Once we had a minute to ourselves, Jodi finally confronted me and said she knew for a fact I hadn’t been in a play with Meryl Streep, never mind the Off-Broadway version of
“I know, Jodi, but look at it this way: This is the first day in months that I haven’t been called a dog or ugly by the fifth-graders, and I’ll be honest with you, it feels pretty sweet.”
“I know,” she said, “but what are you gonna do when they find out you’re lying?”
“They’ll forget about it,” I said, loving the attention. “I’ll just tell them it shoots over the summer, and by the time everyone gets back next year, they’ll have forgotten. Plus, all the fifth-graders will have gone to middle school by then, so they can suck it.”
“Yeah, but what about everybody else?” she asked. “Isn’t there a way you could actually get to meet Goldie Hawn and at least get a picture with her?”
“That’s a great idea,” I told her as I unbuckled my Ms. Pac-Man lunchbox to find a peanut-butter-and-cream-cheese sandwich. “What the hell is this?” I asked, unwrapping it and then slamming it down on the table. “My parents are the worst.”
Jodi and I had been friends since kindergarten, so she was used to this kind of mix-up. As sweet and loving as my mother was, she had the organizational skills of a sea lion and could never remember to make me lunch. So every morning I had to tell my father to make it for me. He, in turn, had the culinary skills of a sea lion, and no matter how many times I repeated the phrase “peanut butter and jelly,” he always somehow managed to fuck it up.
“Do you want half of my sandwich?” Jodi asked, offering me the other half of her ham and cheese. Had I not kept kosher my entire third-grade year, I would have dove into it headfirst.
“Just forget it,” I said, skipping the sandwich and taking a bite out of one of my Ding Dongs.
The day grew more and more insane as well-wishers and new fans were approaching me left and right, prying for information. One first-grader even asked me for my autograph. By the end of the day, not only were we filming in the Galapagos, but Soleil Moon Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster, would be playing my sister in the movie. Then I realized that her dark hair and freckles were in stark contrast to my blond hair and blue eyes and quickly made her my stepsister instead.
By the time school let out, everyone who lived in my neighborhood was racing to get one-on-one time with me, and I walked home with eight other children. The great thing about this attention was that it was coming from all the older kids, who I always believed were my core demographic. I always felt older than the kids my age, and I would get so frustrated when the other third-graders showed no interest in trying to help me figure out what really went down during the Nixon administration a decade earlier. I remember having this feeling early on, during my second day of kindergarten. It became apparent to me that all of my classmates had the necessary faculties to play a serious game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but had no designs on how to forge a late note from their parents.
I constantly had visions of skipping a grade or two, becoming a trailblazer of sorts, and possibly inventing something along the lines of Cabbage Patch Kid “Plus.” Once patented, it would look and feel like a regular Cabbage Patch Kid, but would also be able to help you with chores around the house. It would be able to speak different languages like Spanish and Farsi, and if you poked it in the eye, it would shit out a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on rye.
I walked into my house that cold December day floating on air. “Hi, Mom!” I said as I triumphantly threw my backpack on the ground and skipped into the kitchen.
“Chelsea, sweetie, your father just got off the phone with your principal, Mr. Hiller.”
“What kind of meshugas is this, Chelsea?” my father asked, using one of his two favorite Yiddish phrases. “You’re shooting a movie with Goldie Hawn and flying to the Galapagos?”
My whole day deflated in a matter of seconds. “Mrs. Schectman was making a big deal about me not doing my homework and the Goldie Hawn story was the only thing I could think of,” I told them.
“Well, why didn’t you do your homework?” he asked me.
“Because, Dad!” I wailed, bursting into tears and stomping my left foot. “It was the season premiere of
“Chelsea, sweetie, you don’t have to make up such farfetched lies,” my mother said in her ultracalm tone. “Couldn’t you have come up with something a little more reasonable?”
“I know,” I told her, defeated, and walked over for a hug. My mother was always a softie, and once I got over to her I knew my father would cease being such an immediate physical threat. “But everyone started to believe it and all the older kids were asking me about it and I got carried away.”
“Well,” my father said dismissively, “you’re just going to have to go back to school tomorrow and tell everyone the truth.”
The problem with being the youngest of six children is that my father had me when he was forty-two years old, resulting in what I like to refer to as “severe generational gappage.” That, coupled with the fact that he was born without the embarrassment gene, left us little in common. It would have seemed completely appropriate to my father for me to hold a press conference in the school’s auditorium the next day, wearing a helmet with a maxipad stuck to my forehead while announcing into a microphone that I’d been a “bad, bad girl, and I’ve also been known to shit my pants.”
“Melvin,” my mother said, “that is going to be extremely humiliating.”
“Well, she certainly can’t go on pretending she’s going to be joining the army with some Hollywood hotshot.”
“The sequel isn’t going to be as much about the army as it will be about sea creatures,” I corrected him.
“Chelsea, what are you even talking about?”
“I can’t tell the truth. Then the older girls will go back to calling me a dog.”
“Listen to me,” my father screamed. “We’ve been over this before. If those girls are going to make fun of you because of the kind of car your father drives, then they’re not worth your time anyway.”
“That’s nice, Dad,” I told him. “But it doesn’t matter if they’re not worth my time or not, it’s a lot more pleasant going through the halls at school not getting growled at.”
