Frank tossed his napkin on the table and followed Danny into the other room.
I reached for a third biscuit. LisBETH makes delicious
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biscuits; it's really a shame she never got to do that house-wifey thing.
LisBETH said, "Well, I guess a family holiday wouldn't be complete without at least one fight. You know, you have quite the appetite."
"Thank you. You make great biscuits. Could you pass me some more of that strawberry butter?"
LisBETH watched me eat, probably knowing I was trapped by my hunger and couldn't escape her. Then she excused herself from the table, and I thought she was going to butt in on Frank and Danny's conversation, but instead she returned to the table carrying her briefcase. She opened it and handed me a stack of postcards tucked inside it. There were four tourist postcards, from Cleveland, Beijing, Dallas, and Milan. When I turned them over, I saw each had been addressed to me, dated at different intervals since last summer, and each had a short note from lisBETH.
Oct. 18, Cleveland: Did you know the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is here? We should visit together sometime.
Nov. 30, Beijing: This city makes New York seem like a ghost town.
Jan. 23, Dallas: Do those cheerleaders from this city's basketball team annoy you as much as they do me?
March 2, Milan: Clothes, food, clothes, food: BLISS.
"Uh, thanks?" I said to lisBETH. She said, "I've never had a chance to mail these to you. But I do think of you sometimes." She looked at me hope-
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fully, like maybe I had been writing her postcards too but also not getting around to mailing them. I guess I could, if I ever thought of it. In the future, I decided, I will. LisBETH, my new postcard pen pal--signed, sealed, but delivered.
I felt like I owed her a confidence in return since I had no cryptic correspondence to share. "My boyfriend and I are moving in together in the fall," I said. "But don't tell; it's a secret so far."
"You're not getting married or pregnant, are you?" she said, like, Don't compete in my territory of ambitions!
"Ew, no way," I said. Hmm, thought brewing. "LisBETH, I have this friend who goes to one of the Ivies around here. He's a business major, straight-A student, straight-up good guy. I think he needs a part-time job next fall. Do you think your firm would look at his resume?"
LisBETH took a business card from her briefcase and handed it to me. "Tell him to give me a call. I'd be glad to at least help him get his foot in the door."
Hee hee-. LisBETH, older single woman, intelligent but overbearing NYC career gal, wants to be a mommy, meet Alexei the Not-So-Horrible, overbearing Ivy League stud with the older-chick fetish, living in the tri-state area during the school year, would make great babydaddy. I'm a genius; I don't need college.
Later, after Frank and Danny had returned to the table looking calmer and happier, if tired, we finished the meal in peace. When it came time to leave, Frank gave me a minor hug--the kind where you lean in and pat but don't make full body contact--and said, "I'll be hoping to see more of you in the future."
I said, "Likewise, Frank."
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In the cab on the way back to Danny's apartment, Danny slumped his head onto my shoulder. "That was awful!" he said.
I massaged the back of his neck. "Oh, come on, now. It wasn't that bad."
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*** Chapter 37
Here's how I know Shrimp loves me. He picked me up that night in the arrival area inside SFO instead of a curbside pickup. You don't go to that trouble unless it's true love.
I was so happy to see him I lifted him in my arms when he hugged me. I know he's the guy and he's supposed to do that, but he's also on record (T-shirt variety) as being a feminist , man enough to deal.
"Nice to see you too!" Shrimp said after I let him down and smothered his face and neck in kisses. "New York agrees with you. God, you look awesome." We shared a long, deep airport kiss, the kind that if you're disembarking from an airplane and you're not in love, you want to slap the couple upside their heads for sharing in public.
I said, "New York is like a shot in the arm--makes you feel alive! But all the feeling more alive did was make me miss you more, make me more excited to get home to see you." Repeat above kiss, add in one additional minute and three groans of "Get a room" from passersby. When we pried our lips apart, I asked, "What did you have to tell me?"
