Letter to George Clooney

by Debra Adelaide

  Lacey is rapt because Jamie wears jeans and rides a motorbike and Dawn can tell she’s even rethinking the meat thing, but all she says is, You know he’s got another cookbook out? And she feels like replying, Yeah and you know I could cook veal in peppercorns and dance about in the kitchen pureeing cold soup too, but as if you and Jackson’d eat it, but relations are still strained because of the netball trip.

  TESTIMONIALS FROM PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS: ‘I have received many letters over the years similar to this one and although I am sceptical by nature, there was something different about yours, which has been proven by the wonderful results. Thank you David Rhodes forever.’ Mr L Cavanaugh, Adelaide.

  The next letter, she is pleased to see, is beneath contempt.

  THIS IS NOT A SCAM OR ILLEGAL

  DO NOT THROW THIS IS THE BIN

  READ IT FULY

  THIN ABOUT IT FOR A FEW DAYS

  FILE IN PENDING.

  Although it starts the usual way, My name is David Rhodes and in September 2000 I lost my job, it is clear that David Rhodes has had nothing to do with this letter. She is sure that if he knew of the poor quality of chain letters now in circulation bearing his name he would be horrified. He would not want his reputation associated with letters featuring errors in the second line, or ones that claim, This is legitimate business opportunity and perfectly legal.

  And when she looks at the list of five names and addresses at the end of the letter she suspects it is a joke, except why would you waste money on a joke like this? The last name listed, the name of the sender, is IT Works with a post box address somewhere in South Australia. If she were David Rhodes and she knew people were mocking his scheme like this she would be truly disappointed in humanity. She is more sad than annoyed, as she is sure there would be people responding to that letter in genuine good faith and that is unfair. Not everyone picks up errors like that, but not everyone is like her and used to compiling weekly business reports and proofreading marketing strategy initiatives where inattention to detail has cost some people their jobs.

  The next evening when she gets home Margie has placed the mail on the kitchen bench, right next to the latest letter which she forgot to throw away. Which she would have read, though as if Dawn would take any notice of something so badly spelled. She hopes Margie doesn’t think she’s keeping it for a reason. There’s also a letter with a Spanish stamp, along with one from the local Holden dealer inviting her to their end of year sale (FINANCE CAN BE ARRANGED!), the Medicare receipt and a bank statement. She notices the date on the statement. It is more than sixty days since she has sent her letters out. Her ten-dollar notes should be arriving pretty soon now.

  LOTERIAS Y APUESTAS DEL ESTADO

  FROM: THE DESK OF THE VICE PRESIDENT

  INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS PRIZE AWARD DEPT.

  RE: AWARD NOTIFICATION, FINAL NOTICE.

  Dear Sir/Madam

  We are pleasured to inform you today of the release of the result of EL GORDO DE LA PRIMITIVA LOTTERY MIDDLE OF THE YEAR HIGH STAKE INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM.

  Your name and lucky ticket numbers 14–26–27–40–43–58 have WON Lottery number 0016/3592/12, second division.

  The letter goes on to say she has won €785,510.00 (Seven Hundred and Eighty-Five Thousand, Five Hundred and Ten Euros) from a total cash prize of over five million euros. She is congratulated. To claim her winnings she only has to contact an agent called Don Ricardo Sanchez by the end of August. She is to quote the reference number and the code at the bottom of the letter, and all her bank account details to ensure speedy payment. And again, congratulations. There is a form for her to fill in all her personal details and bank account number, which she can scan and email back if she prefers. Ordinary mail will do, but she must remember to hurry.

  She doesn’t know any Spanish but she would say there’s a typo or two in there for sure. She places the letter and the form on the bench, where Margie spots it on her way to the sink with the kids’ dirty bowls. Then she glances at Dawn and away again and raises her eyebrows and they both snicker knowingly, both thinking, As if.

