by Rachel Cohn
The good news still was Danny had arrived in San Francisco and planned on staying a while, but the queasy news was having Danny in my Left Coast world may mean the separation gap between the two families can no longer be kept separate. Danny's presence could cause the vortex separating the old friends, and me from my other family and them from me, to close permanently, in a way my short summer Manhattan fling never had.
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*** Chapter 30
True love may be making a comeback.
Helen's eighteenth birthday has passed, but that doesn't mean she's legally sanctioned to bring Eamon upstairs to her room. I feel her pain, so I am doing what I can to help her out. Originally I started hanging out in the kitchen at Helen's mom's Chinese restaurant on Clement Street because my work-study job had ended. Then it turned out I actually missed the restaurant environment, and I was looking for a way to get back at Helen for proclaiming Mrs. Vogue to be the "coolest mom ever." Helen's mom refuses to hire me for a regular shift--she said if her own daughter won't work in her restaurant, neither shall I--but she has been teaching me how to make her most excellent dumplings in exchange for occasional early-evening assistance with vegetable peeling and chopping. Helen's mom would also like me to encourage Helen to get rid of her new copper-spotted tiger-print eyebrows, and she'll throw in noodle lessons if I can convince Helen that proper ladies do not draw action-hero cartoon series about dirty old men with names like Ball Hunter.
The pot stickers Helen's mom makes are so good I have composed a love song to them: "Oh, pot stickers you are so yummy and juicy, so porky and full, love that ginger flava whateva..." That's the extent of my song so far, but I am working on a new, international tribute song in celebration
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of the new delicacy in my repertoire--steamed shrimp dumplings--and inspired by the minor language lessons the kitchen crew at the Chinese restaurant have been giving me: "Hen hao chi de hsia long bao, delicious, yummy dumpling, hsia ren hsia ren hsia ren, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp."
I was singing my pot sticker song while I stuffed a stack of gyoza wrappers with meat filling when I looked up to see Helen waving at me from the window at the back door of her family's flat, the back door that opens into a hallway leading upstairs to the apartment, or through which the restaurant kitchen can be entered. She must have jumped a dozen backyard fences to get to that back entrance without coming through the front. I saw the spikes of Eamon's fire-red hair behind Helen's head. Got it. I spilled the bowl of vegetable filling onto the floor, causing Helen's mother, who is crazy for cleanliness, to join me pronto under the work table to help clean up the mess. I looked up from underneath the table to see Helen leading Eamon by the hand as they creeped up the back stairs. "Thanks!" she mouthed at me. Ah, chu lian, young love.
Helen's sneak reminded me that my restaurant time was over for the day. Shrimp was due to pick me up in his Pinto, as my Betty Boop car does not do Clement Street, because Clement Street does not do parking. We were going to a fancy restaurant in the East Bay to meet Danny and Terry, the first time Shrimp would meet Danny, and I would meet Terry, like a double date. When I got outside, The Richmond fog spread a cold mist over my face while I scanned for Shrimp's car on Clement Street. I was especially excited to see him because he hadn't shown up at school for
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two days, and I missed seeing him live and in the flesh something bad. Two whole Shrimpless days equaled a veritable drought. I thought: I am the luckiest girl in the world. I live in the coolest Jog city, I have a boss boyfriend, and we're going to meet my new best half-brother and his lover for dinner, all adultlike and fancy. Life is good.
It would be reasonable to expect some doomsday prospect at this point, just for the sake of irony and all. There I am, standing on my favorite street in San Francisco, life is peachy, I'm in luuuuv, blah blah blah, and then, you know, Shrimp's Pinto bolts down Clement Street and smashes into a fog-covered, double-parked UPS truck. Tragedy ensues; Shrimp is either dead or in a coma, and I spend the rest of my life believing it was my fault for starting to believe in the universe's grand scheme to bestow true love and a good life on me after some really fucked-up years.
