Chanel Bonfire (25 page)

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 in 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.

The police brought Mother home that evening. When I confronted her, she just ranted about what the police had done to her.

“They humiliated me!”

“How could you do such a horrible thing?”

“And they hurt me. Look at my wrists. They handcuffed me!”

“Answer me. Why?” But she didn’t have an answer. It was like trying to ask Godzilla why he destroyed Tokyo.

“And then they raped me!” She wept and climbed the stairs to her room.

Once again, she failed to see that what she had done had injured someone else—her own daughter—so deeply. She only saw the red marks on her own arms.

The next day, I drove her out to school so we could pick up her car. It was parked next to the tennis courts where the police had left it. We rode in silence.

In therapy, Dr. Keylor had encouraged me to try to see the good and the bad in my mother, her strengths and weaknesses. Her weakness seemed to be her diseased mind, but I had to say her strong suit was making herself the center of attention.

At the end of the summer, I drove Robin to the airport to put her on a plane to Missouri, where she would be attending Stephens College. I was happy that, after all this time, it was Robbie who truly ended up escaping. We were sisters, and that bond connected us, but she was the sister who had received the brunt of our shared circumstance. I had survivor’s guilt about being passed over while Mother campaigned so virulently to extinguish my sister’s spirit. Now, Robbie was finally free and going a thousand miles away. She deserved it.

I walked with her to the gate.

“I don’t get it.” She looked at me, shaking her head.

“What?”

“I don’t understand why you stay. I mean, you know it’s just going to be her same old shit over and over, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I shrugged, not knowing what else to say. I hugged her and told her to write to me when she got there.

“You know what your problem is?” she said, turning back from the gangway. “You’re too fucking
nice
.”

chapter fourteen

AA AND BEYOND

Since the whole graduation travesty, I was sure that Mother was unable to care for herself, and I decided to live at home instead of moving back to the dorms for my sophomore year. I had convinced myself that Mother needed me. What I failed to understand is that people as delusional as Mother are far stronger than they appear and don’t need any assistance. But I was a nineteen-year-old idiot who’d been playing the role of the enabling eldest daughter to Mother’s Joan Crawford for so long, I didn’t know any other way of life. I was thinking that I might have let Robin down, but I could still be there to fish Mother out of the Charles River or go pick her up at the police station if she was arrested again.

I told Mother that there was one condition: if I stayed, she would have to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I considered this a stroke of genius on my part. Using emotional blackmail, I almost felt like Mother’s worthy adversary.
Touché! I can beat you at this game,
I thought. Instead of being outraged at this suggestion, Mother greeted it with a Zen-like calm.

“If that’s what makes you happy, Wendy.” She peered at me innocently over her fully loaded ashtray. I was wary of her quiet acceptance, but I’d take whatever I could get.

As an extra piece of life insurance, I invited my friend Amy from next door at Buswell Street to move into Robin’s room. Amy was transferring out of BU to Emerson College and needed a place to stay until she found an apartment near campus. I thought Mother would like the extra money, and I also wanted the protection of having someone else around. I thought that with regular AA attendance and a lodger who had never seen her dark side, Mother might actually behave herself and would be less likely to wade into the deep end.

Amy, in addition to going to school, worked nights at a local radio station called WBCN, answering the request line. Amy had introduced me to the Boston music scene. At BU, she would sometimes stop by late at night and invite me to a show at hot clubs like the Rat or the Paradise. Amy got her name on a lot of guest lists, so I got to see Boston bands with names like Human Sexual Response, Mission of Burma, and La Peste. If there was a knock on my door after eleven at night, I knew it was Amy.

“Hey, I got my name at the door tonight at Bunratty’s. Want to go?”

My roommate was the early-to-bed type, and I jumped
at the chance to get out of my tiny room and experience some nightlife.

Amy was unlike anyone else I had ever met or been friends with. She was a Jewish girl from Long Island with a wild mane of brown hair and a tattoo on her ass. She had a weakness for Rastafarians, drove a big brown Camaro, and smoked Parliaments. Amy was a club girl and a night owl, but kind of a loner like me.

She moved into Robin’s room and I felt better just knowing someone else was there.

Mother’s first AA meeting was at Belmont Hospital near our house. I decided to drive her to make sure she was going; after the rock-on-the-fender incident, I wasn’t taking any chances. She sat in the car, expressionless like a smoking sphinx. We walked through the parking lot in silence and into a room painted the color of old people’s teeth, with overhead fluorescent lighting. I walked her up to the front row of folding chairs where she could sit with all the other alcoholics, then took a seat in the very back of the room where I imagined the nondrunks sat. The first thing I noticed was that everyone was smoking.
Good, she’ll fit right in,
I thought. Then a grizzled man in his seventies with a bumpy, red nose got up and introduced himself to the crowd.