Free All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison Page B

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!”

     

 

     
     

    The Governing Laws of Lulu
     
     
    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