Stealing Buddha's Dinner (25 page)

I pondered Rosa when I found worn paperbacks titled
Co-dependency No More
and
When You Love Too Much
stuffed into a junk drawer in the front hall credenza. My father stayed away more and more that year, avoiding Anh and Crissy's rebellions and their teased hair that literally spiraled out of control. Rosa took on a quiet, acquiescent mood that made me want to tiptoe around her.

She had thought that isolating us in Ada would keep us safe and keep us together. But it left us all, I think, feeling lonely. Vinh could play with Vu, who was tolerant and up for all games, but I missed riding a bicycle over the hills of Sienna and Pine-wood Streets. I even missed Jennifer Vander Wal's companionship. In our new house, the loft Anh and I shared was narrow and had no door: the staircase from the living room led directly to our room. At night the slanted walls of the A-frame seemed to close down on me. The single window looked out onto the property beyond ours, which belonged to a storage warehouse. Someone had left an abandoned cement stoop—three steps and a wrought-iron railing—in the field and every time I looked out the bedroom window I saw it. “The stairway to nowhere,” I joked to Anh, but she just rolled her eyes. I roamed the house, looking for something to do.

The next summer, storms squalled over the yard, rippling the murky pond and bending the willow trees toward the ground. Rosa would wring her hands over the dwindling branches. In the afternoons Vinh and I would walk slowly down the driveway to fetch the mail. Dragonflies hovered over the stagnant pond where Crissy swam once on a dare. She was so often away now, hanging with friends who had their own cars, or working her part-time job at an animal shelter. Noi spent afternoons with her soap operas and knitting. I never knew how she could stand all that cotton, wool, and acrylic, smothering. But her room, as it had on Florence Street, provided a well of solace with its bright blue carpeting, Buddha altar, and shrine to the ancestors. She had a collection of plants near the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, and a new blue La-Z-Boy chair that faced the television. Every day I joined her to watch shows like
Santa Barbara, The Price Is Right,
and
Sale of the Century.
The room was large enough for me to practice cartwheels while Noi sat cross-legged before one of her giant puzzles, pieced together on the same sheet of cardboard my father had found for her years ago. In the evenings, the pine walls glowed in the lamplight when Noi sat down to peel a piece of fruit and snack on a handful of Cheerios. If she had a leftover ear of corn on the cob she'd break off whole rows still intact. She would loosen the knot of her hair, letting it shine to the floor.

One hot morning Rosa drove Anh, Vinh, Vu, and me an hour and a half north to the town of Baldwin. She wanted to see the Shrine of the Pines, which turned out to be a log cabin that someone had built by hand in the late 1800s. Everything in it was made of white pine—rocking chairs, gun racks, a table carved out of an enormous stump, all intricately detailed by one pine-obsessed guy. There wasn't much else going on in that town. Rosa saved the tourist brochures and mulled over magnets in the gift shop. She looked at everything, lingering. On the way back home we stopped at White Cloud State Park to eat the lunch we had brought—sandwiches, chips, and pop—at a picnic table near a trailhead. I remember how the wind kicked up in the trees above us, making a rushing sound among the leaves. Rosa got up and walked into the distance to a water fountain near the parking lot. For one brief moment I had a crazy thought that she was going to get in the car and zoom off without us. But she came back, moving slowly as if each step cost her something. She took her time driving home, taking slow roads while the rest of us nodded off to sleep. Still we made it back long before my father did from wherever he had been with his friends.

The next week, she took us blueberry picking. It was something she liked to do every year, dragging us with her to one of the many "U Pick It” blueberry farms near Lake Michigan. I enjoyed the task at first; there was something satisfying about finding the juiciest, ripest-looking berries and plucking them free. Their stem ends resembled flattened crowns. I ate a few while I picked, but not too many, remembering what Rosa said about pesticides giving people cancer. After an hour or so I grew weary, the hot sun in my face. That's when Rosa would remind us of the full summer days she spent picking berries when she was a child. Grandma and Grandpa did this all their lives, she admonished us. When at last Rosa deemed that we had picked enough, we carried our buckets to the weigh station. It drove Anh nuts that we always picked more than Rosa was willing to buy. We brought home nine or ten pounds, half of which would go into the freezer, to supply us with blueberries through the fall and winter. We had learned to love the cold crunch of frozen blueberries eaten straight from the Ziploc bag.

