“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t feel like maybe you want to talk to someone?”
“We are talking.”
“I mean somebody besides me. I have a friend, a counselor. She’s nice. You might like talking to her.”
“No, thanks.”
He looked like he wanted to sit down, but couldn’t make up his mind where. Finally, he squatted where he stood. “Well, if you ever change your mind
…
”
“Yeah, okay.”
Now that he was squatting, he seemed more restless than ever, like he wanted to stand again.
“Are
you
okay, Dad?”
“Of course, Tiger. Don’t you worry about me. I can take care of myself.” Then, I swear, my father
fl
exed his right bicep, as though the strength to endure grief actually resided somewhere in there. “Don’t you worry about your old dad.”
There is a family picture that was taken at Christmas, about nine months after my mother died. Big Bill bought everybody matching blue poly-
fi
ber sweat suits with three white stripes running down the arms and legs, and little white zippers on the pant legs. He bought us matching tennis shoes, like Adidas but with four stripes. We’re all wearing our new uniforms in the picture. Big Bill is doing a front double bicep pose with a twin dangling from each bicep. He’s got a fake tan and he’s
fl
exing his smile, so that he looks slightly adenoidal.
The twins are grinning like chimps as they swing on Big Bill’s arms, impervious, it appears, to any imbalance in the universe. As for me, I’m standing off to the side; at least, I
think it’s me—a cheerless spec
tator with bad posture.
I’m not saying that Big Bill rejected me; it might have been that I rejected him. I’m just saying we didn’t have much in common.
He was a lamb shank, and I was fashioned of an entirely different stuff: powdered mashed potatoes. The twins, on the other hand, were carved from the very same meat as Big Bill, and in this way they managed to remain within his sphere of in
fl
uence. But while Doug and Ross were playing with dumbbells and posing in their
underwear in front of mirrors, I was living inside of myself; that is, my world was inside out. I had senses, but they were all on the inside.
The sense that something was missing. The sense that this missing thing would forever elude me. The sense that forever as a measure of time no longer existed. The sense that I was
not
being watched, and
not
being followed. And
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nally, a sense that the universe had forsaken me, not out of malice, but as an oversight. And so I built my own universe, and I populated it with things remembered and things that never happened, like the smell of my mother’s bathrobe, and the twin brother I didn’t have.
And something strange happened to my voice. It became scratchy and frayed at the edges, like a prayer
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ag. I was a roaring mouse, afraid to open my mouth lest my big scratchy voice bring the world to its knees trembling. Or worse, laughing. My third grade teacher found my voice so disconcerting that she recommended to Big Bill that I have my throat looked into, to see if there was not some treat-able abnormality: an obstruction, a lymphoma, a hole in the lung.
Maybe I was possessed; maybe I’d swallowed Billy Barty.
And so it transpired that a swarthy man with an unpronounceable name who smelled of alfalfa and hot apple cider poked and prodded and generally violated my cranial ori
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ces with lights and swabs and mirrors and tongue depressors, prattling on all the while about
great big trucks
, and
tractors as big as dinosaurs
, small talk
fi
t for a boy half my age.
When the ordeal was over three days later, after the cultures were cultured and the X-rays inspected, the copper-faced doctor called us back into his of
fi
ce and explained to my father that he could
fi
nd no abnormalities.
“The boy is unique. This is a blessing. With a little luck, he might one day grow into this big scratchy voice of his.”
Big Bill wanted to know if meat would help.
“I’m not sure I understand your meaning.”
“Tell him,” demanded Big Bill. “Explain to my son, the eight-year-old vegetarian, that meat is good for you, that you have to eat meat to grow. How do you think cows got so big?”
The doctor explained that, while he was not a nutritionist, he himself was a vegetarian and what amounted to a weekend Hindu, and that cows, too, were vegetarians, a fact that seemed to impress Big Bill. He proceeded to enlighten my father regarding some cutting-edge research, which suggested that meat was very high in cholesterol and saturated fat, and might in fact increase the risk of thrombosis and heart disease. Big Bill was stymied. But how can that be, when the heart is made of meat?
