Chanel Bonfire (12 page)

Thirty-six hours after walking out of our town house in South Kensington, Robbie and I sat on a plastic-covered couch in the large house in Kansas City, drinking Lipton instant iced tea and watching reruns of
To Tell the Truth
while Grandfather wheezed and grumbled from his La-Z-Boy recliner and his housekeeper, Louella, fussed over him. Mother sat on one of the antique carved wooden chairs Grandfather had brought back from China before World War II, chain-smoking Dunhills and chain-drinking California Chablis.

“Now, Mr. McAdams, let’s try a little of this applesauce.” Louella held the spoon up to Grandfather’s lips, but he waved it away.

“Godammit, get that crap away from me. You’re making me miss my favorite show.”

Grandfather was usually in a foul mood, but dying made him really cranky. He seemed to hate all people, and Robin and I were terrified of him.

“Oh, Georgann, I just wish I could get some food into him,” Louella mewed to my mother.

But Mother wasn’t listening. I could see her eyes darting about, taking mental inventory of all my grandfather’s more valuable possessions. There were some expensive rugs, paintings, and lacquered screens from China, as well as some big silver serving pieces and pretty cloisonné boxes. She popped a few of these into her handbag when she thought no one was looking, as if they were ashtrays from the Ritz.

While Mother’s crusty, old relatives shuffled in and out to call on the dying man, they took turns ogling us as if we
were circus freaks or ex-cons. Mother’s uncle Darby asked her if her cigarette had “maryjawanna” in it.

“Why no, Darby. It’s an English cigarette. Would you care to try one?” Mother replied demurely, and offered him the box.

He looked at it as if it were a severed head, and I could tell he didn’t believe her. She was a fancy-pants woman not to be trusted.

Darby’s wife, Aunt Elizabeth, brought Robin and me a tray of crackers with spray-on cheese, cocking her head to one side to show how much she pitied us. It was as if she were saying, “You poor lambs who have the Whore of Babylon for a mother, I know it’s not much, but I brought you some snacks.”

“Can I get you girls a refill on your iced tea?” Aunt Elizabeth asked as she leaned down with the tray.

“No, thank you.” We politely took a cracker each; neither of us had ever seen cheese that came out of a can.

“Where did you get that pretty blouse, Miss Robin?” Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes twinkled at the thought of her own kindness.

“I think it came from Madrid, Aunt Elizabeth.” Robin looked down at her flowered shirt and peeled her legs off the plastic-covered couch to recross them.

On the side table was a photo of Robin and me sitting on the exact same couch dressed in our Easter best with our baskets. We were three and four and our little legs peeked out from under our dresses in white socks and Mary Janes.

“Oh, dear, that is far away, isn’t it?” Aunt Elizabeth clucked. She had only been as far as St. Louis, on her honeymoon, and imagined Europe as a large opium den filled with communists and clothing-optional resorts.

When it was time to go, Mother steered us over to the La-Z-Boy to kiss Grandfather’s papery cheek good-bye.

“What are you always kissing me for?” he groused, wiping our kisses away with the back of his hand. He died a few weeks later.

The Death Watch visit ended up being only semi-successful; Grandfather did leave Mother some money, but left the house and its contents to his loyal housekeeper, Louella, who Mother said was a hillbilly. This was a crushing blow to Mother, who felt that she was being denied not only what was rightfully hers, but any reparation for her horrific childhood. For her, it was the ultimate rejection from the only father she had ever known.

With the rest of the money, Grandfather had set up small trust accounts for me and my sister to pay for college, most likely knowing that there would be no money for us if it was anywhere Mother could get her hands on it. Of course, this made Mother even more furious, and she proved him correct when, in an extreme act of retail therapy, she tried to salve the wounds of her father’s betrayal with a chocolate-brown Mercedes sedan with tan leather upholstery—purchased in cash.

