All About Lulu Read online

  The twins thought we were insane. Willow had our eyes examined, and as it turned out I was badly in need of glasses.

  Big Bill wasn’t surprised in the least. “Meat needs meat,” he observed. “Why should the eyes be any exception?”

  Soon I was outfitted with a pair of thick black safety frames—the only frames substantial enough to accommodate the telescopic lenses I required. The frames were hopelessly outdated, a relic from the mid-’60s. Not even Devo could save me. They had a fishbowl effect, so that my eyeballs looked huge, Martian-like. The sheer weight of the things caused my neck to ache.

  The upside, of course, was that I could see Lulu better.

  “Tell me again about sandhill cranes,” I said, one gray Saturday in the pampas grass.

  Lulu lay stretched out upon her back, staring up at the low sky. Moments before, she’d permitted me to cup my hands once more over her breasts through her cotton blouse, and with the blood pounding in my temples I had discovered, as per the foretelling of my vivid imagination, that they were now more than a handful. She had a dreamy cast about her now, as she did whenever she talked about birds, a faraway look, as though she herself had once tasted the thrill of flight. “Every year they gather on the banks of the North Platte River. They nest in the same spot.” She plucked a foxtail and placed the stem between her teeth. “And when they meet their mate, they mate for life. And they do the most incredible mating dances. Leaping and jumping and craning their necks. And they do this thing where they stretch their wings way out like they’re doing tai chi. The mates do these things called unison calls, which are different from all the other calls they make. I saw them on KCET. They’re long and lovely and heartbreaking. Someday I want to go there,” she said. “Before the cranes are all gone.”

  In time, our language evolved into a written form, and the vowels were symbolized by pictures of cumulous clouds, and planets with glowing rings like Venus, and spotted mushrooms, and fields of rippling wheat, and cows jumping over moons. There existed no word in our language for suffering, or cancer, and there was no word to symbolize the number one, although there existed a word for zero and a word for two, in fact there were a 118 words for two. And there was no word for apart, but there was a word for together, and when you saw it written down it was the most beautiful word you ever saw, and to hear it aloud was to hear a chorus of angels singing. And it didn’t matter that I was motherless and forsaken and wore oversized glasses, or that nuclear holocaust seemed imminent. None of that mattered so long as there was Lulu to keep me warm through the nuclear winter.

  “Even though I’m not going to get married until I’m at least thirty-two,” she told me in the pampas grass, “that doesn’t mean I’m not ever going to get married, you know. And it doesn’t mean you can’t always be my boyfriend until then, as long as you don’t mind traveling around the world at least three times. My mom says that’s the test. Traveling around the world with someone. She says that you can always see a person’s true colors that way. But I doubt it would make any difference for us. Besides, we’ve already been to Australia, and that’s halfway around the world. It’s just a matter of whether you want to travel around the world three times. If you don’t, that’s okay.”

  “Don’t worry, I do. At least three times.”

  “That’s good. I figured you would. I think it would be better that way, with both of us. That way we’ll always have four eyes.”

  “Six,” I reminded her, tilting my glasses.

  And the truth is, I doubt whether I would ever have seen much of anything if it weren’t for Lulu, because, no matter how corny it sounds, she really taught me how to see. She taught me not to look past things, not to take them for granted. She taught me to look at things until I saw them differently.

  “Things are changing all the time,” she told me. “If you look hard enough, you can see it happening.”

  The Hot Dog of Despair

  Lulu went to cheerleading camp in Vermont the summer after sophomore year, which was perhaps the most un-Lulu thing she ever did, and, I suppose, in that respect, the most quintessentially Lulu thing she ever did. She was going to stay with her grandparents in Burlington for the better part of the summer.

  “It’s not like I’m never coming back,” she told me in her bedroom the afternoon she found out. “It’s just summer.”

  “I know. But what am I supposed to do? It’s not fair.” I was alluding to the fact that while Willow was planning to fly out and join her for a month, I was being forced to stay behind without any good reason.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I sat down beside her on the bed.

