I'm Not Julia Roberts (3 page)

“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?”

“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.”

The man’s grin grew even wider. “But that’s the beauty of it,” he said. “I’m not selling anything but opportunity.”

If he says something about opportunity knocking, I will commit ritual suicide, right here, right now.
“I have a job. I like my job. I don’t want to do anything else.”

“You don’t want to make up to two thousand extra a month, part-time?” said the man. “I have to tell ya, not many people would want to miss that.” He held up his hand, palm facing the sky, as if holding out an invisible offering.

“I guess I’m one of the not many people,” she said, now grinning herself, the way a bear would grin, baring its teeth.

Lu could see the man struggling not to tell her off. He was that type, she knew, the telling-people-off type, the kind of person who would get mad if someone didn’t like the same movies he did. “Well,” said the man, “it’s your choice.”

“Yes, it is,” she said brightly.

He bristled at her tone. “The next time your boss comes down on you, don’t say that opportunity didn’t come knocking.”

She opened the screen door. “I would never go around knocking on people’s doors and pretend to be opportunity personified, okay?”

“Yeah, whatever, lady,” said the man, his plastic smile gone, turning to leave.

“Whatever?”
Lu shouted. “You come here, invading
my
house, wasting
my
time, and then you say
whatever
when I don’t like it? Who the hell do you think you are?” She wanted to kick the man down the stairs.

“Nobody’s invading nothing,” said the man. “Christ. Have you been drinking or something?”

“No, but that’s a good idea,” said Lu. “Now get off my goddamn porch.”

Britt didn’t want to build the Incan village out of papier-mâché.

“Is this a philosophical or aesthetic problem?” Lu said, mostly to herself. She had splashed cool water on her face to calm down after the salesman left, but she was still breathing like an asthmatic.

“I want to build it out of Styrofoam,” Britt said. “Don’t they sell it at the crafts place? That place where we got the stuff for Babylon?”

“It’s six o’clock already. We don’t have time to go to the crafts store.”

“This fricking sucks, man!”

“Yeah,” said Lu. “It does. That’s why I asked you to start the project a month ago, when it was assigned. And reminded you about it every day this week.”

Britt rolled his eyes but said nothing, threw himself into a kitchen chair like an anchor into the sea. Devin shambled in, looking sly and pleased and secretive. Lu could only imagine what sexual mysteries he had cleared up for himself that afternoon.

“What’s for dinner, Loop?” he said.

“Whatever you can scrounge up,” Lu replied, wondering why he even bothered to ask. “I’m not doing anything until I find Picky.”

“Well,” said Devin, putting his hands on his hips just the way Lu always did, “where did you put him last?”

“Funny,” said Lu, surprised by the unusual display of personality.

Devin snorted. “Maybe he got out.”

“What do you mean?” said Lu. “Got out?”

“It’s possible, Loop-la-loop,” Britt said, braces flashing. “He was always looking out the screen door. He could have run away when we were leaving this morning. Or coming back this afternoon.” He leafed through his notebook. “For all we know, he’s in Indiana by now.”

“Or Iowa.”

“California. If I was a cat,” said Britt, “that’s where I’d go. Live outside all year round.”

“You’d go anywhere.” Devin pulled a box of cereal from a cabinet, keeping up appearances. “You’d go to Boise.”

Lu turned and looked out through the window into the yard, everything dark and matted and slick from a cold, wet spring. Picky,
gone
? She scanned the bushes and the trees for movement, shaking her head, astonished by this new possibility, and then astonished at her own astonishment. It had never occurred to her that he might not turn up, her talisman against despair. She had never really believed that a life, even a small one, could be wiped out so quickly, so cleanly, like a spill.

“Come on,” she said.

Britt closed the notebook. “Where are we going?”

“Help me, damn it!” Lu opened the back door and ran outside. “Picky!” she yelled. “Picky!” She ran around the yard like a dog on a line, circling, circling.

She could see Devin and Britt silhouetted in the doorway, watching her disintegrate with a queer sort of disaffection, as if this were precisely what they’d expected to happen, as if it were only a matter of time. It was Ollie who slid between them, opened the door, and sat on the porch steps, watching her ragged run slow to a jog, then a walk. She shuffled over and sat next to him on the steps, sucking wind. He waited until her breathing slowed, until she had wiped away the hot tears that had etched paths down her cheeks.