  Harder than Your Husband

  The reasons people act the way they do never fail to fascinate me. Even when there is a clear line between cause and effect, it still intrigues me, the choices they make. That is, as if there are no choices. As if they have dropped into the groove of a disc and they must follow it around and around until it stops.

  I manage a pastry factory, a medium-sized business in the vicinity of Wetherill Park. We employ about twenty people, mostly on the factory floor. I know nothing about pastry, but I have a good head for administration and marketing, while the owner of the factory, Mario, spends all his time in the kitchens. The only time he comes into the office is to hold a new product under my nose. When I show him forms that need to be signed and statements that should be read, he just laughs. ‘Try this,’ he’ll say. It will be something buttery and crumbly, or rich with cream. Lately he has been experimenting with white chocolate and almond milk ganache.

  Some time ago I advertised in the local paper and online through several agencies for a part-time bookkeeper and accounts clerk to cope with the modest but steady growth of the business. After nearly thirty applications I interviewed six women. Only women applied for the job. For some reason all the interviewees were overweight. By the last I began to worry whether the successful applicant may encounter problems working in an environment inimical to good health and general wellbeing. Mario, perhaps due to the fact that he is constantly on his feet, is pole-thin. I myself have no problem with weight, and though several of the factory workers are overweight, clearly this does not constitute a problem for them. Most seem uncaring of the fact, and if they continue to eat the pastries and other products they handle, they do so more from curiosity. I have noticed that after a week or two, for the factory workers, the novelty of working in this place is replaced by revulsion, then indifference.

  This factory, I should explain, only manufactures sweet pastries and cakes. We supply a range of cafes and restaurants all over the city, and several cake shops in the district.

  The final interviewee, however, was only slightly overweight, in fact I would not say overweight at all unless I were very unkind and the type who focused critically upon a woman’s hips and thighs. Cheryl came with impressive references. Her most recent job, six months previously, was as the office manager for the spare parts division of a large car company. After that she had given up full-time work to concentrate on getting her house in order – quite literally – before deciding whether to keep it or sell it. Cheryl was also about to be married. She wanted a part-time job only, in order to spend more time with her new husband, and to be able to assist in his car detailing business.

  I could tell straight away that she was highly efficient and a well-motivated worker, someone who would be able to work without supervision if necessary, which it was, seeing as I had started to spend a lot of time away promoting our products and securing new markets. We were looking to expand interstate and lately I had been in Melbourne and Perth. Our products travel well. Mario’s cousin is a designer and has created some clever packaging, especially for the most fragile pastries, the lemon curd tarts and the macaroons. Mario, needless to say, is indifferent to these plans.

  After okaying my decision with Mario, who barely paused in folding rice flour through his meringue mix – another experiment with setting and durability – I returned to the office upstairs and rang Cheryl’s referees, who all gave me glowing reports. I then rang to tell her that she had secured the job. This was a Friday. I spent the rest of the day ringing or emailing all the other unsuccessful applicants. Awkward and painful though it is, I prefer to telephone if I can, although many of my calls went straight to voicemail and I had to leave messages. At the end of it I felt as if I had attended a dozen funerals in a row. They say there is no unemployment crisis. But that does not account for the number of unsuccessful applicants who began to cry, and the two women who abuse
d me.

  On the day Cheryl arrived for work I noted that she had a new hairstyle, perhaps to celebrate. At the interview her hair, though neat, was faded and frizzy. Now she had been streaked and smoothed, though the effect was to make her seem older. Or perhaps it threw her face into more relief. She was still wearing the same spectacles. Hers featured those photochromatic transition lenses, which in my view are unflattering. They never really seem to make the transition from tinted to clear lenses. Cheryl worked hard, as I expected, quickly picking up the somewhat clunky bookkeeping system and setting to work to clear the backlog of accounts. She did not take long to convince me to invest in a new version of MYOB. I did not bother running that past Mario. By morning tea she was already on the phone to debtors and by the time she left that afternoon had secured promises that three accounts would be settled by the next day.

