Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  “Are you okay?” I asked. Was it over? Was he dead? I placed my hands flat on his back and felt his slow, deep breathing.

  “Yeah.” He rolled off me onto the floor. “Wow, Wendy, that was great.”

  I wanted to ask what was so great about it, but I didn’t. I smiled weakly at him and thought that I shouldn’t have been in such a big hurry to do it and could have waited, say, another ten years or so. Dylan picked up his guitar and strummed it, broadly grinning. For a second I hated him. He looked so pleased with himself for taking something from me that I could never get back. It wasn’t fair that I didn’t feel as good as he did. Oh, well, I thought. Maybe it will be better next time. At least one of us was happy.

  In my next session with Dr. Keylor, I spilled the beans that I was no longer a virgin.

  “I see.” She scribbled on her pad. Her big, carved wooden bracelets clacked. “And are you using birth control?”

  I told her about going to the clinic.

  “Good. And how did it make you feel?” In anticipation, she handed me the Kleenex box.

  “Kind of lonely. Mad.” I proceeded to leak.

  “That’s all very normal, Wendy. There are many confusing emotions that accompany a first sexual experience.”

  Then Dr. Keylor asked me about my father. I told her about the last time I had seen him, the Christmas I was eleven and Mother had played reverse Santa Claus, confiscating our toys.

  “I’m afraid we have to stop, Wendy.” I looked up at the clock; we were ten minutes over. Dr. Keylor had a pained look on her face as she put down her legal pad, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry . . . I have another patient waiting.”

  I glanced at the photos on her desk of a teenage boy and girl around the same age as me and wondered what her kids were like. They both had dark hair like her and brown eyes. In one of the photos they were standing on the beach with fishing poles. The boy was smiling, showing his braces, and the girl was looking down shyly at the ground. They looked healthy and preppy, like children in an L.L. Bean catalog.

  “Thanks, Dr. Keylor.”

  “Of course, dear. I’ll see you next week. Oh, and Wendy,” she said as she walked me to the door, “if you need to talk to me, if there’s some kind of problem or emergency before our next session . . .” She stopped and looked at me with a worried expression.

  “Yes?”

  She jotted down something on the back of the appointment card she always handed me at the end of our time together. “This is my home phone number. You can leave a message here after office hours, but you can also call me at home. If you need to.”

  I took the card, thanked her, and said good-bye. I drove home wondering if my father ever thought about me. Did he wonder what I looked like? What color my hair was and what was my favorite food? What was he doing right now?

  I was grateful to Dr. Keylor for the safe haven, where I could deposit the goings-on past and present of the Snake Pit. She had even offered to float my therapy bill, allowing me to pay it off when I was able to, at some point in the future.

  When I pulled up in front of our house, I could see Robin’s bedroom light on and the flickering yellow glow behind the shade in Mother’s room from the television. I trudged up to the front door, feeling wrung out. All this spilling-my-guts stuff made me want to go to sleep for a year.

  The following weekend, on a sunny Saturday, I got an idea of how I’d done at my League audition when I opened rejection letters from all of the schools I’d applied to: Carnegie Mellon, Juilliard, Temple, and NYU had all passed on the chance to groom me for stardom. Mother had been right when she had told me I should have something to fall back on. Clearly, I couldn’t cut it. I was devastated.

  I ran upstairs, threw myself onto my bed, and buried my face in my pillow to sob away the disappointment.

  Robbie came in and sat beside me. She placed her hand on my back, moving it back and forth. “I’m really sorry. I know you must be super bummed out.”

  I couldn’t raise my head to speak. I just nodded into my pillow and kept crying.

  “I brought you a glass of water,” she whispered. When we were little, the one who was not crying would go get the one who was a drink of water. It made you feel better.

  “Thanks.” I sat up, sniffling.

  “You can try again next year,” Robbie said, smiling at me like it was all going to be okay.