“How many times do we have to tell you that spending money on material things is not important? What is driving around in a Mercedes or a BMW going to teach you?” he asked.
“I dunno,” I said, still clinging to my mother. “That I want a Mercedes or a BMW?”
“Chelsea,” my father repeated, “you cannot just make up lies.”
“You lie all the time,” I reminded him, and then ran behind my mother and wrapped my arms around her waist to shield me from any impending wrath. “You tell all the people who call about your cars that they run great, or that they have no leaks, or that they’re in mint condition. Half of them need to be jump-started on a daily basis.”
“Listen to me, you little mouthpiece. I am the father,” he said, heading over in our direction while I buried my face in my mother’s ass. “You are nine years old and you are going to have to do what I tell you for the next nine years, whether you like it or not. As long as you’re living under this roof. Do you understand me?”
I wanted to tell him that I had no problem looking in the want ads for an apartment to sublet, but knew the reality of me getting my own place was months away.
“Yes,” I said, in order to avoid getting bitch-slapped. “I understand.”
“That’s enough, Melvin,” my mother told him. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll make you some porridge.”
Even though porridge is a perfectly suitable meal for a bear, I couldn’t resist asking my mother if we were having Goldilocks over for dinner. My father was still in earshot as he headed over to the living room couch, where he normally took his three o’clock feeding. It took one look from him to send me airborne in the direction of the stairs, which I took two steps at a time.
Once safely inside my room, I weighed my options. I could either tell the truth to all the kids at school and endure that embarrassment, or go for the more palatable option-enroll myself in a performing-arts boarding school.
Instead, I got out some loose-leaf notebook paper and started a letter to Goldie Hawn:
Dear Goldie,
I am a third-grader from New Jersey and consider myself to be a huge fan of yours as well as a compulsive liar. I made the mistake of mentioning that I would be playing your daughter in the next installment of Private Benjamin. (A fine performance if I do say so myself. I have seen a lot of movies, and can pretty much, without a sliver of a doubt, tell you that your range far outweighs the likes of Robert De Niro or, my personal favorite, Don Johnson.)
Anyway, it would be of great help to me if you could either come to my school in New Jersey and pick me up for lunch, or send me a personalized autographed photo that reads:
My Dearest Chelsea,
Working together has been a dream come true.
Love Always,
Goldie (your second mom)
Once I sealed the envelope, I spent three hours trying to get her agent on the phone. The furthest I got was to an operator at William Morris who gave me the address for fan mail. I was convinced that not only would she get the letter, but that, in my estimation, it wouldn’t take more than a week for her to respond. I then walked downstairs into my father’s “office,” found a stamp and an envelope, and placed the letter in our mailbox.
The next morning when I got up, I found a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the fridge with a note attached from my mother saying, “You are not a dog.” My father, of course, was the only one up, and was sitting in the kitchen reading the paper. Without looking up, he said, “Don’t forget to tell everyone the truth today.”
I wanted to scream at him and explain the magnitude of the situation. I wanted to tell him that there was a better chance of me shaving my head and walking to school with a dog collar and a leash around my neck than there was of me admitting I had lied.
I walked out the door and it was a beautiful spring day. I had a feeling of hopefulness and excitement that I hadn’t had all year. For the first time, I was excited to go to school instead of dreading it the whole way there.
With that wave of confidence came the feeling that I was, in a way, impenetrable. I was the same exact person I had been the day before, but now I was being treated better and the older kids wanted to be friends with me. It didn’t matter if I was in a movie or not, I had made these people laugh when they asked me questions. I had found myself engaging, charismatic-even sublime at times. I had all the charm I believed a true movie star to have. Who cares if I had lied about starring in
As I descended the hill where we lived, I spotted Jason at the bottom, standing on the sidewalk in front of his house. There was a part of me that felt bad for him for allowing himself to fall in love with me so quickly, and another part of me that was annoyed that he had so little self-respect. Hadn’t he ever seen a Woody Allen movie and realized how to play it cool?
I decided I was going to have to break the news to him first. “Hey,” I said, as I reached his house. I knew he’d be disappointed, and I wanted to let him down easy. I didn’t want people to ever look back at Chelsea Joy Handler and say she was a fibber.
“Did you hear anything about the movie?” he asked.
“Well, Jason, I have some bad news,” I told him. “Goldie broke her collarbone in a hang-gliding accident. It looks like it’s been postponed till summer.”
“Wow! What a bummer,” he said.
“Yeah, but the great news is, I’m in talks to be in one of Madonna’s new videos.”
“No way!”
“Yup,” I told him. “Which means I’m going to have to be on a grueling workout regimen.” I had very little control of the things that were flying out of my mouth. All I knew was that it felt better than confessing. Plus, the idea of getting imaginary rock-hard abs was intoxicating.
I knew then that Jason and I could never really build a solid partnership, mostly because our relationship had been based on inconsistencies.
I spent the rest of the week confirming one ridiculous tale after another, and by Friday I was exhausted. Although the benefits of my newfound fame outweighed the burden of coming up with one celebrity tale after another, I was so disgusted and bored with myself after a week, I was ready to throw myself out of my second-story window. I spent upward of an hour contemplating whether or not the fall would actually end my life or just severely injure an ankle. Then I thought of maybe jumping out of one of my father’s cars while in motion. This seemed the better option of the two,
