Buddha Baby (38 page)

As a writer, I spend a lot of time in my head thinking about the backgrounds and idiosyncrasies of my characters. Sometimes it's hard to decide which details to leave to the readers' imaginations and what to include. Believe me, I could go on for several chapters about germphobia, but it's got to stop somewhere. (Note to reader: When staying at a hotel, always spray the remote control with Lysol before touching it.)

In this book I really wanted to show the closeness between Lindsey and Michael, and how they sometimes got into little fights. But I eventually realized the following scenes needed to be filed under T.M.I
.—
too much information. So sit back down and enjoy a live broadcast from the cutting-room floor, starring Lindsey Owyang and Michael Cartier in these original deleted scenes
:

Monday morning, Lindsey awoke to discover that Michael smelled like pepperoni. She was spooning him in bed and had her cheek against his shoulder when, barely awake, she detected the fine aroma of something kinda spicy, kinda meaty. She leaned in for another sniff. Yep, definitely something porky going on there.

Now, Lindsey was familiar with the notion that white peo-ple had a different smell from Chinese people. Michael was a quarter Chinese on his mother's side, but maybe in the olfactory category that other three fourths just dominated. She detected the faintest whiff of something else, perhaps mayonnaise. She tugged the sheet down and smelled his shoulder. Hmm. Bologna?

Perhaps she was confusing her affection for Michael with her undeniable enthusiasm for pork products, but these discoveries were what a person risked for domestic bliss. No one could smell like CK One all the time. She'd heard that Eskimos had more than a hundred names to describe snow, and as she took a couple more sniffs of her sleeping boyfriend, she wondered if the Chinese language had different words to describe the various ways white people smelled.

"What are you doing?" Michael said, then turned over.

Lindsey looked at him, startled. "Nothing. Um, you smell like Miracle Whip."

"What?" he said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"Maybe it's more like Spam," she said, sniffing his face.

"Get off me," he said, pushing her away.

"I don't think it's a matter of what you ate for lunch or dinner. It's just a white-people thing," she said.

Michael looked at her like she was nuts.

She continued, "Don't be too offended. Some Chinese people seem to smell naturally of mothballs."

"Just because you have no scent at all, doesn't mean you can pick on everybody else," he said.

Michael got out of bed and pulled a T-shirt over his head. He glanced at some of Lindsey's socks that were strewn on the floor. Picking them up, he said, "Have you worn these? Are they clean or dirty? Why don't you put them away?" He tossed them on top of the dresser. "Your clothes are everywhere," he grumbled.

As Michael went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, Lindsey scampered after
him. She tried to explain: "I have different stacks of clothes around the bedroom according to their level of cleanliness: just-out-of-the-washer clean, worn-once clean, clean-enough-but-only-to-wear-outside-the-house, and not-dirty-enough-to-wash-but-okay-to ride-on-the-bus clean." Michael said, "Whatever, Howard Hughes," then got into the shower.

Lindsey crawled back into bed and wondered just how irritated Michael was. She felt bad. Maybe she was crazy, or maybe it was a Chinese thing, this germ concern. Lying there, she thought about the fourteen-year-old Chinese girls she saw spitting by the high school. Who taught them to do that? They acted like spitting was as natural as smoking. Why did Chinese people spit everywhere? For a moment she wondered if, in some twisted way, spitting was considered sanitary. God forbid those germs were actually
in your mouth
. Of course you had to spit them out! And not in a handkerchief, but on the street. In China there were laws against spitting on the sidewalk because the blobs froze and pedestrians slipped on them. There weren't laws against spitting because
it was disgusting
but because people slipped.

Michael was out of the shower in a quick three minutes, then back in the bedroom getting dressed for work.

Lindsey sat up. "I'm sorry I said that you smell like Spam." Grabbing his keys, Michael headed for the door. "Wait!" she called. "What?"

She hesitated, then launched into a more extensive apology, "I'm a freak, I know. But I'm working on it. See, I could have told you I noticed you're leaving the house without going to the bathroom, and you know how I feel about public toilets. So many hideous possibilities: no toilet paper, backsplash, gross smells. But see, I didn't mention it because I'm trying not to be such a freak. And last night, before you got into bed, I didn't even ask if you had used a public toilet, and if you did, I didn't ask if you made sure to cover the seat with the protective paper shield. I didn't say anything. I just let you get into bed. See? I'm getting better—"

"I HAVE TO GO!" Michael said, then ran down the steps.

Lindsey ran to the window and was about to yell out that she loved him. He stopped and turned on the sidewalk to see if she was there, and seeing that she was, blew her a kiss.

I used to have recurring nightmares about being back in school even though I was already grown up. Unlike Lindsey, I never took a job at my grammar school, but I did, in fact, work at my old high school for one year. Incidentally, the dreams stopped immediately. Life, however, had become surreal I just didn't feel quite right about calling Mr. Simon and Madame Donalds "Steve" and "Midge." I couldn't walk up to the headmaster and be like, "Yo, Al, wanna get some coffee?" No, no, no.

