Chanel Bonfire (23 page)

“Don’t forget, Wendy, who’s paying for you to go to college.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Although Mother behaved as if she were picking up the tab for my college education, she was not footing the bill.
The small trust fund my grandfather had left my sister and me to pay for college was still intact. Mother had been able to divert some of the interest for her own use, but the bulk of it remained at the bank in Kansas City. I didn’t care about the money except the part that allowed me to finally leave home. After I escaped her clutches, she could have the rest. It was a small price to pay.

I went over to Jack’s house to say good-bye. He was leaving the next day to go back to boarding school for his senior year. His mom let me in and told me he was up in his room packing his trunk.

“I’ll miss you,” I said as I watched him fold his clothes and ball up his socks.

“No, you won’t.” He shot me a killer smile. “You’ll be too busy.”

It was true that I would miss him, but I was also excited about going to college, where I thought my life would finally begin and become exciting in ways not related to suicide notes and speeding cars.

“We’ll be really far apart from each other, so I don’t want you to feel bad if you meet somebody else,” he said.

I wanted him to be upset that we weren’t going to see each other for a while. But he was being so goddamn grown-up about it.

“I won’t. Meet someone else, I mean.”

“You’re going to meet a lot of people. It’s a big school.”

“You’re not a priest yet, okay? So stop trying to get rid of me.”

I walked over to him and he put his arms around me. He still smelled like soap and trees, I thought, as we kissed. We promised to see each other at the Thanksgiving break. He gave me the number of the hall phone outside his dorm room.

“Good-bye, Candy,” he said.

chapter thirteen

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

The day I left for BU happened to coincide with Mother’s fortieth birthday. On top of that, Pop, finished with Mother’s hysterical phone calls and pleas for cash, finally severed all ties with her by canceling the life insurance policy of which he had made her the beneficiary. It all hit her like a falling piano: she was middle-aged, friendless, manless, broke, and her eldest was leaving the nest. She was stunned into a catatonic silence. Robbie sat in the backseat, smiling and looking out the window as if she were sightseeing in some beautiful tropical paradise.

When Mother dropped me off outside my dorm, she stayed behind the wheel, frozen like a corpse with a lit cigarette. Robbie helped me unload my stuff onto the pavement. I embraced my sister and strongly resisted the desire to dance a jig right there on the sidewalk.

“Good-bye, Mother!” I bent down and smiled at her through the window. She didn’t look at me as the car slowly
pulled away from the curb. Robbie sat in the front, doing a Queen Elizabeth wave at me as the car crawled down the street at a hearselike pace.

Surrounded by tearful parents hugging their children beside laundry baskets filled with alarm clocks and lamps and footballs, I watched the car disappear around the corner—and I started to laugh. The kind of giddy laugh that you hear in casinos after a win. Or in my case, in a dark theater watching a Woody Allen movie. I was free.

My housing at BU was in a brownstone on a quiet narrow street behind Commonwealth Avenue named Buswell Street. My roommate, Julie, was from Chicago and was studying painting at the school for the arts. She was a very sweet, sunny, uncomplicated girl with adoring, supportive parents, who also happened to be enormously wealthy. So she was basically the polar opposite of me.

As the anti-me, Julie would spring from bed in the morning, happy to be alive, drink a cup of herbal tea, and dash off to class. While Julie’s goal of being a painter was in front of her, mine—escaping my mother—was behind me. I slept until noon, made myself an instant coffee, then strolled to one of the English or theater classes I’d signed up for from the catalog with barely a glance. Finally sprung from the confines of the Snake Pit, I let my newfound freedom go to my head. Like Auntie Mame said in the movie, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” I was famished, and now I was making up for lost time.

I ate at the vegetarian dining hall, not for the food but for
the company. Everyone there was cool and doing something interesting. Greg and Craig were in the acting program, Alice was studying the violin, and Hugh wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be more like them, more of a bohemian. I permed my long blond hair into a mass of kinky curls like Alice, who looked like Stevie Nicks. Alice ran around in an old tuxedo jacket, so I started shopping in thrift stores for secondhand stuff. I wore anything that would make me look like one of my fellow gypsies—dangly seashell earrings, a ratty cardigan, harem pants, tie-dyed scarves, preferably with holes in them. I started smoking those stinky clove cigarettes, Djarums. Weekends we would all gather at Craig and Greg’s (they had the biggest place) and listen to jazz and dance and play the bongos. Saturday nights we’d get dressed up and go to the midnight
Rocky Horror Picture Show
at the Harvard Square Theatre. I felt free and the happiest I’d been since London.

Barely two weeks into my own personal
La Dolce Vita
, I awoke in the middle of the night to knocking on my door and my sister’s distraught voice coming from the hallway.

“Wendy, open up. Please.” Her voice was shaking.

“What is it? What’s going on?” I let her in, trying to whisper to keep from waking my roommate. Robin’s face was shiny with tears.