The reality wasn't that bad but it wasn't pretty either. When I got into Shrimp's car he didn't kiss me. He announced, "Once we get to Oakland, I can only come inside to meet your brother for a minute. I have to go over to Berkeley to see about a room at some guy's house."
I couldn't go into a tirade about how dare Shrimp bail on the dinner with Danny and Terry, how many times have I sat through dinner the last few months with the Fightin' Shrimps, it's called being a supportive girlfriend and getting to know the important people in your partner's life, because I first had to know, "What do you mean, a room at some guy's house?"
"I'm gonna move over to the East Bay for a while. Now that Dee is pregnant, she wants Iris and Billy out of the bedroom
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they've been using so she can start the remodel to turn it into a baby room. But Iris and Billy, you know," here Shrimp mumbled low, "they don't, like, have enough cash for a new pad. So they're gonna move into my room for a while, lay low by spending some time up north with their friends up there, and since I am going to help start up Java's new store in the East Bay, I oughta just live over there for a while."
Where should I begin with this bombshell? I said, "How are you going to manage living and working in the East Bay and going to school in The City?" To say nothing of girlfriend time--when did he plan to fit that into this new schedule? What--and who--were his priorities, anyway?
Shrimp played with the dial on the radio station before settling on the news radio station with the traffic report. He is obsessed with hearing the traffic on the :08 every ten minutes. To piss him off I turned down the radio right as the traffic report started.
"Why'd you have to do that?" he griped.
"You haven't answered my question."
We were stuck in inch-along traffic on the freeway entrance toward the Bay Bridge, so it's not like Shrimp could escape my line of questioning. He said, "If you have to know, I'm failing out. I lost my scholarship, and Wallace doesn't want to pay the tuition if I'm failing or just not showing up because I can't catch up no matter what I do. The school was basically gonna kick me out anyway. So I dropped out this week. It was, like, a mutual decision all around."
It certainly was not a mutual decision all around because I'd never been consulted and wasn't I the girl for
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whom he painted Blitzkrieg CC, the one whose cell phone he called at home every night to rap love songs into her ear before she went to sleep? And what about those other so-called important people in his life, the ones called parents!
"Iris and Billy signed off on this?" I asked.
"Sure." He shrugged. "They're cool with it. They know I'll get my G.E.D. eventually."
I turned the radio volume back up and changed the station to the pop music station, which was spinning the latest puke-pop princess's saccharine hit. Shrimp gave me a dirty look and changed the station to the alternative music college station playing a morose Radiohead tune. I met his dirty look and changed the radio station back to the pop princess number. Sometimes Shrimp is just too hipper-than-thou. Sometimes I just want to be a geek and listen to bad pop music and not care whether that's pathetic.
"WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM?" The Artist Formerly Known as Mr. Don't Harsh My Mellow yelled at me. "I hate that shit music. What's the look for? Don't tell me you're mad about me dropping out of school. You hate school. What do you care?"
"I care enough to know I ought to just finish it," I said. I also care enough to know that parents who were "cool with it" were less than cool themselves. I certainly care enough to know that he should have brought all these issues up with me much, much earlier. We'd been sleeping together, talking about our dreams together, assuming we had a future together, for months now, and this was the first I was hearing about all this? Now I felt like all the time we'd spent together
since becoming a couple again was a lie, because he had been holding out this crucial piece of
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him all that time--and I had let him, wanting to bask in the glow of true love.
We settled on the hip-hop radio station and rode in silence the remaining journey to the East Bay. When we reached Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, Shrimp slowed down to look for a parking space as we neared the restaurant. Shrimp said, "I can only come in for a second to meet your brother. Then I'm gonna head over to Berkeley." The car was not quite at a full stop, but I opened my door and hopped out of it. "Don't bother," I said. I slammed the passenger's door behind me. The Pinto came to a complete stop, as if hesitating on how to proceed, then pulled an illegal U-ey and bolted down Piedmont Avenue in the opposite direction.
