“Hi!” I shouted over the music. “I’m Wendy!”
He nodded and smiled at me. He had an easy smile, as if he had it all figured out, but not in an arrogant way. He seemed older, even though I knew he was a year younger than me. He didn’t say anything, so I took a sexy slug of my beer. It tasted like a swamp. He leaned over to talk into my ear. He smelled like soap and was wearing a flannel shirt that looked so soft I wanted to touch it. Around his throat was a puka-bead necklace.
“You want to go for a walk?” His lips brushed against my ear.
I nodded yes. I would have gone anywhere with him. The beer was bubbling through my head, making my temples throb. Jack took my hand and we started to move through the crush of people in the living room. I saw Robbie in the corner still dancing with the guy. Skip was slumped on a sofa watching them with a beer in his hand. Jack and I walked out the back sliding glass doors into the yard. He was still holding my hand as he led me down a slope to the bottom of the garden. We turned and looked back up at the house, which was dark against a night of stars. Jack put his hand under my hair; his fingers gently rubbed the nape of my neck. He drew me to him and kissed me. His breath smelled like cigarettes and beer but I didn’t care, I liked it. When Jack kissed me, I suddenly wanted him to touch me everywhere at once and never stop. He pulled me down onto the grass next to him and whispered in my ear, and again I felt his lips there.
“Do you want me to show you something?”
Yes, I thought, yes, please. “What?”
“Lie down.” He looked down at my jeans and undid them. Then he pulled my jeans and my underwear down. The blood was pounding in my ears and I felt tingly all over, as if fingertips were softly drumming my face. I looked up into the sky. Then he put his mouth on me between my legs and it felt wet and warm. I looked at the stars, then down at the top of his head. I wondered how long it would last—the heat and the heaviness of his body on top of me, pressing me against the ground. He was like a mountain on me, and the stars rushed into my head. I thought about when I flew in my dreams, that moment when my feet would lift off the ground and I would soar above the trees and look down at the tiny town below. I was flying with nothing but air around me.
“Oh my God.”
He stopped, looked at me, and smiled. I caught my breath.
“We should go back,” he said, offering me a hand up.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” He pushed my hair back behind my ear and looked me in the eye. “You just looked so fucking sad.”
He took my hand as we walked back into the house, like he was with me, as if I were his girlfriend—which, judging from what had just happened, I hoped I was. People were looking at us. Jack and I moved into the swaying crowd of kids, who were slow-dancing on the rug, now littered with potato chips and beer cans. We held each other and moved back and forth to the music. I buried my face in his shirt and inhaled. He smelled like fresh air.
The rest of that summer, I went to work at the restaurant during the day, then I’d go out with Jack at night. Sometimes he would pick me up from work in his white VW Beetle. We didn’t really go anywhere; we would just drive around Belmont. It seemed exotic to me that Jack had lived in Belmont his entire life, since I hadn’t grown up anywhere. He knew all the best places to go. Sometimes we’d climb the fence around the local swimming pool, strip off our clothes, and float on our backs in the water, looking up at the night sky.
Another place he liked to take me was off a little dirt road at the top of a hill where you could see the whole city of Boston. It was a kind of secret place that he said not many people knew about. He used to come here with his friends from school, get high, and just look at the lights. Sometimes we would park there, sit on the hood of the car, drink beers, and talk. I made him laugh with stories about the restaurant and my alter ego, Candy. He told me about growing up in Belmont, and his school in New Hampshire, which he liked.
“So why did your parents send you to boarding school?”
He handed me a beer and I took a sip. I found I had acquired a taste for it since making Jack’s acquaintance.
“You know, I started hanging out with all these stoner kids and my grades went into the crapper. My mom and dad got really upset with me. They were worried, and I was just fucking up.” He looked out over the city and drank his beer.
“So then what happened?”
“They basically pulled me out in the middle of the year and sent me to Proctor. I actually really like it.”
“What’s Catholic school like?”
“Catholic school? Jesus, who told you that?” He laughed and snorted some beer out of his nose, which he wiped on his sleeve. “It’s not Catholic. I do have a teacher who is a Jesuit priest, and he’s a very cool guy. We talk a lot.” He told me he was thinking about becoming a priest. I thought that was sexy.
Then I explained to him that I could never, ever, have him over to my house, because my mother was certifiably insane, and that anyone who got close to me would get dragged into the shit show that defined my home life. Robbie and I had recently found Mother passed out on the kitchen floor with a huge bump on her forehead. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had come to. She won over the paramedics, who were too taken by her to notice that she was in her stained nightdress and reeked of Mondavi. They bandaged her head and she bobbed around looking like a wizened Sabu.
“Well, in that case I don’t want to meet her. She doesn’t sound anything like you.” He reached over and pulled me next to him, hugging me close. We looked at the lights.
“So you’ll have to be my secret love.” I smiled into his eyes.
“Fine with me.”
Our dates ended with my going back to his house, where we did it on a double bed in his basement while his parents and kid sister slept upstairs. When I sneaked back into my house, I could usually count on Mother’s being fairly sedated, and a fan in the window covered up any noise I might make on the stairs.
