Shrimp (3 page)

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"Bullshit," Helen said. "You believe that? That's just an excuse for him not to challenge himself to work harder, think bigger."

A waitress placed two cappuccinos on our table and walked away. The cappuccino foam was loose and watery; first sign of a bad barista. The foam should be dense and peaked like a snow-covered mountain. As I lifted the glass to my face, the coffee smell that should have awakened my nostrils to joy was instead weak and bitter. But I took the leap of faith, anyway, and downed a sip, but immediately had to spit the sip back into its cup. "The coffee here sucks," I told Helen.

"Wanna go somewhere else?" Helen said.

I nodded. Helen doesn't know diddly about my man or about proper caffeination. If we were to become friends, perhaps we needed to veer from any more paths leading to Shrimp discussion or consumption of bad coffee.

We left money on the table and wandered outside along Clement Street, my favorite street in The City, a long avenue of Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants mixed in with Irish pubs, produce markets, coffee shops, and bookstores. My legs are many inches taller than Helen's, but I could barely keep up with her. Clement Street is like the way I imagine a street in Shanghai or Hong Kong: narrow and noisy from buses and delivery trucks, teeming with pedestrians and bicycles and grandmas pushing strollers with apple-cheeked Chinese babies so adorable that you just want to pick them up and smother them in kisses. Helen walked down this street like she owned it, barreling through the hordes of people and never bothering to wave back at the store owners who obviously knew her and were waving at her.

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I was eyeballing the Sanrio store but Helen stopped her march to turn around, waited for me to catch up to her, then pointed to a Chinese restaurant across the street. "Mind if we go in there a sec so I can drop the sketch pad off? I don't feel like carrying this thing around."

I followed her inside the restaurant, which was dingy as could be--plastic tablecloths, fake plants standing in the corners, paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling--but was packed with diners, most of them Chinese. Sid-dad says San Francisco is full of great Chinese restaurants, but the great ones are not the tourist traps in Chinatown but the dingy ones out in "the avenues" in The Richmond and The Sunset, and the best way to figure out which are the best restaurants in either of those neighborhoods is just to walk into one that is filled with Chinese people.

I stayed behind Helen as she shoved through a line of people waiting to be seated, followed her as she marched through to the middle of the restaurant where tables were filled with bowls of noodles and dumplings and veggies swimming in soup, and seriously, the smell was so good I almost pulled up a chair at a stranger's table to join in. Helen stomped to the end of the dining room and back to the kitchen. I was following her up a back staircase when a scream that sounded like a banshee (at least the way I imagine a banshee would sound; I've never actually heard one) came from behind us. 'AIIIYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Helen... ," followed by an incomprehensible stream of Chinese words that I hope were curses because if so, then the yeller was doing a really excellent bawl out.

Helen stopped on the stair ledge and turned around to face the screaming woman standing at the bottom of the

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stair landing. The lady was wearing a pair of hot pink plastic dishwashing gloves on her hands and waving a bok choy like it was a murder weapon.

The lady ranted at Helen in Chinese for a good minute, gesturing to her head and banging the bok choy against it. When she finished, Helen snapped, "Get over it, Mom." Helen stomped up the stairs and I followed her. A door at the top of the apartment stairs opened to a huge San Francisco flat--a home taking up the whole floor of a building. I followed Helen into her bedroom, where she slammed the door so hard the floor shook.

Talk about a case of
déjà moi.
Just because I live in a Pacific Heights close-to-mansion doesn't mean a scene like Helen and her mom's, quadruple squared, hasn't played out Chez Cyd Charisse.

Helen's bedroom had clothes and belts and boots lying around all over, like a cyclone had passed through her dresser drawers and closet, depositing their contents randomly throughout the room. Her bed was unmade and surrounded by artwork on the walls everywhere, with random Warhol and Diane Arbus and Dali prints mixed in with artwork that looked like Helen's Ball Hunter man style. The back of her bedroom door was plastered to every last inch with Wonder Woman pictures: old comic book covers, Lynda Carter
Wonder Woman
TV show shots, bubblegum cards, colored pencil drawings.