Danny was waiting for me outside the restaurant. "Terry's getting our table. Where's Shrimp? Parking the car? I can't wait to meet him at last!"
"He's not coming," I murmured. "I don't want to talk about it." I felt stiff in Danny's embrace, wanting to go home, get in bed, and throw the covers over my head.
'Ah," Danny said in my ear as I let go of his hug. "The elusive Shrimp remains elusive."
My hellacious mood didn't help, but it was not the reason I hated Terry. As expected, Terry was a shallow-vain he-man, only worse--he's married to his job instead of his looks. And he's old, like at least forty, though his fake tan, blond looks, and runner's body gave him the appearance of a much younger man. How could I get to know him, try to like him, if he answered cell phone calls from his office every two minutes? Danny explained to me during our appetizers, while Terry excused himself for a good fifteen minutes to take a call, that Terry is a lawyer, a partner at a
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big SF law firm, and he was in the middle of closing an important deal. I couldn't imagine Danny's ex, Aaron, even owning a cell phone, much less using it during an awesome meal that a noted Bay Area chef had prepared. I mean, show some respect.
"I'm bored," Danny sighed halfway through his entree, a fabulous cut steak cooked to perfection. Terry was back outside again on the phone, his salmon untouched on the table.
"Bored with Terry?" I asked, hopeful. That didn't take long.
"You wish!" Danny said. "No, the Terry part, when I get to see him, is great. And I saw you lunge for his phone the last time it rang, and it's a good thing Terry's reflexes are quicker than yours because I know what you were planning on doing to that phone." Danny looked toward the shrub outside the open window behind our table. My brother is truly psychic. "No, I'm living-bored. The 'burbs are killing me. I hate being dependent on a car, but I have to use Terry's car to go out during the day because everything is so far apart, and there's always traffic. And it's so quiet at night at his house up in the hills. I'm a New Yorker. I need energy and noise, subways and cabs, dirt and grime, diversity. I'm actually missing snow and cold--real cold, not this bogus California cold! Every day the weather in the Oakland hills is the same.- perfect. Everybody looks the same: perfect. It's boring. Boring, boring, boring."
Maybe my brother, not Shrimp, is my soul mate.
Terry returned to the table, but I caught him checking out the waiter's tight behind as the waiter refilled a wineglass at the next table. In fact, Terry had yet to look me
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straight in the eyes, because the little time he was in my presence his eyes scanned the room, like he was looking for someone better to mingle with. He must be from L.A. Terry turned to me. "So, kiddo," he said, like he hadn't spent the majority of our dinner away from the table and thereby, in my opinion, forfeited his right to rejoin our conversation. "College in your plans?"
I almost spit out the water I was gulping, because that was when it hit me: Terry was just like bio-dad Frank! These were almost the exact words Frank had asked me last summer, on the one day he'd grudgingly given me some time and we went strolling through Central Park together. Like Frank, Terry was great-looking but with a wandering eye, a deal maker and workaholic, probably incapable of being in a committed relationship--it couldn't be a coincidence that a guy as old and successful as Terry lived in a big house in the hills by himself. Poor Danny and his Oedipal-whatever thingy! Please let this horrid relationship be over soon, I prayed, before Danny's therapy bills grew higher than the debt left over from The Village Idiots' failure.
Before I could answer Terry's question, his cell phone rang. Again. This time my reflexes were quicker, and I grabbed the phone from the table before Terry's hand reached it. I tossed the phone out the window into the shrubs.
Men. Sometimes they just need to be taught a lesson.
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*** Chapter 31
The Sugar Pie-Fernando-Sid-dad hotline must be in full effect because I have been summoned to Sid-dad's study for a Talk. I didn't tell my parents about Shrimp dropping out of school, I haven't mentioned our fight or that Shrimp and I aren't speaking, but my parents can't be completely clueless.
