“The girl tore her wings. They were a present from our dad.”
“That’s still no excuse for biting. Will you tell your mother what happened, or should I write a note?”
I held out my hands and pulled Rosie to her feet, refusing to make eye contact with Alison. “I’ll tell her,” I lied. Then to Rosie, “I might be able to fix your wings.”
I held Rosie’s hand as we walked the two blocks to Main Street, my backpack slung over one shoulder, her backpack slung over the other. The hoods of our jackets were pulled up to protect us from the cold January rain.
When we reached Main Street, we stopped so Rosie could press her nose against the window of the Liberty Bakery and gaze at the mouthwatering baked goods on display in the glass cases. A few blocks later, we crossed King Edward and stopped to inhale the aroma of bacon wafting from Helen’s Diner. Another block up, we arrived outside the William Berto School of Hair Design. I opened the door, and we clomped up the stairs.
The school took up the entire second floor of the building. By the windows facing the street, a row of stations were set up for the students, with swivel chairs and giant mirrors. On the far wall was a row of sinks. A few students were at their stations, cutting and coloring customers’ hair. Because they always needed heads to practice on, the school advertised five-dollar haircuts, and they got a steady stream of walk-ins.
“Girls, hi!” my mom said, waving us over. She was giving her friend Amanda a trim. She stopped what she was doing to give us each a hug.
Even though she was in her late thirties, my mom was still super-pretty. She had thick brown hair that fell just past her shoulders, green eyes, and lips that my dad used to call irresistibly kissable. She’d even managed to keep her figure, for the most part.
It was her clothes I couldn’t stand. She’d started dressing differently after the divorce papers were signed. Her jeans were too tight, and her shirt was cropped to let her stomach show, a stomach that had had to stretch not once but twice to hold babies. A soft layer of flab drooped over the waist of her pants. To top it off, her belly button was pierced – a belated birthday gift from her friend Karen after they’d had a few too many margaritas one night.
I sat down in the chair next to Amanda’s. “Good to see you guys,” Amanda said, giving us each a high five. Amanda was younger than my mom and wore really cool clothes, a combination of secondhand stuff and amazing sweaters she’d knit herself. But even though she probably could have pulled it off, she didn’t expose a lot of flesh. If only Mom had taken her fashion cues from Amanda and not her other best friend.
“Thanks for the hats; we wear them all the time,” I said to Amanda as I took off my toque. She’d knit one for me and one for Rosie for Christmas. Mine was a dog hat, complete with eyes and whiskers, and the flaps on the sides were knit to look like beagle ears. Rosie’s was a kitten hat, with little cat ears sewn onto the top.
“Can you cut my hair when you’re done?” I asked my mom.
“I thought you were letting it grow out.”
“I changed my mind.”
“I wanna play in a chair,” Rosie said. She loved to spin around and around in one of the chairs until she was so dizzy, she couldn’t stand up.
“Sure thing, sweetie. Take the one in the far corner.” Rosie skipped away.
Once she was gone, Amanda grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Violet, you know I love you. But cat turds?”
I turned to Mom. “Did you have to tell everyone?”
“Amanda isn’t everyone,” Mom replied. “She’s one of my best friends.”
“As long as you didn’t tell your other best friend,” I said, just as I heard a cackle behind me.
I didn’t need to turn around because I could see her in the mirror: Karen, approaching at high speed. You know those old cartoons where the character has an angel version of himself sitting on one shoulder and a devil version on the other? Well, Amanda was like my mom’s angel version because she brought out the best in her. Karen was like my mom’s devil version because she brought out the worst.
“Cat turds!” She laughed, an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, Violet, that’s a new low.”
“Hey, Karen. Nice shirt,” I said, nodding at her two-sizes-too-small sheer black top that announced, in big gold letters, COUGAR. I could clearly see her pink bra underneath. She wore a thick layer of makeup, and her hair was dyed platinum blonde.
Mom and Karen had what my mom referred to as “history.” They used to work as a team in the film and TV business – Mom as the key hairstylist, Karen as her assistant. Karen was even there when my mom met my dad. Shortly after Rosie was born, Mom left the business to stay home with us, but when Dad took off, she needed to find a job fast. A job with regular hours and a steady paycheck. That’s how she wound up teaching at the William Berto School of Hair Design. It was in the neighborhood, the pay was okay, and they loved my mom’s work. Within a year, she was promoted to assistant manager. Six months later, Mom hired Karen, after she was fired from two productions in a row for showing up late all the time.
Yup. That was my mom in a nutshell: always wanting to see the best in people, even when it was clear to everyone else that they were nothing but losers.
“Maybe you need to see that therapist again,” Karen said to me as she reapplied her lipstick in the mirror. “That’s pretty twisted behavior.”
My cheeks burned. Oh, how I hated her sometimes.
“Karen,” my mom said in her warning voice, “I’ve dealt with it. And Violet’s going to properly apologize, aren’t you, Violet?”
“We really need to get the washing machine fixed,” I said.
“I know. And we will, in a couple more weeks. I’m still paying off Christmas.”
“If you could’ve seen Dad’s new house –”
“Violet –”
“What about his new house?” asked Amanda.
“It’s huge. They just bought it. Dad’s obviously loaded. He has way more money than when you guys first split up.”
“Violet, enough. We’ve been through this. I don’t want to take more of his money.”
“But why?”
“Because she doesn’t want to get handouts from that cheating son of a bitch, right, Ingrid?” Karen said.
“Karen, do not trash-talk the girls’ father in front of them,” Mom said.
“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 exa
ctly 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.
— 3 —
He 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.
— 4 —
But 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 befo
re 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.
Dear George Clooney Page 2