Buddha Baby (4 page)

Yun Yun often faked deafness for her own purposes, but this time her ears perked up across the room.

"
Chuy
! No pictures!"

She jabbed an arthritic finger in the air, startling Lindsey with her ferocity. Lindsey tried to think of something to say, but Yun Yun didn't give her a chance to speak.

"Always up to something," she said. "Why you try to ruin my birthday, I'll never know."

Someone should have warned Lindsey that under no circumstances should a grown
woman
ever agree to work at her old grammar school. She'd spent kindergarten through eighth grade at St. Maude's, and why she should want to go back was anyone's guess. Maybe she felt compelled to perform penance for all her venial sins. Maybe she was downright insane. Maybe she really needed $15.50 an hour plus health benefits.

Arriving at St. Maude's through a side entrance, Lindsey could hear the raucous sounds of children playing tag in the building's far quadrant. As she walked through the cast-iron gate, a small Chinese girl in a plaid uniform ran past her and burst through the double doors that led to the yard, her high-pitched squeal quickly merging with the other children's voices, which carried the frantic pitch of small-brained animals who could almost smell June, freedom, and impossibly fun days filled with petty crime and candy.

Lindsey walked through the foyer and down the gunmetal gray corridor, and then stopped for a moment in front of a gold gilt frame that held her favorite painting of Mary. She
gazed
at the sapphire blue cape draped across the Virgin's weary, feminine shoulders, and remembered how Sister Constance had once stated with authority that blue was Mary's favorite color. Although such a statement was ultimately improvable, Lindsey could see now that the old nun was onto something. Mary did look great in blue. Admiring the portrait of the saint, Lindsey noted that the Mother of God was definitely a "winter"—fabulous in jewel-toned clothing and potentially dismal in autumnal earth tones, which would have simply washed out that luminous, holy skin.

This painting of Mary had been good to Lindsey when she was a student. The saint had kept Lindsey's secrets and conveyed compassion in Lindsey's times of need. She may have been just a Chinese kid in Buster Browns and a ricebowl haircut, but disturbing signs of evil had lurked in her non-baptized, pagan baby heart.

The threat of mayhem, idolatry, and sloth had begun in kindergarten. On the first day of school, Sister Boniface, the classroom teacher, had searched all the Chinese kids' pockets for Buddhist trinkets such as beads, necklaces, prayer cards or anything else with the graven image of any non-Jesus entity. Not realizing that Buddhists were simply not as doodad-oriented as Catholics, the nun was disappointed when she found nothing but lint and plum wafer crumbs in their pockets. Determined to single out the unsaved, she suggested a quarantine for all the Chinese kids in the back corner of the classroom, but Sister Constance, the sixth-grade teacher and principal, countered that perhaps they should all be seated in the front row because their slanted eyes most likely made it difficult for them to see the chalkboard. Eventually, a think tank of nuns and priests decided to evenly distribute the Chinese kids among the Irish and Italian kids to better dilute their heathenness.

Thus thwarted, Sister Boniface didn't give up. She proceeded to single out the wee Chinese kindergarteners with threats of physical violence. For instance, any time a student whose last name began with an "O" and an apostrophe misbehaved, the nun was lenient. Furthermore, she ignored the shenanigans of any redhead. However, whenever any kid whose ancestors hailed from east of Palermo ever so much as uttered a peep out of turn, she let loose her inner rage-a-holic and threatened to "box their ears" or hang them upside down from the exposed ceiling pipes. When agitated, Sister Boniface's throat closed up and she sounded like the mayor of the Emerald City on helium. But instead of enthusiastically encouraging the children to follow a yellow brick road, she stared down at them, and slowly enunciated, "I… will… crush… you."

Rumor had it that Sister Boniface had come from Dublin after having planned all her life to join the Irish Republican Army. Instead, she decided to teach five-year-olds. Why was this diminutive nun at St. Maude's choking them by their collars and disciplining them with her Vulcan death grip instead of lobbing Molotov cocktails into Paddy's Pub?

Maybe it was because she was only four foot eight. She was barely taller than some of the children, and perhaps being that short made it tricky for her to balance a machine gun on her hip. So rather than planting bombs beneath Citroens, Sister Boniface educated children with jaunty little tales of hell and its environs. She caused deep feelings of dread in Lindsey who, even at age five, was very worried because she had never been dunked in a pool of holy water as a baby. Nor was she one of the majority of kids undergoing training to receive First Communion. Having been uncleansed of her infant sins and now facing the certainty of a waferless life, Lindsey knew that the best she could hope for, destiny-wise, would be a place among the Ethiopian babies in what sounded like a very crowded purgatory. She secretly hoped her soul had a slim chance of recovery if the old Italian ladies in church lit enough votives. Through the prayers of the devout, perhaps a rising tide of pity would lift all sinners in their rickety-ass dinghies. But Lindsey didn't count on it. Deep down inside, she knew she was doomed.

