Chanel Bonfire (17 page)

Mother returned from her driving spree two days later, still dressed in the same nightgown and looking bleary. She had a carton of cigarettes tucked under her arm and a crumpled Stop & Shop paper bag, the contents of which I could only guess at.

“Where the hell have you been?” Robbie demanded.

“He’s in Europe with his wife.” Her voice was flat and dead like her face.

“Who? What are you talking about?” I said.

“Frank. I parked in his driveway and waited for him to come home.” Her eyes were all red-rimmed. “Finally the housekeeper came and knocked on my car window.”

“You drove to Vermont?” Robbie’s disdain was evident, but Mother was too zonked to notice.

Mother continued, ignoring us. “She said he was away skiing somewhere with his wife.”

Robbie shook her head and looked at the ceiling.

Mother started to move past me leadenly, making a break for the stairs and her room. “In fucking Europe. I’m living in a rental the size of a shoebox and that bastard is off in a ski lodge in the Alps drinking hot buttered rum.”

“We called the police! We had no idea where you were!” Robbie spat furiously.

“I ran out of cigarettes so I decided to come home.” With that Mother heaved a sigh, emitting dangerous levels of nicotine that caused my eyes to water as she climbed the stairs, returning to the only place where she seemed to feel safe.

A few days later, I gathered my courage and knocked on her bedroom door. Things had spiraled so out of control, I decided I needed to talk to someone about it other than myself.

Her television was on full blast so I had to shout. “Mother? Mother, are you in there?” Of course I knew she was. “I need to ask you a question!” I listened at the door for some sound.

“In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife!” boomed the announcer on the TV.

I knocked again, this time a little harder. “It’s important!”

“Not even this tin can can dull a Ginsu!”

I put my mouth up to the crack in the doorway and said, “I was thinking that I’d like to go to a therapist.”

Suddenly I heard the key in the lock and the door opened. She was still in her nightgown, which had not been
laundered since her excursion to Vermont. She had stopped frosting her hair again, and it had grown out so that the top of her head was a mop of dishwater blond from which hung a fringe of lighter hair, giving her the overall appearance of a deranged capuchin monkey. Her room smelled like an overflowing ashtray. I glanced over her shoulder to see that she had written in black ink all over her bedsheets what looked like names and phone numbers that I couldn’t make out. Empty cans and ice cream cartons were on the floor. It looked like a rock band had gone berserk.

“Therapist?” She looked at me quizzically, twirling her cigarette as if it were her extra finger. “What do you want to talk to a therapist about?”

“Oh, just stuff,” I stammered.

“Not me, I hope.” She said this to me as if I were accusing her of borrowing my favorite sweater.

“Oh, no, not you. Me.”

“You?” She looked confused. I could see that it was mind-boggling to Mother that I might think of myself as a worthy and interesting topic of discussion.

“Yes, just me and school and, you know, being a teenager.”

She considered this for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. “Well, all right, what the hell, go ahead. But remember, therapy can be a crutch.”

“Yes, Mother.” I decided not to mention her foray into pretend therapy.

She shut the door and turned the TV up louder.

Dr. Keylor’s office was in her house in a suburb of Boston not far from my school. She had a friendly, round face, brown hair, and wore chunky jewelry. She looked like someone’s mom—not mine, but someone’s.

“Can you tell me something about why you are here?” she asked in her calm, reassuring voice. I started to tell her and noticed her eyes getting wider and wider as I kept talking. She scribbled on a yellow legal pad, handed me the Kleenex box, and at the end of the hour told me she wanted to see me twice a week.

At my next session, after I had regaled Dr. Keylor with the story of Thanksgiving in the ER and the events following, she told me that my mother was “psychotic,” a nifty word I had never heard before.

“You mean, like, crazy?” I asked.

“Therapists dislike the word
crazy
,” she answered slowly. “Let’s just say that your mother is mentally deranged and has lost contact with external reality.”

The following week, Dr. Keylor showed me a page in a huge book—the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.

“I want you to take a few minutes and read about these particular personality disorders.” She ran her finger along the words
narcissistic
and
histrionic
. “I believe your mother suffers from both of these psychological conditions, and we call this diagnosis a Cluster B.”

I thought
Cluster B
sounded like an elaborate math problem or a healthy candy bar. I pored over the list of symptoms, which included lack of empathy, excessive emotionality, inappropriate seductiveness, and needing constant admiration. I felt that my mother’s picture should have been right there on the page.

“This is incredible, Dr. Keylor. Thanks for showing it to me.”

“Of course, Wendy. I’ll see you on Monday at three thirty. Have a nice weekend.” She wrote my appointment time on a card and handed it to me.

Armed with all this new information, I felt enormously relieved. It wasn’t my imagination that my home life was frighteningly bizarre. Now I had the validation of a health-care professional. I felt as if I had made an amazing discovery—one that I could share only with Robbie.

