The Merchant of Venice Beach (14 page)

Suzanna found it interesting to see her mother out of context. She seemed younger here in her college town, without the mantle of her own professorship (although, Suzanna noted, she used it when she needed it, as they went from laureled hall to laureled hall and saluted old professors of hers). It occurred to Suzanna, while they were eating lunch at an old Philadelphia haunt called City Tavern, that she never thought about her mother or father as having a life before
parenthood. She just sort of pictured her parents as two flat balloons suddenly filling with air when Erinn was born—and helium the moment she arrived. This concept startled her, and she almost choked on her chowder.

“Temple seems pretty cool,” she said. “I can picture you and Dad here.”

Her mother was having a second glass of California wine . . . it was strange seeing all the familiar labels from the Napa neighborhood in such an unfamiliar landscape. Virginia actually looked a little flushed, which never happened at home. All that wine—it was practically in the air at home—and Suzanna realized she had never seen her mother even remotely tipsy before.

“We had some wonderful times here. It seems like only yesterday.”

She ordered a third glass of wine, and held it up to the sunlight. She squinted at it knowingly.

“I almost married somebody else,” she said suddenly.

Suzanna tried to take this in.

“There was this guy . . . and he was in a band . . .”

Shoot me now. Not a guy in a band!

Her mother was clearly on a roll here, a blitzkrieg down memory lane. She continued, “Yeah . . . he was really into his music. He would talk about music day and night. When we’d be having coffee with friends, he’d be drumming on his thigh . . . and he was a bass player. All he thought about was music, music, music. I was very young and mistook his passion for . . . for . . . well, let’s just say he was extremely focused on himself—and his needs.”

Needs?

Suzanna did not want to be discussing anyone’s needs with her mother—except her own.

“You’ll find out, sweetheart, that just because you’re in love with someone, it doesn’t mean you should marry him,” her mother said.

Suzanna was overwhelmed. They just came to Philadelphia to look at a college and she was getting bombarded with stuff she did not want to know. She needed to get the conversation back on safe ground . . . get it back to herself, where it belonged.

“So what happened?” Suzanna asked. “When did Dad enter the picture?”

“Well, I met your father at a rally for something or other—some save-the-world ordeal. Isn’t it funny how something can seem so important at the time and you don’t even remember it later?”

“Hilarious.”

‘Well, obviously I was a sucker for passion on one level or another . . . one guy with his music, and your father with his social conscience. But as I got to know your father, I could see the difference. Your father’s passions were other-directed—he was such a good man. And that’s who you marry, Suzanna. You marry the good man.”

I’m eighteen and can’t even get a date, but thanks, Mom.

“And besides,” said her mother, with a strange look—if it wasn’t on her dear mother’s face, she would have described the look as leering—“and besides,” she continued, cheeks blazing. “Your father was so damn cute.”

Suzanna could feel a panic swell coming on, which . . . panicked her. Panic swells were still a fairly new phenomenon. But because she was sitting at a table, she managed to stay in her seat by gripping the chair as tightly as she could. She concentrated on getting things back under control.

“Well, are you happy with how things turned out?”

She wondered if she really wanted to know the answer. She waited while her mother looked at the historic street outside the window. Her very own cobblestoned time machine. Her eyes seem to mist over as she searched for an answer.

“Honey.” She took Suzanna’s hand and let out a pitiful sigh. “Sometimes I just get so sick of the Virginia Wolf jokes.”

Suzanna loved Temple and could see herself on the East Coast. Just as she tried to visualize keeping her feet on the ground during a panic swell, she now tried to visualize herself walking the hallowed grounds of some stone-clad, ivy-covered university. But she continued to stall, and junior year evaporated without Suzanna taking any overt action to get into college.

One summer night between junior and senior year, Suzanna was positioning one last strawberry blonde curl when she heard her bedroom door open. The sound was so familiar it didn’t occur to her to be scared. But standing there was a scary sight: Carla, tears and mascara streaming down her cheeks. Suzanna sat up and opened her arms. Carla let out a muffled wail and launched herself into Suzanna’s embrace. The girls fell asleep without ever talking, but Suzanna knew Carla well enough to know that the relationship that had broken her own heart had now broken Carla’s.

In her mind, they were even. They never discussed the breakup.

CHAPTER 12

Fernando had his heart set on some sort of art school. He he didn’t really care if it was design or cooking or hair and makeup as long as it screamed I AM AN ARTIST. Unfortunately, his father couldn’t see past the financial obstacles and pretty much told Fernando that if college was going to happen, Fernando was on his own.

Suzanna’s parents were happy to discuss college options with him, and Martin Wolf offered to take Suzanna and Fernando on a tour of a northwestern college, Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Fernando was thrilled with the opportunity and grateful to Suzanna’s parents, whom he called “Professor Wolf” and “Mrs. Professor” or “Mrs. P.”

It was pouring rain in Washington state as they followed a young tour guide around the soggy campus. The guide said that the programs were designed to provide all students with a general foundation of academic skills.

“As opposed to those other college campuses,” Martin Wolf whispered to his daughter.

After a tour of the campus and the city, Fernando persuaded Suzanna’s father to take them on the ferry out to Vashon Island. This, actually, had been Fernando and Suzanna’s secret agenda. When the thought of going their separate ways unnerved them, Suzanna and Fernando often fantasized about going to college—together. One of the charms of Cornish was that it was within striking distance of Vashon Island, where the two of them envisioned living a remote life and taking the ferry back and forth to school.