Shrimp said, "You have to wait a little longer, till we get to the special place." I assumed he meant our make-out spot, Land's End, but that was very out of the way if he still had to go to Some Guy's house in the East Bay after dropping me home in Pacific Heights.
In fact, the special place turned out to be Outback
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Steakhouse in Daly City. "Huh?" I said, when he pulled into the crowded parking lot. What special announcement could a vegetarian have to make at the 'Australian" steakhouse that's probably about as Australian as Frank Sinatra was Venezuelan?
Once we were seated at a booth, I ordered Shrimp on the Barbie in honor of guess who, and guess who ordered the Walhalla pasta with no meat. Once the waitress had taken our orders, Shrimp started in. "First announcement is this: Iris and Billy are moving to New Zealand. A friend of theirs has some property down there and invited them to take over the guest house, oversee the property when the friend is gone, and Iris and Billy will have some land to use as well. They're becoming organic farmers."
Farmers, indeed. Is there such a thing as organic marijuana? I wonder who is running them out of town: Wallace and Delia or the feds. "That's nice for them," I said. "I hear it's very beautiful there."
"Exactly!" Shrimp said.
My brain connected the dots: Outback Steakhouse... Australia... close to New Zealand... "Exactly!"...OH SHIT. I had barely finished computing Shrimp's logic, but he left me no chance to respond. He was going for it.
Shrimp stood up from his side of the booth and got down on bended knee on my side of the booth. He held out his pinkie finger, dangling from it a hand-carved wooden ring, with a setting carved and painted like a kiwi. This isn't happening, I thought. DO NOT CRY! This is Outback Steakhouse in Daly City, for God's sake--and Shrimp is a vegetarian.
Shrimp looked up into my eyes. "I know you're not the
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marrying kind, but I'm wondering if you would make an exception for me? I've been working on this ring for you ever since Iris and Billy told me their news. I really want to move to New Zealand with Iris and Billy. The surfing is killer there, and I can do my art, and we could travel all around Australia and Indonesia and Bali. I loved that part of the world I saw last summer, and I want more--but it's no good without you there with me. The East Bay idea was alright, but this one is so much better! We can go backpacking Down Under--Tasmania, Sydney, Perth--then on to the Asian Pacific islands and all over NZ. Surfers are like their own community, they always help each other out, so we'll always have places to crash wherever we go, and we can make cash at odd jobs when we need to. We can stay with Iris and Billy as home base. Their friends who made the offer to them have a killer place--huge, they say. Fuck, I love you so much, it's, like, painful. You are the coolest babe I could ever want to share my life with. What do you say?"
A waitress carrying a large tray of entrées bumped into Shrimp from behind his kneeling position, pushing his face onto my knee, so now he was looking up at me like a puppy.
I had no idea what to say, so I nodded my head in confusion and just plain being overwhelmed by the proposal. Shrimp took my head nodding and the unfortunate tears streaming down my face for a yes. And I didn't have the heart to reeducate him, not when he placed the ring on my left hand, stood up, held his hands out for me to stand up, and this time he lifted me in the air. Our fellow Outback Steakhouse diners applauded, much "oohing" and "ahhing" came from the nearby tables, and two comp bottles of
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Foster's, Australian for beer, landed on our table--which the restaurant manager promptly took
away when neither Shrimp nor I would tear our lips apart to show ID.
I was grateful now that Shrimp had chosen Outback Steakhouse for his proposal, because no one Sid and Nancy knew would be caught dead here, and my parents would have simultaneous heart attacks when I got around to telling them, so better not to have spies breaking the news to them first.
