Chanel Bonfire (21 page)

This was supposed to make me feel better. It was Mother’s way of dealing with failed relationships—get revenge and screw the guy before he knew what had hit him.

“Please don’t, Mother,” I said.

But it was too late. Mother took my breakup personally. It was her story now—and she did not appreciate being dumped. Mother believed herself to be irresistible to all men—no matter their age. If they didn’t make a pass or pay proper attention, they either had to be gay or mentally deficient. So if any man had the audacity to break up with her first, he would not be allowed to simply walk away. Not until he paid for it.

All I could hope was that Mother’s white-wine IV would continue to drip, erase her memory of Dylan altogether, and spare me yet another humiliation.

chapter twelve

CANDYLAND

My summer job was hostessing at an upscale Chinese restaurant near my house called Joyce Chen. It was beautiful inside, all gleaming wood and huge, ivory-carved dragons in glass cases. I had no paid job experience, but the guy who hired me was my age and had been doing work-study at Joyce Chen all year to learn the business. Douglas Kinoshita was a Japanese-American kid and wore his black, straight hair long past his shoulders. He had one of those fuzzy mustaches boys get before they start shaving. Douglas always wore khakis and Top-Siders with an untucked white or pink button-down shirt. He was barrel-chested and densely built. He had recently gotten a hernia from pushing off a refrigerator that had fallen on him.

The restaurant was a crazy place but not in a bad way. All the waiters were Chinese men, and none of them could say
Wendy
, so I was rechristened
Candy
. I thought this was
hilarious. It sounded like a stripper’s name to me. The waiters all had other jobs, sometimes two, so they would take No-Doz or Dexatrim diet pills to make them speedy enough to work long days. As a result, they were all wound pretty tightly.

My first week at Joyce Chen, I was working a lunch shift when I saw one of the waiters, a man named Po, run through the front door spouting expletives.

“Lousy son of a bitch! I’ll kill you, I swear!”

“Bad customer!” I heard another waiter announce as he motioned for all the servers on the floor to follow him out to the parking lot. Instantly, a brigade of manic Chinese men in dark blue jackets and name tags started scrambling, charging through the door like Keystone Kops. I followed to see what all the ruckus was about.

Outside, I watched Po hurl some change on the ground at the feet of the offending patron, who, I gathered from the way everyone was acting, had left an insufficient tip.

“You take this, Mr. Asshole! You need it more than me!”

The bad tipper blanched and started fumbling for his car keys, trying to open the door. Po lunged in the man’s direction, throwing a punch at him. Po missed and his fist crunched into the man’s car. Po screamed in pain.

“My family will starve because of you!” shouted Po, as the other waiters grabbed his flailing arms and started dragging him away. The terrified man took a few bills out of his wallet and threw them on the ground before jumping into his car and screeching away. One of the waiters fell back and
picked up the money. I held the door open as they herded back into the restaurant.

“Thank you, Candy.” They nodded as they filed past me. Then they started mumbling in Chinese. That summer, this parking-lot rumble happened weekly.

I enjoyed the camaraderie of the restaurant: we all ate together before work, and everyone laughed and joked with each other. It kind of reminded me of the theater, where you form a family of sorts away from home. Since I was headed to BU’s school of liberal arts in the fall, I had pretty much given up on the idea of being an actress, but the restaurant provided that familiar feeling for me, which made me enjoy being there. And I had a role to play, of sorts, in Candy. Douglas had given me a box of cheongsam dresses that he’d found at the restaurant’s warehouse, abandoned by a woman who had returned to China twenty years earlier. They fit me perfectly and were exquisitely beautiful, in vibrantly jewel-colored silks, and embroidered with flowers and birds. My favorite one was emerald green, with white lotus blossoms. Holding my menus at the hostess station, in my exotic garb, I imagined myself an Irish Anna May Wong, arranging the seating chart to my satisfaction. Besides the local Boston cognoscenti, there were politicians, Harvard professors, famous authors, and anchormen, who all followed me as I sashayed into the dining room, leading them to their tables. I greeted Peter Falk, seating him at the best table, and was sent in to help an inebriated Ginger Rogers in the ladies’ restroom.

A few weeks after I started working there, Douglas sidled up to me, broadly grinning.

“What?” I said.

“Someone has a crush on you.”

“You’re kidding. Who?”

“A cook in the kitchen. He’s been admiring you from afar.” I was not allowed to go down into the kitchen. I had heard all sorts of wild rumors about illegal workers in the kitchen being kept in indentured servitude and forced to work for Joyce to win their freedom. I imagined a smoky room filled with sweaty men chained to stoves, stirring huge woks.

“What’s his name?”

“Chang.”

The only Chang I knew was the Siamese twin, Eng’s brother.

“Actually, he’s gotten a look at you and he’s prepared to offer you five thousand dollars to marry him.” Douglas chuckled; he seemed to be relishing his role as go-between.

“Five thousand dollars? But he doesn’t even know me!”

“It’s for a green card, silly. If he marries you, he can stay in this country legally.”

“Oh.” I actually considered this for a moment. I could marry Chang, get the money, and disappear. No one would have to know my name had once been Candy Chang. It almost sounded like a plan. “Can I meet him?”

“Sure. Come with me.” Douglas took me through a series of dimly lit hallways that led to a black metal staircase. We then descended into what looked to me like the furnace
room of the
Titanic
. Through thick steam I could see men in motion: cleavers chopping, knives slicing, woks banging on the tops of enormous ranges. We walked in between two rows of flaming burners. Douglas pointed to a skinny old man with no teeth.

“Chang, meet Candy. Candy, Chang.”

“Hello,” I croaked, coughing at the smoke enveloping us.

