oohed and aahed at her perfectly manicured fingernails, like Barbra Streisand's at the end of
The Mirror Has Two Faces
, and were further distracted by the pamphlets she distributed about the joys of selling Amway products. Shortly thereafter, slabs of roast beef would disappear and rivulets of brown mushroom sauce could be seen dripping from her bell-shaped sleeves.

Sometimes, when an evening was well under way, Auntie Geraldine would go amissing. After having spent the evening sauntering back and forth between her Buick LeSabre and the party, incrementally stashing plates of filet mignon, turkey legs, and five-layer dip, she would save the most difficult items for last, perhaps trying to figure out how to safely and inconspicuously insert a five-layer cake under her muumuu. Lindsey watched everything from underneath the dining-room table.

The most daring of Auntie Geraldine's capers had been the Christmas when she crammed a pyramid of shish kebabs complete with skewers into her Mary Kay cosmetics travel case. She apparently thought no one was looking, and with her eyes twinkling with holiday mischief, was tiptoeing away like the Grinch stealing the Whoville Christmas tree when Lindsey suddenly woke up from a nap and asked,

"Where are you going with our dinner?"

With big eyes she waited for an explanation just like Cindy-Lou Who, or rather, Cindy-Liu Hu.

"Go back to sleep, dear," Auntie Geraldine said, and then stole into the December night.

With all the different things Auntie Geraldine had made disappear, Lindsey had figured the woman missed her calling as the best magician this side of David Copperfield. As she chuckled at the memories, she got up to replenish the celery sticks and Ranch dip. Restocking the baby carrots, she wondered why Uncle Ran, Auntie Geraldine's husband, wasn't here tonight. Since it had been years since she had last seen Uncle Ran at any family gathering, she figured that maybe he had developed agoraphobia, or maybe he was just buried in his living room under a mountain of hoarded party snacks.

Hmm. Uncle Ran was a recluse and Auntie Geraldine stole vats of Swedish meatballs. Lindsey wondered if all marriages dissolved beneath the weight of a couple's idiosyncrasies. Rumor was that when Uncle Ran and Auntie Geraldine first got together, they were great party hosts who danced the limbo and made killer mai tais. Then they got hitched, made the beast with two backs, and the next thing they knew there were a couple of
hen yoong bows
in the oven. Over the course of several years they went from serving Brazil nuts and rum in coconuts to buying Beechnut baby food and Nutter Butters. And now, they were just plain nuts. Was marriage really a journey that required an emergency stash of candied yams inside your dented sedan's glove compartment?

Just then, Lindsey heard a voice call out to her, "Don't be a jive turkey, give your uncle a hug!"

Uncle Elmore had arrived. He walked over and grabbed Lindsey's hand, then spun her around and dipped her. He hoisted her up, and she gagged in a cloud of Brut by Faberge.

Uncle Elmore was so thoroughly absorbed in his disco persona from 1975 that even now, thirty years later, he still danced the Latin Hustle and bemoaned the disappearance of fern bars. His personality was a blend of Boz Scaggs's aging cool and Bruce Lee's mystique, with a drop of Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire added for good measure. Tonight Lindsey noticed his perfectly blow-dried hair and his poly-blend shirt, which was unbuttoned one notch lower than what was currently considered respectable. Completely tan since the seventies, this evening he was sporting the "Crockett-Tubbs" look
from Miami Vice
.

"Dy-no-mite!" he exclaimed, to Lindsey's amusement. He added, "I might be getting older, but my niece still knows I'm ba-aad!"

Uncle Elmore was bad, all right. He wasn't technically divorced from his wife, Dee, but he haunted places like T.G.I. Friday's and asked girls half his age what their astrological sign was. At weddings, he always got embarrassingly drunk and either splashed wine on somebody or tried to make out with them, even if they were his blood relative.

Uncle Elmore often boasted of being mistaken for various movie stars such as George Hamilton and John Travolta, regardless of the fact that they weren't even Chinese. Although he was obviously deluded and his moral fiber was clearly made of macrame, he was generally accepted by the family as just an odd bird who marched to a different beat, a beat that invariably had something to do with the Bump or the Funky Chicken.

He took a seat on the vinyl sofa and clicked through the channels with the remote control. To no one in particular, he said, "Why did they
take Magnum P.I
. off the air? That dude was ba-aad!" Then, to Lindsey he said, "Hey, bring me a Ts-ingtao, would ya?"

By then, her cousin Belinda had wandered in. "Sorry about dat dad of mines," she said. Although she was capable of speaking normal English, Belinda had absorbed the specific patois of the San Francisco public school system. Her sentences often included purposely mispronounced words delivered with haughty machisma sprinkled with I'm-not-black-but-I-magically-speak Ebonics.

Belinda was a tough little dyke. But much to her chagrin, Uncle Elmore constantly criticized her for not wearing more makeup and tube tops. Last Halloween she dressed as Rambo, which left Uncle Elmore with quite a conundrum. Naturally he thought Stallone was ba-aad in every celluloid incarnation, from
The Lords of Flatbush
to
Rocky V
to
Judge Dredd
, but he still would have preferred his teenage daughter dressed up as Crissy from
Three's Company
, teetering on cork-heeled Candies instead of wearing a camouflage-patterned muscle-T and hoisting a plastic Uzi against a well-placed, bulging tube sock.

"You girls hurry on up with those drinks, now," Uncle Elmore said, eliciting a scowl from Belinda. As he turned back to the television, she flipped him the finger.

Lindsey patted her cousin's bicep. "It's okay," she said, then went into the kitchen to fetch her uncle's drink.

About half an hour later Lindsey and Michael were helping her mom extract an obstinate Jell-O concoction from a Tupperware mold. Lindsey heard a commotion in the living room, which meant that Yun Yun must have arrived. After running out to greet her, Lindsey could tell that she just had her hair coiffed in Chinatown because it was sprayed like a big, black, shellacked ball of cotton candy, making her look like a cartoon astronaut wearing a bubble helmet.

Yun Yun's face had the soft and puckered quality of an apricot that had been left to ripen too long on a windowsill. As Lindsey leaned in to kiss her cheek, her grandmother swatted her away like a gnat.