Cupcake

by Rachel Cohn

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  ***

  TWENTY-SIX

  Self-actualization proves useless when confusion reigns supreme.

  This shall be the first lesson imparted at Miss Cyd Charisse's Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie commune. Class, this pioneer schoolroom has been specially chartered to ease the path of your denial. In this little one-room shack of a schoolhouse with a window view out onto the wide open prairie, you can accept true love back into your life without needing to question how the hell--oops, heck--it came to find you again.

  The second lesson is that if a Shrimp arrives carrying a refrigerated bag of pork pot stickers from Clement Street in San Francisco even though he's a vegetarian--that's just how compassionate he is, caring more about your need for pork than about the pig's need to not be turned into pork--well, you accept that on blind faith, and do not question the health hygiene issues involved

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  in the cross-country transportation of meat products. Clement Street pot stickers are hard to come by on the prairie. Those dumplings are gold, the currency declaring that Shrimp knows what you want better than you know yourself.

  When you ask why he is here, what happened in New Zealand, do not be annoyed with his vague responses. You can read between the mumbles. Shrimp followed his parents to New Zealand, where they were going to become organic farmers, but his parents neglected to clear the immigration and visa hurdles that would have allowed for a permanent relocation there. Kiwis are uptight about hippy parents with marijuana-trafficking legal entanglements in their pasts. Oops. Be compassionate. Be a cupcake. You've made some less than smart decisions yourself. Lots of folks have wanted to deport you. Don't judge.

  Why did Shrimp find you at your schoolhouse? Why now?

  Who cares!

  Focus on the important things. Look at his tight little surfer body, way leaner than you remember, by way of either stress or kiwi diet, you don't know, but surely you'd like to experiment on the differential of his body's equation. Stare deep inside the deep blue of his eyes on his deeply tanned face, newly hardened by antipodean sun but overcast by bad choice haze; admire his new preppy-cut dirty blond hair with a wind-whipped, sun-kissed golden patch spiking up through the middle but slanted to the side, like a

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  Mohawk modeled on the Leaning Tower of I Love You More Than Ever. Transitioning back to that make-believe commune of making out will clearly be a bigger priority than all those damn--oops, darn--questions.

  Believe the dream. Even self-actualized schoolmarms sometimes look out their open schoolhouse windows, into the nothingness, only to find somethingness floating their way. This apparition is not just possibility. It is actuality. Ghosts don't need to properly explain why they choose to appear out of nowhere. That's why they're ghosts. Demand too much of them and they will disappear again, stealing your actuality and all the possible kisses they might have brought along with them.

  Class, Shrimp is lost and you can help find him. He needs you. That's the only lesson you need to know.

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  ***

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  We interrupt the return of true love for an emergency broadcast

  parental freak-out.

  "CYD CHARISSE, DID I HEAR YOU PROPERLY--YOU WON'T BE COMING HOME AT ALL FOR CHRISTMAS? HOW COULD YOU WAIT THIS LONG TO CALL ME WITH THIS INFORMATION? FERNANDO WAS JUST ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR THE AIRPORT TO PICK YOU UP! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T GET ON THE PLANE HOME TO SAN FRANCISCO THIS MORNING?"

  Well, Mom, would you believe a blizzard struck Lower Manhattan around dawn this morning--planes were okay to depart from JFK and Newark, but what help's that if no cab could make it to my apartment building to take me to the airport? No kidding, the mayor declared a snow state of emergency from Wall Street up to Fourteenth Street. Totally

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  freak snowstorm--if it had only diverted a few blocks north, I'd have been fine, winging my way home this very minute. Swear.

  I braced myself, then said the word quietly, almost in a whisper: "Shrimp."

  "SHRIMP!" My mother's voice was not almost a scream--it was more like a deafening screech. "You've GOT to be kidding me. He's there NOW?" I could totally picture Nancy clenching her teeth and balling up her fists in frustration. The vision was almost comforting--just like old times.

  "Yeah, he showed up unexpectedly last night. He's had a hard time, Mom. I can't leave him alone now."

