Cupcake (23 page)

Helen greeted me in front of our former hangout on Clement Street. "Your messed-up angles of blue-black hair look even scarier in person than on a camera phone." This from the girl who had copper dye in the shape of a hand on top of her shaved crew-cut head when I first met her.

"Your belly looks like it's about to pop, which is just as scary," I responded. Helen was a little chunky before, but that was her doughnut addiction talkin'. Her massive belly and radiant face now promised a new being that looked like it was ready to drop into the world any minute.

Autumn said, "Where's the hostile love for me, who didn't

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get knocked up or sprung from Manhattan out of the blue?" She appeared the same, all multi-ethnic fabulous, but with a new, relaxed vibe to go along with her old dazzling smile. Group hug and shit. My girls.

We ordered at the counter and brought our feast to our old table in the back, cornered against the wall where we could watch the never-ending line of mostly Chinese customers (which was how you knew the place's food quality was ace), who shouted their orders in Mandarin and Cantonese to the counter ladies while enormous circular trays of steaming fresh dumplings and chicken and pork buns were brought out from the kitchen at regular intervals. At our favorite perch in our favorite ambience-less dim sum joint, our trays heaped with pot stickers (pan-fried pork dumplings),
har gow
(shrimp bonnets),
fun kor
(steamed rice-paper-wrapped dumplings filled with pork, water chestnuts, and peanuts), and--Phil, so sad you're a vegetarian and missing out on your namesake dumplings--tender, sweet, chive-flavored shrimps wrapped inside a delicate rice noodle.
Hsieh hsieh ni, Clement Street de hsiao long bao, duo bao zhong!
Thank you, Clement Street dumplings, and blessings upon you!

Fog city with friends

Succulent dumpling goodness--

I would stay for shrimp

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I asked Helen, "So your mom's recovered from that breakdown she nearly had when you told her she was going to be a grandma?" Since my mother doesn't hide her displeasure at the prospect of becoming a mother-in-law figure, I wanted to know how Helen's mom--whose sweet and sour disposition could give my mother a run for her Prozac--was dealing with the transition in her daughter's life.

Helen said, "Recovered and then some. She's all into baby projects now. She just finished clearing out the family room and turning it into a baby room. She's setting up the crib this morning, her faithful Eamon puppy at her side. She was so massively pissed when I got pregnant, yet she was the one who marched me and Eamon down to city hall to get married. She hardly said a word to him for like the first month he lived with us, except to come into our bedroom and yell at him for blasting music too loud--even though it was me controlling the volume. Then two of her waiters at the restaurant came down with the flu on the same day, and she trudged upstairs to ask my help, and I was like 'I've got morning sickness, Mama, ask Eamon' and she was like 'No, YOU ask Eamon' but Eamon himself was already downstairs helping out. Do you know Eamon is the most popular waiter in the restaurant now? Aside from being the most capable and charming person there who also sings Irish ditties to customers as he serves them noodles, the just plain oddity of my fair, red-haired Irish soccer boy working

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in a Chinese family restaurant in the Richmond seems to rake in tips for him. I LOVE IT!" Helen rubbed her belly. "It's kicking. Wanna feel?"

Autumn and I both reached over to touch Helen's moving belly. Kick, kick. Cool, cool! Weird, weird!

HELEN'S GOING TO BE A MOM! HOW THE
FUCK
DID THAT HAPPEN? I mean, I know how it happened, but that doesn't mean seeing the late-third-trimester prospect stretched out before me wasn't shocking anyway. Her stomach reminded me how last year at Shrimp's brother's wedding Wallace had been all groom nervous and happy, teasing me that soon it could be me and Shrimp sharing such a union. And I'd thought--
No way. Marriage and baby-making, that's for old people.

Helen is the same age as me and Autumn.

Autumn said, "Helen, promise us you won't become one of those new mothers who can only talk about when the baby makes a poo? Those mommies hang out during the day at my coffeehouse job, and that's all they talk about."

"I promise," Helen said, nodding solemnly.