The truth was I was ashamed and embarrassed by my mother and would have done anything to conceal what went on in my home. My secret was safe with Dr. Keylor, and my mother could occasionally pull it together and make a public appearance. She’d put on her Chanel suit and her pearls, do her hair and makeup, and come see the school play with her mink around her shoulders. Afterward, she would chat with the other parents and annoy the hell out of the headmaster by smoking in the auditorium. The kids would marvel at how glamorous she looked. My friend Nancy Higgins gushed, “Wow, your mom is so cool. She looks like a movie star!” I wanted to tell Nancy that I hated my mother, that
she was a crazy bitch, and that if Nancy knew what she was really like, she would hate her just as much as I did. But instead I smiled and said, “Thanks.”

I had another secret, one that I planned to keep from Mother for as long as possible. I had a boyfriend. His name was Dylan. He was in my class and had longish blond hair, wore glasses, and played the guitar. We didn’t travel in the same circles; he was one of the “cool” stoner kids, but he got all A’s in school. I had first noticed him when he performed the Elvis Costello song “Alison” in the Beaver Talent Show. His voice was thin and cracked in places during the song, but something about him up onstage playing the guitar with his eyes shut and his head thrown back got to me in a way nothing ever had before. He rocked along as he played, spastically dancing in a mustard-colored suit that he wore with a skinny black tie. He looked goofy and exposed and I felt like he was singing to me.

“‘Alison, I know this world is killing you. Oh, Alison, my aim is true.’ ”

He didn’t win the contest; Phillippa Freiberg won for her baton-twirling routine done to the
Star Wars
theme.

The only other boy at Beaver who I’d had a crush on was a hunky lacrosse player named Kirk Winthrop, a golden boy who barely acknowledged my presence. Having no idea how to get him to notice me, I had decided to ignore him, thinking that my icy stare off into the distance would drive him
wild. So far, it hadn’t worked. I decided to take a different tack with Dylan. After he lost, I went right up to him in the auditorium and I told him that I thought he should have won, not that lame cheerleader girl.

“That’s wicked nice of you,” he said. His teeth were a little crooked and he was a tad cross-eyed, which made him look so sweet, like a little boy.

Soon we were eating lunch together in the school cafeteria and I was going over to his house on weekends. His parents were both professors and totally relaxed about everything. They smoked pot and walked around the house practically naked in these big kimonos that hung open. When I went to Dylan’s house we were allowed to go into his room and shut the door for hours, and his parents not only didn’t mind, they hardly seemed to notice. They had a free and easy way; they weren’t drunk all the time, just stoned sometimes, and they never screamed or threw things.

I had kissed a few boys in London and had even slapped one on the face for sticking his tongue in my mouth, which I thought, at the time, was very uncouth. And then there were stage kisses in the school play. That was where you pressed your dry, closed lips together and waited about five to ten seconds (depending how in love you were in the play), and the only thing you’d feel was embarrassment and the air from the other person’s nostrils on your face as the person breathed through them. But making out with Dylan was different.

One Saturday afternoon we were in his room making
out when he pushed my head down to his crotch. I had no idea what he was doing. He just kept steering me down toward his zipper.

“What are you doing?” I knew nothing about sex and was probably the last virgin standing in my class.

“I want you to put it in your mouth.” He wiggled his eyebrows up and down in a naughty way. This was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. I just couldn’t believe that anyone would do that.

“You’re kidding, right?” I smiled and tossed my hair back, trying desperately to look as if I weren’t terrified by the thought of seeing his penis that close up—or at all, actually. Trying to be cool, I told him I’d touch it but I wouldn’t put it in my mouth.

“Please,” he begged, pushing my head even harder down south.

I thought about how much I loved him, how we belonged together, how we were the same person.

“Pleeeease, Wendy.”

I wanted to make him happy so I screwed my eyes shut and felt around for his zipper, pretending to be a blind girl in a French art movie. It wasn’t so bad except for the end part, which tasted like that gross baking-soda toothpaste that I had tried once before throwing away the tube.

Sometimes I did it for so long, my jaw felt like it was going to fall off. To keep my mind off how uncomfortable it was, I thought about other stuff, such as homework, or all my old school-locker combinations, or naming the six wives
of Henry VIII in order. I tried to come up with something he could do to me that would make me feel as good as I made him feel. But I couldn’t think of anything.

It was important to hide the fact that I had a boyfriend from Mother for as long as I could. I had learned this lesson the year before when Tommy Manucci started mowing our lawn. Tommy Manucci was eighteen, had thick, curly, black hair, and was gorgeous. He also didn’t know I was alive. On Mondays, after I finished my homework, I would lower the shade in my room and crouch down to look at him through the bottom of the window so that he couldn’t see me staring at him. He usually took his shirt off about halfway through his work, which was my favorite part. I just loved to watch him mow our lawn. I gazed at his sweaty chest and the hair stuck to his forehead, and the smell of the cut grass would fill my room. I closed my eyes and, inhaling deeply, I imagined us rolling in that grass, it getting stuck on our bodies and tangled in our hair as we rolled down the hill locked in an ardent embrace. He was the first boy I had a physical ache for. Being a late bloomer, I had never experienced these feelings before and made the mistake of talking to my mother about them.