Dixieland Sushi Page 6

  Lucy calls me, sounding panicked. “You aren’t supposed to bring a date,” she breathes into the phone, without preamble, as if she, too, is a subscriber to Nakamura Telepathy. “Your reply card says two people. You weren’t supposed to bring two.”

  “My invitation was addressed to me and a guest.”

  “But I didn’t think you were seeing anybody,” Lucy whines.

  “Lucy! That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to bring a date.”

  “It’s going to mess up the seating at the head table,” Lucy says. She’s got that high-pitched, squawking tone reserved for territorial pigeons and brides who are about to have a nervous breakdown while registering for place settings at Crate and Barrel.

  “Lucy,” I say, slowly and calmly so that I don’t shout. I once read that the best strategy when dealing with injured animals and psychotic brides requires speaking in a calm voice and making no sudden movements. “I think you need to calm down.”

  “Jen. I have less than two weeks, and I don’t have my seating arrangements.” Lucy sighs dramatically after the sentence, letting it sink in, as if she’s just told me she has cancer. When I don’t respond, she barrels on.

  “This is a disaster!” she cries. “The most important day of my life and it’s a disaster!”

  I want to remind Lucy that she’s only twenty, and if this is the most important day of her life she’s going to have a whole lot of boring years ahead of her. But I don’t.

  I remember suddenly one Thanksgiving when Lucy was three and I was twelve. She threw the mother of all temper tantrums when Vivien refused to serve her pumpkin pie before the main course. She ended up hurling silverware from the children’s table and breaking one of Vivien’s prized crystal candlesticks.

  “You said I could bring a date,” I say, trying logic as my weapon.

  “I didn’t think you’d take me up on it.” Lucy sighs. “You don’t even have a boyfriend!”

  Another Lucy moment of note: her fifth birthday party, with a Winnie the Pooh theme, when she took the plates of cake away from each of her party guests claiming that it was her birthday cake and she wasn’t going to share.

  “Do you really have a date?” Lucy asks me.

  I don’t, but there’s no way she’s going to know that.

  “Yes, I do,” I say, resolute.

  “Well, we’ll have to get a longer head table.” Lucy sighs. “But that means that I don’t want you to say you’re bringing a date and then not bring one, because I don’t want empty place settings at the head table. I mean, how will that look in the pictures?”

  “I have a date, Lucy.”

  “Are you sure you can’t just ask him not to come?”

  I bite my lip until it bleeds.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

  I say, you do, no question.

  1983

  As a kid, my cousin Lucy was more spoiled than Blake Carrington’s daughter on Dynasty. Kimberly and I were given strict orders: Lucy was to have anything she wanted.

  Viviean said we were to be extra nice to her at all times because Lucy’s father (Patrick “Woo” Woodstein) was in jail for check fraud, and therefore she didn’t really have a father like we did. We were supposed to somehow make up for this cosmic imbalance by letting Lucy play with (and thereby destroy) all of our toys.

  When she started to crawl, she got into everything. She bit the heads off my Barbies. She flushed my Legos down the toilet. She cracked the door of my Easy-Bake oven, and she tore the firelike racing stripes off my Big Wheel. With her superhuman baby strength, she scattered and lost all the pins to my Light Bright and completely demolished the elevator in Barbie’s Dream House. Nothing she touched could be played with again, and when I’d go to Vivien to complain, she’d tell me to be patient and remember that Lucy didn’t have a daddy.

  Lucy had an appetite for destruction that would make Axl Rose proud. Lucy’s first word was not “Mama” or “Auntie” or “Grandma.” Lucy’s first word was “mo” for “more” and this seemed fitting, since Lucy never had enough of anything. She wanted more food. More juice. More hugs. More airplane rides. More tickling. More toys to destroy. More everything. Nothing was ever enough.

  And at the very hint that whoever was in front of her was not doing her every last bidding, she would erupt in ear-splitting cries that were guaranteed to make the most hardened man beg her to stop. For such a tiny baby (born at six pounds, one ounce) she had a set of lungs on her I hadn’t heard since Patsy Cline. She could wail at a high and steady pitch for twenty minutes if not delivered “mo” of what she wanted, immediately.

