Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom (4 page)

“Why?” I asked.

“It has nothing to do with you, sweetie. It’s just that sometimes adults … they fall out of love.”

“You’ve fallen out of love with Mommy?”

“Not exactly. I still love her. I always will, in a way.”

“But you love the blonde lady with the boobs better.”

There was a pause. “Jennica. Her name is Jennica.”

Two weeks later, Dad moved out of our house and into a furnished apartment in Yaletown. Rosie and I slept over on Wednesdays and every other weekend. This change
in our routine didn’t seem to bother Rosie at first; she was only two, and she acted like the whole thing was just a temporary adventure.

As for me, I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t help thinking about what had gone on
before
Dad buckled his belt, when he and Jennica were alone in the trailer.

As Phoebe said, it was a lot for a kid to process.

Luckily Jennica was never over at his apartment when we were there. But sometimes Dad would plop us in front of the TV and go into his bedroom and close the door and have long talks with her on the phone.

Once, when he was talking to her, I picked up one of his
Paranormal Pam
scripts, which he’d left lying on the glass-topped coffee table. I randomly flipped it open to a page and read.

I could hear Dad in the other room, still talking quietly to Jennica. Rosie was staring at the TV, transfixed. I picked my nose, smeared the booger on the page I’d just read, and closed the script.

Phoebe would later tell me that this was classic passive-aggressive behavior.

Whatever. I just knew that, in the moment, it felt pretty good.

At our place, my mom was trying hard not to fall apart. Most nights, Karen or Amanda would come over with a pizza or a frozen lasagna for dinner, and once Rosie and I had gone to bed, they’d talk long into the night. I was glad my mom had her girlfriends because the mood around the house during those first few months pretty much
sucked. At least when Karen and Amanda were over, I could escape to Phoebe’s house without feeling guilty.

“We can’t just sit here and let this happen,” Phoebe said to me one weekend, while we were holed up in my room. She’d stayed for dinner and witnessed my mom crying over the kitchen sink as she washed the dishes.

“But what can we do?” I asked.

Phoebe thought for a moment. “I saw this movie with my parents once. Some crazy woman was in love with this guy, but he was in love with someone else. So she made a voodoo doll of his fiancée and started to make the fiancée sick with black magic. It gave me nightmares for months.” Cathy and Günter took Phoebe to all sorts of movies that were what my mom called “age-inappropriate.”

“Are you suggesting we make a voodoo doll of Jennica?”

“Precisely. Then we can put a curse on her. Not to kill her, of course. Just to get her away from your dad.”

Phoebe was an excellent ideas person.

So we printed some instructions from the web and got to work. Using scraps of fabric and stuffing, we made a basic doll, about six inches high. When the body of the doll was complete, Phoebe stitched a mouth onto it, and I sewed on two buttons for eyes.

“We need hair,” Phoebe said. “Jennica’s hair. And we need a personal object that belongs to her.”

The next time I was over at Dad’s, I snuck into his bedroom while he was cooking dinner. It didn’t take me long to find a lipstick that had rolled under the bed. In the bathroom I found a pink hairbrush, filled with long blonde hairs. I pulled the hairs out of the brush and slipped them into a Baggie, along with the lipstick.

After school the next day, Phoebe and I went to her house. We stuck the hair on the doll’s head with some glue, then smeared Jennica’s lipstick on its mouth. We held the doll up to the light, feeling quite proud of our work.

Then we cast the spell. We stuck a bunch of straight pins into the Jennica doll and chanted, “May ill fortune befall you! May you be forced to leave this city! May you leave Ian’s life forever!” We repeated this process every day for a month.

On the final day, Karen dropped by to see Mom. Phoebe and I were in the kitchen doing homework.

“Ingrid, I have some interesting news,” Karen announced, as she pulled out a bottle of wine. “Violet, Phoebe. Am-scray.”

We clomped down the stairs to the basement and turned on the TV. Then we tiptoed back up the stairs and listened at the basement door.

“The show wrapped last week,” Karen said. “Jennica took the first plane back to Los Angeles. Said she couldn’t wait to get out of this rain-drenched town.”

“Really,” Mom said, and I could hear a hint of hopefulness creep into her voice.

“And they screened an episode at the wrap party. What a steaming turd. I’d be shocked if it gets renewed.”

Phoebe and I tiptoed back down the stairs and did a little dance, convinced our curse had worked.

Sure enough, just like Karen had predicted, the network aired only three episodes before canceling the show. Phoebe and I figured it was only a matter of time before my dad came crawling back home with his tail between his legs. I think my mom figured the
same thing because she started taking showers again.

So we were all blindsided when Dad announced that he was moving to L.A. to live with Jennica.

And that he was filing for divorce.

And that Jennica was pregnant with the twins.

That night, my sister wet her bed for the first time. After she fell back to sleep, I took all of my books off the shelf and carefully rearranged them in alphabetical order by author, from Louisa May Alcott to Paul Zindel.

When I was done, I took them all down again and rearranged them in alphabetical order by title, from
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
to
Wind in the Willows.

It was the first time I’d ever done a weirdly obsessive thing like that. But it wouldn’t be the last.

“C
ome on, Amanda, you
must
know some decent single men.”

