All About Lulu Read online

  I was determined to make this hard on my father, though it was plenty hard for him already. “My wings?”

  “Well, I mean . . . socially? Don’t you think that maybe you’re just a little too . . . attached to your sister?”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “Well, it amounts to the same thing. You should make some friends, branch out, join a club or something.”

  “A club?”

  “Well, yeah, sure. An after-school thing. Chess club, or something. Debate club. Don’t they have a support group for vegetarians? The point is, branch out. Give your sister a little—”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “—give her a little space. Let her work through this stuff. How’d you like to start lifting?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “Okay, then. Fair enough. Just tossing that out there.” He zipped up his sausage bag. “But you better do something, Will. It’s time. You need to give her some breathing room from here on out. Otherwise, you’re going to suffocate her.”

  He slung his sausage over his shoulder and patted me on the back on his way out of the room.

  Come September, Lulu and I wound up with one elective together—Sociology, with Kimball. Though there were empty seats both directly in front of and behind me, Lulu sat all the way across the room in the back corner. I must have craned my neck at least two dozen times per period to look back at her. Surely she felt my Martian eyes upon her, but she never let on. Then, craning my neck one afternoon, I caught her looking at me, just once, just for an instant, and I felt the tickle of a flame in my sternum, a dry lump in my throat.

  The next day she wasn’t in class. I waited for her at her locker between third and fourth periods.

  “Where were you?”

  “I switched to Current Events.”

  “Why?”

  “Gaskil’s easy,” she said, opening her locker. “I had her for Civics last year. Besides, Mr. Kimball weirds me out.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Her face was hidden in the locker, where she rummaged about mechanically.

  “What’s wrong with you, Lu? What did I do?”

  “Just stop! You didn’t do anything, okay?” She shut her locker and turned to face me, but avoided my eyes. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing past me. “I need to get to Lit. Berringer’s on the rag.”

  At home, sheer repetition managed to cut through some of the tension around the dinner table, but the dark cloud lingered. Lulu wore the same clothes three and four days in a row. She was forever locked away in her bedroom, often so quiet that Willow would tap on the door. “Lu, honey, are you in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  Two weeks before homecoming, she quit the cheerleading squad.

  “Please,” she said. “Those girls are cheerful like sharks.”

  She showed no interest in boys, or other girls, or dancing, or flying, or learning to drive.

  “Drive where?” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  Even a Sunday trip to Cabazon could not awaken her appetites. We had to coax her out of the van.

  “Please, can we go now?”

  And the farther Lulu drifted from all of us, the farther we all seemed to drift from each other.

  Yet, through it all, her grades never slipped. She made honor roll junior year.

  As for me, I may have looked studious in my twelve-pound glasses, but I couldn’t bring myself to study. I’d sit on my bed, a fifteen-year-old atop Tony the Tiger sheets, surrounded by other childhood relics—action figures and View-Masters and dented cylinders of Tinkertoys—and I would gaze across the hall at the band of light leaking out from beneath Lulu’s door, and I wished I could go sit closer to it, wished I could set up camp in the hallway and warm my fingers in that stripe of light.

  For the first time since I’d known her, Lulu’s life was a complete mystery to me, and I was a complete outsider, and the more I accepted that fact, the more all of life seemed like a cruel mystery to me. And the more I sat looking at that closed door, the more it seemed that doors were closing all around me.

  When my grades started falling, the guidance counselor called me into his office for a visit. His name was Mr. Pitts, Larry Pitts. The kids called him Harry Pitts. Not everyone was assigned to Harry Pitts; there were also two other counselors. I think Lulu was assigned Ms. Huson. Harry Pitts wasn’t a bad guy, really. At least he didn’t try to act like an expert on teenagers, he didn’t say things like awesome, or talk about when he was sixteen, back in the Bronze Age. When he talked to you, he seemed interested. Not concerned, like everything was a big deal, just sort of interested, like he’d never heard your story before, like you were a puzzle and he wanted to figure you out, even if it meant skipping lunch. He had thinning red hair, slightly wavy, which he swirled atop his bald spot like soft-serve ice cream. He wore flannel dress shirts, even when it was ninety degrees out, and those desert boots everyone else stopped wearing in the ’70s. He was always kicking his desert boots up on the desk, and folding his arms, and looking at you as though the real answer to his question were written on the bridge of your nose.

  “Everything okay at home?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

  “Any changes around the house? Anything different between your folks?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Any recent transitions in your life? New house, new friends?”

  “No.”

  “Have you got a lot of friends?”

  “Some,” I lied.

  One of the things I liked about talking to Harry Pitts more than to most adults was that he seemed satisfied with short answers. He didn’t overextend a subject. He tried to draw you out in little yes-no increments. He was interested in hard data. He wasn’t one of those guys who was going to hand you a pillow and tell you to pretend it was something else.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your F in history.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s already over. What’s the use?”

