August 06, 2002
about marriage
Last night my roommate came home from Los Angeles to find the Guy and I sprawled out on the living room couches, playing a video game. To be accurate, the Guy was actually playing the video game; I was playing more of a spectator role, which is rather like admitting that one habitually watches curling tournaments on television, possibly one of the most useless wastes of time there is, right behind writing online journals and voting.
At any rate, the roommate came home, lugging her luggage behind her, and halfway through a conversation about how clean the apartment was, she suddenly lifted her hand, showed me its back, and wiggled the fingers at me. The age-old female sign for: ring.
"Hey, Yuhri," she said, and grinned ear to ear.
I blush when I consider what I did next. I think there must be some kind of deeply conditioned Pavlovian Hound instinct deep inside female minds that links the optical trigger of a diamond ring on a certain finger on a certain hand to high-pitched shrieking and the agitated hopping of diarrhetic parakeets. After all the uncontrollable squeaking and jumping about and hugging had ended, I'd like to say that I very gravely extended my hand.
"Congratulations," I said.
I'd like to say I did that. Unfortunately, I can't. I did nothing of the sort. I hugged her madly, squealed, and then sprained her finger by peering at the ring. For the sake of posterity however, I'll steadfastly deny that I'm really capable of acting like a pre-teen at a Britney Spears concert.
Later that night, I discovered the Guy staring morosely up at the ceiling. I poked him; in our vocabulary, this is a shortcut for, "What're you thinking?"
"Everybody's getting married," he said gloomily. "That ring must've cost him a fortune."
I yawned. "Not that much."
"It had to be at least a carat," he insisted.
There was a note of alarm in his voice. I couldn't tell if it was over the thought of my roommate getting married, or because marriage appeared to be stalking him, one foot at a time.
"That ring must've cost, what. Ten, fifteen thousand dollars?"
I yawned again. "Unh."
Oh, yeah. If you're in my book club or you know my roommate, not a WORD, you hear? No emails, no broadcasts, nothing. Shh. It's a secret until she tells it, or I'll get hurt.
A couple of weekends ago, some of the Guy's relatives came into town from England: his aunt, his uncle, his cousin. They met up with the son of their nucleus, currently working as an unpaid intern in San Francisco, and with his wife joined us for dinner at Ebisu, a popular sushi restaurant in the Sunset district.
Of course we went on a weekend. Of course the restaurant didn't take reservations. However, they did have a waiting list, and we called ahead at 5:30 to seat seven people at 7:00 pm. This was why we spent 7:00 to 7:15 standing outside the restaurant, jiggling up and down while waiting for his relatives. "Do they know where it is?" I demanded. "Do they know what time they're supposed to be here? Do they know--?"
I hate it when I'm late. I hate it when other people are late.
Wait. Stop. Correct that. I hate it when I'm late to things I care about.
Like food.
"They'll probably get here in their own sweet time," the Guy said irritably. "Late. British people are always late. I hate the British." I've come to the conclusion that the only people that the British hate more than the French are the British. The Guy is no exception.
As it happened, his family was just in time; the tables that were designated for us didn't open until about 7:20 anyway, and by the time they'd warmed up enough to care, the dawdling group hogging all that space was just about ready to leave. It had been the relatives' idea to go out to sushi, since the uncle had decided that this was what he wanted. "He loves shellfish," the Guy said, gloomy, earlier in the week when the decision was made. "He had a heart attack from eating too much shellfish. There's a lot of cholesterol in that stuff."
His uncle turned out to be a ruddy-faced, charming Englishman with crooked teeth; his aunt was a short Asian woman with the engaging, continental bluntness of the Mauritian. The Guy reported that the two of them had raised him when he was younger. "They let me eat anything," he informed me, cheerful now that the delinquent family had made their appearance. "Chips, crackers, anything I wanted."
...which certainly explained his affection for them.
The uncle sat down next to me in the crowded restaurant and leaned into the menu, looking mildly interested. "I'm not really familiar with sushi," he confided ingenuously in a British accent that was positively edible. "Exactly how do we go about doing this, then?"
