Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  “Girls?” She seemed to be in speech mode.

  We sipped our orange juice and waited for her to begin.

  “Are you happy to see Pop?”

  It was a silly question. Although he had been in our lives briefly, we loved Pop because he was the only stepfather we knew. He laughed at all our jokes and was fun to be around, and he bought us stuff. So we nodded and continued eating.

  “He still loves me and can’t live without me.” Mother paced and smiled, tugging at her cigarette. “So, we’re going to try to work it out.” She turned to us and opened her arms, looking wildly happy. On cue, my sister and I got up from the breakfast table and ran to her embrace. We were a little confused, but if she was happy, what the hell, we went with it.

  So after a five-year absence from our lives, Pop had rematerialized as our fairy ex-stepfather. Suddenly it became not unusual for us to come home from school to find Pop sitting in our living room in London, with a lit Gitanes and a Tanqueray martini nearby. After he’d left, Mother would say, “You know he loves you two so much.”

  “We know, Mother,” we dutifully replied. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t just Pop’s love for me and Robin that kept him hanging around. There had to be another reason he continued to pay for our private school and summer camp in Switzerland. Even if Mother was seeing several men simultaneously, and she always was, she managed to keep Pop on the back burner—just in case she needed him.

  It was quite a juggling act. They seemed to fight as much as they didn’t but always ended up in each other’s arms. It seemed they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be apart. And so they entered a phase of being together some of the time, and then apart some of the time. Pop would go away—and then he would come back. The Atlantic Ocean seemed to make the relationship possible. Where others might see an unfathomable obstacle, they found convenience. I think she loved him for changing her life and showing her the world outside of her small town in the Midwest; but I couldn’t be sure. There was a strong connection between them that was beyond my girlish understanding. Maybe he was the only person who understood her. I would never know.

  “I think he loves you as if you were his own children,” she said to us one day after he’d left. As if to further this feeling, Mother sent a letter to our school and had our last names changed to his, Rea. She talked about his formally adopting us, which never happened, and I didn’t know if it was even true or something she’d made up. I strongly suspected this idea had a financial aspect: we would legally be tied to him, even though she no longer was. And as she was always in survival mode, that would be a boon to her.

  We didn’t have a father in our lives, so it was fun to have Pop, though he was more like a stand-in for the real thing. Like a jolly uncle or an old family friend, he was the guy who would show up to take you to the circus, or out to your favorite restaurant on your birthday. Our image of our own father was starting to fade away. We had no photos of him, and trying to conjure his face in our minds was becoming more and more difficult. Pop seemed to enjoy his paternal role with us when he was around, and we had to take what we could get.

  Like all fairy tales in which Mother was a player, this latest with Pop would be brief and cautionary. At our next spring break, he appeared with tickets to Morocco. He said he was scouting for land there to build a resort and we could come along for the ride. The plane stopped in Gibraltar to refuel, and Pop took us out on the tarmac to see the Barbary apes. We stood on the airport’s only runway, surrounded by the ocean on three sides. Pop pointed at the Rock of Gibraltar, and at first Robin and I couldn’t see them. Then little brown dots appeared to be scuttling all over the giant rock in a kind of figure-eight pattern, continuously swooping over the rock the way birds do in the air. We were amazed, having only seen wild animals in the zoo. Pop seemed happy to have shown us something new. He put his arms around us, sharing our delighted wonder.

  We reboarded and a few hours later arrived in the Moroccan coastal town of Agadir, on the Atlantic Ocean, where we spent a week at Club Med, which at that time was considered more cosmopolitan and exclusive than it is now. In the morning Pop would hand us ropes of plastic pop-it beads, which was the currency of the club, so we could buy lunch, drinks, trapeze lessons—whatever we wanted. Then he and Mother went off in a car Pop had rented that was the size of a washing machine, searching for the perfect piece of land.

  Our first day, Robbie and I met some cute American boys a little older than we were who started talking to us in the pool. Their names were Nat and Tommy Ellenoff. They were tall and skinny and lived in New York.