Around midyear, after having just mastered the alphabet, Lindsey seriously began to suspect that she was the Antichrist. The previous Sunday afternoon, she had watched
Rosemary's Baby
on television and discovered that she and the fruit of Satan's loins shared the same birthday, June 28. Roman Polanski had a hidden message for her: she was the child of the devil, and her true mother was a jackal.

Her fate, hell, was the end of the line. Hell smelled like newly tarred roofs and charbroiled rats. Up in heaven there would be parties, but St. Joseph would be too busy refilling his champagne flute with Veuve Clicquot to offer Lindsey a drop of water on her bloated, canker-sore-ridden excuse for a tongue.

Being non-Catholic and Chinese,
and
born on the same date as Mia Farrow's devil-child, Lindsey knew deep down inside that no matter how many good deeds she performed, she would end up in the Amityville Red Room with history's villains: Judas Iscariot, Adolf Hitler, and Yosemite Sam. God was a take-no-prisoners kinda guy. After all, look at the way he put the smackdown on Adam and Eve for sampling a measly apple.

Either one or both of her parents were obviously in cahoots with Satan. So with nowhere else to turn, Lindsey prayed to Mary. She implored the Virgin Mother that no one would ask her birthdate, and she begged for a grace period so she could figure out what to do. How much time would she need? Well, at least a few months, or until her real parents, Gomez and Morticia Addams, came to fetch her in their tricked-out hearse.

She prayed for weeks, but several Sundays later, another afternoon movie scared the bejeezus out of her. This time it was
The Exorcist
. She wondered why her parents let her watch such a movie, but then figured they were tipping her off about her evil core. Before bedtime she began checking her abdomen for raised welts that spelled "Help me," and if she had to pee in the middle of the night, she turned on all the lights and avoided mirrors so as not to see her own reflection, which was sure to resemble a guacamole-encrusted Linda Blair.

Lindsey suspected she would only have a few short years before her number came up. She had heard that puberty was a time when bodies changed and mysterious things called "hormones" kicked in. No doubt that's when her true evil self would begin to show. It made sense. Birds molted and developed adult feathers. Deer dropped their antlers, caterpillars became butterflies, and Lindsey would sprout horns and a pointy goatee. She begged Mary to make everything okay.

Soon after, she saw
The Omen
and began to check her scalp daily for the telltale
666
. For weeks she ran home from school and sat on the bathroom countertop with her stocking feet in the sink. Using her mother's handheld compact and the medicine cabinet mirror, she checked the back of her head, crown, and behind her ears for the mark of the beast. She also searched for the nubby horns she dreaded would protrude any day now, just like the back molars inside her mouth. She found nothing on her entire head except one single chin hair that convinced her that a goatee was beginning to sprout. To delay the inevitable, she plucked it with tweezers.

Back at school, Sister Constance made another confident proclamation about the preferences of Mary. She decreed that the Memorare and the Act of Contrition were the Virgin Mother's favorite prayers. Lindsey wondered if inside the convent there was a blue telephone that directly linked communications between the nuns and Mary. If the mayor of Gotham could give Batman a jingle any ol' time on the Bat Phone, was it really that far-fetched that there might be a Nun Phone with which Sister Constance could ring up the Mother of God at all hours and ask her personal trivia? When she wasn't pondering such possibilities, Lindsey devoted many diligent hours to the memorization and recitation of these two prayers, and whispered them to herself several times a day for weeks, months, and then years.

In addition, every morning Lindsey paused for a few moments in front of this same corridor painting, stopping to offer up a desperate plea for help to the Holy Mother. As time passed and her horns and goatee never did develop, she knew that someone had taken pity on her.

Good OP Mary. She was all about forgiveness, grace, and mercy. Or maybe she was just getting sick of seeing the same droopy Chinese kid every day. Either way, Lindsey was confident that Mary had her back. She, in turn, was eternally grateful.

Stepping away from the painting now, Lindsey made a little sign of the cross, which she hadn't done in years. She then hurried to the main office, removed her coat, and stuffed it into the staff closet. She smoothed down her appropriately drab attire: a below-the-knee wool skirt, argyle stockings, and black oxford shoes. With her ponytail and fresh-scrubbed complexion, all she needed now was a peplum blouse with a peter pan collar to look like an abnormally large kindergartner who had flunked about twenty grades.

She headed to the library for the Monday-morning staff meeting. Entering the spacious room, she squinted in the fluorescent light and selected an amaretto cookie from the tray of

Italian pastries. Nibbling over a napkin, she stood in the corner, afraid to mingle.

It was surreal enough to be standing once again in front of the bookcase where she had checked out many a Nancy Drew mystery. But it was even weirder to be surrounded by her childhood authority figures: Sister Boniface and Sister Constance were in the corner by the outdated globe; Mrs. Yee, the piano teacher, was teasing her wiglet with her long scarlet fingernails; Mrs. Mann, dean of the lower school, still looked exactly like a man; and Mrs. Grupico, the librarian-registrar, squatted like a bloated bullfrog behind her same old desk scarred by cigarillo burns.