  “Look at me.”

  I looked at her.

  “Quit moping and think of the adventures we’ll have to talk about later.”

  “I don’t want to have my own adventures.”

  “Then we can talk about mine.”

  “But I want to be there for them.”

  She smiled, a little sadly, I thought. She brushed my greasy bangs off my forehead and gazed into my Martian eyes. “Don’t worry, you will be.”

  I was sentenced to six interminable weeks at the gym that summer watching Big Bill take yet another run at the Olympia. The fallout from the ’80 contest had soured me forever to the charms of bodybuilding. Even if the summer of ’84 had promised some form of rekindled intimacy with my father, I probably wouldn’t have wanted it. I argued that at fifteen I was old enough to stay at home alone, but he made me go to the gym anyway.

  A lot of the old faces had disappeared from Gold’s. Waller was gone. Corney and Padilla were gone. Platz was still holding on, but something was happening to his face—it looked rubbery, like something stretched too far. Boyer Coe was still around, though I’m pretty sure he was dyeing his hair. There were a lot of new faces, young serious guys. The gym was different, too. Cleaner. Quieter. Softer around the edges. Guys weren’t cranking Sammy Hagar like they used to, they weren’t jumping around and hooting like sex-crazed baboons. The place even smelled different. Less like armpit.

  By then the twins were already old standbys at Gold’s. They’d reached puberty years prematurely, and were well on their way to muscle-bound by the summer of ’84. Doug wore a mustache before his thirteenth birthday. Ross opted to shave his. Their lats were so overdeveloped that their arms would not hang at their sides—they jutted out a good foot and a half from their torsos. They walked through life like gingerbread men, trumpeting farts and grinning broadly at their own fetid bouquet. Their Adam’s apples had outsized their brains. If ever I wished to turn my universe inside out again, it was that summer. But my outside senses were achingly clear. I remembered every clang and every belch and every sweaty fart that smelled like lasagna. I remembered every grunt, every wallow in sexual retardation, every pussy hair band the radio blared that summer. To this day I can hear every battle cry of no pain, no gain as though somebody were still shouting it in my ear.

  My lone occupation during those interminable hours at Gold’s was the Book of Lulu, which, in its fifth year of existence, had grown far beyond the earmarks of a healthy compulsion. It numbered seven volumes by midsummer.

  July 12, 1984

  Actual conversation between Doug and Ross today at the gym:

  Doug:Knock it off, faggot!

  Ross:You’re a faggot.

  Doug:No, you are.

  Ross trumpets a fart.

  Doug:Chew your food, ass-wipe.

  Ross:You’re an ass-wipe.

  Doug:No, you are.

  I thought life without Lulu would be like drowning. But drowning sounds peaceful. I slept in her bed again last night. Her pillow still smells like her.

  It soon became apparent that something was amiss in Vermont. There were nightly phone calls from Willow, which Big Bill always took in the master bedroom, talking mostly in low tones. I eavesdropped as best I could.r />
  “You’re the one who—now, just hold on a minute, here . . . Well, that doesn’t mean that—of course, I don’t blame her, and I don’t blame you for—let’s not blow this thing out of proportion . . .”

  But the proportion apparently had been blown. The calls got longer, the tones lower as the summer progressed.

  “How do you know? She said that? Jesus. Yes, of course . . . of course! No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ve told you why. This doesn’t concern—well, it doesn’t have to, then. You’re the grief counselor . . .”

  I grilled Big Bill for information, but he refused to disclose anything.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Is everything all right? Is Lulu okay?”

  “She’s fine. Just growing pains. It’ll pass.”

  The more I pressed him, the less patient he became.

  “Everything is fine. Now, drop it. Pass the macaroni.”

