I'm Not Julia Roberts

  When she first moved in, Ward complained of a slight allergy to cats; for Christmas, Lu had wrapped an economy-size package of Benadryl.

  Lu opened the linen closet in the hallway, shoving aside shampoo bottles to peer behind them. One time, Picky had been trapped in that closet all day, and he’d been forced to pee in the bath towels. When she finally found him, he’d run from the closet, his harsh birdlike squawks berating her for her neglect.

  Now, Lu neatly stacked the piles of towels on the floor, then gave up and started yanking them out and tossing them over her shoulder. No Picky, but under the stacks, stuck in a corner, a single envelope gone yellow with age.

  “What’s that?” Ollie wanted to know.

  “Not sure,” said Lu. She opened the envelope. Inside was an old Polaroid of the ex. Wearing only a nightie and panties. Hugely, majestically pregnant.

  “What is it?” Ollie repeated. “Can I see?”

  The ex stood there staring down at herself, her gauzy baby doll pulled up to reveal a basketball-size tummy, expression somewhere between pride and bewilderment. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, just a kid herself, beautiful in that way the young are, smooth and white and firm.

  She looks like a doll, thought Lu. If dolls came knocked up.

  “Loopy!” said Ollie, whining now. “Let me see!”

  “Nothing to see,” said Lu, cramming the photo in her pocket. “People you don’t know.”

  Ollie’s face had gone red and crumpled. “But I want—”

  “Not now, Ollie. I’m trying to find Picky.” Lu dropped to her knees to dig through a jumble of old bath toys stowed on the last shelf. Who’d saved that picture? And what, exactly, was a person supposed to think about it? It was almost repulsive in its intimacy, in its careless, youthful sexiness. Was it a reminder? A lament?

  Lu pulled out a plastic pony with ratted pink hair. “Where the hell could that cat be?”

  Ollie, scowling, thwarted: “You’re not supposed to say H-E-double-toothpicks in front of children.”

  Britt slammed into the house, trudging in dirt as well as major attitude. Lu was crawling around on the floor, looking for Picky under benches and footstools, the little tents made by the newspapers. Britt behaved as if Lu’s posture were normal.

  “Fricking coach benched me,” he said, throwing open the refrigerator door.

  Lu looked up from the newspapers. She could hear the rustle of plastic wrap and knew that when she checked later, she would find every leftover container open and a fingerful of the contents missing. “Why did he bench you?”

  “How am I supposed to know why he benched me? He just benched me.”

  Lu might have been more sympathetic had Britt not said something similar when he was suspended and nearly expelled from school a few months back. He had neglected to mention that he’d been caught stuffing copies of Playgirl into the desk of Mrs. Rubens, his English teacher. “I thought it would help her out,” he’d claimed, unfazed.

  Britt slammed the fridge door shut, thought better of it, opened it again. “Fricking Mom didn’t even come to the game.”

  “Isn’t fricking Mom still away?”

  “What else is new?”

  She thought of the photograph in her pocket and opened her mouth to defend the woman, then snapped it shut. Though she had found the ex a bit erratic and self-absorbed, she had made it a point to not have much quarrel with her. Until Devin showed up with his pillow, Ollie with his night terrors, and Britt with endless unfinished dioramas. Until Ward had announced his business trip in Dallas and the ex immediately hopped a junket to Vegas.

  The ex had, in the last few years, grown progressively larger and, Lu believed, shorter. To her surprise, Lu was not pleased by the ex’s new bulk, her newly hatched jowls, the burgeoning buttocks, the downturned mouth creasing the fleshy face. The bulk just made the woman all the more solid, more formidable. Self-contained. Unmovable. Her face jutted out from her body like the prow of an ancient warship.

  Lu hated her the way she’d hated her own mother years before, with a desperate, ineffectual, shrieky passion that bordered on adolescent.

  Bordered? Ha! Prolonged exposure to the first wife caused emotional regression in the second, she was sure. Someone should study this. Soon she’d be sucking her thumb and screaming for a rattle.

