Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  My sister started camping out at friends’ houses, with me in the small room I shared with Julie, or with anyone we could find who had room for her for a few days. For a month, she lived in my friend Alison Martin’s large walk-in closet in her Boston College dorm room. Robin would go back home when things had blown over.

  Some days it felt like I hadn’t really escaped at all. I could still feel my mother’s tentacles reaching through the phone line, trying to drag me back into the darkness. My phone would ring and ring and I didn’t always pick it up. Sometimes I’d pick up the receiver on the twenty-fifth ring and drop it back into the cradle. Then, other days I was almost happy: I was getting by in my classes, and I wasn’t living at home. Robbie came and went when she needed to, and Douglas would drop by some nights and take me to our favorite place in Chinatown, King Fung, for wonton soup.

  We drove down to Chinatown in the big white van he drove for the restaurant, which smelled of fish. We ate wonton soup in silence. I’d had an easy familiarity with Douglas from the first time we’d met. It was like discovering a brother I didn’t know I had. We both had fathers who had disappeared: mine into another family somewhere in the Midwest, and his into the arms of a mistress in Japan. I felt that he would have done anything for me. We didn’t need to talk about it. It was just there on the table like the soy sauce.

  One day, close to Thanksgiving break, I was studying for a history test when the phone rang and rang for what seemed like ten minutes.

  Exasperated, I picked it up. “Hello, Mother.” I didn’t see any point in pretending I didn’t know who it was.

  “I simply cannot control your sister. She’s run off again and I’m thinking of calling the police.” At least she sounded sober.

  “Please don’t do that, Mother. I’m sure I can find her. And would you mind not calling me quite so much?”

  “Excuse me?” She assumed her imperious tone. I had said the wrong thing.

  “It’s just that it makes it hard to concentrate on my schoolwork.”

  Silence. Shit. I knew I had blown it, so I just waited for the recoil.

  “Oh. I see. Your life is so much more important than mine. You’re busy and I’m bothering you.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “You know something, Wendy? If you think that what I’m doing is easy—raising your impossible sister—then you can just stay at college for all I care.”

  I listened to her smoke for a while.

  “I only meant that—”

  “Don’t bother coming home for Thanksgiving.” She hung up on me.

  It had been a year since our Thanksgiving trip to the emergency room, so Robbie and I were relieved to get a break from the funny farm. She headed for her friend Beth’s house for a safe and incident-free holiday, and I went to Jack’s house in Belmont. I had only had time to call him once since I had started college, and he had written to me a few times. He had explained the whole thing to his parents, who were nice and incredibly normal. Compared to my house, I felt as if I were celebrating Thanksgiving on Planet Corny, but I loved every second of it. Jack’s family and their friends chatted and drank eggnog. The men wore jackets with tartan ties, the women dressed in kilts and Fair Isle sweaters, and the little girls wore party dresses. Jack gave a spontaneous prayer of thanks before the feast. I looked at him in his blazer and tie in the candlelight talking about love, and I thought, Maybe he will be a priest. A very cute priest.

  After dinner, Jack and I stayed up late, listening to Genesis records in the living room. Then he said good night to me in a loud voice. I went downstairs and he went to his room. Then he snuck down later and met me on the bed in the basement.

  I helped him pack up his trunk before he went back to school. I had a feeling of finality this time, watching him get ready to go. I cared about him, but we were so far apart. I felt I couldn’t burden him with my ongoing family wars and that it wasn’t fair for me to depend on him, that somehow he was no longer mine. We spoke on the phone a few times after that, but it felt strained and disconnected somehow. We broke up before Christmas. I sensed that he might have met someone else, but if he did, he never told me. I was sad but not brokenhearted as I had been the last time. It seemed possible to love someone and be loved without catastrophe and pain occurring—this realization gave me hope.

