Dear George Clooney by Susin Nielsen
“Your mom gets around, doesn’t she?” Ashley said. “Remember last year, when she dated our sub?”
Groan. As if I could forget.
What happened was this: In sixth grade, we’d had a sub for a few weeks. His name was Paulo Cassini, and he filled in for our teacher while she dealt with a family emergency. Mom met him at parent-teacher night, and he started making eyes at her. Right in front of me. Right in front of a few of the other parents. It was barf-inducing.
They only went out a handful of times because he was a Dungeons and Dragons fanatic, and it was all he ever talked about. Their short dating history might have remained yet another yucky-but-brief Gustafson Family Secret if Ashley and some of her friends hadn’t seen them together at the Park Theater one night, standing in the popcorn line, holding hands.
Honestly, parent-teacher dating should be outlawed. “If I were you,” Ashley said now as she applied one more layer of lip gloss, “I’d want my mom to nip the PDA’s in the butt.”
“Bud,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nip the PDA’s in the bud. You said butt.”
Ashley gave a dismissive laugh. “Come on, Lauren,” she said, and Thing Two obediently followed Thing One out of the room.
Claudia was sitting next to Phoebe, wrapping her big wad of gum in a piece of paper so she could reuse it later. “You’re lucky,” she said to me. “I wish my mom was still playing the field. She hooked up with my stepdad two months after my dad left. He’s a total jerk-face. Soon as I’m sixteen, I am out of there.”
The door to the gym swung open, and Ms. Baldelli blew her whistle. “Girls, get a move on!”
We were spared doing line dancing because Ms. Baldelli forgot her CD player. She made us play dodge-ball instead. Every ball I threw was aimed at Ashley’s head, but no matter how hard I tried, I never hit her.
But she got me in the nether regions. Twice.
“So, Violet. What do you think of this new guy your mom’s seeing?” Karen asked me, without glancing up from her laptop. She was sitting in one of the salon chairs, her feet crossed under her. Phoebe and I sat beside her at my mom’s workstation, flipping through copies of US magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Rosie sat in her favorite chair farther down, spinning in circles. Once in a while, I would glance up at George Clooney’s grinning face and try to send him positive vibes.
I looked straight at Karen and pretended to stick a finger down my throat.
“You don’t like any of your mom’s boyfriends,” Karen replied.
“That’s because they’re all losers.”
“Hey. I set her up with some of those so-called losers.”
“Yeah, and they were the worst ones of all.”
Karen gave me the hairy eyeball, but she didn’t contradict me because she knew I spoke the truth. She’d set my mom up with Carl, the first guy Mom had dated post-Dad. He seemed like a sweet funny guy at first. But Mom quickly found out that he went all Jekyll and Hyde when he drank. After she told him she didn’t want to see him anymore, he showed up at our house one night, drunk as a skunk. Mom wasn’t home. When I refused to let him in (duh), he picked up a rock and hurled it through our front window.
The Brights saw it happen. They were the ones who called the cops. We never saw Carl again.
Karen was also the one who set my mom up with Jonathan. In some ways, Jonathan had been the worst of all.
“She seems to like him,” Karen said now. “What’s his last name again? Frankfurter?”
“Wiener,” I said. “Dudley Wiener.”
Karen cackled. “That’s a truly unfortunate name.”
“Shouldn’t you be working or something?” I said. My mom was helping Mohamed give a woman a perm a few chairs down.
“I’m here if the students need me,” she replied. “I’m just checking my Facebook page. Speaking of which, how come you haven’t friended me yet?”
Phoebe and I peered at each other over our magazines. We were both on Facebook; all the kids at school were. Personally, the thrill of Facebook had worn off pretty quickly for me, possibly because I had just nine friends and one was Phoebe and one was my mom. I only checked my page about once a week. So when I’d logged on last week and seen 1 friend request, I won’t lie, I was kind of excited. Until I found out the request was from Karen. The urge to hit IGNORE was overwhelming. But instead I hadn’t hit CONFIRM or IGNORE. I just logged out instead.
“Oh,” I lied, “did you try to friend me? I haven’t been on in such a long time.”
“Well, friend me back. I’m about to break the three hundred mark.”
Honestly, it was hard to believe Karen was in her late thirties sometimes.
Mohamed had just put his client under a hairdryer, so Mom came and joined us. She was wearing a shirt that covered her spare tire today, which was a relief.
“Do you want that trim now?” she asked me.
“Sure, thanks.”
Karen made a face as my mom started trimming my hair. “It looks better longer, Violet. You should let it grow out. Boys like girls with long hair.”
“Then this is perfect because I don’t want boys to like me.”
“Why? Are you gay?”
“Karen –” my mom began.
“I’m not gay,” I replied. “I’m just not interested.”
“Seriously? Man, I was boy crazy by the time I was five,” Karen said, chuckling at the memory.
“Yeah, and look where that’s got you.”
Phoebe snorted from behind her magazine. Karen opened her mouth to retort, but Mom cut her off. “Enough, you two. Violet, remember you have to call your dad when you get home.”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m serious. After making your sister lie for you yesterday …”
“She didn’t lie. She said, She says she’s not here.”