  In exchange for Danny's reluctant acquiescence to my request for Shrimp to stay at the apartment while Danny was away on vacation, I promised I wouldn't lie to my parents about the reason I'd bailed on going home for Christmas. Initially Danny said no way could Shrimp stay, and neither could I for that matter, but rather than throw a tantrum disputing Danny's unreasonable edict, I stated the simple fact that I'm old enough and responsible enough to make this decision for myself, independent of the Commandant's rules. Danny sighed like a Nancy and said, "But if you don't go home, your parents will be mad at me." And I corrected him: "No, they'll be mad at me." Danny shrugged his agreement. Trumped.

  As he left the apartment for the airport this morning, Danny did ask me to promise to think it through carefully before jumping

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  back in with Shrimp, but I could give no such pledge. True love waits on no false promises.

  "I thought Shrimp was in New Zealand," Nancy said.

  "He returned to San Francisco last week. But there's a new baby at his brother's house, so he felt weird about getting in the way there, even though his new niece is amazing and one day she will be number one female surf champion of the world. His parents took off to stay with friends in Humboldt County, and Shrimp didn't know where else to go. He had a free airplane ticket because he'd agreed to get bumped on the flight back from Auckland, so he came to New York on a whim. He was gonna stay with some surfer friend from Ocean Beach who now lives in Brooklyn, but he came to look for me first and he brought me pot stickers from Clement Street and--"

  When I had called Autumn this morning to tell her I wouldn't be sharing the plane ride home with her after all, she'd said, "Shrimp has a friend from Ocean Beach who now lives in Brooklyn? Riiiight." Then, "Be careful," she'd advised. "Don't worry," I said, "I'm back on the pill."

  "I meant with your heart," she said. "For that boy to show up out of the blue means he is probably seriously lost, and looking to you to find his way for him. You work on your way, please?"

  "I can't believe you're going down this road again," Nancy interrupted. I couldn't believe she knew without me telling her that

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  I was in fact going down this road again--not just considering it. "After everything you two have been through. After you'd finally made the decision to move on with your lives." Epic San Andreas fault 7.0 Richter scale Nancy-sigh. "I can't believe we're back to this same place again. But you know what? I don't have the energy to argue this one. I can't tell you what to do, but I will tell you I'm very disappointed in you. I'm disappointed with Shrimp for manipulating your romantic idealism by springing up in Manhattan with no warning. Dad and Ash and Josh and Fernando and Sugar Pie will also be very disappointed not to share Christmas with you. And the baby ..."

  Frances Alberta is my new favorite sibling, because her crying in the background of my phone call with our mother distracted Nancy's epic disappointment trying to burst my Shrimp glow-bubble.

  Shrimp does not manipulate. He's not capable of it. He's Shrimp. Applying any form of the word "manipulation" in relation to him is a complete oxymoron--he's the most mellow person in the world. "Manipulation" would harsh him into being an oxy-depleted moron, and he would have none of that.

  Sid-dad got on the phone in Nancy's place. "Cupcake, what's this I hear about you not making it on the plane home this morning?" "Ask her why!" Nancy shrieked in the background as she tended to the baby. But Nancy didn't wait for me to tell my dad

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  before spewing, "Shrimp decided to show up in New York yesterday ON
A WHIM."

  Onawhim. Would make cool band name. Would also make compelling tryst of Scrabble letters.

  Sid-dad took his time before responding to the news my mother hadn't given me a chance to deliver myself. I wasn't sure whether he was directing his comment to me or to Nancy when he said, "Well, she is eighteen. What can you expect?"

  Turns out I'm capable of shrieking like my mother. "That's patronizing!" I snapped.

  Calmly, Sid-dad answered, "But true."

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  ***

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shrimp is a liar.

  I've got his passport in my hand to prove it. "Your real name is Philip! Or is this passport a fake?" I paused to suck in a deep breath, and to ponder every supposed truth I've ever known about the universe. This couldn't be right. "You told me your real name was Shrimp. You even showed me a birth certificate that definitively stated your legal name was Shrimp."

