Shrimp

by Rachel Cohn

  Nancy finished her first glass of wine in one long gulp. "If you really must know, the issue is deeper than just me not telling him. He's angry that I kept your confidence when he feels that as your father, it was his right to know. But the reason he suddenly had to leave to close a deal in New York, one that he could have negotiated perfectly well from his office in San Francisco, is the situation brought back the fights we used to have over whether to send you to boarding school. He had thought boarding school was a bad idea from the get-go."

  "Why did you do that anyway?" I asked. I took a sip from her second glass of wine. It was a nice cabernet, but frankly a white wine would have been a better match with

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  the meal she had ordered. "Because I hated that place and I never understood what I did so wrong to make you send me there."

  "You didn't do anything wrong to be sent there. What would make you say that? Do you really think that? I wanted you to have the best education possible, to meet the right people. I wanted you to have the luxuries I never had."

  She looked hurt so I didn't point out, You wanted me there because having the Little Hellion gone made it easier for you. The whole situation was very Baroness in The Sound of Music, who had wanted to send the Von Trapp children away so she could have Christopher Plummer all to herself and not deal with the messy complications that are teenagers and their hormones and all that.

  I love that movie, The Sound of Music. Every time the camera pans over Julie Andrews on that mountain singing about those hills being alive, or when the children harmonize the song with crescendos of ah-ah-ah-ah, buckets o' tears just stream down my face, out of my control. Maybe that could be my future plan; I'll take a year abroad and become one of those people who go to The Sound of Music sing-alongs at movie theaters throughout the world. That would rock as a plan to DO something.

  "You and Dad aren't going to separate or anything, right?" I'm not worried, but I kinda am and I do feel bad that my problem got Sid-dad so upset. I poured Nancy a third glass of wine, which she cleared right off.

  "Of course not. This is just a bump in the road. Marriage is complicated. It's like being on a ship at sea, rocking back and forth over the long journey. The best you can hope for is to hold steady, smooth sailing, but there will

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  be times when a storm can turn into a crisis. But the storms pass. And then there will be times when the boat..."

  I moved the wine to the far end of the table, near Gingerbread. Nancy and her nonsense similes didn't need any more help from the vino.

  "Shrimp is a hypocrite," I told her. She was tipsy-- what did I care if I confided in her just a little? She probably wouldn't remember. "He acts like he's all mellow Mister Peace, Love, and Understanding, but that all must be a fake act."

  "I noticed he hasn't been by the house to work on his painting. I take it he didn't react well when you told him about Justin."

  "Yeah. Want to know the worst part? He actually had the gall to ask if it was Justin's, like he thought it could have been someone else's. He might as well have punched me in the stomach for how much that hurt. Shrimp and Justin are the only guys I have been with, you know--all the way with." A look of relief--and surprise--flooded her face, like she too had thought, because I was caught in flagrante delicto with Justin, that I was probably getting that busy with other guys too. Nice to suspect even my own mother thought it possible I had been sleeping around. Wouldn't Nancy be surprised to know that her supposed reformed bad-girl daughter isn't ashamed of her past, but if she had to do it all over again, she might have waited a little longer before doing the deed, but she didn't understand then that once you start with that stuff, there's no turning back? "Why are guys like that? Either you're sacred or you're a slut. There's no winning with them."

  "Honey, if you could solve the key to that mystery

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  about men, you could bottle it, sell it, and become the richest woman in the world. But I will say, not meaning to defend Shrimp's reaction, maybe you just caught him by surprise. Maybe he's had this idealized vision of you and he couldn't deal with having it broken, in that particular moment. He'll be back, and he'll be sorry. It's obvious to anyone how much he cares for you. Be patient, and when he comes around be understanding. But don't you dare apologize to him. That's what they want--for us to apologize for being mere mortal beings, not perfect."

  'Are you going to apologize to Dad?"

