Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  These were giddy times during which the doorbell was always ringing and the flowers and the gifts never stopped arriving. We rode around in limousines and taxis late at night, looking out at the lights of Manhattan on our way home from dinner or from seeing a Broadway show. Catherine would put us to bed and we would fall asleep listening to Astrud Gilberto records playing over the low din of conversation in the living room. In the morning, we’d wake up and graze last night’s party hors d’oeuvres for breakfast. Day-old clams casino was not tasty, but Brie was easy to spread, delicious, and could, in a pinch, be eaten with your fingers. Catherine did not approve, but the evenings ended too late for her to clean up then, and there was too much to do getting us off to school for her to tackle the overflowing ashtrays and souring cocktail glasses before we awoke. But despite her clucking over our preference for French cheese over fried bologna, and extra conflicts over our late nights and heel-dragging in the mornings, Catherine remained our much-loved anchor in the whirlwind of Mother’s new life. Her strictness and resolve to provide some kind of structure made us chafe, but drew us closer to her.

  On Saturdays that winter, Catherine took us down to Rockefeller Center for our ice-skating lessons. She’d take us into the dressing room and help us put on our skates, using the big lacing hook that she’d pull out of her battered but voluminous black handbag. Catherine’s purse was like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. We were constantly surprised by its contents, which she always presented with such nonchalance: a seemingly endless supply of dainty, embroidered hankies, little boxes of raisins, a small, collapsible drinking cup, a flashlight for seeing in a dark movie theater, a sewing kit, and a big whistle on a chain.

  “I’ve never seen anything so crazy,” she said, leaning over and grunting as she threaded our skates. “People running around on a floor that’s frozen.” She laughed and shook her head at the foolishness of it all.

  “Thank you, Catherine,” Robbie and I both said, as she slowly raised herself up and stashed the hook back in her purse for next time.

  “I’ll go wait in the restaurant, you two go to Miss Yvonne.”

  Miss Yvonne was our skating teacher. She was Austrian and had once been in the Olympics, but now in her dotage was reduced to teaching little rich children. She always wore a short skirt and a pom-pom hat like Sonja Henie in the movies and was overly cheerful in a clipped way that made Robbie and me a bit nervous.

  “Und now, time for skating!” Miss Yvonne announced at the start of every lesson, clapping her hands up in the air like a Spanish dancer.

  Catherine always sat inside the café that looked out on the rink, drinking a cup of Lipton tea, which was her favorite. She watched us while she sipped her tea, waving periodically. Afterward, in the dressing room, she rubbed our frozen feet, trying to warm them up, as we shivered.

  “Did you see me?” Robbie and I both asked, even though we knew she had been watching us the whole time.

  “What do you think—of course I did! Both of you looked like little dancing snowflakes!” she chuckled.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, lamb. Now your momma gave me money for a taxi, so hurry and put on your shoes.”

  We rode home in a cab, sitting on either side of Catherine with our faces against her coat, drowsing while the city went by, happy and warm.

  With a Park Avenue address, plenty of money, and her freedom, Mother had become a New York socialite. She was not, and could never be, a member of Mrs. Astor’s old-moneyed Four Hundred, but was a part of the modern, more democratic “society” formed at the confluence of new money, liberal politics, and the arts described by Tom Wolfe as the Radical Chic. In addition to dating, drinking, and partying in all the most fashionable places, Mother and her girlfriends were to be found drinking and partying for all the most fashionable causes—campaigning for John Lindsay, visiting the leftist Puerto Rican Young Lords in their East Harlem stronghold, and raising money for world peace at Yoko Ono’s latest performance. None of them would know by looking at Mother’s Pucci pantsuit and blond flip hairdo that she had been living in a trailer park only a few years before with people who killed their own chickens for dinner. That was another world, a world my sister and I got to return to in the summers when we went to stay with our father in Minneapolis.