  But worse than hating the ex was that Lu had started to hate Ward for having married the woman some gazillion years before, for having chosen such a solipsistic person as a mate. What could that say about him? And then what did marrying Ward, choosing someone with such flawed taste, say about Lu herself?

  There they were, the whole ahistorical, solipsistic lot of them, twirling pell-mell around their own universes like planets without suns. Not a grown-up in the bunch.

  She threw the papers back to the floor. “Britt, have you seen the cat?”

  He took out the milk, unscrewed the cap, and lifted the jug to his lips. “I just fricking got here.”

  Where the cat wasn’t: in the cabinets or in the windows, under the beds or in the bathtubs. Not in the closets, dresser drawers, hampers, or bookshelves.

  The basement ceiling, where several tiles had been punched from their metal fasteners and strewn about the floor. Lu looked up into the yawning hole and watched for furtive movements in the dark.

  After Ollie finished his ice cream, he remembered the money irretrievably stowed in his pencil case and was swept away in a fresh wave of melancholy.

  “It’s okay, Ollie. We’re going to leave early tomorrow, remember? You’ll get your money first thing. Now, how about another puzzle? This looks like a good one. . . . No? Do you want to play a game of cards?”

  She felt a headache brewing in the back of her neck. Who would have known there were so many things to confront? Half-naked exes. Her patience gone missing. Her heart, dull as a fist.

  Lu plunked the weeping Ollie in front of the TV and sneaked into the bathroom with the cordless phone and her cigarettes.

  Lu’s sister, Annika, answered after fourteen rings. Because of some potent fertility drugs, Annika had one more moon-eyed baby than she had arms. Lu had stayed with Annika for those first chaotic weeks after the births and had found herself reeling around in a sympathetic mommy-fog for almost a month afterward. The sheer physical demands of her infant nieces had astonished and then terrified her. In comparison, Lu’s own complaints seemed about as consequential as a $25 parking ticket. Still, Lu didn’t know who else to call, who else wouldn’t hold it against her.

  “Talk to me,” said Annika. Her tone was chipper, but her voice was ragged with exhaustion.

  “Devin’s holed up in the basement with a boy named Shoop, probably scouting for porn on the Internet, Ollie’s sobbing in front of SpongeBob SquarePants, and Britt has to build a model of an Incan village by tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like fun,” said Annika. “I’d join you, but I have an appointment to get my fingernails pulled.”

  “And I can’t find Picky anywhere.”

  “I’m sure he’s just hiding. And can you blame him?”

  “No, I guess not,” Lu said. “Listen to me whine about myself. How are you?”

  “How am I? Who am I? Who’s this ‘I’ that people keep talking about?”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Lu said.

  Annika half coughed, half sighed into the phone. “Oh, they’re good. Good babies. Really. You know, they do sleep occasionally, and that’s something. It’s just that there are so very many of them. Thank God for the nanny. I’m obsessed with this nanny.”

  “When did you get a nanny?”

  “I didn’t tell you? I broke down and hired her a few days ago. Her name is Jewel, like the singer.”

  “Does she sing?”

  “No, but she can diaper a wriggling baby with one hand tied behind her back.” She sighed. “At least I have girls. At least girls don’t pee on you.”

  Lu found herself saying, “Yeah, but girls have that period between eight an
d ten where their heads have grown to adult size but their bodies haven’t. You have to keep scrubbing the lip gloss off of them because it’s too damned disconcerting. Every girl in Ollie’s class looks like something out of a Victorian painting.” She winced, though Annika couldn’t see it. Why did she have to say stuff like this?

  “That won’t happen for at least seven years,” Annika said. “By then, they’ll have some nice drugs that can take the edge off, but won’t upset your stomach.”

  “There’s always cyanide.”

  “Jesus. What’s going on over there?”

  “Never mind. I can’t even talk about it. When I do, people look at me like I’m dangerous.”

  “They’re afraid you’re going to gather up your stepkids and drown them like a litter of kittens. I mean, we’re a reductive people. No genetic investment, no real investment.”

