And soon I was talking. Talking like never before. Liberating my beastly voice without fear of humiliation, revealing my foibles without fear of judgment, and allowing this miracle of a girl to tickle the edges of my despair simply by listening to the sound of my voice, and something opened in my chest and tingled like a frostbitten hand regaining its warmth.
The more information she volunteered, the more her little singsong voice washed over me, the more I wanted to hear.
“I used to want to live above a gas station,” she told me. “But not anymore. I still like the smell of gas, though. Just not on my clothes. What do you want to do?”
“I never really thought about it.” And that was true, up until that very afternoon. But then it became crystal clear to me that I wanted to spend the rest of my days with her.
“Really? You never thought about it?”
“Not really. Maybe sometime I’d like to build something.”
“Like what? Like a house?”
“Maybe. Or maybe just drive a car.”
“You mean like a taxi cab?”
“No. More like maybe my own car.”
“Like a race car driver?”
“Maybe. But maybe not so fast.”
“Hmm. Well, you’re a Libra like me, except that you’re on the cusp. Libras make good lawyers, but I don’t want to be a lawyer. We’re supposed to be optimistic, too. Are you optimistic?”
“I doubt it.”
“It says we can be indecisive, but I’m not indecisive. My mom says, honey, you don’t always have to know what you want right away, you can change your mind, you know. But I don’t like to change my mind. Are you indecisive?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s okay. My mom says, Lu, sometimes it’s better not to know the answer, because sometimes we’re wrong when we know the answer. But that doesn’t make any sense to me, because if you know the answer that means you’re right.”
“Maybe she’s talking about wrong answers.”
“But wrong answers aren’t really answers.”
“I guess maybe if people think they’re the right answers it’s the same thing,” I said. “My dad thinks the world is made of meat.”
“Eww.”
“But I don’t. I’m a vegetarian. Not that I think the world is made out of celery or anything. I just think it’s the world. I don’t know what it’s made out of. A whole bunch of stuff, I guess.”
“We should find out,” Lulu said, not knowing that the invitation was the single most welcome invitation I would ever receive, and that the mere gesture meant so much that the dead spot inside of me started to ache in a good way.
Over the next few months Lulu and her mother drove down from San Francisco almost every weekend, booking a room in the same hotel off Santa Monica. They hardly ever set foot in the room. Even their bags found their way to the Pico house. Lulu staged her things in my room, and Lulu’s mom carved out a spot in the office across the hall.
Lulu’s mom was Willow, a hatchet-faced but relentlessly kind woman who reached out to me continually, though I offered her little access. She seemed genuinely to want to engage me, which made me respect her even less. She came bearing thoughtful little gifts—gobstoppers and gliders—which I accepted begrudgingly. The twins accepted her without reservation, and I hated them for it.
Willow exhibited a strange influence over my father. He stopped shaving and grew his hair and started listening to Willie Nelson. She even persuaded him to pick up an acoustic guitar on occasion, something he apparently had not done since the year I was born, 1968. The guitar looked small and silly, like a ukulele perched on his massive leg. He didn’t sing, but sometimes he moved his lips, and he always kept his eyes on the fret board, looking a little awkward and confused, as though he wasn’t quite sure from which angle to approach the instrument. It seemed impossible to me that Big Bill ever knew how to play the guitar in the first place, that he ever had long hair or sat around beach fires wooing women, or that he burned his draft card, or ate LSD. But then there were a lot of things I didn’t know about Big Bill.
We began to take weekend outings like a real family. And really, weren’t we America’s poster family for 1978? The widowed bodybuilder and his three motherless sons. The professional woman and her child prodigy. All of us piling into the silver-striped van with its orange-carpeted catacombs and tinted windows and Yosemite Sam mud flaps. Setting off for the tar pits, Laguna Beach, or Knott’s Berry Farm. Carting coolers of Craigmont soda and enormous Tupperware vats of Big Bill’s famous macaroni salad, which even the twins found inedible.
