by Rachel Cohn
But, Commandant, I thought, my home is as much my old San Francisco family and friends as it is my new New York family and friends. Somehow the twain must meet, and if it's Shrimp who splits that difference--then shouldn't I choose that home where he wants
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to be, earn my place beside him like you earned yours back with Aaron?
When I returned to my parents' bedroom from Ash and Josh servitude, Nancy sat in her rocking chair nursing Frances. I sat down on the bed next to Sid-dad, who had finally found a moment to finish reading his newspaper. I plucked it from his hand.
"Do you love having me home or what?" I asked them.
Sid-dad said, "Somehow I have a feeling your visit isn't about an altruistic, long overdue visit with your family."
Nancy muttered, "Somehow I have a feeling That Boy is involved here?"
Uh-oh, back to "That Boy." Situation in need of damage control. Idea delivered to me in the form of Frances Alberta, who looked like a total Buddha baby, happy and calm and chubby. "Shrimp's becoming a Buddhist," I told Sid and Nancy. What parent wouldn't approve of a Buddhist?
"Super," Nancy said. My looks may come from Frank's side, but I definitely get the sarcasm from her genes.
"Is he back in San Francisco seeking enlightenment?" Sid-dad asked, but without my mother's cynical tone.
"If he was, and I decided to stay here with him to do that-- what would you say?"
Nancy sighed instead of said. Sid-dad answered for them. "We'd say we think you're too young to make that choice. You know we'd love you living back home, but not at the cost of leading your
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own life. Where's that independent spirit we know and love?"
"It's true love," I said.
Nancy barged in with, "It's truly a mistake to follow a boy who is struggling to find his way and will only leave again." I wondered if her assessment wasn't just about her long-running mission to sabotage my life, but was based on the chaos Frank delivered to her own life when she'd been close to my age.
Ash's loud cry from her bedroom brought Sid-dad to his feet. "Ashley's not adapting so well to not being the baby in the family anymore. We get the crying bed routine every night since Frances was born." He stared down at me, all short and adorable and bald, like Frances. "I'll assume this potential move of yours is an ongoing dialogue, not a done deal, and open for more discussion later?" He kissed the top of my head and left the room to tend to Ash.
I asked my mother, "If Shrimp's struggling, shouldn't I be there to struggle alongside with him? Grow with him?"
"Are you actually asking for my approval to follow Shrimp wherever he may go?"
I wasn't sure what I'd meant, but I said, "Guess so." Did I really just ask for my mother's approval?
"Then the honest answer is, No, I don't approve. But I know you will do what you want to do regardless of what I say, and regardless of whether it's the right thing to do. I also know that
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somehow you'll still be fine." Two years ago her comment would have immediately sparked a yelling fight between us; now I could understand it as less of an ornery statement and maybe more an acknowledgment of trust or something. Of course, Nancy followed it up by sighing the Nancy Classic, yet she almost seemed content, too, rocking in her chair while she stroked Frances's head. "I'm too tired to debate the Shrimp issue right now. Talk to me about something else while Frances feeds--this can take awhile. Tell me about your life in Manhattan, something about those periods of time when you're not hanging up on your mother's phone calls. What have you learned?"
Well, Mom, it's like this. The morning-after pill has to be taken within seventy-two hours of unprotected intercourse in order to be effective. Art installations can be found on Walls of Sadness as well as at the Met. If you're headed uptown from the Village, the C train is less crowded than the 1 train, but you have to wait for fucking ever for it to come.
I said, "For one thing, that I'm more like Frank than I think I'd like to be. Why couldn't I have turned out like Dad?" I held up a framed photograph of Sid-dad holding my hand in front of this beautiful Pacific Heights house, taken when I was five, the day Nancy and I arrived here to become his family. Frank would never choose a home on the basis of true love. Maybe he'd never have that
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opportunity either. Whereas Sid-dad made that opportunity for himself, made a home for Nancy to choose.
It only took her ten hours since my arrival home, but at last Nancy threw a genuine smile my way. "You are like Dad."
