Gingerbread (10 page)

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fuggedabout driving and subways and everything else? Mucho.

"Pizza, doofus," Luis said, pretend shoving me. He spoke slowly for him in what probably would have been normal pace for someone like from Idaho or something, "Go...grab...a...slice...of...pizza."

"Do you have a girlfriend?" I asked Luis as we headed toward the elevator. I know, it's like a disease I have, cute boys.

"Why? You got a friend who wants to put in an application?" Luis winked at me.

"Maybe," I said. "How old are you?"

"Just turned twenty," he said. "You got any girlfriends old enough for me?"

I guessed that was Luis's nice way of telling me I was jailbait.

"I don't have friends my age," I told Luis.

"No boyfriend back in Frisco?" he asked.

"Nobody calls it Frisco. People call it The City. It's like this stupid rule people obey."

Luis repeated, "No boyfriend back in Frisco?"

"I had a true love but he dumped me," I said. I sighed. The elevator stopped for us and we stepped in.

"His loss," Luis said. "Beautiful girl like you. He'll wake up. Trust me."

I hit the STOP button on the elevator as it was going down. The elevator came to a sudden halt. "Do you really think so? Because I am getting kind of worried."

Luis hit the START button and the elevator proceeded back down. "If you're meant to be together, you'll figure it out. You must have lots of other friends to hang out with,

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right? While you and your ex figure things out?"

"No," 1 told Luis as we arrived at ground level. "I am the girl at school that even the weird kids think is too weird."

"That just means you're the coolest girl in school," Luis said.

"Thank you, Loo-eese," I said. I pretend shoved him back as we walked out into the hot sticky summer to go grabba slice.

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Twenty-four

So I might be
totally lost in this vast and strange new freakcity, but there's one gig where I totally know the scene, and that is making coffee. Pressing beans, steaming milk, pouring perfection: Here at the Village Idiots, Danny and Aaron's café, I have a little pocket of belonging in this city of millions.

"Wow," Danny said, "you were really trained well. I don't have to teach you anything except where the supplies are."

"You are a godsend!" Aaron, Danny's boyfriend, said. "I didn't know how we were going to survive the rest of the summer without a decent barista. The only people we can afford to pay are out-of-work actors, and they are too busy looking into the mirrors to make decent coffee. Cyd Charisse, where have you been all our lives?"

Funny question, huh? That's what I thought about them. Their café was quite possibly cooler than Java the Hut at Ocean Beach. The café was decorated with medieval wall hangings and gothic wood chairs and had gilded mirrors on the ceilings which reflected back the most sumptuous joy you could imagine: Danny's cakes. Some were soft and delicate, light chocolates with mousse petals, others were towering layers of buttermilk heaved with iced rose bouquets. Each cake was its own artistic masterwork. Not that the beauty of them prevented me from random samplings of as many as I could stomach. Hello Delicious, my new friend.

In the back room, Danny showed me a few of his special

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order naughty cakes which he makes for "bachelor" parties in the West Village and Chelsea. The cakes were not vulgar or crude. They were anatomically correct visions of beauty. Danny sure knew how to put pink icing, chocolate sprinkles, and whipped cream to good effect. I must confess, some of the cakes made me kind of hot. It was a good thing Loo-eese said his good-bye, after taking me on the noisy-crammed-manic-cool subway train and letting me cop a feel on his thundering biceps when I saw huge rats scurrying across the tracks. Catch my breath.

Even better than Danny's cakes and Aaron's mega-delish pasta salads and quiches was the knowledge that, at least for my parole in Manhattan, I would be properly caffeinated. The Village Idiots favored Italian coffee over Java the Hut's Indonesian, but I attributed the diff to an East Coast/West Coast thang and decided I could be hip to the new coffee groove. The taste was totally different but the coffee outtasite. Energy returned to Cyd Charisse.

