Bonnie

“Hi, I’m Bunny, how are you?” she said. Her name caught my attention. “Bunny” is “an informal name of a rabbit, especially a small, young one” in the dictionary. I looked it up; those days, I carried a pocket size English dictionary with me. A slight, timid, white, helpless existence came into my mind’s eye, but here in front of me was a stocky, top-heavy with bosom, serious woman, with thick, black, curly hair, looking at me with her alert, concentrating eyes. Why anyone would be named after a trivial, shy, small animal was beyond my comprehension. 

In my ancestral culture, there are Chinese children named after tigers, predators, for their strength and kingship in the jungle, with hopes that the children will one day be leaders; Sometimes there are children named after dragons or phoenixes, mythical creatures believed to be fortunate omens.  Those names made sense to me. They symbolized powerful and bright futures. But “Bunny,” a vulnerable white puff of fur with naïve, red eyes, depending on others kindness, hardly made the cut. She saw me flipping through my small dictionary.

“What did you look up?” She asked.

“Your name.”  I said and explained my confusion.  

Her eyes were so kind and tender that I didn’t sense any harshness of my ignorance when she clarified that her name was spelled “Bonnie;” it meant pretty, beautiful. Seeing that I was quiet, sulky from embarrassment, she went on to tell me that her last name was Horowitz and wrote that down on a piece of notebook paper for me, then she asked what my Chinese name meant.  

“Like a son,” I said, appreciative that we were out of the misunderstanding of her name. “My parents didn’t have a boy; they raised me with the same fervor as that of raising a boy, hoping that I could compete with men.” Her parents didn’t have a son either. She had two younger sisters. One is teaching math in a New York City public high school. The other younger one is in college majoring in business.     

“Yeah, men are so superior, aren’t they?” She said and we both sighed a little bit. A gust of rain poured down on the window panes. Stirred by the sudden noise, we both looked up on the lake outside. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, the fall weather was trying to morph gradually, inconspicuously into winter; with each spell of rain, the temperature dipped a little. In the deep South, Louisiana, there were still days of reprieve, mornings when we could leave the dorm without a sweater, the sky bright without a cloud. It wouldn’t be cold and damp until mid-December. 

A little distance from the main thoroughfare was Lakeside House, the graduate school women’s dorm for Louisiana State University, situated by two adjoining lakes at the outskirts of the campus, isolated. I rode a used bike I bought for fifteen dollars from the bike shop on Highland Road to the main buildings. I signed up for a lunch plan at the university cafeteria and prepared breakfasts and dinners myself. 

There was an A&P on Highland road; I went there after church on Sundays, packed groceries in my backpack and rode the bike back to the dorm. Eye of round roast was on a half-price sale that week, so I bought a three-pound loaf.  Earlier that afternoon I added soy sauce, Louisiana rock sugar, salt, pepper, two bulbs of garlic, star anise, Sichuan peppercorn and water in the pot with the roast.  I put the pot on low fire, and sat myself by the stove, worked on my statistics homework in between stirring the pot.      

Bonnie came in from the rain, shivering with the cold air. The kitchen and dining hall neighbored the entrance. It was impossible to enter the dorm without passing this hallway. The women gathered here, met here, made friends here. After we introduced ourselves, she went upstairs to change into some dry clothes and came back into the kitchen. 

Cabinets decorated the walls of the kitchen. Students put their names and room numbers on the shelves they owned where they stored their dry goods to prepare meals. Adjacent to the kitchen, the dining hall jetted out to the lake shore, filled with windows letting in the lovely, natural light. Occupied by five round dining tables, each had six chairs scattered haphazardly. Sometimes, some students left plates or utensils heedlessly out on the tables. The cleaning lady, a large Creole woman, would throw them away.  

“Wow! It smells amazing.  What are you cooking in that pot?” Bonnie said. She had changed into a dark blue, loose, cotton sweater and light blue, denim jeans. Plump, round body, circular face, brilliant, sparkly, onyx eyes, hair black and shiny with little round curls; she was tall and elegant in her long strides down the hallway. She looked graceful and natural, possessing an air of aplomb and ease I lacked and envied.  

“Chinese roast beef.” I said, not sure if that would be a proper translation. Should it be stew beef?  The smell was truly appetizing.

