Chanel Bonfire (16 page)

Later, during the drive home, Robin asked what V had wanted to talk to me about. I told her that he thought I should apply to acting school.

“Are you going to?” she asked as we drove home in the dark.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Great,” she said unenthusiastically, but without a hint of her usual sixteen-year-old snarkiness. We both knew what it meant: I was going to get to escape the Snake Pit and she’d be the one left behind to watch over its sole inmate.

During dinner that night I told Mother that I wanted to apply to acting schools. She sat and listened to me talk about which ones Mr. V thought I should try out for and that he thought that I was good enough to get in. She hardly touched her dinner as I spoke, and then lit up a Dunhill.

“Just remember, Wendy, that acting is all very well and good, but you need to have something to fall back on. I suppose with a college degree you could teach.”

“But I don’t want to be a teacher. I want to be an actress,” I said, looking down into my chicken.

“Well,” Mother sighed, “you should at least learn to type so you’ll always be able to support yourself. I’ve known how to type since I was sixteen.” Mother had yet to actually use her typing to support herself, or us for that matter, but I wasn’t going to point that out.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“One hundred and twenty-five words a minute.”

“That’s a very good idea, Mother. I promise I’ll learn how to type.”

Robin looked at me mischievously, lips pursed, desperately trying to stifle a smile. I tried to look serious.

My mother stared at me for a beat, then extinguished her cigarette, pushed her chair back, and rose to leave the room, leaving her uneaten dinner on the table.

“Then you’ll have a valuable skill, just in case things don’t work out,” she said over her shoulder as she exited.

Robin started to stack the dishes, scraping the leftovers on top of Mother’s full plate. We held our breath until we knew Mother was out of hearing range, then burst out in snorts of laughter.

“Well, Wendy, acting is all very well, but really!” Robin said grandiosely, tossing her hair.

“You need something to fall back on. Just in case!” I giggled, flouncing around self-importantly.

“Yeah, if you can’t find some rich guy to take care of you.” Robin snatched up a dinner fork from the table and mimed smoking it.

“Some sucker!” I said, laughing even harder.

“I’ve known how to type since I was nine,” Robin oozed. “Four hundred words a minute!” She threw her arm across her forehead and bulged out her eyes, making herself look like Gloria Swanson at the end of
Sunset Boulevard
when they come to take her away to the booby hatch. We both collapsed onto the dining-room chairs in guffaws.

Spent from our big laugh, we wiped our eyes, blew our noses in the cloth napkins, and returned to clearing the table and doing the dishes.

“She is so full of it,” Robin said as she washed and I dried.

The next day, we came home from school and there she was, firing away at her typewriter. And next to her on the table was an enormous bouquet of yellow roses. Yellow roses were her favorite.

“Who are those from?” I asked her.

“They’re from Frank. Isn’t that sweet? He loves me and he wants me back.” She didn’t look up as she said this but kept typing and smoking. I hadn’t seen a box, or any cellophane from the florist, and I asked if he had brought them over himself. But she said no, that he’d had them delivered.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

My heart sinking, I went outside into the driveway and looked through the windows of her car. The backseat was littered with yellow rose petals. She had bought the flowers herself and had lied about Frank having sent them. I felt disgusted by how stupid she must think we were, but I also felt sorry for her.

There had been so many bouquets in the old days. The men would always telephone to make sure their flowers were delivered, and I would often have the thrill of asking, “Which ones are yours?” But the flowers had stopped coming long ago. Looking at the rose petals on the backseat of Mother’s car, I felt that familiar sense of dread. It was a feeling that something was coming this way. Like a tsunami or a meteorite. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I didn’t say anything to Robbie about the flowers. Despite my sister’s increasing worldliness, I still wished to protect her—playing Pollyanna at any cost. Mother kept up her busy-little-beaver routine, writing in the mornings when we left for school. In the afternoons, she’d still be at it, a full ashtray at her elbow, a chain of lit cigarettes around the house, and a pot of something on the stove. On Thursdays,
the day that she went to see her therapist at McLean, she was especially chipper and eager to share some of the details of her therapy session as soon as we got home.

One Thursday after we got home from school, she was bustling around the kitchen chopping vegetables for a stew.

“Hello, girls,” she said gaily.

My sister and I exchanged worried looks.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“I’m great. But my doctor thinks that it’s because of you girls that I drink.” She said this like one would say, did you know that if you throw water on a fire, it goes out? I looked at her. I was stunned that any doctor would say something like that.

The next Thursday at the dinner table she said, “My doctor thinks that if you and your sister appreciated me more, I wouldn’t be so depressed.” She said it with the same
That’s Incredible!
look on her face. My sister and I looked at each other. “Eat your pot roast before it gets cold, girls,” she said. I began to wonder what kind of a bozo this shrink was.

A month went by and we performed
David and Lisa
to the usual shock and dismay of the parents. The holidays came and went uneventfully, but the wildly unprofessional remarks from Mother’s doctor continued.

The night before her next therapy appointment, I snuck outside and put a rock on the fender of her car. When Robbie and I got home from school the next day, the rock was still there. I did the exact same thing for the next two weeks, and each Thursday after we got home, the rock was on Mother’s
car fender. On the third Thursday, I pulled into the driveway, saw the rock, and lost it.