I’m not proud of my cruelty when I think of poor Willow forever craning her neck in the passenger seat, trying desperately to elicit some small familiarity or acceptance from me, with offerings like, You know my real name isn’t Willow, it’s Mary Margaret, or When I was a girl, we used to go to Niagara Falls. Why did I punish her with aloofness?
My favorite destination was Cabazon, out near the Morongo Indian Reservation on the 10, where a man named Claude Bell—at the expense of a small fortune he’d amassed over the better part of a frugal lifetime—realized his dream of erecting a giant concrete brontosaurus in the arid flats of the San Bernardino Valley. He opened a gift shop in its belly, and immediately started amassing another small fortune to bankroll a tyrannosaurus rex.
Cabazon was my favorite not because it captured my imagination, but because it captured Lulu’s. The way she put it was, “It’s a lovely dream, because it’s nobody else’s.” And that’s how she saw the thing, not as a brontosaurus, but as a dream.
While the twins ran amuck in the gift shop under Willow’s supervision, Lulu, Big Bill, and I stood in the gravel lot, with a half dozen other people, gawking at Bell’s brontosaurus.
“That’s one big sonofabit—er, gun,” observed my father, admiring the musculature of the beast’s foreleg. “Can you imagine being eaten by one of these suckers?”
“The brontosaurus was a herbivore, Mr. Miller. That means he only ate plants.”
“Plants?”
“Yes. Leaves and foliage and stuff.”
My father was incredulous. “No wonder they’re extinct.”
“That was because of the ice age, Mr. Miller. Not because of what they ate.”
Big Bill set a hand on her shoulder and bent down to eye level. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, young lady: You are what you eat.”
“That’s just a figure of speech, Mr. Miller. If we were what we ate then we’d be cannibals.”
Lulu had a way with Big Bill, and though it didn’t occur to me then, her way was a lot like my mother’s.
By the time Lulu became my stepsister in June, it seemed impossible that I had ever lived without her. And the closer I got to her, the more I knew that she was the only person I ever cared to know. Lulu was an entire population. You could string adjectives together like daisy chains and not describe Lulu. Verbs came closer: soaring, crashing, yearning, laughing, dreaming, kissing. But metaphors came closest: Lulu was a white-hearted starburst, a silver-crested wave. Lulu was the sound electricity makes.
With the addition of Willow and Lulu, our family geography was in flux again. The old house on Pico was a patient and tolerant host. No matter how we shuffled and displaced ourselves, whatever arrangement we wound up in, the Pico house always felt like the same old house at the end of the day. Willow and Big Bill moved into the master bedroom, while Lulu took residence directly across the hall from me, in what used to be the office. My heart thrilled watching Big Bill heft her daisy-dappled yellow footlocker out of the van and carry it up the stairs on his shoulder. The original trophy room became a storage room for everything that used to be in the master bedroom and the office. And in the spirit of migration, Doug and Ross switched bunks again.
I, of course, stayed in the same room as always. But it was different. The
whole world changed. My universe was right-side-out, and my regular senses returned with a sharpness like never before. A new sense developed down in the very center of me—possibility. And, miraculously, even my voice changed. I no longer sounded like an emphysemic blackjack dealer from Sparks. The sound that came out of my throat was like velvet thunder riding on Caribbean breezes. My words came from a different place. They weren’t words anymore; they were positively charged ions crackling out of my mouth like fairy dust. And I was a poet every time I spoke the name Lulu.
The Book of Lulu
At ten years and eleven months, I began the Book of Lulu, and the Book of Lulu was all about Lulu, nothing less than a catalogue of everything even remotely Lulu: what she wore, things she said, things she liked, things she hated—a Farmer’s Almanac of Lulu.
August 29, 1979
She wore her yellow socks again. She’s getting a hole in one of them. I smelled her pajamas in the laundry room today, and I’m pretty sure that’s weird. They smelled like frozen waffles.
September 3, 1979
When I ask her about her dad, she says she doesn’t have one. She says it doesn’t matter, but I think it does. I think everybody should have a father, even if it’s just Big Bill.
September 12, 1979
Big Bill was polishing the fender on the van today with a yellow sock. I didn’t say anything.