After the crying and the kissing and the applauding, Shrimp and I sat back down opposite each other in the booth. I took his hand from across the table, admiring my new ring. I said, "I know I want to be with you." In fact, maybe marriage wasn't such a bad idea. If we got married, we'd be locked down. No distractions, like Loo-eese or surfer chicks, could have the potential to pull us apart. And why bother to transform myself into an East Bay girl if I could gallivant across the flip side of the world with my soul mate? Well, it would be far from home, and Sid and Nancy had been supportive so far of my relationship with Shrimp, but this new development would tip them over the edge into hysteria and fights and all-out disapproval again. Alcatraz would no longer be an option this time around, though, because I'm almost eighteen, and after that birthday I can do what or go where I want, with whom I want, so long as I am willing to make my own way. And if I want to marry Shrimp, dedicate my future to him because he's the best future I could ever imagine, well, that's my choice to make, not theirs. Sid and Nancy, or Ash and Josh, Danny, or Sugar Pie and Fernando, Helen and Autumn, my family, the people I care about most, they would just have to live
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with my decision and the fact that I will not be present to share their lives. They will have to love me just the same, and I will have to get over the hurt of missing them.
But crashing with Iris and Billy as our "home base"? I said, "I'm not so sure about the following your parents, though. Maybe that part's not the best idea."
"But they go to cool places," Shrimp said. So? They're also crazy irresponsible! Iris and Billy do whatever suits them in the moment--like abandoning Iris's daughter from her first marriage so they could be together, or leaving fourteen-year-old Shrimp with Wallace so they could go to Papua New Guinea. Nancy might also be crazy, but at least she's not irresponsible--and she's in for the duration of the game, come hell or high water. (She's also not really crazy, although I will jump into the Grand Canyon before admitting that to her face.) I like Iris and Billy okay--they did, after all, breed Shrimp--but I don't want to attach my destiny to theirs.
I pointed out, "New York is cool. That doesn't mean I'm going to live there because bio-dad Frank does."
"This is different and you know it. And you said yes." Shrimp stood up on his side of the booth and thumped his chest like Tarzan. "SHE SAID YES!" he announced for any of the diners in the packed restaurant who might not have caught the earlier bended-knee proposal scene. He did a little hip-hop dance on his seat before the restaurant manager came back over and asked him to be seated or be asked to leave.
Only I didn't say yes, not just yet. I'm thinking.
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*** Chapter 38
So we're having a wedding and a new baby in the family. Nancy got her garden party after all.
We chose May 15 for the wedding day, the anniversary date of Frank Sinatra's passing from this mortal earth, because Sid-dad said he wanted that date to now be associated with new beginnings for the people in his family. Since he was throwing the wedding, he thought he should have some influence in choosing the date.
I wore the lavender Chinese silk gown that lisBETH gave me last year, that had been her grandmother's (mine too, even though I never knew her) favorite dress, but I couldn't deal with those high-heel horrors called fancy shoes, so I went barefoot with black toenail polish and a wood-carved pinkie toe ring that had a kiwi setting. Shrimp changed his hair for the occasion, so he looked like he did the day I first met him-- short mop of dirty blond hair with a patch of platinum blond spikes at the front of his face. He wore an oversized hand-me-down suit and tie from Wallace that made Shrimp look like an earnest Sunday school teacher with punk hair, from the Church of the Stoked. The look of infatuation on Shrimp's face in the back garden at my parents' house that day was the same one he gave me that first day we met at Sugar Pie's room at the home. When I looked back at him, in this haze we've been in ever since Outback Steakhouse, I knew I will never love another person in my life the way I love him.
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As Sugar Pie and Fernando said their vows to the judge under a trellis custom-built for the occasion, strung with white roses and vines, I stood at Sugar Pie's side, her maid of honor, and Alexei stood at Fernando's side, the best man. Chairs were set out in the garden for the ceremony, but it was a small affair, strictly family and a few friends. Fernando's daughter and grandchildren were there, Sid and Nancy and the kids, Helen and Autumn, and Shrimp, Wallace, and Delia. Iris and Billy left for New Zealand almost as soon as they received the call to go. Nancy sat next to Dee, patting Dee's growing belly, and discussing morning sickness.
