Chanel Bonfire (24 page)

“I simply cannot control your sister. She’s run off again and I’m thinking of calling the police.” At least she sounded sober.

“Please don’t do that, Mother. I’m sure I can find her. And would you mind not calling me quite so much?”

“Excuse me?” She assumed her imperious tone. I had said the wrong thing.

“It’s just that it makes it hard to concentrate on my schoolwork.”

Silence. Shit. I knew I had blown it, so I just waited for the recoil.

“Oh. I see. Your life is so much more important than mine. You’re busy and I’m bothering you.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“You know something, Wendy? If you think that what I’m doing is easy—raising your impossible sister—then you can just stay at college for all I care.”

I listened to her smoke for a while.

“I only meant that—”

“Don’t bother coming home for Thanksgiving.” She hung up on me.

It had been a year since our Thanksgiving trip to the emergency room, so Robbie and I were relieved to get a break from the funny farm. She headed for her friend Beth’s house for a safe and incident-free holiday, and I went to Jack’s house in Belmont. I had only had time to call him once since I had started college, and he had written to me a few times. He had explained the whole thing to his parents, who were nice and incredibly normal. Compared to my house, I felt as if I were celebrating Thanksgiving on Planet Corny, but I loved every second of it. Jack’s family and their friends chatted and drank eggnog. The men wore jackets with tartan ties, the women dressed in kilts and Fair Isle sweaters, and the little girls wore party dresses. Jack gave a spontaneous prayer of thanks before the feast. I looked at him in his blazer and tie
in the candlelight talking about love, and I thought,
Maybe he will be a priest. A very cute priest
.

After dinner, Jack and I stayed up late, listening to Genesis records in the living room. Then he said good night to me in a loud voice. I went downstairs and he went to his room. Then he snuck down later and met me on the bed in the basement.

I helped him pack up his trunk before he went back to school. I had a feeling of finality this time, watching him get ready to go. I cared about him, but we were so far apart. I felt I couldn’t burden him with my ongoing family wars and that it wasn’t fair for me to depend on him, that somehow he was no longer mine. We spoke on the phone a few times after that, but it felt strained and disconnected somehow. We broke up before Christmas. I sensed that he might have met someone else, but if he did, he never told me. I was sad but not brokenhearted as I had been the last time. It seemed possible to love someone and be loved without catastrophe and pain occurring—this realization gave me hope.

Back at the Snake Pit, the pattern became this: My sister started running away so often that, before she could, Mother would throw her out of the house. When she left, Mother would call the police and tell them Robin had run away and stolen the Subaru. The police made it clear they had better things to do than flag down my sister on Belmont High Street and bring her home. It looked as if without me as a buffer or a distraction, it became impossible for my mother
to leave my sister alone—like a little kid with a scab she can’t stop picking at. For Robbie, the only choices were fight or flight, and neither was a good one.

I was home one weekend and noticed that my sister’s bedroom door was covered with an Indian-print tablecloth. When I looked underneath, I saw that the whole center panel of the door was missing and there were gashes in the wood. I asked Robbie what had happened.

She had come home from school to find Mother in her room, going through her drawers.

“What are you doing?” my sister asked.

“Don’t you keep a diary? I thought all teenage girls kept diaries.” Mother kept rummaging.

“Why would I write my private thoughts down when you would just read them? I live with you. I don’t need to write about it. And this is
my
room.”

Mother strode out the door. My sister locked the door after her. Minutes later, a loud thwacking sounded on the other side of the door as Mother chopped it in with an ax.

“There are no locked doors in this house, young lady!” Mother boomed from the hall, while Robin screamed and covered her ears and wood chips flew all over.

“So I put the Indian print over it. I mean, I think it looks nice, you know?” Robin shrugged.

I looked around Robbie’s room. The burn marks on the stereo, the scorch marks on the rug, the axed-in door, the little broken-music-box shelf. It was pathetic, and clearly time for me to assume my role as hostage negotiator and attempt
to secure my sister’s release. I started by finding the ax in the garage and hiding it behind some rhododendron bushes in the backyard.

Robbie had a friend from high school, a pale, sad-faced girl named Hope, who was estranged from her family and living in a big old house with some other castaway children. My sister wanted to join them, but without Mother’s agreement it wouldn’t be possible. My job was to convince my mother that my sister should move into this house for the last half of her senior year of high school. Otherwise, I pointed out, they would wind up killing each other and someone might end up in jail. Robin was seventeen, after all, and could definitely take care of herself. Mother said nothing and just gave me the hairy eyeball I had seen so many times before. I knew that the most important thing to Mother in this situation was her exoneration from any guilt or responsibility, followed closely by a large helping of groveling dished out by my sister. Robin was so desperate to go I thought she’d agree to any terms.

