All About Lulu (16 page)

Big Bill’s illness succeeded, where any attempt at reconciliation probably would have failed, in luring Willow back to the nest.

Though she swore she was through with my father, Willow, who had already moved her practice back to Sausalito, closed her doors inde
fi
nitely the week of his release from Cedars and came back to Santa Monica for the end of summer, where she took up residence in the trophy room.

Just when it seemed the Millers were scattered for good, a thing of the past, here came the thickening walls of Big Bill’s heart. His illness had a magnetic effect on our scattered brood. Not only was Willow drawn back into the fold, but Ross started spending more time at home during Big Bill’s convalescence. He remained Alistair, and had discovered Guns N’ Roses just as the rest of America’s
Appetite for
Destruction
began to wane. He spent a half hour in the bathroom every morning amidst a cloud of Aqua Net, teasing his scraggly hair into a rat’s nest. He started tearing his T-shirts on purpose, and began pegging his pants so straight that they
fi
t like leotards. All of this was an improvement, to my way of thinking. Even his little friend Regan made a cameo in the Miller abode on occasion, dragging the tattered hem of his trench coat up the stairs to Ross’s room, though he never settled in much, and kept one eye at all times on the open door, like a cornered fox.

The Pico house was buzzing again. There were rumors that even Lulu would be home to roost before the end of summer, and this knowledge heartened me to such an extent that I actually began releasing her to a degree, or so I believed.

On Willow’s fourth or
fi
fth night back, I came home late from Fatburger after a double and found her seated alone in the half-light of the kitchen, sipping herbal tea in her bathrobe. Immediately she noticed the disheveled gauze bandage mummifying my right wrist and palm.

“What happened?”

“Burned it on the stupid grill trying to stop a Baby Fat from falling in the grease trap. I was slammed.”

She stood up and turned on the overhead light. “Let me have a look at that.” She shepherded me to the sink, where she began unwrapping the gauze.

“My God, who wrapped this?”

“Acne Scar Joe did.”

“Gracious, what a mess. Stay put.”

She left the kitchen.

Inspecting the damage, I found that it was not so bad, really. An oval blister had burst on my wrist and palm. It was big and
fl
eshy and pink at the edges, but it was mostly bark and not a lot of bite.

Willow returned with Neosporin and fresh gauze and some athletic tape. She cleaned and began patting dry the edges of the wound.

“This might sting,” she warned, squeezing a little curlicue of ointment onto the raw oval.

“So, is this just temporary?” I said.

“We’ll re-dress it tomorrow.”

“No, I mean you coming back here.”

“I don’t know what it is. Hold this tight with your other hand,” she instructed me. “Your father and I can’t agree on anything, William, but it doesn’t stop me from loving him.” She tore off a strip of tape with her teeth, and fastened the gauze wrap tight against my wrist. “All that talk about change, I don’t know anymore. I get less and less sure every day. Sometimes there are forces beyond our control. Sometimes even human forces. I’m still trying to accept these things.”

She closed the
fi
ngers of my open hand and gave them a little pat.

“You’re ready to go, soldier.”

One way or another, life makes you smaller. It whittled my mother down to nothing, and now my father was shrinking like a snowman before my eyes. He lost nearly twenty pounds in just over
fi
ve weeks without the juice. His chest and arms de
fl
ated, even his head shrank.

And the shrinkage was not limited to his physique. His whole manner was shrinking. He passed mirrors without pausing. His turgid smile went into hiding. The bronzed temple of his body had forsaken him, and having nowhere else to focus his self-consciousness, Big Bill turned it inward as never before. The results were disheartening.

A softness was born in him, or perhaps rediscovered—a neediness, a nostalgia, an eagerness to appease.

Big Bad Bill was indeed Sweet William now. Moreover, he had a lot of time on his hands. He circled want ads, played the guitar, dusted his trophies, and pondered the future with a big thorny question mark written upon his forehead. He had spent the better part of the ’80s building himself into a rippling giant, gobbling up trophies and vitamin supplements and entire hams faster than he could pay for them. Now his body was shrinking, his debt continued to mount, and he was becoming clownish.

“Sit on down with your old dad and watch some boob tube, Tiger.”

“I gotta work, sorry.”

“Say, why don’t we all play Monopoly tonight?”

“You mean Monotony?” said Ross. “How about we all just drill a hole in our skull instead?”

“Well, maybe Scrabble, then.”

“No offense, Dad, but playing Scrabble with you and Doug is like wrestling a pair of quadriplegics.”

“I heard that, ass-bait!”

Sometimes Big Bill would coral Willow onto his lap and try to nibble her ears until she writhed free of his clutches, or he’d sneak up behind her and give her a bear hug while she was doing the dishes.

And when that failed to yield suf
fi
cient results, he looked elsewhere for hugs. We should have got him a dog.

The most pathetic part of all may have been watching him eat. Not only had his appetite shrunk along with the rest of him, but there were also the dietary restraints placed on him by his condition. To see Big Bill with a wee slice of lean turkey breast and some blanched snow peas on his plate was painful enough. But to watch him savor those few sad bites of stringy white meat, working them between his mandibles as though it were his life’s work, caressing the moisture out, puckering his lips like some French gourmand, as though the meat were unbearably succulent, was just too much to take.

Eventually he managed to arouse my outright contempt. I knew it was irrational, I knew it wasn’t fair, but I just couldn’t stand to see him go soft. Sensitivity
fi
t him like a tuxedo: tight in all the wrong places. There was something unseemly about it. Big Bill was supposed to have a low threshold for weakness. He was supposed to be Darwinian in his strength. He was born to eradicate weakness, to snuff it out, to negate it with the business end of a shovel. What was his unique specialization, if not strength? If anything, the walls of his heart seemed thinner now. And every time he said please or thank you or anything else agreeable, every time he played his stupid guitar or said something gooey about Haight-Ashbury or Willow or my mother, I wanted to throttle him, because every kind gesture, every tolerant word, every mushy song sounded like a surrender.

