Chanel Bonfire (18 page)

“You know, Wendy, boys that age are already having sex.” She eyed me suspiciously. Sixteen and tragically nerdy, I certainly was not.

“I just think he’s handsome.” Feeling all hot and prickly,
I suddenly realized how stupid I had been to confide in her. Most girls could talk to their mothers and not have it be ammunition that could be used against them later. But not me.

“A boy that age is only interested in one thing.”

“All I said was that . . .” I had foolishly lowered my guard and tried now to backpedal.

“You’ve grown up without a father.” Mother shook her head as if it were my fault. “I don’t want you to confuse sex with love.”

“I’m not going to have sex with him, I just think he’s cute.” I pedaled faster.

“And he’s
Italian
.”

“So?” I didn’t get the connection.

“Very hot-blooded. God knows what could happen.”

She made him sound like a rapist. I was sure that once he noticed I was alive, he would never pressure me into anything I wasn’t ready for.

“You stay away from him, young lady.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It turned out I didn’t have to worry about his raping me because a couple of Mondays later, after I watched him mow the lawn, I heard my mother call to him. He turned off the lawn mower and started to put his shirt back on. Mother walked up to him and was talking to him, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I noticed that she was wearing a halter top. I didn’t even know she owned a halter top. My heart started to beat so fast that it hurt. I watched in horror as Mother reached out to him and put her hand
on his arm. Then she started to steer him in the direction of the little pup tent in our yard that Robbie and I had been planning to spend the night in as soon as it got warmer. Experiencing chest pain, I ran to the guest-room window so I could see where they were heading. I saw my mother take Tommy into the tent. I sat down on the bed. She apparently had come up with an alternative form of payment. They emerged about twenty minutes later. Mother was smiling and chewing on a piece of grass. The boy who cut our grass got into his truck and drove away. Mother waved. He never came back.

“No, Wendy, seducing the lawn boy is not normal behavior.” Dr. Keylor shook her head with an air of distaste.

I explained to Dr. Keylor that I was not eager to introduce Mother to Dylan. She didn’t need to meet him anyway because soon he and I would be living in some fabulous city far away where I would pursue my acting career and he would be playing guitar in a rock band. Dr. Keylor assured me that my dream of getting away and living my own life wasn’t just an idle fantasy; it might not work out exactly the way I wanted it to, but I was taking steps in the right direction.

“Good luck in New York,” Dr. Keylor said with a smile and a little squeeze of my arm.

That weekend I took the train down to New York, where the auditions for the Leagues were being held at the Warwick Hotel on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. It was a freezing cold day, but I walked the blocks around the hotel trying to calm my nerves. There were memories for me all along those sidewalks. There were the smelly horse carriages outside the Plaza, where Robbie and I had once ridden through the park with Mother and a man she had picked up at the Oak Bar with a bottle of pilfered champagne. There was the GM Building, where the Auto Pub used to be. Robin and I loved to go there because you ate inside a car and watched a movie that was projected up on the wall. I passed FAO Schwarz, where we had once ridden a slide that went from the second floor down to the first. The city seemed different now, louder and dirtier and filled with more people. Putting the New York of my childhood behind me, I circled back to the Warwick.

I was sitting on the floor outside one of the hotel ballrooms where they were holding the auditions in my leotard and wraparound skirt. I was trying not to feel too horribly nervous when a pair of fashionable black pumps with little bows on them stopped in front of me.

“Excuse me, dear, are you Wendy Rea?” I was just reading the word
Ferragamo
on the shoes when I looked up and saw a petite, elegantly dressed woman with coiffed silver hair.

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m Betty Rea, dear. I saw your name on the list and I thought I’d come over and wish you good luck.” This was my
stepfather’s first wife; the woman whom my stepfather had deserted for Mother. My mother had ruined her life, and she was wishing me good luck on my audition.

I thought it was very classy of her. I got up off the floor and thanked her.

“You look just the same, dear. Just like your father. How is he?”

“Oh, fine,” I lied. She told me that if I moved to New York, I must call her; she was the head of casting at a soap opera and she would give me some extra work.

“Very good experience, you know, to be in front of the camera.” She handed me her card.

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you.” We shook hands.

“Break a leg, dear.” She gave me a cheerful wave over her shoulder as she walked away. I thanked her again and she was gone.

“Next, we’d like to see Wendy Rea.”

I went in and performed my monologues in front of a table filled with silent onlookers. No one said anything, and most of the people didn’t even look at me; they were hunched over, writing on pads of paper. One man ate a whole pie during my audition. The entire experience was completely unnerving. I came out with no impression of how I had done.

I took the train back to Boston that evening. Mother picked me up at South Station in her nightgown and immediately started talking about how painful life was. I was exhausted and not really listening at first, not interested in her philosophical musings. I did notice that she hadn’t asked
me about the tryout, but I was too tired to tell her about it and I certainly wasn’t going to mention seeing the first Mrs. Oliver Rea.

“You know, I’ve been thinking very hard about this terrible pain that is life.” She sounded like Greer Garson in
Mrs. Miniver—
very noble and all that.

I looked out the window at the dark streets of Boston. I just wanted to go to bed.