Ollie’s damp fingers entwined with hers. “I’m sorry about Picky.”

“Me too.”

“Did you look in the toilet?”

Lu inhaled so swiftly that she gave a lame whistle, like a cooling teapot. “That’s where I’ll look next.”

“Okay. I’ll look with you. When you want to.”

She gave Ollie’s fingers a squeeze, feeling her own chin work at a hoary grief she wasn’t sure she had a right to. She looked around the yard, trying to be brave, to see it for what it was. But instead she pictured Peru in the days before the Spanish: the cities blazing with gold, the Inca lying with his favorite wife, and the maiden slouching toward the temple—the girl assigned to keep this sunny world safe.

RESTORATION

B
eatrix loves home improvement stores. The rows of ladders, the rolls of insulation, the stacks of wood, the smell of sawdust and machine oil and metal filings, the tools enshrined in their own special room—all of it fills her with a strange sort of joy, the sense of possibility.

This is a new thing. When she was married to Ward, she hated home improvement stores and all the dirty boys who flocked to them, hands palsied and eyes wild as they lingered over the drill bits, the tubing, the nail guns. But with Alan, a trip to the home improvement store—like a trip to the grocery store, fruit stand, dentist, park, or any other place—is different. Alan, as dirty as the rest of them when he’s in the middle of a project, is as careful as those other men are crazed. When he reaches out to pull a box of screws from the shelves, Beatrix can see the authority in his movements, understands that he knows exactly how to use the equipment he selects. With Alan, she doesn’t worry that he will pull the bathroom sink off the wall and leave it that way for the next year and a half. She doesn’t fear that the washing machine he installed himself will suddenly and without warning vomit up gallons of soapy water onto the basement floor.

For Beatrix, the home improvement store has become a place where one sees one’s future and buys the materials with which to build it. Beatrix pulls her hair into a ponytail, dons her overalls, and feels young and uncomplicated and adorable.

Today, they are shopping for paint. They have a pillow from their new couch, and they’re trying to select the right color for the walls. There’s just one problem. Well, two.

“You’re going to paint it red?” says Problem One. “Walls are not red.
Meat
is red.”

“Whatever,” says Problem Two.

Problem One is small, thin, and perfect, long dark hair shiny and straight, smoky eyes glittering with contempt. She hates red. Pink reminds her of the insides of mouths. Beige is the color of an old man’s teeth. Purple makes her want to puke. Yellow, she says, yellow is so over it’s o-
ver.

Problem Two is also thin, but shaggy haired, tall, and lanky, his arms hanging off his shoulders at odd angles like the limbs of paper dolls. Two doesn’t speak much, and when he does, it is to express his utter lack of concern for home improvement and the middle-aged couples who value it.

Beatrix and Alan are standing in front of the Glidden paint display, holding the color swatches against the new pillow. It’s the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, the ideal weekend for a project such as this one. The living room is already prepared—washed and spackled and sanded. They have to buy painter’s tape, some tarps, new brushes, and the paint itself. It should have been simple, it should have been a pleasure, it should have been one of those mornings that Beatrix would recount to her incredulous friends: “I know! The hardware store! I haven’t had so much fun since we went to get the new tires!”

But Beatrix hasn’t counted on Liv, Alan’s only child, and Devin, her oldest son, the two of them taking truculence to new depths. Though they are not exactly Pollyannas, Beatrix and Alan do believe in the power of teamwork, believe that something like painting a room can instill group pride and positive feelings. But so far, the Problems are interested only in being bigger problems. The two of them stand as far away from each other and from their respective parents as they can while still remaining in the same aisle.

“What do you think of this?” Beatrix asks, holding up a swatch of green, more sage than moss.

In response, Problem Two lifts his T-shirt and examines his rippled abdomen.

“It’s nice,” Problem One offers, “if you like snot.”

“You’re the snot,” Alan says mildly. Beatrix believes she detects a hint of fondness in his voice and is once again amazed at his ability to remain sanguine around his daughter, who she believes would inspire thoughts of homicide in the pope.

“Alan,” Beatrix says, “what do you think?”

He looks at the swatch. “I think it’s green.”

“But do you like it?”

Materials, Alan cares about. Colors, not so much. “Do
you
like it?”

“Of all that we’ve looked at, this matches best,” Beatrix says, tapping the green swatch with her fingernail.

