Free Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen Page B

party games. Pink and purple balloons bobbed from the lawn chairs and hung from the clothesline. I was excited for the ice cream and cake, and the party favors Jennifer had promised. Then Jennifer’s friends, the ones from her real life—church and Clearbrook Christian School—appeared. They floated toward us, dressed in white like the birthday girl. A few months later, when I first heard that song from The Sound of Music — girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes —I recalled with bitter and astonished poignancy that moment on the hill. It seemed to replay itself, forever in slow motion, in my mind. Later, when my birthday rolled around, Jennifer brought me a little white box with a blue adhesive bow. When she put it in my hands I saw that it was nothing but a piece of paper folded into a cube. I opened it:

    Every immigrant knows the dual life, marked by a language at home and a language outside. For me it was also the face I saw in the mirror. It was the smell of rice simmering in its cooker. The statue of Buddha in Noi’s bedroom. None of these made sense when I played with Jennifer, but the second I came home they were mine all over again.
    I remember being invited into Jennifer’s kitchen—I was not allowed just to walk in, the way she did in our house—and gazing with wonder at the cleared countertops, the sink uncluttered with dishes, everything clean as a whistle, as Jennifer’s mother might have said. I called her Mrs. Vander Wal; Jennifer called my stepmother Rosa. “She can’t possibly be your real mom,” Jennifer had said to me once. I refused to admit to her how much I didn’t know.
    Linda Vander Wal smiled her soft-cheeked smile. She had light, painted-on eyebrows, her one vanity. She opened the freezer door and removed a tray of homemade Kool-Aid popsicles, giving one to Jennifer, one to her brother Paul, and one to me. This event happened but two or three times a summer. Never mind that these popsicles didn’t even taste that good—you could suck out all the juice, leaving a pale block of ice. I would hold the plastic popsicle holder and eat the frozen Kool-Aid as if it were the only delicacy I would ever have. From the kitchen I could see the living room piano and curvy-armed sofa. I’d hardly ever stepped foot in that room, the showpiece of the house, used only when “company” came over. It was for grown-ups, Jennifer said. Off the path of the plastic runners, it glimmered like a vision of candy in a fairy tale.
    For years my father and Jennifer’s father maintained their silent hatred—the curt hello, the briefest nod, the distance in their faces. My sister and I absorbed this feeling, too. “I’d like to beat him up,” Anh would say about Cal, gritting her teeth. “I wish Dad would punch his lights out.”
    One late afternoon in the summer of 1983 Jennifer and I were playing hopscotch in her driveway while our younger brothers pulled each other around in a wagon. It was almost time for Linda to call out dinnertime, and I was filled with a quiet, tenebrous feeling that I would recognize years later as a sense of responsibility. I didn’t know what it meant then, only that it hit me hardest when I came home in the evenings and Noi dished me up a bowl of canh chua, or beef and noodles. Falling asleep on one of the reject pillows from North American Feather, I would feel as though I’d forgotten something important.
    Cal Vander Wal was working on the tulip beds in front of his house; my father was picking some Vietnamese herbs he had planted in our backyard. Those days, Rosa was either working or at night school, and I felt a sense of suspended time when I stepped inside our house. There were no bedtimes or bath times, no order to the evenings.
    In Jennifer’s driveway her brother Paul stood up in the wagon. Jennifer screamed even before he crashed onto the pavement. In an instant Cal was