Chanel Bonfire (3 page)

It wasn’t long before my poor father stumbled unknowingly into Mother’s field of vision and got caught in the crosshairs of her desperation. Their marriage lasted seven years—the first of which may have been happy . . . until they got to know each other better.

My father, James Lawless, was born in a small town called Brockville in Ontario, Canada. He was the oldest of five children. His father owned a small dental laboratory and spent his days making false teeth. His mother was an Irish Catholic housewife who attended church daily and lived in her kitchen, cooking bacon and drinking endless cups of tea. My father never saw his parents display any physical affection for each other, no kisses or hugs. Any intimacy between them must have occurred behind closed doors—at least five times. The rest of the time my grandfather Lawless preferred his drinking buddies and his cigars, while my grandmother favored fussing over her children and saying the rosary. At school, the nuns tied my father’s left arm behind
his back to force him to become right-handed—everyone knew that left-handed people had the devil inside—but he stayed a lefty despite their efforts. When they forced him to be in the school play as part of his detention, he discovered Shakespeare and was immediately enthralled by its all-consuming beauty, humor, and passion. He became head of the drama club and won many awards for his acting. Standing onstage, beneath the hot, bright lights, reciting fiery prose—he realized there was more to the world than the gray, lifeless winters at home.

Eventually, my father was awarded a scholarship to study theater at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. I have a photograph of him from this time; he was tall and gangly with a head of dark hair and enormous blue eyes. When I would ask Mother why she married him, she would take a long drag on her cigarette and say, “It was those eyes of his, those damn cow eyes.” He had long black lashes, and his eyes were always slightly watery, which made them look dreamy and full of emotion.

My mother first saw my father in a play at the university in Kansas City and said to her girlfriend Sylvia, “I am going to marry that man.” Sylvia was my mother’s best friend and partner in crime. They had both attended St. Teresa’s Academy for young ladies, where they had smoked in the bathroom together and climbed on the ledge outside the science lab on a dare. Mother probably didn’t need to announce her intentions to Sylvia, as Sylvia would grow up to be a famous psychic, author, and daytime talk show regular.

Even with her psychic abilities as yet undeveloped, Sylvia knew how determined my mother could be, but nothing could have prepared my father for the full force of the juggernaut heading his way—a desperate, beautiful, poetry-writing blonde, hell-bent on escape.

My parents courted secretly, holding hands at Winstead’s, a famous Kansas City hamburger stand that has long outlived their marriage. I can picture them there when they were still happy—sitting at a pink Formica table in a gray-green Naugahyde booth drinking milk shakes, playing the little tabletop jukebox, and staring into each other’s eyes. They had to sneak around back then because my grandfather would never have given his blessing to a foreigner—worse, an actor—even if he was Catholic. My grandfather worried that his daughter marrying my father would surely condemn her to destitution or deportation or some equally horrible fate.

But before my father knew what had hit him, he and my mother had eloped and were married by a justice of the peace in Oklahoma. Fearing my grandfather’s wrath, they kept the wedding a secret, and my mother returned home after the ceremony wearing her wedding ring around her neck on a chain. My mother was nineteen and my father was twenty-two at the time, but their marriage wasn’t discovered for a whole year—until my mother had become pregnant with me and had started to show.

My grandfather was furious but he bought them a house to live in and made them get remarried in a church so he
wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of his friends. He had always regarded his daughter as a dreamy girl who read too many books; she was flighty and high-strung and now she’d run off with a man who didn’t have a real job.
God only knows what will happen
, he thought to himself. At least, thanks to him, they had a roof over their heads.

Marriage wasn’t the escape my mother had dreamed it would be. It was a trap in which she was alone all day with an infant (me), dirty dishes and laundry to do, while my father went to his announcer job at a classical radio station. By the time my sister came along fourteen months later, my father knew that my mother was not only deeply troubled but also felt suffocated by her new life as a wife and mother.

