Buddha Baby (7 page)

Sister Constance immediately noticed the ruckus and stopped the math lesson. In her trilling singsong voice, like the haughty, deep-throated goose from
Charlotte's Web
, she said, "Bring that he-ere…" The whole class stopped what they were doing and breathlessly awaited what might happen next.

Lindsey stood up to bring the eraser to Sister Constance, but the nun waved her aside and said, "Not yoo-hoo. The boy. I want to see the bo-oy."

Even back then Sister Constance resembled a salt-and-pepper cartoon dachshund with a mustache and a habit. With her long snout and imperious demeanor, she looked exactly like the Doggie Diner logo. Her socks were frequently mismatched from either getting dressed in her dark convent hovel or tossing back a few too many Long Island iced teas in the faculty lounge. As Dustin listlessly trudged up the aisle like a death row inmate headed for the electric chair, Sister Constance dangled her black-stockinged foot out of her shoe with flirtatious abandon, savoring the approach of her beloved.

Everyone watched as Dustin made the familiar pilgrimage to her podium. When he reached the front of the classroom, he stood a few feet away from the nun.

"Come closer, Mr. Lee," Sister Constance said. She then proclaimed that his "enormous length" from her and his "flaccid posture" were a disgrace.

"Come forward and be erect, Mr. Lee," she commanded.

Once poor Dustin stepped within reach, Sister Constance grabbed him. She held his hands outstretched like he was J. C. on the cross, and silently devoured him with her bulging peepers as he stood helplessly and pleaded, "Sister, please."

Within seconds Sister Constance secured him in an amorous headlock, pressing his head into her woolen-cloaked bosom. While he attempted to hold his face to the side, Sister Constance stroked his hair, and like a purebred canine whose incestuous pedigree had warped its mind, she swayed back and forth and hummed Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour." Cradled thusly, poor Dustin's head looked like a swollen, brown cabbage, as she stroked his neck and ears muttering, "Such a beautiful boy, such a shame to be so cheeky. Cheeky, cheeky boy. Such a shame to be acting the maggot."

Later that day out on the playground at lunchtime, Dustin resumed his teasing of Lindsey. He pointed at her robotically and said, "Chinese rat eater!"

When she didn't respond, Dustin went into a manic, Robin-Williams-as-Mork routine and started spastically flailing his arms and insisting that Chinese people ate rats for dinner every night.

Why was he calling her a Chinese rat eater, when he himself was Chinese? She wasn't able to decide which was more galling, his accusation or his voluntary affiliation with anything having to do with Robin Williams. Meanwhile, a circle of sixth and seventh graders formed around them.

The previous Sunday, Lindsey had seen
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
? The image of the dead rat on the silver salver stuck in her consciousness. While kids began to congregate around them, she was mortified to think that anyone believed her family ate fricasseed rats instead of McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwiches which, at that time, happened to be all the rage amongst the St. Maude's preteen cognoscenti.

"Rodent eater!" Dustin said again, with Orkian detachment.

Standing there she thought of all the different kinds of rodents and how they might be prepared in Chinese cooking. She imagined marmots in black bean sauce, sweet 'n' sour gerbils, Peking squirrel with hoisin sauce, chipmunks cubed in a dry wok, and chinchilla chow fun.

She was not a rodent eater. Nor did she know any Chinese people who ate rats. As she considered what she might do next, it seemed, somehow, that the pride of her people was at stake.

The circle of kids closed in tighter around them.

Before her brain could talk her arm out of it, with dead calm, Lindsey picked up her
Dukes of Hazzard
lunchbox, wound back like she'd seen Atlee Hammaker do at Candlestick Park, and swung her weight forward, pivoting from the hip so her arm carried the full force of her body. She clocked Dustin square across the chin with her lunchbox. The sound of industrial-strength metal catching against his tooth enamel was quite unique.

"YEAH!" Cheers erupted from all around. Kids who hated Dustin slapped Lindsey on the back and offered her congratulatory remarks.

She noticed the bloody cut on her victim's chin and couldn't believe what she'd done. The kids began shoving Dustin and started chanting, "Rat Boy! Rat Boy!"

Stunned, Dustin still managed to affect his robot-voice and said, "I am not a rat. I am a homosapien."

Peals of laughter erupted. "He's a homo! He says he's a homo!"

"No! Not homosexual
, homosapien
. I am a homosapien like all of you…" He tried to explain the difference in meanings, but at the word "sexual" his audience howled even louder.

Like Mork from Ork at the end of each show, Dustin began tugging on his ears and exclaiming, "Na-nooh, na-nooh! Na-nooh, na-nooh!"

His defeat at the hands of a girl, his allusion to homosexuality, his Texan-ness, and his all-around dorkiness invisibly sparked what happened next. A mob of hormone-fueled preteens swept Lindsey aside, then proceeded to kick and pummel Dustin every which way they knew how. Girls yanked his hair, boys socked him in the face, and Franklin Ng performed an impressive, kung fu flying kick to the groin. Lindsey stood aside and watched the whole melee unfold like Shirley Jackson's
The Lottery
.

