The Merchant of Venice Beach

by Celia Bonaduce

  “Pop didn’t give these guys his seal of approval for wine,” he replied, pointing to the heap of grapes on the counter. “I thought I’d make jelly and sell it—put the money toward my college fund.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Suzanna said, mentally calculating how many jars of jelly one would have to sell in order to even buy the books required for college.

  Every once in awhile, Suzanna felt guilty about the fact that college was a given for the kids of the wealthier families in the valley. Now that she and all her friends were juniors in high school, college was on everyone’s minds. Although Suzanna’s parents weren’t rich, they, too, had made college a priority and had saved their entire lives for their girls’ tuition.

  Back when Erinn was in high school, she’d been offered scholarships—of course—to all the important universities and had settled on NYU. But her playwriting career took off almost as soon as she hit New York City, and she was so busy making headlines and money that she quit sophomore year. Even though Erinn and Suzanna’s parents were academics, they were understanding about Erinn leaving school. Erinn could always go back to college if the fantastic life of the young playwright didn’t pan out.

  Suzanna pinched a grape and popped it in her mouth. She winced.

  “Ick,” she said. “This grape tastes gross.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can make anything taste good.”

  Suzanna looked at all the grapes, the jars and pots, and was alarmed at exactly how much grape jelly he was undertaking to make.

  “You know,” Suzanna said, “you really aren’t supposed to make grape jelly in large batches. You’re only supposed to make about six cups at a time or it won’t gel.”

  Fernando looked frustrated as he surveyed the countertops full of grapes.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Mom and I make jelly every year,” she said.

  “Well, crap!” he said, and then looked to Suzanna for help. “Now what?”

  Suzanna stuck her hands under the faucet and washed up.

  “We’ll work fast and see what we can save.”

  “Hurry! My future is in these jars!”

  They washed, crushed, sieved and measured grapes, sterilized jars, and measured sugar and pectin.

  “This seems pretty runny,” Fernando said as he gently stirred the jelly.

  “Let me check.”

  Suzanna knew they were racing against the clock. She’d put a metal tablespoon in a glass of ice water and now that they’d arrived at the gelling stage, she pulled it out, scooped up a little of the hoped-for jelly, and let it cool to room temperature on the spoon.

  “If it thickens up, we’ve got our jelly. If it’s too runny, we’ll need to mix in a little more pectin,” Suzanna told Fernando, who was watching the jelly, willing it to thicken.

  Miraculously, they pulled it off. They poured the sticky grape jelly into little jars, sealed them, and plunged them into their boiling water bath.

  While they were washing up, Suzanna licked one of the spoons.

  “This is delicious!”

  “I know!” he said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “No problem. It was fun.”

  Fernando put his sticky fingers on her shoulder.

  “We’re a pretty good team,” he said.

  That night, Suzanna was so worn out, she was practically asleep the minute she hit the pillow. She hit the pillow softly, arranging her curls per Fernando’s instruction on how to avoid bed head.

  It was a toss-up as to which caused Suzanna more anguish that year, the Eric–Carla situation, or worrying about college. It was pretty much a no-brainer that she would be accepted to decent universities. Maybe not Princeton. Or Yale. Or Harvard. Or Georgetown. Or any of the universities that had been begging for her sister ten years earlier. But she had more than a fighting chance at a fair portion of the academic world. Although she had only vague recollections of Erinn applying to colleges, she did remember that her parents took more than a passing interest in the procedure. They lost none of their concern with their second child and lovingly filled Suzanna’s room with pamphlets from various schools.

  Suzanna gave Fernando some of the leaflets that stressed financial aid, hoping he wouldn’t feel left out. As he grimly pointed out, his grape jelly sales wouldn’t get him across the bridge to San Francisco.

  “It will be just like American Graffiti,” Fernando said, thumbing though the pamphlets. “Some of us will go off to college without a blip and some of us will stay home and rot.”