  Nancy sighed. "Well, yes. But in all fairness, I was wrong. About boarding school. And about letting him be a father to you all these years, and yet not letting him in when it mattered most. You made a mistake, but that was in your past and it's nothing you should have to apologize to Shrimp, of all people, about. He had nothing to do with it."

  Baby tears specked the corners of Nancy's eyelids. I touched her hand across the table. "Maybe I should drive home after dinner."

  She yawned. "That would be great."

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  *** Chapter 17

  I haven't gone so long without a boyfriend, or at least a decent crush, since elementary school. I'm still too mad at Shrimp to ponder how I am going to channel the sexual frustration that is building inside me. Even Alexei is starting to look hot, but we're not talking Loo-eese danger-fling-zone hot. I would have to gag at kissing any lips that might also have...done things...with/to/on Lord Empress Kari. Blech.

  The unexpected bonus of Shrimp being in the dawg-house is that Autumn and Helen turn out to be acceptable in the companion department.

  Why did I not have girlfriends before? Because all the girls I knew at boarding school were jerks, or because I didn't know how to be a friend to other girls?

  I was worried about H&A spending too much time in the house because you never know when Fernando or Sid-dad is going to break out with an Asian driver joke, but Autumn doesn't drive anyway and Helen knows more Asian driver jokes than Fernando. Those girls love hanging out at my house. It turns out a House Beautiful that has a family room with a huge TV, video games, and tons of movies, a backyard garden with a trampoline, a younger brother who loves roughhousing, and a younger sister who is fascinated watching her Ken doll transformed into Sid Vicious by big sister's friends, is not considered a prison by everybody.

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  I had just woken up on a Saturday morning and was heading downstairs to make a coffee when the front door opened. Helen doesn't bother to knock anymore, she knows the security code to get into the house. She was carrying a take-out tray filled with beverages, and she buzzed past me with Autumn in tow. Helen said, "Ya still got bed head, CC."

  I followed them to the kitchen. Fernando was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Spanish-language newspaper. Helen handed him one of the bubble teas with the tapioca balls at the bottom of the cups from her take-out tray. "Here ya go, Ferdie," she said. "The bubble tea store on Clement Street has a D.WA. drive-up window."

  Fernando didn't look up from his newspaper, but he took a sip from the bubble teacup straw. He said, "You mean, the Driving While Asian drive-in window for when you crash your souped-up Honda with the hot-rod racer wheels into the storefront window?" Fernando chuckled. 'Asian driver," he said, and Helen finished off his statement in unison with him, "No survivor." Helen and "Ferdie" all but high-fived each other.

  I think Helen's mother loves Helen spending time at our house more than Helen does, because then Helen isn't home to abuse her mother about having no fashion sense or to scream at her mother that's she going to ART SCHOOL not to COLLEGE, even if she has to pay for it her goddamn self. Helen has two older sisters--one a first-year law student at Stanford and the other an engineering major at Cal, so Helen's mom must suspect there was a baby switch at the hospital when Helen was born, because Helen is just not conforming to the family's expectations of a nice Chinese girl. Helen smokes and loves beer--and Irish soccer night at

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  the pub. She's really smart but her grades are only so-so. She has a temper--hence "alternative" school. She
refuses to work in her family's restaurant. (Helen assures me her mother is relieved on that count.) But Helen has never pretended to be a "nice" Chinese girl. She's just...Helen.

  Maybe Helen and I were switched-at-birth babies, because she's a natural in my household whereas I am a probable freak of nature here. I could totally groove on living in a cramped flat over a Chinese food restaurant in The Richmond, with a mom who would teach me to make pot stickers and pork buns and tell me brave tales of how she escaped a brutal Communist regime.

  "Where's Mrs. Vogue?" Helen asked. "She promised I could look at her old modeling portfolio today. I need to take some photographs for my art school portfolio, and I want to see if I get any ideas looking at some '80s relic flashback."