One night, Jack drove me home at five in the morning. I kissed him good-bye and tiptoed up the driveway to the back stairs. I came around the corner of the house and was horrified to see Mother sitting on the back stairs in her nightgown, smoking a cigarette.
She stared at me disdainfully. “You know, Wendy, you can’t fool me.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet.
“I have an eye in the back of my head. I can always see you, wherever you are.” She stood up, tossing her cigarette butt into the trees. “I am all-knowing and all-seeing.” She regarded me with an air of superiority and, turning, walked up the steps and back into the house.
Even though I was eighteen, and technically a grown-up, Mother could still fill me with her own particular brand of fear. While her drunken tirades and throwing of furniture were intimidating and scary, it was her cryptic spookiness and talent for surprise that allowed her to retain a power over me.
As we neared the end of the summer, I started to feel a building excitement over my looming departure for school, and supreme guilt over leaving my sister behind. A part of me felt enormous relief, knowing that my escape was imminent, but I was deeply concerned about leaving Robbie with our mother the shrike. My sister had a gift for getting under Mother’s skin, putting out the fire with gasoline.
“I mean, what are you supposed to do?” Robin snorted. “Stay home and babysit me?” We were in her room and she was painting her fingernails fire-engine red. I just bit mine while we talked.
“I’m just worried, that’s all.”
“Well, don’t be. I can take care of myself.” I knew she was tougher, and braver than me certainly. She fanned her fingers in the air to dry her polish.
“Promise me you’ll call if the shit hits the fan.”
“Okay . . . . Gee, I wonder when that will be?” She looked at her watch theatrically, then laughed.
“No, really, be serious.”
“Lighten up! You should be happy you’re being set free from this nutho
use.” She smiled and I felt a hair better.
A few days before my departure, Mother started negotiating with me. She tried to bribe me with the promise of a new car if I agreed to live at home. I didn’t need a car at BU, and where she thought the money for a new car would come from, I had no idea. So I held firm in my resolve to live on campus. If across town was as far as I could get, then so be it.
“Don’t forget, Wendy, who’s paying for you to go to college.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Although Mother behaved as if she were picking up the tab for my college education, she was not footing the bill. The small trust fund my grandfather had left my sister and me to pay for college was still intact. Mother had been able to divert some of the interest for her own use, but the bulk of it remained at the bank in Kansas City. I didn’t care about the money except the part that allowed me to finally leave home. After I escaped her clutches, she could have the rest. It was a small price to pay.
I went over to Jack’s house to say good-bye. He was leaving the next day to go back to boarding school for his senior year. His mom let me in and told me he was up in his room packing his trunk.
“I’ll miss you,” I said as I watched him fold his clothes and ball up his socks.
“No, you won’t.” He shot me a killer smile. “You’ll be too busy.”
It was true that I would miss him, but I was also excited about going to college, where I thought my life would finally begin and become exciting in ways not related to suicide notes and speeding cars.
“We’ll be really far apart from each other, so I don’t want you to feel bad if you meet somebody else,” he said.
I wanted him to be upset that we weren’t going to see each other for a while. But he was being so goddamn grown-up about it.
“I won’t. Meet someone else, I mean.”
“You’re going to meet a lot of people. It’s a big school.”
“You’re not a priest yet, okay? So stop trying to get rid of me.”
I walked over to him and he put his arms around me. He still smelled like soap and trees, I thought, as we kissed. We promised to see each other at the Thanksgiving break. He gave me the number of the hall phone outside his dorm room.
“Good-bye, Candy,” he said.
chapter thirteen
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
The day I left for BU happened to coincide with Mother’s fortieth birthday. On top of that, Pop, finished with Mother’s hysterical phone calls and pleas for cash, finally severed all ties with her by canceling the life insurance policy of which he had made her the beneficiary. It all hit her like a falling piano: she was middle-aged, friendless, manless, broke, and her eldest was leaving the nest. She was stunned into a catatonic silence. Robbie sat in the backseat, smiling and looking out the window as if she were sightseeing in some beautiful tropical paradise.
When Mother dropped me off outside my dorm, she stayed behind the wheel, frozen like a corpse with a lit cigarette. Robbie helped me unload my stuff onto the pavement. I embraced my sister and strongly resisted the desire to dance a jig right there on the sidewalk.
“Good-bye, Mother!” I bent down and smiled at her through the window. She didn’t look at me as the car slowly pulled away from the curb. Robbie sat in the front, doing a Queen Elizabeth wave at me as the car crawled down the street at a hearselike pace.
Surrounded by tearful parents hugging their children beside laundry baskets filled with alarm clocks and lamps and footballs, I watched the car disappear around the corner—and I started to laugh. The kind of giddy laugh that you hear in casinos after a win. Or in my case, in a dark theater watching a Woody Allen movie. I was free.
My housing at BU was in a brownstone on a quiet narrow street behind Commonwealth Avenue named Buswell Street. My roommate, Julie, was from Chicago and was studying painting at the school for the arts. She was a very sweet, sunny, uncomplicated girl with adoring, supportive parents, who also happened to be enormously wealthy. So she was basically the polar opposite of me.
