Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  While Mother’s crusty, old relatives shuffled in and out to call on the dying man, they took turns ogling us as if we were circus freaks or ex-cons. Mother’s uncle Darby asked her if her cigarette had “maryjawanna” in it.

  “Why no, Darby. It’s an English cigarette. Would you care to try one?” Mother replied demurely, and offered him the box.

  He looked at it as if it were a severed head, and I could tell he didn’t believe her. She was a fancy-pants woman not to be trusted.

  Darby’s wife, Aunt Elizabeth, brought Robin and me a tray of crackers with spray-on cheese, cocking her head to one side to show how much she pitied us. It was as if she were saying, “You poor lambs who have the Whore of Babylon for a mother, I know it’s not much, but I brought you some snacks.”

  “Can I get you girls a refill on your iced tea?” Aunt Elizabeth asked as she leaned down with the tray.

  “No, thank you.” We politely took a cracker each; neither of us had ever seen cheese that came out of a can.

  “Where did you get that pretty blouse, Miss Robin?” Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes twinkled at the thought of her own kindness.

  “I think it came from Madrid, Aunt Elizabeth.” Robin looked down at her flowered shirt and peeled her legs off the plastic-covered couch to recross them.

  On the side table was a photo of Robin and me sitting on the exact same couch dressed in our Easter best with our baskets. We were three and four and our little legs peeked out from under our dresses in white socks and Mary Janes.

  “Oh, dear, that is far away, isn’t it?” Aunt Elizabeth clucked. She had only been as far as St. Louis, on her honeymoon, and imagined Europe as a large opium den filled with communists and clothing-optional resorts.

  When it was time to go, Mother steered us over to the La-Z-Boy to kiss Grandfather’s papery cheek good-bye.

  “What are you always kissing me for?” he groused, wiping our kisses away with the back of his hand. He died a few weeks later.

  The Death Watch visit ended up being only semi-successful; Grandfather did leave Mother some money, but left the house and its contents to his loyal housekeeper, Louella, who Mother said was a hillbilly. This was a crushing blow to Mother, who felt that she was being denied not only what was rightfully hers, but any reparation for her horrific childhood. For her, it was the ultimate rejection from the only father she had ever known.

  With the rest of the money, Grandfather had set up small trust accounts for me and my sister to pay for college, most likely knowing that there would be no money for us if it was anywhere Mother could get her hands on it. Of course, this made Mother even more furious, and she proved him correct when, in an extreme act of retail therapy, she tried to salve the wounds of her father’s betrayal with a chocolate-brown Mercedes sedan with tan leather upholstery—purchased in cash.

  The trusts were buried at the bank in Kansas City, and we would inherit them when we turned twenty-one. Mother periodically reminded me that the money in our trust accounts was really hers, and that she fully expected us to turn it over to her as soon as we came of age.

  After Kansas City, we set up temporary residence at a Howard Johnson’s in Danbury, Connecticut, and Pop reappeared like the genie from the lamp and started driving Mother around to look at houses. He had divorced Mother’s girlfriend and thought two ex-wives in the city was enough. Mother had burned too many bridges there anyway, so they both decided some cozy little Yankee enclave a short trip away in the bar car seemed like a good idea. She even liked the names of the towns: Milford, Greenwich, Darien. How long it would last this time with Pop, I didn’t know. We still loved him, but Robbie and I decided after Morocco that they would never get back together permanently, so we kept our investment in the relationship to a minimum.

  After two months at the HoJo’s, Mother found a house she liked—a rented white farmhouse with a stone wall around it in Ridgefield. It was a charming house in a tastefully understated New England town with a main street and a white gazebo in the town square. Every time I rode my bike I expected to see Betsy Ross on her front porch churning butter and waving the flag or something.

  Mother started making us sack lunches and walking us to the bottom of the road where the school bus picked us up. It was the new her: the gracious Connecticut Yankee Housewife, minus the annoying husband. The sort of persona Martha Stewart would later perfect, package, and turn into a fortune.

