Chanel Bonfire (19 page)

When I opened the door, Robbie eyed me weirdly. “What the hell is going on in there?” She looked around behind me like she was hoping to catch me with some guy.

“Nothing, nothing. I just really had to, you know . . . um, you know, go.” I fastened my jeans, trying to look nonchalant.

“You’ve been in here for an hour. Get outta my way.”

“I have not. Jeez, relax.”

“You relax, my bladder is gonna blow up.” She pushed past me.

“I was hoping you could run lines with me,” I called after her.

Our last Drama Club production of the year was to be Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s black comedy
The Visit
. I was playing the lead, Claire Zachanassian, a grotesque and much-married millionairess who travels back to her hometown to confront the man who ruined her life years before when he impregnated and abandoned her, forcing her into prostitution. Now on her sixth husband, rich and with a wooden leg and a hand carved out of ivory, Claire buys up the entire town and, at the end of the play, bribes the villagers to murder her old lover. It wasn’t exactly
Guys and Dolls
, and we were all psyched about the shock value for the Beaver parents on opening night.

“Sure, meet me in my room,” Robbie answered.

We ran lines sitting on her bed. Her room was larger than mine and got more light during the day. An inexpensive stereo, the kind with the plastic lid, was on a low table at the end of her bed. Robbie liked to listen to the Doors and Bob Seger. The curtains matched the bedspread and had an oriental flower pattern in navy blue and orange. It was very much the bedroom of an American teenager, except for the little shelf with the broken remains of her precious music-box collection, which were laid out like strange and delicate bones in some macabre children’s museum.

“You want to know a secret?” I asked, closing my script and lowering my voice.

“Sure.” She scooched over next to me on the bed.

“Well, I think Dylan and I are going to you know what.” I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go into more detail than that.

“Omigod!” She covered her mouth with both her hands. “When?”

“Soon.” I didn’t want to tell her that I was shooting for the weekend.

“But how do you know? Did he ask you to? Did you ask him?”

“No, nothing like that. I just know. I know he’s the one and that he feels the same way about me.”

“Wow.” She flopped back onto the bed and looked at the ceiling. “Janice Ruzika told me that you look different after you do it.”

“Really?” Did that mean other people would know just by looking at me? “I feel like we belong to each other; that this was meant to be,” I said dreamily.

“That’s weird. I don’t get it.” She looked at me like I was bonkers.

“When you fall in love, you’ll see what I mean.”

“Well, I’ve already decided that I’m never doing it.” She shook her head and looked as if she had a bad taste in her mouth.

“But you might want to one day.”

“No way. Boys are buttheads.”

I looked at her and smiled. She was still a young girl, my baby sister. I was so much more mature and worldly. She couldn’t understand how profound the connection between Dylan and me was. Our physical union would be so beautiful and life changing.

Eight days after my eighteenth birthday, Dylan and I went back to his house after school and raced up the stairs to his bedroom. He drew the curtains, and the only light was the glow from his fish tank, which threw a bluish hue across the floor. We lay down on the rug beside his bed and looked into each other’s eyes.

“I love you,” he said. He took off his glasses and tossed them over his shoulder onto his single bed, looking at me like some super-suave guy who’d done this a million times. All I felt was scared and nervous. Desperately trying to hide it, I took off my wristwatch and threw it on the bed in the same nonchalant way. He laughed, then kissed me while he unbuttoned my shirt.

“I love you, too,” I whispered into his hair. I struggled out of my cords until I was just in my bra and underwear. Dylan was already naked. I felt as if everyone I’d ever known could see me and was watching what I was doing, even though just the two of us were in the dark room. My face felt all red and hot and I wondered if I should apologize for the size of my breasts. I sat up and unhooked my bra. Dylan pulled off my panties and lifted himself on top of me. I looked up at his face hovering above mine, searching his eyes for some clue or hint as to what to do. I didn’t see one, so I closed my eyes.
Then he covered me with his body and I could feel him pushing into me. It hurt at first but then it stopped. He started to move faster and I placed my hands on his shoulders as if to keep him from flying away, then he sort of collapsed on top of me and didn’t move. I opened my eyes and looked up at the little fish darting around in the tank flashing yellow, green, and blue.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Was it over? Was he dead? I placed my hands flat on his back and felt his slow, deep breathing.

“Yeah.” He rolled off me onto the floor. “Wow, Wendy, that was great.”

I wanted to ask what was so great about it, but I didn’t. I smiled weakly at him and thought that I shouldn’t have been in such a big hurry to do it and could have waited, say, another ten years or so. Dylan picked up his guitar and strummed it, broadly grinning. For a second I hated him. He looked so pleased with himself for taking something from me that I could never get back. It wasn’t fair that I didn’t feel as good as he did.
Oh, well,
I thought.
Maybe it will be better next time
. At least one of us was happy.

In my next session with Dr. Keylor, I spilled the beans that I was no longer a virgin.

“I see.” She scribbled on her pad. Her big, carved wooden bracelets clacked. “And are you using birth control?”

I told her about going to the clinic.

“Good. And how did it make you feel?” In anticipation, she handed me the Kleenex box.

“Kind of lonely. Mad.” I proceeded to leak.

“That’s all very normal, Wendy. There are many confusing emotions that accompany a first sexual experience.”