  “Hmm. Okay. I guess I can see that. What about the D in gym?”

  “I hate gyms.”

  “Yeah, me too. So then, what do you like?”

  “Not much.”

  “Girls?”

  “Not really. Not in general, anyway.”

  “A specific girl, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you want to tell me about this person?”

  “Not really.”

  “Fair enough. You’re sure?”

  Just how big a loser was I? The school guidance counselor became my friend. I talked with him three times a week. I ate lunch in his office sometimes. I was his favorite puzzle. He started figuring me out after a few sessions.

  “Any progress with the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been giving her some space like we talked about?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “That’s good.”

  “What about History? How’s that coming?”

  “The same. Maybe a little better.”

  “How’s it working with Health instead of Gym?”

  “Better.”

  “Good. Still thinking about the girl a lot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think she’s thinking about you?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Yeah, hard to know something like that, I suppose.”

  “Okay, yeah, I think she’s thinking about me,” I said. “She has to be.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I don’t know, the past.”

  “You mean like your history?”

  “Nice try, Mr. Pitts.
It’s not old enough to be history. It was just this summer. And besides, it isn’t over.”

  “So, why don’t you tell me how things are different now?”

  “Uh, you mean, like she barely talks to me?”

  “What is it you want to say to her?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’d like to know what happened, but I wouldn’t even ask her. I don’t want to have some big talk. I just want to talk like we used to talk.”

  But there was nothing I could do to win Lulu’s favor back. No song or dance would arouse her slightest curiosity. I invented whole systems of logic to help explain what happened to us. How can I explain my compulsion, except to say that it was the most natural thing in the world, as involuntary as an itch. I checked the mail diligently. Lulu received nothing. No phone calls, either. I followed her at school, lurking around corners, staking out her locker between periods. I watched her eat her lunch from across the cafeteria—that is, when I wasn’t eating lunch with Harry Pitts.

  One day I tailed Lulu from Current Events to Lit, then from the AV room to the portable behind the gym, where fifth period she T.A.’ed for Mrs. Melendez in Special Ed. I pressed my face to the narrow rectangular window and watched Lulu drift around the room in her baggy sweatshirt, dispensing charcoal pencils, passing the math ball around the circle. While I was watching, Anna Burke, the big fat retarded girl who always smelled like papier-mâché and wore one of those furry-collared coats no matter what kind of weather it was, stood up from her seat and started blubbering. There was milk all over her face, and dried boogers all around her nose, and she was really going nuts about something. Mrs. Melendez went over and tried to calm her down, but that only made her worse. She began stomping her feet and plugging her ears. She was screaming so loud that I could hear her clearly through the walls of the portable.

  “Nooooo,” she was yelling. “Nooooo.” She was saying other stuff, but I couldn’t decipher it through all the snot and the screaming and the excitement.

  Then, for a second while Anna Burke was freaking out, I thought Lulu saw me at the window, because she walked right toward me, until her face was only four or five feet from my own. But all she did was turn off the light, and the room went gray, and Anna Burke calmed down immediately. Lulu went over and began stroking her big broad jacketed shoulders, and talking to her softly, so that I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but whatever it was, it had a soothing effect on Anna Burke. Within fifteen seconds she was smiling. Lulu pulled Anna’s handkerchief out of her coat pocket, and I remember thinking it was probably crusty. And she wiped the boogers and the milk from around Anna’s face, and she kept talking softly to her the whole time. Finally, Lulu gently coaxed Anna to sit back down, and then pulled a chair up next to her. Together they looked at Anna’s workbook.

  I stood there for ten minutes fogging up the window, wishing I were retarded, and I sensed that the terrible day had finally arrived when Lulu could no longer feel my eyes upon her.

  In the mad jumble of the corridor between classes, Lulu was always alone. She convened with no one at her locker. She ate her lunch alone. She walked to the bus alone. And I knew she was alone in her room. Clearly, it wasn’t somebody else that stood between us.

  The conclusion was inescapable: It was me. She had outgrown me and all of my flaws—my cowardice, my clinginess, my general lack of grace. Somehow she had managed to see past my veneer, straight through to my black little heart. The bigger world of Vermont had revealed something to Lulu. She had crossed some threshold and left childish things behind. And while she was away, she saw me for what I truly was: a toad.

  “Have you ever considered that it’s not you?” Harry Pitts wanted to know.

  “Yeah, I have.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know. What else am I supposed to think?”

  “Well, have you ever thought that this girl is going through some uncomfortable changes of her own, and maybe she’s confused, or frightened?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “And?”

  “And, if that’s the deal, I want to be there for her, because she needs me.”