  But at lunchtime I felt obliged to offer some social chitchat. I asked a couple of questions about her forthcoming wedding, and her future husband. I asked how long she had known him, or something like that, and she surprised me by replying with a question of her own.

  ‘Do you have a vacuum cleaner?’ she said.

  I considered asking why she was interested, but instead said that I did, and then she asked how much I had paid for it. I was not entirely sure, but I thought it was a couple of hundred dollars.

  At that she almost sneered. ‘My husband’s got a Speed Queen,’ she said. ‘He paid fifteen hundred dollars for it. That’s the kind of man Dennis is. That’s the kind of man I’m marrying.’ She managed to express all this with a mixture of contempt, for me, for my cheap vacuum cleaner, for all cheap vacuum cleaners and all the kinds of men who buy them; as well as pride, for her vacuum cleaner, for Dennis, for the quality of his love.

  ‘He’s still paying it off, actually.’ There was even more pride in her voice. For the kind of man, I assumed, who would commit himself financially like that, for a small domestic appliance. This, was the implication, was a man worth having.

  I detected an anomaly here. Cheryl called Dennis her husband when the marriage was yet to take place. It was to be in several weeks’ time, on a Saturday afternoon, in the Dancing Bear Garden Court and Taverna in Greystanes. Fifty guests. This, however, is common among people, especially in the western suburbs. The word partner is restricted to business relationships. I myself have a wife, not partner. By this time, I ascertained, Cheryl and Dennis had been living together for two years.

  The rest of the lunch break, that first day, proved to be a steep learning curve for me. I realised that Cheryl and I only seemed to be of the same culture, the same society, the same linguistic group. In fact I would have felt more at ease with a naked Amazonian exchanging nods and grunts instead of English words. She gave me all the fine details of her expensive appliance, a thorough description of its myriad virtues, and I learned that spending anything less than fifteen hundred dollars on a vacuum cleaner constituted not only grave uxorious shortcomings but also possibly moral failure.

  At some stage I explained that I only thought my – our – vacuum cleaner cost a few hundred. It might have been more. And when Cheryl pressed the point, I told her I was almost certain it also did dust mites, although I could not be one hundred per cent sure about the upholstery attachment, because we never used it.

  ‘Never use it?’ she said. ‘What do you clean your lounge with?’

  ‘Oh, we just give it a wipe over with leather cleaner now and then.’

  ‘So it’s leather,’ she said. Then, after a pause, ‘Ours is crushed velour.’

  She went back to the pile of accounts on her desk. I noticed the dust on my computer screen, the grimy desktop. Underfoot the carpet was grey from crumbs and sugar. Mario never cared when he brought things up trailing icing sugar or dripping caramel. His industrial boots were dusted white, and crunched wherever he walked. I did my best but sugar in a carpet is a magnet for dirt. In the five years I had worked here I had never noticed, until now, after just this one conversation with Cheryl. I even felt unclean in my shirt. Perhaps she would insist on fresher office conditions. Perhaps she would bring in the Speed Queen. Or perhaps she would not stay in the position.

  When I recounted the conversation that night to my wife, she reminded me that our vacuum cleaner had cost three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and that I had bought it several years ago on a wedding anniversary. She had kicked the old one which had just expired in a blast of dust and declared that if I were any kind of a husband I would buy her a new one. In fact, if I expected the marriage to continue at all, I would go straight away. She had been only partly joking.

  How could I have forgotten that? It had been a Saturday afternoon, and instead of going out for that anniversary, our tenth, we were having friends to dinner, which was why my wife was stressed. I left her to start preparing the paella and, taking the dead vacuum cleaner, I drove to the nearest Godfreys where I paid cash for a sturdy and voracious Wertheim, discounted by fifteen per cent with my trade-in. And no, I recalled, it did not do dust mites, but at the time of this story it was still sucking hungrily.

