I'm Glad My Mom Died(16)

I wonder if Dad knows. If he purposely had us take our bikes and stop for smoothies because he knows that I hate acting class. Maybe he wants to help me. Maybe he wants to save me.

“Eeeeeven more lemon,” he reiterates.

I decide that I’m crazy for thinking this way. Dad’s clearly more focused on the amount of lemon in his smoothie than he is on my well-being.

I debate reminding him of acting class, that we need to hurry and even still I’ll be late. But then I decide not to. Why should I? I’m enjoying my time with Dad despite the disconnect. I’m enjoying the ease, so I say nothing.

We finish up the smoothie and pedal back slowly. We stop at the park again and ride on the swings. By the time we get home it’s 11:05. Mom’s pacing in the front yard, jangling her keys like it’s a threat.

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!” she screams.

Bud, our nosey neighbor, pokes his head over the fence. I wonder if he’s gonna threaten to call social services again, like he did the last time Mom was screaming on the front lawn. I pray Mom keeps her voice down so he doesn’t.

“We stopped for a smoothie,” Dad says with a shrug, slow on the uptake.

“YOU STOPPED FOR A SMOOTHIE??” Mom’s furious.

I wave at Bud to let him know at least someone can see him watching. He ducks down below the fence.

“Yeah…” Dad says, trying to figure out why Mom’s upset.

Mom storms into the house and slams the door shut behind her. Dad follows after her, and I trail behind him.

“Deb, come on…”

Mom’s in the kitchen by now, opening and closing appliance doors—first the fridge, then the oven, then the microwave. I don’t know why she’s doing this, what she’s looking for, but there’s a wildness to her gestures that scares me.

“I told you Jennette had acting class. But she MISSED IT NOW. They were doing a scene from I Am Sam this week. I AM SAM, Mark. Jennette would’ve KILLED that.”

Mom kicks in a cupboard door. Her foot gets stuck in the wood. She yanks her foot out. The wood is fragmented and splintery.

“I’m sorry,” Dad says.

“I guess she doesn’t have to act that one since it’s her REAL LIFE. A WISE LITTLE GIRL with a RETARDED DAD.”





13.


THERE’S A LOT OF TALK about big breaks in Hollywood, but so far I haven’t experienced that. Instead, I’ve experienced a bunch of little breaks that trickle in just as I’m almost positive I won’t catch one again. Mom says Hollywood’s like a bad boyfriend.

“They keep stringing you along without making any type of formal commitment.”

I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it sounds right.

So far, my little breaks since Mad TV have been these:


A commercial for Dental Land. The dentist’s office we shot the commercial in was in a Westfield Shopping Mall, so we got to spend the lunch break walking around the mall, and Mom got me a grab bag from Sanrio Surprises for being “by far the best actor of the group.” We were all just sitting down for the commercial, so I’m not sure what gave Mom the idea that I was a better actor than everyone else, but I’ll take the compliment if it gets me a Sanrio grab bag.

A low-budget independent movie called Shadow Fury. Mom complained because I wasn’t even paid a principal’s salary. “My baby deserves a proper salary when she spends Halloween crouched over a fake dying man with sugar blood running down her arms.” In the scene, my fake dad gets shot and I hear the gunshot from upstairs, come downstairs, and cradle his head while he dies in my arms. The sugar blood was not the worst part of it, despite how sticky and uncomfortable it was. The worst part by far was the mic pack. The budget was so low that they didn’t have a proper waistband for the mic pack so they just duct-taped it to my body. At the end of the night, I cried while they peeled the duct tape off me, but we got home in time to catch the two thirty a.m. rerun of Conan O’Brien, and Mom smeared aloe vera gel on my body while we watched it, so it wasn’t all bad.

A role in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. This one was particularly exciting because it was my first guest-star role instead of co-star. Co-star roles are usually fifteen lines or less and credited at the end of the episode; guest-star roles are typically more significant and credited at the beginning. The episode was about the mom character dreaming of having girls instead of boys. I played the female Dewey aka Daisy. They put hard wax behind my ears to make them poke out more because they said the trademark of Dewey is that he has big ears that poke out and that I have small ones. The wax was bulky and made the backs of my ears really sore, but I liked the studio where we shot the episode and the producer was very kind to me. I thought Frankie Muniz was nice to look at and I liked when he said hi to me in the hallways. I felt like I was being pretty discreet about my feelings until Mom snapped at me. “Don’t even think about it. He’s way too old for you. And more important, not Mormon.”

A Sprint PCS commercial—my first national commercial, which means… residuals! Enough residuals to pay for the oak bunk bed I bought for myself. Mom did as she’d promised and cleared the space in Grandma and Grandpa’s room for my bed. She wound up filling the top bunk with stacks of papers and old toys and books and things, though, which was a little frustrating since I had initially wanted to sleep on the top bunk. Mom said it was too risky anyway and that she never would’ve let me. “We can’t risk you falling out and cracking your head open, like when Dustin fell out of the stroller at Knott’s Berry Farm! I’ve never forgiven myself for that and I’d never forgive myself for this. Even though they did give us some free boysenberry punch, which was nice.”