Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  Mother and Frank went off on little trips to Maine and Nantucket. She talked about how he was planning to leave his wife. I wanted to tell her not to hold her breath. I had done a little research on this in Cosmo and had discovered that a small percentage of men left their wives for other women. I decided to keep the information to myself, but at the same time I worried about Mother getting her hopes up. And I was worried, too, about who would be left holding the bag when things didn’t work out.

  And they didn’t work out. Just like it said in Cosmo.

  After stringing her along for six months and wining and dining her all over the Eastern Seaboard, Frank decided to stay with his wife. This tragedy, coupled with the alienation of some of her new crowd and another run on her finances, sent Mother into a period of black despair and us all into a slightly less grand house on top of a hill in Belmont, a leafy suburb of Boston. After the move, and Frank’s betrayal, Mother was heartbroken and, like a Victorian lady in mourning, took to her bed. Only Mother’s version of appropriate mourning attire was her blue Pucci nightgown. And instead of weeping and making bracelets from her departed beloved’s hair, she chain-smoked and plotted a murder/suicide that would make the six o’clock news.

  It was Thanksgiving, months later, when she came downstairs fully dressed for the first time. She had changed out of the nightgown into a tailored, brown Jaeger skirt and a pale pink silk blouse. One of her three pearl necklaces adorned her throat, and an Hermès scarf that perfectly matched her blouse was expertly placed over her shoulders, the knot settled on her chest. She had put her frosted blond hair back in a chignon and had even put on some makeup.

  Mother set the table with her Limoges china and the Tiffany flatware that we hadn’t seen since we’d left Park Avenue. She cooked a turkey with all the trimmings. Looking at her elegant appearance and the lovely table setting, I had to admit that when she wanted to, she could still pull it together. The trickier question was how long she could keep it up.

  Robin and I sat at the table watching Mother carefully carve the turkey—our mouths hanging open ever so slightly as if we were witnessing a miracle. She placed the turkey slices on our plates and spooned mashed potatoes and green beans next to them. Then she heaped on the stuffing and, doing her best Donna Reed, said, “Help yourselves to the cranberry sauce.” She pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear with the back of her hand, just like a contented housewife.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I said, smiling. “Everything looks delicious.” I looked at Robbie, cuing her to compliment Mother’s cooking, but she just stared back at me and said nothing.

  In silence, we began pushing mashed potatoes onto our forks and spearing green beans. The clock ticked. The carving knife clicked against the serving fork.

  I thought of how other people celebrated the holidays: laughing and joking with grandparents, cousins, and old friends. But not us, because we didn’t have any. The house in Belmont was our tenth home in twelve years, and my mother had no more friends left, old or new, having driven them all away. Robbie and I had decided that this was her superpower, and we were too afraid to invite our friends over in case she turned it on them. So it was just the three of us, the turkey, and our cat Gus, a stowaway from Ridgefield, and I wasn’t even sure how long he planned to stick around.

  I was staring into my mashed potatoes, feeling sorry for myself, when Mother decided to ratchet things up a little by polishing off a bottle of Almaden Chablis in about five minutes flat. This was a trick she had perfected years before with a cold, crisp Pouilly-Fuissé, and although her finances had forced her to move on to the cheaper labels, the result was the same. Her empty glass tipped over onto the table and she moved back onto the warpath for the first time since we’d moved to Boston and she’d met Frank.

  She fixed her woozy gaze upon us. Her eyes filled with a creepy intensity that made me feel as if she could see inside me to the knotted heap of fear that had replaced my stomach.

  “Do you know something, Wendy and Robin?” Her voice was quiet with a touch of acidity from the cheap wine.

  Here we go, I thought. The jungle drums were beating in the distance, the natives were coming to get us.

  “I have sacrificed my whole life to raise the two of you.”

  My sister and I sat at the table frozen, our forks poised in midair. I was too afraid to look at her so I stared down at my dinner plate. I noticed that my gravy was running into my green beans. I hated that.

  “My whole life.” The drums were growing louder.