"Go about doing what?" I asked blankly, and peered suspiciously at the Guy across the table. They're not familiar with sushi? What the hell does that mean?
"Do these little things make a full meal?" wondered the uncle, peering through the menu in a mildly baffled, shortsighted way. "Or, oh. I remember this. Tempura. Do we order this as a main course and have the sushi as appetizers?"
I cast a dark glance back at the Guy. Going out to sushi is one thing; going out to sushi with sushi virgins was a different experience altogether, one I wasn't sure I was emotionally equipped for. The Guy hastily reached across and confiscated the menu from his uncle. "Why don't we just order for you?" he suggested, and pressed down the menu being flapped between his aunt's equally confused hands. "We can get all sorts of things and you can just try them out."
His aunt leaned across the table to me. "I had sushi for the first time the other day," she confided. "In Canada. It was so wonderful."
FOR THE FIRST TIME. I glowered at the Guy.
Ordering sushi for the uninitiated is a delicate and stressful business. There are, if you can fathom it, people in this world that object to eating raw fish; there are still others that have problems with the concept of eating eel, or sea urchin, or fish roe. Still others react with muted horror when they are presented with large, deep-fried shrimp heads by a polite waitress. I am not, and have never been, one of this odd and sad number.
Unfortunately, because I myself am an acolyte in the mysteries of the Sushi, I have a grave responsibility to those novices that come to me for guidance. It becomes my role to nudge them gently down the true path, by presenting them first with such tastes that will not shock or offend, and only gradually weaning them off the tamago (sweet egg) and California roll onto more sophisticated flavors like raw salmon and tobiko (fish roe).
Not that I was overly worried. If you don't mind the analogy: educating a newbie about sushi is rather like initiating a virgin to sex. One hopes that the first encounter is convincing, but even if it isn't, one can pretty much rely on the reputation of the subject matter to encourage the other party to try again, eventually.
Although, okay, sex doesn't normally give you food poisoning. Or so I'm told.
Fortunately, it turned out that the Guy's relatives weren't quite as virginal as he'd made out; they accepted everything without too much questioning, and I was pleased to notice that they tried all the things that passed them at least once before making up their minds. "This is delicious," one end of the table informed us with delight, accepting a second round of unagi. "What is it?"
"Eel."
"This is eel? Wow." Another piece disappeared.
"Hey," said the Guy's dreamy-eyed cousin. "This is nothing like jellied eel back home."
Jellied eel. I shivered. The British really are barbarians.
After dinner we went out to a bar where we engaged in some clumsy darts and drinks, and then it was time to go home before it got too late. We exchanged a round of hugs and continental cheek kissing, bundled ourselves off to the car, and I sank down into the seat for a well-deserved nap on the way home.
Until we reached Millbrae, that is. The Guy abruptly broke the silence.
"They liked you."
"Hm? That's nice. I liked them, too."
"Each of them pulled me aside at some point during the evening and asked, 'when's the day?'"
"Unh?" I offered blearily.
The Guy's voice was rising a little. It was getting, in a word, loud. "I was, like, what is this, a conspiracy? Did you two plan it beforehand?"
It was about this point that it became rather obvious that the Guy was getting painfully agitated, and that it was starting to have an impact on his driving. As a matter of prudence, I took off my glasses so that everything outside the car -- the other cars, the street lights, the traffic signs -- would blur into a fuzzy, magical world of indistinct colors. What I couldn't see, couldn't hurt me.
"Why are you taking off your glasses?" the Guy demanded suspiciously. His voice was starting to split the soprano range.
"Pretty," I offered, and made a vague gesture around. "Lights."
"I'm not ready to get married yet," he told me with alarm.
"Okay," I said agreeably.
"I need to be financially secure first."
"Uh huh."
"I mean, I need to actually own a house."
"Okie dokie." My hand crept for the 'Oh-Shit' handle at the top of the car door frame. The Guy noticed.
"PUT YOUR GLASSES BACK ON," he yelled. "I'M DRIVING JUST FINE."
In the dark, his head was a fuzzy moon-shaped pale splotch. I beamed at him. "Pre-tty."
It's amazing he doesn't beat me.