  As Mother walked back into her Pepperidge Farm commercial, the bus would take us to Ridgefield High, where Robin and I stuck out like a two-headed baby. The kids thought we were snobs because we talked funny and had been (compared to them) everywhere. When someone asked me where I’d got my sweater, I made the mistake of telling her Paris. We were freaks of the highest order, and good students, too, which was an even greater crime than owning a French sweater. It wasn’t my fault that I did my homework on time and didn’t own a pair of painter’s pants or a Kiss T-shirt. It seemed fruitless to even try to fit in, so we didn’t. We walked up and down the locker-lined halls together, shoulder to shoulder, chins up, and eyes straight ahead, daring anyone to mess with us while praying they wouldn’t.

  While we were the unhappy pariahs at the high school, Mother started cheerily seeing men she met around town. Bob, who ran the service station and had a shaved head à la Telly Savalas, picked her up at the town newsstand. A man named John crawled up our driveway and let the air out of her tires when she broke up with him. And there was Tom, a slick dude in a shiny blue suit whom Mother described as her “lawyer.”

  To shield Robbie from the frequency and rapacity of Mother’s sex life, I had become an expert at covering up the fact that she had one. In London, the gentleman sleeping in the guest room was easy to explain, but back in the States Mother became a little sloppier at hiding her affairs, so I would sneak upstairs to hide a suit jacket or big shoes before my sister had a chance to see them. Sometimes I failed. Once, Robbie and I had just got home from school when I heard her cry out in distress. I dropped my backpack and ran to her room. She was standing in front of a wicker chair, upon which hung Tom’s trousers.

  “Omigod, omigod! Whose are those? What are they doing here?” She was fifteen and totally grossed out.

  “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation.” I tried to look nonchalant.

  “Eeeew! That’s soooo nasty!” She jumped up and down, clawing at her throat as if she were gagging. “You don’t think Mother did anything in my bed, do you?” Her voice started sounding tighter and higher as her mind started to form a picture of an act too revolting to contemplate—Mother and some naked guy cavorting on her blue-flowered bedspread underneath her poster of Jim Morrison. The years of trying to protect Robbie had steeled me against it. To me, Mother’s sex life was annoying, and inconvenient. For Robbie, just the idea of it was disgusting.

  “Of course not. What, are you kidding?” I put my hands on my hips, trying to look professorial. “Whoever’s they are, he probably just spilled something on them and had to put on another pair.” This sounded asinine as it came tumbling out of my mouth, but, incredibly, she bought it.

  “Really?”

  It was because she wanted to think it was true, like when you’re too old to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy but you cling to the last shred of innocence you still possess.

  “Sure.”

  Even though Robbie and I had the Happy Hooker for a mom, we were fairly ignorant when it came to sex. Mother had neglected to inform us of the basics—maybe she was too busy in the advanced course.

  We met Tom a week later when he came to pick Mother up for a dinner date. I thought lawyers had to wear their pants, but it seemed Tom didn’t always need his. Mother got rid of him when he suggested a three-way with her and my sister.

  I don’t know if it was all the fresh country air or making the sack lunches or the boyfriends’ scarpering, but it didn’t take long for the cracks to appear in her June Cleaver façade. Mother, who up until then had always been a w
ell-groomed and impeccably dressed size 4, gained fifteen pounds, stopped going to the hairdresser to get her hair frosted, and stopped changing her clothes, preferring to remain in her nightgown all day.

  The years of shopping, dancing, and glamour in London had somehow kept the pin in the grenade of Mother’s psyche, but now it was out and she blew up, went nuts.

  She bought an air rifle and started running out onto the porch like a frenzied cowpoke in a western and shooting at any dog or cat that came into our yard. The paper girl stopped coming, too afraid to venture into the crosshairs.

  When Mother wasn’t running around with a lit cigarette and a gun, she was locked up in her room for days at a time. When she did emerge, it was in the middle of the night and she was on a rage-fueled mission to destroy. It was the beginning of what Robin and I called the warpath.

