I'm Not Julia Roberts (19 page)

“I’m sorry,” said the man, standing up straight. “I don’t think this is going to work for us.”

“Right,” Lu said. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

Vamoose the Wonder Dog—Moose for short—bonked Lu’s legs with his nose as if he were some sort of living metronome while Lu chopped vegetables for a salad. Moose, they discovered soon upon adopting him, loved tomatoes, cherry being a particular favorite. He tucked the tomatoes into his cheeks like a squirrel and toted them around for a while before finally settling somewhere to bite down.

Lu dropped a cherry tomato to the floor, where it was soon sucked into the corgi’s mobile lips, sticking out like a tumor. “You’re a strange dog, Moose,” she told him. The dog did not appear too concerned about this. He gave her leg another nudge and sprawled out in a sunspot.

The back door flew open and Devin ambled in. “Hey,” he said to Lu. He stooped to pat the dog. “What’s up, Moose Man?” The dog’s tail thumped, but he didn’t bother to stand. He was like that. His name, Vamoose, was born of the fact that the dog was the polar opposite of the term, ever present and everywhere, always underfoot. When they presented the dog to Ward, Ward took one look and said, “This dog thinks it’s all about him.” Lu had replied, “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

“How was your last day?” Lu asked Devin.

“Boring,” said Devin. “Hours of saying good-bye to teachers you didn’t like in the first place.”

Lu grabbed a carrot and peeled it, shooting orange ribbons into the salad and onto the counter. “You never have to go to that school again. Can you even believe it?”

Devin scratched Moose’s belly, and the dog did a yoga stretch in response. “Yes and no,” he said. “It’s weird. Like, I don’t know.”

Lately, Devin had been trying something new: conversation. So far, he wasn’t so great at it, and Lu wasn’t at all used to it, but it was an improvement over the era that Lu now referred to as the Grunting Years.

“Yeah,” Lu said. “It is weird. You want to leave a place for just about ever, and then, when you can, you’re not sure if you’re ready to go.” She plucked a stray string of carrot from the countertop, trying to think of what else to say.

“Here’s something that should cheer you up,” Devin said, somehow understanding that she needed cheering. “I broke up with Ashleigh.”

“You did? Really?”

Devin smirked. “Don’t look so sad.”

“Sorry,” Lu said. “What happened?”

“She was getting on my nerves. Acting all weird and shit. Uh, sorry. I mean, and
stuff.
”

“It’s okay. I’ve heard worse. How was she acting weird?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She just was. And it was getting old, you know?” Devin sat cross-legged on the floor and ruffled Vamoose’s ears. “I told her that since I’m going to college in a few months, I didn’t want to be tied down to one girl or whatever. I want to have fun this summer.”

“Really,” said Lu. “How many girls do you plan on having fun with?”

“Ha, ha,” Devin said, looking up at Lu out of the corners of his eyes. “Hundreds, probably.”

“How did she take that news?”

“What do you think?” Devin said, disarming her completely with a rare grin. “She was
weird
about it.”

Lu nodded. “A lot of people are weird.” The way Devin sat made his long, gangly limbs look smaller, and she could see the sweet, glossy curls on the top of his head. Without thinking, she added, “Everything’s weird.”

“What do you mean?”

Lu hadn’t expected the question and scrambled for an appropriate answer. “Well, you’re an adult now, right? Having fun with hundreds of girls. Going off to college. Reminds me how old I am. Except I don’t feel old. I feel the same as I did when I was a kid. Like you. I feel young. See? Weird.”

“You’re not that old,” Devin told her, scratching the dog under the chin. “It’s not like you’re fifty or something.”

She didn’t say that fifty sounded pretty youthful to her these days. “True. It’s not like I’m fifty.”

Devin kept going. “And except for the ones under your eyes, you hardly have any wrinkles.”

“Gee, thanks, Dev,” she said far more forcefully than she intended, almost a shout. “I guess it’s time for the Botox.”

Britt appeared in the doorway. “Time for the Clorox?”

“We’re all looking a little dingy,” Lu said. She watched Devin for signs of annoyance, but he continued to pet the dog as if she’d never raised her voice.

Her saucy middle stepson sprawled in a kitchen chair. “So. What are we talking about?”

There was a brief silence before Devin said, “We were talking about you. We were wondering how many weeks it’s been since you’ve been thrown out of class or off a team or something. We’re thinking of calling the doctor. We’re thinking of having it classified as a true miracle.”