“Snot. Mucus. Phlegm,” says One, pronouncing the “g.”

Beatrix tries to ignore her. “I like this one.”

“Just pick a color so we can get out of here,” Two mumbles.

One tosses her hair. “You cannot like that color.”

“I do,” says Beatrix. “Amazingly enough.”

“That’s the thing,” One says, nibbling thoughtfully at a hangnail. “It’s not amazing at all.”

Alan is methodical about taping before a paint job. Okay, he’s downright anal, but that is, Beatrix knows, the only way to get the job done right the first time. These are things she wishes she’d understood when she was younger: details, follow-through.

“Remember the sides of the windowsill, Beatrix. You can take smaller bits of the tape and piece them together so that you get the right shape.”

Beatrix rips off a shred of the brown tape, keeping an eye on the Problems. Problem Two is taping crookedly along the moldings in a way that will drive Alan nuts, though he won’t comment on it. Problem One, who is supposed to be taping, is obsessed with the paint she disdains, stirring it over and over again, like a witch over a cauldron.

“Hey!” Alan says. “Are you helping or what?”

“I’m mixing.”

“You’re done mixing. How about some taping. The doorway, okay?”

Problem One heaves one of her impressive sighs, grabs a roll of tape, and goes to the doorway. She holds the ring of tape in both hands like a crown and considers the door, as if someone infinitely more interesting—say, Prince William—were about to waltz through the opening. “Dad? Do you remember that time that you, Mom, and me turned the basement into an opium den?”

Alan glances at Beatrix, who is concentrating on her windowsill. “Not really.”

One turns, threading her thin wrist through the tape ring. “Yes, you do. We painted the paneling maroon? And then we bought all those beads and hung them in the doorways? And Mom went out and got those huge throw pillows that we used instead of couches?”

Alan nods. “Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“And when we were done decorating, we stayed up all night watching horror movies and smoking those candy cigarettes. I made you watch
The Exorcist
twice, remember? That was a funny movie.”

One’s mother is a rather strange woman named Roxie, a woman Beatrix has no trouble believing would turn a room into an opium den at the whim of her satanic offspring. Perhaps Roxie actually used opium, or something only slightly less toxic. Perhaps she puffed suspicious substances from a long thin pipe while pregnant, and One was the result.

One is now twirling the roll around her arm. “It was when Mom still had a sense of humor, remember? Right before you guys went insane and screwed up my life.”

“Oh, then,” says Alan. “I’ve blocked out everything before I went insane and screwed up your life.”

Problem One gives up and drops the tape ring to the floor. “I’m thirsty. Is anyone else thirsty?”

“Now that you mention it,” Beatrix says. “A diet something, whatever we have.”

“Diet,” says Problem One, her dark eyes sliding over Beatrix’s overall-clad figure. “Dad?”

“Water would be great. I’m sweating already.”

“You’re always sweating already,” says Problem One. She turns to the other Problem, who is using his fist to pound the tape onto the wall. “What about you?”

“Huh?”

“You want a drink or not?”

Problem Two barely glances at her. “Whatever,” he says. He examines his fist, rubs it.

Problem One stares at his back, her eyes narrowing. Problem One is not used to being ignored. Beatrix wants to tell her that, though it is difficult at first, a person
can
get used to such things. A person can grow accustomed to addressing the backs of heads, a person can become inured to blank stares and aggressive silences.

Problem One leaves the room as Beatrix finishes taping and admires her own handiwork, admires how careful she has become. This admiration—for her work, for herself—must be all over her face, because out of the corner of her eye she notices that her son is smirking at her. Beatrix sees this smirk more and more; she saw it earlier that morning when Two handed her a letter from his father, the flap unsealed. She’d peeked inside, glimpsed the salutation “Dear Psycho,” and quickly shoved the letter back into the envelope.

“Dad’s pissed. I don’t think he wants you to write any more letters to Lu,” Two had said.

“It’s none of your business,” Beatrix replied, feeling herself flush. Yes, she had written a letter to Lu, her ex-husband’s wife, but it was a perfectly appropriate letter, a
well-deserved
letter. She doesn’t care what names her ex calls her. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

Two smirked. “I’m not worried.”

