Willow in the mirror: eyes like eight balls, crow’s-feet, a slackening of skin. She uses her re
fl
ection as an instrument for self-improvement, creating shadows and highlights, employing various implements.
Plucking. Dusting. Applying. Sighing, stopping, looking hard at the mirror. Where? Past her re
fl
ection? Inside herself ? Into the future?
Perhaps more than anyone, Willow tried to make me comfortable throughout adolescence. She reached out to me unfailingly, without ever crossing the line. She was kind and considerate. She yearned for me to con
fi
de in her, she longed to gather me up in her arms and squeeze me reassuringly, I’m sure of it. Yet, I never allowed her access.
I could have made things easier on her by accepting her love unconditionally, like the twins did, and certainly she deserved as much, but I punished her instead with aloofness, and with silence.
Meanwhile, the dinner table bec
ame a nightly theater of conten
tion between Lulu and Big Bill.
“Reagan’s a senile boob,” she’d say. “He’s got a head full of stale jelly beans.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Big Bill would say, with a mouthful of turkey sausage. “He’s decisive. Something that peanut farmer your mother voted for wouldn’t know anything about. Reagan works fast.”
“So does Maalox.”
One bene
fi
t of all this antagonism was that it was contagious.
“Cherry Coke sucks ass,” Doug would say. “It’s for butt pirates and Girl Scouts.”
“Yeah, well, it’s way better than Coke Classic. Coke Classic tastes like Tidy Bowl.”
“Does not!”
“So then, you know what Tidy Bowl tastes like?”
Doug was powerless against such guile. He walked into every trap, he seemed to have a genius for it. And as he strained to formulate his comeback, he was like an overtaxed robot. You kept expecting to see smoke come out of his ears.
“You’re the one that drinks Tidy Bowl, ass-munch.”
It was nice to see the twins
fi
ghting again, even if it was a massacre now that Ross had grown a brain.
Willow rarely jumped into the fray. She ate with her eyes down, not so much like she had given up the
fi
ght, rather like she was silently nursing some grudge, letting it build up strength. You got the feeling she was a ticking time bomb at the far end of the table.
It was hard to believe that our family dinners even endured this rough period, that we all didn’t take our plates and go our separate ways. It would have been so much
easier than watching Willow sim
mer, and Big Bill bluster, and Lulu, the bright little girl who once lit up our lives, express her new disgust for the world.
“It’s no wonder we have AIDS and acid rain and a giant hole in the ozone,” she said. “The whole world is lying to itself.
Especially
us.”
Nor was Lulu’s disgust limited to the present—it extended well into the past.
“The Summer of Love was a crock.”
“Now, wait a minute, here—”
“Oh, give me a break. Only two percent of the young people were actually
doing
anything. The rest of them were just posers—getting stoned and pregnant and living a complete lie.”
“I was there, young lady. And let me tell you something—”
“Tell me this: Where are your hippies, now? Where are all your enlightened revolutionaries? Selling tennis shoes on television and driving Beamers, that’s where!”
“I don’t drive a Beamer!”
“You don’t make enough money!”
And always after dinner, after the arrows had been slung and the pot roast had been whittled down to a pool of blood and gristle and some greasy string, after the vegetarian contingent had
fi
nished picking at their lemon Jell-O and baked beans, we invariably did go our separate ways, and that was the most heartbreaking part of all.
I suppose it’s ironic that in a household where closed doors were rapidly becoming the standard, mine alone stayed open the last years of high school. Nobody wished more than I did to isolate himself from the supreme disappointment that lay just outside the doorway.
The only reason my door stayed ope
n was the possibility of glimps
ing Lulu on her way to the bathroom, or the increasingly improbable prospect of some reconciliation between us.
Willow and Big Bill were less discreet than ever. Occasionally their discord rattled the rafters. I could hear it over the play-by-play of Vin Scully or Ross Porter, and at such times I thought of Lulu sitting in her room in her puddle of light, pondering God only knew what, and Doug, still ducking when he sat on his disjoined bunk bed out of habit, and Ross out somewhere smoking clove cigarettes and wondering how any of us
fi
t together, wondering whether we were ever intended to be together in the
fi
rst place.
One night Big Bill and Willow spilled out into the hallway. Big Bill was trying for one of his patented short endings.
“Just drop it!” he shouted.
“I’m tired of dropping it! We’ve been dropping it for years.”
“That’s enough!”
Tudor is ahead in the count one and two. Pedro singled sharply to
center in the
fi
rst. St. Louis playing Guerrero to pull.
“Some things you can’t put behind you, Bill. That’s a truth. Sometimes the best thing you can do is put them beside you.”
“Don’t play grief counselor with me. I’m not your client anymore.”
Tudor peers in for the sign.
“It doesn’t make sense not to,” she said. “You admitted it yourself.
There’s no ‘too late,’ Bill.”
“Well, it used to make sense! It made good goddamn sense, until you decided to—”
“I didn’t decide it, my conscience decided it for me! My daughter decided it! And it’s about time that—”
“Stop right there!”
Guerrero calls time, steps out of the box. LaValliere wants to have a
word with Tudor.
“I’ll never understand you,” said Willow bitterly.
Tudor does not have his good change-up tonight, but he’s been spotting
his fastball well, and making good pitches when he needs to.
“Stop, right now,” ordered Big Bill. “I’m dead serious about this.”
“That’s pretty serious, Bill. You ought to take a look at that.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,
Mary Margaret
.”
“Quit making me, then.”