The following scene was supposed to be near the end, but didn't make the final cut:

Monday morning at work, Lindsey alleviated her feelings of loneliness by getting high off the fumes from the ink of the ditto machine. Who knew why, after all these years, the nuns still used the mimeograph instead of the digital copier? Maybe wielding the hand-crank of the old contraption kept their slapping arms in top form and brought a little extra-credit suffering to daily life.

At St. Maude's, outdated technology was somehow regarded as more pious than state-of-the-art machinery. Actually, Lindsey had a theory that the nuns kept their old ways because they, too, were addicted to the pleasant, incidental highs that could be had in an antiquated workplace. Who needed colorless, odorless glue, when rubber cement did the job and gave off those soothing, stress-reducing fumes? Noting the office was strangely quiet, Lindsey imagined all the penguins huddled in the infirmary sniffing Liquid Paper and doing shots of Robitussin.

Lindsey held a couple of loose-leaf pages to her nose and inhaled deeply. As she enjoyed the astringent vapors that rose off the damp sheets of paper, she read Sister Constance's instructions for the day. The jubilee was fast approaching, and it was up to Lindsey to locate hundreds of missing alumni.

Glancing over the long list of names, she wondered how Sister Constance could expect her to track down all of them. Some addresses and phone numbers hadn't been updated for ten to twenty years, and she didn't have the slightest idea how long it would take to find the ones with such common names, like "Mark Wong." It was going to take a lot of legwork on her part to dig up the hiding places of her fellow Marauders, and it seemed like a lot of trouble just to invite them to the school's Welcome-Back-We-Still-Think-You're-Sinners-but-Now-Desperately-Need-Your-Money jubilee.

Lindsey, Mrs. Grupico, and Mrs. Mann were all sharing the task of finding the wayward alums. Lindsey was not privy to how the lists were divided, but Mrs. Grupico seemed to have laid claim to tracking down all the Italians, while Mrs. Mann took on the Irish and occasional Portuguese. As for Lindsey, she supposed it made some sense, but she was still a bit annoyed that she was assigned the list of Chinese names, as if her non-fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin could possibly come in handy.

Working from a mimeographed list with random updates from sporadic years scrawled in the margins, she crosschecked addresses and phone numbers with Internet directories and the telephone book. As she plodded through the tedious work, the only thing that kept her from going nuts was listening to the
Hits of the Eighties
compilation CD that Dustin had given her.

In
The Dim Sum of All Things
, I mentioned that Lindsey was really into music from the eighties. One song that really captured that era was
88 Lines About 44 Women
by The Nails. I imagined that this was one of the tunes on the CD that Dustin burned for her, and I pictured Lindsey toiling away at work while the song became etched on her brain with repeated listenings. With so many people to call about the reunion, to help remember who was who, she wrote her notes in the same format as the song:

Nelson was a dirty boy

He took a crap then disappeared

Glenn Wong was gone after lunch

Murdered by nuns, everyone feared

Franklin was a gay guy

Was always stylish, avoided perms

Johnny barfed in the yard

Spaghetti-Os like chewed-up worms

Jeff Lee was a round-head boy

He cracked his melon on the sink

Debbie looked like a baboon

Kids used to call her "missing link"

Nellie had a skin disease

Left little flecks atop her desk

Hoover ate paste at recess

His fingers bled, left a mess

Anselm Chin was one bad-ass mo-fo

He didn't take no shit at all (Uh-uh. Not Anselm.)

Melvin had moved to Chicago

Would fly back to see the gang

Oliver would donate some food

From his restaurant, House of Wang

Helmond was a stoner surfer

On the phone he fell asleep

Tiffany was overtly shy

Didn't utter a single peep

Ingrid was a renowned doctor

Busy at UCSF

Raymond, always good at sports

Worked for the NBA as a ref

Alex had a wife named Jing

Who spoke no English—please call back

Pam bragged about her boob job

Couldn't wait to show off her rack

Kelvin Toy was so excited, said

Sure, he'd be there in a jiffy

William sounded oh-so-snobby

When called "Bill" he got miffy

Ulysses was way more friendly

Said he'd make it if he could

Clarence was a total pervert

Said right now he had stiff wood

Lonnie worked the graveyard shift

Voice mail said, "Call back at nine"

Jimmy was like Uncle Elmore

Said, "Don't jive me, what's your sign?"

Sergio couldn't talk now

A baby slept in his lap

Morris was an angry man

Darren split, moved to L.A.

His mom gave no address or phone

Yong was eating chicken wings

Heard him gnawing on a bone

Arthur was a busy dad

Babies crying in the background

Dirk was a heavy breather

Wouldn't talk, he made no sound

Lindsey called all these people and caught them at odd moments. She talked to mouth-breathers, people who were eating, and others who felt free to tell her the most random information:

Ruthie worked at Safeway now

She was the store's fastest checker

Humphrey Chang was a bus driver

Now he drove a double-decker

Garren Chew was another boy

Worked in TV, won an Emmy

Arnold had a funny face

Like a Chinese Steve Buscemi

Horatio raced motorbikes