Delia is due in November, and Nancy is due in December. Trust my mother to do something fashionable like get pregnant at her advancing age. Nancy seems happy but reluctant. Sid-dad is ecstatic. He is already interviewing for a new housekeeper and nanny, so in the end Nancy wins again. I don't think their new addition is like some TV show where the writers have run out of plot lines so they throw in a late-in-life baby to rejuvenate the tired old parents. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that two people who married for convenience--Sid so he could be a dad and protector, Nancy so she could be rich and a protectee--have now, more than ten years after the fact, fallen in love with each other. And baby makes six. It's still disgusting, but maybe not totally.
The apartment at the side of our house has been renovated for wheelchair access for Sugar Pie's dialysis days, and Sugar Pie will move in after the honeymoon at Disney Land with Fernando's grandkids. I think someone should build a senior citizen commune that's also an amusement
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park, where the wrinkles on the old people's faces are like a map of their lives, and all the rides are custom-designed to accommodate wheelchairs and memory loss and a complicated array of prescription side effects.
After last Christmas, when Fernando didn't take Sugar Pie to Nicaragua to meet his family back there, she asked him, 'Are you in this or aren't you?" Fernando said he'd thought it would be too difficult to travel with her because of her dialysis needs, and Sugar Pie said, "Where there's a will, there's a way, and I repeat: Are you in this or aren't you?" So Fernando said, "57, I'm in if you're in." But where Sugar Pie just meant she wanted the next trip to Nicaragua because she heard it was a really cool place, Fernando meant it's time to get legal with this true love. And that is how Sugar Pie came to be a bride for the first time at age seventy-something, and probably the only person I will ever meet who's done a reverse nursing-home swing, moving out of one to start a new life instead of going into one to wait to die. She made a beautiful bride in her white suit and church lady hat, standing with the cane that Ash and Josh decorated with strings of flowers and mini chocolate bars. It was Fernando, the tall, broody man of steel wearing a most excellent Italian black silk suit, who was the weeper during this particular ceremony.
After the ceremony I took Alexei aside to hand him lisBETH's business card. I told him, "Just because you're an insufferable faux intellectual doesn't mean Wall Street wouldn't be lucky to have you. Here, this is my sister's card. She's a managing director at some big investment firm. She needs a college student to help her out part-time next fall. Call her, okay?" Rule #1 of Matchmaking, by Cyd Charisse:
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Always go for the sneaky setup, where the two interested parties meet without knowing they're being matched. That's how I got Sugar Pie and Fernando together, and I'd have to say the evidence is weighing in favor of my methods on that one.
Shrimp came to my side and took my hand. I looked toward Sugar Pie and Fernando, holding hands and beaming, and I thought, Sugar Pie waited a lifetime to have her momen
t. I'm barely eighteen and I could have mine now if I want. But would mine be as heartfelt, as accepted by my friends and family? Would mine last? Josh came to my other side and latched on to my other hand. He looked up at me with that beauty-boy face and said, "Shrimp said you guys are taking me to the rickety roller coaster at Santa Cruz after your graduation. You're going to stay here all summer and not go away again like last summer, right?"
I've been thinking about Shrimp's proposal since the Outback Steakhouse, and letting Shrimp think that we're going through with it, but only at this moment, seeing Josh's trusting face, did I realize my answer. Soon I will have to tell Josh that when I assured him I wasn't leaving, I meant it at the time, but things change, people change. I will be going.
But first I have to tell Shrimp.
Later that evening, after the guests had gone home and the party cleaned up, Shrimp and I took a walk through the Presidio to talk about our plans. We wound up at Fort Point, at the old brick military building underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, where the Hitchcock Vertigo movie lady with the freaked-out eyebrows jumped into the freezing cold Bay and poor chump Jimmy Stewart had to dive in to rescue her.
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We sat down on the ledge at the water, our feet dangling over the Bay. I am not a drag-the-moment-out type of girl, so I just came out with it. I told Shrimp, "If I'm going to be on an island, I want one that's a city at the center of the universe, not one that's its own nation at the bottom of the world. I don't want to be so far from my family. If I wanted to be married, I would want you for my husband and life partner, but no way am I ready to be married yet. Can't we go to New York instead?"