“Would you like to join me for dinner and try some cooking from Taiwan?” I said. On the warm, hospitable, small Asian island I came from, it was common to invite strangers to dine together. I made a cabbage salad with soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. I served my roast along with some white steamed rice. We ate in the dining room, facing the lake.  

Bonnie talked to me like she had known me for a long time. She was Jewish, from Brooklyn, spoke Yiddish. I had been eating alone since I came to America, to this campus four months ago.  That was the first time I had a dinner companion and a real conversation. To eat with a single woman with such accomplishment, an intellectual, a PhD candidate, a woman with a mysterious, unknown origin, very far away from my own small island, to share a meal of my natal home and to see her enjoying it, I was full of admiration, tickled from the bottom of my spine. Keen on learning about different cultures and languages, also eager to build a more in-depth friendship with her, I proposed she taught me one Yiddish word a day when we met for breakfasts.  

The rain stopped and the sunlight faded outside. Beams from corner lamps of the dining hall shaded the edges with gentle, yellow rings. In the dripping sounds of the water from the gutter, our intimacy thickened. She was in the last year of her PhD program for Finance, the most Americanized, and the least Jewish among the three sisters. I had not realized there could be different levels of Americanness in the same family, and it drew my thoughts to my own identity as a newcomer to this country. How Chinese am I? How did one become Americanized? Eat bread and drink coffee? Surely it’s more than that.  

She loved my roast beef, rolled her eyes up behind her head when she savored the roast. She said the Jewish Brisket is also a large cut of meat, slow cooked on low fire for the Jewish holidays with other root vegetables.  After we ate, Bonnie pulled out a loaf of bread from her shelf. She said we should have some sweets. The bread is called babka. I repeated it a couple of times to pronounce it, such an interesting name, an unusual, unique combination of sounds so foreign and inviting. The dense dough mixed with chocolate and cinnamon was amazingly flavorful. I especially loved the crunch at the bottom of the bread, intense with chocolate crumbles. This time it was my turn to roll my eyes.  

Mornings, we came down to the kitchen in our pajamas and foggy eyeglasses, bushy hair, half closed eyes. In silence, we boiled water for Bonnie’s coffee and my tea. Whatever leftovers from the night before we warmed in the microwave and served for breakfasts. Sometimes there was fresh milk and we would have cereal. 

We sat by the window in front of the lake, waited for the jilt from hot tea and coffee, gazed at the sun traveling further up the arc, pink dawn transformed slowly into white light. We ate quietly, exchanged only a few words about our days, like an old couple. When the caffeine finally set in, we would have one Yiddish word, repeated a few times, some reviews, then we parted ways to our own days of study, work, meetings, classes. 

Weekend breakfasts were elaborate. The university cafeteria was closed on weekends and the kitchen filled with women preparing breakfasts, laughing, pans clashing, coffee spilling, toasts burned, steam from sausages, crushed eggshells. I liked making green onion and egg pancakes with a new soft white bread I found – tortilla. Bonnie contributed eggs and green onions, and we ate together. The window seats were usually taken. We ate in the kitchen, by the stove, used our hands to roll up the greasy pancakes to dip in spicy sauce. It was gratifying in the cooled late fall days.  

When we had the luxury to share dinners, Bonnie bought the produce and I cooked. She lacked the patience or imagination for culinary knack. She didn’t mind if they were Taiwanese spices, Thai curry sauce or Korean BBQ. She devoured them with much enthusiasm. Most days, she ate from boxes, mac and cheese, cans of tuna, frozen TV dinners, cold cuts and white bread; sometimes she made a casserole of baked spaghetti with ground meat, cheese, and a jar of marinara sauce and lived on that for a week.  

Chinese Moon Festival was at the end of October. Its significance in Chinese culture is equivalent to that of Thanksgiving in America. I missed hot pot with fat lamb shoulder slices, cabbage, fish balls, shrimp, glass noodles, mushrooms and garlic oil as dipping sauce. I thought if we weren’t having a family gathering around a hot pot, we should at least have some mooncakes.  

A week of torrential rain had finally passed and muddy brown lake water ran over the earth path. The cleared air was humid and pungent with fresh cut grass. We rode in Bonnie’s small, old Toyota with no air conditioning to the only Chinese grocery store in downtown Baton Rouge to buy mooncakes. My shirt stuck to my back, and my legs were wet from the sauna-like air. On our way back, I thought we really ought to cool down, so we passed by A&P and I bought a six-pack of icy cold Coors Light to commemorate the holiday. 