The modest house we lived in was a fraction of the size of her parents’, with simple wooden furniture bought on layaway and not as nice as she would have liked. There was nothing romantic about it, nothing as beautiful or fulfilling as my mother had been led to believe about marriage in books and movies. And when, in short order, she was pregnant with my sister, my father would come home to find her catatonic on the sofa, with a daiquiri in one hand and a cigarette in the other, while I screamed in my playpen in the corner of the room and the hi-fi belted out Frank Sinatra. She was lonely and disappointed, and even though she told my father so, her unhappiness mystified him.

One day, after my sister was two or three, my father came home from work to discover that my mother had locked us in the hall closet for the day.

“In you go,” she had ordered. She held the door open for us and tapped her foot, waiting. Robbie and I walked in; there was nowhere to sit so we sat on the floor, underneath all the winter coats smelling of mothballs and smoke. Mother closed the door and then locked it. A slit of light came from under the door, and slowly our eyes adjusted.

“I’m scared,” Robbie said, starting to cry.

“Shhh, if she hears you, she’ll come back and be even madder.” I reached over and linked my arm through hers.

“It’s dark in here,” she sniffed.

“Let’s pretend we’re in the forest at night.” I felt along the wall for Daddy’s tennis racket and placed it on the floor flat in front of us. “This is our firewood. You make a campfire and I’ll look for food to cook.” I stood up and fished around in Daddy’s winter coat pockets. I found half a roll of Life Savers.

“Candy!” I whispered. It was dark but I could smell that they were wild cherry. I peeled the paper back and gave the first one to Robbie. We shared the roll, sucking quietly in the dark, rubbing our hands together in front of the make-believe fire.

We sang all the songs we knew as softly as we could—“Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Three Blind Mice,” “This Old Man,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky . . .”

Finally, I pulled some coats down onto the floor and we
slipped in and out of sleep while we waited for our father to come home and rescue us.

It had been about six hours when I heard Daddy’s car coming into the garage alongside the house and then the front door opening and closing. I could hear my parents talking through the door, first quietly, then more loudly. I heard him ask her where we were. Then I heard my father’s footsteps striding up to the door, and the key turning in the lock.

He pulled the light-switch cord and looked down at us. “Are you girls all right?” He crouched down on the floor and looked into our faces. His forehead was all wrinkled, and I didn’t want to see him look so worried. But I burst into tears along with Robbie, unable to maintain my stoic front any longer. We were so happy to see him, so happy it was over.

“Oh, Daddy.” I reached out my hand to him and stood up, then pulled my sister to her feet.

“Daddy, I’m hungry,” Robin sobbed, and my father hugged us both close. We rubbed our eyes and squinted from the light the way you do when you come out of a dark movie theater on a sunny day. Then we followed my father into the living room, where Mother was sitting calmly on the sofa reading a magazine.

She went to the hospital the next day.

After Mother had been there for a full week, Daddy took us for a visit. I was excited to see her; it felt like she’d been gone for such a long time. When we pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a few people walking around, but none of them
looked sick. I asked my father why no one was in a wheelchair or wearing a hospital gown, and he told me that it was a special kind of hospital for people who had tired brains.

The hospital was bright and clean inside and smelled like a swimming pool. Mother’s room was all bleached white and glowing with sunlight. Her blond hair was pulled back in a bun. Looking at her in the skinny hospital bed, I didn’t think she looked sick at all. She looked beautiful, like a fairy princess.

Mother laughed and smiled and was so happy to see us. Daddy stood against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, as we climbed up onto the bed to hug her and kiss her. She told us that she got to eat her breakfast in bed and that most nights they showed movies in the dining room after dinner. She told us about a woman she’d met there who had been a famous Olympic diver, but then had dived into a swimming pool with no water in it and now she had problems thinking straight. I wondered aloud why someone would jump into an empty swimming pool in the first place, but Mother said it had been an accident.