  “So where are you guys from?” asked Nat. He was the older one. I never knew how to answer this question. Which of the four cities we had already lived in was the one we were from? I decided to keep it simple.

  “Well, we’re actually from New York, too.” We all got out of the pool.

  “Wow, that’s weird. Where do you go to school?” Tommy was rubbing his chest with a towel. Water dripped from the ends of his curly, dark hair.

  “Town,” I said.

  “But actually we live in London now,” added Robin as she fidgeted with her bikini bottom. I flipped my wet hair behind my shoulder and twisted the water out of it.

  “That’s cool,” said Nat. He snatched the towel away from Tommy, the younger one, who was kind of nerdy looking. They both wore braces.

  “We go to Dalton,” said Nat. “Jeez, Tommy, this towel is soaked.”

  “Hey, man, get your own.” Tommy shrugged at his brother.

  “So is that gray-haired guy with your mom your grandfather or your dad?”

  “He’s our stepdad—I mean, our ex-stepdad,” I said.

  The boys looked confused and I couldn’t blame them.

  “Our real dad is dead,” Robbie pitched in. I nodded.

  We had decided after a few weeks at ASL, since we honestly had no idea where Daddy was or if we’d ever see him again, to cut off such discussions rather than try to deal with the series of confusing questions that would always follow statements like “We don’t know where our dad is.” The truth was that we had no real answers anyway and no place to go for them. Our dad was MIA, that was all we knew. I felt bad lying and sometimes worried that by lying it would come true to punish me—but it just seemed easier for everyone. Including me.

  The boys nodded solemnly.

  “You want to come to lunch? We’ve got a ton of beads.” Tommy pointed at the outdoor restaurant at one end of the pool. Nat nodded in agreement.

  “Sure,” we said. After lunch, Robbie and I agreed to meet them for surfing lessons at the beach the next morning. None of us ended up being that good at it. The boys said the waves were puny anyway. We laughed and joked about being city kids.

  “Nat and I were thinking maybe we could meet you down at the beach tonight when it’s dark, you know, after dinner.” Tommy shook his wet head.

  I looked at Robin and we nodded. “Sure, see you then.” We wouldn’t have any trouble sneaking out.

  That night after dinner in the hotel restaurant, Mother and Pop went off on a rented scooter to experience Moroccan nightlife. I thought they looked comical with their helmets on, Mother clinging to Pop’s bearish midsection, looking panicked in her safari suit and white Gucci pumps. Pop, decked out in Levi’s and a denim jacket, revved the engine to scare her. As I looked at them, the difference in their ages seemed more pronounced to me now. He had gone all gray and wore a woolly Ernest Hemingway beard. She was the same, her beautiful self. Off they went, Mother shrieking as Pop peeled out of the club driveway.

  Robbie and I walked down to the beach, looking around in the dark. There was a flashlight beam under a palm tree.

  “Nat? Tommy? Is it you?” The ocean drowned out the sound of our voices.

  Then Nat put the flashlight under his chin so that it lit up his face in a creepy way. “Ooooooo,” he said, making a ghoul face.

  Tommy grabbed the flashlight and they started fighting over it. “Give it
!” Tommy said. We ran over to them and fell down onto the sand under the tree.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I brought an empty 7UP bottle.” Nat held it up. “We could play spin the bottle.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Robbie said. I giggled.

  “So who wants to go first?” Nat asked. There was a silence, then Nat said quickly, “Okay, I’ll go.”

  We smoothed out the sand and sat in a circle. Nat placed the bottle down. On the first spin it pointed to Tommy.

  “Hey, no way am I kissing you.” Tommy guffawed. We all laughed. I nervously wondered who was going to get kissed first. The bottle spun again and pointed at Robbie. I felt a shiver of disappointment.

  Robbie lifted her face up, going in for the lip-lock, when suddenly gunshots rang out over our heads. Instinctively, we all ducked down, only to be hit with a huge searchlight beam and then surrounded by men in burnooses armed with rifles yelling in French.

  “Halte! Stop! Cette zone est interdite!” they shouted.