  But everything wasn’t fine. The calls continued, the tones remained hushed. Once, I stood outside Big Bill’s room in the darkened hallway, with my ear pressed into the slight opening of the doorway.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “What makes you think the incident has anything to do with it? Of course I haven’t told them. We’ve already discussed that. Well, that conversation is just going to have to wait. No . . . no, I don’t expect I’ll be changing my mind. Yes, of course I am, of course I do. Damnit, you were complicit too, Mary Margaret, you can’t put this squarely on my shoulders. Of course I do . . . yes . . . of course . . . I understand that. Put her on.”

  I heard the bed creak. Big Bill heaved a heavy sigh. When he started speaking again his voice sounded weary. “Lulu, honey, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but—I’m sorry about that, honey . . . Yes, I know, please don’t—I understand you’re angry, sweetheart. There’s just so much to expl—just let me expl—I understand . . . Yes, I’d feel the same way, I don’t blame you. I blame myself. But there’s a lot more to this than . . . Oh, sweetheart, please try to understand. I know this sounds—I know it sounds like—I will make this up to you, but you’ve got to let me, honey, you’ve got to under—Lulu, honey, stop. Please just tell me what happened . . .”

  The bed creaked again as Big Bill got to his feet. I could hear him pacing the floor. “It is a big deal,” he said. When his pacing brought him closer to the door, I pulled back a half foot and swiveled my shoulders around to avoid detection.

  “You’re damn right it’s a—Well, that’s not what your mother said. Now, damnit, I want the straight stuff here, I wanna know just what exactly . . .” Then he closed the door, and his voice went muffled, and his pacing carried him toward the farthest corner of the room.

  In the morning I confronted him again in the breakfast nook.

  “Nothing’s the matter. You’re blowing this out of proportion. Lulu quit cheerleading camp, that’s all. Just some growing pains, teenage girl stuff,” he assured me.

  I had no choice, really, but to toe the Miller party line—that is, to act like a traffic cop at the scene of a grizzly accident. But just because I toed the line didn’t mean I believed it for a minute—not when words like blame and complicit were being whispered behind closed doors. I rounded up the usual teenage suspects—shoplifting, drugs, alcohol, sex, vandalism. But none of them quite suited Lulu. Maybe she really did quit cheerleading camp. Maybe she lied about it. Maybe she was skipping out on camp and Willow found out. Whatever it was, it would pass. Lulu would probably get grounded when she returned. Big Bill would go soft on her. Everything would return to normal. The important thing was just getting Lulu back to Santa Monica before I went out of my mind.

  The longer Lulu was away, the harder it became to summon her face, her smell, her touch. At night I dreamed of her, or fell asleep trying. I pursued her down dark corridors, through vast labyrinthine cities of my own invention. But I could no sooner catch her than I could roll over and touch her.

  In the waking hours I summoned her image with the help of photographs. I sat on her bed and buried my face in her bras, inhaling her scent and leaving spots of drool on the cloth. I lay belly down on her bedspread straddling her pillow with my loins on fire, caressing her breasts, sucking her nipples. And when I took my relief from the unbearable pressure of Lulu, it felt altogether different than when I thought of anyone else, and the fruit of my labors sprang from some deeper well.

  July 16, 1984

  She still hasn’t written. I felt so bad today that I ate a hot dog. Then I puked in the van. The twins called me a wuss. I called them faggots. They said no, you’re a faggot. I said no, you are. Something’s happening to me.

  Something was indeed happening to me. After three weeks without Lulu, without so much as a phone call or a postcard, I’d lost my voice. My beautiful velvet thunder, like everything else, had forsaken me, and nobody seemed to notice. When I opened my mouth to speak, the positively charged ions did not crackle out like fairy dust. Instead, negative space streamed out of my mouth, swallowing anything in its path, and then it collapsed back inside itself and filled me with nothingness.

  For two weeks my hair stopped growing, my nails stopped growing. My dream cities disappeared without a trace. No thought, no smell, no image could arouse my erotic life force. My young manhood wilted, and the seeds of my possibilities dried up before I could ever sow them.