The trusts were buried at the bank in Kansas City, and we would inherit them when we turned twenty-one. Mother
periodically reminded me that the money in our trust accounts was really hers, and that she fully expected us to turn it over to her as soon as we came of age.

After Kansas City, we set up temporary residence at a Howard Johnson’s in Danbury, Connecticut, and Pop reappeared like the genie from the lamp and started driving Mother around to look at houses. He had divorced Mother’s girlfriend and thought two ex-wives in the city was enough. Mother had burned too many bridges there anyway, so they both decided some cozy little Yankee enclave a short trip away in the bar car seemed like a good idea. She even liked the names of the towns: Milford, Greenwich, Darien. How long it would last this time with Pop, I didn’t know. We still loved him, but Robbie and I decided after Morocco that they would never get back together permanently, so we kept our investment in the relationship to a minimum.

After two months at the HoJo’s, Mother found a house she liked—a rented white farmhouse with a stone wall around it in Ridgefield. It was a charming house in a tastefully understated New England town with a main street and a white gazebo in the town square. Every time I rode my bike I expected to see Betsy Ross on her front porch churning butter and waving the flag or something.

Mother started making us sack lunches and walking us to the bottom of the road where the school bus picked us up. It was the new her: the gracious Connecticut Yankee
Housewife, minus the annoying husband. The sort of persona Martha Stewart would later perfect, package, and turn into a fortune.

As Mother walked back into her Pepperidge Farm commercial, the bus would take us to Ridgefield High, where Robin and I stuck out like a two-headed baby. The kids thought we were snobs because we talked funny and had been (compared to them) everywhere. When someone asked me where I’d got my sweater, I made the mistake of telling her Paris. We were freaks of the highest order, and good students, too, which was an even greater crime than owning a French sweater. It wasn’t my fault that I did my homework on time and didn’t own a pair of painter’s pants or a Kiss T-shirt. It seemed fruitless to even try to fit in, so we didn’t. We walked up and down the locker-lined halls together, shoulder to shoulder, chins up, and eyes straight ahead, daring anyone to mess with us while praying they wouldn’t.

While we were the unhappy pariahs at the high school, Mother started cheerily seeing men she met around town. Bob, who ran the service station and had a shaved head à la Telly Savalas, picked her up at the town newsstand. A man named John crawled up our driveway and let the air out of her tires when she broke up with him. And there was Tom, a slick dude in a shiny blue suit whom Mother described as her “lawyer.”

To shield Robbie from the frequency and rapacity of Mother’s sex life, I had become an expert at covering up the fact that she had one. In London, the gentleman sleeping in
the guest room was easy to explain, but back in the States Mother became a little sloppier at hiding her affairs, so I would sneak upstairs to hide a suit jacket or big shoes before my sister had a chance to see them. Sometimes I failed. Once, Robbie and I had just got home from school when I heard her cry out in distress. I dropped my backpack and ran to her room. She was standing in front of a wicker chair, upon which hung Tom’s trousers.

“Omigod, omigod! Whose are those? What are they doing here?” She was fifteen and totally grossed out.

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation.” I tried to look nonchalant.

“Eeeew! That’s soooo nasty!” She jumped up and down, clawing at her throat as if she were gagging. “You don’t think Mother did anything in my bed, do you?” Her voice started sounding tighter and higher as her mind started to form a picture of an act too revolting to contemplate—Mother and some naked guy cavorting on her blue-flowered bedspread underneath her poster of Jim Morrison. The years of trying to protect Robbie had steeled me against it. To me, Mother’s sex life was annoying, and inconvenient. For Robbie, just the idea of it was disgusting.

“Of course not. What, are you kidding?” I put my hands on my hips, trying to look professorial. “Whoever’s they are, he probably just spilled something on them and had to put on another pair.” This sounded asinine as it came tumbling out of my mouth, but, incredibly, she bought it.

“Really?”

It was because she wanted to think it was true, like when you’re too old to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy but you cling to the last shred of innocence you still possess.

“Sure.”

