Chanel Bonfire (14 page)

Robbie and I looked at each other and slowly got out of our chairs. We approached the body with great caution—the
way you would a dangerous animal you had just shot on safari that might suddenly spring back to life and leap up to tear your throat out.

“Mother?” I looked down at her and waited a full minute. Then I knelt on the carpet and poked her with my finger a few times. No response. “You’d better go call an ambulance,” I said to Robbie.

“Shit,” she said. “Happy Thanksgiving, we’re going to the emergency room.”

We opted to drive behind Mother’s ambulance in our now battered Subaru; it was always important to have a getaway car in case . . . well, just in case. I drove because I was older and my sister was a bad driver, a Boston driver. Since getting her license four months before, she’d had so many accidents in the car that both doors were now fused shut and the only way to get in and out was to crawl through the windows. This always attracted attention whenever we arrived anywhere and made for a fairly spectacular entrance at the Mount Auburn Hospital, where we screeched into the parking lot behind the ambulance, crawled out of the windows, and rushed into the ER entrance.

Robin and I sat in the ER waiting room, and after about an hour, our mother’s gynecologist, Dr. Stander—the only man she ever really trusted—arrived. It had started raining and his raincoat was wet and dripping onto the shiny waxed floor.

“Don’t you girls worry,” he said very reassuringly. He was very reassuring, like God with a mustache.

We smiled weakly at him, offering no information as none was needed.

“Your mother is a very sick woman,” he said, leaning down to look into our eyes for emphasis. The television up on the wall behind his head gave him a kind of weird electric halo. Then, having nothing else to offer, Dr. Stander turned and ran through the ER’s double doors, shedding his wet raincoat as he disappeared. My sister and I looked at each other. We were too old for this.

We sat in the waiting room and passed the time by playing one of our favorite games: Murder. We played it to comfort ourselves; we both knew that. Somehow, if only for a moment, it made us feel that we were in the driver’s seat.

This time, we plotted the fabulously gruesome murder/death of the man we blamed for this most recent bout of Mother’s suffering and insanity: Frank Collins. He had broken her heart by not leaving his wife and had made our lives a living hell, and he was going to have to pay. Things had been bad in the past, but whatever quality of life our move to Boston had returned to us had been stomped on by this asshole’s big, tasseled loafers. We’d already endured weeks of coming home from school to a dark house with no food in the fridge, no dinner bubbling on the stove, and an empty baked-beans can on the counter with a big wooden spoon sticking out of it. And now, here we were in the ER on Thanksgiving. It sucked.

“Hey, remember that movie about the girl with those amazing psycho powers?” Robin asked me.

I stared at her jiggling foot and bit my nails. “
Psychic
powers, stupid. You mean
The Fury.
” We had just seen it at the Harvard Square Theatre. “Starring Amy Irving and John Cassavetes, directed by Brian De Palma.” I was beginning to consider myself a bit of a film buff.

“Yeah, well, remember when she made the blood come out of that guy’s eyes and stuff? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make Frank’s head explode into a million pieces like she did to that guy who really pissed her off at the end of the movie?”

I pictured Amy Irving’s character totally losing it and blowing up the bad guy’s head. It’s pretty gross because it’s in slow motion and you see parts of his head flying around the room.

“Yeah, that would be awesome.” I imagined Frank’s glasses being blasted off his face as his head detonated and chunks of him flying in slow motion through the air: a bloody ear and his thin upper lip floated by as we jumped up and down with glee as if we’d just won what was behind door number three on
Let’s Make a Deal
.

The emergency room was fairly empty; maybe because it was Thanksgiving. Other people were home drinking hot chocolate and playing Scrabble after their festive holiday meal. Robin and I sat in chairs against the wall staring at the news on TV. The sound was turned down. The screen showed a huge fire that was burning somewhere downtown.

“Yeah, I’d love to see Frank’s brains all over the curtains,” I said dreamily.

“Or, we could just run him over with the Subaru,” Robin said.

“Quick and easy.” Vehicular homicide, it was almost too good for him.

“Yeah, and we’re too young to go to jail, aren’t we?”

Yes, we probably were, but jail didn’t seem so bad to me now. It even sounded kind of . . . well, nice. I was sure there was a lot of structure and three meals a day.

After the news was over, Johnny Carson came on and we moved on to planning Mother’s death—even though she was doing a pretty good job on her own. Since we had already used the car to kill Frank, we needed something new.

“Hey, I know. We could push her down the basement stairs,” I said.

Robbie smiled. We always remembered the old bedtime story from the Dakota, partly because it was terrifying and partly because it was one of the few times Mother had actually told us a story at bedtime.

“We could do that. Get her to go down to the basement stairs and then do it,” I said.

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “We’ll run Frank over first and then push Mother down the stairs.”

After we played Murder, I went to get some Diet Pepsis and candy bars to celebrate everyone’s being snuffed out and all our problems being solved. When I got back, Dr. Stander was waiting with Robin.

“Well, girls, it seems your mother will be staying the night and perhaps an extra day or two.” He cocked his head
to the side at us as if we were cute puppies. Mother had hemorrhaged internally due to an old IUD she had and would have to have a D&C in the morning. “Any questions?” He raised his eyebrows in anticipation.

I wondered how Mother could have claimed to have been pregnant last year by that Jewish architect and had an abortion if she had an IUD, but said nothing.

“Yeah, Dr. Stander, what’s a D and C?” Robin asked, as if it were something you ordered at the Dairy Queen.

“Well, Robin, D and C stands for ‘dilation and curettage’; it is surgery to treat abnormal uterine bleeding,” he said, as if describing the changing of a tire. “Your mother is heavily sedated but you can come and see her tomorrow.”