  “No one else gives a shit about you.” The natives were almost upon us.

  “You’re just selfish little brats!” She stood up and threw her napkin onto her plate of uneaten food. Stumbling back against her chair, in high dudgeon now, she raised her hand to her breast.

  “You will never know how much I have given up because of the two of you!” she snarled.

  My sister and I did not move, did not breathe. At least when she had raided our rooms at three in the morning, we had the covers to hide under. An icy tingling started to creep up the back of my neck and onto my scalp—an all too familiar feeling that never seemed to improve with time.

  “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’”

  I can’t remember exactly when, but somewhere between our evacuation from London, the Kansas City Death Watch, and the suburban nightmare of Ridgefield, she’d begun to quote Shakespeare or the Bible when things were about to get really hairy.

  But before we could move, the Mommie Dearest routine was cut short by the wine or an act of God and she passed out and keeled over onto the carpet.

  Robin and I looked at each other. Was she really out or was this just another lunatic, attention-getting ploy? It was Thanksgiving, for God’s sake, and the food was getting cold.

  “Maybe she’s dead,” Robin said. “Or faking it.”

  I looked under the table. Mother’s chest was moving. “She’s out cold.”

  Mother had often played dead through the years, though when we were seven and eight it was more a game than a tactic. She would ghoulishly limp to her bed and flop down on the mattress, and my sister and I would scream and jump on her, poking her and pleading with her to wake up. The game would always go on a little too long, my mother being very good at it, and we would start to really believe that she was dead. We’d lift her heavy arms and legs and drop them onto the bed wondering why she wouldn’t move. Finally, after our fear overcame us, we’d start to cry, and it was only then that she would open her eyes, coming back to life at the sound of our tears. It was a kind of twisted version of the fairy-tale prince’s kiss. It was her way of gently reminding us that she was all we had. If she were to die, we would have no one.

  Robbie and I looked at each other and slowly got out of our chairs. We approached the body with great caution—the way you would a dangerous animal you had just shot on safari that might suddenly spring back to life and leap up to tear your throat out.

  “Mother?” I looked down at her and waited a full minute. Then I knelt on the carpet and poked her with my finger a few times. No response. “You’d better go call an ambulance,” I said to Robbie.

  “Shit,” she said. “Happy Thanksgiving, we’re going to the emergency room.”

  We opted to drive behind Mother’s ambulance in our now battered Subaru; it was always important to have a getaway car in case . . . well, just in case. I drove because I was older and my sister was a bad driver, a Boston driver. Since getting her license four months before, she’d had so many accidents in the car that both doors were now fused shut and the only way to get in and out was to crawl through the windows. This always attracted attention whenever we arrived anywhere and made for a fairly spectacular entrance at the Mount Auburn Hospital, where we screeched into the parking lot behind the ambulance, crawled out of the windows, and rushed into the ER entrance.

  Robin and I sat in the ER waiting room, and after about an hour, our mother’s gynecologist, Dr.
Stander—the only man she ever really trusted—arrived. It had started raining and his raincoat was wet and dripping onto the shiny waxed floor.

  “Don’t you girls worry,” he said very reassuringly. He was very reassuring, like God with a mustache.

  We smiled weakly at him, offering no information as none was needed.

  “Your mother is a very sick woman,” he said, leaning down to look into our eyes for emphasis. The television up on the wall behind his head gave him a kind of weird electric halo. Then, having nothing else to offer, Dr. Stander turned and ran through the ER’s double doors, shedding his wet raincoat as he disappeared. My sister and I looked at each other. We were too old for this.

  We sat in the waiting room and passed the time by playing one of our favorite games: Murder. We played it to comfort ourselves; we both knew that. Somehow, if only for a moment, it made us feel that we were in the driver’s seat.