"Don't promise," I told Helen. "Cuz I guarantee it will happen to you. I've been working the East Coast café version of Autumn's job, and trust me, it's not just a West Coast phenomenon. It's a universal mommy thing. Obsession with poo, and sleeping patterns, and ..."

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"Ohmygod, enough talk about babies," Autumn interrupted. "Let's talk about a real babe." She whipped out her camera phone and flashed us a photo of a surfer chick with short spiky strawberry blond hair, kinda butch build, in her wet suit, and one massive Autumn-size smile on her freckled face. "That's April, my new lady," Autumn announced. She looked directly at me. "I am walking the walk. I am in school, working, and in the first throes of new love. So glad I came home."

"April and Autumn? Has to be true love, it's too cute not to be. Good for you," I said. Then I slipped in: "Think I should move home to be with Shrimp?"

"NO!" My girls answered.

Little known fact: Superheroes on rescue missions are often the loneliest people in the world. "Why?" I said.

Autumn chimed in, "If Shrimp wants to live in San Francisco, then it's because he doesn't know where else he wants to be. He wants the safe and familiar. He wants the old waves, the old life."

Helen backed her up. "You know we love Shrimp, and we would love to have you close by again, but you should only move back to San Francisco if this is really where you want to be. Otherwise, it won't last. You must already know that."

I love how my friends give me credit for being smarter than I actually am.

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Autumn said, "There may have been some Shrimp surveillance."

"Excuse me?" I asked.

Autumn continued, "My lady hangs out with the Ocean Beach surfer crowd. She told us about Shrimp coming back. Helen and I may have gone over there to hunt him down and check out the situation."

"May have or did?" I asked.

"Did," Helen said, nodding.

"And?" I asked.

Autumn said, "We went purely on a fact-finding mission on your behalf. Wanted to find out why he left New York so suddenly, what he planned to do now. We got nothing out of him, other than a flyer for some meditation retreat up north he said he wanted to try. He is deep into thinking mode, not talking mode."

Helen handed me the flyer, advertising an upcoming Buddhist weekend retreat in Humboldt County, where his parents are living. "Turn it over," she said.

I turned over the flyer and saw a new Shrimp masterwork drawing, etched in crayons. It pictured him and me, sitting on a backyard deck patio with prayer flags hanging from an overhead line. Strips of fog wisped through the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. In the foreground I stood at a patio table wearing an apron, and Shrimp stood at the grill wearing a wet suit. Two children sat in high chairs: perfect hybrid-babies with my dark hair (Mohawked) and his cherry lips (pursed). What was most notable

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about the picture was that, unlike the pages and pages of sketchbook art he's devoted to rendering me in since we first got together, he hadn't drawn me this time in movie star or comic book fantasy projection. He looked like a regular Ocean Beach surfer dad, minus the golden boy beauty halo I would have drawn over him, and I looked like a regular Ocean Beach bohemian mom chick, with long hair in a solid black color. In Shrimp's back-of-a-flyer snapshot drawing of our potential future life together, we just looked like us. But older. And chill. In love. A family. No more, no less.

What have I been agonizing over? This choice should be so easy. I want that picture. Shrimp wants that picture. We should do it--wherever and whatever it takes.

Watching Helen and Autumn watch their watches, I knew my gift from my girls was the proof of the flyer, but not the luxury of time to analyze the art in a girlfriend forum. Helen stood up and took a business card out of her purse, handing it to me. "The art-work's yours to figure out how you want to answer it. You know we support you no matter what you choose. Just choose carefully, 'kay? And for chrissakes go see my auntie at the salon on this card. She's just down the street. Tell her I sent you and she'll give you a good price to get your hair fixed."

Autumn stood up and pointed at Helen. "What she said." They both kissed me on the cheek and left.