“Really?” said Britt, trilling the “r.” “I think it’s a miracle that none of my teachers or coaches are assholes this year.”

“Britt,” said Lu.

“I’m just expressing myself.”

“But Ollie’s not even here to correct you. Where’s the fun?”

“Ollie doesn’t care anymore,” Britt said. He was wearing his hair longish and shaggy now, like a yearbook picture from the 1970s. He loved to make phone calls with Lu in earshot, just so that she could hear him say: “You’re the girl of my dreams, and I want my future to include you.” If Lu hadn’t known him, if he wasn’t only sixteen, she might have believed he’d gotten permanent makeup tattooed on his eyelids and lips. He was that pretty.

“Haven’t you noticed, Lu,” Britt added, “that Ollie’s too into his Game Boy to tell on me? I’m beginning to think he doesn’t love me anymore.”

“News, bro,” said Devin. “Nobody does.”

“That’s cold,” Britt said, teeth flashing.

“Cold but true,” Devin said. “You’ve got a face only a stepmother could love.”

“You sure? I wonder what Ashleigh would say if I called her. I think she’s hot for me.”

“She’s hot for herself,” said Devin. “Then again, so are you. Maybe you’re the perfect couple.”

Britt balled up a napkin and threw it. “Are we having dinner sometime this century?”

“No,” said Lu. “Why would we do that? Besides, you have to go pick up Ollie at school.”

“What?”

“You promised,” said Lu.

“Why would anyone want to join the chess club, anyway?”

Lu shrugged. “Maybe he’s looking to get thrown out of it.”

“You know, you were always too smart for your own good.” Britt pulled a banana from the fruit basket and his keys from his pocket. “I’ll be back with the little darling in a few minutes. Don’t eat real food without me.” With the banana, he saluted his brother, Lu. Then he was out the back door.

Devin stood up, and the dog put on his wounded face. “I’m going to go call Shoop. See if he wants to go to a movie later.”

“Devin,” Lu said.

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Sorry about before.”

“Huh?” he said.

“About raising my voice. The crack about the Botox?”

“Oh, that. Whatever.” He fished a string of carrot from the salad and popped it into his mouth. At Lu’s feet, Moose’s eyeballs rolled back in their sockets like a shark’s. Then he bit down into his cherry tomato, splashing the juice on Lu’s feet.

She wanted to say: Thank you for talking to me. Or, Thank you for not being so angry today. Or maybe, Thank you for growing up. But of course she couldn’t say any of it. It was too strange, the boys in her kitchen, or rather, her in the boys’ kitchen, and then her increasingly elaborate fantasies about another boy that took her to a world where kitchens didn’t matter.

She settled for this: “I’m glad you cut Ashleigh loose. Nothing against her, really, but I thought you could do better. Not looking forward to explaining that one to Moira, though. Moira’s not the understanding type.”

Devin smiled, not as big as before, but still. “Good luck. I wouldn’t want to be you.”

Her husband turned to take her hand as they made their way up the bleachers, his eyes warm and crinkled just a bit around the corners. She saw the appraising looks he got from the other women, the ones who admired his full head of curly hair and still-muscular body, all the things they wished their men had held on to a little longer. Just the night before, they’d made love not once but twice, something they hadn’t done for a long time, something that made her feel exhausted and happy and guilty all at once, wondering where her appetite had come from. Lu squeezed his hand and berated herself for her own greed, for being such a man about things, for wanting her cake with a piece of Mr. Tasty Pants on the side.

Lu wished she were a man, because then she wouldn’t have made the mistake of wearing hose; according to this audience, only old women wore hose. That’s what Devin’s mother was wearing, hose and a butter-colored linen suit. With the red hair and the red shoes, she looked like a big chicken.

“Hello, Alan,” Lu said. “Hello, Beatrix. I love your suit.”

Beatrix smiled and shielded her eyes from the imaginary sun glare as Lu and Ward sat behind her.

Ward shook Alan’s hand and then reached for his sons, who happened to be spending that week with their mother. “Hey, sport,” Ward said to Britt.

“Sport,” said Britt, smiling wickedly. No matter what the situation, Britt was always smiling wickedly. “I’m so not a ‘sport.’”

“What are you, then?”

“I’m a soccer god.”

“Right. I’ll remember that. Hey, Ollie, are you with us?”

