Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom (3 page)

“Oops,”
Karen replied, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “I’m going out for a smoke.” She tottered away in her platform wedgies. Amanda raised a discreet eyebrow at me in the mirror, and I raised one back. I was pretty sure Amanda wasn’t nuts about Karen, either.

“I’m going to have to ask you to get supper for you and Rosie tonight,” Mom said, as she turned her attention back to trimming Amanda’s long red hair. “There’s a pizza in the freezer.”

“Why, what are you doing?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“I have a date.”

Amazing how four little words can make you feel like you want to barf.

“Please tell us you’re not going out with Alphonse again,” said Amanda, wrinkling her nose.

Alphonse was this creep my mom had met on Havalife, an online dating service that Karen had convinced her to join. He was about the fifth guy she’d met that way. They’d all been losers, but Alphonse was in a category all his own. Twice, he’d taken my mom out to really fancy restaurants. Twice, he’d ordered the most expensive things on the menu. Twice, he’d “forgotten” his wallet and Mom had to pay.

“No, not Alphonse, give me some credit.”

Amanda and I shared another look. We wanted to give her some credit, we really did.

“This is a new one. And I didn’t meet him online. I met him in the flesh.”

“Where?” asked Amanda.

“He came in for a haircut last week.”

“So we know he’s cheap,” I said.

Mom ignored this. “He seems really sweet.”

Which is exactly what you’ve said about all the other losers you’ve dated,
I wanted to say.

“Really … genuine.”

Ditto.

Amanda pursed her lips. But all she said was “Too bad we couldn’t set you up with
him.
” She nodded at an eight-by-ten glossy photo that hung over Mom’s workstation, beside a bunch of photos of Rosie and me. Smiling out at us from the picture was George Clooney.

Mom loved George Clooney. She’d loved him long before he’d become super-famous. Mom loved him from the first time she’d seen him in a sitcom called
The Facts of Life,
which was on TV when she was a teenager, back in the Dark Ages. I’d seen it a few times myself, on one of those cable channels that airs nothing but sitcoms from the 1980s, which seems to be a decade where everyone – even George – had really bad hair.

The photo my mom had was older than me, but it was personally signed to her because she’d actually
met
George Clooney. When she was still new to the business, she’d do what were known as day calls, filling in for stylists who were sick. One day, she’d been called to a movie set, and who walked into the trailer but George himself. She actually got to do his hair. That’s right, she touched his head. And he obviously liked her because he’d written on the picture
To Ingrid – May Our Paths Cross Again.

Even now, as she gazed at the photo, her expression went all mooshy. “He was amazing. So sweet, so charming. So freaking
gorgeous
… he was perfect.”

“I wanted one pink streak!
One!
”

Mom tore her gaze away from George Clooney. Three stations away, an older woman was shrieking at a cowering male student. Every hair on her head was hot pink.

Mom took a deep breath. “I’ll have to cut your hair another time, Violet.” She put down her scissors and walked away to deal with the crisis.

I said good-bye to Amanda and collected Rosie from her chair. She wobbled and fell in a heap of giggles onto the floor. “That was fun!”

“C’mon,” I said, pulling her to her feet and adjusting her glasses, which were crooked from all the spinning. “We have lots to do when we get home.”

And I wasn’t just talking about doing the laundry, finishing my homework, and making supper.

Because when Mom has a date, she isn’t the only one who has to prepare for it.

H
e sat parked across the street in a banana yellow Toyota Corolla. Not a new model. I couldn’t get a clear picture of him through my binoculars.

I was kneeling on my red beanbag chair, peering out the small dormer window between my bed and Rosie’s. With my free hand, I dug into a box of Life cereal – a pre-pizza snack.

Suddenly Rosie came tearing into the bedroom, wearing nothing but her underpants. A colander was perched on her head. “Lemme see, lemme see!” She started jumping on her bed, careful not to hit her head on the sloped ceiling, then she launched herself onto the beanbag chair and tried to yank open the curtains.

“Rosie! You almost blew my cover,” I scolded, as she
tried to grab the binoculars away from me. “Cut it out! He’s opening his door.”

