The Three Stooges The Three StoogesI am such a twit.
How did I get so swept up in Mama’s propaganda campaign that for a couple of weeks there, I actually believed I wanted to go to the Stanford University Math Camp for “mathematically talented and motivated high school students”? After getting sick of hearing me gloat, “I’m going to SUMaC,” Abe pointed out that sumac is a poison plant. A cousin to poison oak and poison ivy. Well, no kidding. With a few minutes left before I head to the airport, I am itching all over with anxiety and dread.
“Come on, four weeks will go by fast,” says Laura, lying on my red comforter cover that Mama insisted on buying for my birthday a couple of days ago so that I could start sleeping under good luck. So far, the comforter is a dud. After reading the fine print in the SUMaC materials, I realized that if my fifteenth birthday had been just a month later, I wouldn’t have been old enough to attend.
“Yeah, they’ll fly by.” Janie nods her head hard so that her curls spring up and down like bungee cords. “It’s not like we’re going to be here anyway.” Her manicured fingers run through my matted carpet. I know she’s just trying to fluff me up, too. But sumac’s yellow oil seeps into my head, and my brain develops a severe allergic reaction: Let me stay! A summer of Tonic Soup isn’t so bad!
“Hawaii and basketball camp aren’t exactly in the same league as SUMaC,” I say. “SUMaC” spews out of my mouth the way Steve Kosanko and Mark Scranton do: worse than disgusting, repulsive, something to be squashed immediately. I flatten the wispy strands of carpet next to my hips.
Laura and Janie exchange a look.
“I saw that,” I say, triumphantly, pointing an index finger at each of them, my personal Pep Team. “You know it’s true.”
A thump, thump, thump pounds down the hall, and Abe pokes his head into my room, spinning a basketball in one hand. Summer show-off, all he’s got on his schedule is manga comics, basketball, computer games and packing.
“Oh, my God!” he squeals dramatically, and I hate to admit it, sounding like a baritone version of Janie. “A whole month without The Three Stooges talking to each other at least five times a day. How are Laura, Curly and Ho going to survive?”
“Don’t you have some comic book to read?” I ask Abe before I slam the door on his still-smiling face. “Yuck,” I say, shuddering. “Maybe math camp isn’t such a nightmare compared to a summer with him.”
“Well, you can vent all about it.” Janie hands me a pink journal with giant, green polka dots on it. On the first page, she has inscribed: “Patty + (insert hunkalicious math camper’s name) = Summer Fling. Nothing but the Truth by Patty Ho.”
“No way!” My smile disappears into the null set when the doorbell rings, and Mama yells up the stairs, “Anne here! Time to go!”
The only things flinging in my summer are bodies, hurtling out of Mama’s way as she barrels through the packed airport terminal like it’s Sunday at a Chinese market, thronging with equally pushy shoppers. Her mission: get to the front of the line first. Who cares if it means taking out a businesswoman, harried dad and a little kid or two?
“Watch where you’re going!” snarls a lady, baring teeth that have been bleached an hour too long. She rubs the thin arm that Mama nearly dislocates. Naturally, Mama pays her about as much attention as she pays her own clothes. Not a nanosecond.
“Sorry,” I tell the woman, smiling apologetically at her. But she ignores me, teen Asian flotsam and jetsam in the wake of the Mama tidal wave.
“Get some manners. We aren’t in China,” the woman mutters before stomping off as far from the rude immigrant as she can get.
Like me, Abe hunches into himself. Disappearing is easier for him than me; he can basically hide behind my gargantuan suitcase. But you can’t disguise a huge, hulking Asian elephant any more than you can me. Amazingly, Anne doesn’t duck-and-hide like we do. She simply follows in Mama’s footsteps, my mother who has now cut in front of an old man in a wheelchair, narrowly avoiding a collision.
“God, what did you pack?” huffs Abe.
“Stuff.” I mentally inventory all the outfits and matching shoes that Laura and Janie picked out for me to borrow and bring. Anyway, why is Abe complaining? He’s been pumping iron for two years, figuring he might as well grow wider since he wasn’t growing any taller. What, exactly, are those muscles for, if not to carry heavy things?
“You pack it, you carry it.” Abe drops the ancient suitcase onto the dirty airport carpet. “Anne is.”
Yeah, well, Anne considers a book a fashion accessory, and her beat-up, ripped backpack the must-have handbag of every season. So obviously all she needs is a tiny duffel bag.
“Hurry!” Mama yells, motioning to us impatiently. She is the angry general of our regiment gone AWOL. Punishment by embarrassment awaits the poor defectors. People turn to look at her, then us. Mortified, Abe moves away from me, suddenly riveted by the arrival and departure times at a nearby kiosk.
I struggle with the suitcase that Mama herself used when she left Taiwan seventeen years ago. Sweating, I stumble forward.
Thank God for stanchions because even Mama realizes that while she can bash through a line of people, she can’t cut through metal and rope. A screaming toddler lies on the ground behind us, his hands and feet flailing, which is what Mama looks like she wants to do. She sighs heavily, jittery for having to stand still for once. Not a good sign.
Her silence is golden for all of three seconds before the barrage of last-minute instructions.
“You have airplane ticket? Registration paper?” demands Mama, staring at me like she expects me to have forgotten every thing.