"How do you figure?"
"You have his heart."
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***
FORTY-TWO
Sleep? Who needed sleep with friends to see, boys to retrieve, and dumplings to eat?
I felt like I'd barely fallen asleep when the ring of my cell phone woke me up at seven in the morning. "Hello" hadn't been uttered by my lips before Helen's voice barked, "Princess, if you want to see me and Autumn, your ass better be at our old dim sum place on Clement Street in an hour. I have Lamaze class and Autumn has Econ at City College at ten."
During the tail end of our senior slump last year, we three used to spend hours hanging out at the dim sum place, eating dumplings and drinking bubble teas, laughing and talking. Now we were all about time management. At least we could still keep up the tradition of enjoying the real San Francisco treat together--
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major consumption of pork products first thing in the morning.
Forget about of loverboy Phil. I could move back to San Francisco solely on the basis of the food on Clement Street, my favorite SF street of Asian restaurants and Irish pubs, and more important, a street on which you can find almost any Hello Kitty product imaginable (except for the pornographic ones--you have to go to Castro Street for those). Breathing in the cold SF air while fog literally sliced through my body as I stumbled the City's streets awoke me even better than the fresh Peet's coffee in my hand. There is no fog-eucalyptus-ocean-coffee-dumpling air as luscious as San Francisco's, anywhere. Period. The heavy fog helped evaporate my fear that this City, as it likes to capitalize itself, feels too small to contain me now.
Helen greeted me in front of our former hangout on Clement Street. "Your messed-up angles of blue-black hair look even scarier in person than on a camera phone." This from the girl who had copper dye in the shape of a hand on top of her shaved crew-cut head when I first met her.
"Your belly looks like it's about to pop, which is just as scary," I responded. Helen was a little chunky before, but that was her doughnut addiction talkin'. Her massive belly and radiant face now promised a new being that looked like it was ready to drop into the world any minute.
Autumn said, "Where's the hostile love for me, who didn't
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get knocked up or sprung from Manhattan out of the blue?" She appeared the same, all multi-ethnic fabulous, but with a new, relaxed vibe to go along with her old dazzling smile. Group hug and shit. My girls.
We ordered at the counter and brought our feast to our old table in the back, cornered against the wall where we could watch the never-ending line of mostly Chinese customers (which was how you knew the place's food quality was ace), who shouted their orders in Mandarin and Cantonese to the counter ladies while enormous circular trays of steaming fresh dumplings and chicken and pork buns were brought out from the kitchen at regular intervals. At our favorite perch in our favorite ambience-less dim sum joint, our trays heaped with pot stickers (pan-fried pork dumplings), har gow (shrimp bonnets), fun kor (steamed rice-paper-wrapped dumplings filled with pork, water chestnuts, and peanuts), and--Phil, so sad you're a vegetarian and missing out on your namesake dumplings--tender, sweet, chive-flavored shrimps wrapped inside a delicate rice noodle. Hsieh hsieh ni, Clement Street de hsiao long bao, duo bao zhong! Thank you, Clement Street dumplings, and blessings upon you!
Fog city with friends
Succulent dumpling goodness--
I would stay for shrimp<
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I asked Helen, "So your mom's recovered from that breakdown she nearly had when you told her she was going to be a grandma?" Since my mother doesn't hide her displeasure at the prospect of becoming a mother-in-law figure, I wanted to know how Helen's mom--whose sweet and sour disposition could give my mother a run for her Prozac--was dealing with the transition in her daughter's life.