  This time, we plotted the fabulously gruesome murder/death of the man we blamed for this most recent bout of Mother’s suffering and insanity: Frank Collins. He had broken her heart by not leaving his wife and had made our lives a living hell, and he was going to have to pay. Things had been bad in the past, but whatever quality of life our move to Boston had returned to us had been stomped on by this asshole’s big, tasseled loafers. We’d already endured weeks of coming home from school to a dark house with no food in the fridge, no dinner bubbling on the stove, and an empty baked-beans can on the counter with a big wooden spoon sticking out of it. And now, here we were in the ER on Thanksgiving. It sucked.

  “Hey, remember that movie about the girl with those amazing psycho powers?” Robin asked me.

  I stared at her jiggling foot and bit my nails. “Psychic powers, stupid. You mean The Fury.” We had just seen it at the Harvard Square Theatre. “Starring Amy Irving and John Cassavetes, directed by Brian De Palma.” I was beginning to consider myself a bit of a film buff.

  “Yeah, well, remember when she made the blood come out of that guy’s eyes and stuff? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make Frank’s head explode into a million pieces like she did to that guy who really pissed her off at the end of the movie?”

  I pictured Amy Irving’s character totally losing it and blowing up the bad guy’s head. It’s pretty gross because it’s in slow motion and you see parts of his head flying around the room.

  “Yeah, that would be awesome.” I imagined Frank’s glasses being blasted off his face as his head detonated and chunks of him flying in slow motion through the air: a bloody ear and his thin upper lip floated by as we jumped up and down with glee as if we’d just won what was behind door number three on Let’s Make a Deal.

  The emergency room was fairly empty; maybe because it was Thanksgiving. Other people were home drinking hot chocolate and playing Scrabble after their festive holiday meal. Robin and I sat in chairs against the wall staring at the news on TV. The sound was turned down. The screen showed a huge fire that was burning somewhere downtown.

  “Yeah, I’d love to see Frank’s brains all over the curtains,” I said dreamily.

  “Or, we could just run him over with the Subaru,” Robin said.

  “Quick and easy.” Vehicular homicide, it was almost too good for him.

  “Yeah, and we’re too young to go to jail, aren’t we?”

  Yes, we probably were, but jail didn’t seem so bad to me now. It even sounded kind of . . . well, nice. I was sure there was a lot of structure and three meals a day.

  After the news was over, Johnny Carson came on and we moved on to planning Mother’s death—even though she was doing a pretty good job on her own. Since we had already used the car to kill Frank, we needed something new.

  “Hey, I know. We could push her down the basement stairs,” I said.

  Robbie smiled. We always remembered the old bedtime story from the Dakota, partly because it was terrifying and partly because it was one of the few times Mother had actually told us a story at bedtime.

  “We could do that. Get her to go down to the basement stairs and then do it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Robbie said. “We’ll run Frank over first and then push Mother down the stairs.”

  After we played Murder, I went to get some Diet Pepsis and candy bars to celebrate everyone’s being snuffed out and all our problems being solved. When I got back, Dr. Stander was waiting with Robin.

  “Well, girls, it seems your mother will be staying the night and perhaps an extra day or two.” He cocked his head to the side at us as if we were cute puppies. Mother had hemorrhaged internally due to an old IUD she had and would have to have a D&C in the morning. “Any questions?” He raised his eyebrows in anticipation.

  I wondered how Mother could have claimed to have been pregnant last year by that Jewish architect and had an abortion if she had an IUD, but said nothing.

  “Yeah, Dr. Stander, what’s a D and C?” Robin asked, as if it were something you ordered at the Dairy Queen.

  “Well, Robin, D and C stands for ‘dilation and curettage’; it is surgery to treat abnormal uterine bleeding,” he said, as if describing the changing of a tire. “Your mother is heavily sedated but you can come and see her tomorrow.”

  We headed back out to the parking lot. I handed Robbie the Snickers, which I knew she liked. “Happy Thanksgiving, Robbie,” I said as I washed down my 3 Musketeers with some now room-temperature Diet Pepsi.

  “Oh, yeah, you, too.” She lit up a Parliament and took a huge drag. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks. Hey, I bet the Pilgrims didn’t have candy and soda on Thanksgiving.”