  “Yeah,” Suzanna replied, keeping up the American Graffiti imagery, “and some of us will be total jerks and drag the other guys down.”

  Because of her irrational guilt over Fernando not having her options, Suzanna dragged her feet with the whole college process. Her parents were doing their best to let her make her own decision—God knows they’d seen enough disgruntled college kids between them to last a lifetime. It amused Suzanna, in a benign passive-aggressive way, watching her parents trying not to guide her, when she could tell they were going to burst into flames if she didn’t start taking her future seriously. She knew they just hated it when they acted like conventional parents, and she wanted to make them happy, but she also wanted Fernando to be happy. She felt she owed him more.

  Suzanna’s mother’s nerves got the better of her and she suddenly whisked Suzanna off to Philadelphia to see Temple University, hoping it would inspire her to commit. Even though her parents often talked about their clear-eyed “protest days,” they were also pretty sentimental about their alma mater. It was May, and Suzanna was overwhelmed by the beauty of the East Coast springtime. It was gorgeous!

  Suzanna’s mother knew what she was doing. She knew from experience that it is really hard to make a decision about how you want to spend the next four years of your life when you are surrounded by flowers—flowers on the ground, flowers in window boxes, flowers in the trees! Of course, anyone in his or her right mind would want to go to school in the East! A person would be crazy not to want to go to school in the East! It’s one of God’s cosmic jokes to seduce young people with East Coast springs and falls, then—let them move there, and whammo! Here come winter and summer! SURPRISE!

  Springtime aside, Suzanna fell in love with the campus—and got caught up in the prospect of having a college agenda. The day was a whirl of buildings with the words Journalism, English, History, and Chemistry emblazoned importantly on them.

  Suzanna found it interesting to see her mother out of context. She seemed younger here in her college town, without the mantle of her own professorship (although, Suzanna noted, she used it when she needed it, as they went from laureled hall to laureled hall and saluted old professors of hers). It occurred to Suzanna, while they were eating lunch at an old Philadelphia haunt called City Tavern, that she never thought about her mother or father as having a life before

  parenthood. She just sort of pictured her parents as two flat balloons suddenly filling with air when Erinn was born—and helium the moment she arrived. This concept startled her, and she almost choked on her chowder.

  “Temple seems pretty cool,” she said. “I can picture you and Dad here.”

  Her mother was having a second glass of California wine . . . it was strange seeing all the familiar labels from the Napa neighborhood in such an unfamiliar landscape. Virginia actually looked a little flushed, which never happened at home. All that wine—it was practically in the air at home—and Suzanna realized she had never seen her mother even remotely tipsy before.

  “We had some wonderful times here. It seems like only yesterday.”

  She ordered a third glass of wine, and held it up to the sunlight. She squinted at it knowingly.

  “I almost married somebody else,” she said suddenly.

  Suzanna tried to take this in.

  “There was this guy . . . and he was in a band . . .”

  Shoot me now. Not a guy in a band!

  Her mother was clearly on a ro
ll here, a blitzkrieg down memory lane. She continued, “Yeah . . . he was really into his music. He would talk about music day and night. When we’d be having coffee with friends, he’d be drumming on his thigh . . . and he was a bass player. All he thought about was music, music, music. I was very young and mistook his passion for . . . for . . . well, let’s just say he was extremely focused on himself—and his needs.”

  Needs?

  Suzanna did not want to be discussing anyone’s needs with her mother—except her own.

  “You’ll find out, sweetheart, that just because you’re in love with someone, it doesn’t mean you should marry him,” her mother said.

  Suzanna was overwhelmed. They just came to Philadelphia to look at a college and she was getting bombarded with stuff she did not want to know. She needed to get the conversation back on safe ground . . . get it back to herself, where it belonged.

  “So what happened?” Suzanna asked. “When did Dad enter the picture?”

  “Well, I met your father at a rally for something or other—some save-the-world ordeal. Isn’t it funny how something can seem so important at the time and you don’t even remember it later?”