  Lu could almost see her sister with an invisible cigar, waggling her brows: Hey, Snow White, ever been to the woods? She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, face drawn, cigarette cocked, frowned at the image. “They need so much, Annie. It’s not like the babies. It’s different. They can feed themselves and dress themselves, but all they have to do is stand there and you can see how much they need. And I’m such a moron that I didn’t think about that part.”

  “Of course you didn’t think. If we actually thought about anything, who’d get on a plane? Who would have sex? Who would have their nipples pierced?” Annika’s voice took on a slightly hysterical edge. “And, not that I’m the best example right now, damn it to hell, but where’s their mother?”

  “Their mother is molting. And she’s just getting bigger and stronger and freer. You should see her. She looks like a giant bird. Like a great white bird in a blue business suit.”

  “She’s a bitch and I hate her.”

  Lu dropped her cigarette in the toilet and watched it float round and round. “We all do.”

  “I mean it, Lu, I totally fucking hate her.”

  Lu could hear a snuffling sound, and she marveled again at the self-absorption that had prompted her to call Annika, whose ruined belly looked like the smirking face of a very old man.

  “I’m sorry, Annie. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Oh, fuck it,” Annika said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! I’m going to keep saying it, because I’m sure as hell never doing it again.”

  “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Yes, you should. You have to.” More snuffling. “I need to know there are other women out there in the world so tired they’ve forgotten their own names. Do you know what your name is?”

  “I think it’s Jennifer,” said Lu.

  “There you go,” Annika said.

  Lu cleared her throat, adopted the breezy tone of a sitcom mom. “It gets a little worse.”

  “It better,” Annika barked. “This is my sanity we’re talking about.”

  “You know that mole under my nose?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a hair growing out of it.”

  “Thank God.”

  Lu squeezed her eyes shut and listened to Annika breathe. “Well. I suppose I should start thinking about the Incas now since I’m pretty sure Britt hasn’t.”

  “Incas. I’ll add that to my list,” said Annika. “Learn to diaper babies one-handed, learn to function on 2.3 hours of sleep per night, become expert on Incas. What the hell do you know about the Incas?”

  “I know that they were into human sacrifice,” Lu said.

  “Ha! Who isn’t?”

  Renaming the dwarves: Itchy, Sticky, Snotty, Grubby, Mouthy, Truculent, Deliberately Obtuse.

  It was Britt who had gifted her with the name “Loopy.”

  At ten, he was like an amiable dog, eager to get in any car for any reason. Lu often took him along when she ran errands. One Saturday, they went to the bank. He watched as Lu signed all her checks, sounding out her full name. He pronounced it “Loop.”

  “No, Britt. It’s Lupe. Lu-pay.”

  “Loopy?” he said, and giggled. “Loopy! What kind of name is that?”

  She could endure the brattiness of her richest clients but was always unprepared for the bluntness of grade schoolers. “Well, what kind of name is Britt?” Lu said, childishly imitating his tone.

  “My grandfather’s name.”

  “Oh.” Lu scratched at the bottom of her bag for a deposit slip. “My mother’s name is Sue, and her sister’s name is Jane. She got a little inventive when she had her own children. Just call me Lu. It’s easier.”

  He thought a moment. “I like Loopy.”

  This was at a time when all the people and all the books cautioned her to allow potential stepchildren to call her what they liked, to bestow their own special titles. She had been hoping for something a bit more dignified, not a name that, when written, encouraged a person to fill the double o’s with little cross-eyed pupils.

  “How about Lulu?” she suggested.

  “I like Loopy.”

  “Luna? That’s ‘moon’ in Italian.”

  “Loopy,” he said. Without warning, he began to wave his arms around and jog in a circle, a cross between a rain dance and a celebration of the Chinese New Year. Startled and embarrassed, Lu tossed furtive glances at the other patrons as Britt chanted her new name: “Loo-PEE, Loo-PEE, Loop-PEE . . .”

