Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  The police brought Mother home that evening. When I confronted her, she just ranted about what the police had done to her.

  “They humiliated me!”

  “How could you do such a horrible thing?”

  “And they hurt me. Look at my wrists. They handcuffed me!”

  “Answer me. Why?” But she didn’t have an answer. It was like trying to ask Godzilla why he destroyed Tokyo.

  “And then they raped me!” She wept and climbed the stairs to her room.

  Once again, she failed to see that what she had done had injured someone else—her own daughter—so deeply. She only saw the red marks on her own arms.

  The next day, I drove her out to school so we could pick up her car. It was parked next to the tennis courts where the police had left it. We rode in silence.

  In therapy, Dr. Keylor had encouraged me to try to see the good and the bad in my mother, her strengths and weaknesses. Her weakness seemed to be her diseased mind, but I had to say her strong suit was making herself the center of attention.

  At the end of the summer, I drove Robin to the airport to put her on a plane to Missouri, where she would be attending Stephens College. I was happy that, after all this time, it was Robbie who truly ended up escaping. We were sisters, and that bond connected us, but she was the sister who had received the brunt of our shared circumstance. I had survivor’s guilt about being passed over while Mother campaigned so virulently to extinguish my sister’s spirit. Now, Robbie was finally free and going a thousand miles away. She deserved it.

  I walked with her to the gate.

  “I don’t get it.” She looked at me, shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “I don’t understand why you stay. I mean, you know it’s just going to be her same old shit over and over, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I shrugged, not knowing what else to say. I hugged her and told her to write to me when she got there.

  “You know what your problem is?” she said, turning back from the gangway. “You’re too fucking nice.”

  chapter fourteen

  AA AND BEYOND

  Since the whole graduation travesty, I was sure that Mother was unable to care for herself, and I decided to live at home instead of moving back to the dorms for my sophomore year. I had convinced myself that Mother needed me. What I failed to understand is that people as delusional as Mother are far stronger than they appear and don’t need any assistance. But I was a nineteen-year-old idiot who’d been playing the role of the enabling eldest daughter to Mother’s Joan Crawford for so long, I didn’t know any other way of life. I was thinking that I might have let Robin down, but I could still be there to fish Mother out of the Charles River or go pick her up at the police station if she was arrested again.

  I told Mother that there was one condition: if I stayed, she would have to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I considered this a stroke of genius on my part. Using emotional blackmail, I almost felt like Mother’s worthy adversary. Touché! I can beat you at this game, I thought. Instead of being outraged at this suggestion, Mother greeted it with a Zen-like calm.

  “If that’s what makes you happy, Wendy.” She peered at me innocently over her fully loaded ashtray. I was wary of her quiet acceptance, but I’d take whatever I could get.

  As an extra piece of life insurance, I invited my friend Amy from next door at Buswell Street to move into Robin’s room. Amy was transferring out of BU to Emerson College and needed a place to stay until she found an apartment near campus. I thought Mother would like the extra money, and I also wanted the protection of having someone else around. I thought that with regular AA attendance and a lodger who had never seen her dark side, Mother might actually behave herself and would be less likely to wade into the deep end.

  Amy, in addition to going to school, worked nights at a local radio station called WBCN, answering the request line. Amy had introduced me to the Boston music scene. At BU, she would sometimes stop by late at night and invite me to a show at hot clubs like the Rat or the Paradise. Amy got her name on a lot of guest lists, so I got to see Boston bands with names like Human Sexual Response, Mission of Burma, and La Peste. If there was a knock on my door after eleven at night, I knew it was Amy.

  “Hey, I got my name at the door tonight at Bunratty’s. Want to go?”

  My roommate was the early-to-bed type, and I jumped at the chance to get out of my tiny room and experience some nightlife.

  Amy was unlike anyone else I had ever met or been friends with. She was a Jewish girl from Long Island with a wild mane of brown hair and a tattoo on her ass. She had a weakness for Rastafarians, drove a big brown Camaro, and smoked Parliaments. Amy was a club girl and a night owl, but kind of a loner like me.

  She moved into Robin’s room and I felt better just knowing someone else was there.

  Mother’s first AA meeting was at Belmont Hospital near our house. I decided to drive her to make sure she was going; after the rock-on-the-fender incident, I wasn’t taking any chances. She sat in the car, expressionless like a smoking sphinx. We walked through the parking lot in silence and into a room painted the color of old people’s teeth, with overhead fluorescent lighting. I walked her up to the front row of folding chairs where she could sit with all the other alcoholics, then took a seat in the very back of the room where I imagined the nondrunks sat. The first thing I noticed was that everyone was smoking. Good, she’ll fit right in, I thought. Then a grizzled man in his seventies with a bumpy, red nose got up and introduced himself to the crowd.

  “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 even
ing 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—”
r />   “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?”