I didn't even have a chance to respond to the room-- much less to ask
What just happened downstairs?
--when the Wonder Woman door flung back open. Helen's mom waved the bok choy at Helen again. She said, "You know the rules. Friend upstairs, door stays open." Then Helen's

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mom finished whatever she was saying in Chinese. Her mom was tiny, she seemed to drown under the smock she was wearing over her shirt, and she had long black hair like Helen's used to be, but with lots of gray at the roots and pulled back into a bun held together with two Chinese sticks.

Helen rolled her eyes. "Fine!" Helen said. "But I'm not getting rid of the shave cut. I don't care if Auntie is coming over." Helen's mother sighed--oh, it was just like my mother, just brilliant--and went back downstairs.

Helen sat on her rumpled bed. "Sorry about that," she said to me. "My mom is freaking over the new hair. I just got it done today on Haight Street, and she hadn't seen it yet. She can't do anything about the almost-bald shave, but my life is so over if I don't dye the copper hand out."

I had to commend Helen's mother's keen taste. Helen's buzz cut was cool, but the copper hand is just a fashion NO, a nice idea in theory but too much in reality.

I said, "How come she spoke a little in English to you, then the rest in Chinese?"

"Because the English part--about leaving the door open--was for you to hear and understand. The rest-- about the hair and the shame if her sister sees her daughter looking like this--was just for me to understand."

"How come she wanted me to hear about the door being left open? What, does she think I'll have nightmares of Wonder Woman?"

"No, my mom doesn't want my friends upstairs since she walked in on me kissing another girl. It's amazing she even let you upstairs. Guy friends aren't allowed upstairs at all anymore. Give my mother a few more months and pretty

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soon
I
won't be allowed in my own room anymore."

Muy interesante.
'Are you a lesbian?" I asked Helen. With her shaved head, combat boots, and buxom proportions of hips, stomach, and chest, Helen did have kind of a butch look.

"Way to stereotype, Cyd Charisse. God, that's a mouthful of a name. Can I just call you CC?"

I am all about new identities, plus that's what my brother Danny in New York calls me so I said, "Okay. But really, are you a lesbian?" I have known lots of gay men but never a girl who was gay.

"I'm tempted to say yes because being one would really piss off my mom. But I haven't decided either way."

"So what are you, one of those lesbians until graduation, until a guy comes around?"

"I would never be some hypocritical asshole like that. I like kissing girls and I like kissing boys. I just like
kissing.
Right now I'd say I'm bi, but I haven't experimented enough on either side yet to know for sure. Make sense?"

Totally. Being bisexual is probably like being bicoastal, like me. Like being part of two places--San Francisco and New York--and loving them both the same, happy to be in one yet always yearning for the other.

Helen tucked her sketch pad under her bed then glanced at her watch. She said, 'All the hot Irish guys will be finishing their soccer league games over at Kezar Stadium about now and just hitting the pub. I've got at least two hours until the dinner rush downstairs is over and my mother starts getting on my case about school starting up tomorrow. Let's get outta here. The soccer guys have the sexiest Irish accents--I swear you can barely understand a

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word they say. And they wear these soccer shorts with these World Cup uniform shirts so tight, you'll wish you're like blind and you could read the guys' pecs in Braille. You think Shrimp is hot? Come with me early one Saturday morning when they show the satellite games live in the pub and all the Irish guys are sitting around, screaming at the TV over their Guinnesses. I might have convulsions just thinking about..."

Helen's suggestion had the makings of Cyd Charisse's former middle name, Trouble, written all over it. If Sid-dad were here, he'd be giving me the
This is how you get to be called Little Hellion
look. But Sid-dad was not here. And this time I had no problem keeping up with Helen as she zoomed from her room back down to Clement Street.

I like the way this Helen person thinks.

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*** Chapter 4

The Little Hellion
has been good for a very long time and was long overdue for a little hell-raising--at least for some
fun.
Count on my mom with her radioactive telepathy to call at exactly the moment trouble was about to accelerate.

