Lily and the Octopus(19)
“What about Franklin being Chinese?” I blurt.
“What about it?”
“I don’t know.” I’m trying to stay involved, pull my thoughts away from Lily, to be in the moment. “What about kids? Does it change anything about how you will raise them?”
“Of course not. It mostly just means I can never wear heels.” Meredith has always been self-conscious about her height.
As we drink our second slings, we press Aaron about single gay life in San Francisco and remain tuned to his every word like he’s a telenovela—his stories are outlandish and addicting and we understand most of what’s going on even if the concepts are a little foreign for the rest of us in longer-term relationships.
“You mean people just do that in the streets?” Jeffrey interrupts when Aaron is in the middle of a story about the Folsom Street Fair.
“What do you mean, naked?” I add. “Naked, naked?”
“What are chaps?” Poor Meredith.
By the third round of slings, we know what we’re doing. We dispense with the pineapple and the cherries and the umbrellas and get down to the business of gin. Two rainstorms have showered the lagoon and we’re due for a third, and the band on the barge has paddled by us several times playing what they bill as Top 40 hits, but which are certainly not the current Top 40 hits unless Kool & the Gang have made some recent cultural resurgence I’m not aware of. Some straight couples dance on the barge, but I’m not sure how they boarded or if they’re even supposed to be there.
The conversation turns to Lily, and Meredith and Aaron ask questions and I let Jeffrey answer as I lower my head to my glass and chew on my straw. After a few minutes, my straw mangled beyond any ability to do its job, I finally speak.
“When Lily was a year old she ate an entire bag of wasabi peas.” I laugh at the ridiculousness of that sentence, but no one else does. “She’d once eaten a bag of chocolate-covered blueberries that someone had given me as a gift, so I had been down this road before. Since chocolate is toxic for dogs, I called the vet and they suggested giving her some hydrogen peroxide as a way to induce vomiting—one teaspoon for every ten pounds of body weight, so one and a half teaspoons for Lily. Pretty effective stuff. To this day I don’t know if wasabi peas are toxic to dogs, but to be on the safe side, I decided to pull out the old hydrogen peroxide. Only this time she was wise to the trick and wanted no part of it. So I grabbed her by the snout and pried open her jaw. At the last second she zigged left and I zagged right and the peroxide ended up going down the wrong pipe. So not only did she not throw up, but now in addition to wasabi peas burning her stomach she had hydrogen peroxide burning her windpipe, and she couldn’t breathe without a horrible wheezing sound. I rushed her to the animal clinic, and a few hours later it was as if the whole thing hadn’t happened, but I remember thinking I was going to lose her.” I remember how much I hated myself that night, how I felt like a total failure if I couldn’t keep her alive for more than a year.
Somewhere in my speech the rain over the lagoon had started again, and the patter of rain on water sounds like a gentle snare drum. I pause and take the disfigured straw out of my glass and replace it with another straw from an empty glass. I don’t even know whose empty it was, nor do I care. “I don’t know what made me think of that.”
But I do know. I hate myself again, much as I did that night. Living things, maybe not barnacles or plants (although plants technically do bend their leaves toward the sun), need to move. And under my watch Lily was unable to retain what she was born with—the ability to move herself about. Even if it was an accident, or an injury that was breed-specific—just one of those things—it was my fault, just as every unpleasant thing that happened to her was a failure of mine to keep her safe.
On the table, hidden behind a standing cocktail menu, is a bowl of snack mix. I stick my finger in it and swirl the crunchy items around, taking a sort of inventory to see if there are any wasabi peas.
There aren’t.
“Ow!” The kick comes swiftly under the table and I jump and the cocktail glasses rattle. I look across at Meredith, who is grinning broadly.
Enough with the self-pity.
“You’re in trouble now,” I say to Meredith.
“What did I do?” she says, feigning innocence while failing to stifle laughter.
I grab as many of them as I can by the elbows and pull them away from the table. “Let’s dance!”
The rain stops and the barge sets sail again, this time with us aboard, and I’m already waving my hands in the air doing some sort of rhythmic snapping thing when the band starts to play “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates.
The Vow
I’m not entirely sure what Franklin’s Chinese parents think of their son marrying a tall white woman, but I’m pretty sure what they don’t think the occasion needs is two six-foot-plus homosexuals. Still, they nod and smile and do their best to make polite conversation, and the judge who officiates turns out to be Chinese and that seems to go a long way toward making the whole thing more palatable.
San Francisco City Hall is a stunning feat of marble, ambition, and architectural chutzpah; a Beaux-Arts monument to government as beautiful as any cathedral. After Meredith and Franklin get their marriage license, we wait in the cavernous entryway at the base of the grand staircase for their turn to get hitched. The floor’s marble inlay consists of circles and squares and I trace them awkwardly with my foot. Meredith looks stunning in a simple cream-colored backless wedding dress from J. Crew. It’s perfect for both her body and her temperament. My sister is not someone whose wedding I ever imagined. She’s not the kind of girl who grew up daydreaming of one, or playing bride in any fashion. But now that I see her looking radiant in this backless cream number against the ornate-but-not-ostentatious backdrop of city hall, I can’t imagine it any other way.