As the anti-me, Julie would spring from bed in the morning, happy to be alive, drink a cup of herbal tea, and dash off to class. While Julie’s goal of being a painter was in front of her, mine—escaping my mother—was behind me. I slept until noon, made myself an instant coffee, then strolled to one of the English or theater classes I’d signed up for from the catalog with barely a glance. Finally sprung from the confines of the Snake Pit, I let my newfound freedom go to my head. Like Auntie Mame said in the movie, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” I was famished, and now I was making up for lost time.
I ate at the vegetarian dining hall, not for the food but for the company. Everyone there was cool and doing something interesting. Greg and Craig were in the acting program, Alice was studying the violin, and Hugh wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be more like them, more of a bohemian. I permed my long blond hair into a mass of kinky curls like Alice, who looked like Stevie Nicks. Alice ran around in an old tuxedo jacket, so I started shopping in thrift stores for secondhand stuff. I wore anything that would make me look like one of my fellow gypsies—dangly seashell earrings, a ratty cardigan, harem pants, tie-dyed scarves, preferably with holes in them. I started smoking those stinky clove cigarettes, Djarums. Weekends we would all gather at Craig and Greg’s (they had the biggest place) and listen to jazz and dance and play the bongos. Saturday nights we’d get dressed up and go to the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Harvard Square Theatre. I felt free and the happiest I’d been since London.
Barely two weeks into my own personal La Dolce Vita, I awoke in the middle of the night to knocking on my door and my sister’s distraught voice coming from the hallway.
“Wendy, open up. Please.” Her voice was shaking.
“What is it? What’s going on?” I let her in, trying to whisper to keep from waking my roommate. Robin’s face was shiny with tears.
“She tried to set fire to my room.” Robin cleared her throat, something she always did when she was upset and trying not to lose it.
“Jesus.”
“She was drunk and she grabbed this shirt off the floor and lit it on fire with a Bic lighter.”
“Are you hurt?” By this time, Julie had got out of bed and was standing next to mine. She turned on the little lamp on my bedside table.
“She tried to throw the shirt at me, but it landed on top of my stereo and it started to smoke and melt. I grabbed it and ran to the bathroom and threw it in the toilet but the curtains caught on fire.”
“What’s going on?” Julie asked. I gave her the lowdown. “Wow. So she’s really nuts.”
I nodded. Together we made a bed on the floor for Robin with extra blankets and pillows.
“Have you ever tried just talking to her?” Julie asked.
I was always asked this question by people who meant well but had no idea what it was like dealing with the highly irrational. They wondered why I couldn’t just bring all this to a halt with a few well-chosen words. I wanted to explain that I was a teenager, not Carl Jung or a lion tamer. You couldn’t just read I’m OK, You’re OK and grasp this situation. I couldn’t heal my mother’s wounded Inner Child, no matter how many pop-psychology books I read. The world Robbie and I lived in was like a parallel universe, and unless you’d been there, you couldn’t possibly fathom it. Even then, Mother’s ability to turn off the crazy and pour on the charm left people, like the paramedics, unaware of what was really going on.
I smiled at Julie and assured her that it didn’t work that way. Robbie and I were alone inside our world of understanding. I suppose in a way my childhood practice of shielding my sister from the truth, and later keeping it from the world, derived from Mother’s example. But at least I was trying to use it for good. I looked down to see my sister already asleep with the covers pulled over her head.
The next day, I called Dr. Keylor. I hadn’t seen her since graduating from high school, but I was still paying off my bill. I told h
er what had happened. Dr. Keylor spoke in an unruffled tone, but I could hear the concern in her voice. I held the telephone in between me and Robbie so she could hear.
“If you believe that your mother is a danger to others or to herself, I think you should seriously consider having her committed.”
“You mean like a hospital?” I imagined Mother wrapped in a straitjacket, spouting expletives as she was stuffed into an ambulance, while the neighbors stood around watching. Like her own mother being taken away on a stretcher but without the reassuring terminal diagnosis.
“Yes, where she might be able to get some help. Talk it over with your sister. I can help you take the necessary steps.”
I thanked Dr. Keylor and hung up the phone.
“Well, she is dangerous,” Robin said, “but putting her in some place?” Robin ran her index finger across her throat. Committing her seemed even more scary because of what she would do to us when she got out. She’d hunt us down and kill us like some deranged convict, escaped to wreak vengeance on her accusers. We’d have to go into Witness Protection.
I wondered what else I could do—who else could I call?
I walked to Commonwealth Avenue and called my stepfather collect from a pay phone. Pop had always rescued us before—from bad hotels, bankruptcy, insanity. But this time he told me he couldn’t do it. Things had deteriorated so much with Mother that he might have to change his phone number. She’d even called his other ex-wives. He no longer had any control over her.
It wasn’t the answer I’d wanted, but after everything I’d seen, I understood. I thanked him anyway and asked him why he’d stuck around for so long, paying our private-school tuitions, fees for summer camp in Switzerland, and class trips to Africa.
“Dearie,” he said, “it is probably the nicest thing I’ve ever done.”
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