Then Dr. Keylor asked me about my father. I told her about the last time I had seen him, the Christmas I was eleven and Mother had played reverse Santa Claus, confiscating our toys.

“I’m afraid we have to stop, Wendy.” I looked up at the clock; we were ten minutes over. Dr. Keylor had a pained look on her face as she put down her legal pad, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry . . . I have another patient waiting.”

I glanced at the photos on her desk of a teenage boy and girl around the same age as me and wondered what her kids were like. They both had dark hair like her and brown eyes. In one of the photos they were standing on the beach with fishing poles. The boy was smiling, showing his braces, and the girl was looking down shyly at the ground. They looked healthy and preppy, like children in an L.L. Bean catalog.

“Thanks, Dr. Keylor.”

“Of course, dear. I’ll see you next week. Oh, and Wendy,” she said as she walked me to the door, “if you need to talk to me, if there’s some kind of problem or emergency before our next session . . .” She stopped and looked at me with a worried expression.

“Yes?”

She jotted down something on the back of the appointment card she always handed me at the end of our time together. “This is my home phone number. You can leave a message here after office hours, but you can also call me at home. If you need to.”

I took the card, thanked her, and said good-bye. I drove home wondering if my father ever thought about me. Did he wonder what I looked like? What color my hair was and what was my favorite food? What was he doing right now?

I was grateful to Dr. Keylor for the safe haven, where I could deposit the goings-on past and present of the Snake Pit. She had even offered to float my therapy bill, allowing me to pay it off when I was able to, at some point in the future.

When I pulled up in front of our house, I could see Robin’s bedroom light on and the flickering yellow glow behind the shade in Mother’s room from the television. I trudged up to the front door, feeling wrung out. All this spilling-my-guts stuff made me want to go to sleep for a year.

The following weekend, on a sunny Saturday, I got an idea of how I’d done at my League audition when I opened rejection letters from all of the schools I’d applied to: Carnegie Mellon, Juilliard, Temple, and NYU had all passed on the chance to groom me for stardom. Mother had been right when she had told me I should have something to fall back on. Clearly, I couldn’t cut it. I was devastated.

I ran upstairs, threw myself onto my bed, and buried my face in my pillow to sob away the disappointment.

Robbie came in and sat beside me. She placed her hand on my back, moving it back and forth. “I’m really sorry. I know you must be super bummed out.”

I couldn’t raise my head to speak. I just nodded into my pillow and kept crying.

“I brought you a glass of water,” she whispered. When we were little, the one who was not crying would go get the one who was a drink of water. It made you feel better.

“Thanks.” I sat up, sniffling.

“You can try again next year,” Robbie said, smiling at me like it was all going to be okay.

After I was sufficiently recovered, she drove us in the Subaru, in her Mario Andretti style, to Bailey’s, an old-fashioned marble-tabled place in Harvard Square, where we gorged on coffee ice cream cones, slathered in jimmies. Then we walked to Nini’s Corner, the newsstand up the block, and bought a box of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes, which were hot-pink- and pistachio-colored in a shiny black-and-gold box. We strode smoking them through Harvard Yard arm in arm, speaking in Russian accents, pretending to be kick-ass Bond girls. We had survived all the helter-skelter times and still had each other—our sisterhood, the only thing we could count on.

The one school I hadn’t heard from was Boston University. I had applied to the school of liberal arts as a backup, but now it was my only chance. Word of my bombing out spread
quickly through the entire school. Since Beaver was supposedly a “college preparatory school,” it would look bad if I didn’t get in anywhere. Paying that stiff Beaver tuition was supposed to be a guarantee of entrance into a fine university. A flurry of faculty meetings took place, and Mr. Valentine kindly volunteered to call BU and “secure” me a spot for the fall term. He kept me after class that week and told me he had contacts there and that I was not to worry. BU was a stone’s throw from my house, so not only were my dreams of a life in the theater dashed, so was my plan to escape. V tried to make me feel better by telling me that I could probably reapply next year and transfer into the university’s school for the arts. He was being so nice, but I still felt like a loser.

Dylan was my anchor at school, walking down the hallways with his arm around me while the other kids avoided making eye contact with me. I was the embarrassment of Beaver Country Day—the kid who didn’t get in anywhere, and they were all going to Harvard or Cornell.

“Fuck them, man,” Dylan said to me as he leaned over the lunch table in the cafeteria and looked meaningfully into my eyes. “They’re all just robots, doing what their parents want them to do anyway.” He told me he was glad I wasn’t going away to school, because he’d be staying in Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. This way we could still be together. Dylan was the only thing in my life going right.

The next morning, Mother came wafting into my room. She had been on hiatus from writing the Great American Novel and was back in her blue-nightgown period. She
slowly walked around my room, filling it with smoke from her Merit, perhaps hoping to find drug paraphernalia or a beer can or two. She stopped beside me and saw the photo of Dylan I had taped to the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door.

“And who, may I ask, is this?”

Since I was now eighteen, I didn’t see any point in lying. “That’s my boyfriend, Mother.”

“I see. Does he have a name?” She stood close and peered at his face.

“It’s Dylan. Dylan Sweeney.”

“And have you had sex with him?” She continued to stare at Dylan’s face.