  After I was sufficiently recovered, she drove us in the Subaru, in her Mario Andretti style, to Bailey’s, an old-fashioned marble-tabled place in Harvard Square, where we gorged on coffee ice cream cones, slathered in jimmies. Then we walked to Nini’s Corner, the newsstand up the block, and bought a box of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes, which were hot-pink- and pistachio-colored in a shiny black-and-gold box. We strode smoking them through Harvard Yard arm in arm, speaking in Russian accents, pretending to be kick-ass Bond girls. We had survived all the helter-skelter times and still had each other—our sisterhood, the only thing we could count on.

  The one school I hadn’t heard from was Boston University. I had applied to the school of liberal arts as a backup, but now it was my only chance. Word of my bombing out spread quickly through the entire school. Since Beaver was supposedly a “college preparatory school,” it would look bad if I didn’t get in anywhere. Paying that stiff Beaver tuition was supposed to be a guarantee of entrance into a fine university. A flurry of faculty meetings took place, and Mr. Valentine kindly volunteered to call BU and “secure” me a spot for the fall term. He kept me after class that week and told me he had contacts there and that I was not to worry. BU was a stone’s throw from my house, so not only were my dreams of a life in the theater dashed, so was my plan to escape. V tried to make me feel better by telling me that I could probably reapply next year and transfer into the university’s school for the arts. He was being so nice, but I still felt like a loser.

  Dylan was my anchor at school, walking down the hallways with his arm around me while the other kids avoided making eye contact with me. I was the embarrassment of Beaver Country Day—the kid who didn’t get in anywhere, and they were all going to Harvard or Cornell.

  “Fuck them, man,” Dylan said to me as he leaned over the lunch table in the cafeteria and looked meaningfully into my eyes. “They’re all just robots, doing what their parents want them to do anyway.” He told me he was glad I wasn’t going away to school, because he’d be staying in Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. This way we could still be together. Dylan was the only thing in my life going right.

  The next morning, Mother came wafting into my room. She had been on hiatus from writing the Great American Novel and was back in her blue-nightgown period. She slowly walked around my room, filling it with smoke from her Merit, perhaps hoping to find drug paraphernalia or a beer can or two. She stopped beside me and saw the photo of Dylan I had taped to the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door.

  “And who, may I ask, is this?”

  Since I was now eighteen, I didn’t see any point in lying. “That’s my boyfriend, Mother.”

  “I see. Does he have a name?” She stood close and peered at his face.

  “It’s Dylan. Dylan Sweeney.”

  “And have you had sex with him?” She continued to stare at Dylan’s face.

  This is it, I thought. Forgetting, once again, that telling the truth had always got me in trouble, I told her, “Yes. You don’t have to worry, though. I mean, we’re using birth control.”

  She turned and looked at me, tilting her head and smiling like a demented Mrs. Olson in the Folgers coffee commercial.

  “My baby,” she muttered softly, then bobbed from the room, all glassy eyed. I heard her door shut, followed by loud sobbing.

  I didn’t know if Mother’s crying was genuine or an act, if she was mourning my virginity, or if she was disappointed she hadn’t got to my boyfriend first.

  The following day, Dylan met me at my locker with his books. “Hey, your mom invited me to
lunch at your house on Sunday.” He was smiling.

  My heart sank. “Really?” Clearly he didn’t know that this was probably the worst news I’d received since not getting into theater school.

  “Yeah, she called and talked to my mom. Cool, huh?”

  I pulled my science book out of my locker and tried not to throw up on it. “You aren’t going to come, are you?” I laughed nervously and fidgeted around in my purse for a pencil. I resisted the urge to get into my locker and shut the door.

  “Well, of course I am! She invited me.” He shook his head and looked at me like I was nuts.

  “Dylan, there’s something I have to tell you.” How could I explain to him that if he came, he’d be walking into the abyss, the Bermuda Triangle, the Cave of the She Bear.