  To this day, I can’t see why Harry Pitts indulged my obsession. He must have believed me, or just been intensely curious. Or maybe he had an obsession of his own. He must have felt that there was something there to be recaptured, or rekindled, something worth saving, because he never went out of his way to discourage me, he never told me to wave any white flag.

  Nothing

  I’ll admit that I never gave the twins much credit. I always regarded them as one person. The notion that Doug and Ross somehow shared a brain between them, or at least the better part of one, helped account for the fact that they were largely controlled by their ids. There wasn’t enough brain to go around. Something had to move all that flesh. The notion that their brain was spread thin also made it easier to forgive the twins for their Neanderthal ways. Who could blame them for wrestling in stairwells and farting in libraries, when they had only half a brain?

  As I saw it, not only did Doug and Ross share a brain, but they shared a will and a common destiny. I always imagined them at fifty, still living together in a one-bedroom apartment with bunk beds in Glendale or Cerritos. Maybe they’d own a gym together, or a carpet cleaning business. They’d still punch each other and call each other faggots. But they would always exist as one. Ross was no more separable from Doug, in my mind, than the holes were separable from a block of Swiss cheese, or the skin was separable from a hot dog. Even if Doug stood alone in front of me, Ross was there like a phantom appendage.

  Among the 118 words Lulu and I invented for the number two, we assigned a specific word to describe the oneness that is two, or the twoness that is one—that is, the particular togetherness that characterizes identical twins and, in rare instances, lovers. Loosely translated, the word was: it. And Doug and Ross had it, which meant they were never alone. Maybe it was impossible for me to conceive of separating it, because I’d always wanted it, as long as I could remember, and when I found Lulu, I wanted to be absorbed by her, whether to free myself from the responsibility of being myself, or just to bask snuggly inside her Luluness. Being driven from that garden was hell. To walk away from such a state, I reasoned, would be insanity.

  One afternoon I came home and found Ross in the living room, alone, just sitting. No television, no Atari, no steak sandwich.

  “What are you doing home? Aren’t you supposed to be at the gym?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “No pain, no gain,” I observed dryly.

  “Screw you. Why don’t you go have some alone time with your notebook?”

  Ross had me there. That’s when I first knew there was hope for him. But I was determined to thwart him anyway.

  He had quit doing his lower-body work on Tuesdays and Saturdays. “Better be careful,” I warned. “If you let your legs get too skinny, you’re gonna have a hard time lugging that head around.”

  “It’s not as big as it looks. It’s just those binoculars you’re wearing.”

  Who was this guy? Certainly not Doug’s better half. Doug could never have conjured something so original. Doug would have called me ass-bait, and left it at that. Was it possible that Ross’s brain was suddenly developing after years of atrophy? By the time he cut Thursday’s ab session out of his regimen, he had even resorted to reading, for lack of occupation.

  “Givin’ the old lips a workout, eh?”

  “Very funny. Shouldn’t you be jerkin’ your gherkin?”

  “Do you even know what a gherkin is?” I said.

  “Duh.”

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  “Screw you. I don’t have to tell you crap.”

  Eventually, Ross abandoned the gym altogether, and in doing so cut himself off not only from Doug, but from Big Bill. The remarkable part was that neither of
them chastised Ross for quitting. Doug seemed a little afraid of Ross. At the very least, he was a little suspicious.

  “What’s the deal with Ross, do you think?” he asked me one day in the kitchen.

  “Got me.”

  “You don’t think . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t think he’s, you know . . . ?”

  “Depressed?”

  “No. I mean . . . you don’t think he’s an ass clown, do you?”

  Was I wrong to despise my brother Doug? Can you blame me? Have you any idea what it’s like to look at your own flesh and blood and wonder what happened? How you awoke in the lair of your mortal enemy?

  After Ross quit pumping iron completely, he moped around the house for a few weeks, a little dazedly, not really knowing which direction to turn. More often than not he parked himself on the couch and gazed at the television set, or turned toward the kitchen and the curative powers of meat, devouring entire hams in a sitting, picking at cold chickens until nothing remained but a greasy cage. And when the miracle of meat failed Ross, and he had nowhere else to turn, he turned to me.

  “What are you doing?” he said, from the doorway.

  “Sitting on the bed.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You care if—?”

  “Whatever.”

  He sat down on the foot of my bed and started gazing, like me, in the general direction of Lulu’s door.

  “What are we staring at?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Or what’s left of something.”

  “Oh,” he said again, and kept staring at nothing.

  We stared at nothing for a long time.

  “Where’s Doug?” I said, just to be cruel.

  “At the gym.”

  “So, why aren’t you?”

  “Didn’t feel like it.”

  There was a hard little lump inside my chest. I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to hate Ross for walking away from Doug like Lulu had walked away from me. Nobody should ever walk away from anyone.

  “Remember when we used to go to World Gym?” I said. “When Mom was still alive?”