Chanel Bonfire (26 page)

“Hello, my name is Howard and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hello, Howard,” everyone echoed back.

Howard had been a reporter at the
Boston Globe
for thirty years and had spent all his free time in the local bar, knocking back the Cutty Sarks while he waited for the big stories to break. He talked wistfully about the cops dragging the city for the Boston Strangler, the bank robberies and the fires he had covered, and I couldn’t help thinking that he seemed to really miss drinking. In fact, my impression of all the people who spoke was that they were nostalgic about the good old days when they were living much more exciting lives, boozing it up.
Never mind,
I thought,
I got her here, so let’s make the best of it
. The meeting ended with more smoking, and coffee was served in Styrofoam cups. Mother seemed to be enjoying herself, puffing up a storm cloud of cigarette smoke, and working a room of people who didn’t know she had a police record.

I halfheartedly enrolled in some classes, which I halfheartedly attended. In my French Existentialist Cinema class, my teacher looked like Mr. Death. He always wore black, was thin with waxy white skin, and liked to rant with his arms raised over his head about how badly the French had behaved during World War II.

“Don’t you see? They behaved like pigs! They worship people like Maurice Chevalier and Jerry Lewis! So utterly banal!”

I went to my Introduction to Creative Writing class, but only on the days that my work wasn’t being read. It was easy to be invisible in this way. My other two classes were art history and a costume class in which I did the minimum of
work, so I was barely passing them. Living in the house with Mother made me feel sad and tired, and a kind of heaviness soaked into my bones. I missed my sister, and walking past her old room reminded me of her absence and all the turmoil that had occurred there. Everything I normally did—walking up the stairs, putting the dishes away, hanging up my coat—seemed to take more energy than I possessed. Except for Amy, I had no friends at school and couldn’t seem to make new ones. Sometimes, in the evenings at the dinner table, I felt like Mother’s paid companion, a forlorn girl in a Victorian novel who has to sit with an old lady and keep her company.

At her next AA meeting, Mother was given a sponsor, a plain woman named Carol, who was supposed to check up on Mother, and whom she could call if she felt she was going to start drinking again. Carol had been a librarian until excessive drinking had caused her to be fired from her job. Carol dutifully phoned my mother every evening and they had a nice chat.

About two weeks later, after the meeting during coffee time, Carol sidled up to me. “They have a meeting for you, too, you know, dear.” Carol looked like a perfectly nice housewife from the Midwest. She favored sherbet-colored shirtdresses, smelled like Aqua Net, and her purse looked like a little picnic basket. I tried to picture her at the library, stashing vodka bottles on shelves behind self-help books.

“Oh, I don’t have a drinking problem or anything.” I gestured vaguely toward Mother.

“No, dear. Next time, go downstairs to the Alateen meeting. It might help.” I had seen the sign in the hallway for a few weeks now, with a big black arrow pointing ominously down the steep metal stairs.

During Mother’s next meeting, I followed the arrow down to the basement. The hall was dark and I tried the lights, but they didn’t work. Still, it wasn’t difficult to locate the meeting—a kind of rumble emanated from the end of the corridor. It sounded like heavy furniture being moved around. I followed the ruckus until I stood in front of a door. This must be the place. I took a breath and walked in.

About ten young people my age were in various poses of dismay, rage, and despondency. Metal chairs were set in a circle, where one girl held her head in her hands sobbing uncontrollably, while another boy stood on a chair and shouted obscenities at the ceiling. One boy just sat and stared straight ahead. Another young woman was lying on the floor with her arms shielding her face. A middle-aged man wearing an adhesive name tag that read
SID
was trying to calm a kid who was jumping up and down screaming, “No,” over and over. It was so loud no one had noticed me come in.

“Okay, people, let’s settle in the circle,” Sid boomed over the din, placing a large hand on the “no” boy’s shoulder. Everyone stopped what they were doing and sat down. I joined the circle.

“So who’d like to start? Anyone? I see we have someone new here today.” Everyone turned and looked at me. I stared down at my lap.

“There’s no pressure to speak, so don’t worry.” Sid was wearing a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt and a tie. He was dark and burly with black tufts of hair on his arms.

“I’ll start,” the loud boy said.

“Great. Thanks, Rich.” Sid crossed his arms and hunkered down in his folding chair. All the kids copied him, so I did, too.

“Well, I think I told you last time I was going to spend the weekend at my mom’s while my dad went on a business trip.”

“Yes, Rich, and how did that go?”

“Not so hot. So, Friday after school when I walked in the door, my mom was already totally out of it on the couch, and I had a friend with me and he saw her. And her dress was all hiked up and stuff.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

I sat in the room and listened to them talk about their parents’ drinking problems. There was a lot of sorrow and pain, but at the same time, I didn’t hear anyone saying anything I could relate to. None of it sounded like what went on in my house. It was . . . Dad had too many highballs and forgot my birthday, or Mom fell asleep on the couch. Well, none of that sounded like . . . my mom tried to run me over, or my mom was arrested at my sister’s high school graduation and was dragged off screaming in her blue nightie. Where was the support group for that? My mother drank and she became someone else, but she was also nuts. I left the meeting feeling confused and as if I didn’t belong there. I didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Except maybe the theater.

In a weird art-imitating-life occurrence, I auditioned for and was cast in a production of Neil Simon’s play
The Gingerbread Lady
. One day I had seen the poster announcing auditions in the student lounge of the liberal arts building. The little theater group was not affiliated with the school for the arts, so I figured the competition wouldn’t be that fierce. I was right; the director called me that evening to offer me the part. The play was about a washed-up nightclub singer in her forties named Evy, who gets out of rehab and goes home to try to live her life sober. I played Evy’s daughter, Polly, the spunky, resilient teenager who loves her mom and tries to help her get back on her feet. So I was basically playing myself, albeit the bittersweet, corny Neil Simon version of myself.