On her last day at home, we stood in the driveway to play out Robin’s departure scene like actors in a movie, hoping the only take we had went well.

“Just remember, Robin, that you are not moving out. I am throwing you out because you are an out-of-control, disobedient child who has no appreciation for anything I’ve ever given you,” Mother began.

I held my breath. Robin folded her arms across her chest. “Okay.”

“You have proven yourself to be undeserving of my patience and my generosity.”

And let’s not forget awesome mothering skills,
I thought as I watched the scene.

“Even if you asked me to stay, I would have to say no.”

I glanced nervously over at Robbie. I could see her coming to a boil. I prayed she could keep it together.

“Well, I guess I can’t ask then. I’ll just take my things and go,” she said.

“Aren’t you even going to apologize to me for what you’ve done?”

I could tell Mother had a wicked hangover and her voice shook. This was the deal breaker; without an apology, everything would go nuclear. I chewed the inside of my lip, waiting.

Robin cleared her throat a few times, looking down at the gravel, then said, “Sorry.”

And that was it. My sister would never again be under the same roof as my mother.

We loaded a suitcase and the few boxes Robin had been allowed to take into the Subaru, and we drove to her new home in Jamaica Plain. I thought it was a bit grim. The paint was peeling, the furniture tatty, and Robin’s new roommate Hope seemed totally depressed about her life. But there was plenty of room and Robin was away from Mother. Safe. I kissed my sister good-bye and took the T back to school.

I finished out my year at college that May with no great distinction, though I had managed to get my grades up to B’s and one C by the end of the year. My crowd at school was moving on. Craig and Greg were going to Juilliard. My roommate, Julie, was transferring to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Lacking funds for a summer rental, I was going home and hoped Douglas would give me my old job back.

I saw my sister only periodically. We had always been so close, a team united against you-know-who, but all of a sudden our relationship became strained and distant. She acted as if I had abandoned her, and I felt that she had chosen her newfound friends over me. Her roommates seemed to be her new family, and the family didn’t include me. When I went over to her place, I imagined that everyone was staring at me and that Robin had told them what a weasel I was. I felt guilty about all the time I had spent away. I hadn’t been there to help her because I was too busy trying to live my own life. I was a selfish bitch just like Mother had been telling me all these years.

Maybe all this weirdness between us was what made me start sneaking Robin’s stuff out of her room and taking it over to her new house. She had been allowed to take very little with her. So, a few weeks before her graduation from Beaver, I drove over one evening with a box of records and books and a shopping bag of her clothes. I knocked on the front door, and Robin’s roommate Hope answered. Instead of inviting me in, she stood in the doorway. Her lank, mousy brown hair framed her long, thin face, which had no expression at all.

“Yes?” It seemed to me that she was pretending that she didn’t know who I was. I shifted the box onto my other knee. The shopping bag was hanging on my arm. It was heavy but Hope didn’t notice.

“Hi, it’s me, Robin’s sister? Is she here?”

“I’ll go see.”

Hope padded across the foyer and started up a rickety staircase, leaving the door open. I invited myself in, closing the front door with my foot and dropping the box onto a chair and the bag on the floor. Robin came down the stairs a minute later, dressed in a bathrobe, her face damp from the shower and her hair wrapped in a towel. She was followed by Hope, who then sat on the stairs watching us. My sister had a blank look similar to Hope’s; I couldn’t tell if she was glad to see me or sorry that I came. Robin looked up at Hope a few times, as if they were exchanging thoughts telepathically. This made me feel resentful and threatened.

“I snuck this stuff out. I don’t think she’ll notice.”

We just stood there in the hallway, looking at one another. I shot Hope a dirty look. I pointed to the box on the chair and Robin crossed over to it, flipping through the records, and peered into the shopping bag.

“Thanks,” Robin said with a shrug, like it was no big deal. This, along with the presence of Hope as a kind of chaperone or witness to the proceedings, pissed me off. I thought of how Mother had put all of Robbie’s things in garbage bags and stripped the room. It already looked as if she had never
been there. I was sticking my neck out and my sister couldn’t care less.

“Well,” I replied, trying to cover my feelings of anger and awkwardness, “I thought you might like to have them.”
I’m trying to help you, stupid,
I wanted to say. She had been my closest friend, playmate, the person with whom I shared my secrets. We had been through the shit together. Now it was as if we were strangers. All our games, dreams, nicknames, shot to hell. I had thought taking her stuff to her would make her happy, but it just made me look like a kiss-ass.

Robin shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “You coming to the graduation?” I detected a faint smile.

“Sure. I’ll be there.”

“Okay. Dinner’s ready so we have to go.” Robin gestured to some other room in the house. I hadn’t got past the hallway. I said good-bye and left.

We
. It was a different
we
now.