That afternoon, back from the blueberry farm, Rosa dumped a load of berries into a pot on the stove. I asked her what she was doing. I could see the lines in her face and around her mouth, the way she kept all of her attention on the cooking. She said, “I'm making pies today.” I was afraid of her voice, calm as a river covering a bed of razors. Outside, Anh was baking in the sun with her coating of Bain de Soleil. Vinh and Vu were tidying up the yard from the last summer storm. I could hear them competing in a match to see who could hit a distant tree with a rock.

“Do you need any help?” I asked Rosa.

She said she didn't. She pulled out four ready-made graham cracker crusts and lined them up on the counter.

I used to wish Rosa would make lattice-top pies and cool them on a windowsill, as I had seen in comic strips. I loved the construction of a pie, the swell of pastry cradling fruit. It was easy to bake a cake from a Duncan Hines mix, but no one in our household had ever attempted an actual pie. So it was bizarre to see Rosa hovering over the pot of blueberries, mixing in cornstarch and a stream of sugar. She stirred the mixture hard, the curls of her hair trembling. Then she scooped the whole mess into the pie shells, evening the tops with the back of the spoon. She turned the oven on and without waiting for it to preheat she stuck two of the pies in, the tin pans crackling under her hands, and slammed the door shut.

Later, all four pies sat cooling on the kitchen counter. They were heavy and purpled around the edges, and a tough skin had formed over the tops. I asked Rosa if I could have a piece and she told me to help myself. I poured a glass of milk and chose what appeared to be the most pie-looking pie. The blueberry juices had mostly cooked away so that the filling looked as viscous as bean paste. The graham cracker crust had baked into a durable shell that I had to break with the knife point. I overturned a gloppy portion onto my paper plate and took a bite. It was a mouthful of syrup, sweeter than the Hostess pies whose half-moon shapes were finished with a sugar glaze, the original blue-berryness cooked out. I could not get past two bites and neither could anyone else, for by the middle of the next day not even half of one pie was gone. The day after that temperatures soared into the nineties but the pies remained, attracting a bevy of flies. No one touched them. No one dared to move them.

My father got home earlier than usual, but he and my mother walked past each other. As night fell, my father sat outside by himself. He was drinking cognac, probably. My mother glanced at him out the window for a moment, then went to bed.

It was too hot to sleep and we had no air conditioning. Anh and I decided to try the living room. We set fans against the open sliding glass door and camped out on sofa cushions. After a while she drifted off, but I stayed awake, flipping my pillow over to find a cool spot. Finally I got up and went to the kitchen. The orange fluorescence of a new construction site next door reached through the kitchen windows and made the pies look lurid and ghastly. I sat at the counter for a while, pondering Rosa in these pies. When Vinh appeared, also unable to sleep, we decided to throw out the pies, crushing them into a brown paper bag. We pushed that bag into a plastic sack and left it in the corner. Then we searched for something to eat. Anything but pie. We dug up old rolls, pickles, and mustard; a two-liter bottle of Sprite. We sawed away at the block of government cheese. We ate silently, filling up the hunger, eating instead of talking so as not to wake up our house.

The following summer, I was fourteen. Another hot day, another announcement from Rosa: “Your dad and I got divorced.” Her voice quieter than I had ever heard it. She hugged each of us, and I remember the way my wrists dangled at her backside when she held me. Then she took us all out to Sizzler, where none of us had been before. It was the middle of the afternoon and the restaurant was empty. It showcased a buffet, smaller and grimier than Ponderosa's, but we just ordered french fries and chicken fingers and pop. A few solitary diners roved around the buffet, scraping the salad bowl with tongs.

We didn't have much to say. We all knew a few kids with divorced parents, but they made up a small fraction of our classes. I tried to imagine my father taking a sad bachelor apartment in some complex off the expressway. Would we have scheduled visits with him, see him only on weekends?

I sipped away at the melted ice in my Sprite while Vinh and Vu started running their fingers through the smear of ketchup on their plates. I didn't like the taste or smell of ketchup, but I leaned over anyway to help them draw zigzags and swirls. We opened packets of sugar and Sweet 'N Low and created starry knolls all over the table. After a while Anh gave in and joined us. Rosa didn't stop us, or lecture us to think about the people whose job it was to clean up. She simply let us make a mess in the Sizzler, and we stayed there long past the end of our meal.