  “Wake up, both of you, this instant!” Mother would cry as she turned the overhead lights on in our rooms. Surprised at the suddenness and severity of these attacks, we were too afraid to get out of bed and just pulled the covers over our heads, rolled into balls, and waited for it to be over.

  “You’ve ruined my life!” she’d scream as she overturned my bookshelf and ripped pictures from my walls. The tinkling of falling glass would play over her feet as she beat a path to my sister’s room.

  “I wish you’d been abortions!” she’d shout as she flipped the little table on which Robbie kept her music-box collection.

  Then, as quickly as she had come, she was gone—screeching off like a banshee in her nightgown. The field of destruction would settle as the warbly wheezing of the music boxes playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Edelweiss” would slowly fade.

  At first, Robbie tried to glue her music boxes back together, but she gave up eventually and just put all the little bits back up on the table. There was something very sweet and hopeful about her refusal to throw them away. Little chimneys and gates lay next to the bombed-out shells of what had once been a jaunty Alpine chalet or a cute carousel with elves riding on it. My sister’s favorite one featured a bird, a robin, sitting on a picket fence. At one time it had played “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” but now it sounded like a backward, low-speed version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The bird’s head had been snapped off and lost. Its body lay on the shelf, decapitated.

  We quickly learned to hold our breath and read the signs when we trudged up the driveway in the snow after school. Were the lights on in the kitchen? Could we smell something cooking mixed with cigarette smoke? Was it safe? One day we returned home in the snow to find she had locked the front door.

  “What should we do?” I looked through the window in the door into the dark kitchen. There were no signs of life.

  “We have to break in,” Robbie snapped, clearly ticked off at our dilemma, as well as our mother’s lack of sanity.

  “But if we break in, she’ll get mad.”

  “Oh, who cares! Let her get mad! I’m freezing.” Robbie picked up a big rock on the porch that we used as a doorstop and chucked it through the glass. Then she reached her arm over and turned the doorknob.

  “There,” Robbie said, swinging the door open for me. “She’s so out of it, she probably won’t even notice.”

  After nine months of this, we were so desperate I called Pop in New York. He was trying again to patch things up with his first wife, but he still came up to Connecticut to play fairy ex-stepfather.

  On my sixteenth birthday he had given me a used Subaru coupe and taken us all to see A Chorus Line on Broadway, followed by dinner at Sardi’s. I’d thought the show was interesting. All the people in it were unhappy about something—they didn’t like their bodies or they were ashamed of being gay or didn’t feel loved by their parents. But they had been able to escape their problems, sort of, by becoming performers. I’d thought, was that why I liked acting? And was there a way for me to escape?

  It hadn’t been much of a celebration, as Mother had hated the show and spent most of it in the theater bar, sulking. She had complained sourly all through dinner. But Robbie and I were happy to be back under the dazzling lights and marquees of Broadway. The city was so alive and filled with people, not like Ridgefield, where it was dark at night and all you could hear were the insects rubbing their legs together.

  After almost a year in Ridgefield, Pop was our only connection to our old, fun life. He was also the only person, maybe because of his money at least, who still had any influence on Mother, and the only father figure we had.

  The phone rang and rang. Someone picked up after about the tenth ring.

  “Pop?” I could tell by the wheezy breathing that it was him. I also heard the familiar sound of ice cubes in a glass.

  “Yes, dearie.”

  “I was wondering if you could speak to Mother. She’s been locked up in her room for days. And I think maybe she’s been drinking a lot.”

  “Well, dearie, I’ll try and talk to her, but you know your mother. . . .”

  His voice trailed off. I wanted to say, Well, I may know her, but I sure don’t understand her. But I didn’t.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I don’t know if Pop made the call, but she emerged from the miasma of her room in the spring and was somehow fine again. It was if she had woken from a long winter’s nap and not a nervous breakdown, which was certainly one way of looking at it.