  Back at the Snake Pit, the pattern became this: My sister started running away so often that, before she could, Mother would throw her out of the house. When she left, Mother would call the police and tell them Robin had run away and stolen the Subaru. The police made it clear they had better things to do than flag down my sister on Belmont High Street and bring her home. It looked as if without me as a buffer or a distraction, it became impossible for my mother to leave my sister alone—like a little kid with a scab she can’t stop picking at. For Robbie, the only choices were fight or flight, and neither was a good one.

  I was home one weekend and noticed that my sister’s bedroom door was covered with an Indian-print tablecloth. When I looked underneath, I saw that the whole center panel of the door was missing and there were gashes in the wood. I asked Robbie what had happened.

  She had come home from school to find Mother in her room, going through her drawers.

  “What are you doing?” my sister asked.

  “Don’t you keep a diary? I thought all teenage girls kept diaries.” Mother kept rummaging.

  “Why would I write my private thoughts down when you would just read them? I live with you. I don’t need to write about it. And this is my room.”

  Mother strode out the door. My sister locked the door after her. Minutes later, a loud thwacking sounded on the other side of the door as Mother chopped it in with an ax.

  “There are no locked doors in this house, young lady!” Mother boomed from the hall, while Robin screamed and covered her ears and wood chips flew all over.

  “So I put the Indian print over it. I mean, I think it looks nice, you know?” Robin shrugged.

  I looked around Robbie’s room. The burn marks on the stereo, the scorch marks on the rug, the axed-in door, the little broken-music-box shelf. It was pathetic, and clearly time for me to assume my role as hostage negotiator and attempt to secure my sister’s release. I started by finding the ax in the garage and hiding it behind some rhododendron bushes in the backyard.

  Robbie had a friend from high school, a pale, sad-faced girl named Hope, who was estranged from her family and living in a big old house with some other castaway children. My sister wanted to join them, but without Mother’s agreement it wouldn’t be possible. My job was to convince my mother that my sister should move into this house for the last half of her senior year of high school. Otherwise, I pointed out, they would wind up killing each other and someone might end up in jail. Robin was seventeen, after all, and could definitely take care of herself. Mother said nothing and just gave me the hairy eyeball I had seen so many times before. I knew that the most important thing to Mother in this situation was her exoneration from any guilt or responsibility, followed closely by a large helping of groveling dished out by my sister. Robin was so desperate to go I thought she’d agree to any terms.

  On her last day at home, we stood in the driveway to play out Robin’s departure scene like actors in a movie, hoping the only take we had went well.

  “Just remember, Robin, that you are not moving out. I am throwing you out because you are an out-of-control, disobedient child who has no appreciation for anything I’ve ever given you,” Mother began.

  I held my breath. Robin folded her arms across her chest. “Okay.”

  “You have proven yourself to be undeserving of my patience and my generosity.”

  And let’s not forget awesome mothering skills, I thought as I watched the scene.

  “Even if you asked me to stay, I would have to say no.”

  I glanced nervously over at Robbie. I could see her coming to a boil. I prayed she could keep it together.

  “Well, I guess I can’t a
sk then. I’ll just take my things and go,” she said.

  “Aren’t you even going to apologize to me for what you’ve done?”

  I could tell Mother had a wicked hangover and her voice shook. This was the deal breaker; without an apology, everything would go nuclear. I chewed the inside of my lip, waiting.

  Robin cleared her throat a few times, looking down at the gravel, then said, “Sorry.”

  And that was it. My sister would never again be under the same roof as my mother.

  We loaded a suitcase and the few boxes Robin had been allowed to take into the Subaru, and we drove to her new home in Jamaica Plain. I thought it was a bit grim. The paint was peeling, the furniture tatty, and Robin’s new roommate Hope seemed totally depressed about her life. But there was plenty of room and Robin was away from Mother. Safe. I kissed my sister good-bye and took the T back to school.

  I finished out my year at college that May with no great distinction, though I had managed to get my grades up to B’s and one C by the end of the year. My crowd at school was moving on. Craig and Greg were going to Juilliard. My roommate, Julie, was transferring to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Lacking funds for a summer rental, I was going home and hoped Douglas would give me my old job back.