Chang gave me a gummy smile.

Douglas then informed me that I would have to live with my new husband for a year to ensure his green-card status. Chang nodded and leered at me, perhaps envisioning our wedding night. He clearly saw himself as a catch and thought that I was getting the better end of the deal. I politely declined my first offer of marriage and my big chance to be Candy Chang.

“You’re a riot,” I said to Douglas as we walked back upstairs to the main floor.

“I thought you’d enjoy that.” He grinned at me.

Douglas knew something was going on at my home when I showed up on his doorstep that summer at 2:00 a.m. with cuts all over my arms from trying to break into my house through a basement window. Mother had locked me out, but I had needed clean clothes for work and didn’t want her to know how late I’d come home. They were superficial cuts. I stood in the kitchen while Douglas’s mom put the small-size Band-Aids all over the insides of my arms and said nothing.

He may have suspected a few weeks earlier that all was not well with me when we had gone to see the Woody Allen
movie
Interiors
and I had laughed my butt off through the whole thing. The scene where the mother, who is an insane perfectionist, duct-taped herself into her bedroom to gas herself was a hoot. I was still laughing when the lights came up at the end, after the mother succeeds in drowning herself in the ocean and her daughters all stare out the window at a tree. It cracked me up. People stared at us as we left the theater.

Douglas looked at me and said, “Are you hungry after all that laughing?” I was, so we drove down to Chinatown for wonton soup and spareribs.

While I counted down the days I had remaining at home, the conflict between my mother and my sister escalated into violence of such sensational proportions that it began to resemble a bad-girl prison movie. Mother was cast as the sadistic screw who was trying to crush the spirit of the wildcat juvie runaway—my sister.

The tension had started to snowball after Mother discovered my sister coming home at three in the morning. I was an expert at sneaking in, turning the headlights off before I pulled into the driveway, and knowing which steps on the staircase squeaked, but Robbie was less interested in covering her tracks, and it was her bad fortune to get caught.

“Where the hell have you been?!” Mother fumed, flicking on the lights in the foyer, my sister’s keys still stuck in the door. I came to the top of the stairs to witness the scene.

“At a party, Mother, if you must know,” Robbie replied somewhat archly.

“Do you know what time it is?” Mother shouted.

“What does it matter? You’re usually passed out, anyway.”

Mother slapped Robbie across the face, and my sister, without hesitating, slapped her right back.

Mother backed away, leaning against the wall for support while my sister walked by her and climbed the stairs.

From that moment on, it was war. Now they openly hated each other’s guts and the gloves were off. Ever since our car ride back from the train station after my League audition, I had given up on trying to reach Mother. I just wanted to bide my time and stay below the radar until I could make my getaway. Robbie became determined to put a mirror up to Mother’s face and show her all the ugliness inside her.

“You’re a pathetic, sick-in-the-head drunk. All you do is drive people away with your toxic personality,” Robin would coolly state.

This direct approach of my sister’s pushed Mother’s buttons big-time. Whereas I felt like I needed some directions and a map to try to understand Mother because she was like an alien from outer space, Robbie just told her to fuck off, that she hated her, and, worst of all, that she was insane. Then it was time for them to go a couple of rounds. I tried to intervene, but stopped after I got a bloody nose during one of their scuffles. A week after that, Robin pushed
Mother down the front stairs, just like in Mother’s Kansas City bedtime story. Luckily or unluckily, it didn’t succeed in killing her.

One day after working a lunch shift at the restaurant, I came home and heard a lot of thumping upstairs. My sister was supposed to be at her summer job at a nearby nursing home, where she was giving sponge baths to old people and emptying bedpans. Mother was taking a break from her summer job, writing her life story.

“Hello?” As I started up the stairs, I heard a crash. I rushed to Robbie’s room and found my sister and my mother rolling around on the rug.

“You bitch!” my sister screamed. “I fucking hate you!”

Robbie’s room was trashed. Clothing was strewn all over and a broken lamp was on the floor. A trickle of blood was coming from my sister’s nose. They separated and scrambled to their feet to gear up for the next round, circling each other like wrestlers in the ring.

“I despise you, you little wretch!” Mother snarled back.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I wish you would just
die
!”

At this, Mother emitted a gurgling sound of rage and lunged at my sister. I watched them kicking and punching each other.
Maybe this is it,
I thought. M
aybe this will be the day they kill each other
. I waded into the fray, trying to pull Robbie away, and immediately caught a flying elbow in the eye. Mother’s face was red and sweaty from trying to strangle her own daughter. My sister murderously bellowed and banged Mother’s head against the floor. I ran to the window
and, throwing it wide open, started to yell for help to anyone who might hear me.

“Help! Please, someone, help!” Right across the driveway I could see into the bedroom of our neighbor, a boy named Skip. Since our houses were so close together, I was sure he could hear everything that went on at our house above a certain decibel level, just like I could hear his Steely Dan records when he played them really loudly. Skip went to the local public high school and worked at a gas station. For both of these reasons, Mother disapproved of him. He spent a lot of time looking at Robbie from his window across the driveway, and I was pretty sure he had a crush on her. I screamed again, and Skip’s head popped up into the window.

“Hey, what’s up?” He was dressed in his gas station uniform and I think he’d been trying to take a nap. The name tag on his shirt said
STEVE.

“They’re fighting! I don’t know what to do!”

“I’ll be right there.” And he was off.

I ran to the front door to meet him, and he followed me back upstairs, where they were still going at it big-house style. Skip said my sister’s name, but she didn’t hear him. Skip, who was bigger and no doubt stronger than my sister and my mother put together, spread his arms wide and grabbed Robbie around the waist, lifting her up in the air. She flailed her legs at Mother.