Stealing Buddha's Dinner (15 page)

“Who do you think they are? The picketers, of course.” They carried plain signs—“FAIR WAGES! SUPPORT YOUR TEACHERS!”—as they walked back and forth, looking nothing like Tom Joad or Casey or Ma or Rosasharn. Things only got exciting when parents drove by, at which point the teachers started jumping and waving their signs. If they saw a scab they screamed, “Scab!” No one paid them any attention. No paid-off cops came to arrest them.

Vinh and I marched alongside Rosa and the other women for a while. It was early September and hot out, and we soon lamented not having any candy to keep us going. Other teachers showed up with thermoses of coffee, talking in serious tones about the lack of response from the superintendent. They looked indignant, and I rallied myself to feel the outrage I had felt when cops tried to arrest Tom's friend for “agitating,” and when Casey got hit with the pick handle. I thought about how big corporations kept lowering wages, knowing that there were people waiting, and hungry enough, to take any worker's place. I tried to imagine Ma Joad among these teachers, walking heavily in her faded calico print dress.

The teachers ended the strike two weeks later with only some of their demands met. I started school mostly worried that my classmates were already sailing far ahead of me. Cliques might have been formed, desks decorated and arranged. I would be the odd one out, the one anxious to find a seat in the cafeteria, the one having to court all over again the blue-eyed girls who held the keys to popularity.

As it happened, Holly said the scabs had been like substitute teachers. They'd spent the days reading and drawing and going over last year's easy math. I hadn't missed much at all. At recess on my first day back I felt so comfortable that I bragged that I had joined the picket line, until Jamie Taylor, who always dressed up as a princess for Halloween and whose mother had once sent her to school with a platter of homemade rosette cookies dusted with powdered sugar, called me a Communist. When I denied it she shrugged and said, “Your
mom's
a Communist.”

“She is not,” I said, thinking of how Rosa spoke of Communists with foreboding in her voice, and how she warned me that if they “took over” we would have no more liberties.

Jamie Taylor pointed out, “You're the only one whose mom didn't let her come to school during the strike.”

Her words reinforced the shame I already felt: I did not have a mother who stayed home to clean the bathrooms and bake angel food cakes. Rosa worked downtown, near the “bad” part of the city, directing GED and ESL classes at the Hispanic Institute. She liked to bring us kids there on weekends and after school, to help run the mimeograph machine and tidy up the classrooms. The building had been an elementary school in the sixties and now it seemed to soak up dust on every surface. Grime coated the windows and gritted the vinyl floors. Inside the main hall, someone had painted a fantastic mural in the style of Diego Rivera. A bald eagle and a brown-faced man faced each other, and around them groups of American Indians, African-Americans, and Latino-Americans looked on, wearing proud, impassioned expressions. Above them a banner unscrolled the words “We the People of America” and
“Viva la raza!”
The vending machines stood near the mural, so I spent a lot of time staring at it. I felt the bold eyes watching me; the colors—all browns and russets streaked with red—followed me down the hall as I wandered in and out of classrooms, looking for something to read, teaching myself the Spanish words for the months and days. I scanned bilingual education phrase books. We had some at home, including one devoted to explanations of American idioms like “go jump in a lake” or “get out of town.” My father always got these wrong. When he didn't know the answer to something he'd shrug and say, “Beat me.”

The previous year Rosa had enrolled me in an evening cake-decorating class. While she caught up on paperwork in her office, I and a half dozen middle-aged Mexican-American women learned how to mix buttercream frosting and use silver nozzles fastened onto pastry bags to create stars, letters, and flowers. For my final project I decorated a cake with a pink unicorn prancing in a field of violets. I enjoyed the class—the murmur of the ladies fretting over their scalloped borders, the swirl of dye into frosting, the effort involved in each sugar rose. But it frustrated me that I could never frost a cake in even waves the way the women on commercials and in the Sunday coupons did. Their round two-layer confections, lavishly coated in Betty Crocker whipped frostings, never sloped or showed crumbs. I became convinced that such talents lay only in the hands of white mothers in aprons. To me, life lived in commercials
was
real life. Commercials were instructions; they were news. They showed me what perfection could be: in the right woman's hands, the layers of a cake would always be exactly the same size. In the right woman's kitchen, a cartoon rabbit would visit the children and show them how to slurp down a tall glass of Nestlé Quik with a straw. A shaken cruet would spill a stream of Good Seasons over hills of lettuce leaves. Commercials had a firm definition of motherhood, which almost all of my friends' mothers had no trouble fulfilling. They swept floors and scrubbed bathtubs. They cooked casseroles and washed dishes. They had smooth, sensible pageboy hairstyles and serene smiles. They set the dinner tables every night and sang Cinderella songs and taught their children where to sit.