Before we left, she gave us each a little pair of moccasins that she had made for us during recreation. I asked what that was, and she said it was a time when everyone at the hospital got to make something with her hands—baskets or pot holders, for example—and that she had decided to make something for us. The moccasins were brown suede and had little beads sewn onto the tops of them—they were so pretty. I told her I loved them. Then a
nurse came in and said that visiting hours were over and we kissed Mother good-bye.

“I’ll be home soon,” she promised.

I rode home in the car smiling the whole way with my moccasins on my lap. I told my father that I planned to wear them to school the next day to show everyone. My father said nothing; he just looked out at the road over the steering wheel.

chapter three

FATAL ATTRACTION

When the classical-music radio station went under, my father took a job acting in summer stock in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Perhaps he hoped a change of scenery might help improve my mother’s frame of mind. She had even been offered a few small speaking parts in the plays. It was only when we arrived that my father learned the actors were to be housed in a nearby trailer park—a fact that may not have thrilled my mother, but she took it on the chin, happy to be out of Kansas City.

The trailer park was built on land donated to the town by a wealthy businessman on the condition that no black people live there or even enter the park that surrounded it. Our parents were the youngest people living there by far; everyone else was old and sat in folding chairs in their yards all day. Our neighbor Sam used to take his teeth out or pretend to steal Robbie’s and my noses, but it was really his thumb.
Sam lived with his wife, Gloria, and their collie dog and some chickens they kept.

One day, when we were playing out front, we saw Sam heading to his coop with an ax. He came back carrying a flapping chicken by the legs. He laid it on top of a stump and held it still with the toe of his boot, then he chopped its head off. Robin and I were thrilled and disgusted all at the same time. We had never seen anything killed and couldn’t take our eyes off the chicken’s severed head, eyes still blinking as it lay in the dirt. Then Sam let go of the chicken’s body, and it started running around the yard in a wide circle without its head, to the delight of us all. It was kind of like a cartoon—the chicken running around headless for about a minute before flopping to the ground. Then, as if to extinguish its life completely, Sam’s collie leapt forward and gobbled up the head.

Robin and I spent the days running around the trailer park, and the nights in the back of our station wagon in the parking lot of the theater. Since the theater was outdoors, Mother lowered the backseat and made a bed for us with pillows and blankets. We would lie there in our pajamas, and if we got frightened, we only had to sit up to glimpse our parents lit up on the stage.

The little local paper did a story on Mother: young, plucky wife of an actor and mother of two living in summer lodgings, writing poetry, and washing her husband’s socks. The article had a picture of Mother sitting on the steps of the trailer with my sister and me, dressed in matching
plaid sunsuits, our hair cut pixie-style for summer, on her lap. Perhaps in defiance of the drabness of her surroundings, Mother is wearing a stunning white sheath dress and her hair is in a French-twist updo à la Tippi Hedren in
The Birds
. In the photo, we are all smiling and squinting into the sun. Being featured in the newspaper was Mother’s first taste of fame, and she liked it. She liked the compliments on her acting she received at the cast parties, and she liked being the prettiest among the other summer-stock wives. She was a local celebrity, the glamorous wife of a dashing actor.

Mother’s happiness made our time in Chapel Hill feel more like one long extended summer vacation. The days were warm and sunny and we were near enough to the ocean to spend our parents’ days off there. Mother had never seen the ocean and instantly fell in love. Every Monday, she would pack us a picnic and we’d spend the day in the sun. My father would take Robbie and me down to the water, where we shrieked at the way the sand sucked up our feet, while he skipped stones for us. And Mother would sit on a bedspread we used as a beach blanket and read a book or more often just stare out at the water.

At the end of the summer, when the playhouse closed up for the winter, my father was offered a contract understudying and playing small roles at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It was a chance to get in on the ground floor of what was promising to be the country’s leading regional theater. At my mother’s insistence, he took it. She never wanted to go back to her hometown, and her first brush with the
spotlight had made her want more. We packed up the station wagon and drove to Minnesota.