Suzanna and Fernando were great fans of Betty MacDonald, an American author who wrote about life on Vashon Island. Suzanna had been listlessly trolling her mother’s library one afternoon and came across The Egg and I, the autobiographical account of Betty MacDonald’s life as a young wife on a chicken ranch in the 1920s. Suzanna loved the book and insisted that Fernando read it. He said he didn’t really see what she liked so much, but then Suzanna passed on Betty’s next venture, The Plague and I. Fernando was hooked on the lighthearted account of her time in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Then MacDonald wrote Onions in the Stew—and this was about Vashon Island. Ever since they had read that, Suzanna and Fernando had been dying to visit.

The ferry trip to the island was everything they dreamed it would be. Suzanna’s heart beat faster as the island came into view out of the fog. They jumped off the rocking boat and had lunch in a drafty café. After an hour of poking around town, Suzanna and Fernando felt their collective dream fade.

As Fernando recounted to Suzanna’s mother when they got back, “Your husband was cool taking us up to Washington. But Vashon Island was boring as shit.”

Mrs. Professor laughed and told Fernando to watch his language.

“Seriously, Mrs. P . . . can you imagine a place that makes Napa look like it has a pulse?”

Senior year sped by. Suzanna was still up in the air about college. She excused it by telling herself that she was going to concentrate on getting her grades up rather than focus on college. She hung out with Fernando, and then Eric and Carla in varying degrees. When Carla and Eric broke up, Carla moved on to an entirely new group of friends, although she did do science projects with Suzanna and Eric from time to time. Their cumulative knowledge really did give them an edge and they somehow managed to put all personal feelings aside to capture those elusive few remaining good grades.

Eric, through some unspoken agreement, seemed to retain the rights to the friendship with Suzanna and, by extension, Fernando, and the three of them did almost everything together.

Suzanna and Carla sometimes hung out together on the weekends, but, as a pair, they didn’t play well with others.

Although there had been nothing romantic between Carla and Eric for almost a year, there was certainly no indication that Eric now returned Suzanna’s admiration. And Suzanna still saw Carla as a threat to the any-minute-now romance that might spring up between Eric and herself.

Suzanna was studying in her room and looked up to see Carla running down the lane toward the barn–house. She was whooping, and waving something in the air. Suzanna closed her book and raced out to meet her friend. Carla bounced around in a circle while Suzanna read the letter that Carla had been waving. It was an acceptance letter from Howard University in Washington, D. C. Suzanna grabbed Carla by the wrists and they leaped in a circle, squealing with relief. For Suzanna, the relief was twofold. First, that her friend had, deservedly, gotten into an amazing school. Second, since Eric had set his sights on Berkeley, which was almost a local school, the fact that Carla would be three thousand miles away was a huge blessing. Fernando had confessed to Suzanna that he, too, wanted to get into Berkeley, but Suzanna knew that would never happen.

“Well, I can dream, can’t I?” Fernando said resolutely.

Letters of acceptance (and rejection) were making the rounds at the school. Suzanna noticed that the news of Carla’s acceptance letter brought back the look of panic to her parents’ eyes. Suzanna was studying a map of the San Francisco area, hoping a college might reveal itself to her as the perfect place—one that would satisfy her parents and be near Eric and Fernando—when the phone rang. It was Eric, and he wanted to see her right away. She headed out to meet him on the road between their houses. It was a path they’d been taking since childhood. She would leave her house and Eric would leave his and they’d head down opposite ends of their little dirt lane toward each other. The way the road was laid out, both of them would have to crest a little hill, when they could see the other one. When they were kids, as soon as the other was in sight, they’d start to run.

But they had grown, and while Suzanna’s instinct was still to run toward him the moment she saw him, he was now way too cool for any of that. They sauntered toward each other at a maddeningly slow pace until they were walking side by side. By this time, Eric and Carla had been broken up for almost a year—an eternity, by high school standards. Suzanna no longer braced herself for their reconciliation. She’d moved on to the next stage, that of periodically getting her hopes up that the lightning bolt of love would strike Eric right on the spot and he would realize the object of all his desires was standing right in front of him . . . or at least beside him on a dusty little road in Napa.

“What’s up?” Suzanna said in the casual tone Fernando had drilled into her.

“Check it out,” he replied, handing her a letter.

Suzanna opened it and saw that it was an acceptance letter from Boston College.

She felt her throat tighten. Eric was going away?

“I thought you were going to Berkeley.”

He shrugged.

“Well, I didn’t get in,” he said. “But I’m going to Boston! Is that cool or what?”

Suzanna’s eyes started to well with tears and she tried to swallow. He’d talked so much about Berkeley that she hadn’t even considered him going away. He looked down the road.

“I can’t wait to get out of this place,” he said.

Suzanna watched Eric head back toward his house as she blinked back tears.

She felt her feet lifting off the ground. But Eric stopped and turned around. She felt her feet settle back on the ground. She stared at him. They were about ten feet apart. He made no move toward her, but just kept looking at her.

“You want to go to the prom with me?” he asked.

Suzanna felt her brain seize.

“Go to the prom?”she asked, her mouth moving as if filled with marbles. “With you?”

She tried to concentrate, but it was no use. The question came as such a shock and, coming on the heels of the news that Eric would be going to the opposite coast, she had no defenses. She started to float again.

No! Not now! Not now!

Eric, with his easygoing way, just continued the conversation as if everything was normal.

“Yeah. I mean, I’m not seeing anybody and you’re not seeing anybody . . . are you?”

Luckily, her belt got caught in the low-hanging branch of a sycamore, and she tried to sound as casual as possible while dangling among the leaves.

“No . . . I’m not seeing anybody.”