Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  I didn’t say anything to Robbie about the flowers. Despite my sister’s increasing worldliness, I still wished to protect her—playing Pollyanna at any cost. Mother kept up her busy-little-beaver routine, writing in the mornings when we left for school. In the afternoons, she’d still be at it, a full ashtray at her elbow, a chain of lit cigarettes around the house, and a pot of something on the stove. On Thursdays, the day that she went to see her therapist at McLean, she was especially chipper and eager to share some of the details of her therapy session as soon as we got home.

  One Thursday after we got home from school, she was bustling around the kitchen chopping vegetables for a stew.

  “Hello, girls,” she said gaily.

  My sister and I exchanged worried looks.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “I’m great. But my doctor thinks that it’s because of you girls that I drink.” She said this like one would say, did you know that if you throw water on a fire, it goes out? I looked at her. I was stunned that any doctor would say something like that.

  The next Thursday at the dinner table she said, “My doctor thinks that if you and your sister appreciated me more, I wouldn’t be so depressed.” She said it with the same That’s Incredible! look on her face. My sister and I looked at each other. “Eat your pot roast before it gets cold, girls,” she said. I began to wonder what kind of a bozo this shrink was.

  A month went by and we performed David and Lisa to the usual shock and dismay of the parents. The holidays came and went uneventfully, but the wildly unprofessional remarks from Mother’s doctor continued.

  The night before her next therapy appointment, I snuck outside and put a rock on the fender of her car. When Robbie and I got home from school the next day, the rock was still there. I did the exact same thing for the next two weeks, and each Thursday after we got home, the rock was on Mother’s car fender. On the third Thursday, I pulled into the driveway, saw the rock, and lost it.

  “Goddammit!” I exclaimed loudly as I rolled the window down and crawled out of the car. “Goddammit, goddammit.” I yanked my backpack out of the backseat, heaved it up onto my shoulder, and headed for the stairs.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Robin hollered after me.

  I marched into the house and there she was, sitting in a cloud of her own smoke in the sunporch.

  “How was your therapy session today?” I said sarcastically. I visualized flinging her typewriter through the sunporch window, but I wanted to trip her up in her big fat lie first.

  “Oh, fine,” she said waving her cigarette around.

  “Any life-shattering discoveries?” I sneered.

  “Um, no.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “What’s your doctor’s name?” I commanded.

  “Epstein.” She took a huge drag on her cigarette.

  I stomped over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. I called directory assistance and asked for the number of McLean Hospital. Mother watched me calmly, stubbing out a cigarette and then lighting another. I got through to the switchboard, where the operator informed me that there was no doctor named Epstein at the hospital. Then she asked if she could help me with anything. I said no and hung up. I looked at Mother as if to say, Yes? Well? Is there something you’d like to explain?

  She gave me a frosty look.

  Robin walked in. “What’s going on?” she demanded, looking back and forth between us.

  “I suppose you think you’re very clever, Wendy,” Mother said archly as she swept by me and up the stairs to her room. Slam! went her door a few seconds later.

  The Waltons was canceled. Good night, John Boy.

  chapter ten

  INNER MEDEA

  That night, Mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. The sound of her tires on the gravel woke us up, and we dashed out after her just in time to see her peel out of the driveway and reverse into the street. I shouted at her to stop.

  “Just let her go,” Robin yelled. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back toward the dark house. I wrenched away from her, ran to the street, and stood in front of the car, waving my arms in the air. Mother put her foot on the gas, revving the engine theatrically, and headed straight for me.

  “Mother! Stop!” I screamed.

  I moved a few feet over to the side of the street and she steered toward me. I jumped backward as she approached, throwing myself onto the mounded lawn. Her face was almost unrecognizable over the steering wheel—hair flying, eyes practically screwed shut, and her cigarette glowing from between her bared teeth. She just missed me by sharply turning at the last second, then gunned it down the street. I got up and watched her taillights melt into the blackness. I turned and saw Robin standing in the doorway. We looked at each other with no idea of what to do. It wasn’t like there was a manual that tells you what to do when your drunk mom tries to run you over and then drives off at a hundred miles an hour in the middle of the night. It was like a scene in a bad TV movie. Except, of course, it wasn’t a movie; it was our life.

  We went quickly back into the house and I ran to the sunporch to use the phone to call the police and discovered, in her still-running typewriter, a note announcing her intention to kill herself: Life was no longer worth living, her children hated her, no one loved her, she was ten pounds overweight, and it was time to end it all.

  I called the police and gave them a description of the missing person: about five foot four, blue, bloodshot eyes, 110 pounds, wearing a blue nightgown, no shoes, probably drunk, and most likely holding a cigarette.

  Robbie stood beside me, arms crossed, tapping her bare foot on the floor.

  “Yes, Officer, it’s our mother,” I said.

  “Well, your mother has to be missing for at least twenty-four hours before we can start searching for her,” the policeman said.

  Robin grabbed the phone away from me. “Look, she left a suicide note! Are you telling me you’re not going to do anything?!”

  “I’m sorry, but she has to be gone for that amount of time to legally qualify as a missing person.”

  Of course, we knew she’d been missing for years.