My siblings and I were always plaguing Rosa to buy things we saw on TV. Instead of the generic raisin bran and Toasty-O's, which came in big bags that were slung onto the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle, we campaigned for Trix, Cookie Crisp, Franken Berry, and Count Chocula. We begged for any kind that came with buried trinkets—stickers, spokes, tattoo stamps. We created our own ads for orange juice, reenacted the commercials for Life cereal (Vinh always played Mikey), and sang the Carnation Instant Breakfast song: “You're gonna love it in an instant!”

On rare weekends, Rosa or Crissy made pancakes or French toast with blueberries we had picked and frozen the previous summer. That's when the trusty bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's syrup came out. I loved that her body was the bottle, which seemed both perverse and alluring. In the commercials, when kids talked to her she came to life, her arms gesturing regally as she spoke. I waited for her to speak to me, too, staring at her placid face to will her to life. Sometimes, too, I shouted “Hey, Kool-Aid!” but the giant pitcher of Mr. Kool-Aid never did come crashing through a wall of our house.

Most of all, I would have given so much to have the Pillsbury Doughboy appear in our kitchen. He would bounce across the counter like a living marshmallow and wave his wee rolling pin at me. His puffy white chef's hat would almost fall off and he would spread his arms to welcome me to his world. Then, at last, I would reach out and poke his belly with the tip of my finger, making him coo and giggle, his round eyes scrunching up with laughter.

All of my stepmother's talk about boycotts and Chávez had given me the brilliant idea of going on strike at dinnertime. It started one night when she made another big pan of Mexican rice strewn with stewed tomatoes and pieces of boiled chicken thighs. I said I was sick and tired of eating the same things—
pho
and stir-fries,
sopa
and rice—and I was going on strike until we started eating better food.

“There are migrant children starving right now,” Rosa told me. “Think of all the girls your age in Vietnam who are starving. You could have been one of them. If the Communists came here right now do you know what would happen?”

“I don't care,” I shouted, suddenly determined. Let the Communists come.

By this time it was just the two of us at the table. My father was off somewhere with his friends, as he was all the time now, playing pool at Anazeh Sands, convinced he could bring home profits from gambling. Rosa said I was lucky he wasn't home. “You're cruisin' for a bruisin',” she said, one of her favorite phrases. She announced that I would be staying at the table until I finished my plate of rice.

My temper boiled up. “You can't tell me what to do.” The words tumbled out. “You're not my real mother.” It was the first time I ever acknowledged it.

You're a scab,
I almost said, but a piercing fear held me back.

Rosa glared at me, shocked, and walked away. I sat in my chair for a while, waiting for punishment, but nothing happened. Finally I got up and slinked off to my grandmother's room.

For the next couple of days Rosa didn't look at me at all. Then the weekend arrived, and she woke everyone up with the sound of the vacuum running at seven in the morning, something that had never happened before in our house. She barged into the room I shared with Crissy and Anh and threw our clothes out of her way as she bore the vacuum over the green carpet. She started cleaning everything. She dusted and mopped and scrubbed tiles in the bathroom, all the while her face set in a grim mask. My siblings and I tiptoed around her, afraid to speak or interrupt. Noi, sensing trouble, stayed in her room. At lunchtime Rosa slapped down paper plates heaped with Kraft macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets. That's when she finally spoke. “Eat it all,” she barked. “This is what you want to eat, well, you'd better eat it.”