"Va-va-va-voom, Cyd Charisse!" Aaron proclaimed after I gulped my first straight double espresso shot and shouted out "HIIIIIIIIIII-YAAAAHHHH" like a banshee and then shimmied with caffeinated pleasure. Gingerbread, who was reclining in a giant porcelain coffee mug, rolled her eyes at me. I know, I know, I telepathed back, I don't have to try so hard, he's just a long-lost brand-new brother, but it's just all so good and where do I feel more at home than at a coffeehouse surrounded by gorgeous guys? Just deal, okay?

I liked Aaron, and not in a dangerous Java-my-heart-beat-races-when-he's-within-five-feet-of-me radar kind of way. Aaron was not pretty-boy cute, or smoldering like Java. He was tall and chunky and scruffy, and for an upstanding

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homosexual, not that great a dresser, what with his faded decal Aerosmith T-shirt and his worn-out pajama pants he wore because of the oven heat. He was a mellow type of dude with a shock of strawberry red hair creeping out under his tall white chef's hat that he wore even though he cooked for a little café and not a four-star shi-shi restaurant, and he had big baby blue eyes that softened every time he looked at Danny. How could you not like him?

Danny and Aaron met at boarding school. They have been together that long, like almost ten whole years. High school sweethearts. They gave me hope.

Sid and Nancy have been together for just a little bit longer, but you would never see them sharing a business together, or not freaking that the business doesn't make a ton of money--hardly any actually--or bring them lots of influence and admirers. You would never see one of them bring the other ice wrapped in a washcloth when the other burned a finger and then kissing the finger to make it better, you would never see them laughing over old jokes and having hearts open enough to allow a new sister into their lives without feeling threatened or put out.

Danny wanted to take the evening shift off to spend time with me and Aaron was all, "Cool, go, have fun." One time Blank and Java didn't come to work because their cousin was visiting, and I counted the minutes until my shift ended that day, I was so uptight about them having fun without me and forgetting about me. I broke three glasses that day and sulked when Blank asked me how my day was on the phone that night. Ouch.

I was grateful that Aaron was a lot sweller about sharing Danny than I would have been about Blank. I had only

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known my brother for a day, and I wanted to spend as much time with him as he would give me. I wanted to suck information from him like a sponge. And anyway, when Danny called Frank-dad to tell him he was kidnapping me for the night, I swear I could hear the sigh of relief coming from Frank's end of the phone, even though Danny said "daddy" was annoyed with him for making my acquaintance without consulting Frank first. I had a feeling that's how things were done in his biological corner of the family: Everyone just did what they wanted and then told Frank, because you couldn't rely on him to take care of things the right way.

"So tell me about yourself, charm girl whom I'm going to call CC," Danny said when we finally sat down to dinner at about eleven that night. We had planned on ditching the Village Idiots much earlier, but the cafe got so busy, and I was churning out the lattes so smooth and Danny was dishing out the cakes so fine, that we ended up just staying a couple extra hours because Ella blasting from the stereo sounded so good and the all-over vibe, with customers chattering, forks clinking, coffee slurping, people happy, we just couldn't desert Aaron until after the crowds left, they tummies full, they teeth tingling.

"No," I said. "You first." I wanted to bask. We were seated at an outdoor cafe, which you can never do in San Francisco because it is too cold at night; it felt great to sit outside at night wearing only a black tank dress and combat boots and not be freezing. I liked Greenwich Village much more than Frank Land on the Upper East Side. There were no skyscraper office buildings or condo complexes, but loads of old brownstones, funky restaurants, and little parks where people played rapid-fire dominoes and chess

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with timers set on the sides of the tables. From where Danny and I sat perched for dinner, you could see the Empire State Building bursting in a red spoke to our north, and the Twin Towers humming in gray clouds to our south. It was like being in the center of an Oreo whose black sides were opened in a
V
shape.

Being the little sister, even though Danny is about my same height, being looked after and cherished, was even better. I hope one day when Ash and Josh are grown up we can come back to the Village and have dinner and bond. Hopefully Sid and Nancy will keep it together and we won't have to spend our sib time talking about our parents' secrets and lies, the way Danny and I were going to have to spend our first dinner.