Sid-dad shut the door to his study and started out the Talk with, "So I understand our friend Shrimp is no longer matriculated at school." Our friend Shrimp's painting, Blitzkrieg CC, hung behind Sid-dad's desk, purchased for a tidy sum at the hospital charity auction. Nancy sat next to Sid-dad on the leather couch, her hand pressed into his. Those two are getting ridiculous. I have to resist the urge to spontaneously hurl every time they touch each other like that when I'm around. PEOPLE: children are present. Restrain yourselves!
"So?" I said. He's not their kid--what do they care?
Nancy said, "Well, I am just horrified." Good--but I didn't ask your opinion.
Sid-dad said, "But we're not his parents, so we have no say one way or the other in his decision. But we're concerned because we are your parents, and we thought now is a good time to get a sense from you of your intentions."
"I'm not dropping out or failing out!" I said, on the defensive. I was bummed enough about the Shrimp situation. Did we have to have the DO something talk just now?
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Nancy said, "We know that. But we're concerned that you're flailing." I glanced toward Lady Liberty CC in the painting, holding out the silk stockings over her legs, and suddenly I pictured her like a fish just plucked out of the Hudson River and gasping for water, placed on a piece of the tabloid newspaper bound for the morning fish market, headline: flailing!
To parents, flailing is just another word for failing. "What does it take to get through to you people?" I huffed. "I am this close to graduation and I have a perfectly respectable GPA this year. Have some faith in me--how about that? And if you really must know, since you're so nosy, I think Shrimp made a mistake myself. I think he's gonna wake up in a few years and all his friends are going to have moved on, and he's gonna feel left behind and regretting this decision, bad. But I'm only his girlfriend and barely that right now, and I was offered no influence in the decision. So be happy. I would have said not to do it. And Shrimp and I are not even talking now because of how he handled the whole thing."
"Oh," Sid and Nancy both said. It was hard to tell if they looked pleased or surprised--maybe it was somewhere in between.
Sid-dad said, "My secretary has tried reaching him regarding a contact I'd like to give him, but no one seems to be able to track him down." That's the truth. Elusive Shrimp hasn't been by my house, Java the Hut in Ocean Beach, or Sugar Pie's, and he must have been struck with amnesia when it comes to my cell phone digits. I have no idea where he's been since our fight. "I can't condone his decision, but I thought he would be interested in knowing
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there is a gallery owner here in The City who was at the hospital auction, who is interested in seeing more of Shrimp's work. Could be a tremendous opportunity for the young man."
"Forget about it," I said. This much I know about the elusive Shrimp, for sure: give him an opportunity to turn his art into cash from The Man, not just a charity opportunity accepted to get into my parents' good graces, and Shrimp will disappear faster than you can say Hang loose.
Nancy gestured to a stack of brochures on the coffee table. "We're well aware of your feelings about college, and while we don't plan on insisting..."
"... I don't want to go to City College next year, not even part-time--"
Sid-dad interrupted me. "Now whose turn is it to show some faith? We've got your message already: NO COLLEGE. Forgetting that most students your age would be thrilled to have the privilege you take for granted, to go to college without the worry of financing the education or the burden of student loan debt, we nonetheless have heard you loud and clear on this point. You'll be an adult soon; we can't force you to go. And frankly our time is better spent than trying to force this issue. No, these brochures are for culinary school. Your work-study time at the restaurant last fall proved what I suspected: You're a natural candidate for a culinary arts curriculum."
The idea was intriguing, but why did he have to use the word curriculum! Talk about a buzz kill. Also, I did not appreciate that my sentence to work with Lord Empress Kari had, in fact, been part of an evil, manipulating scheme to test the waters on my restaurant abilities and culinary
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inclination. My eyes lingered on the brochures but I didn't reach for them. I couldn't give my parents that much satisfaction.
"There are some excellent schools here in the Bay Area. Your brother Danny and I have been talking about this, and he's recommended a few schools he thinks would be appropriate matches for you," Sid-dad offered, like I was a suspicious cat to whom he was offering his hand to sniff first, before getting in close.