By Thanksgiving, the Book of Lulu had grown to two volumes. I kept them rubber-banded together in the big drawer of my desk. But the truth is, Lulu’s discovery of my secret would likely have come as a relief at that point, because if I got any fuller of Lulu I was sure to explode. And the only way to stand it was to grant myself the luxury of imagining that Lulu actually had a Book of William: an everything-for-and-about-me book. But I doubt it. I really don’t think Lulu had the patience for a book about anybody.
Christmas of 1979 saw my new family in full blossom. It was the first holiday in three years not eclipsed by the shadow of my mother. No chestnuts, no sleigh bells, no snow, but a six-foot silver electric tree festooned with popcorn chains, a variegated mountain of wrapping paper, and enough meat to feed a small battalion: turkeys (yes, plural), hams, meatballs, shepherd’s pie, mincemeat (the real deal), you name it. Three days before Christmas, even as the feast was being cured, soaked, thawed, and generally prepared, Lulu proclaimed herself a vegetarian, and for once in my life I had an ally in the meat resistance. While the Millers gorged themselves on all manner of fauna, hoofed, winged, or otherwise, Lulu and I ate baked beans and banana pudding for Christmas dinner.
As was the custom, Doug and Ross received identical gifts, but fought over them anyway. Big Bill got them football helmets in the largest size. They still didn’t fit. Providence had blessed my brothers with enormous heads—one might even say presidential—though nothing to fill them but glands.
Christmas of ’79 marked another milestone of sorts in that it was the first Christmas I ever looked forward to giving a gift more than receiving one—that is, the first year I understood “the true spirit of Christmas.” The gift, of course, was for Lulu, and was not one gift, but two: a small, trim, leather-bound diary (which I prayed she would fill with private thoughts of me), and a new pair of yellow socks.
We did a covert exchange after breakfast in the trophy room, a small wainscoted den cluttered with little bronzed men in bronzed Speedos striking various poses. The walls were adorned with framed posters of Big Bill Miller’s rippling personage in various states of contortion, but smiling, always smiling, the smile of a man rushing to deliver a painful bowel movement at the frantic behest of Turkish customs agents. And for whatever reason, the posters were autographed, though it never occurred to me then to ask who autographs a picture to themselves?
We sat Indian style in the middle of the room, a circle of two.
“You first,” I said.
“No, you.”
“Please.”
She unwrapped the diary first. Her blue eyes smiled as she caressed the leather and turned the book over in her hands. “Oh, William, thank you, thank you. It’s lovely. I can use it for my birds.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. My face went hot in a flash. I could’ve given her gifts forever, could’ve made it my life’s work, if only to look upon those smiling eyes.
“Open the other one,” I said.
Deliberately, careful not to tear the already hopelessly maligned wrapping paper, she finally reached the socks, and her eyes were a circus of light.
“Yay, they have toes!” she said. “I’ve always wanted socks with toes!”
“I know.”
“You’re so sweet, William Miller.” And she leaned over and gave me a second kiss, which loosed a cloud of butterflies in my chest.
“Now you,” she said.
Lulu presented me with a flawlessly wrapped package the size of a Happy Meal. All I could do was look at it: the crisp folds, the carefully taped edges, the way the paper was pulled tight and shiny as a skin around the box. I felt unworthy of such fastidious wrapping, as though such delicacy were wasted on a boy made of mashed potatoes. It didn’t matter what was in the box.
“Open it!”
I began to unwrap it carefully with clumsy fingers.
“Oh, just open it!”
The box said Tandy, so I knew it was from Radio Shack. I tore the flap open and liberated two squeaky Styrofoam bookends and pulled them apart to reveal a transistor radio.
“I already put the batteries in,” she said. “It’s AM and FM.” Then, with a slight air of disappointment, she added: “I wanted to get you Bone Phones but they cost sixty-four dollars.”
I flipped the radio on and it hissed like a theremin in hot oil.
“I like radio better than TV,” she announced. “Everything’s too planned out on TV. In radio, everything is floating in space and you get to choose. A radio is like a spaceship and you can land it in whatever world you want.”
