Chanel Bonfire (22 page)

“Tell that crazy cow to leave me alone!” Robin yelled.

“You’re coming with me right now.” Skip turned, holding my sister in his arms, and charged from the room. I heard the
front door slam a few moments later. Mother slowly stood up and smoothed her hair. She seemed unsure of what had just occurred. She had a scratch on her face.

“Well,” said Mother, weaving her way back to her bedroom, “that boy and your sister deserve each other.” Then she added haughtily, “He’s just white trash.”

I went next door to check on Robin. Skip’s mom was never home because she had to work, and Skip didn’t seem to have a dad. He let me in and led me into the living room. The walls were painted a dusky blue color, and the furniture was drab and colorless, giving the whole place a lifeless waiting-room feel. Robin was sitting in an armchair with a can of Fresca in her shaking hand. She was smoking one of Skip’s Marlboro Reds. She flicked the ashes onto her jean leg and rubbed them in with her palm, then looked up at me.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I wanted to grab her and shake her and ask why she couldn’t just keep her head down the way I did until she could make her escape.

“Yeah.” She looked so small and alone sitting in that chair, like the little bird torn from the fence on her favorite music box.

I felt helpless to protect her now. What kind of a sister was I if I couldn’t even keep her safe?

That weekend, Skip, our hero, invited us to a party. I think he was hoping Robbie might take notice of him after he’d rescued her. The party was all Belmont High kids, so we
didn’t really know anyone there. A friend of Skip’s named Andrew was throwing the party because his parents were in the Bahamas. The house was pretty dark when we got there and packed with people. Cheap Trick blasted from the stereo speakers:

“Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away.”

Robbie grabbed my hand and made a beeline for the kitchen. She opened the fridge and expertly grabbed two Rolling Rocks with one hand. She opened them and handed one to me. A guy asked her to dance and she said yes and disappeared into the dark with him. I took a sip of my beer and started to feel nervous because I was alone and surrounded by strangers. I looked around for Skip. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I drank more beer, which I didn’t really like, but it gave me something to do while I stood there feeling as if people were staring at me.

Then, across the room, I saw Jack. Jack was a friend of Skip’s I had met once before when Robbie and I bumped into them both at the record store in Belmont. He was cute, tall and blond with a thin face that made him look a little like Tom Petty. Jack used to go to the high school, but something had happened and his parents had sent him away to boarding school. Whatever had happened must have been bad, because it was Jesuit boarding school. I decided I wanted to find out. I took a big gulp of Rolling Rock and, so emboldened, walked over to him.

“Hi!” I shouted over the music. “I’m Wendy!”

He nodded and smiled at me. He had an easy smile, as
if he had it all figured out, but not in an arrogant way. He seemed older, even though I knew he was a year younger than me. He didn’t say anything, so I took a sexy slug of my beer. It tasted like a swamp. He leaned over to talk into my ear. He smelled like soap and was wearing a flannel shirt that looked so soft I wanted to touch it. Around his throat was a puka-bead necklace.

“You want to go for a walk?” His lips brushed against my ear.

I nodded yes. I would have gone anywhere with him. The beer was bubbling through my head, making my temples throb. Jack took my hand and we started to move through the crush of people in the living room. I saw Robbie in the corner still dancing with the guy. Skip was slumped on a sofa watching them with a beer in his hand. Jack and I walked out the back sliding glass doors into the yard. He was still holding my hand as he led me down a slope to the bottom of the garden. We turned and looked back up at the house, which was dark against a night of stars. Jack put his hand under my hair; his fingers gently rubbed the nape of my neck. He drew me to him and kissed me. His breath smelled like cigarettes and beer but I didn’t care, I liked it. When Jack kissed me, I suddenly wanted him to touch me everywhere at once and never stop. He pulled me down onto the grass next to him and whispered in my ear, and again I felt his lips there.

“Do you want me to show you something?”

Yes,
I thought,
yes, please
. “What?”

“Lie down.” He looked down at my jeans and undid
them. Then he pulled my jeans and my underwear down. The blood was pounding in my ears and I felt tingly all over, as if fingertips were softly drumming my face. I looked up into the sky. Then he put his mouth on me between my legs and it felt wet and warm. I looked at the stars, then down at the top of his head. I wondered how long it would last—the heat and the heaviness of his body on top of me, pressing me against the ground. He was like a mountain on me, and the stars rushed into my head. I thought about when I flew in my dreams, that moment when my feet would lift off the ground and I would soar above the trees and look down at the tiny town below. I was flying with nothing but air around me.

“Oh my God.”

He stopped, looked at me, and smiled. I caught my breath.

“We should go back,” he said, offering me a hand up.

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know.” He pushed my hair back behind my ear and looked me in the eye. “You just looked so fucking sad.”