  The next day, however, it seemed that my telling Cheryl all this, and therefore proving I was not quite such a lamentable example of a husband, was an irrelevance. And I caught myself, just before I mentioned the anniversary Wertheim, wondering why I wanted to prove this to someone I barely knew. In any case Cheryl did not seem so interested in a conversation about cleaning standards the next day, nor on any of the other three days each week when she worked. It was as if now she had proven something she could then move on to the next theme.

  It turned out that Dennis’s Speed Queen was more in the way of an engagement ring. The real gift cementing their union took the form of a second-hand but very much restored red Holden Commodore V8 with mag wheels, aprons, skirts and quadraphonic sound. Over the weeks following Cheryl’s arrival at the factory and her wedding, I came to appreciate the importance of things like mag wheels and aprons, but only after learning what they were, because of course in this, as in the matter of domestic appliances, I was also ignorant. I always take the bus to work, leaving the car for my wife, who is a district nurse for the Western Sydney area. At the time she was doing geriatric care, and some days she visited up to six patients in their homes, driving as far away as Narellan or Orchard Hills. Besides the fact that the bus is convenient for me, I have no interest in cars. I bought our Nissan Pulsar from a friend and to this day still have no more idea of the model than that. As a kind of test, I believe, Cheryl asked me how many cylinders, and even though I answered satisfactorily, she stopped talking and concentrated on her computer screen. I felt I had still managed to disappoint her. Something in the set line of her mouth indicated that Dennis would never stoop to catching buses.

  But it was my turn, when I learned about the wedding-present Commodore’s sound system, particularly about the graphic equaliser and the boot-mounted speakers, to be incredulous because Cheryl had never shown the slightest interest in any form of music. She never mentioned a singer, a group, a song, even a style of music. The only time she listened to the radio was when Alan Jones was on. She listened to him every morning until she arrived at work, where my old portable CD player would often be belting out Tom Waits or Frank Zappa. When she came in at nine am I would turn it down, or off, and switch over to the ABC. The player is also sticky with sugar. She once examined the covers of some of my CDs. She flicked through them all one by one, holding them by the corners – I keep them in a cardboard box beside the printer but they get sticky too – pausing to stare at Frank Zappa’s swarthy features for a bit longer than the rest, before replacing them and returning to her desk without saying a word.

  However, I am digressing. By the end of the first month I knew an enormous amount about cars, Holden Commodores in particular, much more than I ever realised there was to know, and certainly far more than I ever wanted to know. By the end of the second month the marriage was unravelling, quickly. On reflection, this was un
derstandable in context, though not exactly inevitable, which is why I and everyone else at the factory were so surprised to learn of the demise of this new union.

  Dennis, it appeared, did not tolerate women driving. I shall qualify that. When Cheryl drove her old but reliable Mazda to work, that was quite okay, quite within the bounds. Apart from the fact that she had owned it long before ever meeting Dennis, it was just a Mazda, of an unremarkable colour and with narrow wheels, unworthy of any expense beyond the absolutely necessary, and certainly not a candidate for the sort of devotion accorded the Commodore.

  The Commodore, on the other hand, was a shrine on wheels. And these wheels happened to be very new, black and unmarked. Early one morning not long after Dennis had presented his bride with this gleaming symbol of his love, Cheryl had left him, still asleep, taken the key and started the ignition. She only intended to drive to the 7-Eleven for a loaf of bread and two packs of cigarettes. She got as far as the letterbox when Dennis came lurching half awake down the driveway, screaming obscenities. He was wearing a singlet and teddy-bear patterned boxers. Thanks to Cheryl’s obsession with details I also know that the singlet was mesh and that Dennis’s chest hair stuck out of it in an unflattering way. Also that this chest hair was greying.

  I understood that strong words were exchanged on both sides, that neighbours to their right and left and over the road were involved, giving rise to the ventilation of a range of other grievances. These were mostly to do with unwelcome noises generated by V8 engines with inadequate mufflers, for Dennis owned a number of Commodores, in various states of restoration. Late-night revving, in their drive, in the street, was alleged. Which Cheryl, despite her issues with Dennis, insisted to me was outrageously untrue. But all that is off the track of the main story.