  She laughed. “Or Parliaments. You want me to drive?”

  “No way.”

  We crawled into the Subaru and made our getaway.

  The next morning I woke up and assessed the damage. The turkey was still on the table, along with the mashed potatoes, but our cat, Gus, had eaten most of the green beans, which he really loved. I was glad someone had a good time. I went into the kitchen to get a big garbage bag. Robin was heating up chicken-noodle soup for breakfast and smoking a cigarette.

  “Want some soup?” She inhaled deeply, flicking the ashes onto the linoleum with her thumb.

  She was wearing jeans with holes in the knees and a tight T-shirt, displaying what my mother liked to call her Rita Hayworth taste. The whole effect was very teenage runaway. Robin had fully evolved into the defiant one—she didn’t care if Mother caught her smoking in the house or found out she had cut math class.

  But I never stopped trying to be the dutiful daughter—always striving to do the right thing and make nice. I could be a real drag.

  “Mother’s going to kill you if she finds out you’ve been smoking in the house,” I warned.

  “Oooh, I’m terrified. Crackers?” She tossed a package of saltines onto the table, placed a bowl of soup down, and sank into the chair across from me. We slurped in silence.

  After breakfast, we took out the trash and headed over to the hospital to see our mother. Unlike with Mother’s first trip to the hospital, after she’d locked us in the closet for a day, when we arrived to visit at Mount Auburn, there were no moccasins and she didn’t look like a fairy princess; she looked like shit. She was puffing away on a cigarette in her cigarette holder, defiantly blowing the smoke at the NO SMOKING sign on the bilious green wall. We took turns kissing her cheek, then sat in the plastic chairs next to the bed.

  “Mother, you look great,” I said. She looked as if she would have sold one of us for a glass of white wine had there been a market nearby.

  “They’ve taken out practically all my internal organs. It’s a miracle I’m still alive,” she snorted.

  I turned to Robbie for backup, hoping that she would say something nice, but she just glowered and snapped her gum. I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was nothing to say. Sitting there, I felt overwhelmed by a deep feeling of utter helplessness. It was like a black blob crushing me that made me wish I were dead. I couldn’t do anything that would make th
ings better. Our family, such as it was, was like a big dying animal. And there wasn’t a shovel large enough to bury it, cover it up, or put it out of its misery.

  After about ten minutes, my mother turned her face away from us. The audience was over.

  “We’ll go now, Mother,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I was afraid Robin was about to say something unhelpful so I grabbed her arm and dragged her away. It was best to get out before there was an eruption.

  I admired Robin’s fuck-you attitude, which was so different from anything I would ever dare to do. After years of trying to shield my sister from the truth, I had almost come to believe my little Girl Scout routine. When things were bad with Mother, whatever anger or resentment I felt was channeled into my cover-up. I still wanted the neighbors, everyone at school and at the grocery store, to think that we were just like everyone else. When things with Mother calmed down, I was just so grateful for the peace, I didn’t want to do anything that would disturb it. Trying to disguise it all was my full-time job; and for a while, I thought I was fooling the world.

  chapter nine

  THE NEW AND IMPROVED GEORGANN

  After Mother came home from the hospital, things went back to a strange version of the way they were when she wasn’t on the warpath. She was up and dressed in the morning, making us toast with little, cold lumps of butter embedded in them and mugs of hot chocolate. Everything tasted like the inside of the refrigerator. She had a lit cigarette in an ashtray in every room in the house so she could just smoke from room to room like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. We came home from school, and dinner was there, ready for us. My sister and I set the table, cleared the dishes, did homework, and watched TV. It was like we were the Waltons or something.

  Since the fall after we’d moved to Boston, we attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, where I was a senior and Robin was a junior. Beaver was billed as a “college preparatory school” on the sign out by the stately front gate on Hammond Street. It was well-appointed, with soccer fields, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Many of the kids came from well-to-do families, and the headmaster was kind of famous because he had taken Sylvia Plath to the prom. In short, the school had just the right country-club patina for Mother.