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Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.
Kendra’s staying over at Jeb’s, so Kali offers her bed to Dee, and she crashes on Kendra’s bed. When all of us nestle under our covers, we call out good night to each other, like we’re in summer camp or something, and I feel that sense of rightness, stronger than ever.
Dee starts snoring straightaway, but it takes me a long time to drift off, because I’m still wondering about Lulu. Maybe it was just a name. Maybe it was just pretend. But at some point, it stopped being pretend. Because for that day, I really did become Lulu. Maybe not the Lulu from the film or the real Louise Brooks, but my own idea of what Lulu represented. Freedom. Daring. Adventure. Saying yes.
I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu, too.
Twenty-five
APRIL
Miami Beach
Mom and Dad are waiting for me at my gate in the Miami airport, Mom having arranged for their flight to get in a half hour before mine. I’d hoped I might have gotten out of this year’s Passover Seder. I just saw Mom and Dad for spring break a few weeks ago, and coming down for Seder means taking a day off from school. But no such luck. Tradition is tradition, and Passover is the one time of year we go to Grandma’s.
I love Grandma, and even if the Seders are always mind-numbingly dull and you take your life in your own hands eating so much of Grandma’s home cooking, that’s not why I dread them.
Grandma makes Mom crazy, which means that whenever we’re visiting, Mom makes us crazy. When Grandma visits us at home, it’s dealable. Mom can get away, go vent to Susan, play tennis, organize the calendar, go to the mall to buy me a new wardrobe I don’t need. But when we’re at Grandma’s old-people condo in Miami Beach, it’s like being trapped on a geriatric island.
Mom starts in on me at the baggage claim, sniping at me for not sending thank-you notes out for my birthday presents, which means she must have asked Grandma and Susan if they’d gotten theirs. Because other than Jenn and Kali—who baked me a cake—and Dee—who took me out to his favorite food truck in Boston for dinner—and Mom and Dad, of course, there was no one else to send thank-you cards to this year. Melanie didn’t send anything. She just posted a greeting on my Facebook page.
Once we get into a cab (the second one, Mom having rejected the first one because the AC was too weak—no one is safe from Mom when she’s on a Grandma trajectory)—she starts in on me about my summer plans.
Back in February, when she first brought this up, asking what I was going to do over the summer, I told her I had no idea. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of spring break, she announced that she had made some inquiries on my behalf and used some connections and now had two promising offers. One is working in a lab at one of the pharmaceutical companies near Philadelphia. The other is working in one of Dad’s doctor friend’s offices, a proctologist named Dr. Baumgartner (Melanie used to call him Dr. Bum-Gardner). Neither job would be paid, she explained, but she and Dad had discussed it and decided they’d counter the loss with a generous allowance. She looked so pleased with herself. Both jobs would look excellent on my résumé, would go a long way toward offsetting what she referred to as the “debacle” of my first term.
I’d been so irritated, I’d almost told her that I couldn’t take those internships because I wasn’t qualified; I wasn’t pre-med. Just to spite her. Just to see the look on her face. But then I’d gotten scared. I was getting an A in Shakespeare Out Loud. An A minus in Mandarin, which was a first for me. A solid B in my biology class and labs, and an A in ceramics. I realized I was actually proud of how well I was doing in my classes and I didn’t want Mom’s inevitable and perennial disappointment to poison that. But that was going to happen no matter what, though I was sticking to my plan A—to show her my final grades when I made the announcement.
But finals are still three weeks away, and Mom is breathing down my neck right now about these jobs. So as we pull into Grandma’s high-rise, I tell her that I’m still mulling it over and then I skip out of the cab to help Dad with the bags.
It’s so strange. Mom is the most formidable person I know, but when Grandma opens the door, Mom seems to shrink, as if Grandma is some ogre instead of a five-foot bottle blonde in a yellow tracksuit and a KISS THE MESHUGGENEH COOK apron. Grandma grabs me in a fierce hug that smells of Shalimar and chicken fat. “Ally! Let me look at you! You’re doing something different with your hair! I saw the pictures on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?” Mom asks.
“Ally and I are friends, aren’t we?” She winks at me.
I see Mom wince. I’m not sure if it’s because Grandma and I are FB friends or because Grandma insists on shortening my name.
We step inside. Grandma’s boyfriend, Phil, is asleep on the big floral couch. A basketball game blares from the giant television.
Grandma touches my hair. It’s to my shoulders now. I haven’t cut it since last summer. “It was shorter before,” I say. “It’s sort of in between.”
“It’s better than it was. That bob was awful!” Mom says.
“It was a bob, Mom. Not a Mohawk.”