Denkinger out to the mound to break up the conversation. Nothing
stirring in the St. Louis bullpen.
“I’m done with this,” said Big Bill. “I’ve been done with it for years.”
“You never started.”
“It’s done. I’ve moved on, damnit!”
And with that, Big Bill stormed down the hallway to the stairs.
Now Guerrero steps back in the box and LaValliere is ready with the
sign.
“You moved to Santa Monica, Bill!” she called after him. “That’s not the same thing!”
Thanks to the miracle of contact lenses, Clearasil wipes, and a growth spurt the summer of ’85, my seventeenth birthday found me less ugly than my sixteenth,
fi
fteenth, and fourteenth birthdays. I was neither toad nor prince. My nose was
fl
at. The walls of my nostrils were too thick. I was kind of oily. But I had good teeth and cowish brown eyes (no longer three times their natural size), and my velveteen voice was dreamy to anyone who could hear it. I was in the neighborhood of happy and well adjusted for the
fi
rst time since freshman year. I even stopped eating lunch with Harry Pitts. I could not put Lulu behind me, so I put her beside me.
Big Bill bought me a banana-yellow Plymouth Duster with spring-loaded seats, an ocean of black dashboard, and an AM/FM stereo.
I took scrupulous care of that car, washing and waxing its yellow shell until it glistened like a mango, buf
fi
ng the hubcaps, shining the nylon interior, vacuuming the black carpet, tweezing snags and loose
fi
bers out like a surgeon. My credibility, real or imagined, depended on that car. Moreover, my psychic and emotional mobility depended on it. I drove the Duster aimlessly around the basin at night, listening to my beloved voices on KABC and KNX and KFI. Burbank, Glendale, Arcadia, it didn’t matter. As long as I was moving, I was at peace.
That year, I kissed a girl for the
fi
rst time. Her name was Shelly Beach, and I’m not making that up. Yes, she had an older sister, and yes, her sister’s name was Sandy Beach. She had a brother named Rocky.
Sometimes there’s a very
fi
ne line between adoration and cruelty.
Shelly Beach was two-and-a-half years my senior. After she graduated in Yelm, Washington, the previous year, Shelly had moved to Alhambra to live with her aunt and earn resident status. She wanted to go to Cal State Northridge and study Consumer Sciences. In the meantime, she worked at a Red Lobster near Pasadena. That’s where I met her, on one of my aimless sojourns into the night. Hungry from my travels, I stopped at Red Lobster and discovered Shelly Beach at the podium in front, clutching an oversized crab-shaped menu to her chest. She had poodle hair, and, arbitrary as it may seem, it was an observable fact that girls with poodle hair liked me. Especially larger ones. Shelly
fi
t both descriptions. She was in fact quite big boned in all the wrong places, but then, look at me. I don’t know why Shelly Beach decided to like me, whether her poodle hair was on too tight or she just felt sorry for me, but it wasn’t the voice that attracted her, because I could feel the force of her infatuation before I even spoke.
Maybe she liked oily skin. Maybe I smelled like Big Macs.
“Can I get you a Coke or something while you wait?”
“Uh, no, thanks.” Had I known the Coke was free, believe me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.
“Are you sure?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m good for now.”
She smiled. “Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind.
Sorry about the wait.”
After that
fi
rst steamy exchange, I started making Red Lobster a destination. I drove forty-
fi
ve minutes across the southland to drink Cokes and coffee and order baked potatoes and side salads. I came at busy times, so that people were backed up in the foyer waiting to be seated. It didn’t occur to me that the waitresses probably groaned at the sight of me: prince of the eight dollar check, the bottomless re
fi
ll.
The guy who tipped in silver stacks.
One night the place was crawling with Little Leaguers, and there was a line all the way to the door. I sat in the foyer, catching glimpses of Shelly Beach’s ample
fi
gure as she came and went, clutching her oversized menus, seating families of
fi
ve. Around minute six, Shelly Beach brought me a Coke.
“I insist,” she said.
Three hours (and about fourteen Cokes) later, I kissed her in the parking lot. And it was not inexperience that bridled my passion, nor the wealth of her
fi
gure, but something else. Lulu, I guess.
“What’s wrong?” Shelly wanted to know.
“There’s nothing wrong. It’s just that
…
something isn’t right.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean.”
But perfection is rare, so we forged ahead anyway, going through the motions in the front seat of the Duster until our teeth hurt, and Vin Scully and Ross Porter wrapped up the post-game show.
And after that, there was silence and no more pretending. We made vague plans. Nobody had a pen, but I knew where to
fi
nd her. We kissed one last time before Shelly Be
ach drove off in her Toyota Ter
cel, bound for Alhambra, and I drove off in the Duster, bound for nowhere.
After fogging up the windows with Shelly Beach, it was impossible to set Lulu aside. Without her, there would be only more Shelly Beaches, a lifetime of Shelly Beaches. And there was nothing wrong with Shelly Beach, after all—poodle hair and forty pounds notwith-standing—she only shared the common
fl
aw of all other women in that she was not Lulu. Lulu was not like anybody else; nobody else was young and weary, nobody else wore pajamas to school, nobody else inspired such fantastic speculation as Lulu. A mythology was created to explain Lulu’s inaccessibility.
She dates Jose Gonzalez from
the Dodgers. She only dates black guys. She’s a lesbian.
Had I myself been capable of accounting for the tantalizing and dangerous singularity known as Luluness, I would’ve found myself possessing large sums of social currency at Santa Monica High School, though certainly I would’ve hoarded such a bounty.