  Mrs. Vogue joined us in the kitchen, holding a grocery list in her hand. She was fully Gucci'd out for her big trip to Safeway. "Good morning, girls!" I think Nancy loves H&A hanging at our house more than they do. She actually likes Helen's nickname for her in tribute to Nancy's favorite pathetic magazine of anorexic bimbos, and Nancy claims I am less pouty and unreasonable when my peers are present. Maybe Nancy oughta worry about getting herself an actual college degree, not me, so then she could stop spouting self-help-books pop psychology, "peers are present" blah blah blah. "I'm on my way to the grocery store. I'm making meat loaf and green bean casserole for dinner! Can you stay for dinner tonight?"

  Sid and Nancy have made up since he returned from his business trip, but Nancy is still working extra hard (for

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  someone who hasn't had a job in almost twenty years) to prove to Sid-dad how much she cares for him and how she really can survive without a Leila (she can't). The unfortunate consequence of Nancy's efforts is that our family is being subjected to horrible Midwestern cuisine, the only cuisine in her cooking repertoire, which means dry meat loaf and casseroles made from frozen vegetables and soup mix.

  "No, thanks," H&A both said. Like I said, smart girls.

  "Fernando," Nancy said. "Sid is at the office until this evening. I'm taking Ashley with me as soon as she finishes getting ready. She needs to be picked up from her birthday party at one, and Josh from his sleepover at two. Here are the addresses."

  "Si," Fernando said, taking the slip of paper from Nancy.

  Helen handed my mother a bubble tea. "Mrs. Vogue, will you show me your modeling portfolio before you leave?"

  Nancy's face brightened. "Yes! Gosh, I haven't looked at that thing in years. Nobody in this household has ever shown an interest, if you get what I'm saying." She looked in my direction. "Come with me."

  I'm so gonna get Helen back for this.

  Fernando got up from the table. "Tell Sugar Pie 'hi,'" I told him. He didn't acknowledge me as he left the kitchen. Their romance may be out of the closet, but he's a very private person and doesn't like that when he has a few hours to spare, we all assume he'll be at her place. Because he will be.

  Autumn sat down in the chair Fernando had vacated.

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  "Can I use the computer in your family room today to check out some colleges and scholarship programs?" she asked.

  "Duh," I said. Autumn lives in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in The Sunset with her dad, who is a poet--that is, broke all the time--and has a crap computer.

  "How come you didn't come to the party at Aryan's last night?" Autumn asked.

  "Why do you think?" We're at two weeks since I told Shrimp about the A-date: Week one he ignored me at school, and week two he simply didn't show up at school. But I knew he would show up at Aryan's party, so no way was I going.

  "He wasn't there," she said.

  "Oh." THEN WHERE HAS HE BEEN! "How was the party?"

  "Your basic beer, booze, and girls-sticking-out-their-boobs situation."

  "So why did you go? It's not like you would meet somebody you'd be interested in with that surfer crowd." Autumn's Shrimpcapade was the experience that made her decide she was gay for sure, but she's not rushing to jump into a relationship. I envy her that--she has that first time/first love to look forward to, but by the time she finds it she'll have really earned it. The waiting may make the payoff better for her.

  "To watch over Helen," Autumn said.

  "What does that mean?"

  It means: Given enough beer, Helen doesn't exercise the best judgment when it comes to doling out, er, certain sexual favors, and not of a reciprocal nature. No wonder she knows tons of guys but has no boyfriends. What does she

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  expect? Maybe I need to have another conversation with Helen about the Madonna/whore boy complex. We chicks don't have to like it, but the fact is it's there, and if Helen wants Aryan for real she better wise up. I am all for sexual liberation, but fooling around when it's not an even exchange is just a raw deal, especially if it's with a guy she really likes, someone she wants to know in more than a casual sense. Has Helen learned nothing from my whole Shrimp debacle?