Ollie took one hand off his Game Boy to wave at his dad but didn’t look up. Ollie rarely looked at his dad too much around his mother, because it made Beatrix testy.

Beatrix got testy anyway. “You’re late,” she told Ward.

“Did the ceremony begin?” Ward asked.

“You know it didn’t,” Beatrix answered.

Ward grinned, also helpful. “Then we’re not late, are we?”

Beatrix pursed her lips and faced the football field, where Devin would soon be slumping in his chair with the two hundred other graduates as the principal and the salutatorian and then the valedictorian bored everyone woozy. Lu herself was already woozy. She hated any events that required the presence of them all, hated the vapid commentary that dripped from her own lips, hated the way the boys got stiff and unsure, afraid that if they paid more attention to one parent, the other might explode in rage or, worse, tears.

The band tuned their instruments, and they all tried to pretend that they were at ease in one another’s company while Lu rifled dispiritedly through her bag. That’s what she did at these things, rifled through her bag. She wished that, like Ollie, she could veg out with a Game Boy, oblivious to the world. But
no,
she had to be a grown-up.

Suddenly, Ward popped up from his seat, waving at some man she didn’t recognize who sat several sections below them. Before Lu had a chance to protest, Ward slipped from their row and jogged down the steps to greet him, leaving Lu to fend for herself.

She continued to rifle through her bag, furiously now. There were several things she knew: Ward was friendly, he didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, he wasn’t abandoning her. And then: She should be adult enough to manage situations like these. Hadn’t they been married for years? Hadn’t she had plenty of practice?

Beatrix took notice of all that rifling and took pity on Lu, a frightening prospect. “Devin tells me that he applied for another scholarship through your agency.”

Lu pulled a pen out of the bag, one with a wad of gum stuck to the end of it. “Well, yes. They offer a small—”

“Uh-huh,” said Beatrix. “Do you know how many applications the agency received?”

“I’m not sure. It’s run out of the national—”

“Right.” Beatrix swiveled her head to the left and right, and Lu was again reminded of a bird, the way birds look at you: one eye at a time. “He’ll probably apply for the one that Coke’s doing. Oh, and did you hear about that one offered by the duct tape association?”

“No, I—”

“They want you to make an outfit entirely out of duct tape and then have someone photograph you wearing it. Isn’t that crazy?”

Lu opted for the one-word answer, because it seemed that would be the only thing she’d be able to get in. “Yes.”

“Devin will do it, though. He said that Ward wants him to get as much as he can from scholarships.” Beatrix smiled with half her mouth. “I can believe it. You know how Ward is. Even with all his money . . .” She trailed off, shrugging, before turning around to face the field.

Shocked, Lu stared at the back of Beatrix’s head and tried to figure out the most appropriate response. The options she liked most were the least mature, the least political:
thwapp
ing Beatrix with her purse, scrawling obscene words on her suit in red lipstick, announcing loudly that she didn’t know anyone actually got gonorrhea anymore and she wished Beatrix luck with it. Her lips parted and pursed, forming words and then losing them. She thought of her old cat, Picky, dear Picky, sitting in the window, watching the birds fly past. Picky, his mouth gaping—to utter a battle cry, to protest his imprisonment, to rail at the world—and issuing only sad and silent meows.

In front of her, Alan, Beatrix’s husband, fiddled with his camera case, unlocking it and snapping it shut. The curse of the second spouse: rifling and fiddling, opening and closing. She zipped up her purse and set it at her feet. Yes, she had brought baggage to her marriage, but her husband had brought the whole moving van. She imagined the graduates filing out onto the field: young and fresh and relatively unencumbered. She thought about what it would be like to be one of them, to be with one . . . say, Mr. Tasty Pants. How would he taste? Tangy. Or maybe sweet and minty, like an iced tea. And what would he do if she were to pull a whole Mrs. Robinson thing, slit skirt and shiny set hair, ice cubes clinking in a glass? She could see his face, the wide-set blue eyes even wider, the cheeks flushed, the lips parted slightly as he tried to get enough oxygen.

Ward sat down, grabbed her hand, squeezed it. She tried not to pull away, tried not to let him see her face, how far she’d gotten in the ten minutes he was gone.

“How you holding up?” he whispered in her ear.

“Fine,” she whispered back, the
Graduate
vision in her head morphing into scenes of Ward crying, her mother-in-law looking at her in disgust, her stepsons frowning in confusion: What kind of skank was she?