But the tension had drained our appetites, and when she went off to clean the bathroom we threw the food away, forgetting to think about the girls and boys starving in Communist countries. Anh and Crissy, pissed at me for starting all the trouble, refused to talk to me, so Vinh and I holed up in the basement to play Chinese checkers. My father seemed never to come home. For dinner Rosa dished up large portions of my coveted Noodle Roni. But none of us ate much, and without a word she picked up our plates and heaved them into the trash.

This went on for two more days, Rosa serving foods my sisters and I had always clamored to have: Chef Boyardee, frozen pizza, scalloped potatoes from a box. But we could not enjoy it. My sisters glowered and Rosa spoke to no one. The food itself began to feel heavy, slicked with the artificial flavorings and colorings promised right on the packages. I didn't know how much more I could take of such silence and abundance.

Then, as abruptly as she had started, Rosa stopped. One day Noi was back in the kitchen heating up her seafood soup; the cloud over the house had lifted. My stepmother and I never spoke of our standoff, for she had sent her message. This was what it would be like if she, like all of my friends' mothers, stayed at home. This was what it would be like never to have blissful solitude, to be watched and cleaned and fed and fed and fed. I never again wished for Rosa to be what Jennifer's mother proudly called herself: a homemaker.

No, this was the mother I had. Neither royal nor rich, nor yet a woman like Ma Joad, who had huddled with a dead body in the back of a jalopy just so her family could get across the desert. For a long time, the sting of the words I had thrown at Rosa stayed with me. She was not, in fact, my real mother, but I never said it again.

I could shed tears for the Joads, but I did not wish to imagine other Nguyens working for food in Vietnam. I knew the dragon shape of the country, its gauntness and curves, but I couldn't imagine where my actual mother could be in it: where she lived, what she did, what she thought about at night when she was alone. Or was she alone? I didn't know that, either. I had no photo to comprehend, no voice to recall, not even a description or a name. I pictured a random Vietnamese woman eating
pho
the way my father and uncles did—faces bent toward the steaming bowl to suck all the flavor in—but her face remained blank. She could have been any of the women who pushed past me in the tight aisles of the Saigon Market.

I had several worlds—the one inside the house, the one outside in Grand Rapids, and the one that existed in my books and diaries and on television. These were always colliding, and my real mother fit in none of them. Her existence, vague as it was, complicated all of the ones I had arranged so carefully for myself. Better, then, to stay silent, too, keep our house unrippled by questions. What I didn't know was that all that time she had been making plans. While I studied fractions and followed once again the path of the Joads along Route 66, immigrants in their own country, my real mother was out there, too, threading her way to the United States.

MY STEPSISTER CRISSY WAS ALWAYS IN CHARGE. WHEN
she decided that it would be neat to wear fluorescent pink with royal blue, I wanted to wear that, too. When she sang “Bette Davis Eyes,” I learned the words, too. She determined what songs were cool, what clothes were cool, and whether or not we were cool. Invariably, I was not. She called me “Nerd,” but that didn't stop me from aspiring to be in her realm. Crissy had always been fresh and pretty, with a fine smattering of freckles across her nose and dark hair that fell in natural waves. Her best friends were Keri and Lisa, girls knowledgeable about boys and nail polish; Lisa even owned a scandalous triangle bikini. Anh and I longed to be a part of their giggles and codes.

Crissy could talk Rosa into letting her stay up late to watch TV. She persuaded Rosa to buy her some Calvin Klein socks so Crissy could snip off the labels and sew them onto her clothes. When school-picture time rolled around she somehow managed to get Rosa to spring for more expensive backgrounds—the woodsy one with a fake piece of timber to cross her arms on, or the laser-light one that had zigzagging neon bars to impart a hint of
Miami Vice.
Crissy had reign over our bedroom, bathroom, and television. She could change the channel if she felt like it, right in the middle of my and Anh's beloved
Bugs Bunny/Road Runner
show. Later, she was the first in the neighborhood to tease her hair into airy claw shapes, highlighting it with peroxide and Sun-In; she rolled up the hems of her pants until they were tight and tapered. She would show up with lacy fingerless gloves, plastic bracelets, and purple shimmery lipstick, and I would wonder how she managed to get such beautiful things.