Navigating around the FM band, I grabbed little fits and blossoms of music and patter.
“See what I mean? On TV everything would have straight lines. On TV you don’t do any work, you just watch. Radio is different.”
I was soon in orbit around a voice on the low end of the AM band. I finely tuned the static out and narrowed in until the voice surrounded me with the warm deep clarity of bathwater. And the voice (which I would later learn belonged to Gary Owens), struck me as an awfully big voice to be coming out of such a little box, and awakened a possibility in me that would one day be the instrument of my destiny.
“I hope you like it,” she said.
Can you fathom my fullness? Can you understand my gratitude? Can you see all that Lulu gave me?
Shortly after the main event—the general gift exchange, which saw the twins wrestling in a wilderness of wrapping paper while Big Bill continually bellowed “settle down”—we were instructed by Big Bill (who I can only assume was instructed by Willow) to select three of our own gifts to give to Friends Outside.
“Well, if they’re our friends why don’t we let ’em inside,” said Doug. “That’ll be my gift.”
In the car, Doug cried at the prospect of giving up his Super Jock. He threatened to break the kicking leg so they wouldn’t want it.
“Don’t you dare,” said Big Bill.
But within five minutes the leg was broken anyway when Ross tried to wrest the helmeted hero out of Doug’s grip.
Friends Outside was not far from the airport. It was a big two-story wood house in a stucco neighborhood, with chipping paint and a sagging porch. Every three minutes or so the shutters rattled on their hinges as airliners thundered overhead. There was a sick willow tree out front, a giant, long past the weeping stage, which only served to make the house darker.
A hard little woman who looked nothing like Mother Hubbard greeted us on the porch. She led us inside
through the foyer to a huge living room, where eight or nine kids of various ages and colors were lounging on ancient sofas or seated on the floor around a game of Monopoly. A huge old television was on in the corner. The picture was squiggly. A few of the older kids looked up when we entered.
“These people have been thoughtful enough to bring gifts,” the woman announced.
I’ll never forget the terrible awkwardness of my new family bunched together in the middle of that living room like a wagon train, dispensing gifts. How desperately I wanted to run from that place: the sad crepe paper ornamentation, the joyless light, those old dusty couches. Everything about the place spoke of strained circumstances, of our casserole days.
Lulu surrendered every gift she received, including the yellow toe socks. I’m not proud of the fact that this gesture wounded me, that behind my lame smile I was gritting my teeth as she presented my socks to a black girl in pink barrettes roughly her own age. I knew better, but I couldn’t help myself, because no conceivable circumstance, not even the threat of physical violence, could have compelled me to part with my transistor radio.
On the drive back home, Lulu pressed her face to the tinted window. She didn’t say a word about it, nor should she have. I should have known how hard it was for her to give up those things. But in spite of all I’d lost in my short life, I still knew nothing of sacrifice.
Big Bill Down Under
My father was no emissary of American sophistication, a fact that became painfully clear within eight minutes of our arrival in Sydney, Australia, for the 1980 Mr. Olympia. I realize it’s not a unique or unusual condition to be embarrassed by your father, but when, at every photo op, your father persists in peeling off his T-shirt and setting his hairless pectorals to dancing like a chorus line for gathering crowds, embarrassment threatens to become a lingering condition.
Big Bill was optimistic going into Sydney, and he had every reason to be. His back was ripped. His lower-body definition was better than ever, and while his proportions may have been slightly off (maybe a little top-heavy, though that’s debatable), he looked better than in ’79, when he finished fourth. His biggest improvement had nothing to do with musculature, but with his posing, which had come light-years under the tutelage of Willow. Having endured seven strictly enforced years of ballet growing up in Vermont, Willow managed to thoroughly transform Big Bill. In the past, he had simply lumbered onto the stage and bungled through a rapid succession of herky-jerky contortions, beaming like a jack-o’-lantern in heat. But Willow infused Big Bill with a sort of poetry, perhaps the same poetry that inspired her at seventeen to leave behind Mary Margaret and the pleated skirts of prep school in Vermont and head west for Big Sur with the wind in her hair.