  Shrimp took the passport from my hand and tossed it against my bedroom wall. "Actually, the birth certificate was the fake. My brother had it made for me as a joke birthday present one year. The birth certificate was supposed to be used as ID because I don't have a driver's license. Wallace wanted me to show the birth certificate to get the shrimp birthday special discount to go along with the gift certificate he gave me, good for dinner for two at Red Lobster."

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  "That's just mean."

  "No kidding. Like I'd eat at Red Lobster?" (Said the boy who proposed marriage to me at Outback Steakhouse.)

  "Wait a minute. Your real name is Philip, and you don't have a legal driver's license, either? But you drove your brother's car around everywhere when you lived in San Francisco."

  "Yeah. So?" Shrimp nuzzled his head inside my neck from behind me, then pulled the blanket up higher over our bodies. "Its burr-ito in New York. Did you know about this?" His body spooned into mine, I felt no cold draft.

  No Jell-O shots had been necessary to bring us back to the ecstasy where we'd left off. We've lost and found each other too many times to bother with the Will We or Won't We mating dance. We know we will. We did. It's, like, predetermined. We waited about as long as it took for Danny to leave the apartment this morning, for him to walk down the five flights of stairs, and for me to see him from our front window down at the street curb, hailing a taxi and being whisked away to the airport.

  God, it felt holy-fantastic-great to mind-soul-body merge with Shrimp again. Like all was right with true love and our place within it. Praise Jesus for Christmas miracles!

  "Why didn't you write me or call me from New Zealand?" I asked him.

  "I was respecting your explicit directions. You told me not to

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  contact you at all when I left. You said it would be too painful. Clean break. Your idea. Remember?"

  I hate when guys take everything a girl says literally.

  Shrimp added, "I noticed you didn't contact me either? So the clean break was an equal opportunity one, don't you agree?"

  We'd both agree that we wouldn't dare the real question hovering over our clean break: "Have you been with anyone else?" Neither of us was ready for that answer. Hover elsewhere, question.

  I pitched the soft serve inquiry instead. "Phil, what do you want from life now?"

  Shrimp pressed tighter into me, and I almost rescinded the philosophical entreaty merely on the grounds of his left hand exploring the right territory. The new fullness of me matched the new leanness of him, like a yin/yang balance reflecting the changes in our lives as a result of what had happened in our lives since our News--York and Zealand.

  Shrimp's slow hand definitely appreciated my growth spurt. As his hand surfed my curves, he talked to me, warming me further. He'd never been one for talking in the past. "For right now I want to be here with you. For later, I don't know. Maybe get my GED. Seems like the only job worth having that I can get without a high school diploma is working either for my brother or as a truck driver. Not that I really want a job or a career, but I guess eventually I'm gonna have to sell my soul to make the cash to travel again."

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  "What about your art?"

  "I love creating art, but it's like you never know when inspiration will strike. I don't want to be obligated to it. I want the canvasses or the sculptures or whatever it is to happen when it wants to happen, and not happen because a car needs insurance or rent has to be paid. I want to live free of all that."

  "That's what you want to do? Travel?"

  "Seems like a decent and honorable goal to me, spiritually fulfilling and personally satisfying and whatever--the essence of what life's about, I guess? There are beaches I dream about in Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur and Norway and Cyprus, where the surfing is supposedly like--"

  I turned over to look at him, to separate our bodies from their tight soul clasp. It's like I had tried to forget what his face looked like so I wouldn't hurt from missing it, and now I wanted to drown in the beauty of it. I placed my index and middle fingers on his full red lips. "Shhh," I whispered.

  Seriously, he'd just told me more about himself in the last two minutes than in like the last two years of our knowing each other. It was overwhelming.

