Buddha Baby (27 page)

The woman took a sip of her drink, keeping one still, sparkling eye trained on Lindsey. She rattled the ice cubes in her glass and Lindsey, nervous, mistook the sound for her own chattering bones. Nervously, she reached for the red concoction on the tray in front of her and tasted it. It was a grenadine Shirley Temple.

Lindsey waited for the woman to tell her something extraordinary, like she was actually 280 years old, or a time traveler. She imagined seeing the old woman's likeness in an old documentary, perhaps in some film footage about Hearst Cas-tle, where she would have easily fit in playing tennis with Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill.

Lindsey gulped her drink. She knew there had to be an "only in San Francisco" kind of story going on in this decrepit house filled with such terrifying junk.

She waited in silence as her eyes darted around the room, noticing a collection of scorpion-under-glass paperweights and a stuffed emperor penguin in the corner. Jilan had run off, leaving Lindsey and the old woman alone, sipping their beverages until finally, the woman spoke.

"My name is Mrs. Clemens. I was raised by Chinese, right here in this house," she said. "My daughter too, before she moved to Abilene, Texas, and changed her name. Now she teaches at your school, has been teaching some years. Didn't talk to me for a long while. Had things all figured out. Didn't want nothing to do with this family, or this house. But now she's not so tough. She adopted a girl from China. That's Jilan, who, as you can see, lives with me now."

Lindseys inner monologue took off.
I am at Ms. Abilene's house. I should have figured she was raised in a haunted mansion filled with snarling, dead animals. No wonder she's nuts. Andjilan is her kid? I've got to get out of here immediately and call Child Protective Services. What weird shit goes on here? And… why am
I
here
?

Lindsey actually blurted this last question out loud. The old woman sat back and sipped her drink for a moment longer.

The woman's head jiggled around like a bobblehead on a dashboard. Finally, she answered carefully, "Let's just say… someone asked me to keep an eye on you."

For all Lindsey knew, this old lady was one of Michael's octogenarian fans. He was always attracting elderly gals who needed help, just like at the grocery store. Perhaps the old woman had seen him on the street one day and asked him to help her get across. Or maybe he was walking by and she asked him to help bury a body for her in the backyard. Who knows. But why would Michael have asked the old woman to keep an eye on her?

Before Lindsey could inquire further, Mrs. Clemens said,

"Was a time, all good San Francisco homes had Chinese. Cooking, cleaning, raising the children."

Lindsey interrupted, "Yeah, but wasn't that back in the eighteen hundreds? How old are you, anyway?"

She knew her question was rude, but it just popped out. She started to apologize, but the old woman let out a whooping holler, a screaming kind of merriment that bordered on a howling wail of insanity, like Laughing Sal at the Musee Mechanique.

"Well, ain't we all big for our britches!"

Lindsey nodded, wondering when her acid trip was going to fizzle out. She sipped her drink down to the bottom of the ice and placed her empty glass on the silver tray.

"Let's back up," Mrs. Clemens said, smiling now. "What else would you like to ask me?"

Lindsey was still digesting the Jilan/old lady/Ms. Abilene connection. She said, "Where did all these dead—I mean, stuffed—animals come from?"

The woman patted her pompadour. "Ain't they something? My family's been in San Francisco a long time. My Granny Mae was in the
entertainment
business, shall we say. She was an old friend to Mr. Adolph Sutro—you hearda him—and when his home out by the ocean shut down in thirty-nine, she inherited most of this stuff. Made our house famous for its decor. Mae's Menagerie, is what the men used to call it."

Lindsey wasn't quite sure what the woman was trying to tell her, but had a pretty fair idea.

Mrs. Clemens looked at Lindsey with a twinkle in her eye. She said, "But really. Call it what you want. It was a long time ago, and the house hasn't been that sorta thing around here since way before you was born. But still. It was a good business for a while and someone had to do it. Did you know there used to be upwards of five hundred whorehouses in the San Francisco city limits? Cornichon?"

"No thank you."

The old woman popped a pickled nub in her mouth, then munched on some cocktail onions.

"Our decor made things a little more memorable. Sally Stanford, Mabel Malotte—you hearda them? They were good gals. Sometimes I think about opening up this place as a museum, but reputations, you never know…"

Lindsey felt nauseous from the syrupy drink. "I think I should go now," she said, abruptly standing up.

The woman looked at her with amused eyes.

"Is that so? Well, there's plenty more I gots to tell you, so when you feel better, you come and see me."

Lindsey took a few steps toward the door, then ran out of the room and catapulted herself toward the hallway banister. Careening down the stairs, she reached the bottom of the landing and heard Jilan's high-pitched, sweet goodbye float over her head. Either the portrait of the wolfhound or the shutting of the heavy door made a
whoofing
sound as she escaped the cavernous house. Stepping out into the sunlight, she headed home.

A few days later, Lindsey was still flipped out about having met Ms. Abilene's mom. She tried to call Michael at the Psychic Food Ashram several times, but there was only a recording with space music playing in the background. She didn't want to blow his cover, so all she could do was leave a series of hang-ups and hope he psychically got the message to call home.