Helen and I had gone into the pub and ordered Cokes. Helen and I look old enough to be in a pub; no one questioned us. We didn't push our luck by ordering alcohol. Why should we, when apparently there were plenty of over-twenty-one soccer guys, all sweaty from their games, who couldn't wait to bring us beers? What were we supposed to say--no? So when I was teasing the team captain, Eamon, with the fire-engine-red hair and green eyes, about was his name
A-men,
or
Eh, mon,
it's not like I actually expected that soon I would be outside the pub with him, pressed against the wall and forgetting about my true love-- Shrimp, yeah, that's his name.

I guess it was a good thing I followed the hot Eamon guy outside, cuz there really would have been hell to pay if I had been inside the noisy pub and hadn't heard my new cell phone ringing in my jacket pocket, flashing the name
Nancy,
at the exact moment Eamon's pink lips were about to press into mine. Nancy thinks because we're not yelling at each other all the time now that we're gonna be like buddies, and that we should do girly things like go shopping and watch mother-daughter TV melodramas together, or,

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worst of all, chat on my loathed new cell phone. My parents have given me a new free leash to roam The City on my own, to take the bus and not be driven around by Fernando, Sid-dad's right-hand man, but the price of that new freedom is I had to agree to carry a cell phone so Nancy can check up on me at all times. I'm fairly sure the cell phone is my mother's form of a chastity belt for me.

Eamon stepped back from my mouth as I flipped open the phone. He lit a smoke, effectively killing any make-out occasion that might have been about to occur, as attaching my lips to a case of tar and nicotine breath is a big
You'd Better Be at Least an 8.6 on a Scale of Ten Hottie if Your Cigarette Mouth Wants to Suck Face with Me
situation. Eamon scored a probable 7.8.

My mother's timing never fails, I swear. "Yeah," I said into the phone.

"Where are you, Cyd Charisse? It's getting late. You're not still at the nursing home with Sugar Pie, are you?"

Give me a little credit. At least I hadn't told my mother I was at the library. Even she's too smart to buy that one.

I said, "No, I left there a while ago. I'm just wandering down Clement Street. I went into the bookstore for a while, now I'm just getting some school supplies." School supplies! Good one, Cyd Charisse. Even after two pints of Guinness, I could still come up with the parent-friendly lines. I hoped I hadn't slurred my words.

"It's after dark and I really don't like you wandering around strange neighborhoods on your own. Shall I send Fernando over to pick you up?"

"No!" I do not need the big broody Nicaraguan pulling up in a bling Mercedes with darkened windows and then

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sniffing my breath for alcohol. That could set the scene for a whole new round of Alcatraz incarceration.

"Well, get home soon, please. It's the first night before school and I don't want you out late. And I thought we could go through your new school clothes and see what goes with the new makeup I bought you, and we could try it on together." My mother maxed out the credit card on new clothes and makeup for me, and ya know what I will be wearing to school this year? The same thrift-store ensemble of short black skirts, black tights, ratty old flannel shirts, and combat boots I was wearing last year. I do like the Chanel lipstick, Vamp, dark and Goth against my fog-dweller pale face.

One superior feature I love about cell phones is when the signal breaks. "Home soonish, Mom," I said into the cell before the call dropped.

Helen stumbled outside, attached to the hand of Eamon's teammate. She grinned at me as we stood against the wall together. Eamon and his friend huddled at the street corner, smoking and probably discussing the hooking-up details--how do we get the girls to our place or at the very least to our cars, do you like the tall, flat-chested one or the Asian one with the crazy hair?

I am okay with scamming on hot guys, but tomorrow is the dawn of my senior year of high school, which will indeed be all about Shrimp, whenever I find him. My previous year of school was all about high drama--the trouble my ex Justin got me into, the getting expelled from boarding school, the returning home to San Francisco and fighting all the time with Nancy, the Alcatraz incarceration after the unauthorized Shrimp sleepover. Oh, then throw in the