  Squinting in the intense light, we all raised our hands like we’d seen in the movies. More men rode up on horses. They had rifles, too. Combining all our years of French to aid in translation, we figured out that the beach was off-limits at night and had to be patrolled to keep away the boats with drug runners on them.

  “Oops,” said Robbie, her eyes wide.

  “Pardonnez-nous, s’il vous plaît,” uttered Nat meekly.

  Tommy, scared shitless, was crying, ropes of snot coming out of his nose. “Omigod, they were gonna kill us,” he choked out.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?” the men demanded.

  “Nous sommes désolées, messieurs,” I whispered.

  The men then smiled, lowering their weapons and patting us on our heads, as if we were lost children. It then occurred to me that I had peed in my pants. We stumbled back to the hotel and went straight to our rooms, where Robbie and I sat watching Moroccan TV in French.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t get to kiss Nat,” Robbie pouted.

  “Yeah. Too bad.” Of course, I was happy because she hadn’t.

  When Pop couldn’t find what he was looking for, we said a sad good-bye to the boys, regretting the kisses we never got to have, and headed off across the Atlas Mountains in the washing-machine car. After a dusty drive with many goat and camel sightings, we arrived at the eleventh-century walled city of Marrakech. Always a famously exotic city, Marrakech, in the late sixties and early seventies, was a symbol of every Westerner’s romantic, hashish-fueled dreams of North Africa.

  We checked into the best hotel in the city, La Mamounia, just inside the city walls. La Mamounia was a rose-colored stone palace that had been built in the 1920s by a prince; it was surrounded by a lush two-hundred-acre garden. My sister and I had a room with a terrace that looked out over the agaves and bougainvillea and the palm, olive, and Savoy orange trees that surrounded the hotel.

  With Mother and Pop we walked through the twisty streets of the city, with three or four children hanging on each arm, begging for money. Moving like a big protozoan, we toured Jamaa el Fna, the enormous square with snake charmers, chained monkeys doing tricks, and camels and donkeys for sale. From there we went to the souk, where the blue- and red-colored yarn dyed for carpets hung to dry on racks suspended over our heads. We visited the famous Koutoubia Mosque and the tombs of the Saadian, where the sultans are buried with their wives and children. Then we went back to the hotel and swam in the pool with Petula Clark’s children.

  “Go make friends with those blond girls,” Mother had urged as she narrowed her eyes, scoping out the situation. While Mother pretended to take pictures of us while we cavorted in the pool with our new friends, she was really photographing Petula Clark’s handsome Swiss husband, who was playing Marco Polo with us.

  At dinner, we ate pigeon pie spiced with cinnamon, but only after Mother assured us it wasn’t the kind of pigeon you saw in Trafalgar Square. Pop laughed and ordered another bottle of French wine. The waiters sprinkled lavender-scented water on our hands at the end of the meal. We were like any happy family on an exotic vacation.

  Then, Mother ran into an old flame from New York in the lobby, Eliot Wyden, and greeted him too affectionately for Pop’s liking. Mother had considered marrying Eliot for a brief time after her divorce from Pop. But problems arose when it turned out Eliot’s mother disapproved of a multiple divorcée saddled with two children. Mother decided that she couldn’t be married to a man who still cared what his mother thought, and besides, she didn’t want to give up her alimony.

  “Good Lord, Georgann, what are you doing here, of all places?” Eliot wetly kissed her cheek and thrust his big, floppy hands into the pockets of his Brooks Brothers blazer. I had always thought Eliot looked like a thumb. He was somewhat featureless and hairless.

  “How is your mother, Eliot?” Mother was trying to postpone introducing Pop and wondering how to do so.

  “She’s dead!” Eliot blustered cheerfully. “Hit by a taxi last year crossing Madison.”

  “How awful. I’m so sorry,” Mother said, her eyes sparkling the way Holly Golightly’s did when she met Rusty Trawler, the richest man in America under forty.

  “I would love to take you to dinner.”

  Mother laughed, looking over her shoulder at Pop. It was a tempting offer.

  “Why don’t you call me, Eliot, when you get back to the city?”