  "NO!" we heard Helen shriek from the living room. Autumn and I hustled to the living room, where Helen was poring over a large black notebook/briefcase type thing with pages of photographs inside. Helen saw us and said, "Your mom is the coolest, CC." Helen held up a black-and-white picture of my mother, about my age, standing on a gritty New York street of graffitied tenement buildings. Nancy was skinnier even than she is now, wearing a short black leather dress and dancer tights with cowboy boots, her blond hair moussed high in front, and eye shadow--dark on one side, light on the other--applied in a rectangular shape from the bridge of her nose across her eyes to the edge of her head, like sunglasses. She looked like a freaking Blondie Debbie Harry new wave goddess.

  "Holy shit!" I exclaimed.

  Helen pulled out a picture from behind the Debbie Harry photo, a strip of photo-booth shots of my mom laughing and kissing some stubble-faced James Dean-looking stud.

  "What's this?" Helen asked.

  "Yeah!" I said. "Who's the hot guy?"

  Nancy looked uncomfortable and surprised, like she'd

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  forgotten about the photo-booth shots hidden behind the portfolio shots. But she acknowledged, "Brace yourself, CC. Your mother had a life before you were born. That was my first boyfriend. We ran off to New York together as soon as we'd finished high school. We were barely eighteen years old. I was going to be a dancer; he was going to be a photographer."

  "What happened to him?" Autumn asked.

  Nancy hesitated a moment before answering. Then: "He died about six months after those pictures were taken. Heroin overdose." For heavy words, her tone was light, but her face had gone pale and her eyes blank.

  Talk about a downer on the Nancy past-life discovery. If you had quizzed me yesterday, I would have said Nancy, from her privileged perch lording over Pacific Heights, would have no clue what heroin looked like, she wouldn't even know the diff between a needle user and a pipe user.

  I can't imagine how devastated I would be if Shrimp died. I don't know how I could go on. How did she?

  Some mental time line calculations fired off in my head. She must have met bio-dad Frank right after her first love died. All my life I've been kind of ashamed that I am the product of my mother's relationship with a married man, not because of the so-called illegitimacy aspect (anyone who cares about that is an idiot), but from feeling that my coming into the world was the cause of pain for a lot of other people. But if it were me and I had just lost Shrimp, I probably wouldn't make the best choices about the next person I jumped into bed with either. I might just want someone to take care of me. Maybe that's what Nancy thought she would get from Frank.

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  The doorbell rang and we saw Ashley run past us wearing her birthday party velvet frock, white tights on her legs, and Mary Jane patent leather shoes. She shrieked, "I'll get it!" Ash returned to the living room, holding Shrimp's hand.

  Nancy had said he would come around, and she was right.

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  *** Chapter 18

  Ash must have sensed the girl-powe
r-solidarity wave of resentment toward Shrimp coming from me, H&A, and Nancy, because after she saw the expressions on our faces she dropped his hand like he had cooties.

  Shrimp's dirty blond hair was loose and curled from the rain outside, and he was wearing khaki cargo pants, flip-flops, and a black T-shirt emblazoned in red with a single word : feminist.

  Since when does Shrimp go for the whole Old Navy look?

  "Hey," Shrimp said.

  One more hey from him and I might turn violent.

  You'd think a fire was raging in the house for how quickly everyone else got outta there. Nancy hustled Ash outside for her b-day party, while Helen and Autumn suddenly had to take a walk over to Union Street to get some moisturizer.

  Without speaking, Shrimp and I both headed toward the kitchen, and then we were out on the outdoor deck again, sitting in the same positions as the last time he'd been in the house, oblivious to the light rain splattering our faces. Fernando had moved Shrimp's painting and materials to the garden shed, but the tarp still covered the painting and we still didn't know what it was.

  Moisturizer?

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  "Where've you been?" I asked him.

  "I went up north with Iris and Billy for a week. They had some business up in Eureka, and I needed the fresh air so I went with them. I went camping in the mountains by myself. Needed some time alone."

  "What about school?"

  "I'm so far behind already, since coming back from PNG. What's it matter? I'm never going to catch up."

  "So taking another week off was the answer to that?" Even by my antischool philosophy, his logic was twisted.

  "I had stuff to think about."