I glanced at my watch. It was exactly 6:00 p.m. This put him a step ahead of Larry the Unibrow, who, during the brief period he’d dated my mom, showed up anywhere from half an hour to ninety minutes late. Of course, this made a lot more sense when Mom found out he was married. With four kids.

I tried to get a good look at her new date as he crossed the street, but he glanced up toward the window and I had to duck out of sight.

We listened as his feet thumped up the old wooden stairs. Then he rang the bell. We knew he’d rung the bell, even though we didn’t hear it. It had been broken for over a year.

Rosie stood up, but I gripped her arm. “Rosie, you know the rules. Not yet. Besides, if you want to go to the door, you have to put on some clothes.”

Rosie slipped on the clothes she’d been wearing earlier while I grabbed my Magic 8 Ball from its perch on my bookshelf.

I knew Mom’s date was ringing the doorbell again. I knew he was starting to worry that he had the wrong address, or, worse, that he was being stood up.

“Will this guy be any better than all the others?” I asked the Magic 8 Ball, giving it a good shake and flipping it over.

Highly doubtful,
it read. I placed it back on my bookshelf.

Finally – like I knew he would – he knocked.

“Violet, can you get that? I’m still putting on my face,” my mom hollered from the bathroom down the hall.

“Got it,” I shouted back.

“And be nice!”

I slowly made my way to the stairs. Rosie, the colander still on her head, tried to scoot around me, but I spread my arms to block her path.

“Lemme answer!” she shouted.

“Rosie. What have I told you?”

Rosie sighed. “Play it cool.”

As we continued our leisurely descent, I said my little prayer:
Dear God, or Allah, or Buddha or Zeus or Whoever-You-Are, please let this one be okay. Please don’t let him be a cheater (Jonathan), a cheapskate (Alphonse), an alcoholic (Carl), a creep (Guy), married (Larry), or a general, all-around jerk (Dimitri, Paulo, Jake, Yuri).

I said this prayer even though I’m a cynic when it comes to love because I know that my mother is not. You’d think, after what had happened with Dad, that she’d have given up on men and found contentment in a life dedicated to child-rearing, hard work, and celibacy. But, no. Despite a growing list of epic failures, she had this freakish need to have a man in her life. So she dated
like there was no tomorrow, always hoping the next guy would be The One.

Did I think this was a kind of sickness?
Yes!
Did I find it tragic?
Of course! But I also knew that she wasn’t going to stop until she’d found her version of The One, and that once she found him, Rosie and I were going to have to live with it too because, let’s face it, we were a package deal.

So, yeah – a small part of me had no choice but to hope that the next guy would be so spectacularly awesome, he’d put an end to the serial dating that was torture for all of us.

Just as he started to knock again, I opened the door.

The guy blinked like a startled mole. “Oh, hi. I was beginning to think no one was home.”

I gave him my classic once-over.

He was pudgy. His pale skin was sprinkled with freckles. His ears were too small for his head. His hair was reddish brown and thinning. He was wearing a loud multicolored sweater. Its loose fit did not manage to hide his man-boobs.

“You must be Rosie,” he said, bending down to shake her hand. “I like your hat.”

Rosie beamed up at him. “It’s a crown.”

I love my little sister. I really do. But she made my job very difficult because, like Mom, she’s an optimist,
which means she likes
all
of Mom’s dates, at least in the beginning.

“And you must be Violet,” he said to me, holding out his hand. I shook it. His skin was moist and clammy. “I’m Dudley,” he continued. “Dudley Wiener.”

Groan
. I’d seen enough. I turned away without another word. I walked back up the stairs and into our bedroom, where I threw our clothes and sheets into a laundry bag to take to Phoebe’s house. Then I went into Mom’s room and added her clothes to the bag. When I was done, I lined up all the makeup and perfume on her dresser in precise little lines, tallest to shortest.

This was the tenth guy my mom had dated post-Dad. The tenth guy who wouldn’t be good enough for her. The tenth guy who’d either dump her because she was too clingy, or who’d do something so awful, she’d be forced to dump him. The tenth guy who wouldn’t come close to being The One.

I couldn’t be a bystander any longer. Something had to be done.

B
ut first, a little history.

