Chanel Bonfire (29 page)

“They’re from my girlfriend.” He acted as if it didn’t matter that he was telling me now that he had a girlfriend.

“You have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, actually she’s coming up to visit me this weekend.”

“I thought I was your girlfriend,” I said. I felt like I was going to barf.

“Well, Wendy, this is fun and everything, but you’re twenty years old and I’m not interested in anything serious—”

His speech was interrupted by my drink flying into his face from across the table.

I stood up while he wiped his face with a cocktail napkin. He was smiling slightly, looking embarrassed. People were staring at us and my hands were shaking.

“If she comes up here, I don’t want to see you again.” I stormed off.

The next day at work, I saw Michael as usual backstage but didn’t look at him or speak to him. I felt miserable—jealous
of this other woman and foolish for throwing the drink at him. I was acting like my mother, and look where it had got me. He probably hated me now.

Michael was waiting for me after I came out the stage door. “Can I talk to you?” He didn’t seem mad.

My face burned and I could barely bring myself to look at him. “I’m sorry I threw the drink at you. I was so angry,” I stammered.

“It’s okay,” he said, half smiling. “I have to say I wasn’t expecting it.”

We started to walk down the street together. It was drizzling lightly and the streetlights shone on the trees that lined Brattle Street. The air smelled like lilacs.

“I won’t let her come,” he said. “She’s not even really my girlfriend. I just said that because I was afraid.”

I looked down at the sidewalk, which was all shiny with the rain. “What are you afraid of?” I didn’t understand.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said quietly.

When we reached his apartment, his message machine was blinking. I dropped my stuff on the couch while he went over and pressed the flashing button. It was my mother’s voice on the machine. She cleared her throat theatrically and then spoke. It was chilling to hear her in Michael’s apartment, where I thought I was safe.

“Hello. I wanted Wendy to know that the FBI just called me and informed me that her sister, Robin, has committed suicide.” Then she hung up.

“Oh my God. Who the hell was that?” Michael started
to rewind the machine. He played the message again. I told him it was my mother. He stared at me for a second with his mouth hanging open. “What should we do?” he asked, sounding panicked.

“Nothing.” I picked up the phone and called Robin’s dorm-room number. She answered and I asked her if she was okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine except you woke me up,” she said, sounding cranky.

“Sorry, go back to sleep. I’ll call back later in the week.” I put down the receiver.

“So, your sister’s fine? Is this some kind of a joke?”

“Not a joke exactly, but I’m sure Mother’s having fun.”

“But how did she get this number?”

“She probably called the theater and said it was an emergency,” I said matter-of-factly. Then I gave him the short version of my struggles with Mother. He just listened and didn’t say anything for a while.

“So why didn’t you tell me any of this? I mean, this is pretty huge, having to handle something . . . someone like this.” He searched my face, looking perplexed.

My throat felt all tight as I tried to explain. “Most people don’t stick around when my mother makes an appearance. I guess I was afraid you’d disappear, too.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere, but I do need a drink.”

We went to the kitchen and sat down at the little dinette table. He poured himself a scotch from a bottle he kept on top of the fridge. He poured me a small one and dropped a few ice cubes into it.

“Thanks.” I sipped the burning flavor.

He sat down across from me, stirring his drink with his finger. “You know, you can’t live your life for anyone else.” He picked up the salt shaker. “You see, this is your mother.” He placed it at one end of the table. Then he picked up the pepper. “And this is you.” He put the pepper down at the other end. “She doesn’t have any power over you really. You’ve given her that power.”

“Me?” I eyed the salt shaker. “Well, first of all, that’s wrong because she would be the pepper.”

“Yeah, okay, I get it. It matches her black soul. You can be the salt.” He switched the shakers on the table.

“That’s more like it.”

“And pretend the salt has a shit raincoat on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A shit raincoat that protects you from all the crap that she slings at you. She throws her insane garbage at you and it hits the shit raincoat and it falls off.”

“I wish.”

“The shit raincoat takes practice.” He laughed, and it occurred to me that he hadn’t run away yet.

I sort of saw what he was talking about. Not that I was a salt shaker, but that Mother was a separate entity, and a small and inconsequential one at that. She only loomed large in my mind; in reality she was an empty, sad wreck of a person. After spending more time talking to Michael, I began to realize that I had to make a break for freedom or she might just take me down the rabbit hole with her.

One day I was sitting in the wardrobe room with Don, reading the program for the theater’s season, and I noticed that one of the actors, Max Wright, had worked at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, where my father had been for so many years. My face started to tingle and I felt a little queasy. Maybe he could tell me something about my dad.

I hadn’t seen or heard from my father in ten years. Mother had told Robin and me that he had abandoned us for his new family all those years ago. As a ten-year-old girl, I had accepted this as the truth. Why had he found it so easy to walk away from his children? Why had he never even sent a letter or a postcard in ten years? I didn’t have a photograph of him, but Mother told me I looked just like him. If he saw me on the street, would he recognize me?

“You should go ask Max,” Don said. “It’s your father, for Christ’s sake.”

A few weeks went by and I still couldn’t muster the nerve to talk to Max about my father. Before the show, he was always at his dressing table in the corner, reading some heavy book about Brecht or Sartre, and I couldn’t ask him there because so many people were around. After the show, he was always the first one to bolt out the door as soon as he had changed. I knew he was leaving soon to go back to New York, so there wasn’t much time left.

“You better hurry up,” Don warned, hands on hips and arching his eyebrows for emphasis.

The next night during the show, I was crossing through the theater lobby with some laundry and there was Max having a cigarette. This might be my last chance. I walked up to him and blurted out that I was wondering if he had met an actor named James Lawless at the Guthrie.