“Don’t argue with me. He’s expecting your call after school today.” She tugged gently on my ear. “You can’t avoid him forever, Violet. You need to clear the air.”
“Don’t tell me you still haven’t apologized?” asked Karen, incredulous.
“Shut up, Karen,” I replied. Which was just another way of saying no.
When we got home, I gave Rosie a glass of milk and a granola bar from the Costco mega-pack in the cupboard and sent her down to the basement to watch a video. Then I ran upstairs to my bedroom and grabbed my Magic 8 Ball.
Phoebe was already sitting on the gold couch when I came into the living room. I sat on the red couch.
“Are you sure about this?” Phoebe asked.
I shrugged. “It’ll keep things interesting. Ready?”
“Ready.”
I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hello?” I heard my dad’s voice on the other end. So did Phoebe, since I had us on speakerphone.
I didn’t reply.
“Violet, is that you? We have call display.”
I shook the Magic 8 Ball. “It is decidedly so.”
“I’m glad you called. We have lots to talk about. How are you?”
I shook it again. “Ask again later.”
There was a pause. “Hey, I’m directing an episode of Glamour Girl starting next week. Isn’t it your favorite show?”
It was. But since the Magic 8 Ball was providing my answers, I said, “Don’t count on it.”
There was another pause. I could tell he was trying really hard not to sound frustrated, which gave me a great deal of satisfaction. “Yeah, I guess your favorite shows change all the time. Too bad, I got you Carly Joseph’s autograph.”
Phoebe and I looked at each other, our eyes wide. We loved Carly Joseph.
“Maybe I’ll send it anyway. If you don’t want it, Rosie might.”
“It is certain.”
There was another pause. “Are you answering me from a Magic 8 Ball?”
“Signs point to yes.”
“Well, cut it out, okay?” he said, and this time he didn’t hide his frustration. “We hav
I shook the Magic 8 Ball. “My reply is no.”
Dad took a deep breath. “Look. You and your sister are supposed to be coming down for March Break. But until you apologize … I can’t allow it.”
To be honest, this stung a little, but I kept my expression neutral for Phoebe’s sake.
“How could you have done it, Violet?” he continued. “They’re two years old. They’re your sisters, for crying out loud!” He sounded genuinely upset now.
Phoebe covered her face with her hands, peering through the cracks between her fingers like she was watching a horror movie.
I didn’t answer. Part of me wanted to shout that of course I was sorry, that I knew it was a terrible thing I’d done. But part of me wanted to shout that what he’d done to us was so much worse, and nobody had ever made him apologize.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m done. Just remember that I love you.”
I shook the ball one last time. “Highly doubtful,” I said. Then I hung up.
Phoebe looked at me, a cushion crushed against her chest. “Wow,” she said. “That was better than TV.” She shook her head. “You’re truly awful.”
But the way she said it, I could tell it was a compliment.
— 9 —
After Dad moved to Los Angeles to be with Jennica, I made like a turtle and went into my shell. I spent most of my spare time alone in my room, reading or doing weird obsessive reorganizing of our clothes, our books, our toys. When I was done with the stuff in our room, I’d sneak into Mom’s room and organize her shoes by color, or line up everything in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom according to size. It wasn’t so much about cleaning as it was about wanting everything to be in its proper place.
Phoebe tried to pull me out of myself for the first couple of weeks, but when she realized it wasn’t working, did she abandon me? No. She’d just come over with a book of her own, and the two of us would read in my room for hours without talking. If I needed to take some time out to reorganize all the towels and sheets in our linen closet, she wouldn’t say a word. We traded books we liked, and by the end of those first few months, I’d read the Narnia series, the Alice, I Think trilogy, plus everything Judy Blume and Roald Dahl had ever written.
Mom was worried about me, but she had a lot of other stuff on her plate. She had to look after Rosie; she had to think about going back to work; and she was dealing with her own grief. At first I thought grief was a weird word to use because it wasn’t like my dad had died or anything. But Amanda explained to me one night that grief was the perfect word.
“Your mom has suffered a big loss. You all have.”
I didn’t tell Amanda that I sometimes wished Dad was dead. Killed in a car crash, or struck by lightning. I thought it would be easier to grieve if he was dead and buried, instead of alive and well and living in L.A. with a bimbo who was about to give him a new set of children to love.
Eventually, on Amanda’s advice, my mom sent me to a therapist to help me work through my feelings. The therapist’s name was Dr. Belinda Boniface, which was a pretty fabulous name. She was nice enough, I guess. I only went a handful of times because Dr. Belinda Boniface charged a lot of money for her services, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me since all she did was ask questions and watch me play with dolls.
One day she asked me to draw a picture of our family. This is what I drew.
She noticed that my dad wasn’t in the picture, so she asked me to draw a picture of him. This is what I drew.
Afterward, Dr. Belinda Boniface told my mom that these drawings indicated that I was feeling a lot of anger toward my dad.
Duh, I remembered thinking. I hardly needed expensive therapy for someone to tell me that.
— 10 —
“What’s your alias?” I asked Phoebe. “Nancy,” she said.
“As in Drew?”
“But, of course.”