“She tried to set fire to my room.” Robin cleared her throat, something she always did when she was upset and trying not to lose it.

“Jesus.”

“She was drunk and she grabbed this shirt off the floor and lit it on fire with a Bic lighter.”

“Are you hurt?” By this time, Julie had got out of bed and was standing next to mine. She turned on the little lamp on my bedside table.

“She tried to throw the shirt at me, but it landed on top of my stereo and it started to smoke and melt. I grabbed it and ran to the bathroom and threw it in the toilet but the curtains caught on fire.”

“What’s going on?” Julie asked. I gave her the lowdown. “Wow. So she’s really nuts.”

I nodded. Together we made a bed on the floor for Robin with extra blankets and pillows.

“Have you ever tried just talking to her?” Julie asked.

I was always asked this question by people who meant well but had no idea what it was like dealing with the highly irrational. They wondered why I couldn’t just bring all this to a halt with a few well-chosen words. I wanted to explain that I was a teenager, not Carl Jung or a lion tamer. You couldn’t just read
I’m OK, You’re OK
and grasp this situation. I couldn’t heal my mother’s wounded Inner Child, no matter how many pop-psychology books I read. The world Robbie and I lived in was like a parallel universe, and unless you’d been there, you couldn’t possibly fathom it. Even then, Mother’s ability to turn off the crazy and pour on the charm left people, like the paramedics, unaware of what was really going on.

I smiled at Julie and assured her that it didn’t work
that way. Robbie and I were alone inside our world of understanding. I suppose in a way my childhood practice of shielding my sister from the truth, and later keeping it from the world, derived from Mother’s example. But at least I was trying to use it for good. I looked down to see my sister already asleep with the covers pulled over her head.

The next day, I called Dr. Keylor. I hadn’t seen her since graduating from high school, but I was still paying off my bill. I told her what had happened. Dr. Keylor spoke in an unruffled tone, but I could hear the concern in her voice. I held the telephone in between me and Robbie so she could hear.

“If you believe that your mother is a danger to others or to herself, I think you should seriously consider having her committed.”

“You mean like a hospital?” I imagined Mother wrapped in a straitjacket, spouting expletives as she was stuffed into an ambulance, while the neighbors stood around watching. Like her own mother being taken away on a stretcher but without the reassuring terminal diagnosis.

“Yes, where she might be able to get some help. Talk it over with your sister. I can help you take the necessary steps.”

I thanked Dr. Keylor and hung up the phone.

“Well, she is dangerous,” Robin said, “but putting her in some place?” Robin ran her index finger across her throat. Committing her seemed even more scary because of what she would do to us when she got out. She’d hunt us down and kill us like some deranged convict, escaped to wreak vengeance on her accusers. We’d have to go into Witness Protection.

I wondered what else I could do—who else could I call?

I walked to Commonwealth Avenue and called my stepfather collect from a pay phone. Pop had always rescued us before—from bad hotels, bankruptcy, insanity. But this time he told me he couldn’t do it. Things had deteriorated so much with Mother that he might have to change his phone number. She’d even called his other ex-wives. He no longer had any control over her.

It wasn’t the answer I’d wanted, but after everything I’d seen, I understood. I thanked him anyway and asked him why he’d stuck around for so long, paying our private-school tuitions, fees for summer camp in Switzerland, and class trips to Africa.

“Dearie,” he said, “it is probably the nicest thing I’ve ever done.”

My sister started camping out at friends’ houses, with me in the small room I shared with Julie, or with anyone we could find who had room for her for a few days. For a month, she lived in my friend Alison Martin’s large walk-in closet in her Boston College dorm room. Robin would go back home when things had blown over.

Some days it felt like I hadn’t really escaped at all. I could still feel my mother’s tentacles reaching through the phone line, trying to drag me back into the darkness. My phone would ring and ring and I didn’t always pick it up. Sometimes I’d pick up the receiver on the twenty-fifth ring and drop it
back into the cradle. Then, other days I was almost happy: I was getting by in my classes, and I wasn’t living at home. Robbie came and went when she needed to, and Douglas would drop by some nights and take me to our favorite place in Chinatown, King Fung, for wonton soup.

We drove down to Chinatown in the big white van he drove for the restaurant, which smelled of fish. We ate wonton soup in silence. I’d had an easy familiarity with Douglas from the first time we’d met. It was like discovering a brother I didn’t know I had. We both had fathers who had disappeared: mine into another family somewhere in the Midwest, and his into the arms of a mistress in Japan. I felt that he would have done anything for me. We didn’t need to talk about it. It was just there on the table like the soy sauce.

One day, close to Thanksgiving break, I was studying for a history test when the phone rang and rang for what seemed like ten minutes.

Exasperated, I picked it up. “Hello, Mother.” I didn’t see any point in pretending I didn’t know who it was.