WHAT HAPPENED TO US? We were once rebels! Proudly

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insolent teenagers! Helen used to draw a comic book series about an action hero called Ball Hunter who chased golf balls along with other *cough* misadventures, and she used these alluring comics as bait to lure over-twenty-one boys into buying her beers when her underage self was hanging out in local pubs. (She's now married to one of those conquests!) Autumn used to get high with other girls' surfer boyfriends and then use these boys (and some of the girls, too) for sexual experimentation while she came to terms with her own sexuality. I got kicked out of boarding school after the boy there who got me pregnant was busted for selling E out of his dorm room, and when I returned home to finish out high school, it wasn't long before my parents had me on lockdown in Alcatraz due to my exemplary bad attitude problem and the matter of an unauthorized sleepover at Shrimp's.

Now Helen is happily pregnant and married, Autumn is competently juggling school and job and girlfriend, and I, who was once banished to Alcatraz, am considering a permanent, peaceful move back into its realm. I don't know whether to be scared or pleased.

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***

FORTY-THREE

A fertility potion must be woven into the San Francisco fog, what
with all the procreation running rampant here lately.

All this procreation, and all I can think about is death.

"Promise me you won't die," I demanded of Sugar Pie.

"Anyone ever tell you that you need a restraint device for your mouth?" Fernando asked me from the driver's seat of my father's Mercedes.

From the back seat I grimaced at the big broody Nicaraguan through his rearview mirror observation of me. I answered, "Yes. You. On practically every drive you ever gave me to or from school or work or the beach or whatever while I was growing up. But listen up, señor. I've known your wife longer than you have-- need I remind you I introduced you to her? And I know she

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appreciates the demand as an expression of my devotion to her rather than as a death wish for her."

Seated next to Fernando, in the front passenger seat, Sugar Pie allowed, "The young lady is right." She turned to face me. "As for promises, we all know I can't promise I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." This young lady has always admired Sugar's use of double negatives. "I'm"--(*cough, indistinguishable number, cough*)--"years old with one remaining kidney that's failing. I plan to enjoy every day that comes to me as I get it, and the good Lord willing, I'll pass on in my sleep with Fernando at my side, but beyond that, I have no wish or expectation for when or how it will happen. Could be tomorrow, could be next year, could be on the dialysis chair, could be sitting in a car with you like right now." To let her husband know she bore no ill will about my death comment, Sugar Pie opened a box of See's candy. "Now baby, I'm going to offer you to take a piece, but as you can see, there aren't many left, so I'm hoping you'll be a polite young lady and say no. I know you wouldn't want to take an old lady's last piece of chocolate." She held out the box to me. "Cyd Charisse, would you like a piece of candy?"

I shook my head. "No, thank you, Sugar." Must be true love between us for me to turn down a chocolate. Hypothetically I never imagined a universe in which this scenario could play out, so now seemed like the appropriate time to play out another hypothetical

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with Sugar Pie. "It seems a shame that you finally moved out of the old folks' home and in with Fernando at the apartment at the side of our house, and then I'm not around to hang out with you more. Do you think I should move back home?" I didn't add the "with Shrimp" part, for the sake of blind judgment and all.

"Follow your heart." Sugar Pie has always been a mind reader.

"What if my heart's in conflict with my mind?"

"Mind!" Fernando shook his index finger at me from the rearview mirror. "Use your mind more, already. What's that I heard about you never bothering with culinary school?"

Sugar Pie added, "You've told me about all these gentlemen in your life in New York--but what about friends your own age, girls, like Helen and Autumn?"

I told them, "First, I did try a culinary class. School is not for me. And, I did make one friend, this girl who works at a nail shop in the neighborhood. But then I guess I came on too strong or something, must be cuz I don't have that restraint lock placed on my mouth yet, since what seemed like it started out as a cool friendship just went nowhere."

At the same time Fernando and Sugar Pie both said, "Did you try again?"

Their evolution into coupledom sync-talk is truly off-the-charts impressive. I liked that when I looked at them through the car mirrors, the reflection of contentedness on their faces was not a

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false mirage. They're another year older, and they looked it--but another year happier, and they looked that also.

As the car approached our destination in Ocean Beach, Sugar Pie told me, "The cards have confidence you could make a successful go of it wherever you chose to live."

"But what do
you
think, Sugar?" I asked.

"I
am
the cards," Sugar Pie intoned as Fernando stopped the car to drop me off. "How have
you
not figured that out yet?"