  I saw my sister only periodically. We had always been so close, a team united against you-know-who, but all of a sudden our relationship became strained and distant. She acted as if I had abandoned her, and I felt that she had chosen her newfound friends over me. Her roommates seemed to be her new family, and the family didn’t include me. When I went over to her place, I imagined that everyone was staring at me and that Robin had told them what a weasel I was. I felt guilty about all the time I had spent away. I hadn’t been there to help her because I was too busy trying to live my own life. I was a selfish bitch just like Mother had been telling me all these years.

  Maybe all this weirdness between us was what made me start sneaking Robin’s stuff out of her room and taking it over to her new house. She had been allowed to take very little with her. So, a few weeks before her graduation from Beaver, I drove over one evening with a box of records and books and a shopping bag of her clothes. I knocked on the front door, and Robin’s roommate Hope answered. Instead of inviting me in, she stood in the doorway. Her lank, mousy brown hair framed her long, thin face, which had no expression at all.

  “Yes?” It seemed to me that she was pretending that she didn’t know who I was. I shifted the box onto my other knee. The shopping bag was hanging on my arm. It was heavy but Hope didn’t notice.

  “Hi, it’s me, Robin’s sister? Is she here?”

  “I’ll go see.”

  Hope padded across the foyer and started up a rickety staircase, leaving the door open. I invited myself in, closing the front door with my foot and dropping the box onto a chair and the bag on the floor. Robin came down the stairs a minute later, dressed in a bathrobe, her face damp from the shower and her hair wrapped in a towel. She was followed by Hope, who then sat on the stairs watching us. My sister had a blank look similar to Hope’s; I couldn’t tell if she was glad to see me or sorry that I came. Robin looked up at Hope a few times, as if they were exchanging thoughts telepathically. This made me feel resentful and threatened.

  “I snuck this stuff out. I don’t think she’ll notice.”

  We just stood there in the hallway, looking at one another. I shot Hope a dirty look. I pointed to the box on the chair and Robin crossed over to it, flipping through the records, and peered into the shopping bag.

  “Thanks,” Robin said with a shrug, like it was no big deal. This, along with the presence of Hope as a kind of chaperone or witness to the proceedings, pissed me off. I thought of how Mother had put all of Robbie’s things in garbage bags and stripped the room. It already looked as if she had never been there. I was sticking my neck out and my sister couldn’t care less.

  “Well,” I replied, trying to cover my feelings of anger and awkwardness, “I thought you might like to have them.” I’m trying to help you, stupid, I wanted to say. She had been my closest friend, playmate, the person with whom I shared my secrets. We had been through the shit together. Now it was as if we were strangers. All our games, dreams, nicknames, shot to hell. I had thought taking her stuff to her would make her happy, but it just made me look like a kiss-ass.

  Robin shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “You coming to the graduation?” I detected a faint smile.

  “Sure. I’ll be there.”

  “Okay. Dinner’s ready so we have to go.” Robin gestured to some other room in the house. I hadn’t got past the hallway. I said good-bye and left.

  We. It was a different we now.

  On the day of Robin’s graduation from high school, I knocked politely on Mother’s bedroom door to ask if she was coming. There was no answer. I took that as a no. About fifteen minutes later, dressed and running late, I was loading a few boxes of Robbie’s stuff into the Subaru when suddenly Mother appeared, dressed in her nightgown, dragging two of the big black garbage bags from Robin’s room toward her car. She flung the car door open, stuffed the bags inside, and turned to face me. Her greasy hair hung around her face, which was distorted and exaggerated like a mask in a Japanese play.

  “You’re not going to that fucking ceremony for that little bitch!” she screamed.

  I took a step back, but in seconds she was across the lawn, standing right in front of me. Before I knew what was happening, she snatched my car keys away and threw them into the bushes in front of the house. She leapt into her car and raced away, the bottom of the blue nightgown caught in the door and dragging in the street.