  Two decades later, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised she’s about to walk down the aisle with the man Aunt Teri’s I Ching coins once said I’d marry.

  —Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid III

  One day you do own way.

  “No, Jen, I’m sorry, but no, I can’t be your date,” says Jason, my old roommate. He’s gay and has been my stand-by date since we used to live together in a small apartment in Wicker Park after college. Jason is now a corporate accountant who lusts after Carson on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and spends his time keeping up an elaborate charade with his sixty-year-old conservative father about being straight.

  “Do I have to remind you of your brother’s wedding last year? You owe me one,” I say.

  Jason took me to his younger brother’s wedding in Wisconsin last summer where there was no open bar, cocktails cost ten dollars apiece, and all of Jason’s aunts (who were under the impression Jason and I were contemplating marriage) kept asking me whether I planned to breast-feed. At the end of the night, my bar tab was more than my plane ticket.

  “I knooow,” Jason wails, sounding backed into a corner. “I know. I’m a bad friend. A bad, bad, bad friend. If I could, I would. But I’ve got this business trip, and I can’t get out of it.”

  “I hope this business trip isn’t six one with blond hair.”

  Jason has a thing for blonds. See Carson from Queer Eye.

  “No,” Jason says, primly. “He’s technically five ten.”

  “Jason!”

  “I’m kidding. Just kidding. I have to go to Montreal to meet a client. You won’t believe what they’re asking me to do,” Jason says. “But you know me, I’ll lick the pole.”

  “Licking the pole” is Jason’s term for being willing to do something extreme to advance your career. It comes from an interview he read featuring Elizabeth Berkley, former Saved by the Bell star, who said she won the dubious role in the Las Vegas stripper movie Showgirls because she was the only actress who licked the stripper pole during her audition.

  “I am so sorry I can’t go, though, really. You know I don’t really believe you when you say you’re from the South.”

  “I am from the South. Who would lie about something like that?”

  “Well, let’s look at the evidence. You have no accent. You’re Asian, and I have never once heard you use the word ‘ya’ll.’ I’d say that’s about as anti-South as you can get.”

  “I worked hard to lose my accent,” I protest. When I was in college, my roommate Carrie burst out laughing every time I said “ya’ll,” so I just stopped saying it.

  “Not to mention, I have never even heard of an Asian person speaking in a Southern twang.”

  “You’ve heard my mother’s answering machine messages,” I point out. Vivien always says “hiya, darlin’” in her easy Southern drawl.

  “Yes, but I’m convinced your mother is white.”

  “Why would I lie? If I lied about where I’m from, I’d say I’m from Hawaii,” I say. Hawaii, after all, is typically where people guess I’m from. “Besides, don’t change the subject. I was trying to make you feel bad for not being my date.”

  “Look, I’ll call around and see if I can find a replacement,” Jason offers.

  “I don’t know.” I hesitate. Some of Jason’s “friends” aren’t exactly the sort who would blend seamlessly into a small Dixieland wedding. Three yea
rs ago, Jason and a few of his closest friends walked in the Gay Pride Parade in Boys Town wearing only white skivvies, cowboy boots, and brown leather chaps.

  “I’ll see what I can do, okay?” Jason says. “Don’t be mad at me, puhlease?”

  Jason, the youngest of a Catholic family of five, lives in mortal fear of being the recipient of anyone’s displeasure. This is one of many reasons he’s still in the closet with his family.

  “I’m not mad,” I sigh.

  “Good,” Jason sings. “What about that guy from work?”

  “Who?”

  “The one who claims to have a girlfriend but who shows an unnatural interest in your love life.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  “We are,” I protest.

  “Well, I’d bet he’d jump at the chance to go.”

  “You mean, if his girlfriend lets him,” I say.

  “If you asked him, I bet you a spa day at Mario Tricocci, he finds a way to go.”