It was a rainy Saturday morning, and Phoebe and I were talking to Amanda in the knitting shop she owned on Main Street. It was called Wild and Woolly and was just a couple of blocks away from the William Berto School of Hair Design. Mom and Amanda had met when Mom signed up for Amanda’s first-ever “Stitch and Bitch” workshop five years ago. As far as I could tell, this meant a group of women got together in her store after hours and did ten percent knitting, thirty percent drinking, and sixty percent complaining about men. They’d been good friends ever since.

“If I did, don’t you think I’d have introduced them to your mom by now?” Amanda answered, as she stocked
a shelf with balls of emerald green angora wool. “Besides, your mom tells me this new guy is different.”

“She said that about Paulo, too,” Phoebe said.

“And Jonathan, and Alphonse, and Guy,” I added.

Amanda sighed. “Yeah, I know. But maybe she’s right this time.”

“Please. I’ve met him. He looks like Mole Man.”

“Who’s Mole Man?”

“I don’t know, I made it up. But that’s what he looks like – part man, part mole.”

“And his name is Dudley
Wiener
,” Phoebe added.

“Now, girls. Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Amanda said, as she headed back to the counter, Phoebe and I trailing behind her. “Remember, my boyfriend’s name is Cosmo.”

“True,” I replied, “but Cosmo is hot.”

“Totally,” sighed Phoebe.

Confession: I might be a love cynic, but Amanda and Cosmo were the one couple I rooted for. They’d been seeing each other for almost two years and were perfect for each other, like a right shoe and a left. When I saw them together, my heart did like the Grinch’s when he heard little Cindy Lou Who sing that day … it grew.

“Cosmo must have some friends,” I said.

But Amanda just laughed as she tucked a piece of her long red hair behind her ear. “He has plenty of
friends. And I wouldn’t wish any of them on your mother.”

“They couldn’t be any worse than Guy. Or that drunk Karen set her up with,” said Phoebe.

“Carl,” I said.

“True,” Amanda replied. “But they’re still not good enough for your mom. Besides, it’s not all about looks and names, and you know it. Maybe Dudley’s got a great personality.”

“Highly doubtful,” I said. “But I guess I’ll find out tonight.”

“Tonight?” Amanda raised an eyebrow.

“She’s invited him to dinner.”

“Wow. That was fast.”

I nodded glumly. Usually we were spared that unique form of torture until after she’d had at least a few dates. And since Mom hadn’t even mentioned her first date with Dudley afterward, I kind of figured it was over before it had ever really started.

Last night, I found out I was wrong.

What happened was this: Mom arrived home shortly after six, carrying a DVD and a take-out bag full of Thai food from Sawasdee, just like she did every Friday night. Rosie placed a blanket in front of the TV, and I arranged the food on top of the blanket while Mom grabbed a cold beer for herself and glasses of milk for Rosie and
me. Then Mom popped in the movie, and we all sat down on the blanket and started to eat.

It was the same routine week after week, and I loved it. See, Friday night is the official Gustafson Girls’ Night. It’s the one night of the week that Mom keeps free and clear for me and Rosie. No dates, no company – not even Phoebe or Karen or Amanda. Just the three of us.

Anyway, last night we were about half an hour into
Ocean’s Eleven
, a caper movie starring George Clooney, when the phone rang. We aren’t supposed to answer the phone during Gustafson Girls’ Night. But when Mom saw the number on call display, she picked up, blatantly breaking one of our rules.

“Hello?” Mom said, like she didn’t already know who it was. “Dudley, hi …” She left the room, clutching the portable phone to her ear. She was gone for almost half an hour. I know because Rosie and I watched a whole episode of “Jeopardy!” while we waited.

When she returned, I said, “You do realize you are in violation of a number of official Gustafson Girls’ Night rules.”

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “I hope you girls don’t mind … I’ve invited Dudley to dinner tomorrow night.”

“What? You’ve only been on one date,” I protested.

“Well, yes and no. We’ve had coffee every morning this week.”

“Really.” It bugged me that I hadn’t known this. “What kind of job does he have that he has time to sit around drinking coffee with you every morning?” I asked. “Or is he ‘between jobs’ like Jake?”

“He owns a bath shop. It doesn’t open till ten.”

“A bath shop. Like, he sells tubs?”

“No, items for the bath. Towels, shower curtains, soap dishes –”

“Toilets?”

“No, Violet.”

“Toilets for pooping in,” giggled Rosie.

“Anyway,” Mom continued, “he’d like to meet you both.”

“Why? Is he a pedophile?”

“Violet!”

I was getting on her nerves, and it felt quite satisfying.

“What’s a pedal file?” asked Rosie.

At that point, Mom just grabbed the remote and restarted the movie, and that had been the end of that.

“You’re
sure
Cosmo doesn’t have any friends?” I asked Amanda again.

“For the last time, I’m sure. And might I point out, it’s not really your job to find a man for your mom.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “But since she’s so dead-set on having a man in her life, and since her choices affect us, too –”

“Yeah, remember the rock-throwing incident?” Phoebe interjected.

“I’ve made it my mission to find someone more suitable,” I concluded.

“And I’m her sidekick,” Phoebe said. “The Watson to her Sherlock. The Gayle to her Oprah. The Robin to her Batman –”

“I get it,” Amanda said. “So you don’t think Dudley’s The One?”

“God, no.”

“I think Dudley’s nice,” Rosie announced as she joined us from the back of the store, where she’d been checking out the bins of buttons.

“You think everyone’s nice,” I reminded her. “And you met him for five minutes.”