  Although we were apart for nine or ten months at a time, Daddy sent us letters, and sometimes cassettes of him talking about his day at the theater. Listening to his deep, velvety voice, we imagined him in his apartment, sitting in the scratchy plaid armchair near the bookcase, drinking a beer in his white Fruit of the Loom undershirt after work—the edges of his face tinged here and there with makeup the cold cream failed to reach. Closing our eyes, we wished ourselves there, next to him.

  Though we grew accustomed to our lives as children of the privileged Upper East Side and enjoyed many of its perks, in late spring we would begin to count down the days until we could kick off our party shoes, get to wear jeans, and go to Minneapolis. At the end of June, we’d get off the plane and Daddy would take one look at us in our fancy frocks and Mary Janes and take us straight to Dayton’s department store (where Mary Tyler Moore throws up her beret in the introduction to The Mary Tyler Moore Show) to buy us play clothes: Danskin shorts and tops, and Garanimals. It was sort of a crazy version of The Sound of Music in which the roles were reversed. My father played Maria and saw kids who needed to have some fun, and my mother was Captain von Trapp, worried about our appearance in case the baroness stopped by for tea, or in Mother’s case, a vodka gimlet.

  In Minneapolis, my sister and I would spend all day outside in our play clothes, never wearing shoes. We would bomb around with a big pack of kids, riding bikes and playing games of red rover or capture the flag that sometimes went on all day. We had a babysitter, always a teenage girl who would inevitably develop a crush on Daddy as the summer progressed, who watched us when he had rehearsals during the day and performances at night.

  Once the play was open, his days were free and he spent them with us. We went swimming in Lake Calhoun, to the movies, or sometimes out to eat at the Lincoln Del, our favorite restaurant, which had spaghetti with huge meatballs that we adored.

  Daddy was always clowning, making us laugh while he feverishly conducted to Beethoven blasting on the car radio, or driving a hundred miles an hour while we screamed and rolled around giggling on the backseat. Every night before he went to work, we scratched his back and he would grimace and grunt like we were hurting him, even though Robbie and I both knew he loved it.

  Sometimes he would take us to the theater with him and we would hang around the greenroom, playing pool and bumming money off the actors to buy snacks from the vending machines. I loved the smell of the theater: an intoxicating perfume of coffee, paint, and wood that to me smelled like romance, beauty, and possibility. I felt about the theater the way Holly Golightly did about Tiffany’s—nothing very bad could happen to you there.

  At the end of the summer, Robbie and I would tearfully call Mother and beg her to let us stay in Minneapolis with our dad. Mother would listen to us sobbing into the receiver and then ask that we put our father on the line. They exchanged a few words, Mother reiterating the terms of their divorce agreement, and Daddy looking down at the floor, frowning slightly as he listened to my mother tell him we had to return to her.

  “I’m sorry, girls,” he would say, then carefully and deliberately pack our suitcases himself and put us back on the plane to New York. He always stood at the window of the terminal, waving and smiling, until we took off. I could see the little, dark speck of his head through the small fishbowl window as the plane lifted off the ground and my sister and I cried our eyes out. The flight attendant would come down the aisle and pin on our little gold wings, the accessory of the traveling child of divorce. They were meant to make you feel special but only made you feel even more alone and pathetic. What we really needed was some Kleenex and a hug. At least we had each other—another small hand to hold as the plane rose into the
air and the other passengers stared at us, shaking their heads and wondering who would let two little girls fly alone.

  The annual ritual ended in New York when my mother would unpack our suitcases and, without skipping a beat, throw out all our play clothes. Those polyester separates just didn’t fit in with our cosmopolitan lifestyle. Eloise didn’t wear Garanimals to the Plaza for tea, or to her French lesson. Of course, by throwing the clothes away, she cast aside our summer, our time with our father, and our memories, as well as her own. She did not want to be reminded of a time when she’d eaten three-bean salad and certainly not that she had liked it.