  My phone conversation with Jason makes me happy, which I realize is wrong, and as instant karmic punishment, my cousin’s bridesmaid’s dress arrives, sent express from Vivien in Dixieland.

  The dress is a hundred times worse than I could have imagined. For one thing, it is pink. In fact, it’s more than pink; it’s bright magenta. There are more ruffles on it than stretches of smooth fabric, and as I feared, there is no butt, per se, except for a giant flat bow the size of Rhode Island.

  When I put the dress on and stand in front of the mirror I think, Kevin Peterson is going to see me in this and instead of thinking “that’s the girl I let get away,” he’s going to think “her ass is wider than Lake Michigan.”

  “What the hell IS this?” Kimberly shouts into the phone the next morning while I’m at my desk at work. It’s 10 A.M. and I’m trying to juggle two crises at once: the fact that yet another guest is canceling, this one for Wednesday’s show, and Michelle is on the warpath because someone broke the handle off her coffee mug. “It looks like Kathy Lee Gifford threw up all over me.”

  “Well, at least it’s….” I try to think of something nice to say about the dress to calm Kimberly down. “At least it’s not … uh … a Teletubby costume?”

  “I’d rather have that,” Kimberly says. “At least no one could recognize me in one of those.”

  “Did you get your plane ticket? We have to be in Dixieland in a few weeks.”

  “I told you I’m not going,” Kimberly says, sounding resolute.

  “You have to go.”

  “I’m trying to abide by my political beliefs. I object to this wedding—and this dress—on principle.”

  “You’re going to the wedding, even if I have to fly you there myself.”

  “I just want to know how they knew my dress size,” Kimberly says. “I’ve been deliberately avoiding their calls!”

  I don’t tell Kimberly that I secretly sent Vivien her measurements for the dress—going largely from memory.

  “You’d better buy your plane ticket right now, or I’m going to donate twenty dollars to the Republican Party in your name,” I say.

  Since Kimberly calls George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft the Triumvirate of Evil, she reacts to this in a heartbeat. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I would. And then I’d email the receipt to all your crunchy granola friends.”

  “I hate you sometimes,” Kimberly says.

  “I love you, too.”

  “Well, try to at least talk to Lucy, would you?” Kimberly pleads with me. “We can’t actually be expected to wear this.”

  As much as I’d hate to wear the same dress, part of me wouldn’t mind seeing Kimberly have to wear it. I hardly think she can hold on to her hippie-chick charms wearing fuchsia polyester. Then again, Kimberly could make a potato sack look sexy—which is why, I think, she insists on going around wearing cargo pants and combat boots. Even in those she has to fight off men by the dozens.

  My IM window pops up on my computer.

  RUGGER9: How’s your plan coming to bust up your cousin’s wedding?

  I glance up and see Riley looking over at me. He’s arrived, as usual, at 10:15. He wiggles his eyebrows at me. I roll my eyes.

  JEN76: Don’t you have work to do?

  RUGGER9: Noblemen are notorious slackers. So? You have a date yet?

  JEN76: Nope.

  RUGGER9: That’s a shame. Don’t you know you’re supposed to provide me with entertainment? I’m 312th in line to the throne of England.

  JEN76: I thought it was 344th.

  RUGGER9: Old royal buggers die off every day.

  My phone rings. I pick up the receiver while catching a disgruntled look from Riley. He throws up his hands as if to say “You’re ditching me for the phone?”

  “Hi, Jen,” cries the sexy, throaty voice of Tiffany, Riley’s girlfriend.

  “Tiffany!” I say, unable to contain my surprise. We’re certainly friendly, but she doesn’t usually call me at work.

  “Listen, I told Riley to tell you that we’re having a few people over tonight, nothing too formal or anything, but you’re more than welcome to come.”

  “Tonight?” I cry, again off balance.

  “Riley didn’t mention it?” Tiffany sighs, sounding disappointed.

  “Uh, no, he didn’t.”

  I give Riley a look over my computer. He shrugs at me, trying to look innocent.

  “Well, there’s this guy I work with—he is such a doll, you’re going to love him,” Tiffany says. “He’s from Sydney, and I swear he looks just like Russell Crowe. Anyhow, he’s going to be there tonight.”