And as ridiculous as it all sounds, Big Bill may have been right about meat. I wore the same school pants for nearly a year and a half after my mother died, and they never became high waters. Even my hair stopped growing. If my voice had changed again, I wouldn’t have known it, because I kept it locked tight inside my chest. And I wouldn’t have known what to say, anyway. I wanted only to grow backwards into something I used to be.
The twins’ progress was unimpeded; they grew like prize zucchinis. Nearly three years my junior, they had already outsized me by my ninth birthday. They were giants, a full head taller than anyone else in kindergarten. Their brains couldn’t keep up. I’m not going to say they were dull, maybe just unconcerned. They barreled through the buffet of life grabbing drumsticks and
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stfuls of Jell-O, shouting and laughing and making friends without even trying to.
We commemorated my ninth birthday with a family dinner party at The Captain’s Table, a queasily lit buffet of Homeric proportions across the street from the Howard Johnson’s. Despite the nautical theme, there was plenty of real meat at The Captain’s Table: impossibly big meat—mutant drumsticks, sausages as thick as beer cans, roasts as big as camels.
To see Big Bill carrying on in a party hat, waving a drumstick about like a ping-pong paddle, even if it was for my bene
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t, was an indignity to my mother’s memory. Thus, I was snake-eyed and sullen on my ninth birthday, and I did my best to make the party a joyless occasion. And that’s how I remember it: just the four of us and my dad’s old training partner Uncle Cliff, a few months before he drove his car off an overpass. He wasn’t really my uncle, of course, more of a stranger, really. According to Big Bill he’d once had the biggest chest in the world. But something was wrong with him. His cheeks were hollow. He looked small inside his hooded sweatshirt.
Cliff never went to the buffet, not even for
fi
rsts, which left the two of us alone at the table for most of my ninth birthday party—he with his empty coffee cup and me with my watermelon rinds—while Big Bill and the twins made continuous trips to the meat bar, the salad bar, and the potato bar, in addition to trips to the bathroom between feedings.
Cliff wasn’t much of a talker either, which was
fi
ne by me. We were kindred spirits that way. He nodded knowingly now and again throughout the evening, as if to say:
Pfff. Birthday parties. Tell me
about it
.
I hate buffets
. The cluster of colored balloons tied to the post nearest his seat kept hectoring him. He’d push them away, but as soon as somebody passed down the aisle, they’d drift back over and bonk him on the head, and cling to the side of his face.
“Balls,” he said, at one point. And I’m pretty sure that’s the last thing, and maybe the only thing, I ever heard him say.
Among the gifts I received upon the occasion of my ninth birthday were a set of dumbbells, a Joe Weider powdered vitamin supplement, an obscenely large vacuum-packed summer sausage from Vienna, and, from Uncle Cliff, a World Gym shirt with a cartoon gorilla holding the world above his head like he wanted to throw it.
My life began again the moment I met Louisa Trudeau. Without Lulu, I might never have existed again, might never have known the smell of a gauze bandage or felt the delicate winking of an eyelash against my cheek.
Arriving home slump-shouldered beneath the weight of my book bag one afternoon in February, I discovered her roosting in the breakfast nook in a swath of golden sunlight, as though she’d been delivered to me.
“Your dad’s in the garage with my mom,” she observed. There were a half dozen books spread out in front of her. “I’m Lulu. But don’t call me Louisa. My grammy in Vermont calls me that, and I absolutely despise it. When’s your birthday, anyway?”
I was afraid to unleash the voice. All I wanted to do was look at her. She was Mr. Potato Head beautiful. Nothing
fi
t right. But somehow this girl in the yellow socks, with the small nose and the big ears and the gap-toothed smile, achieved a certain harmony, a beauty greater than the sum of its parts.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Your dad already told me. That you’re shy, I mean. He said that you say about twelve words a day. Is that true?”
I nodded.
“That must be hard,” she said. “I say at least twelve words every thirty seconds, I’ll bet. Maybe even more. Sometimes my mom tells me,
honey, you don’t
have
to say every single thing that comes into your
head
. But I don’t, really. I mean, say everything that comes into my head. Not even close.”
She fell silent and turned her attention back to the book directly in front of her. “Don’t you think unicorns are stupid?” she said.
