Shrimp (21 page)

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made my eye sockets go all wet, and when it came time for Wallace and Delia to say their vows they were both in tears. Waterproof mascara: great invention. I'm not saying all the universal bawling means Wallace and Dee's marriage is destined to last and will be the happiest one ever, but even my cold nonmatrimonial heart warmed from the true love you could feel rising between Wallace and Delia and dispersing through the ballroom like pixie dust.

But true love blahbitty blah blah, let's talk PARTY. A swing band played until midnight, and I mostly stayed at my assigned table, watching people dance. Not knowing many of the two-hundred-something guests, and being skeeved out by all the guys finding Mrs. Vogue's dress to be more stare-worthy on her daughter than I appreciated, I was more than happy to fade into the background for the first hour or so of the reception. Plus, I was dodging my "pal" Shrimp, who seemed caught up in official best man duties anyway, as I was determined we would not get locked into a cliché clock-strikes-midnight New Year's Eve kiss. 12:08 or 1:42, negotiable. The view from my seat offered plenty of entertainment. Delia is a professional dancer, as were most of her friends, so the dance floor could have been a USO party back in WWII from how great these people knew the old moves.

When I returned to my seat from a bathroom interlude, the lady sitting next to me said, "You just missed it, but Shrimp gave a lovely toast to Wallace and Delia. You're Cyd Charisse, right?"

I nodded. "Who are you?" I asked her. She introduced herself as Priscilla, Delia's half-sister from Alaska. Priscilla seemed as desperate for a friend in this room full of

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strangers as I. She looked like she was in her late thirties and she had curly carrot-colored hair like Delia's. Priscilla told me she'd hadn't decided to come to the wedding until almost the last minute; she was much older than Delia and hadn't been raised in the same house as her sister, and she liked Delia a lot although she didn't know her sister very well and hadn't seen her in a few years, but she was hesitant to come because the only family she knew at the wedding was their dad, and otherwise all the family members came from Dee's mother's side. Priscilla ended up coming to the wedding when her husband back in Anchorage told her that she needed a break from her kids, and he gave her the trip to San Francisco with some girlfriends as a Christmas present. As she spoke I could see that Priscilla thought she'd be getting some peace and quiet with her short adventure away from home, but I suspected on this New Year's Eve she would take rambunctious kids running wild all over her house to not be orphaned in this wedding ballroom. I will probably feel the same as Priscilla if my half-sister lisBETH ever gets married--that is, if I even get invited to lisBETH's wedding. You never know with lisBETH when she's going to go all embarrassed about "Daddy's little indiscretion."

The bubbly I'd been consuming throughout dinner caught up with me after midnight, when the swing band was replaced by a deejay. "C'mon, fellow wallflower," I told Priscilla. I grabbed her hand to lead her to the dance floor as the deejay got the floor pumping with "Dancing Queen" by Abba. I literally had to drag Priscilla from her chair--she really didn't want to go--but once she was on the floor there was no stopping her. There was no stopping CC either,

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because apparently the deejay had the same five-dollah CD from the remainder bin at Amoeba Records that practically wore out my audio player:
Soul Train--The Dance Years: 1977.
By the end of "Got to Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye, Priscilla and I had both tossed our shoes under the table, and we burned up the dance floor for a good half hour, laughing and bumping and grinding, celebrating. Priscilla taught me how to dance the Hustle during "Fm Your Boogie Man" by K.C. & The Sunshine Band (best song ever) and I showed her it was possible to dance the Macarena to "Don't Leave Me This Way" by Thelma Houston. Priscilla and Delia's semibald carrot-topped father joined us for "Boogie Nights" by Heatwave and showed us his old disco moves from when he was young, but when it came time for the slow disco era song "If I Can't Have You" from the
Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack, he took Priscilla out for a twirl, just the two of them.

