All This Heavenly Glory (26 page)

LUCY LOUISE MILLER, age four and a half, reminds Charlotte of herself at that age, if she had any early childhood memories,
which she doesn’t. (Charlotte Byers has been told that she was a talkative, tree-climbing, knee-skinning two-to-five-year-old,
but life for Charlotte began, for better or worse, in New York City at age six as a shy only child with a southern accent
and a bowl haircut.) She is greeted warmly at the door to the Millers’ house by Lucy’s parents, Jane and Scratch (there has
been an explanation for this name that is less than appetizing, but the truth is that Scratch is a gentle, baby-faced young
dad), and Lucy, who has been anticipating Charlotte and her boyfriend Colins arrival for days, says, Hey, urn, Charlotte?
Hey what’s up I’m Lucy and this is a sign on my door that says my name L~U~C~Y and that’s a heart next to it it’s a red heart
red is my favorite color do you want to see my room okay come on look it’s purple and has polka dots. Jane and Scratch joke
that they’ll see Charlotte on her way out, knowing that once Lucy has attached herself to someone there’s little chance she’ll
pry herself off unless there’s a Wallace and Gromit movie involved. Charlotte tells Lucy that her room is purple too but there
are no polka dots, and Lucy tells her she should get her boyfriend Colin to paint her some.

It’s July fourth weekend. Charlotte and her boyfriend Colin are in his hometown of Kalamazoo.

Some of the ways in which this is new:

1. Charlotte has never gone home with a boyfriend before.
   
2. Charlotte has never used the word boyfriend before, without irony.
   
3. Charlotte has a boyfriend.
   

Scratch is one of a wide circle of Colin’s oldest friends. He and Jane, preparing a barbecue at their modest home (outfitted
with ten-dollar sofas that Charlotte wishes existed in Chicago and an equally enviable art collection made mostly by Scratch
or their friends), are, Charlotte observes, as much Colin’s family now as his own family. Charlotte has met Jane and Scratch
once before, in Chicago. It went well. (She could have met them the first week she and Colin were dating, but she heard friends
and punk show and passed on the invitation, picturing dudes and beer and pogoing instead of the easygoing parents of a four-year-old.)
Colin has been to New York with Charlotte and met her best friend Jenna and hung with Jenna and her son and he met her stepfather
and they had lunch and it went well. In another week they will go to Iowa where he will meet her father and possibly some
assorted siblings and she is not even worried a little about if it will go well.

One way in which this is not new:

1. Colin is younger.
   
2. By a lot.
   
3. It’s not creepy or anything, it’s just a lot. We don’t need to say how much.
   
4. Except that there have been younger. So there’s that.
   

Somewhere along the line Charlotte very unintentionally started dating younger guys until it became a thing, even though she
will still insist that it’s not a preference sort of thing but just a who-she-meets sort of thing (and if she ever had a real
thing, it could be easily argued that it was a non-age-specific, emotionally unavailable type thing, which type thing, she
has discovered through a great deal of trial and error, or maybe error and error is a better way to put it, is an all-ages
show). Prior to turning thirty she had dated older guys and younger guys and same-age guys just to point out that there exists
statistical evidence of her having no particular preference. That said, she has theories about the evolution of the alleged
thing. The brief mission statement of the evolution of the thing is that she has in a way aged backward, but in a good way.
Charlotte Anne Byers, born at age six in New York City with a bad haircut to a hyper/ambitious/loving/weepy mom and a missing
dad (Charlotte deduced some decades later that there must have been an explanation involving the words
divorce
and Iowa that took place sometime before her memory loss), arguably fits an earlier theory quite well, one held by her stepfather’s
deceased father, who hypothesized that everyone is born a certain age and stays that age. His favorite example was that his
son was born forty, and this would bear itself out quite well over the years; he is who he is, always, a man with none of
the apparent or even subtle discomfort that pretty much applies in one way or another to every single other person Charlotte
has ever met, an extremely straightforward, personable, and funny but responsible young man who at twenty-nine married an
older woman (Charlotte’s mother) and at fifty-nine married a younger woman (Charlotte’s stepfather’s new wife, which is admittedly
beyond clunky, but, you know, welcome to the twenty-first century). Charlotte might use Lucy Louise Miller as a case study,
as she appears to have been born at age twenty-five, with equal interests in Björk and
Finding Nemo
. At age six, Charlotte Anne Byers had a rich internal life but remained reserved and shy until about her freshman year of
college when alcohol became available, and starting around age twelve, she was frequently mistaken for older until somewhere
around twenty-one, when suddenly and overnight the opposite became true, which was sort of annoying at the time but which
she would eventually be pretty obviously grateful for. At thirty she would quit drinking and begin, slowly, absurdly, painfully
so, to turn her life around, including and not insignificantly somehow learning to be comfortable in the world, or more comfortable
would be more accurate, she has more or less traded in the goal of ever reaching some perfect comfort level for the new and
more realistic goal of being just a little more comfortable than she is at any given point or as an offshoot of this, being
willing to accept that her comfort level is not what she’d like, therefore theoretically affording her some comfort to the
extent that she’ll sometimes give herself five minutes off from wishing she were at the next comfort level up. It helps not
a little that she’s finally found a world she’s more comfortable in, which turns out not to be the world she’d been in since
she was six, which probably seemed obvious all along to everyone except Charlotte, but you try leaving New York if that’s
where you’re from, it’s problematic. Also and plus it would take her until her late thirties to make a career for herself
out of something she actually wanted to do and plus also, at forty, she still passes for thirty (if you squint, she’ll say
and doesn’t dress her age particularly, she’s not going around like Britney or anything, but added a couple of tattoos and
mixes some vintage in there and so she meets guys who, she guesses, just don’t immediately know. Not that she would ever lie,
she wouldn’t, but that’s who she meets. But she will argue that it is not a preference and can make a pretty good and obvious
case for why it might be a lot easier with someone closer to her own age. But it didn’t happen, and so here comes the very
adorable shaggy-haired Colin who seems not to care about the age difference and makes crazy beautiful bookshelves and paints
and draws and who loves old buildings and
This American Life
and tapes stuff for her dad who he’s never even met and gives her a Yo La Tengo record with love songs on it and says,
This makes me think of you,
and treats her well and is sweet and smart and funny and easy to be around, is the main thing, she feels as though she can
really be herself around him which is sort of the opposite of how she’s felt with almost everyone she’s ever dated, with whom
she felt she should actually be someone else (and always had the impossible task of trying to figure out who she should be
but who was usually someone who could name all the members of the cabinet and looked like Angelina Jolie). So Colin, some
years younger, is very cool, and he’s a carpenter, he
carpents,
as Jenna says, and he’s an artist, and his friends are all artists of one kind or another, and this is a universe Charlotte’s
been in and around since she moved to Chicago and also has a lot of feelings about but wonders sometimes where this universe
was in New York because she sort of got stuck on the Upper West Side long after the artiness of it had morphed into trader
and stroller world and so anyway Charlotte looks at her Chicago friends and Colin’s Kalamazoo friends and it occurs to her
that there was some confusion about the date of her birth with the dude in charge insofar as it seems to have been approximately
ten years too soon and actually wonders if you could legally change your birth date in the same way some people change their
names, if you could argue,
You know, 1972 just feels more
me. So what happens is she feels simultaneously more comfortable in this world than any other world while also being kind
of peripherally aware that she is forty and they aren’t. But it’s fine and the main thing is that she believes that Colin
has considered the issue and, while also being aware that she is forty and he isn’t, believes that love is love and also that
Charlotte is kind of hot, and also it’s kind of been acknowledged more or less without even needing to have too much discussion
about it that the collective loss/illness factor between them is on the high side, point being that you just never know. What’s
sort of interesting is that in New York, Colin, who has some discomforts of his own, social and otherwise, fared surprisingly
well the entire weekend, even at a party where he knew no one besides Charlotte, had arguably been as relaxed as Charlotte
has ever seen him (this being a rare sentence in which the words
Charlotte
and
relaxed
and
New York
will appear together, as her New York—related stress has only increased since her departure), while in Kalamazoo a parallel
will occur in which Charlotte, who might have reasonable cause to feel uncomfortable with Colin’s friends that she barely
knows, feels as relaxed and calm as is possible for her to be, while Colin kind of freaks out inside a little bit from a similar
sort of stimulation, a too-much-backstory kind of sensory overload that Charlotte has in New York (minus a few million people).