Helen said, "Recovered and then some. She's all into baby projects now. She just finished clearing out the family room and turning it into a baby room. She's setting up the crib this morning, her faithful Eamon puppy at her side. She was so massively pissed when I got pregnant, yet she was the one who marched me and Eamon down to city hall to get married. She hardly said a word to him for like the first month he lived with us, except to come into our bedroom and yell at him for blasting music too loud--even though it was me controlling the volume. Then two of her waiters at the restaurant came down with the flu on the same day, and she trudged upstairs to ask my help, and I was like 'I've got morning sickness, Mama, ask Eamon' and she was like 'No, YOU ask Eamon' but Eamon himself was already downstairs helping out. Do you know Eamon is the most popular waiter in the restaurant now? Aside from being the most capable and charming person there who also sings Irish ditties to customers as he serves them noodles, the just plain oddity of my fair, red-haired Irish soccer boy working
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in a Chinese family restaurant in the Richmond seems to rake in tips for him. I LOVE IT!" Helen rubbed her belly. "It's kicking. Wanna feel?"
Autumn and I both reached over to touch Helen's moving belly. Kick, kick. Cool, cool! Weird, weird!
HELEN'S GOING TO BE A MOM! HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? I mean, I know how it happened, but that doesn't mean seeing the late-third-trimester prospect stretched out before me wasn't shocking anyway. Her stomach reminded me how last year at Shrimp's brother's wedding Wallace had been all groom nervous and happy, teasing me that soon it could be me and Shrimp sharing such a union. And I'd thought-- No way. Marriage and baby-making, that's for old people.
Helen is the same age as me and Autumn.
Autumn said, "Helen, promise us you won't become one of those new mothers who can only talk about when the baby makes a poo? Those mommies hang out during the day at my coffeehouse job, and that's all they talk about."
"I promise," Helen said, nodding solemnly.
"Don't promise," I told Helen. "Cuz I guarantee it will happen to you. I've been working the East Coast café version of Autumn's job, and trust me, it's not just a West Coast phenomenon. It's a universal mommy thing. Obsession with poo, and sleeping patterns, and ..."
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"Ohmygod, enough talk about babies," Autumn interrupted. "Let's talk about a real babe." She whipped out her camera phone and flashed us a photo of a surfer chick with short spiky strawberry blond hair, kinda butch build, in her wet suit, and one massive Autumn-size smile on her freckled face. "That's April, my new lady," Autumn announced. She looked directly at me. "I am walking the walk. I am in school, working, and in the first throes of new love. So glad I came home."
"April and Autumn? Has to be true love, it's too cute not to be. Good for you," I said. Then I slipped in: "Think I should move home to be with Shrimp?"
"NO!" My girls answered.
Little known fact: Superheroes on rescue missions are often the loneliest people in the world. "Why?" I said.
Autumn chimed in, "If Shrimp wants to live in San Francisco, then it's because he doesn't know where else he wants to be. He wants the safe and familiar. He wants the old waves, the old life."
Helen backed her up. "You know we love Shrimp, and we would love to have you close by again, but you should only move back to San Francisco if this is really where you want to be. Otherwise, it won't last. You must already know that."
I love how my friends give me credit for being smarter than I actually am.
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Autumn said, "There may have been some Shrimp surveillance."
"Excuse me?" I asked.
Autumn continued, "My lady hangs out with the Ocean Beach surfer crowd. She told us about Shrimp coming back. Helen and I may have gone over there to hunt him down and check out the situation."
"May have or did?" I asked.
"Did," Helen said, nodding.
"And?" I asked.
Autumn said, "We went purely on a fact-finding mission on your behalf. Wanted to find out why he left New York so suddenly, what he planned to do now. We got nothing out of him, other than a flyer for some meditation retreat up north he said he wanted to try. He is deep into thinking mode, not talking mode."
Helen handed me the flyer, advertising an upcoming Buddhist weekend retreat in Humboldt County, where his parents are living. "Turn it over," she said.
I turned over the flyer and saw a new Shrimp masterwork drawing, etched in crayons. It pictured him and me, sitting on a backyard deck patio with prayer flags hanging from an overhead line. Strips of fog wisped through the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. In the foreground I stood at a patio table wearing an apron, and Shrimp stood at the grill wearing a wet suit. Two children sat in high chairs: perfect hybrid-babies with my dark hair (Mohawked) and his cherry lips (pursed). What was most notable
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about the picture was that, unlike the pages and pages of sketchbook art he's devoted to rendering me in since we first got together, he hadn't drawn me this time in movie star or comic book fantasy projection. He looked like a regular Ocean Beach surfer dad, minus the golden boy beauty halo I would have drawn over him, and I looked like a regular Ocean Beach bohemian mom chick, with long hair in a solid black color. In Shrimp's back-of-a-flyer snapshot drawing of our potential future life together, we just looked like us. But older. And chill. In love. A family. No more, no less.