My mom and dad met fourteen years ago, on the set of a TV show called
Crime Beaters
. It was about a bunch of homicide cops who solved a different murder each week. My dad was the first assistant director, which means he shouted at the crew to hurry up and shoot scenes before they lost their light, or their time, or their money. My mom was the on-set hair person, which means she combed and sprayed and bobby-pinned the actors’ and actresses’ hair in between takes. One day, by accident, she blasted some hair spray right into my dad’s eyes. He started to curse. Mom poured water into his eyes and leaned in really close to him, her big green eyes full of concern. According to my dad, “That’s when I knew I was going to marry this woman.”

They tied the knot a year later. Three months after that, I was born. You can do the math.

When I was five years old, they bought the house just east of Main Street. It was a “heritage” home, which Dad said was just a fancy word for “falling apart.” But he was good with his hands, Mom had a great eye for cheap but cool-looking furniture, and together they turned the house into a home. Mom still worked on occasional shoots when she could find good child care for me, and Dad started getting directing gigs, first on
Crime Beaters,
then on other TV series. When I was almost seven, Rosie was born, and Mom and Dad decided that Mom would put work on hold for a few years.

Two years later, when I was nine going on ten, Dad got a job directing a bunch of episodes for a TV series called
Paranormal Pam.
It was about a woman who investigated ghost sightings. The twist was that she was a ghost herself.

I remember sitting at dinner with Dad on the weekends (the only time we ate meals with him while he was directing because he worked really long hours), and he would say things like “I think this show is going to be a hit. The star – Jennica Valentine – is a real find….

“Jennica is unbelievably talented. I had my doubts at first – I just figured she was another blonde bimbo – but, no, she’s got substance. And she’s only twenty-four….

“Jennica said the funniest thing today….”

I guess you could say the clues were there.

One day, Mom decided to surprise Dad by taking us all to the set, so we could have lunch with him. At first, it was sort of like a homecoming for her. Even though Mom had never worked on
Paranormal Pam
, she knew a lot of the crew. Including Karen.

“Ingrid! It’s about frigging time you came to visit!” Karen said, when we entered the hair and makeup trailer. She put me into her chair and started braiding my hair, and, even though I could smell her stale cigarette breath, it was kind of nice.

“I hope Ian’s treating you well,” my mom said.

I was gazing into the mirror, and I saw a look pass between Karen and one of the makeup artists.

“It’s not the same without you here,” Karen replied.

After Karen finished braiding my hair, Mom took us to find Dad. They’d just broken for lunch, but Dad wasn’t in the lunch tent, and no one answered when we knocked on his trailer door.

We were still standing there when another trailer door opened nearby and a woman with long blonde hair, big boobs, and tons of makeup stepped out.

Followed by my dad, who was buckling his belt.

You know that expression “the color drained from his face”? That’s what happened to my dad when he spotted us.

So I might have been only nine, but I knew something big was going down. I didn’t know what, exactly, but I did know that a man shouldn’t be buckling his belt in front of a woman who wasn’t his wife.

“Ingrid, hi!” Dad said, forcing a smile. “What a nice surprise.”

“We thought we’d join you for lunch,” Mom said, her voice a weird monotone. “But I can see you’re busy.”

“No, no, Jennica and I were just going over some line changes, that’s all. Jennica, this is Ingrid, my,
um,
wife.”

Jennica’s face turned fire engine red. “Hi, there! I’ve heard so much about you.”

“And these are my girls, Violet and Rose,” Dad continued, trying to act like everything was perfectly normal.

“What lovely names! I love violets,” she said to me.

I hid behind my mom.

Jennica’s smile was frozen on her face. “Well, nice to meet you,” she said, then ducked back into her trailer and slammed the door.

Dad turned to us and smiled. “Well, troops, shall we eat?”

“Screw you, Ian,” my mom said quietly. “You will tell me everything when you get home.” Clutching Rosie
to her chest, she grabbed my hand, pulling me so hard I thought my arm would come out of its socket. Dad didn’t try to stop her.

That night, Mom got what she asked for.

He told her everything.

“Your mother and I are going to live apart for a while,” Dad announced a week later. He’d taken me on a bike ride to La Casa Gelato. We were sitting outside, and I was working my way through a massive cone of Rocky Road. (Phoebe told me later that my choice of flavors was psychologically significant. Her parents’ profession couldn’t help but rub off on her somewhat.)