I shrugged.
“Well, I sure do. They don’t even make sense. And besides, there are so many incredibly diverse kinds of animals, why would you want to make one up?”
I could understand quite easily wanting to make things up, but I didn’t say as much.
“Sandhill cranes are my favorite animal,” she pursued. “Do you know about sandhill cranes?”
I shook my head.
“That’s okay, not everybody does. In fact, most people don’t, actually.
They’re very large birds with very long necks. They do beautiful dances and sing beautiful songs to each other. I might be an ornithologist when I grow up. That’s a bird studier. I’m not going to get married until I’m at least thirty-two. And
fi
rst I’m going to travel around the world at least three times.” She went back to her book for a
fl
eeting moment. “If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go?”
All I could think to say was “back.” So I didn’t say anything.
She looked at me kindly. “It’s okay if you don’t talk. I don’t mind.
Actually, I kind of like it. That’s what my mom does for a job, doesn’t talk. She’s a grief counselor. People come to her of
fi
ce and talk about the horrible things that happen to them. Like when their wife dies or their daughter d—” Stopping herself, Lulu cast her eyes down and retreated into a very real silence for the
fi
rst time. “I’m sorry,”
she said, unable to look at me. “I wasn’t thinking about
…
I forgot that
…
”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Really, I mean it, it’s okay.”
When she heard my voice she looked me right in the eye, and I was frozen in the power of her gaze. “I’m sorry about what happened to your mom.”
“That’s okay.”
“Do you want to sit down and I’ll
fi
gure out your astrological chart?”
I swung my book bag onto the counter and took a seat across from her, a little jelly-legged. I stared unabashedly at her wild blue eyes as they scanned the pages, and her fast little
fi
ngers as they ri
fl
ed through her astrology books. Never had I been so completely and unexpectedly disarmed by a stranger.
And soon I was talking. Talking like never before. Liberating my beastly voice without fear of humiliation, revealing my foibles without fear of judgment, and allowing this miracle of a girl to tickle the edges of my despair simply by listening to the sound of my voice, and something opened in my chest and tingled like a frostbitten hand regaining its warmth.
The more information she volunteered, the more her little sing-song voice washed over me, the more I wanted to hear.
“I used to want to live above a gas station,” she told me. “But not anymore. I still like the smell of gas, though. Just not on my clothes.
What do you want to do?”
“I never really thought about it.” And that was true, up until that
very afternoon. But then it became crystal clear to me that I wanted to spend the rest of my days with her.
“Really? You never thought about it?”
“Not really. Maybe sometime I’d like to build something.”
“Like what? Like a house?”
“Maybe. Or maybe just drive a car.”
“You mean like a taxi cab?”
“No. More like maybe my own car.”
“Like a race car driver?”
“Maybe. But maybe not so fast.”
“Hmm. Well, you’re a Libra like me, except that you’re on the cusp. Libras make good lawyers, but I don’t want to be a lawyer.
We’re supposed to be optimistic, too. Are you optimistic?”
“I doubt it.”
“It says we can be indecisive, but I’m not indecisive. My mom says,
honey, you don’t always have to know what you want right away,
you can change your mind, you know
. But I don’t like to change my mind. Are you indecisive?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s okay. My mom says,
Lu, sometimes it’s better not to know
the answer, because sometimes we’re wrong when we know the answer
.
But that doesn’t make any sense to me, because if you know the answer that means you’re right.”
“Maybe she’s talking about wrong answers.”
“But wrong answers aren’t really answers.”
“I guess maybe if people
think
they’re the right answers it’s the same thing,” I said. “My dad thinks the world is made of meat.”
“Eww.”
“But I don’t. I’m a vegetarian. Not that I think the world is made out of celery or anything. I just think it’s the world. I don’t know what it’s made out of. A whole bunch of stuff, I guess.”
“We should
fi
nd out,” Lulu said, not knowing that the invitation was the single most welcome invitation I would ever receive, and that the mere gesture meant so much that the dead spot inside of me started to ache in a good way.
Over the next few months Lulu and her mother drove down from San Francisco almost every weekend, booking a room in the same hotel off Santa Monica. They hardly ever set foot in the room. Even their bags found their way to the Pico house. Lulu staged her things in my room, and Lulu’s mom carved out a spot in the of
fi
ce across the hall.
