Chanel Bonfire (20 page)

This is it,
I thought. Forgetting, once again, that telling the truth had always got me in trouble, I told her, “Yes. You don’t have to worry, though. I mean, we’re using birth control.”

She turned and looked at me, tilting her head and smiling like a demented Mrs. Olson in the Folgers coffee commercial.

“My baby,” she muttered softly, then bobbed from the room, all glassy eyed. I heard her door shut, followed by loud sobbing.

I didn’t know if Mother’s crying was genuine or an act, if she was mourning my virginity, or if she was disappointed she hadn’t got to my boyfriend first.

The following day, Dylan met me at my locker with his books. “Hey, your mom invited me to lunch at your house on Sunday.” He was smiling.

My heart sank. “Really?” Clearly he didn’t know that this was probably the worst news I’d received since not getting into theater school.

“Yeah, she called and talked to my mom. Cool, huh?”

I pulled my science book out of my locker and tried not to throw up on it. “You aren’t going to come, are you?” I laughed nervously and fidgeted around in my purse for a pencil. I resisted the urge to get into my locker and shut the door.

“Well, of course I am! She invited me.” He shook his head and looked at me like I was nuts.

“Dylan, there’s something I have to tell you.” How could I explain to him that if he came, he’d be walking into the abyss, the Bermuda Triangle, the Cave of the She Bear.

“What? I think it’s awesome.” Although Dylan was supersmart and got A’s in everything, he was not complicated. I think that this sweetness and naïveté were my favorite things about him. He just didn’t see all the badness and evil in the world that I knew was out there. How could I get him to understand?

“My mother is not . . . she’s not . . .” I struggled to find a word that would both help him grasp the situation and frighten him enough to keep him away. “She’s strange. And weird. Really weird. She’s not like other mothers.”

“Okay. So? No big deal.”

I tried again. “She has a dark side. And it’s, well, very dark. Very.”

“Jeez, Wendy, she’s just your mom, not friggin’ Darth Vader.”

I wanted to grab him and shake him and say,
But she
is
Darth Vader!
Instead I smiled and, feeling queasy, headed down the hall with him to our first class.

Dylan came to lunch at our house the following Sunday. Mother was on her best behavior when she wanted to impress someone, especially a man. I, of course, was immune to her charms. I watched as she sat a little too close to Dylan on the sofa, showing him pictures in a photo album of me when I was younger.

“Here’s Wendy on her second birthday blowing out the candles on her cake. She was a beautiful baby, don’t you think?”

Mother had got her hair done and put on a low-cut, ivory crepe-de-chine blouse and black trousers. She was really piling it on, and I could tell Dylan was uncomfortable. He simply wasn’t accustomed to a woman his mother’s age treating him like her gentleman caller. She’d narrow her eyes, slightly lean in toward him, and part her lips before she spoke. He shot me a few looks of slight panic when she wasn’t fixing her languid gaze upon him.

“Here we are in Amsterdam. She’s thirteen or so. Isn’t that a nice outfit she’s wearing? We stopped there after a summer cruise down the Rhine.”

Dylan nodded and smiled at her, pointing to someone in the photo. “So who’s this? Is this Wendy’s dad?”

“Heavens, no. We were divorced ages ago. That was my boyfriend at the time, Giuseppe.”

“He’s a good-looking guy, Mrs. Rea.”

“Yes, he was very handsome. He spoke no English, I spoke no Italian, so he would speak to me in Spanish and I would answer in French.” Mother laughed coyly like a debutante and played with her pearls.

Giuseppe had been Mother’s boyfriend during a break in her on-again, off-again affair with Pop. They had met on the boat, and soon he was traveling with us. He was Marcello Mastroianni gorgeous and five or six years younger than my mother, and at fourteen I found it all kind of confusing. I instantly developed a terrible crush on him and, for the first and only time ever, found myself wishing I was my mother so that Giuseppe would look at me the way he looked at her. But he didn’t because I was his girlfriend’s daughter and just a kid. He was great with Robbie and me. One thing my sister and I hated was some guy who thought that because he was with our mother he had to try to be our dad and exert some sort of influence over us. Giuseppe just wanted to take us out to lunch and buy us things, so we were crazy about him, me especially.

On our final day in Amsterdam, we walked down a cobblestone street to a square filled with young, scruffy people playing guitars and sitting around on the ground. Some of them were smoking joints. Suddenly, we heard a siren, and two VW buses drove up onto the pavement. Police armed with clubs started pouring out of the buses and beating the hippies with their sticks. People were screaming and running, trying to get away. We were right in the middle of the square and had no way to escape without passing through
the police battle. Giuseppe pushed us all onto the sidewalk and threw his body over us, shielding us from the riot. I could hear screams and shouts, then I heard the doors of the VW buses slam closed, followed by silence. For a long time I remembered that day, lying on the sidewalk with Giuseppe’s body shielding us—the way his cologne smelled, the sheen of his hair, and his eyes covered by sunglasses just like a character in a Fellini movie. My Marcello.

“Thanks for inviting me, Mrs. Rea. It was nice to meet you. I enjoyed myself very much.” Dylan stuck out his hand to Mother and she took it, enveloping it with her slender fingers like a spider.

“You’re very welcome, Dylan. Good-bye.”

I walked him outside to his car.

“Jesus.” He smiled in that goofy way he had. “I couldn’t tell if I was there to see you or to see your mom.”