  Pop looked furious and stomped off to the bar.

  From that moment on, our meals together were either heavy with silence or fraught with sniping comments from the up-until-then happy couple. Robbie and I were on Pop’s side. It seemed to us that if Mother was sleeping in the same room with Pop, she shouldn’t flirting with some old boyfriend, or anyone for that matter.

  One morning, Mother and Pop didn’t show up for breakfast. I went up to their room and knocked on the door. A little, round Moroccan woman in a pink maid’s uniform answered the door. She said nothing to me, but turned and went back to her work. The maid knelt on the white carpet, scrubbing at a dark stain. I noticed that a pane of glass in the French window that led out to the terrace was broken. A brown trickle led from the window to the bathroom. I could see blood on the sink and on some towels on the floor.

  The maid looked up at me, clearly unhappy with the mess she had to clean up. I could hear my heart inside my head.

  “C’est du sang. Très difficile à enlever.” She shook her head and clucked her disapproval.

  I was trying to stay calm and guess what might have taken place at the same time. “Où sont ma mère et mon père, madame, s’il vous plaît?”

  “À l’hôpital, mademoiselle.” She said something about an accident.

  “Merci, madame.” I raced downstairs to the lobby, where I literally ran smack into Mother, looking as if she’d been up all night. She lifted a trembling hand up to her sunglasses and pushed them closer to her face. I searched her face and wrists but saw no blood or bandages.

  “What’s happened? Where’s Pop?”

  “He’s fine. We had an argument, that’s all.” I followed her into the bar, where she ordered a bullshot—a 1970s pick-me-up like a Bloody Mary, but made with beef bouillon.

  “But I saw your room,” I whispered, standing next to her barstool, my eyes adjusting to the dark room.

  “He punched his fist through the window. He was jealous about Eliot. He’d been smoking hash that he got somewhere. Thank God it’s all over now. Jesus, what a night.”

  Mother lifted the salt-rimmed martini glass to her lips and sucked it down in one go. She then explained to me that even though Pop had no plans to leave his current wife, he didn’t want her seeing other men and she had no intention of just being his mistress. So, they had reached an impasse and the deal was off. As a consolation prize, he had agreed to take out a life insurance policy in her name. This seemed to please her. She tapped on her glass, signaling the bartender for another. I didn’t understand adults. And suddenly I wasn’
t so sure I wanted to be one.

  Despite her numerous dalliances with men and women, many of them wealthier and younger than Pop, something special about him kept her coming back. And despite cheating on her, marrying one of her girlfriends, and possessing the means and the charm to capture any number of other women, Pop couldn’t leave Mother for good. Maybe she saw him as a lover and a father; maybe he saw her as the classic doomed beauty in need of a savior. I’d read enough Jacqueline Susann to guess at these motivations, but at fourteen I couldn’t possibly know. All I was sure of was that once again they had blown it—dangled a shiny idea of some kind of stable life for Robbie and me and then smashed it and left it for the maid to clean up.

  I walked out of the tomblike darkness of the bar and into the Magritte blue of the Moroccan sky, where my bikini-clad sister lay on a chaise reading Seventeen magazine by the pool, looking like Sue Lyon sans lollipop in Lolita.

  “So, where were they?”

  “They had breakfast in their room,” I lied. Despite Robbie’s knowing-nymphet demeanor, I was still trying whenever possible to spare her the dirty details.

  On our way home, Pop sat in the airport bar sullenly drinking until our flight was called. I felt sorry for him. Sitting on his barstool, he seemed lost somewhere far away, like the little boy who had everything except the one thing he really wanted. Mother sat with us at a little café table, flipping through Italian Vogue, sipping white wine. She glanced over at him every couple of minutes, a faint smile curling up one side of her mouth.

  After our return from Morocco, Tracy Turner came sashaying up to me in the hallway after gymnastics class.

  “Hey, are you auditioning for the spring musical?” I noticed that she’d got blond streaks in her hair over the break, making her look even more like Farrah Fawcett.

  “I don’t know, are you?” I asked.