He took my hand as we walked back into the house, like he was with me, as if I were his girlfriend—which, judging from what had just happened, I hoped I was. People were looking at us. Jack and I moved into the swaying crowd of kids, who were slow-dancing on the rug, now littered with potato chips and beer cans. We held each other and moved back and forth to the music. I buried my face in his shirt and inhaled. He smelled like fresh air.

The rest of that summer, I went to work at the restaurant during the day, then I’d go out with Jack at night. Sometimes he would pick me up from work in his white VW Beetle. We didn’t really go anywhere; we would just drive around Belmont. It seemed exotic to me that Jack had lived in Belmont his entire life, since I hadn’t grown up anywhere. He knew all the best places to go. Sometimes we’d climb the fence around the local swimming pool, strip off our clothes, and float on our backs in the water, looking up at the night sky.

Another place he liked to take me was off a little dirt road at the top of a hill where you could see the whole city of Boston. It was a kind of secret place that he said not many people knew about. He used to come here with his friends from school, get high, and just look at the lights. Sometimes we would park there, sit on the hood of the car, drink beers, and talk. I made him laugh with stories about the restaurant and my alter ego, Candy. He told me about growing up in Belmont, and his school in New Hampshire, which he liked.

“So why did your parents send you to boarding school?”

He handed me a beer and I took a sip. I found I had acquired a taste for it since making Jack’s acquaintance.

“You know, I started hanging out with all these stoner kids and my grades went into the crapper. My mom and dad got really upset with me. They were worried, and I was just fucking up.” He looked out over the city and drank his beer.

“So then what happened?”

“They basically pulled me out in the middle of the year and sent me to Proctor. I actually really like it.”

“What’s Catholic school like?”

“Catholic school? Jesus, who told you that?” He laughed and snorted some beer out of his nose, which he wiped on his sleeve. “It’s not Catholic. I do have a teacher who is a Jesuit priest, and he’s a very cool guy. We talk a lot.” He told me he was thinking about becoming a priest. I thought that was sexy.

Then I explained to him that I could never, ever, have him over to my house, because my mother was certifiably insane, and that anyone who got close to me would get dragged into the shit show that defined my home life. Robbie and I had recently found Mother passed out on the kitchen floor with a huge bump on her forehead. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had come to. She won over the paramedics, who were too taken by her to notice that she was in her stained nightdress and reeked of Mondavi. They bandaged her head and she bobbed around looking like a wizened Sabu.

“Well, in that case I don’t want to meet her. She doesn’t sound anything like you.” He reached over and pulled me next to him, hugging me close. We looked at the lights.

“So you’ll have to be my secret love.” I smiled into his eyes.

“Fine with me.”

Our dates ended with my going back to his house, where we did it on a double bed in his basement while his parents
and kid sister slept upstairs. When I sneaked back into my house, I could usually count on Mother’s being fairly sedated, and a fan in the window covered up any noise I might make on the stairs.

One night, Jack drove me home at five in the morning. I kissed him good-bye and tiptoed up the driveway to the back stairs. I came around the corner of the house and was horrified to see Mother sitting on the back stairs in her nightgown, smoking a cigarette.

She stared at me disdainfully. “You know, Wendy, you can’t fool me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet.

“I have an eye in the back of my head. I can always see you, wherever you are.” She stood up, tossing her cigarette butt into the trees. “I am all-knowing and all-seeing.” She regarded me with an air of superiority and, turning, walked up the steps and back into the house.

Even though I was eighteen, and technically a grown-up, Mother could still fill me with her own particular brand of fear. While her drunken tirades and throwing of furniture were intimidating and scary, it was her cryptic spookiness and talent for surprise that allowed her to retain a power over me.

As we neared the end of the summer, I started to feel a building excitement over my looming departure for school, and supreme guilt over leaving my sister behind. A part of me felt enormous relief, knowing that my escape was imminent,
but I was deeply concerned about leaving Robbie with our mother the shrike. My sister had a gift for getting under Mother’s skin, putting out the fire with gasoline.

“I mean, what are you supposed to do?” Robin snorted. “Stay home and babysit me?” We were in her room and she was painting her fingernails fire-engine red. I just bit mine while we talked.

“I’m just worried, that’s all.”

“Well, don’t be. I can take care of myself.” I knew she was tougher, and braver than me certainly. She fanned her fingers in the air to dry her polish.

“Promise me you’ll call if the shit hits the fan.”

“Okay . . . . Gee, I wonder when that will be?” She looked at her watch theatrically, then laughed.

“No, really, be serious.”

“Lighten up! You should be happy you’re being set free from this nuthouse.” She smiled and I felt a hair better.

A few days before my departure, Mother started negotiating with me. She tried to bribe me with the promise of a new car if I agreed to live at home. I didn’t need a car at BU, and where she thought the money for a new car would come from, I had no idea. So I held firm in my resolve to live on campus. If across town was as far as I could get, then so be it.