  “What? I think it’s awesome.” Although Dylan was supersmart and got A’s in everything, he was not complicated. I think that this sweetness and naïveté were my favorite things about him. He just didn’t see all the badness and evil in the world that I knew was out there. How could I get him to understand?

  “My mother is not . . . she’s not . . .” I struggled to find a word that would both help him grasp the situation and frighten him enough to keep him away. “She’s strange. And weird. Really weird. She’s not like other mothers.”

  “Okay. So? No big deal.”

  I tried again. “She has a dark side. And it’s, well, very dark. Very.”

  “Jeez, Wendy, she’s just your mom, not friggin’ Darth Vader.”

  I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, But she is Darth Vader! Instead I smiled and, feeling queasy, headed down the hall with him to our first class.

  Dylan came to lunch at our house the following Sunday. Mother was on her best behavior when she wanted to impress someone, especially a man. I, of course, was immune to her charms. I watched as she sat a little too close to Dylan on the sofa, showing him pictures in a photo album of me when I was younger.

  “Here’s Wendy on her second birthday blowing out the candles on her cake. She was a beautiful baby, don’t you think?”

  Mother had got her hair done and put on a low-cut, ivory crepe-de-chine blouse and black trousers. She was really piling it on, and I could tell Dylan was uncomfortable. He simply wasn’t accustomed to a woman his mother’s age treating him like her gentleman caller. She’d narrow her eyes, slightly lean in toward him, and part her lips before she spoke. He shot me a few looks of slight panic when she wasn’t fixing her languid gaze upon him.

  “Here we are in Amsterdam. She’s thirteen or so. Isn’t that a nice outfit she’s wearing? We stopped there after a summer cruise down the Rhine.”

  Dylan nodded and smiled at her, pointing to someone in the photo. “So who’s this? Is this Wendy’s dad?”

  “Heavens, no. We were divorced ages ago. That was my boyfriend at the time, Giuseppe.”

  “He’s a good-looking guy, Mrs. Rea.”

  “Yes, he was very handsome. He spoke no English, I spoke no Italian, so he would speak to me in Spanish and I would answer in French.” Mother laughed coyly like a debutante and played with her pearls.

  Giuseppe had been Mother’s boyfriend during a break in her on-again, off-again affair with Pop. They had met on the boat, and soon he was traveling with us. He was Marcello Mastroianni gorgeous and five or six years younger than my mother, and at fourteen I found it all kind of confusing. I instantly developed a terrible crush on him and, for the first and only time ever, found myself wishing I was my mother so that Giuseppe would look at me the way he looked at her. But he didn’t because I was his girlfriend’s daughter and just a kid. He was great with Robbie and me. One thing my sister and I hated was some guy who thought that because he was with our mother he had to try to be our dad and exert some sort of influence over us. Giuseppe just wanted to take us out to lunch and buy us things, so we were crazy about him, me especially.

  On our final day in Amsterdam, we walked down a cobblestone street to a square filled with young, scruffy people playing guitars and sitting around on the ground. Some of them were smoking joints. Suddenly, we heard a siren, and two VW buses drove up onto the pavement. Police armed with clubs started pouring out of the buses and beating the hippies with their sticks. People were screaming and running, trying to get away. We were right in the middle of the square and had no way to escape without passing through the police battle. Giuseppe pushed us all onto the sidewalk and threw his body over us, shielding us from the riot. I could hear screams and shouts, then I heard the doors of the VW buses slam closed, followed by silence. For a long time I remembered that day, lying on the sidewalk with Giuseppe’s body shielding us—the way his cologne smelled, the sheen of his hair, and his eyes covered by sunglasses just like a character in a Fellini movie. My Marcello.

  “Thanks for inviting me, Mrs. Rea. It was nice to meet you. I enjoyed myself very much.” Dylan stuck out his hand to Mother and she took it, enveloping it with her slender fingers like a spider.