I loved being in a play again, and I was glad to spend my evenings at rehearsal, not sitting at the dinner table with Mother, trying to make chitchat over a pot roast while she chain-smoked. Sometimes I went from rehearsal to the radio station where Amy was answering phones for Oedipus, the hot DJ of the moment. From there, we’d go out dancing for a few hours and not get home until after the bars had closed and Mother was asleep.

After about a month of sobriety, Mother decided to run for the position of leader of her AA meeting. I actually made signs for her, using posterboard and markers. She won, using that charm that I knew so well and saw right through; I was no longer impressed by her talent for manipulation. During this uneventful time at home Mother went back to work on her book, got bathed and dressed each day, and even made
a pot of coffee for me and Amy before we went off to school in the morning.

“Wendelson,” said Amy, heading out with her steaming go-cup, “catch you later maybe at the station. Thanks for the coffee, Mrs. Rea.”

“Have a wonderful day, girls,” Mother exclaimed. It was almost like the old Donna Reed days in Connecticut.

My play opened and Mother attended the first performance. It seemed painfully obvious to me that I was playing a version of myself and that I was onstage with a character very much like Mother, except with more one-liners. During my big speech at the end of the play where my character cries, yells, and begs her mother to stop drinking, I felt that it was clear that I was speaking directly to her. But Mother didn’t seem to see it, or didn’t want to.

“Well,” she said afterward, shrugging her mink-draped shoulders, “it’s not one of his best plays, is it?”

Of course, the play had a happy ending. The Gingerbread Lady goes on a bender and hits rock bottom again after being beaten by her lover. Then her friends (the Gingerbread Lady had two—two more than Mother) and her daughter gather around her, and she sees that she’s hurt herself and the people she loves, and everyone forgives her, and she stops drinking, and it ends with everyone happy and hugging and joking.

A week into the run, I got home from performing the show to find Mother sitting in a living room armchair in the dark. I knew she was there because I could see the little orange point of her cigarette.

“Mother?” I switched on the lights. She was staring straight ahead. She was wearing the blue nightgown.
Oh, shit,
I thought.

“I just got off the phone with Carol.” It was eleven o’clock at night, which struck me as a bit late for a chat with her sponsor.

“Is everything all right?” I had that old feeling, my stomach instantly in knots.

“I told her I was resigning my position as leader of the meeting.”

“Why?”

“It’s Carol!” Mother rose from the chair and started pacing back and forth like a caged animal. “She hates me! I swear she’s trying to drive me to drink. That’s what she wants!”

I pointed out to Mother that just couldn’t be true. Carol was her sponsor after all and only wanted to support her.

“She’s jealous of me. Now that I’m group leader, she’s gaslighting me!”

It was hard for me to imagine Carol as Charles Boyer’s evil character in the movie
Gaslight
, trying to drive his wealthy but fragile wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane. I had also never heard
gaslight
used as a verb. I resisted a temptation to run over to the light switch and flick it on and off—something Boyer does to push his wife over the edge. Of course, there was no need; Mother was already there.

“Come on, Mother.” I was really tired and I had classes in the morning, which I would probably be late to.

“Carol is the ringleader and she’s turned them all against
me. Of course she’s jealous of my brains, my beauty. She’s a fucking librarian!”

“It’s late, Mother, maybe you should—”

“I’m simply better than any of them and they can’t stand it!”

“Please, Mother, try to calm down.”

“I’m not going back. Ever.” She marched past me, then stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Never screw a spider,” she announced to no one in particular.

Her paranoia didn’t surprise me; I wondered why it hadn’t happened sooner. I chalked it up to another failure on my part. Mother’s turn at AA had lasted three months. Life was not a Neil Simon play. Why didn’t I know that by now?

The night the play closed, I came home late after the cast party. As I passed the bathroom on my way to my bedroom, I heard Amy’s voice. It was hard to hear, as Mother had her TV blasting.

“Wendelson? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” I spoke to her through the door.

“Can you get me outta here? I’ve been in here since three o’clock this afternoon.” It was now midnight.

I tried the door, which opened easily with a little jiggling.

“Omigod, thank you!” Amy was wearing a T-shirt and panties.

“Jesus, you mean you’ve been in there for nine hours?”

“Yeah, I came in to take a shower and then I couldn’t
open the door. I banged, I screamed. Nothing.” Mother’s bedroom door was just diagonally across the way. Clearly, she had been too out of it to hear.

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. I mean, I was too afraid to jump out the window. So I shaved my legs, I did my nails, I took a nap, you know.”

“I can’t believe my mom didn’t hear you,” I lied.

“Must be the TV. It’s superloud.”

I nodded.

“Hey, I’m late for work. Wanna come to the station with me?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to sleep. How about tomorrow?”

“Sure, Wendell. I gotta get dressed.”

I went to my room and got ready for bed. I heard Amy bustling around, then the front door closing and her Camaro driving away. The play was done, and I was finishing up the semester with one B, two C’s, and a D in my costume class—I hadn’t studied for the final because I just didn’t care. It was easier to be a ghostlike presence in my own life, sleepwalking through the days.

The next night, I went to the station with Amy. The story of Amy’s being locked in the bathroom for nine hours had been on the WBCN news all that day. Amy had been enjoying her celebrity status, and when I got to the station, people asked me, “Oh, are you the one with the mom who couldn’t hear Amy screaming and beating on the door for nine hours?” Yes, it was my mom, my bathroom.