“Sure, I know Jimmy Lawless.” He nodded.

I swallowed. “What’s he like?”

“He’s a really nice guy. Why are you asking?” Poor Max looked at me like I was one of those freaky autograph hounds who stalked the stage door.

“Well . . . he’s my father and—”

“Jesus, you’re Jimmy’s kid! Omigod, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty.”

“Christ, that makes me feel old.”

“Um . . .” I was about to launch into my tale of woe when Max’s head twitched up toward the monitor.

“Holy shit, that’s my cue!” Max stubbed out his cigarette and ran like hell.

A nice guy.
It wasn’t much to go on, but Max hadn’t said he was a monster with two heads. I sleepwalked back to the wardrobe room, where Don was sitting sewing, his mouth full of pins.

He saw my face and almost spit the pins out. “Omigod, you asked him, didn’t you?”

I nodded and smiled.

He took a piece of paper out of his jeans pocket. “I took the liberty of getting the number from directory assistance.”
He gave me the paper and handed me a roll of quarters. “Are you gonna be okay? Are you scared?”

“No, I’m not scared at all.”

The truth was that I felt strangely calm. Suddenly I knew that this was the right thing for me to do, that I had to do it. It had just taken me some time to know it. Ten years.

chapter sixteen

THE FRIENDLY SKIES

This time on the airplane to Minneapolis, rather than getting wings from the flight attendant like the last time I made this trip, I ordered a Bloody Mary to calm my nerves. I had always been afraid to fly, and as the plane hurtled toward its destination, I looked out the window and wondered if my fear was connected to all the tumult I used to experience on airplanes—the tears, the feeling of emptiness when you leave something behind that is still a part of you.

“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Michael had driven me to the airport in Boston.

“I think I should go on my own. But thanks.”

“God, wait till your mother reads that note.” He laughed maniacally like Dr. Frankenstein when they asked him if he was mad.

I smiled. Since Mother was barricaded in her fortress, I had scribbled a note about where I was going and left it
on the kitchen table. I kept playing the movie of her reaction to the note over and over in my head, for fun. I could see her stumble down the stairs into the kitchen, go to the fridge for a quart of ice cream, and on her way back to her room notice the note. She would pick it up, holding it close to her face trying to read it in the dim light. Then her eyes would bulge and she’d throw back her head and scream like the lady in the scary movie when she sees the monster for the first time.

“You should probably turn off your answering machine for a few days,” I told Michael at the gate.

“Good idea. You’d better go.”

I kissed him and got on the plane.

When I got off in Minneapolis, I looked around. I searched for a face I hadn’t seen in ten years but felt sure I would know. Strangers walked by lugging strollers and backpacks as I scanned the crowd. Then I noticed, across from my gate, standing next to a large potted palm tree, a distinguished-looking older man. He had beautiful, wavy white hair and was nattily dressed in a navy blue, pinstripe suit with a maroon paisley tie. His black shoes were shiny and pointy. I started to walk toward him. He had a big Irish face and blue, misty eyes, and he was chewing gum. He looked remarkably like me. He was also wearing makeup and hair spray because he had just been shooting a commercial for Red Baron pizza. I walked over to him; he stood there smiling.

“Daddy?”

“Sweetheart! Ha-ha!” He opened his arms wide, laughing.

I could see the gum dancing around on his molars like a little musical peanut, and I hugged him, breathing in the smells of my dad, which were the same after all this time: Trident spearmint gum, hair spray, and Dunhill cologne. It was a great smell.

“Let’s go to the bar and have a drink.”

We bellied up to the bar and I ordered coffee, and he had a perfect manhattan on the rocks with an olive.

He told me that my stepmother was on a business trip, so we would have the next few days to ourselves. “She sends her love.” He gestured to my hair. “What color is that?”

I had been dyeing my hair with henna so it was red. I told him that my hair had started turning white when I was around nineteen. I didn’t want to say that I’d often thought that Mother had given me the prematurely gray hair with all her shenanigans. But now I knew it was inherited.

“It runs in our family. Your grandmother has it and my brother and sisters, too.” He looked down into his drink. “I’m just so happy to see you.” He shook his head and looked up at me with tears in his eyes. I was crying, too. It was weird—like looking into a mirror after not having seen yourself for such a long time. Here we were, father and daughter, lost and found, sitting in an airport bar.

We went down to baggage claim, where my bag was the only one remaining. Daddy carried it through the parking garage, and we got into his huge, black Buick LeSabre. Classical music played on the radio as we drove through Minneapolis, which I had not seen since my childhood. He drove me past
the old house on Humboldt Avenue, where Robbie and I used to live with him in the summers, and around the park where he played tennis while we rode our bikes, and down Mount Curve Avenue with all the elegant mansions, where Robin and I lived briefly after our mother had left him for Pop. We swung past the Guthrie Theater, with its modern concrete-and-glass façade, where we had watched him in
Twelfth Night
and
The Tempest
and other plays, and by Seven Pools, where our babysitters used to take us swimming in the summer, and Dayton’s, where Daddy used to take us to buy our summer play clothes.

Their home was one I had never seen—a lovely, old stone house with lots of windows and a big fireplace across from the front door. It reminded me of a house in a fairy tale, which of course it was in a way. The house was filled with things I didn’t recognize. Every rug, every chair, and every book was new to me, and I was painfully struck by how I had missed so much time with him and that it had gone on without me. The photographs in the house were of my stepmother’s children. They had grown up with my father, I had not. The only pictures of me and my sister were in a clear plastic photo cube, which I picked up off the mantelpiece. I turned the box over in my hand, looking at snapshots of two little blond girls. We were all grown up now.