The Merchant of Venice Beach (13 page)

Suzanna was speechless when kids in her American Literature class complimented her on her new look. It took her a few minutes to realize they were sincere.

Suzanna kept her eyes open and would spot Fernando from time to time in the gym, shooting hoops by himself, or getting into his father’s truck after school. The next time she actually spoke to him, she was standing in the art-department classroom by herself before some sort of awards ceremony, freaking out, quietly and alone, about her dress. She had bought it at a great little boutique and thought it was perfect, but now, in the harsh glare of high school, she could see that it was wrong, so wrong. It was dorky. She was dorky. Luckily, she was wearing her Gibson Girl up-do, so she knew that at least her hair looked good.

Fernando popped in silently again and gave her the once-over.

“Honey, that dress looks like something Bob Mackie would design after a stroke.” He shook his head. “Next time, take me shopping with you . . .”

And with that, he grabbed a pair of scissors, cut off her sleeves, widened the neckline, and pulled the whole thing off one shoulder. He spun her around so she could see herself in the reflection of the classroom mirror. Suzanna had to admit it—she looked pretty good. While she stood blinking in gratitude, Fernando was rummaging around in the pastels. He picked up a charcoal, licked it, and rimmed her eyes.

“See?” he said. “You can be fabulous. You just need to work it.”

“Thanks,” she replied.

“I’m Fernando,” he said, as he continued his overhaul.

“And I’m—”

“Late for the ceremony,” he said, pushing her out the door.

After that, she’d see him around, and they started to become friends. He was a loner, like she was, but in his case, it was by choice. Apparently, Fernando was a magnet for people and if he wasn’t careful, his life could instantly overflow with hangers-on. But for some reason, he took a liking to—or pity on—Suzanna, and they became inseparable.

Suzanna really liked him, but there was also some satisfaction that she was getting even with Carla and Eric, even if only in her own mind. They, of course couldn’t have cared less, lost in their own world as they were. If anything, they were probably relieved that Suzanna now had somebody to hang out with. In any case, it didn’t hurt to be seen everywhere with an incredibly handsome guy.

Fernando told her right off the bat that he was gay, so there wouldn’t be any “weirdness,” as he put it. Suzanna was disappointed, of course, but even though she hated to admit to stereotypical thinking, she kind of guessed he was gay when he told her that she could be “fabulous if she would just get that stick out of her ass.”

Every time Suzanna was scared of looking a little too flashy, Fernando would nudge her to go for it. But because this was real life, she didn’t suddenly shoot right to the top of the list with the popular kids just because she suddenly had a secret stylist.

CHAPTER 11

Suzanna cried herself to sleep at night once Eric and Carla were considered a couple by all their friends. The pain was compound. She’d not only lost Eric, the object of her desire, she’d also lost Carla, her best friend. But the possible biggest torment of all was worrying that Carla would tell Eric all about the teenage fantasies Suzanna had spun and share them in excruciating detail. During her campaign to move to New York, Suzanna poured out her heart to Erinn about her fear that the two of them were laughing at her.

“They aren’t laughing at you,” Erinn said. “They’re busy.”

Erinn shared their mother’s talent for clear-eyed advice, no matter how much it smarted.

Throughout their friendship, Carla had always been the visionary. When she received a large trampoline for Christmas the year the girls turned twelve, Carla begged her father to put it in the side yard, so she could look at it from her window. Mr. and Mrs. Caridi never woke up to the fact (literally and figuratively)that Carla’s bedroom was on the second story and that they had bought their daughter a late-night escape route.

It wasn’t that Carla didn’t love the trampoline for what it was—the girls would bounce on the trampoline for hours on end—it was just that Carla always managed to envision everything to its fullest potential. She would catapult herself out her bedroom window, drop onto the trampoline, and soundlessly bounce into the grass. Then she’d make her way over to the Wolf barn–house, where she would let herself into the kitchen (nobody locked their doors in Napa in those days) and sneak through the living room and down the hall to Suzanna’s room. When Suzanna’s mother had designed the house, she left the organic footprint of the barn in place. The girls’ bedrooms were old horse stalls with thick walls at the far end of the structure. Once Carla was past the living room, where overhead the senior Wolfs were sleeping in the loft, she was in the clear.

It hadn’t immediately occurred to Suzanna that Carla would curtail her nighttime visits when Eric became her main focus. It was as if her entire world went down a rabbit hole. The girls remained civil and publicly social (neither was into catty revenge or painful drama) but things were certainly not the same. Suzanna tried not to wonder if Carla was hurling herself out of her room and making her way to the Cooper winery every night. Luckily, her new friendship with Fernando was opening up new worlds—they cooked, they sewed, they conquered. Fernando made it his mission to keep Suzanna’s mind off Eric and Carla, going to great lengths to keep her distracted. Anything he was doing, he included her.

One Saturday, he invited her to his house and Suzanna enthusiastically pedaled over on her bike. Fernando lived with his father. His mother had moved back to Mexico when Fernando was a baby. Suzanna was flabbergasted when Fernando told her this nugget in his matter-of-fact way. But Fernando made no bones about it. His father, Armando Cruz, worked for a large winery but had aspirations to be a vintner himself one day. He owned a small plot of land where he grew the obscure merlot grape, confident that merlot would catch on with the California palate. Mr. Cruz was way ahead of his time.

The road to Fernando’s was mercifully flat, but the weather was hot and the fields were heady with the scent of ripening grapes. She was wobbly when she got off her bike and pushed it up his rutted driveway.

Suzanna dropped her bike in the backyard and entered a kitchen that smelled more like grapes than the wineries did. She looked at Fernando quizzically, but he was intensely focused on a bubbling pot. There were grapes being boiled, grapes piled a foot high on the counter, and grapes draining through colanders in the double sink.

“What’s all this?” Suzanna asked.

Stir, stir, stir.

“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.