After dinner Scratch’s mom meets up with everyone on the front porch for some pre-fireworks fireworks (some brought in by
Colin fresh from a giant warehouse in Indiana that sells only fireworks, not even a gum ball, only fireworks, and they have
shopping carts and they have crowds and the shopping carts are full and Colin is super psyched and given that he is not the
athletic type but more of the arty introspective type, he does not also seem like the firework type except that he is also
a Midwestern boy and around these parts of the Midwest anyway, everyone, Charlotte learns, is the firework type) and Colin
and Charlotte give Lucy a package of B’loonies (a knockoff of Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, weird-smelling soft plastic in
a tube you blow up into balloon-like shapes with a straw), an impulse buy at the BP made as much for the purposes of Charlotte
re-creating the good parts of her childhood as it is for Lucy’s fun. Lucy takes it upon herself to introduce Charlotte to
her grandmother, saying,
Grandma this is Colin’s girlfriend
Charlotte,
moments later introducing her to the neighbors as Colin’s girlfriend Charlotte to everyone’s amusement and when Jane suggests
to Lucy that she can whittle that down to just Charlotte, Charlotte says it’s fine and explains that even though she’s been
given license to freely use the term, she uses it sparingly but secretly enjoys hearing it out loud as often as possible.
The artists blow up the B’loonies and manage to put them together into something that looks like it could actually go into
a museum, which Scratch photographs and Jane subsequently titles
Not a Gum,
from a warning on the package, to which Charlotte adds,
B’loonies/Digital Image, Collaboration, 2003
. Which will be one of a growing list of repeated jokes for the weekend that will include but not be limited to things known
as

1. Colin’s Stomach.
   
2. Shine!
   
3. Jefferson Starship.
   
4. Setting on fireworks. (As opposed to setting them
   off,
   which makes no sense in the mind of one Lucy Louise Miller.)
   

The rest of which will be explained soon enough, but mentioning numbers one and three are relevant insofar as Colin has been
asking Charlotte to write something about him in which he’s a really funny guy, which is hard both because what’s funny about
Colin tends to be sort of subtle and not easily translatable to the screenplay format necessarily but also because of the
lack of conflict thing, which tends to help any compelling stories, Charlotte feels. The stomach thing had come about during
dinner when Charlotte noticed that Colin’s shirt was buttoned somewhat haphazardly so that the top button and the bottom buttons
were buttoned but not the center buttons, leaving his somewhat hairy middle exposed, which became even more amusing when Colin
thought to participate in the Millers’ wig-and-giant-glasses photo series by putting the giant glasses into his stomach and
a cigarette in his navel, resulting in an alarmingly lifelike human face, albeit one that somewhat resembled a satanic and
boozy Cabbage Patch doll. Joke number three refers to Colin’s sudden songwriting inspiration in which a record cover is transformed
into, for better or worse, an unforgettable tune called “Jefferson Starship.’ Which goes,
Jefferson Staaarship. Jefferson Star-ship. Jefferson Staaarship. Jefferson Star-ship. Jefferson Starship.
Okay, whatever, but just know that there is a lot of laughter over the weekend.