Free All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison Page A

sincerity and schmaltz, by dancing that line with the cascading polyrhythms of his voice. But more than anything else, it was the companionship these voices afforded me in my solitude that kept me tuning in.
    While I had many friends, I had but one god, and that was Vin Scully. His voice rode crackling upon invisible wavelengths from St. Louis and Chicago and New York, arriving in Santa Monica to transform my bedroom into someplace altogether grander. And when Vin’s voice streamed out of my radio, the words were no longer weightless and invisible; they expanded like paper fl owers until they had form and weight and color, and they smelled like pretzels and green grass and some place far away. Vin Scully spoke to me like a father. Sometimes I wished he were my father. I know that sounds weird. But I’m just telling you how it was.
     
     

 

     
     

    Everything Is a Crock
     
     
    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