Nancy claims I am a punk girl but she is wrong about that. A punk girl cares as much about the politics of the music as she does the sound of it. She knows what's going on in the world, she's fierce, a music snob, and completely dedicated to a punk ideology, fuck all the rest of y'all. I
wish
I could be that girl. Helen is that girl. No, my dirtiest little secret is that I like almost all music, from punk to opera to serious soul, but if you insist on slapping a label on me, you should know that in my heart I am a straight-up disco queen, a good-time girl.

After Priscilla's dance with her dad, she returned to our table for cake and more champagne and we watched Wallace and Delia dazzle the crowd with their
Saturday Night Fever
dance moves. Wallace had passed on the Arthur

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Murray ballroom dance lessons in preparation for his wedding and had opted for a disco dancing class at the Ocean Beach senior center, and may I just say, the guy was a regular John Travolta. He and Delia looked amazing on the dance floor, a king and queen in all their glory.

About half past one in the morning, the crowd was thinning out and the music beat simmering down. Priscilla and I shared a last dance to "Strawberry Letter 23," joined by Shrimp, whose official best man duties were finished. His tux jacket was long gone, the tie hanging loose around his neck, and his white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his bare chest. He was sweaty from dancing as well--never looked hotter. We three danced the Bump, Priscilla's specialty, before Priscilla decided to call it a night and return to her hotel room. She hugged me extra hard and whispered in my ear that I'd made an evening she'd been anxious about into a fun one after all. As she left I saw her share a brief conversation and hugs with Wallace and Delia.

"Well," Shrimp said. The disco ball hanging over his head flecked his exposed chest with bursts of light. "Did you save the last dance for me?"

The hotel staff was busy folding away chairs as I took the sweaty hand Shrimp extended to me. The deejay was closing up shop too, and his last song was a slow ballad. "Thanks for looking after Priscilla," Shrimp said. "Delia wanted to spend more time with her, but then Dee got caught up in all that bride business. Delia told me every time she was worried about Priscilla hardly knowing anyone here, she'd see her dancing with you and knew she didn't have to worry about Priscilla after all."

You know how a single song can change everything?

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That's how the romantic Aaliyah ballad the deejay was playing affected me. I danced with my head on Shrimp's shoulder, my brain still pondering the pulsating disco anthem by Thelma Houston where she expressed how she was full of love and desire and she couldn't stay alive without her man's love, but my heart tuned to the slow, bittersweet Aaliyah song the deejay had spinning. That song got me thinking about that beautiful angel girl, who died at such a young age, without getting to live what appeared to be a great life ahead of her.

All the champagne had nothing to do with the words I said to Shrimp as the song ended. "I love you," I stated, loud and clear, no mumbling or whispering for this sentiment. "Just friends" was a lie I couldn't live any longer. I didn't care that I hadn't said
I
love you
to Shrimp since long before we'd broken up so many months ago, not even knowing then what it was to love Shrimp because when I said those words to him before, I was spouting an ideal I thought I felt that had nothing to do with the actual person. I didn't care if in the present moment, Shrimp--the Shrimp who befriended my parents so he could win a way back into my life, the Shrimp who botched the Justin revelation but who knew it and worked past it, the Shrimp who is forever loyal to parents who act on their best interests, not his-- didn't say the words back to me. I just wanted him to know.

"Ditto," Shrimp said.

I guess we did not need the long official conversation about whether we should get back together or not after all.

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*** Chapter 26

We left the
hotel together and Shrimp drove us to the original scene of the crime, to Land's End, where he parked his Pinto the first time we got together. That first time, I remember a U2 song was playing on the car radio tuned to the Berkeley campus radio station, and when we did it in the backseat of the car to the sound of Bono's ultrasexy voice, the experience was hot and urgent, infatuated. Shrimp and I had barely met and I was just past the Justin-boarding school thing. It was like neither of us expected our connection to last past a simple, extremely satisfying hookup, and when a relationship developed in the months that followed, we were both surprised--and unprepared.