  “Hilarious.”

  ‘Well, obviously I was a sucker for passion on one level or another . . . one guy with his music, and your father with his social conscience. But as I got to know your father, I could see the difference. Your father’s passions were other-directed—he was such a good man. And that’s who you marry, Suzanna. You marry the good man.”

  I’m eighteen and can’t even get a date, but thanks, Mom.

  “And besides,” said her mother, with a strange look—if it wasn’t on her dear mother’s face, she would have described the look as leering—“and besides,” she continued, cheeks blazing. “Your father was so damn cute.”

  Suzanna could feel a panic swell coming on, which . . . panicked her. Panic swells were still a fairly new phenomenon. But because she was sitting at a table, she managed to stay in her seat by gripping the chair as tightly as she could. She concentrated on getting things back under control.

  “Well, are you happy with how things turned out?”

  She wondered if she really wanted to know the answer. She waited while her mother looked at the historic street outside the window. Her very own cobblestoned time machine. Her eyes seem to mist over as she searched for an answer.

  “Honey.” She took Suzanna’s hand and let out a pitiful sigh. “Sometimes I just get so sick of the Virginia Wolf jokes.”

  Suzanna loved Temple and could see herself on the East Coast. Just as she tried to visualize keeping her feet on the ground during a panic swell, she now tried to visualize herself walking the hallowed grounds of some stone-clad, ivy-covered university. But she continued to stall, and junior year evaporated without Suzanna taking any overt action to get into college.

  One summer night between junior and senior year, Suzanna was positioning one last strawberry blonde curl when she heard her bedroom door open. The sound was so familiar it didn’t occur to her to be scared. But standing there was a scary sight: Carla, tears and mascara streaming down her cheeks. Suzanna sat up and opened her arms. Carla let out a muffled wail and launched herself into Suzanna’s embrace. The girls fell asleep without ever talking, but Suzanna knew Carla well enough to know that the relationship that had broken her own heart had now broken Carla’s.

  In her mind, they were even. They never discussed the breakup.

  CHAPTER 12

  Fernando had his heart set on some sort of art school. He he didn’t really care if it was design or cooking or hair and makeup as long as it screamed I AM AN ARTIST. Unfortunately, his father couldn’t see past the financial obstacles and pretty much told Fernando that if college was going to happen, Fernando was on his own.

  Suzanna’s parents were happy to discuss college options with him, and Martin Wolf offered to take Suzanna and Fernando on a tour of a northwestern college, Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Fernando was thrilled with the opportunity and grateful to Suzanna’s parents, whom he called “Professor Wolf” and “Mrs. Professor” or “Mrs. P.”

  It was pouring rain in Washington state as they followed a young tour guide around the soggy campus. The guide said that the programs were designed to provide all students with a general foundation of academic skills.

  “As opposed to those other college campuses,” Martin Wolf whispered to his daughter.

  After a tour of the campus and the city, Fernando persuaded Suzanna’s father to take them on the ferry out to Vashon Island. This, actually, had been Fernando and Suzanna’s secret agenda. When the thought of going their separate ways unnerved them, Suzanna and Fernando often fantasized about going to college—together. One of the charms of Cornish was that it was within striking distance of Vashon Island, where the two of them envisioned living a remote life and taking the ferry back and forth to school.

  Suzanna and Fernando were great fans of Betty MacDonald, an American author who wrote about life on Vashon Island. Suzanna had been listlessly trolling her mother’s library one afternoon and came across The Egg and I, the autobiographical account of Betty MacDonald’s life as a young wife on a chicken ranch in the 1920s. Suzanna loved the book and insisted that Fernando read it. He said he didn’t really see what she liked so much, but then Suzanna passed on Betty’s next venture, The Plague and I. Fernando was hooked on the lighthearted account of her time in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Then MacDonald wrote Onions in the Stew—and this was about Vashon Island. Ever since they had read that, Suzanna and Fernando had been dying to visit.