We headed back out to the parking lot. I handed Robbie the Snickers, which I knew she liked. “Happy Thanksgiving, Robbie,” I said as I washed down my 3 Musketeers with some now room-temperature Diet Pepsi.

“Oh, yeah, you, too.” She lit up a Parliament and took a huge drag. “Want one?”

“No, thanks. Hey, I bet the Pilgrims didn’t have candy and soda on Thanksgiving.”

She laughed. “Or Parliaments. You want me to drive?”

“No way.”

We crawled into the Subaru and made our getaway.

The next morning I woke up and assessed the damage. The turkey was still on the table, along with the mashed potatoes,
but our cat, Gus, had eaten most of the green beans, which he really loved. I was glad someone had a good time. I went into the kitchen to get a big garbage bag. Robin was heating up chicken-noodle soup for breakfast and smoking a cigarette.

“Want some soup?” She inhaled deeply, flicking the ashes onto the linoleum with her thumb.

She was wearing jeans with holes in the knees and a tight T-shirt, displaying what my mother liked to call her Rita Hayworth taste. The whole effect was very teenage runaway. Robin had fully evolved into the defiant one—she didn’t care if Mother caught her smoking in the house or found out she had cut math class.

But I never stopped trying to be the dutiful daughter—always striving to do the right thing and make nice. I could be a real drag.

“Mother’s going to kill you if she finds out you’ve been smoking in the house,” I warned.

“Oooh, I’m terrified. Crackers?” She tossed a package of saltines onto the table, placed a bowl of soup down, and sank into the chair across from me. We slurped in silence.

After breakfast, we took out the trash and headed over to the hospital to see our mother. Unlike with Mother’s first trip to the hospital, after she’d locked us in the closet for a day, when we arrived to visit at Mount Auburn, there were no moccasins and she didn’t look like a fairy princess; she looked like shit. She was puffing away on a cigarette in her cigarette holder, defiantly blowing the smoke at the
NO SMOKING
sign on the bilious green wall. We took turns kissing her cheek, then sat in the plastic chairs next to the bed.

“Mother, you look great,” I said. She looked as if she would have sold one of us for a glass of white wine had there been a market nearby.

“They’ve taken out practically all my internal organs. It’s a miracle I’m still alive,” she snorted.

I turned to Robbie for backup, hoping that she would say something nice, but she just glowered and snapped her gum. I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was nothing to say. Sitting there, I felt overwhelmed by a deep feeling of utter helplessness. It was like a black blob crushing me that made me wish I were dead. I couldn’t do anything that would make things better. Our family, such as it was, was like a big dying animal. And there wasn’t a shovel large enough to bury it, cover it up, or put it out of its misery.

After about ten minutes, my mother turned her face away from us. The audience was over.

“We’ll go now, Mother,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I was afraid Robin was about to say something unhelpful so I grabbed her arm and dragged her away. It was best to get out before there was an eruption.

I admired Robin’s fuck-you attitude, which was so different from anything I would ever dare to do. After years of trying to shield my sister from the truth, I had almost come to believe my little Girl Scout routine. When things were bad with Mother, whatever anger or resentment I felt was channeled into my cover-up. I still wanted the neighbors,
everyone at school and at the grocery store, to think that we were just like everyone else. When things with Mother calmed down, I was just so grateful for the peace, I didn’t want to do anything that would disturb it. Trying to disguise it all was my full-time job; and for a while, I thought I was fooling the world.

chapter nine

THE NEW AND IMPROVED GEORGANN

After Mother came home from the hospital, things went back to a strange version of the way they were when she wasn’t on the warpath. She was up and dressed in the morning, making us toast with little, cold lumps of butter embedded in them and mugs of hot chocolate. Everything tasted like the inside of the refrigerator. She had a lit cigarette in an ashtray in every room in the house so she could just smoke from room to room like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. We came home from school, and dinner was there, ready for us. My sister and I set the table, cleared the dishes, did homework, and watched TV. It was like we were the Waltons or something.

Since the fall after we’d moved to Boston, we attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, where I was a senior and Robin was a junior. Beaver was billed as a “college
preparatory school” on the sign out by the stately front gate on Hammond Street. It was well-appointed, with soccer fields, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Many of the kids came from well-to-do families, and the headmaster was kind of famous because he had taken Sylvia Plath to the prom. In short, the school had just the right country-club patina for Mother.

Beaver was our third school in three years. By now Robin and I were accustomed to being the new kids. It was our métier, and any novelty attached to it had worn off for us long ago. The important question had been, where would we fit in? Beaver had three basic cliques: the preppies, the jocks, and the stoners. Robin and I didn’t qualify as members of any of those groups, so we gravitated toward the Drama Club—a kind of artistic catchall for the kids who didn’t belong anywhere else. There was Sally Messman, who had a genius IQ, a mouthful of metal, and an unruly mop of black, curly hair. Neal Burch was a tall, hulking boy who lurched when he walked and had a bad lisp; “Athole,” he would say to the kids who made fun of him. Mitch Hall, who wore the same blue jacket to school every day, was always trying to call the pope or Idi Amin on the pay phone in the student lounge.

This band of social pariahs was ruled over by the drama teacher, Mr. Valentine. A short, ruddy-faced man with flaming red hair, he wore plaid pants and turtlenecks instead of a suit and tie like the other male teachers. Some days he even wore a medallion. Mr. V was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown the term before we’d arrived at Beaver. His hands shook, supposedly because of the lithium he had been
put on after the breakdown. This made him seem to us like some kind of tortured, tragic artist. He was a little angry and sarcastic and had a sinister laugh—he definitely had an edge. Mr. V’s classroom was in a little house near the pool, a separate kingdom where he taught theater classes and held Drama Club meetings.