  Robbie and I took advantage of her exit from lulu land and convinced her that this country-mouse life was making us all despondent. What we needed was new surroundings. We could move to Boston, which wasn’t New York, and no one knew us there. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would be like it used to be in London. She could make new friends, start going out again. It would be like old times.

  And it worked, for a while.

  BOSTON, 1977

  chapter eight

  PLAY DEAD

  In Boston, just as she had in London, Mother zeroed in on the most happening and poshest neighborhood she could find. In the late seventies, that was Cambridge and, for us, a mansion for rent that stood behind a long, serpentine stone wall on Fresh Pond Parkway. It was a pile, with four bedrooms that all had interconnecting dressing rooms and loos, a sunken living room added in the twenties, a solarium, and an outdoor porch that hugged the entire back of the house, which looked out on a glorious lawn peppered with dogwood trees, their petals trembling and floating in the wind. While it was way out of our price range, Mother embraced living beyond our means, as usual. Locally famous as “the house behind the wavy wall,” it and Pop’s introductions got Mother almost instant invitations from Cabots and Lodges and many of the bright young things of the Boston literary and arts scene. Soon she was lunching at the Ritz at least once a week and had her own table at Harvest, a chic nouvelle-cuisine spot in Cambridge.

  The house gave Robbie and me easy access to Harvard Square and a summer full of bright lights and fun distractions like we’d had in London and could only dream about during the long, dull nights and days in Ridgefield. We practically skipped along the streets of Cambridge, flipping through LPs at the Harvard Coop and shopping for long, flowered skirts, cowboy boots, and jumpsuits in Urban Outfitters. We went to movies at the Harvard Square Theatre or more often at the Brattle, a revival house featuring sophisticated and racy double bills like The Boys in the Band and The Women.

  On weekends while Mother was partying with society trust-fund babies, Robbie and I would drive to the beach in Provincetown and eat boiled lobsters and corn on the cob out of foil-lined bags on the rocks. At sunset, we’d change in the Subaru and go out dancing in the gay bars in P-Town. Robbie was an expert at charming the bouncer at the door, and we always got in. No one ever bothered us, perhaps thinking we were together, and we’d dance our asses off until last call. Then, soaked in our own sweat, we’d stumble out into the street, to see Edward Gorey riding by on his bicycle like Ichabod Crane on wheels, and hunt for our car. I’d drive home and we’d listen to the radio. Robbie would put her bare feet u
p on the dashboard, and her hand with a cigarette would dangle out the window. If we passed someone on the road, she’d defiantly, and just for the fun of it, give them the finger, and we’d end up in a drag race with the offended driver of the other car—screaming with laughter and singing at the top of our lungs to the Police’s “Roxanne” as we raced along the empty beach roads.

  While we were gone on one of these Cape Cod expeditions, Mother met the next man of her dreams, Frank Collins, at the bar at Harvest.

  Frank lived somewhere in Vermont with his wife and family and would visit Mother when he came to Boston on business. He was tall, thin, and blond and wore horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t seem to bother her that he was married, but it bothered me because I knew there was no chance he would marry her and take care of her so we wouldn’t have to keep calling Pop to lend us money all the time.

  I only had one conversation with Frank. During one of his lunchtime visits, he described tearing the wings off flies when he was a small child—apparently this was what he did for fun. As he told me this story, he smiled and looked really happy and my mother stared adoringly at him, as she did whenever he said anything.

  The only other thing I knew about him was a story my mother had told me about his hitting a little girl accidentally with his car many years ago. The girl had darted out into the road, not giving him time to react or stop the car, and she was killed instantly. According to my mother, he felt terrible and would never recover from the horror of it. I wasn’t sure I believed it was really an accident after hearing him talk about what he did to the flies.

  He reminded me of a character in a John Cheever story, someone who seems normal and nice, but underneath the calm façade there’s all this darkness boiling that he barely contains with his flashing smile and perfectly polished shoes. Frank came and went suddenly, as if he had his own trapdoor in the floor. But Mother seemed happy when she was with him, and despite some bitchy moments, she wasn’t on the warpath the whole time they saw each other.