  Tiffany is trying to set me up. Oh dear.

  “Come on, I know you are just going to go home and sleep before your next shift. Why don’t you stop by our place for a couple of hours before you go? You’ll love Paul. I swear.”

  JEN76: And just when were you going to mention your girlfriend wants to set me up with an Australian?

  RUGGER9: I wanted the element of surprise. I knew you wouldn’t leave the office willingly, so I had planned on knocking you out with chloroform.

  JEN76: You could have just asked me.

  RUGGER9: Brits don’t like to do anything the easy way.

  Riley and Tiffany live in a newly renovated condo in Wrigleyville two blocks from Wrigley Field. Tiffany moved in only a month ago, after a fire in her building caused so much water and smoke damage to her apartment that she could no longer live there. No one was injured in the fire, but Tiffany continues to mourn the loss of her matching white twill loveseat set from Pottery Barn.

  Riley’s apartment still looks something like a bachelor’s pad. His furniture is all dark leather, and he’s got black-and-white pictures of old rugby players on his wall, as well as two cricket bats and a British flag (a Union Jack, as Riley would say) above his fireplace. Tiffany’s things are still mostly in boxes, which are stacked in his hallway and the far corner of the living room.

  The party is in full swing when I arrive at nine.

  “You’re going to need this,” Riley says, handing me a glass of wine and keeping his voice low. “That Australian bloke is a real wanker.”

  I laugh and take a step around some of Tiffany’s boxes as I accept the glass of wine. “He’s that bad?”

  “Well, he’s Australian. You know those guys are insane, right?”

  “I don’t think I should drink,” I say. “I have to work in two hours.”

  “You Yanks, always so scared of getting a little pissed,” Riley says.

  “Did you say ‘pissed’?”

  “Means drunk in England,” Riley explains. “One drink won’t kill you, and it could make work infinitely more interesting.”

  “Can’t argue with you there,” I say, taking the glass.

  I glance over to the corner of the living room where Tiffany is talking animatedly with a tall, burly guy who looks distantly like Russell Crowe, but only in size and stature and the fact that he seem
s to be scowling a lot.

  “Is that him?” I ask, nodding my head in their direction.

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Tiffany seems to like him.” In fact, she seems to like him a lot. She is standing very close to him, and she is touching his arm now and again. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was flirting.

  “Well, Tiffany has terrible taste in men,” Riley says, taking a sip of his drink. “After all, she is dating me.”

  Just then, Tiffany glances over. “There you are,” she says, looping her arm through the Australian’s and leading him to me. “Jen, this is Paul. Paul, Jen,” she says. “Paul watches News Four all the time, don’t you, Paul?”

  “All the time,” Paul says.

  “Don’t you just love his accent?” Tiffany exclaims.

  Riley rolls his eyes.

  “You do the Daybreak show?” Paul says. “I like Michelle. She’s a fine Sheila for sure. She’d make you crack a fat.”

  “Crack a fat?” I ask.

  “You don’t want to know,” Riley tells me.

  “I think I could listen to him read out of the phone book, couldn’t you?” Tiffany sighs.

  Given that he doesn’t seem too bright, I think reading out of a phone book might be all he could manage. He doesn’t look entirely like Russell Crowe, although he does have the same thick neck and beefy build. Right away there is zero chemistry. I don’t like dumb, muscle-bound types. I go for scrappy, smart, and boyishly handsome guys. Guys like Riley.

  Then again, Paul doesn’t seem to have any interest in me.

  He seems to have eyes only for Tiffany. I begin to wonder, was this setup for me or for her?

  Riley doesn’t look happy. He doesn’t look happy at all.

  I get about five minutes alone with Paul, who talks exclusively about Australia and about how he hates “that drongo” the Crocodile Hunter. “He’s got a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock,” he says. Then, as if I’m in some sort of farce, he starts talking in the third person.

  “Paul would never do something like that … and if Paul were in charge, I’d tell you what he’d do to those terrorists ….”