I nod and nod like I am a Patty Ho bobble head doll.
“Remember, Auntie Lu lives in Palo Alto. You call if need anything. You have phone number, right?”
I nod again.
Yes, I have the phone number of Mama’s only sister in America. The last time I saw Auntie Lu was when I was nine. There are only two things I remember from her visit. The first is her present, dried cuttlefish that I nearly choked to death on. And the second is her fight with Mama over a man named Victor. I woke up the next morning, thinking I had dreamed about the yelling, but Auntie Lu was gone. So I’m not sure whether Auntie Lu is a stranger I happen to be related to. Or a strange relation.
Regardless, Auntie Lu is on my Do Not Call list. Just the thought of a Mama clone hovering over me for a month makes me vow never to contact her.
“You have cell phone?”
The Patty Ho bobble head nods again.
“But no call unless emergency. Too expensive.”
Save the dime, Mama. I can already hear my summer telephone conversations with her:
Mama: You study hard?
Patty: Uh-huh.
Mama: Math camp so expensive.
Patty: Uh-huh.
Mama: You friends with nice boy?
Patty: (Silence)
And then all I hear is a click on the other line. No good-bye. No I miss you. Just a dial tone of disappointment.
It takes all of a half-second for the destructive force of nature that is Mama to blow away any semblance of customer ser vice. The check-in lady, a friendly grandmother in a uniform, beckons us with a warm smile and one plump hand. I almost expect her to push freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on me until Mama leads the charge to the counter.
“Aiyo, why so slow?” demands Mama.
The smile on the old lady’s face fades, sealing in any goodwill behind now-tight lips. Say hello to the unfriendly skies, not that Mama notices.
Is it any big surprise that the check-in lady shakes her head after I heave my suitcase on the scale? With some satisfaction, she tells Mama, “That’ll be an extra seventy-five dollars.”
Two dull circles of outrage blotch Mama’s cheeks. If the check-in lady knew any better, she would have gotten on the loudspeaker to announce, “Code red. Prepare for a public display of anger.” I cringe, look away and pretend that I’m with the tall, Asian guy at the next station. But he doesn’t notice me. Typical.
With muscles I didn’t know Mama has, she hauls the suitcase off the scale and onto the floor, and wrenches the latches open. My man-magnet outfits, Janie-chosen and Laura-approved, fling out. Sure enough, they attract attention, but not in the way any of us imagined.
“Mommy, what is that lady doing?” asks the toddler loudly, no longer crying now that he’s watching Mama, the yellow Teletubby in a live per for mance.
That lady, I could have told the kid, is yanking out clothes without any clear plan except to put my suitcase on an immediate Slim-Fast diet.
“Ummm, excuse me, ma’am?” The check-in lady is hesitant now. She’s probably afraid that Mama will karate chop her and stuff her headfirst into the rapidly thinning suitcase.
She doesn’t have to worry. Mama ignores her to pick on me: “Why you pack so much?”
I reenter my reality just as my pink panties flutter to the ground. I pluck them off the carpet, and then stand there, The Statue of Lunacy with my underwear in one hand. Fortunately, Anne grabs the panties out of my paralyzed hands and crams them and whatever else she can stuff into her nearly empty duffel bag. Saved by the Geek Scout. I would say thanks, except my lips are so swollen with shame that I can’t get a sound out of them.
Which is a good thing, otherwise who knows what I would have gargled out when the guy at the next station asked in startled disbelief, “Anne?”
I watch, openmouthed, as the Asian Adonis hugs Anne. He’s one of the few boys my age who’s actually taller than I am. Long bangs hang down into his eyes. In an unwrinkled, fitted white T-shirt and knee-length khaki shorts, he’s more chic than any boy at my high school.
Mama’s sex-dar is on high-alert, too. She demands, just as if Anne is her daughter, not me, “Who that?”
“This is Stu.” Anne introduces us casually like we’re all at a civilized English afternoon tea instead of at the airport with my luggage open for all to see. “We went to the Spring Fling together.”
Strategic information so that Mama doesn’t drive straight to Mrs. Shang’s house to share a cup of jasmine tea and the juicy gossip that (aiyo!) Anne’s been hugging a boy!
I can’t take my eyes off Stu, but I tell myself it’s because I’m trying to decode their hug, and figure out how a hunk like him could possibly go to a dance with a nerd like her. Was it a friendly-good-to-see-you platonic kind of embrace or a friendly-I-want-to-feel-all-of-you one?
Unperturbed, Anne continues, “This is Patty. She’s going to math camp, too.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say, shaking Stu’s hand, hoping that my palm doesn’t feel clammy. Inside, I’m screaming, I’m going to SUMaC! After insisting to Janie and her mom that Asian guys don’t do anything for me, I am now officially eating my words as a hearty mid-morning snack.
I’ve almost forgotten all about my baggage claim to idiot fame until Stu brushes his bangs out of his eyes to see me better. His face is all angular yang with stark cheekbones and a strong nose. He asks me, “You need some more room for your stuff?”
“No, no,” I manage to say, channeling confidence, poise and sophistication. An image that gets blown the second the snotty-nosed, sticky-handed toddler pokes the stuffed cups of my bra that’s lying by my feet.
The truth is, I realize while my face grows hotter and Mama hunhs behind me, that no amount of extra room can hold all my excess baggage.