  Then the postcard came. I gazed upon its beauty without ever looking at the front of it. Every inch of the card was filled with tiny writing. Participles dangled into margins, sentences curled around stamps. It must have been five hundred words. I began reading it as I mounted the stairs.

  Right away I could tell something was wrong. The tiny words ran their circuitous route down the card, forming sentences, then paragraphs, but there were no cumulus clouds, no fields of wheat, no lovely incantations. This was not our language. These were only words. Regular words.

  Electives

  Lulu was not the same when she returned from cheerleading camp in Vermont. She spoke without blinking and squinting, and her words were antimatter. She was distant and cheerless and she’d started smoking cigarettes.

  September 1, 1984

  Yesterday was the worst day of my life until today. Today Lulu acted like I was a total stranger. She wouldn’t tell me about Vermont. She wouldn’t tell me about anything. She won’t even look at me. Maybe she knows about the bras, or about me humping her pillow. Maybe she even knows about me sucking her nipples.

  I was determined not to annoy Lulu. But in the end I was weak. One evening when Lulu snuck out for a smoke, I followed her, and fell into stride with her along the shadow-dappled sidewalk in the direction of Joslyn Park.

  “Do you hate me?” I said.

  “Of course not. I could never hate you. I’m just not myself anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not a matter of why. It’s just a bad case of the way it is. It’s nothing personal, William. It’s just that if I were you, I wouldn’t count on me anymore. Not like you used to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lulu puffed on her cigarette. I could tell she felt my eyes staring holes into her. She looked off in the other direction. “I mean, I don’t think I can be the same kind of friend to you anymore.”

  “And what kind of friend is that?”

  “I just want to be more like, I don’t know, I guess, like a sister, you know?”

  I was eerily silent.

  She stopped along the sidewalk. “What’s so wrong with that?”

  I kept walking.

  Lulu hurried to catch up, and threw her cigarette into the gutter. “Well?”

  “Well, what? What am I supposed to say to that? I don’t even know what it means.” I was practically foaming at the mouth. “You’re acting all weird and distant and you won’t tell me why,” I growled. “It’s like you’re trying to give me th
is whole breakup speech, and you won’t even tell me what I did.”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Then what’s so wrong with me?” I picked up my pace and focused my sullen gaze straight ahead.

  Lulu stopped again. “Nothing,” she said softly. “Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s me, William.”

  Some dark cloud had settled on our household. There was a palpable tension between Big Bill and Willow, and Lulu and Big Bill, and Lulu and Willow. In short, between Lulu and everybody. It filled the dining room like bats. It hovered about the kitchen like a cloud of mosquitoes. Even meat could not appease it. It was a force of gravity that compacted words before they were ever uttered, a force so strong not even the twins were impervious to it. There was no farting at the dinner table. No wrestling in the stairwell.

  I was so full of dread, so helpless and uninformed, that I actually looked to Big Bill for guidance. I caught him as he was packing his gym bag, a strapped canvas sausage that lay on the bed.

  “Dad, what happened?”

  “What do you mean, Tiger?”

  “To Lulu.”

  He started rummaging through his sausage bag. “Oh, just girl stuff. We’ve been over this already at least three times. You know how they are. Probably jilted by some polo player.”

  “It’s not that. Something’s wrong.”

  “Look, Tiger, teenage girls are moody. I wouldn’t read too much into any of this.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Nothing,” he snapped, but softened immediately. “Nothing.” He set his massive hand on my shoulder. “Give her a week and she’ll be back to her old self.”

  I think Big Bill really believed that. There was no use pushing him further. I’d only run into a short ending. I ducked his massive hand and turned to leave.

  “Will?”

  “What?”

  “Well, son . . .”

  “What already?

  “Look . . . you’re fifteen years old.”

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “I’m not exactly sure how to put this, but . . . Don’t you think it’s time to start . . . well, you know, spreading your wings a little?”