  “You’re very welcome, Dylan. Good-bye.”

  I walked him outside to his car.

  “Jesus.” He smiled in that goofy way he had. “I couldn’t tell if I was there to see you or to see your mom.”

  “You were perfect. I can tell she really likes you.” Of course, this wasn’t much of a compliment. Mother liked anything in pants. I kissed him and looked up into his slightly crossed eyes.

  “Well, I’m glad I passed, I guess.”

  I knew this time it wouldn’t be like Tommy Manucci the lawn-mower boy. It would be different because Dylan loved me; he wanted me. She couldn’t take him away. I didn’t have to worry.

  And I didn’t worry the whole next week. Dylan and I held hands and kissed on the soccer field. I went over to his house after school and we did it in his room. He played his guitar and called me “babe.” We talked about how we’d see each other all the time because I would be at BU and he was going to Berklee, just a few blocks away. It was almost as if the dream might come true.

  Then Mother started calling his house. Sometimes she’d call ten times a day. If she was drunk, she’d shout obscenities into the phone. If she was sober, she’d demand to know if his parents knew we were sleeping together. His parents took it in stride, as if my mother were an annoying telemarketer, but it freaked Dylan out. He began being stone-faced and silent with me. He started making excuses not to see me and went back to hanging out with the cool kids at school who cut class and smoked pot—a group I was not part of.

  At Patty Golden’s end-of-the-year party, he didn’t even show up. At Kenny Pratt’s party, he ignored me. I felt sick to my stomach as I watched him stand as far away from me as he could. He was laughing and holding a big, red plastic cup. I had heard that the boys had a keg hidden in the bushes. I wanted to walk over to him, grab the cup from his hand, and toss it in his face to wipe that nice-guy smile off it, while screaming, You coward! You don’t even have the guts to stand up to a crazy woman. And I even told you she was crazy! But I didn’t have the courage to go over to him. I went out on the dance floor and danced by myself. I closed my eyes and moved around to the Earth, Wind & Fire song that was playing:

  “Hearts of fire . . . take you high and higher to the world you belong.”

  I twirled around and wished some giant hand would sweep down and pluck me up and away from all this horrid emptiness I was feeling. Even though he had been ignoring me for weeks, I still loved him. I just didn’t know any better.

  Dylan officially broke up with me a week later, right before graduation. He had asked me to meet him at the scruffy little park near his house. It was doomsday hot; the trees were curling in the sun. We sat on concrete benches next to the dead grass.

  “It’s just that I’ve met someone else.” He was wearing jean cutoff shorts and one of his testicles peeked out from the inside of his leg. He looked down at the ground. I felt like I was choking.

  “Who is it? Is it someone from our class?” I kept staring at his ball.

 
It turned out the someone else was Nadine Horvath.

  “But why her? What’s so special about her?” Nadine Horvath was a nothing of a girl, a wispy, whiny drip with a bad perm.

  “She needs me,” he said, staring down at the scorched, brown grass.

  Whatever the hell that meant it was a lie and I didn’t believe him. I needed him so much more and he knew it. At that moment I hated him so much that I imagined tearing off his testicle and throwing it into the street, where maybe it would be run over by a big Chevy station wagon. I knew the real reason he was dumping me. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me that he couldn’t take the heat with my mother. If he really loved me, he would save me and take me away from everything, but he didn’t really love me. My eyes stung with tears and the park smelled like baking dog shit.

  I ran to my car and drove away without looking back at the boy who had just stomped on my heart. I screamed and sobbed, gripping the steering wheel. People stared at me through their car windows. I must have looked like a horror movie with the sound turned off.

  At graduation, after the diplomas were handed out, my class sang the Beatles song “In My Life.” I’m sure that to the faculty or other students it seemed an appropriate choice of a song for a group of people whose lives were about to change forever, and who had happy times to look back on, but to me, it sounded like a dirge.