The moon cakes were moldy when we opened the box. Seeing how disappointed I was, Bonnie popped a bag of buttery popcorn. We lay supine on the grass by the lake, ate popcorn and drank beer, gazed at the full moon. I recited an ancient Chinese poem about the moon festival in Mandarin Chinese and explained each character to Bonnie. 

“Well, the gist of the poem is that the poet wished for good health and long life for his loved ones so that they could share the allure of the full moon thousands of miles apart.” I said. 

“Your family is outside staring at the moon with you now.”  Bonnie said, her eyes glossy from the beer.

“Well, with the time difference, I think they were done with hot pot and staring at the sun this morning.” I burst out laughing. We toasted with our cans, enjoying the buttery popcorn with icy bubbles. 

The opaque yellow moon, risen to the middle of the sky, was looking at her own wrinkled self on the ripples of the lake water. Bonnie talked about her family. Her grandfather left Russia and came to America. He worked as a construction worker, saved money to bring his family to New York. Her father was fourteen when he came, and he went to work as a painter the day after he got off the boat. Her mother’s family owned a kosher grocery store in Brooklyn. Bonnie’s parents took over the store after her maternal grandparents passed away. She and her two sisters helped in the grocery store when they were growing up. She knew how to run a cash register when she was five years old. They did homework at the back of the store till the store closed at night then went upstairs to sleep.    

A Jewish family from a faraway land, their mystic, dramatic story mesmerized me. Quietly absorbed in her story, we sat in stillness. The only sound was the leaves rustling in the soft wind by the lake.

“I don’t know what to do. I am confused.” Bonnie blurted out in the middle of her reverie.

“About what? You are a PhD candidate; your family cannot be prouder.” I said, startled, spilling half of my second can of beer.  

“You see, I wanted to teach in Tel Aviv University. That’s why I got into the PhD program four years ago.” Bonnie said. 

“Oh, go to Israel? With all that fighting. It’s a war zone there.” I said, having learned about that from the news on the television; I tried to listen to the news every day to improve my English.       

“It was my dream, to dedicate myself to Israel, to give my life to educating young people there.” Bonnie said, raised both her open arms to the moon.

I looked at her with clear admiration. She was willing to risk her life for young Jewish people in Tel Aviv.

“But, last year, my aunt introduced me to a man, Jason. He is forty-two, has two girls, one nine, and one eleven; his wife died of cancer. You see, it’s a close-knit community. The Jews in Brooklyn, we all sort of knew or heard about one another. I went out with him in summer, and the way he kissed me and caressed me, such exuberant passion; the way he rolled his tongue inside my mouth and on my lips. Oh. And how he wept when I told him about my dream of teaching at Tel Aviv, our home country, Israel. He knew my deepest heart’s desire. We belonged together. Oh, I wanted to be married, and maybe if I get lucky, I will have my own child.” Bonnie said, tears filling her big, beautiful, round eyes.

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. I was lost with her intense display of emotions. On my Asian island, tears were reserved for death or tremendous physical pain, not lamenting about a lover after a few beers. And a forty-two-year-old man weeping over a young woman’s dream was kind of far-fetched for me. This woman, whom I regarded as one with a purposeful authority and self-sufficiency, could have her own secret desires, aching for her own home, children, late night conversations by the fireside with the love of her life, like an inexperienced, dreamy teenager. This Bonnie was new and foreign to me. She was not the independent, single minded, women’s liberation leader I knew.  

“Do you have more popcorn on your shelf? This one is almost out. I’ll warm up those leftover chickens too.” I said. I shook the spilled beer off my hand, went inside to wash, pop more popcorn, and warm up leftovers. I came back out with the tray of food and managed to give her an awkward but heartfelt hug I learned in the last few months from the Southern women around me.

“I like to marry my own people, stay within my social circle, you know. If I married him, it would be impossible to go live in Tel Aviv; I would be obligated to help him with a family in New York.” Bonnie said, her burnished eyes casted a longing gaze into the lake water. We ate and drank quietly, with a few comments about how the leftovers were quite good with the beers, with the rest of night, with the moon, the stars, and the overfilled lake water swishing.