  The Christmas I was ten, Daddy came to New York to tell us he was planning to marry our stepmother in the summer. We had only met her a couple of times, but I was glad about it. She was the opposite of my mother; not a fair and fragile beauty but handsome and tall with a big, low laugh that made you want to go sit next to her. She looked like the actress Patricia Neal and had three children, whom she had raised on her own as a working mother. I thought it was a wonderful Christmas surprise.

  After he told us, Robbie and I ran to the tree in the living room to open our gifts. Daddy had brought us dolls that were dressed like angels, with long gold dresses and starry halos in their blond ringlets. We hung around his neck kissing him while he made funny groaning noises and said we were going to break his back.

  “Excuse me,” Mother said. “You girls have received other presents, you know.” In our Christmas-morning frenzy, we had run right past the gift Mother had given us: an ice cream soda fountain from FAO Schwarz that was so big it couldn’t be wrapped. It had red swivel stools, and the white counter had ice cream cones painted on it.

  Carrying our dolls, we obediently went over to our mother to thank her for her present. She was wearing a long-sleeved, black wool dress, with her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, and her face looked all tight. I realized our mistake in not thanking her first, but it also occurred to me that she was not pleased with Daddy’s plan to remarry. Looking back later, I think she’d thought my father had traveled to New York to ask her to come back to him, not to announce his engagement to someone else. After breakfast, Mother stood next to the front door with a frozen smile on her face seeing my father out.

  “I’ll send tickets for the girls,” he promised.

  “Sure. Great. Good-bye, Jim.” Mother shut the door.

  My sister and I ran to our bedroom and waved to him from the window when he appeared on the sidewalk below. It was raining and he had turned up the collar of his overcoat. Daddy waved up at us and then popped into a cab and was gone. We watched the taxi drive down Park Avenue.

  “And have you had a merry Christmas?” Mother was standing in the doorway, holding two large, black trash bags. She spoke in a quiet, calm tone, but her clenched teeth gave me pause—this had to be a trick question.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I took Robbie’s hand and waited for it to come.

  “I want you to each take one of these.” She snapped the bags in the air, opening them with a violent crack. We each obediently took one. “You are to put all your old toys and your Christmas presents in these bags, including the one gift your father was kind enough to bring you. They will all be given away to children who deserve them.” Mother turned on her heel and started to leave the room.

  “But why?” I asked, as Robin started to cry.

  “Why?” Mother turned and looked at me, her eyes burning with anger. “Because you don’t appreciate anything you have.” Her voice grew louder and quavered slightly. Robbie and I instinctively took a step back.

  “Did we do something wrong?” I didn’t understand what was happening, why she was so furious at us.

  “Just put your toys in the bags.” She marched out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Terrified and sobbing, Robbie and I started taking our dolls, puzzles, and stuffed animals off the shelves and dropping them into the bags. We hid our favorites—which included the two angel dolls our father had just given us, my sister’s teddy bear, Guthrie, and my Raggedy Andy—on top of the high bookshelf, which you could climb up like a ladder because it was built into the wall. Everything else, including our Christmas presents, went into the trash bags, and we were sent to bed with no dinner.

  In the morning, Mother’s black mood was gone. She greeted us at breakfast as if nothing had happened. Robbie and I were confused. It was almost as if it had been a dream. Only the absence of our toys, the garbage bags, and the soda fountain told us it wasn’t.

  Spring came and my mother started to talk about moving. Not just moving house again but moving away. She’d heard that Pop was seeing a girlfriend of hers, and suddenly it seemed there were ghosts and old boyfriends around every corner. New York was finished for her.

  Two weeks later, Catherine came into our room in the middle of the night. She turned my bedside table light on and sat down next to me. She was crying.

  “I just want you to know that your momma fired me and I love you both.”