What have I been agonizing over? This choice should be so easy. I want that picture. Shrimp wants that picture. We should do it--wherever and whatever it takes.
Watching Helen and Autumn watch their watches, I knew my gift from my girls was the proof of the flyer, but not the luxury of time to analyze the art in a girlfriend forum. Helen stood up and took a business card out of her purse, handing it to me. "The art-work's yours to figure out how you want to answer it. You know we support you no matter what you choose. Just choose carefully, 'kay? And for chrissakes go see my auntie at the salon on this card. She's just down the street. Tell her I sent you and she'll give you a good price to get your hair fixed."
Autumn stood up and pointed at Helen. "What she said." They both kissed me on the cheek and left.
WHAT HAPPENED TO US? We were once rebels! Proudly
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insolent teenagers! Helen used to draw a comic book series about an action hero called Ball Hunter who chased golf balls along with other *cough* misadventures, and she used these alluring comics as bait to lure over-twenty-one boys into buying her beers when her underage self was hanging out in local pubs. (She's now married to one of those conquests!) Autumn used to get high with other girls' surfer boyfriends and then use these boys (and some of the girls, too) for sexual experimentation while she came to terms with her own sexuality. I got kicked out of boarding school after the boy there who got me pregnant was busted for selling E out of his dorm room, and when I returned home to finish out high school, it wasn't long before my parents had me on lockdown in Alcatraz due to my exemplary bad attitude problem and the matter of an unauthorized sleepover at Shrimp's.
Now Helen is happily pregnant and married, Autumn is competently juggling school and job and girlfriend, and I, who was once banished to Alcatraz, am considering a permanent, peaceful move back into its realm. I don't know whether to be scared or pleased.
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***
FORTY-THREE
A fertility potion must be woven into the San Francisco fog, what with all the procreation running rampant here lately.
All this procreation, and all I can think about is death.
"Prom
ise me you won't die," I demanded of Sugar Pie.
"Anyone ever tell you that you need a restraint device for your mouth?" Fernando asked me from the driver's seat of my father's Mercedes.
From the back seat I grimaced at the big broody Nicaraguan through his rearview mirror observation of me. I answered, "Yes. You. On practically every drive you ever gave me to or from school or work or the beach or whatever while I was growing up. But listen up, señor. I've known your wife longer than you have-- need I remind you I introduced you to her? And I know she
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appreciates the demand as an expression of my devotion to her rather than as a death wish for her."
Seated next to Fernando, in the front passenger seat, Sugar Pie allowed, "The young lady is right." She turned to face me. "As for promises, we all know I can't promise I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." This young lady has always admired Sugar's use of double negatives. "I'm"--(*cough, indistinguishable number, cough*)--"years old with one remaining kidney that's failing. I plan to enjoy every day that comes to me as I get it, and the good Lord willing, I'll pass on in my sleep with Fernando at my side, but beyond that, I have no wish or expectation for when or how it will happen. Could be tomorrow, could be next year, could be on the dialysis chair, could be sitting in a car with you like right now." To let her husband know she bore no ill will about my death comment, Sugar Pie opened a box of See's candy. "Now baby, I'm going to offer you to take a piece, but as you can see, there aren't many left, so I'm hoping you'll be a polite young lady and say no. I know you wouldn't want to take an old lady's last piece of chocolate." She held out the box to me. "Cyd Charisse, would you like a piece of candy?"
I shook my head. "No, thank you, Sugar." Must be true love between us for me to turn down a chocolate. Hypothetically I never imagined a universe in which this scenario could play out, so now seemed like the appropriate time to play out another hypothetical