I called my mother that night and sobbed. The unknown was inspiring at that age; loneliness was never an issue. There was an eagerness for untrodden territory and copious trust in strangers. My mother said I was heartless. I boarded that Boeing plane to cross the largest saltwater divide, to leave the island where I grew up, not shedding a tear. Before I left, we had family banquet after family banquet to celebrate my scholarship to an American university. Being the first girl in a long line of domesticated women to be bequeathed an opportunity to study in America was an extraordinary accomplishment. My grandmother gave me a pocket size English dictionary. And then I traveled twenty-two hours to the new campus; it was not only a new university, a new city, a new state, it was a new country entirely alien to me.  

When it was the Jewish Sukkot holiday, Bonnie bought us crispy Pastrami sandwiches with melted cheese and pickles from a deli. That was the first time I tasted a Pastrami sandwich; the tender, brined meat with the stretchy cheese between crusty rye bread soaked in salt and herbal olive oil was so unbelievable. The crunch of the pickles in between bites added more dramatic excitement to the experience. I was completely absorbed in devouring the sandwich and didn’t make any conversation. Oil dripped down the corner of my mouth. I wiped it with the back of my hands. Sips of icy Coca-Cola and the warm, gooey cheese - I thought I could die tomorrow. This sandwich was all I had ever wanted in my little life. 

Bonnie looked at me and smiled. She talked about how her people roamed all over Europe, never had a country to call their own. She went upstairs to her room and brought two books, The Chosen and Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel. She said I could keep them. 

It was late, the end of the day. The pastrami sandwiches filled us, made us dizzy and lethargic. Bonnie looked battered; there was a touch of destitution behind her sensitive eyes from the imperceptible thumb prints of the wandering and homelessness of generations past. With the love of food, and appreciations of dissimilar cultures enforcing our bonds, Bonnie and I became not only friends, but families in a small town in the American South, Fall of 1980.

Bonnie went back to New York for the winter break. I stayed in Baton Rouge, read Chosen and Lioness, learned more about Jews, the holy land, and Israel, met a Chinese boy, Antonio, born and raised in Costa Rica, at my church Christmas celebration. Miserable with a cold for two weeks, I watched all the programs on the television with Antonio who brought me orange juice. Bonnie came back after the New Year. She was engaged to Jason during the winter holiday. I introduced her to Antonio, the farthest version of a Chinese man I could ever find on the campus. I switched from learning Yiddish to studying Spanish.         

As the semester started, Bonnie and I went back to our breakfast routine. I boiled water for coffee and tea, listening to Bonnie recount her holidays: 

“My youngest sister is taking over the store. She is a business major and loves talking to customers. She had already expanded the back of the store, where we used to do homework, cook, and eat, to be the storage room for more merchandise. She is going to have a bakery section to sell babka, rugelach, and other sweets.”  Bonnie said.

“Wait, wait, say that word again, ru-ge-la-ch.” I laughed. This new word excited me. I loved the blend of the sounds, so exotic and thrilling.  

“I will stay in New York. I will marry Jason after my graduation. We can go to Tel Aviv later for a trip.” Bonnie said, stirring her coffee.  

“My father’s health is frail. I don’t want him to worry about me in Israel. You know there were attacks there.” She said.

“Yes, I think it’s the safest here in America. My whole family wanted me to stay here and make a life for myself. This is the country for us.” I said.  

The messy, tangled affairs of love in New York? Or the pure, unadulterated devotion to teaching in the Holy Land? The choice plagued her, and she had finally decided to stay in New York, teach part time, and raise a family.   

My first American hero, Bonnie.    

 -Catherine Con

Catherine C. Con grew up in Taiwan. She earned a BA in English Literature from Fu-Jen Catholic University in Taipei and an MS in Information System from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She is a Computer Science instructor at University of South Carolina, Upstate. Her short story "A Tale of Two Paintings" was published in Emrys Journal 2019 and nominated for 2020 PEN American Literary Awards. Her flash non-fiction "Birthday" was published in Tint Journal Fall 2019. Her short story "Letters" was published on The Petigru Review Fall 2019. Her short nonfiction "Eggs" was published in the Bare Life Review 2019. Her nonfiction "This Writing Life" is forth coming in Emrys Journal 2020. She was selected for the "2020 Local Authors" by Greenville County Library, South Carolina. Her nonfiction "Mandarin Suits" is forthcoming in the Tint Journal in March 2020.