Free Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

mixing bowl and cookie sheets. I had thought all American food came from a package and some mystical factory process. The idea that a person could create such a thing at home was a revelation. And then, a desire.
    I wondered how many more layers of discovery stood between me and true Americanness. I decided that even if Rosa wouldn’t let me change my name, I could change myself anyway. I could keep secrets: from my white friends at school and from my family at home. At school I was good, as neat with my homework as any other girl and just as well behaved. At home I stole food, sulked in my grandmother’s closet, and in fits of unexplained rage threw Rosa’s clean clothes down the laundry chute.
    It was exhausting, this secrecy, this effort to be normal, and I took to wandering the house at night when everyone else was asleep. I liked being invisibly in-between, a shadow dissolving into itself. My father and stepmother believed in silence and fear; they made strict rules to contain their possible unraveling. In truth, I had a thousand questions about my face and my race, but it was so much easier to deny them than to speak out loud and court the embarrassment and shame that always lay in wait for me. As I stood at the living room window, the street lamps seemed to cast an eerie glow over the neighborhood. I wrapped myself in the yellowed nylon curtains my stepmother had hung and wondered what it would be like to live in any other house.

5
    Toll House Cookies
    EVERY SUMMER MORNING JENNIFER VANDER WAL, MY next-door neighbor, friend, and enemy, would ring the doorbell and ask if I wanted to go play. I always did, and we would spend our daylight hours running from her house to mine, riding bicycles, and listening for the ice cream truck to roll through the neighborhood. Jennifer and I worked a trade-off. She had a basement of dreams, a trove of Legos, construction paper, and crayons— the full Crayola 64, not the pallid Kmart version my parents bought. I could offer video games, Days of Our Lives, and MTV. Barbie dolls, too, or at least the knockoff version, Cindy, whose shiny breasts Jennifer’s parents had forbidden from their house.
    Summer arrived when the ChemLawn truck pulled up in front of Jennifer’s yard. Her father, Cal, was a music teacher and spent warm days fixating on his garden. He pruned and weeded in his pressed shorts, knee-high black socks, and Hush Puppies. A Dutch gardener, Rosa called him, rolling her eyes.
    Jennifer’s mother, Linda, was a soft-fleshed woman with a singsong voice. She gave occasional piano lessons but spent most of her time cleaning. Her kitchen was so clean it looked like no one ever cooked there. But Linda did cook, of course. She served lunch at noon and dinner at six o’clock, and in the afternoon she baked Toll House cookies, stashing them in a glossy blue jar. Linda’s fears were all about stains—Kool-Aid, grass, chocolate milk. She fretted over dirt, lined the hallways with plastic runners. Sometimes, like a Cheer commercial come to life, she hung bright towels on a clothesline in the backyard.
    Jennifer was one year younger than I, but she was taller, bigger, her manners mimicking an adult’s. She had her father’s deep-set blue eyes and her mother’s efficient, can-do demeanor. She had a habit of running her hands inside the waistband of her shorts, and she licked the space below her lower lip compulsively, so that a pink swath formed there. I liked this about her, this glimpse of lack of control. On Sundays she wore frilled dresses to church and had to stay indoors. Once, Vinh and I sat in the backyard with a box of Lemonheads and stuffed tufts of grass through the chain-link fence that divided our backyard from the Vander Wals’. There was something satisfying about seeing the grass fall on the other side. Part littering, part disappearing.
    My father and Jennifer’s father hated each other. The hatred was immediate and