“I’ve begun to think that the best thing for me to do is to kill you and your sister and then myself,” she continued in a calm voice. “That is the only way you won’t have to go through what I’ve been through. If you and your sister were dead, you wouldn’t have to suffer, to feel this pain.”

Great,
I thought,
I probably just bombed out of drama school and now my mom wants to kill me.
I put my hand on the door handle so I could jump out of the car if she decided to crash it into a tree.

“You just don’t know how much agony I would be sparing you. It’s so hard.” She pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, then looked at me and said in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, “You see, Wendy, the truth is, life isn’t worth living.” Then she smiled.

I got out of the car and went upstairs to my sister’s room. She was sound asleep. I closed the door and propped a chair beneath the door handle. Then I crawled into bed next to her and spent the night listening to every creak and ping, expecting Mother tiptoeing upstairs with a kitchen knife, channeling her inner Medea.

chapter eleven

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

After returning from New York and my first assault on the world of the theater, I prepared myself for the next big event in my life: having sex for the first time with Dylan. I drove to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Cambridge to secure the necessary equipment.

I sat up on the examination table in a paper dress waiting for the doctor to come in. I had left my socks on because I was cold. I stared at the brightly colored oven mitts with a kitty cat pattern on them that covered the stirrups at the opposite end of the table. I wondered if the oven mitts were meant to keep the stirrups warm or to help catch a flying baby. On one wall was a large medical drawing of the female reproductive system with everything labeled in large red letters, as if issuing a warning:
DANGER—UTERUS AHEAD!
On the other wall was a travel poster advertising the Swiss Alps. I pondered the possible connection between the vagina and
all that snow and ice. Would losing my virginity be exciting, like being transported to the top of the highest mountain, or would I be frigid, feel nothing, and wish I’d stayed home? There were no magazines to look at in the room, so I bit my fingernails while I worried and waited.

There was a knock on the door, and in walked a very tall, dignified-looking woman. She was wearing a black velvet hair band to keep her bobbed gray hair back, and she had on tasteful pearl earrings. She wore a tweed skirt and a light blue cashmere sweater underneath her white coat. She looked like my English teacher, Miss Thompson, who gave me good grades on my creative-writing assignments and asked me to read from Shakespeare in class. Looking at her, I suddenly felt out of danger. She glanced down at a clipboard that had my medical form on it.

“Wendy? I’m Dr. Mayher.” She looked at me with a bright smile. I nodded and smiled back. “I just have a few questions I need to ask you before we start the examination.” I nodded again. “Are you sexually active?”

“Um, no, but I hope to be.” I noticed that the kittens on the stirrup pot holders were playing with little balls of yarn.

“So you’ve never had any sexually transmitted diseases.” She wrote on my chart, sounding slightly disappointed.

“Well, I had a yeast infection once. Does that count?” I wanted Dr. Mayher to like me. Jesus, I was so pathetic.

“No, dear, not the same thing.” Then she asked me how old I was.

“Seventeen.” Then, just so she didn’t think I was a slut, I added, “But I’ll be eighteen in a few months.”

“All right.” She finished writing on my chart. “Now, why don’t you lie down and try to relax.”

I took a deep breath and placed my feet in the cheerful oven mitts.

“This will feel very cold.”

I turned my head and gazed again at the poster of the Alps, clasping my hands together on my chest like a nun. I flinched slightly at the icy feel of the speculum going inside me and tried to think tranquil thoughts: raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. For the next few minutes it felt as if Dr. Mayher were rearranging my internal organs the way you move furniture around in a room—rolling up the rug, lifting the coffee table, and pushing the sofa against the wall—but it was inside me. Then it was over. I felt the speculum come out and heard it clatter onto a tray.

“Everything looks fine, dear, you can sit up. Now we have to discuss your options. The easiest is really the pill.”

I explained to Dr. Mayher that I didn’t want to take the pill because my friends had told me it made you fat and made your skin break out.

Dr. Mayher laughed. “Well, we can just fit you for a diaphragm, dear.” She started poking around in a different drawer. “Not to worry.”

Twenty minutes later, I left the clinic with a diaphragm in its own little pink case and an industrial-size tube of
Ortho-Gynol stashed in my backpack. I hurried home to practice.

Checking to make sure that Mother was barricaded in her room, I headed for the bathroom and locked the door. I pulled down my pants and opened the pink case. I put the spermicidal jelly inside the diaphragm and around the rim and folded it so it looked like a rubber mini-taco.

“What are you doing in there?” Robin shouted from the hall as she turned the doorknob.

“Nothing!” I almost dropped the diaphragm into the toilet.

“Well, I have to pee!”

I managed to insert the diaphragm, but I had used too much killer jelly and my hands were covered in it. “I’m going as fast as I can!” I didn’t want to wipe it on the hand towel, so I hobbled over to the sink with my pants around my ankles.

“Hurry!”

I washed my hands and at the same time I used my foot to flush the toilet to create a diversion. “Just give me a minute.” I stuffed my contraception items into my backpack. The hefty tube of Ortho-Gynol was especially unwieldy and really unsexy. I was going to have to shop for a non-jumbo size that could fit in my purse. If Dylan saw me whip this big sucker out, I’d stay a virgin.