“You were perfect. I can tell she really likes you.” Of course, this wasn’t much of a compliment. Mother liked anything in pants. I kissed him and looked up into his slightly crossed eyes.

“Well, I’m glad I passed, I guess.”

I knew this time it wouldn’t be like Tommy Manucci the lawn-mower boy. It would be different because Dylan loved me; he wanted me. She couldn’t take him away. I didn’t have to worry.

And I didn’t worry the whole next week. Dylan and I
held hands and kissed on the soccer field. I went over to his house after school and we did it in his room. He played his guitar and called me “babe.” We talked about how we’d see each other all the time because I would be at BU and he was going to Berklee, just a few blocks away. It was almost as if the dream might come true.

Then Mother started calling his house. Sometimes she’d call ten times a day. If she was drunk, she’d shout obscenities into the phone. If she was sober, she’d demand to know if his parents knew we were sleeping together. His parents took it in stride, as if my mother were an annoying telemarketer, but it freaked Dylan out. He began being stone-faced and silent with me. He started making excuses not to see me and went back to hanging out with the cool kids at school who cut class and smoked pot—a group I was not part of.

At Patty Golden’s end-of-the-year party, he didn’t even show up. At Kenny Pratt’s party, he ignored me. I felt sick to my stomach as I watched him stand as far away from me as he could. He was laughing and holding a big, red plastic cup. I had heard that the boys had a keg hidden in the bushes. I wanted to walk over to him, grab the cup from his hand, and toss it in his face to wipe that nice-guy smile off it, while screaming,
You coward! You don’t even have the guts to stand up to a crazy woman. And I even told you she was crazy!
But I didn’t have the courage to go over to him. I went out on the dance floor and danced by myself. I closed my eyes and moved around to the Earth, Wind & Fire song that was playing:

“Hearts of fire . . . take you high and higher to the world you belong.”

I twirled around and wished some giant hand would sweep down and pluck me up and away from all this horrid emptiness I was feeling. Even though he had been ignoring me for weeks, I still loved him. I just didn’t know any better.

Dylan officially broke up with me a week later, right before graduation. He had asked me to meet him at the scruffy little park near his house. It was doomsday hot; the trees were curling in the sun. We sat on concrete benches next to the dead grass.

“It’s just that I’ve met someone else.” He was wearing jean cutoff shorts and one of his testicles peeked out from the inside of his leg. He looked down at the ground. I felt like I was choking.

“Who is it? Is it someone from our class?” I kept staring at his ball.

It turned out the someone else was Nadine Horvath.

“But why her? What’s so special about her?” Nadine Horvath was a nothing of a girl, a wispy, whiny drip with a bad perm.

“She needs me,” he said, staring down at the scorched, brown grass.

Whatever the hell that meant it was a lie and I didn’t believe him. I needed him so much more and he knew it. At that moment I hated him so much that I imagined tearing off his testicle and throwing it into the street, where maybe it would be run over by a big Chevy station wagon. I knew the
real reason he was dumping me. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me that he couldn’t take the heat with my mother. If he really loved me, he would save me and take me away from everything, but he didn’t really love me. My eyes stung with tears and the park smelled like baking dog shit.

I ran to my car and drove away without looking back at the boy who had just stomped on my heart. I screamed and sobbed, gripping the steering wheel. People stared at me through their car windows. I must have looked like a horror movie with the sound turned off.

At graduation, after the diplomas were handed out, my class sang the Beatles song “In My Life.” I’m sure that to the faculty or other students it seemed an appropriate choice of a song for a group of people whose lives were about to change forever, and who had happy times to look back on, but to me, it sounded like a dirge.

Mother, decked out in one of her Chanel suits, took my picture in my white cap and gown beside Robbie in the pretty, tree-lined courtyard in front of the school, where the Beaver graduations always took place.

“Wendy, why don’t you go ask Dylan to come over and I’ll take a picture of you two on your big day.”

Mother gestured to where he was standing with his family a few yards away. Conveniently for her, she had no recollection of her past bad behavior. That tape had been erased by white wine.

“Oh, Mother, please, I can’t.” I shot a pained look at Robbie, who pursed her lips but said nothing.

“Don’t be ridiculous, he’s standing right there.” Mother pointed at him again. I glanced over and saw Nadine Horvath bounding up to him, looking like a frizzy-haired poodle.

“Please, don’t point at him, and can you lower your voice?” I whispered, looking down at the ground at her feet.

“Why not? And who is that?” She sniffed in Nadine’s direction.

“I’ll tell you in the car, Mother.”

Robbie and I started herding her toward the parking lot.

“What awful hair she has.”

I looked over my shoulder at Dylan and wished he would turn to look at me, to make everything that was now so wrong right again. But he didn’t. I turned away and we walked to the car.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

Once we were a safe distance away, I told Mother that Dylan had broken up with me and that he was dating the poodle girl now.

As she listened to me, her eyes became slits, and she lit up a cigarette. “I don’t want you to worry about it.” Her voice was low and conspiratorial, as if she were a criminal mastermind planning an assassination. “When we get home, I’ll make some calls.”

“Calls?” Calls from Mother had caused all this. “What are you going to do?”

“First, I’ll make sure he’s fired from his summer busboy job.”

I eyed Robbie in the rearview mirror. She smirked and looked out the window, as if to say,
What did you expect?

“Then I’ll call your stepfather, who is still a very important man. I’m sure when he hears this, he’ll be on the first plane to Boston with a baseball bat.”