Meanwhile, she was getting lonely. One balmy evening after work, she found herself walking down the street with Dustin. They had decided to meet spontaneously, and were strolling down the street near her house, eating ice-cream cones.

Dustin was like Niagara Falls. She had read recently that the awe-inspiring majesty of the site somehow inspired fairly happy, well-adjusted people to jump into the rushing water and end it all. Dustin had the same effect on her. Something about him just sucked her in. As they walked in the last light of dusk, Lindsey glanced sideways every few moments to check him out, and the sight of his pink tongue against the drippy vanilla made her feel tingly. Down there.

Between licks, Dustin said, "So, have you given it any more thought?"

"What?" Lindsey asked, biting into her sugar cone.

"Marrying me."

She figured he was just taunting her to get her all riled up. "Aw, shut up," she said.

"Don't you like the idea that I'd be your first Chinese boyfriend and you'd be my first Chinese girlfriend? And besides, we wouldn't have to get engaged right away," he said. Giving her a little shove, he added, "I'd have to get in your panties before I really decided if I like you."

"What part of 'I'm already engaged' do you not understand? And hello, I thought friends aren't supposed to give each other ultimatums."

Dustin stopped walking and reached out to touch her arm. He brought his face so close to hers that the tips of their noses almost touched. He said, "I don't want to be just friends."

Lindsey felt her stomach drop. She twisted away from him and kept moving without saying anything. Her mind began to race.

Dustin satisfied a certain part of her that had been dormant for a while. It was a side of herself she'd abandoned in college, and he made her feel more like her younger, more carefree, more stupid self. Being with him reminded her how entire relationships could be forged and sustained with well-aimed put-downs that sparked an inflammation that started in the ego and traveled down to the groin. She missed competitive flirting, and had to admit it had been a while since she felt this nervous around Michael.

In a lot of ways, Dustin was no better than a Hoarder of All Things Asian who fetishized her because she was Chinese. He was constantly talking about how he'd only ever dated white girls. In fact, his pride in this "achievement" suggested that he might be some kind of Hoarder-in-reverse.

All of these variables confused her, compounded by the fact that she couldn't deny that she liked the way he moved. No Chinese guy had ever liked her before, and that, in itself, was a novelty. Was she no better than he, curious to know what it would be like to do the nasty with a Chinese person? Was it even possible to fetishize your own race?

Just then they stepped into the intersection and a middle-aged, Chinese woman in a convertible Mercedes-Benz slowed to a stop. She waited for them to pass, smiled and watched them for a long second before slowly accelerating. Lindsey briefly wondered if she knew the woman. She was fairly certain that she didn't.

Another block later, Lindsey was still thinking of the Chinese woman in the Mercedes. The eye contact between them had lasted only a moment, but something about the exchange was more than just a motorist allowing pedestrians to pass. Something in the way the woman looked at them, smiling and nodding with appreciation, made Lindsey feel slightly uncomfortable. Her uneasiness had everything to do with Dustin.

When Lindsey was with him, she never noticed strangers giving them hostile looks, the kind she sometimes got when she was with Michael. Rather, walking side by side with Dustin, she noticed subtle nods of approval, and not just from old Chinese people. In the course of the ten blocks they walked from the ice-cream parlor, complete strangers—white, black, Asian, and Latino—had taken one look at Dustin and Lindsey together and not blinked an eye. Maybe she imagined it, but she could have sworn that some of them had sent barely detectable messages of approval with their split-second glances and adjustments in body language. The few smiles and looks they received in just a few short blocks made her feel a little freaked out and tapped one of her deepest insecurities. It was something that no one had ever come right out and said, but it loomed over her anyway, all her life. Even if it wasn't an absolute law, she knew that deep down inside people thought it but didn't necessarily say it:
A Chinese should be with a Chinese
.

In contrast, when Lindsey was with Michael, passersby talked all kind of smack, right to their faces. It happened more often than she liked to admit. Although Michael was a quarter Chinese, his appearance never struck anyone as anything but white, and their pairing of races seemed to push people's buttons like a passing motorcycle setting off car alarms. Jerks hung out of cars and called out, "Hey geisha," and once, "Go back to Korea!" Even hipsters jokingly called them "John and Yoko."

She hadn't ever mentioned it to Michael, but a couple of times when he had stepped away from her for a second, to go into a store or to pay for gas, strangers had approached her and said, "What are you trying to prove?" and "What, Asian guys aren't good enough for you?" She had gotten it from both sides, white people and Asians alike. It was simultaneously weird and tiresome to be at the grocery store, in the car, or on the sidewalk and, at any given moment, have someone say something or give a look that made her feel forced to defend her relationship. Michael and Lindsey didn't consider their union an aggressive political statement. But people all over, at any given time, felt free to offer their commentary. One time a lady walked up to them in a Chinese restaurant and said, "Good for you," and a homeless guy had once said, "Love is color-blind! Got a quarter?"