  She plucked the hair from her mole and then all of the other stray hairs that seemed to be sprouting randomly from her skin, then realized that dinnertime was approaching and, in her yearning for her cat, she hadn’t given a thought to it.

  Britt would eat anything sweet in any combination. Honey ham and carrots, a big hunk of cornbread. Twinkies with a side of peas that he would devour in a few huge, desperate bites.

  Kid comfort food for Ollie. A hot dog or macaroni and cheese that he would throw up at two in the morning after some nightmare featuring giant sharks with wings or flaky-faced crazy people. He would poke her arm in the middle of the night and tell her that the crazy people were angry again, plucking at him with their crazy fingers.

  Devin would declare a staggering, gut-wrenching hunger and leave his meatless meal untouched.

  She sighed, trying to remember if she had been as unbalanced as her stepchildren when she was young. She thought not, but what did she really know? Her mother told her that she used to cozy up to complete strangers at the grocery store, helping elderly women pick out peaches, chatting with the suburban moms. This bizarre friendliness, her mother said, stopped after the divorce. “That’s when you got all stiff and strange and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

  That’s it, Lu thought, dinner could wait. She threw open the bathroom door, walked down the hallway, and attacked Ward’s closet. Maybe Picky had gotten in there somehow; she’d looked everywhere else. She knelt, tossing shoes over her shoulder, feeling along the floor way in the back.

  The doorbell rang. Cursing, she stood and kicked the pile of shoes. Then she ran downstairs.

  “Doorbell,” said Ollie from his perch on the couch, glassy eyes glued to the cartoons.

  “Really?” Lu said. It was probably for Ollie, too, or for Britt. Living with kids meant that the doorbell was always ringing, and there was always somebody who wanted to come in, small and medium-size somebodies who were invariably hungry and thirsty and would need cheese sandwiches or some Kool-Aid or new batteries for the remote-control car, somebodies who scoured the house looking for the cat only to chase him under the bed.

  She opened the door. A man who looked vaguely familiar stood there, grinning toothily. He was wearing a brown suit and carrying a dark red briefcase.

  “Yes?” Lu said.

  “Lu!” said the man, still grinning.

  “Yes,” Lu said again, trying to place him. One of the kids’ friends’ parents? One of the neighbors? She was adrift in a sea of faces. She could never keep all of them straight.

  “It’s Mike,” said the man. “Mike Ritchie. I’m a friend of Alan’s.”

  Lu blinked. “Alan?”
br />   “Beatrix’s husband,” said the man with the red briefcase. “She told me that you might be interested in an opportunity.” He eyed the screen door as if Lu were supposed to open it.

  Lu could feel her left eye begin to twitch. “I’m sorry, did you say that Beatrix sent you?” Beatrix was Ward’s ex-wife.

  The man shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other. “Beatrix and Alan work for me. As distributors for Energetics? I’m sure you’ve heard of us. We’re one of the top manufacturers of health care products.”

  “But Beatrix works for a food company,” Lu said dumbly. She knew about the whole pyramid scheme, of course, and where Beatrix met Alan, but what did that have to do with Lu? What was this man doing here, on her doorstep, swinging his red briefcase?

  “It’s pretty much Alan’s business, but Beatrix helps out,” the man said.

  “Helps out. Okay,” Lu said. Her face was heating up, and she wondered if the man could see the flush rising in a pink wave across her cheeks.

  “Now, I know that you sell real estate. Are you happy with that?”

  “Happy?” Lu managed. “Yeah.”

  “Ah,” said the man, Mike. “But not really happy.”

  Who the hell was really happy? “I’m doing just fine.”

  “But is fine enough?” said the man. “It’s a choice.”

  “What’s a choice?”

  “What you do with your life.”

  Lu took a deep breath, suddenly so furious that her vision blurred around the edges. Wasn’t it enough that evidence of Beatrix was everywhere, in the children, in the photographs, all through the house? Did the ex really need to send envoys, too, these grinning dispatches from a distant empire? “I don’t think I’m interested in what you’re selling.”