  Shrimp instigated a silence of kisses, but I strangely couldn't focus on the taste of his mouth. I was reconsidering this new Phil creature whom I'd never known. My head flipped through mental

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  images of Phil ten years in the future, long burnt out on surfing, never having bothered to get the GED even though that Cyd Charisse girl who'd been the love of his life back when he was a Shrimp had told him not to drop out of high school, had told him he'd eventually regret that decision. Years after her prophetically brilliant observation, Phil's regret finds him with a new life working as a truck driver, with a not-CC wife and kids in Modesto. Truck driver Phil makes regular pit stops at his favorite refuge along the 1-5, where he'd be all, "Evenin', Polly, I'll have my usual" to the waitress. And Polly would be all perky and like, "Vegetarian quesadilla comin' right up," giggle giggle, because Polly couldn't wait to deliver Phil-not-Shrimp the blue plate special as his reward for steering clear of the strip clubs while on the road and choosing the side trips to Hooters instead--not like the old wife would mind. Wife came from a long line of Hooters waitresses; in fact that's where she met Phil, and he promised on their wedding day while they stood before the Elvis impersonator chaplain at the Reno Chapel of Love with her eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly sticking out that he would never love Hooters other than hers, and she believed him. Girls will believe anything when they're blinded by love.

  "Where'd you go?" Shrimp asked me, his face pensive and no longer attached to mine.

  I had no response. I no longer understood my relationship to truth.

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  Shrimp answered for me. He whispered, "I still love you."

  I whispered his old standard back: "Ditto."

  Manipulation does not spout "I love you." It's not possible. Manipulation does worry that the sentiment, however sincerely felt, might not have been truly earned.

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  ***

  TWENTY-NINE

  My mother is evil. She drops these little comments that seem

  stupid or insignificant when she's sighing them, yet somehow they have the power to get under my skin. "I hope you know what you're doing letting Shrimp back into your life just when yours seemed to be getting on track...." Nag, nag, nag. Really, what does she know?

  Except, sigh, I sort of see her point. Annoying, annoying, annoying.

  Theoretically I assumed that if Shrimp and I were together in New York, I would be bursting out of my skin wanting to share this city with him. We'd go ice skating in Central Park, explore art galleries in Williamsburg, eat our way from Chinatown to Astoria, slam with the punks at dive clubs in Alphabet City. And of course we'd fit in the requisite time in my bedroom, hiding out from the

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  world, lost in each other. The reality was, I loved that Shr
imp came to Manhattan and found me, but I felt powerless about how that choice was made. He just showed up. I had no say in the when and the whim of how our lives once again intersected. My heart burned all these months for wanting him to share my new life, but with him suddenly here live and in the flesh, giving no indication as to whether he planned to settle in or pick up and leave for the next killer curl somewhere else in the world, I really didn't know what I was doing with Shrimp. Should I relax and enjoy it for the moment, or expect our reunion to evolve into a new relationship like before, only now we were grown-up and living on our own, accountable for our own choices--and mistakes?

  Life seems to sort itself out for me at LU_CH_ONE_TE, so I figured I'd better dip Shrimp into the well there, test him in my new environment and see how he fit in with that part of my new life. Experimenting with how a San Francisco surfer boy adapted to my Manhattan Project could yield important findings.

  "What are you doing here, Myself?" Johnny Mold asked when I arrived for a Christmas Eve day shift, Shrimp in tow. "You're supposed to be in San Francisco."

  The joint jumped with people, shoppers with all their cheery holiday bullshit gift bags, the yoga mommies and their infinite realms of strollers, and a hella strong gathering of Chelsea boys. Clearly Johnny needed me, regardless of whether he expected me.

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  "Then why am I here, Mold?" I stepped behind the counter, intending to show off my pride and joy to Shrimp. But my path to La Marzocco was blocked by a hulking figure standing at the machine, with a pitcher of foam milk in his hand, readying to pour the milk over a pull of fresh espresso. His Hunky Tallness had long, wavy black hair, a chiseled face with big green eyes and long black eyelashes under heavy black eyebrows, a roman nose, and morning why-bother stubble surrounding his mouth. He looked either like the Aramis man or the hero dude of questionable sexuality pictured on the covers of Harlequin romances, except one who wore prayer beads around his wrist and a yellow shirt picturing a happy big-belly red Buddha. All I could say to him was, "Who the fuck are you?"

  "Such language!" He laugh-smiled. The Jolly Harlequin Giant looked toward Johnny Mold. "This is the barista you write to me about who bring the buzz back to this place?" He had some weird foreign accent, like maybe Italian, and in his warm eyes and wide grin I knew he was one of those genial, good karma people whom everybody instantly loves. I hate people like that.