It’s safe to say that I wasn’t the only one nervously anticipating Lulu’s homecoming. The night before her arrival, she was the lone topic of conversation around the dinner table.

“She’s an adult,” said Big Bill.

“Well, she’s not acting like one,” said Willow.

“So, she’s a little mixed up,” he proceeded. “We can’t push her into the right decision. Let her get her feet on the ground, she’s got plenty of time to
fi
nd her path. She’s just a kid.”

“But you just got through saying she’s an adult,” I observed.

“She’s both,” he said. “You, of all people, ought to know that.”

He was right, I should have. Why else was I paying rent at home?

“Well, Jesus, Bill, we spent over—”

“It’s not about money.”

“Well, then, how do you propose to pay her tuition, now that—”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I was beginning to wonder how long before Big Bill ran out of clichés.

“How is she going to pay off those loans?” said Willow. “You know, she’ll have to start paying those off if she doesn’t register next semester.”

“She’s a smart kid,” said Bill. “She’ll work it out.”

“She’ll register,” I said, I have no idea why. I fully expected Lulu to quit school altogether.

“What makes you so sure she’ll register?” Willow asked me.

I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

“Can I go now?” said Ross.

“Where to?” said Big Bill, who had shortened the leash on Ross in recent days.

“Out.”

“Where?”

“Movies.”

“With who?”

“Regan and some guys.”

“Pfff,” said Doug.

“You do your homework?”

“It’s summer, Dad.”

Big Bill grinned. Ross grinned back dutifully. It was becoming a ritual. It made me want to puke. “Be back by eleven.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ross, or Alistair, as he excused himself and took
fl
ight into the Santa Monica night, dressed like a confused vampire.

“I think we need to move her along slowly,” said Big Bill. “Let her
fi
gure some things out.”

“Maybe somebody should light a
fi
re under her ass,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” said Big Bill. “Your sister’s a little combustible for that. She’s going to have to do some searching, maybe a lot of searching.”

“What on earth makes everyone think she’s going to discover herself by dropping out of school and working at a bookstore and dating some guitar player?” Willow wanted to know.

“
Bass
player,” I said.

“Bass player, then. The point is, whether or not—”

“Hey, what’s wrong with guitar players?” said Big Bill.

“The point is, Bill, I’m worried about her lack of direction. She has no idea where she’s headed. Ask her, and she’ll tell you as much. The last time I spoke with her she spent twenty minutes talking about everything she
didn’t
want to be, all the things she
didn’t
want to do.”

Big Bill smiled knowingly.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Willow. “This is different, Bill, so you can stop grinning. Times are different. This isn’t 1967. Seattle’s not San Francisco.”

Big Bill continued to smile knowingly.

“I may have ‘dropped out,’” she said. “But only
fi
guratively, Bill. I stayed in college. I went to class.”

“What was your
fi
rst major?” said Big Bill.

“Political Science.”

“What about your second?”

“I don’t remember. Look, I see what you’re getting at. But Lulu’s not me. Lulu has nothing to rebel against, not like I did. Lulu didn’t endure Catholicism and ballet and charm school. Nobody tried to
mold
Lulu. Lulu’s lost because
…
”

“Because she wants to be,” I said.

Willow looked at me hopefully, like she was hungry for my insight.

I was trying to remember how Troy had put it. “She’s never the same person twice,” I explained. “She’s always trying to reinvent herself so she doesn’t have to be who she really is.”

“Who’s that?” said Willow and Big Bill simultaneously.

“Uh, well, that’s where the cul-de-sac begins,” I explained.

Doug ate through the entire dialogue, gobs of mashed potatoes and canned corn. His head followed the conversation like a ping-pong match, but the action was always secondary to the food on his plate. On this occasion, the hiatus in the conversation prompted him to look up from his Sloppy Joe, momentarily.

“What about this boyfriend?” said Big Bill. “What do we know about him? Wasn’t he encouraging her to express herself, to paint or something? That’s a start.”

Doug rolled his eyes and took a bite of Sloppy Joe.

“He’s a bartender, Bill. He’s twenty-three.”

“You sound like your mother.”

Willow didn’t deny it. “I just don’t see how a
bass-playing bartender
makes for any sort of substantive support system, Bill, even if he is encouraging her to express herself. What else is he encouraging her to do? Have unprotected sex? Pay his rent with her student loans?”

I couldn’t help but crack a smile.

Willow shot me a look.

“At least she’s not working at Fatburger,” I said, half ironically.

Doug guffawed and took a big gulp of milk.

“You’re different,” said Willow. “You’ve got a plan for the future, William. And I suspect you’ll stick by it.”

“And I think it’s a great plan,” said Big Bill. “I think more kids ought to take that route—take a year and do some real thinking,
fi
gure some things out.”

“Yeah,” said Doug. “Like how to make onion rings.”

“That’s enough,” said Big Bill.

As much as I hate to admit it, I could feel pride coloring my cheeks. I didn’t know Big Bill’s approval could still do that to me.

“And if you’d just give Lulu a chance,” pursued Big Bill, “I think she’ll
fi
nd her way.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” sighed Willow. “I just think
…
I think we should encourage Lulu to be closer to
…
to
home
.”

“Leave her be. If she wants to come home, she’ll come home. Let her
fi
gure it out herself.”

Willow narrowed her gaze at Big Bill. “Hasn’t she already
fi
gured enough out by herself ? Jesus, Bill, you’d think you’d have learned by now.”