And here he is, smirking again. Beatrix is so tired of it. The smirking, the mockery, the disdain. He had smirked and mocked and dismissed and disdained her until she simply could not take it anymore, until she allowed him to move in with his father and
that woman
full-time. But instead of things getting better, they had only gotten worse. The most recent problem had to do with his birthday, which he was supposed to spend with his brothers, Beatrix, Alan, and even Liv. They were going camping for the weekend. Together, as a family. But he didn’t want to spend his birthday with
them,
he said. He wanted to go to some stupid baseball game with his friends. She knew she shouldn’t be insulted or even surprised by this, but she couldn’t help it. She had carried him for nine months. She had bathed and clothed and nurtured him. She had endured his contempt without complaint. All she asked for was one nice birthday celebration. A tidy tent. A cookout. Card games by the fire. These simple things, and he hadn’t spoken a civil word to her since.

One returns with a tray of pop cans that she’s slipped into foam insulation sleeves. “To keep things cold,” says she, chill incarnate. Trays, foam insulation sleeves, thinks Beatrix. How can a girl who visits only a few times a month find such things when Beatrix herself isn’t aware they have them?

One puts the tray on top of the coffee table—left uncovered because they plan on refinishing it anyway, whitewashing and distressing it—and grabs two of the cans. She sips from the can in her right hand and, with the can in her left, jabs Two in the ribs.

“What?” says Two.

“Take it,” says One.

Two doesn’t look down at the can; he is watching a spider make its way across the ceiling. “I don’t want it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I said, I don’t.”

“God, you’re a shithead,” says One, jabbing him again.

“Come on,” says Alan. “Can’t we all just get along?”

Two stares down at One, then at the can in her hand. “Knock it off.”

One is unimpressed. “Take it and I will, wingnut.”

Two takes the pop. One sneers at him and flounces over to the sheet-covered couch, sits, and crosses her legs. Problem Two drinks, peering at One over the can. This is not the first time that One and Two have been in each other’s company, of course, but it is the first time that Two has ever looked at One in any way other than with complete indifference. Beatrix tells herself that she should be encouraged, but instead a finger of anxiety tickles her gut.

“Are you guys ready to paint?” Alan says. Alan loves to paint things. Alan has the steadiest hands in the universe.

“Sure,” says Beatrix.

“Let’s get it over with,” says One.

“Whatever,” says Two.

Twenty minutes pass in silence, until Alan disappears into the kitchen to retrieve the radio. In deference to the Problems, he tunes in to a top forty station, and rap music assaults Beatrix’s ears, some woman chanting about licking someone up and down. Lick, lick, lick, lick.

“What are we listening to?” she says before she can stop herself. She is always talking too fast, stating the obvious, leaving herself open.

“It’s called music,” says One. She looks at Two. “I guess they didn’t have this sort of thing back in the day.”

“No,” says Beatrix, “they didn’t. They
sang
back in the day.”

“That’s what you call—”

“That’s what I call it, yes,” says Beatrix, cutting her off, letting her irritation get the best of her. “Singing. Someone plays instruments and a person actually
sings
the words. Someone with
talent.
”

One rolls her eyes and flicks her brush in Two’s direction, spattering droplets all over him and the ceiling.

“Watch it,” he says.

One shrugs. “I
am
watching it.”

Two drains his drink and holds it out to One. “How about another?”

“You know where the fridge is. And get me one, too.”

Two smiles then, actually smiles, and steps over the radio and out of the room. One paints a face onto the wall, two X’s for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. As if One had just put the finishing touches on a specially commissioned fresco, Alan beams.

What Beatrix loves about Alan is that he is so hopeful. That he is able to maintain his optimism in the face of overwhelming difficulties that would defeat the most dogged. They met at a marketing seminar hosted by a company that produced vitamins and encouraged a pyramid structure of management. She could sense his profound hopefulness from across the room, saw it shining like an aura all around him. For this man, she thought, there is no mountain high enough. She would have climbed anything, anywhere, with him.

Watching him painting carefully around the windowsill, his hands so sure, she still wants to make those climbs, even though her own enthusiasm for their vitamin business waned in the early months when they hosted their own parties and tried to convince their friends to join them. Every morning, Beatrix goes to her job as a marketing director at a food company, and Alan gets up, puts on a shirt and a tie, and cheerfully makes his phone calls. And when they sit together at the end of the day, he’ll recount the rude things that people have said to him, and he will chuckle into his mashed potatoes.