  We sat downstairs in the guest bedroom watching a Columbo rerun on TV, waiting for her to come back or for a call from the morgue. I prayed for rain to make it easier for her to drive her car off the road. It was going to be a long night.

  “I’ll go make some popcorn.” I went to the kitchen and put a big pot on the stove to heat up the Jolly Time.

  “Shit, I have a huge math test tomorrow,” Robin said from the other room. “Can you bring me a Tab?”

  “Sure,” I said, raising my voice over the popping sounds in the pot as I shook it back and forth.

  Just as I was grabbing a soda for Robbie out of the fridge, I heard her scream. I ran back into the room and her face was frozen. Wide-eyed, mouth open, she was pointing at the television. I turned to look at the screen and saw a dignified, white-haired man in a suit. He was standing in front of a bookcase, holding up a bottle of vitamins and looking very sincere. There was something about the man that I recognized—he looked familiar but I couldn’t think of where I had met him before. I kept staring and he kept talking about the vitamins, then he began to recite a telephone number that appeared at the bottom of the screen. That’s when I realized who it was.

  It was Daddy.

  It was the first time in almost ten years we had seen him or heard his voice. It was, in fact, the first proof we’d had that he was still alive.

  “Oh my God,” Robbie gasped.

  “His hair’s turned white,” I whispered.

  Although Robbie and I sometimes talked about looking him up, we always decided against it. It was too scary, the fear of rejection too great. Maybe, for once, Mother hadn’t lied about his not wanting us. After all, he hadn’t tried to find us in all these years. The queer feeling of seeing him on the screen, a stunned shock of recognition, was followed by a flash of anger at the man who had left us to deal with a huge
mess. He was most likely peacefully asleep in his bed somewhere, while we were pacing the floor, waiting for the phone to ring from the hospital, or the cops, or a phone booth somewhere. It wasn’t fair.

  Mother returned from her driving spree two days later, still dressed in the same nightgown and looking bleary. She had a carton of cigarettes tucked under her arm and a crumpled Stop & Shop paper bag, the contents of which I could only guess at.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Robbie demanded.

  “He’s in Europe with his wife.” Her voice was flat and dead like her face.

  “Who? What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Frank. I parked in his driveway and waited for him to come home.” Her eyes were all red-rimmed. “Finally the housekeeper came and knocked on my car window.”

  “You drove to Vermont?” Robbie’s disdain was evident, but Mother was too zonked to notice.

  Mother continued, ignoring us. “She said he was away skiing somewhere with his wife.”

  Robbie shook her head and looked at the ceiling.

  Mother started to move past me leadenly, making a break for the stairs and her room. “In fucking Europe. I’m living in a rental the size of a shoebox and that bastard is off in a ski lodge in the Alps drinking hot buttered rum.”

  “We called the police! We had no idea where you were!” Robbie spat furiously.

  “I ran out of cigarettes so I decided to come home.” With that Mother heaved a sigh, emitting dangerous levels of nicotine that caused my eyes to water as she climbed the stairs, returning to the only place where she seemed to feel safe.

  A few days later, I gathered my courage and knocked on her bedroom door. Things had spiraled so out of control, I decided I needed to talk to someone about it other than myself.

  Her television was on full blast so I had to shout. “Mother? Mother, are you in there?” Of course I knew she was. “I need to ask you a question!” I listened at the door for some sound.

  “In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife!” boomed the announcer on the TV.

  I knocked again, this time a little harder. “It’s important!”

  “Not even this tin can can dull a Ginsu!”

  I put my mouth up to the crack in the doorway and said, “I was thinking that I’d like to go to a therapist.”

  Suddenly I heard the key in the lock and the door opened. She was still in her nightgown, which had not been laundered since her excursion to Vermont. She had stopped frosting her hair again, and it had grown out so that the top of her head was a mop of dishwater blond from which hung a fringe of lighter hair, giving her the overall appearance of a deranged capuchin monkey. Her room smelled like an overflowing ashtray. I glanced over her shoulder to see that she had written in black ink all over her bedsheets what looked like names and phone numbers that I couldn’t make out. Empty cans and ice cream cartons were on the floor. It looked like a rock band had gone berserk.

  “Therapist?” She looked at me quizzically, twirling her cigarette as if it were her extra finger. “What do you want to talk to a therapist about?”

  “Oh, just stuff,” I stammered.

  “Not me, I hope.” She said this to me as if I were accusing her of borrowing my favorite sweater.

  “Oh, no, not you. Me.”

  “You?” She looked confused. I could see that it was mind-boggling to Mother that I might think of myself as a worthy and interesting topic of discussion.

  “Yes, just me and school and, you know, being a teenager.”

  She considered this for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. “Well, all right, what the hell, go ahead. But remember, therapy can be a crutch.”

  “Yes, Mother.” I decided not to mention her foray into pretend therapy.

  She shut the door and turned the TV up louder.

  Dr. Keylor’s office was in her house in a suburb of Boston not far from my school. She had a friendly, round face, brown hair, and wore chunky jewelry. She looked like someone’s mom—not mine, but someone’s.

