I'm Not Julia Roberts (2 page)

“Ollie, did you see the cat anywhere?”

“Stevie said a cat had babies under his porch. There are twenty babies. They don’t have any eyes.”

“I meant Picky. Did you see Picky?”

Ollie made a face. “I saw him drinking out of the toilet bowl this morning. Why does he do that? It’s gross.”

“Yeah, well, you pick your nose. That’s gross, too.”

“I do not pick my nose!”

Lu gave him a look and a napkin.

Picky, short for Piccolo, was a little gray pelt of a thing, a tiny scrap of biology that Lu had found huddled in the bottom of a garbage can at a New York City apartment building, back in her other life. He had stopped growing at six months, retaining the size and energy of an adolescent. Though he was close to seven years old, Lu still had to pluck him from the top of the screen door, where he often got stuck, splayed like a science experiment.

Picky was a living retreat for Lu, a handful of calming noises and familiar smells (his fur was loamy and sweet, like beets). When she got home from work, Picky would methodically clean each of her fingertips with his tongue, sanding away the limp handshakes, defiant keys, strange doorknobs, and stained countertops. And in this crowded house full of increasingly unfamiliar activities, loud noises, and unanticipated demands, Picky reminded her who she had been. Or at least reminded her that she
had
been someone else once.

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 and 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.”