“Goddammit!” I exclaimed loudly as I rolled the window down and crawled out of the car. “Goddammit, goddammit.” I yanked my backpack out of the backseat, heaved it up onto my shoulder, and headed for the stairs.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Robin hollered after me.

I marched into the house and there she was, sitting in a cloud of her own smoke in the sunporch.

“How was your therapy session today?” I said sarcastically. I visualized flinging her typewriter through the sunporch window, but I wanted to trip her up in her big fat lie first.

“Oh, fine,” she said waving her cigarette around.

“Any life-shattering discoveries?” I sneered.

“Um, no.” She shrugged her shoulders.

“What’s your doctor’s name?” I commanded.

“Epstein.” She took a huge drag on her cigarette.

I stomped over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. I called directory assistance and asked for the number of McLean Hospital. Mother watched me calmly, stubbing out a cigarette and then lighting another. I got through to the switchboard, where the operator informed me that there was no doctor named Epstein at the hospital. Then she asked if she could help me with anything. I said no and hung up. I looked at Mother as if to say,
Yes? Well? Is there something you’d like to explain?

She gave me a frosty look.

Robin walked in. “What’s going on?” she demanded, looking back and forth between us.

“I suppose you think you’re very clever, Wendy,” Mother said archly as she swept by me and up the stairs to her room.
Slam!
went her door a few seconds later.

The Waltons
was canceled. Good night, John Boy.

chapter ten

INNER MEDEA

That night, Mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. The sound of her tires on the gravel woke us up, and we dashed out after her just in time to see her peel out of the driveway and reverse into the street. I shouted at her to stop.

“Just let her go,” Robin yelled. She grabbed my arm and tried to pull me back toward the dark house. I wrenched away from her, ran to the street, and stood in front of the car, waving my arms in the air. Mother put her foot on the gas, revving the engine theatrically, and headed straight for me.

“Mother! Stop!” I screamed.

I moved a few feet over to the side of the street and she steered toward me. I jumped backward as she approached, throwing myself onto the mounded lawn. Her face was almost unrecognizable over the steering wheel—hair flying, eyes practically screwed shut, and her cigarette glowing from between her bared teeth. She just missed me by sharply
turning at the last second, then gunned it down the street. I got up and watched her taillights melt into the blackness. I turned and saw Robin standing in the doorway. We looked at each other with no idea of what to do. It wasn’t like there was a manual that tells you what to do when your drunk mom tries to run you over and then drives off at a hundred miles an hour in the middle of the night. It was like a scene in a bad TV movie. Except, of course, it wasn’t a movie; it was our life.

We went quickly back into the house and I ran to the sunporch to use the phone to call the police and discovered, in her still-running typewriter, a note announcing her intention to kill herself: Life was no longer worth living, her children hated her, no one loved her, she was ten pounds overweight, and it was time to end it all.

I called the police and gave them a description of the missing person: about five foot four, blue, bloodshot eyes, 110 pounds, wearing a blue nightgown, no shoes, probably drunk, and most likely holding a cigarette.

Robbie stood beside me, arms crossed, tapping her bare foot on the floor.

“Yes, Officer, it’s our mother,” I said.

“Well, your mother has to be missing for at least twenty-four hours before we can start searching for her,” the policeman said.

Robin grabbed the phone away from me. “Look, she left a suicide note! Are you telling me you’re not going to do anything?!”

“I’m sorry, but she has to be gone for that amount of time to legally qualify as a missing person.”

Of course, we knew she’d been missing for years.

We sat downstairs in the guest bedroom watching a
Columbo
rerun on TV, waiting for her to come back or for a call from the morgue. I prayed for rain to make it easier for her to drive her car off the road. It was going to be a long night.

“I’ll go make some popcorn.” I went to the kitchen and put a big pot on the stove to heat up the Jolly Time.

“Shit, I have a huge math test tomorrow,” Robin said from the other room. “Can you bring me a Tab?”

“Sure,” I said, raising my voice over the popping sounds in the pot as I shook it back and forth.

Just as I was grabbing a soda for Robbie out of the fridge, I heard her scream. I ran back into the room and her face was frozen. Wide-eyed, mouth open, she was pointing at the television. I turned to look at the screen and saw a dignified, white-haired man in a suit. He was standing in front of a bookcase, holding up a bottle of vitamins and looking very sincere. There was something about the man that I recognized—he looked familiar but I couldn’t think of where I had met him before. I kept staring and he kept talking about the vitamins, then he began to recite a telephone number that appeared at the bottom of the screen. That’s when I realized who it was.

It was Daddy.

It was the first time in almost ten years we had seen him
or heard his voice. It was, in fact, the first proof we’d had that he was still alive.

“Oh my God,” Robbie gasped.

“His hair’s turned white,” I whispered.

Although Robbie and I sometimes talked about looking him up, we always decided against it. It was too scary, the fear of rejection too great. Maybe, for once, Mother hadn’t lied about his not wanting us. After all, he hadn’t tried to find us in all these years. The queer feeling of seeing him on the screen, a stunned shock of recognition, was followed by a flash of anger at the man who had left us to deal with a huge mess. He was most likely peacefully asleep in his bed somewhere, while we were pacing the floor, waiting for the phone to ring from the hospital, or the cops, or a phone booth somewhere. It wasn’t fair.