Lulu’s mom was Willow, a hatchet-faced but relentlessly kind woman who reached out to me continually, though I offered her little access. She seemed genuinely to want to engage me, which made me respect her even less. She came bearing thoughtful little gifts—gobstoppers and g
liders—which I accepted begrudg
ingly. The twins accepted her without reservation, and I hated them for it.
Willow exhibited a strange in
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uence over my father. He stopped shaving and grew his hair and started listening to Willie Nelson.
She even persuaded him to pick up an acoustic guitar on occasion, something he apparently had not done since the year I was born, 1968. The guitar looked small and silly, like a ukulele perched on his massive leg. He didn’t sing, but sometimes he moved his lips, and he always kept his eyes on the fret board, looking a little awkward and confused, as though he wasn’t quite sure from which angle to approach the instrument. It seemed impossible to me that Big Bill ever knew how to play the guitar in the
fi
rst place, that he ever had long hair or sat around beach
fi
res wooing women, or that he burned his draft card, or ate LSD. But then there were a lot of things I didn’t know about Big Bill.
We began to take weekend outings like a real family. And really, weren’t we America’s poster family for 1978? The widowed bodybuilder and his three motherless sons. The professional woman and her child prodigy. All of us piling into the silver-striped van with its orange-carpeted catacombs and tinted windows and Yosemite Sam mud
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aps. Setting off for the tar pits, Laguna Beach, or Knott’s Berry Farm. Carting coolers of Craigmont soda and enormous Tupperware vats of Big Bill’s famous macaroni salad, which even the twins found inedible.
I’m not proud of my cruelty when I think of poor Willow forever craning her neck in the passenger seat, trying desperately to elicit some small familiarity or acceptance from me, with offerings like,
You know
my real name isn’t Willow, it’s Mary Margaret
, or
When I was a girl, we
used to go to Niagara Falls.
Why did I punish her with aloofness?
My favorite destination was Cabazon, out near the Morongo Indian Reservation on the 10, where a man named Claude Bell—at the expense of a small fortune he’d amassed over the better part of a frugal lifetime—realized his dream of erecting a giant concrete brontosaurus in the arid
fl
ats of the San Bernardino Valley. He opened a gift shop in its belly, and immediately started amassing another small fortune to bankroll a tyrannosaurus rex.
Cabazon was my favorite not because it captured my imagination, but because it captured Lulu’s. The way she put it was, “It’s a lovely dream, because it’s nobody else’s.” And that’s how she saw the thing, not as a brontosaurus, but as a dream.
While the twins ran amuck in the gift shop under Willow’s supervision, Lulu, Big Bill, and I stood in the gravel lot, with a half dozen other people, gawking at Bell’s brontosaurus.
“That’s one big sonofabit—er, gun,” observed my father, admiring the musculature of the beast’s foreleg. “Can you imagine being eaten by one of these suckers?”
“The brontosaurus was a herbivore, Mr. Miller. That means he only ate plants.”
“Plants?”
“Yes. Leaves and foliage and stuff.”
My father was incredulous. “No wonder they’re extinct.”
“That was because of the ice age, Mr. Miller. Not because of what they ate.”
Big Bill set a hand on her shoulder and bent down to eye level.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, young lady: You are what you eat.”
“That’s just a
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gure of speech, Mr. Miller. If we were what we ate then we’d be cannibals.”
Lulu had a way with Big Bill, and though it didn’t occur to me then, her way was a lot like my mother’s.
By the time Lulu became my stepsister in June, it seemed impossible that I had ever lived without her. And the closer I got to her, the more I knew that she was the only person I ever cared to know.
Lulu was an entire population. You could string adjectives together like daisy chains and not describe Lulu. Verbs came closer: soaring, crashing, yearning, laughing, dreaming, kissing. But metaphors came closest: Lulu was a white-hearted starburst, a silver-crested wave.
Lulu was the sound electricity makes.
With the addition of Willow and Lulu, our family geography was in
fl
ux again. The old house on Pico was a patient and tolerant host.