Even though Robbie and I had the Happy Hooker for a mom, we were fairly ignorant when it came to sex. Mother had neglected to inform us of the basics—maybe she was too busy in the advanced course.

We met Tom a week later when he came to pick Mother up for a dinner date. I thought lawyers had to wear their pants, but it seemed Tom didn’t always need his. Mother got rid of him when he suggested a three-way with her and my sister.

I don’t know if it was all the fresh country air or making the sack lunches or the boyfriends’ scarpering, but it didn’t take long for the cracks to appear in her June Cleaver façade. Mother, who up until then had always been a well-groomed and impeccably dressed size 4, gained fifteen pounds, stopped going to the hairdresser to get her hair frosted, and stopped changing her clothes, preferring to remain in her nightgown all day.

The years of shopping, dancing, and glamour in London had somehow kept the pin in the grenade of Mother’s psyche, but now it was out and she blew up, went nuts.

She bought an air rifle and started running out onto the porch like a frenzied cowpoke in a western and shooting at any dog or cat that came into our yard. The paper girl stopped coming, too afraid to venture into the crosshairs.

When Mother wasn’t running around with a lit cigarette and a gun, she was locked up in her room for days at a time. When she did emerge, it was in the middle of the night and she was on a rage-fueled mission to destroy. It was the beginning of what Robin and I called
the warpath.

“Wake up, both of you, this instant!” Mother would cry as she turned the overhead lights on in our rooms. Surprised at the suddenness and severity of these attacks, we were too afraid to get out of bed and just pulled the covers over our heads, rolled into balls, and waited for it to be over.

“You’ve ruined my life!” she’d scream as she overturned my bookshelf and ripped pictures from my walls. The tinkling of falling glass would play over her feet as she beat a path to my sister’s room.

“I wish you’d been abortions!” she’d shout as she flipped the little table on which Robbie kept her music-box collection.

Then, as quickly as she had come, she was gone—screeching off like a banshee in her nightgown. The field of destruction would settle as the warbly wheezing of the music boxes playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Edelweiss” would slowly fade.

At first, Robbie tried to glue her music boxes back together, but she gave up eventually and just put all the little bits back up on the table. There was something very sweet and hopeful about her refusal to throw them away. Little chimneys and gates lay next to the bombed-out shells of what had once been a jaunty Alpine chalet or a cute carousel
with elves riding on it. My sister’s favorite one featured a bird, a robin, sitting on a picket fence. At one time it had played “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” but now it sounded like a backward, low-speed version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The bird’s head had been snapped off and lost. Its body lay on the shelf, decapitated.

We quickly learned to hold our breath and read the signs when we trudged up the driveway in the snow after school. Were the lights on in the kitchen? Could we smell something cooking mixed with cigarette smoke? Was it safe? One day we returned home in the snow to find she had locked the front door.

“What should we do?” I looked through the window in the door into the dark kitchen. There were no signs of life.

“We have to break in,” Robbie snapped, clearly ticked off at our dilemma, as well as our mother’s lack of sanity.

“But if we break in, she’ll get mad.”

“Oh, who cares! Let her get mad! I’m freezing.” Robbie picked up a big rock on the porch that we used as a doorstop and chucked it through the glass. Then she reached her arm over and turned the doorknob.

“There,” Robbie said, swinging the door open for me. “She’s so out of it, she probably won’t even notice.”

After nine months of this, we were so desperate I called Pop in New York. He was trying again to patch things up with his first wife, but he still came up to Connecticut to play fairy ex-stepfather.

On my sixteenth birthday he had given me a used Subaru
coupe and taken us all to see
A Chorus Line
on Broadway, followed by dinner at Sardi’s. I’d thought the show was interesting. All the people in it were unhappy about something—they didn’t like their bodies or they were ashamed of being gay or didn’t feel loved by their parents. But they had been able to escape their problems, sort of, by becoming performers. I’d thought, was that why I liked acting? And was there a way for me to escape?