  “Can you tell me something about why you are here?” she asked in her calm, reassuring voice. I started to tell her and noticed her eyes getting wider and wider as I kept talking. She scribbled on a yellow legal pad, handed me the Kleenex box, and at the end of the hour told me she wanted to see me twice a week.

  At my next session, after I had regaled Dr. Keylor with the story of Thanksgiving in the ER and the events following, she told me that my mother was “psychotic,” a nifty word I had never heard before.

  “You mean, like, crazy?” I asked.

  “Therapists dislike the word crazy,” she answered slowly. “Let’s just say that your mother is mentally deranged and has lost contact with external reality.”

  The following week, Dr. Keylor showed me a page in a huge book—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  “I want you to take a few minutes and read about these particular personality disorders.” She ran her finger along the words narcissistic and histrionic. “I believe your mother suffers from both of these psychological conditions, and we call this diagnosis a Cluster B.”

  I thought Cluster B sounded like an elaborate math problem or a healthy candy bar. I pored over the list of symptoms, which included lack of empathy, excessive emotionality, inappropriate seductiveness, and needing constant admiration. I felt that my mother’s picture should have been right there on the page.

  “This is incredible, Dr. Keylor. Thanks for showing it to me.”

  “Of course, Wendy. I’ll see you on Monday at three thirty. Have a nice weekend.” She wrote my appointment time on a card and handed it to me.

  Armed with all this new information, I felt enormously relieved. It wasn’t my imagination that my home life was frighteningly bizarre. Now I had the validation of a health-care professional. I felt as if I had made an amazing discovery—one that I could share only with Robbie.

  The truth was I was ashamed and embarrassed by my mother and would have done anything to conceal what went on in my home. My secret was safe with Dr. Keylor, and my mother could occasionally pull it together and make a public appearance. She’d put on her Chanel suit and her pearls, do her hair and makeup, and come see the school play with her mink around her shoulders. Afterward, she would chat with the other parents and annoy the hell out of the headmaster by smoking in the auditorium. The kids would marvel at how glamorous she looked. My friend Nancy Higgins gushed, “Wow, your mom is so cool. She looks like a movie star!” I wanted to tell Nancy that I hated my mother, that she was a crazy bitch, and that if Nancy knew what she was really like, she would hate her just as much as I did. But instead I smiled and said, “Thanks.”

  I had another secret, one that I planned to keep from Mother for as long as possible. I had a boyfriend. His name was Dylan. He was in my class and had longish blond hair, wore glasses, and played the guitar. We didn’t travel in the same circles; he was one of the “cool” stoner kids, but he got all A’s in school. I had first noticed him when he performed the Elvis Costello song “Alison” in the Beaver Talent Show. His voice was thin and cracked in places during the song, but something about him up onstage playing the guitar with his eyes shut and his head thrown back got to me in a way nothing ever had before. He rocked along as he played, spastically dancing in a mustard-colored suit that he wore with a skinny black tie. He looked goofy and exposed and I felt like he was singing to me.

  “‘Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh, Alison, my aim is true.’ ”

  He didn’t win the contest; Phillippa Freiberg won for her baton-twirling routine done to the Star Wars theme.

  The only other boy at Beaver who I’d had a crush on was a hunky lacrosse player named Kirk Winthrop, a golden boy who barely acknowledged my presence. Having no idea how to get him to notice me, I had decided to ignore him, thinking that my icy stare off into the distance would drive him wild. So far, it hadn’t worked. I decided to take a different tack with Dylan. After he lost, I went right up to
him in the auditorium and I told him that I thought he should have won, not that lame cheerleader girl.

  “That’s wicked nice of you,” he said. His teeth were a little crooked and he was a tad cross-eyed, which made him look so sweet, like a little boy.

  Soon we were eating lunch together in the school cafeteria and I was going over to his house on weekends. His parents were both professors and totally relaxed about everything. They smoked pot and walked around the house practically naked in these big kimonos that hung open. When I went to Dylan’s house we were allowed to go into his room and shut the door for hours, and his parents not only didn’t mind, they hardly seemed to notice. They had a free and easy way; they weren’t drunk all the time, just stoned sometimes, and they never screamed or threw things.

  I had kissed a few boys in London and had even slapped one on the face for sticking his tongue in my mouth, which I thought, at the time, was very uncouth. And then there were stage kisses in the school play. That was where you pressed your dry, closed lips together and waited about five to ten seconds (depending how in love you were in the play), and the only thing you’d feel was embarrassment and the air from the other person’s nostrils on your face as the person breathed through them. But making out with Dylan was different.

  One Saturday afternoon we were in his room making out when he pushed my head down to his crotch. I had no idea what he was doing. He just kept steering me down toward his zipper.

  “What are you doing?” I knew nothing about sex and was probably the last virgin standing in my class.

  “I want you to put it in your mouth.” He wiggled his eyebrows up and down in a naughty way. This was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. I just couldn’t believe that anyone would do that.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I smiled and tossed my hair back, trying desperately to look as if I weren’t terrified by the thought of seeing his penis that close up—or at all, actually. Trying to be cool, I told him I’d touch it but I wouldn’t put it in my mouth.