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Twenty-five

So this is
how it went down," Danny explained. "I was barely in middle school at the time, and so I've had to put together the pieces over the years, and my facts are not one-hundred percent reliable, but here's what I know. Daddy and your mom were having an affair and then she got pregnant. I'm sure they talked about having an abortion--if I'm making you uncomfortable just tell me--but she decided to have the baby. I think she expected Daddy to marry her, and I think Daddy wanted to. My parents' marriage was awful, you should know that. My mother spent most of her time at our house in Connecticut, and Daddy had an apartment in the city where he spent weeknights. Really, we only saw him on weekends when I was a kid. He was a workaholic and was, and still is, a womanizer. This is fact. CC, I can tell by looking at you and talking to you that you're not so innocent and naive that you can't hear this stuff--I think you get it and I think you can understand that our father can still be a loving father even though as a husband or lover, he was no angel. Right?" Danny looked a little worried that he had said too much too soon.

I nodded. I was sad to hear Danny proclaim what I already suspected to be true, but at the same time, I think I felt a little relieved not to have to put Frank real-dad up on any pedestal anymore. Also, I liked Danny for laying down the facts without sugar-coating, much as I love sugar.

"My mother would not give him a divorce. She was a

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very devout and serious Catholic, and I think she wanted to spite him, too. She held him responsible for all of her unhappiness."

"Did you hate your mom?" I asked Danny. Because even though Nancy and I aren't exactly going to be cat-walking at any mother-daughter fashion shows anytime soon, I don't hate her at all, despite what she thinks. She makes me crazy and I think she totally does not get me, but I know that in her mind, she tries to do what is right for me, even though what she thinks is right usually results in decisions I hate, i.e., boarding school, puke princess room, Alcatraz incarceration. I realized it must have been a huge leap of faith for her to let me come to New York on my own and find out things that I might not like. I wondered if, in her own way, maybe she was trying to allow me an independence that would nudge my growing up process along.

"No," Danny said, "I loved my mother very much, even though she thought my being gay was a sin. She was very controlling, but she loved us and would have done anything for us. My sister is a lot like her."

"Do you miss her?"

"I do miss my mother," Danny said. "We fought a lot when I was a teenager. She didn't approve of Aaron and was always referring to him as my 'friend.' She never told her friends I was gay. But at the end of her life, when the cancer was eating her away, I spent a lot of time with her, nursing her, talking to her. Aaron did, too, and that made a huge difference. She finally got to know him and see how wonderful he was and appreciate him as my lover and my mate. The denial wore away, and I think she came to love him as

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much as she could. He was very good to her, especially considering that initially she had been awful to him."

"What about my dad?" I asked.

"Daddy has always been great about Aaron, but in a very stiff way..." When I asked about my dad, I had meant Sid-dad. Sid-dad who had always been there for me, who loved me as much as he loved Ash and Josh, who would never try to pass me off as his niece. "It's like he was trying so hard to be cool about the whole situation that eventually he just came to accept it."

"What about 'Uncle' Sid?" I clarified.

Now Danny smiled. "I miss him!" he said. "When I was little, he was like a hero to Lisbeth and me. He didn't have a wife or children so when he came to visit, he would take us to amusement parks and baseball games. He had an inexhaustible supply of energy for us. You could tell he wanted kids but he was also a workaholic and he didn't date much. And then Daddy made the mistake of asking his old pal Sid to watch over his girlfriend and love child in the city one weekend and it was all over after that. Uncle Sid, I guess, was so furious at Daddy about the way Daddy had behaved--leading double lives and lying to my mom and to your mom--that he stopped talking to Daddy, and soon after that, I guess your mom realized he was never going to marry her or help her raise their child, and she broke things off with Daddy. And then like a year or two later, Sid came back into town, got in touch with your mom, fell in love with you from the way I understand it, and whisked you both away to San Francisco, which worked out very conveniently for Daddy and my mom because the whole situation had become this silent onus

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that everyone knew about but nobody talked about, it made them total enemies. Lisbeth and I were trapped in the middle of a very unhappy family."