At 1:20 P.M., Dustin Lee lay in a crumpled heap. A few minutes later, Lindsey's class returned to their homeroom and Sister Constance noticed immediately that her beautiful boy was missing. Lindsey watched from the window as a few nuns hurried out from the convent to scrape him off the playground asphalt. When his silent whimpers turned to pained wails, Lindsey was relieved to know that she hadn't killed him.

That was the last day she saw Dustin Lee until today. Over the years she had, in fact, thought of him a couple of times, but mostly out of guilt. She'd wondered if the creepy romance that Sister Constance inflicted upon him had sent him off the deep end. She once speculated that he was dead, perhaps killed in a Texas tornado.

Well, now she knew. He was alive and well and living in San Francisco.

Walking home from St. Maude's the next day, Lindsey peeled off a few layers of clothes as she sweltered in the afternoon sunlight. It had been damp and cold that morning, but now all the fog had burned off and retreated to the coastline, leaving just a few puffy clouds in the distance.

She was beginning to regret having told her dad she would spend the upcoming weekend helping clean Yeh Yeh and Yun Yun's house. In theory, she thought it was great that Chinese families were tightly knit and valued togetherness, but in reality she dreaded spending her Saturday unloading cases of Depends and Metamucil, having to make sure she kept a tight lid on her casual swearing for fear that Yun Yun might catch her uttering the f-word and administer a swift knuckle to her head.

As she crossed the Panhandle, Lindsey surveyed the street lined with Victorian houses. All the buildings looked as if they were painted in either 1875 or 1975, she couldn't decide which. One house was the curry-ochre of a Hari Krishna's dusted forehead, another the hue of a Willy Wonka peanut butter candy, and a few paces up ahead, a faded bungalow reminded her of a melted Creamsicle.

Crossing the street to avoid an oncoming hippie in a poncho, Lindsey made her way toward the intersection and passed a decrepit, pink mansion perched high on a cement foundation. She was admiring the impressive stone wall on the building's west side, when she had the sudden, eerie sensation of someone watching her.

Even without looking around, Lindsey had a hunch who it was. Over the last few weeks she had grown familiar with a certain pair of eyes that had been following her. Although overheated just minutes before, she now felt a chill around her neck.

The eyes belonged to an elderly Caucasian woman who lived somewhere in the neighborhood. Lindsey could see her now up ahead, her tiny, slippered feet visible just beyond a camellia bush. She seemed to be waiting, slowly biding her time—for what, Lindsey didn't know. She never said anything, but now that Lindsey spotted her, the snow-haired lady began to walk. Today she wore a lacy periwinkle shawl that rested on her sparrow shoulders, and the silky fringe of her wrap brushed the sidewalk, barely skimming the concrete.

Lindsey was fairly used to seeing the woman around, but each time she encountered the lady on the route to or from home she felt a skin-crawling twinge. The woman was like the garden statue of the prowling jaguar that Lindsey sometimes passed on Steiner Street. Both were gray specters that never touched her, but seemed to be watching her every move. Any time Lindsey passed either of them they bid a silent hello, one carved in still stone and the other, the human one, gazing through her with sparkling, amethyst eyes.

She didn't know the woman's name or where she lived, but Lindsey watched as she shuffled slowly in her low, silver shoes. When the woman turned and tilted her head a bit, Lindsey re-crossed the street and disappeared behind a hollyhock to avoid being followed.

Many blocks later, Lindsey spotted the rounded turret of her apartment building. She ran up the steps and slipped the key into the lock of the brass faceplate. Once behind the leaded-glass panel of the front door, she finally felt safe.

Michael came home about an hour later and flopped down on the sofa, smelling of burnt plastic and fake butter.

He said, "One of the protein-starved interns forgot about her popcorn in the microwave and set off a trans-fat explosion in the office kitchen."

"Let me guess, she was smoking on the stairs while reading
Optimal Health.'"

"Actually, someone told me they saw her in the bathroom trying to purge herself of some lime-flavored Pop Rocks because she realized they contained gelatin and hence, weren't vegan."

Lindsey smiled, almost missing the antics of her former workplace. She and Michael had met at
Vegan Warrior
magazine, where he was an editor and she had been the receptionist. She never really fit in with the group of militant vegetarians and could barely tolerate the mandatory "lifestyle sessions" on Friday afternoons, when they had to endure poetry slams and hackeysack tournaments. She couldn't understand how Michael could stand it, and she was actually kind of glad when she was ousted after being caught red-handed gnawing on a pork chop she had brought for lunch. Working at St. Maude's now, at least all she had to worry about was not eating meat on Fridays instead of hiding her carnivorous habits every day of the week.

Michael stretched out on the couch and patted the cushion beside him, signaling for her to come sit near him.

He rubbed his chin. "What else? The Druid wants me to use up all my rolled-over weeks of vacation time. Says it's a financial liability or something. Can you take time off? Maybe we could go to New Orleans and visit my parents."

Lindsey shook her head. "I'm too new at both my jobs. I haven't accrued any days off from either St. Maude's or the museum."