“And what are you looking for?”
“A gift for my mom’s birthday.”
It was a Tuesday night, and Rosie and I were hanging out at Phoebe’s house. We’d just demolished one of Cathy’s delicious stir-fries and were working our way through wedges of Günter’s apple pie. We’d come by after school so I could do a couple of loads of laundry, and when Cathy had heard that my mom was going out with Dudley again, she’d invited us to stay for dinner.
“Remember to bring binoculars,” Phoebe said.
“Binoculars, check.”
“I’ll bring walkie-talkies.”
“Walkie-talkies, check. I’ll bring sandwiches.”
“And I’ll bring cookies and juice boxes.”
“I like Dudley,” Rosie piped up, her mouth full of pie.
“I know you do. But we have to make sure he doesn’t have any nasty secrets. Remember Jonathan?”
“He hurted Mom’s feelings.”
“Exactly. We don’t want that to happen again, do we?”
Rosie shook her head. She stuffed her last bite of pie into her mouth, then jumped out of her chair to find Günter, who’d promised to play a game with her on the Wii.
“You know, we wouldn’t need to do any of this if George would just answer my letter,” I said. It had been almost a month since I’d sent it, and I still didn’t have a response.
Phoebe shrugged. “He’s probably really busy. Anyway, I’m glad we’re doing this. I’ll finally get to see what The Wiener looks like.”
I sighed. “He looks like a wiener.”
I couldn’t believe my mom was still seeing Dudley. She definitely wasn’t doing it for his looks. And she certainly wasn’t doing it for his stupid gifts. We were now the proud owners of a matching toothbrush holder to go with the soap dish, bathtub stickers, a toilet brush (! seriously), and toilet paper with hearts printed all over it.
And she couldn’t be seeing him for his money because if he had any, he clearly didn’t like to spend it.
“We went to a free jazz concert in a church,” Mom told us one night.
Or, “We went for a long walk down at Jericho Beach in the rain.”
Or, “He took me to a free lecture by the Tree-Hugging Granny.”
And she absolutely, positively wasn’t seeing him for his sense of humor. I’d recently had my darkest suspicions confirmed: Dudley was a punster.
While he’d waited for Mom to get ready one night, Dudley played Go Fish with Rosie in the living room. “This game is starting to give me a haddock,” he said. “Hey, you just had your tuna. Do you think I cod have my tuna now?” Rosie, of course, thought this kind of wordplay was hilarious. He had her in hysterics. When Mom joined them, he said, “Rosie’s giving me a halibut hard time here, Ingrid.”
Mom had actually giggled.
“You do realize that puns are the lowest form of humor,” I said.
He’d nodded happily. “I know. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. I love words! I love the English language.”
Then stop massacring it! I’d wanted to shout.
Tonight The Wiener had taken my mom to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Why? Because it was pay-what-you-can Tuesday. Phoebe and I had decided that since the next day was a Professional Development day and we didn’t have to go to school, we would seize the opportunity to spy on Dudley.
It wouldn’t be the first time we’d spied on one of Mom’s boyfriends, and we were quite good at it. We’d read the ultimate detective handbook, Harriet the Spy, at least three times each. And between us, we’d devoured a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories and about ten of the Nancy Drew mysteries, after I’d discovered a box full of them at a yard sale two summers ago. Nancy was a little outdated, but some of her techniques were still relevant.
Most of Mom’s dates had simply provided a chance for Phoebe and me to perfect my list of questions for interrogation purposes. For example, we didn’t add the question about addicti
CASE #1: GUY FORNIER
Guy was pronounced the French way, like “Gee” with a hard G. Mom met him on Havalife. Guy had lots of thick black hair and designer glasses, which made him look smarter than he really was. He wore expensive suits and worked in an office building downtown, and he must have made a lot of money because he drove a very expensive sports car that had only two seats, which was the first clue that he wasn’t child-friendly.
Guy hated Rosie and me. Oh, he’d fake it in front of my mom, but whenever she left the room, he’d go all cold and weird. Once, I’d simply asked him if he had a criminal record or any aliases we should know about, and he’d said to me, “Too bad your mom couldn’t put you up for adoption.”
The thought of him becoming a more permanent part of our lives made me feel sick. So Phoebe and I took a page out of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles: We set a trap.
Next time Guy was scheduled to pick Mom up, Phoebe and I bought a chocolate cake mix and told Rosie we were going to bake him a cake. We let Rosie add the water and the egg and stir. By the time she was done, her hands and face were covered in batter.
The doorbell rang because it was still working back then. “I’ll get it!” Rosie shouted, running out of the room.
Phoebe and I followed. We watched from the hallway as Rosie did what we knew she would. She launched herself at Guy and threw her arms around him.
He looked down at his white-and-blue pin-striped shirt and navy jacket, which were both covered in brown handprints. His face twisted with anger.
FOR THE RECORD: If I’d had any idea what he was going to do next, I would never, ever have sent my sister into the line of fire.
He grabbed her and smacked her on the bum. Once. Twice.
Phoebe and I were so shocked, we couldn’t speak. I wanted to tear out his thick black hair. Rosie, of course, burst into tears.