  As her car disappeared, I began to panic. I hunted for the keys on my hands and knees, crawling under the bushes in my white dress. It took me about five minutes, but I found them. I ran to the Subaru and drove to school as fast as I could.

  By the time I arrived, the ceremony was over. This seemed odd to me as it should have lasted at least an hour and would normally still have been going on. As I walked up the tree-lined, curved driveway in front of the main building where the ceremony was held, I noticed that people were staring at me in a queer way. Then I saw Mr. Valentine coming toward me with a stricken look on his face, like the mask of tragedy that quickly changed to comedy—an artificially cheerful smile. He took my arm and steered me toward the school auditorium, where the reception was being held.

  “I want you to go and stand next to your sister right now and pretend that nothing is wrong,” he said in a low voice.

  I suddenly felt like I had swallowed an anvil and my ears started to tingle. I turned to him, as I had many times before for direction: Where should I go? What should I feel? But this was real life and not the stage. I asked him what had happened, and he pulled me into a doorway and told me with a big smile on his face, so no one would suspect he was giving me bad news.

  While I was crawling around in the dirt under the bushes looking for my keys, Mother (apparently having changed her mind about attending my sister’s graduation) drove directly to the school. When she got to the gates, she honked her horn to announce her arrival, then drove her car up the driveway, past all the parents, faculty, and students sitting on folding chairs in the courtyard listening to the headmaster’s speech, and stopped right in front of the dais. People looked at each other, confused by the sudden appearance of this petite woman in her car with a cigarette holder sticking out of her mouth. No one moved. The headmaster stopped speaking. Mother got out, yanked her muddy nightgown hem free of the door, and flicked her ash.

  I could just imagine the ripple of shocked chatter from the audience observing the scene.

  “Who on earth is that?” muttered Beatrice Kleppner, whose son Paul was graduating that day.

  “I don’t know, dear,” said her husband, Daniel, “but she’s in her nightdress.”

  Tippy Nauts, the school secretary, who had offered to man the phones that day, was watching all this in horror from the small window i
n her office. Good Lord, she realized, it’s that awful Rea woman, the one who smokes in the auditorium. Tippy quickly picked up the telephone and called the Brookline police.

  “Do you think she was invited?” hissed Erica Labalme behind her program to her husband, Hector.

  “Perhaps she’s lost,” Hector replied foggily.

  With all eyes upon her, Mother proceeded to deposit the garbage bags, filled with my sister’s things, in front of the podium. A sea of faces stared. It wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill “I’m going to rain on your parade” moment, it was a huge “Fuck you, I am going to ruin your life” moment.

  My mother probably saw it as her crowning achievement, an Oscar-worthy humiliation of my sister. Unfortunately for her, no one else did. When Mother attempted to get back in her car, she was quickly subdued by a few of the more strapping fathers present.

  “Don’t you dare touch me!” Mother had screamed as she tried to twist herself free.

  “Calm yourself, madam,” Hector said, holding her, while another man took away her cigarette holder before somebody got burned.

  “Yeah, take it easy,” the man said, crushing the cigarette under his shoe. When the police arrived, she was arrested and led away handcuffed, screaming in her nightgown.

  “So go over there and act natural,” Mr. V said.

  Act natural, I thought blankly, and made my way as if underwater to stand next to my sister in the auditorium. She was next to a table that had a plate of cookies on it, staring straight ahead. I stood next to her with an idiotic smile on my face and felt that an imaginary circle was around us that no one dared come into for fear of catching some disfiguring disease. Everyone seemed to be safely keeping their distance, except for Mr. V, who stood inside the circle nervously eating all the cookies off the plate.

  I explained what had happened, Mother throwing the keys and my hunt for them. Robin listened to what I had to say and told me it wasn’t my fault. I think she was in shock, retreating into some other place in her mind where none of this had occurred. I felt ashamed about not having been there to stop it. Later, Robbie went to her home and I went to mine.