This time, the experience was... careful. The head bangin', boots knockin' reunion I'd been anticipating did not happen. No music played from the radio, and the secluded Land's End spot under the tall trees where Shrimp had parked the Pinto was silent except for the hiss of the Bay wind and the rustle of leaves. Noises I'd never noticed between us before, like the fumbling to open the condom and the squishy-rubbery sound as he placed it on, the creak of the backseat, the awkward grunts, his deep gravel voice asking if I was comfortable, felt especially loud in the car this time around. The feel of our bodies pressed together was sweet, tender, but the earth did not move from our actions, as if we were both too polite to disturb its peace,

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too cautious to tread deeply in our new territory.

It will get good again. I'm fairly sure. We just had to get past the first time, the second first time.

After, we drove back to his house in Ocean Beach. Iris and Billy and Wallace and Delia had opted to stay at the hotel for the night. Shrimp and I changed clothes--he from his tux into sweats and a T-shirt, and me from Mrs. Vogue's dress into an extra pair of Shrimp's flannel jammies that rode too high on my calves because of my long legs and his short ones. We took Aloha for a quick walk around the block, wearing our pj's and slippers, then returned to Shrimp's bedroom. Shrimp placed a sleep mask over my eyes, not as a prelude to some kinky sex game but so he could unveil, at long last, the painting he'd started at my house that was now standing, covered, opposite his single, unmade bed.

Shrimp is not an
I love you
-spouting type of guy, a main reason why "ditto" gets recycled in his vocab when he has to verbalize the sentiment in return to my words. Shrimp speaks through his art.

"I call this
Blitzkrieg CC,
" Shrimp said as he removed the mask from my eyes. "Look carefully at the face; it's the same one you gave me when I said the wrong thing that day you told me about Justin." Blitzkrieg Cyd Charisse the painting was indeed: my face, with this mad punk snarl that was somehow sexy and inviting at the same time, embedded into the face of the Statue of Liberty. Lady Liberty, the CC version, was not holding her usual torch. She was bent over placing a pair of pink silk stockings on her long, creamy legs, with the Golden Gate Bridge instead of the Brooklyn Bridge behind her, a thick wisp of SF-style fog creeping

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through its spokes. I'm no art expert, but even I knew the piece was amazing, having nothing to do with me as inspiration and everything to do with the stroke textures and layers of color that dug way deeper than the simple portrait.
Blitzkrieg CC
looked like how he said I looked to him.-always different. You could look at this painting a million times and find something new in it every time.

"Wow," was all I could say. Shrimp likes his art to be admired in silence, so I knew not to say more.

We grabbed some down quilts and Aloha followed us upstairs to the roof. Shrimp turned on the space heater, covered up Aloha on the doggie bed, and then Shrimp and I laid down on the hammock next to the pooch. We didn't attempt another round of Iovemaking--we were both way too tired--so we curled tight into each other under the blankets and fell asleep almost immediately as dawn rose over the Pacific.

True love, for real, for sure.

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*** Chapter 27

Granny A died
on New Year's Day. I think she held out that long so she could get an extra year on her tombstone. I felt sad when Sid-dad called to tell us, but sadder for Nancy than for me. Death generally is a bummer, right, but death specifically when it happens to someone who raised you has to be hard so I felt really bad for my mom. I didn't know what I was supposed to do to grieve for someone I never really knew and didn't particularly like, so I got some pâté and Ritz crackers from Safeway, which Josh and I tried to eat for dinner in Granny As honor. But the pâté and crackers were seriously gross, so we went over to Shrimp's instead and he made us scrambled eggs and Pop Tarts, which was much better. I didn't have to worry about whether I would seem like a fake grieving granddaughter at the funeral because a blizzard in the Midwest had closed the local airports, meaning Josh and I could not fly to Minnesota for the service, meaning further that I got extra Shrimp time before Sid and Nancy and Ash came back to San Francisco. Thanks, Granny A!

I knew Nancy would be somber about Granny A once she returned home, of course, but I figured she would snap out of it quickly enough when I broke the news to her about the whole didn't fill out any college applications because I was too busy spending the school vacation with my BOYFRIEND thing. Nancy could thank me later for distracting her sadness and turning it into fury.