  The ferry trip to the island was everything they dreamed it would be. Suzanna’s heart beat faster as the island came into view out of the fog. They jumped off the rocking boat and had lunch in a drafty café. After an hour of poking around town, Suzanna and Fernando felt their collective dream fade.

  As Fernando recounted to Suzanna’s mother when they got back, “Your husband was cool taking us up to Washington. But Vashon Island was boring as shit.”

  Mrs. Professor laughed and told Fernando to watch his language.

  “Seriously, Mrs. P . . . can you imagine a place that makes Napa look like it has a pulse?”

  Senior year sped by. Suzanna was still up in the air about college. She excused it by telling herself that she was going to concentrate on getting her grades up rather than focus on college. She hung out with Fernando, and then Eric and Carla in varying degrees. When Carla and Eric broke up, Carla moved on to an entirely new group of friends, although she did do science projects with Suzanna and Eric from time to time. Their cumulative knowledge really did give them an edge and they somehow managed to put all personal feelings aside to capture those elusive few remaining good grades.

  Eric, through some unspoken agreement, seemed to retain the rights to the friendship with Suzanna and, by extension, Fernando, and the three of them did almost everything together.

  Suzanna and Carla sometimes hung out together on the weekends, but, as a pair, they didn’t play well with others.

  Although there had been nothing romantic between Carla and Eric for almost a year, there was certainly no indication that Eric now returned Suzanna’s admiration. And Suzanna still saw Carla as a threat to the any-minute-now romance that might spring up between Eric and herself.

  Suzanna was studying in her room and looked up to see Carla running down the lane toward the barn–house. She was whooping, and waving something in the air. Suzanna closed her book and raced out to meet her friend. Carla bounced around in a circle while Suzanna read the letter that Carla had been waving. It was an acceptance letter from Howard University in Washington, D. C. Suzanna grabbed Carla by the wrists and they leaped in a circle, squealing with relief. For Suzanna, the relief was twofold. First, that her friend had, deservedly, gotten into an amazing school. Second, since Eric had set his sights on Berkeley, which was almost a local school, the fact that Carla would be three thousand miles away was a huge blessing. Fernando had
confessed to Suzanna that he, too, wanted to get into Berkeley, but Suzanna knew that would never happen.

  “Well, I can dream, can’t I?” Fernando said resolutely.

  Letters of acceptance (and rejection) were making the rounds at the school. Suzanna noticed that the news of Carla’s acceptance letter brought back the look of panic to her parents’ eyes. Suzanna was studying a map of the San Francisco area, hoping a college might reveal itself to her as the perfect place—one that would satisfy her parents and be near Eric and Fernando—when the phone rang. It was Eric, and he wanted to see her right away. She headed out to meet him on the road between their houses. It was a path they’d been taking since childhood. She would leave her house and Eric would leave his and they’d head down opposite ends of their little dirt lane toward each other. The way the road was laid out, both of them would have to crest a little hill, when they could see the other one. When they were kids, as soon as the other was in sight, they’d start to run.

  But they had grown, and while Suzanna’s instinct was still to run toward him the moment she saw him, he was now way too cool for any of that. They sauntered toward each other at a maddeningly slow pace until they were walking side by side. By this time, Eric and Carla had been broken up for almost a year—an eternity, by high school standards. Suzanna no longer braced herself for their reconciliation. She’d moved on to the next stage, that of periodically getting her hopes up that the lightning bolt of love would strike Eric right on the spot and he would realize the object of all his desires was standing right in front of him . . . or at least beside him on a dusty little road in Napa.

  “What’s up?” Suzanna said in the casual tone Fernando had drilled into her.

  “Check it out,” he replied, handing her a letter.

  Suzanna opened it and saw that it was an acceptance letter from Boston College.

  She felt her throat tighten. Eric was going away?

  “I thought you were going to Berkeley.”

  He shrugged.

  “Well, I didn’t get in,” he said. “But I’m going to Boston! Is that cool or what?”