  I was still half-asleep as she gathered me up in her treelike arms and crushed me against her immense bosom. I reached my arms around her neck and held her. I remembered all the times she’d made us that special syrup when we were sick, cooked our breakfast, and helped us find our shoes. She tucked me back into bed and kissed the top of my head. Then she gave my sister the same farewell. She turned out the light and waddled to the door.

  “Bless you, my lambie pies,” she said in the dark.

  Catherine was leaving us, and we would never see her again. Feeling such sorrow that she wouldn’t be in the kitchen in the morning, or anyplace else in our lives, my heart felt pressed down upon, as if the heaviest book in the world had been placed there. Utterly bereft, my sister and I cried quietly into our pillows.

  The next day, when Robbie and I came home from school, I spied a large pile of familiar-looking Louis Vuitton luggage heaped in a corner of the lobby as we walked through to the elevator. I glanced over at Johnny the doorman, wondering if he might want to tell me something, but he just clasped his arms behind his back and looked out through the door at the street. When we got upstairs, we discovered our front door open and the apartment completely empty.

  “Is this our house?” my sister said. She took her coat off and, seeing nowhere to put it, plopped it down on the floor.

  “I think so,” I said, looking around.

  We were standing in the foyer wondering if we’d been robbed when Mother emerged from her bedroom with her mink coat over her arm.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said, checking her watch.

  “Where is . . . everything?” I asked. All that was left were the nails in the walls where the pictures had once hung, and little dust balls on the floor that had previously been trapped by pieces of furniture. Even the piano was gone. It made me think of what the Grinch did to Whoville.

  “The movers came today and I had it all put into storage.”

  The elevator man walked by with another suitcase and our cat, Maudie, in her carrier, yowling like an angry baby. Maudie was a chocolate-point Siamese and always meowed loudly like a person who wouldn’t be ignored. I ran to my room to see if anything had been left behind, but it was empty.

  “Wendy? Where are you?” I heard my mother’s shoes clicking down the hallway toward me. I looked up to the top of the bookshelf where our stash of secret saved toys was hidden. They would have to stay behind now. Mother came into the empty room, her voice echoing off the bare walls: “You see, all gone. Now hurry because I have a taxi waiting downstairs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I followed her down the hall and out the front door of the apartment. I imagined another little girl, the next little girl, finding the angel dolls and the teddy bear, like a hidden treasure.

  We all got into the elevator and went downstairs, where we said good-bye to Johnny the doorman, who held open the door of the taxi that was to take us to our new home: the Croyden Hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.

 
“You’ll love it there,” said Mother as we barreled down Park Avenue. “There’s a gift shop in the lobby, and there’s a movie theater right around the corner.”

  My sister and I stared dumbly at her. This morning we’d left our home to go to school, and at the end of the day we had a new one. Maudie was wailing from her carrier on the front seat next to the driver. I understood exactly how she felt.

  As promised, a gift shop was in the lobby—more of a newsstand really—where Robbie and I lingered while Mother checked in. Our eyes roved over the Tiger Beats, True Romance comics, Chiclets and Chunkys, as the reality of our collective fate sunk in.

  “We can get room service,” I told Robbie, reverting to my Little Mary Sunshine routine as I always did at moments of massive upheaval.

  “Like Eloise,” Robbie said glumly.

  “And the maid will clean up our room,” I chirped.

  I pointed out to her that this meant no more being chased around by Catherine telling us our room was a pigsty and trying to smack our bottoms with a tea towel as we screamed and ran away. I was trying to melt Robbie’s sadness through sheer perkiness and it worked.

  She looked at me and her mouth popped open. “We can make as many spitballs as we want.”

  Catherine used to get furious when we threw wet wads of toilet paper up onto the ceiling. The balls either fell to the floor, making a ploppy mess, or fused to the ceiling, making them impossible to remove.

  Now, breakfast was an Entenmann’s chocolate doughnut and a glass of Tropicana orange juice from the little fridge in our kitchenette. All our other meals were ordered over the phone from the restaurant in the lobby, and the hotel did our laundry.