But no one mentioned the divorce again. My father, in fact, never once spoke the word. I don't recall him ever moving out of the house. He and Rosa went on living the way they always had, except my father slept on the worn black leather sectional in the living room. After a few months we almost forgot that they were ever divorced at all. It was another one of their unspoken arrangements. We all bowed to it, skirting it, never once asking a direct question about their relationship, their lives, our lives.

Rosa had moved us to Ada to keep us isolated and safe and, I suppose, she succeeded. My parents endured each other as they endured the tornado warnings that pulsed over Michigan every spring and summer. They waited it out. I became, in hindsight, the spy I had once longed to be, skulking around, trying to eavesdrop.

When I visit my parents now and drive through Grand Rapids, I sometimes look for the false-front shape of the Ponderosa restaurant and its hokey Old West signage. It used to be welcoming, an entrance into a no-holds-barred, up-for-grabs kind of territory. Now I see the myth of endlessness. The bottomless bowl of soup is never bottomless; the limitless trips to the salad bar always met a limit. Eventually, the longest, biggest buffet in Grand Rapids must end.
All you can eat
is a lure and a dare. “They'll see how much I can eat,” my father promised once, speaking to our family generally. He said he'd run the restaurant bankrupt if he had to. We ate like marathoners, as if we could truly fill ourselves up, as if we wouldn't start all over again the next day, hungry.

In this All-American City rife with new Old Country Buffets, China Buffets, and India Buffets, I look back on Ponderosa, and the years that unraveled after it, and I mourn the false hope of all those vats of food. How slick they became, how glutinous the portions, cold on my cold plate. So much emptiness in so much possibility. And out in Ada, the promise of open space became the curse of growing up, of watching my parents morph and struggle while I said nothing but remembered everything. Then I could no longer claim to be a child. That long-ago day at the Sizzler, I had looked at the lit-up dinner menu and realized: Kids Menu, 12 and under. I had spent years wishing to pass that mark and it had happened without my even noticing.

WHEN THE LETTER FROM MY MOTHER ARRIVED, I WAS
writing a report on waterfalls of the world for my fifth-grade segment on geography. Angel, Ribbon, and Victoria falls were my primary interests, though I could never see angels or ribbons in the encyclopedia photos. I spent hours trying to draw them, to generate a mist that resembled a halo or a flutter of wings. The letter came from a women's housing center in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. While I had been playing four square at recess and lingering over fruit roll-ups and Capri Suns at lunch, my mother had boarded planes in Saigon, Singapore, and Los Angeles. She had touched down in America without so much as a glimmer of recognition from me.

I never read or saw the actual letter, which must have passed quietly through my father's and stepmother's hands. If it was a shock they didn't show it. They presented me and Anh with the news almost casually. Just the facts. Guess what happened?

My father and Rosa told us that we could write her back. To me, this was a good, concrete thing we could do to offset the unspoken questions in our minds.
How did she get here? Why Pennsylvania? Is she going to come see us? Where will she live?
We set about fashioning greeting cards out of construction paper. On the front we drew landscapes of trees and flowers, with fluffy clouds, birds, a few dogs, cats, and rabbits. In the distance, great hills climbed toward the sun shining in one corner.

Hi,
we wrote.
How are you?
I said I liked to read and draw. Anh said she liked to draw and listen to music. We wrote about fifth and sixth grade. We kept our sentences short and strict, as though our words would have to pass through censors. Inside her card Anh tucked a wallet-sized school picture. Unlike me, she looked fresh-faced and cute in her photos, her eyes never half shut in a blink. Searching for a semi-decent photo, I remembered that Mrs. Ryzema had taken a class picture of us fifth-graders sitting together in the school library. My smile wasn't as stiff as usual, nor my glasses and hair as askew. Rosa had been giving me Ogilvie home perms since my fourth-grade year, insisting that they would help me look pretty. The bleachy, dog-shampoo odor of the perm always seemed to fit the disappointment I felt each time she unwound the curlers. My hair never came close to the soft waves of the girl on the box, or the girls who tossed their heads sumptuously in the commercials for Prell, Finesse, and VO5. My straight black hair merely frizzed, sticking out at wayward angles. Rosa called it “natural-looking.” I seized a pair of scissors and cut out my picture from the class portrait. My face ended up a polka dot in the palm of my hand, hardly bigger than an M&M. I dropped it into the card anyway. I didn't have Anh's face to show off, so it was probably better that our mother not know what I really looked like.