Chanel Bonfire (6 page)

The Christmas I was ten, Daddy came to New York to tell us he was planning to marry our stepmother in the summer. We had only met her a couple of times, but I was glad about it. She was the opposite of my mother; not a fair and fragile beauty but handsome and tall with a big, low laugh that made you want to go sit next to her. She looked like the actress Patricia Neal and had three children, whom she had raised on her own as a working mother. I thought it was a wonderful Christmas surprise.

After he told us, Robbie and I ran to the tree in the living room to open our gifts. Daddy had brought us dolls that were dressed like angels, with long gold dresses and starry halos in their blond ringlets. We hung around his neck kissing him while he made funny groaning noises and said we were going to break his back.

“Excuse me,” Mother said. “You girls have received other presents, you know.” In our Christmas-morning frenzy, we had run right past the gift Mother had given us: an ice cream soda fountain from FAO Schwarz that was so big it couldn’t be wrapped. It had red swivel stools, and the white counter had ice cream cones painted on it.

Carrying our dolls, we obediently went over to our mother to thank her for her present. She was wearing a long-sleeved, black wool dress, with her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, and her face looked all tight. I realized our mistake in not thanking her first, but it also occurred to me that she was not pleased with Daddy’s plan to remarry. Looking back later, I think she’d thought my father had traveled to New York to ask her to come back to him, not to announce his engagement to someone else. After breakfast, Mother stood next to the front door with a frozen smile on her face seeing my father out.

“I’ll send tickets for the girls,” he promised.

“Sure. Great. Good-bye, Jim.” Mother shut the door.

My sister and I ran to our bedroom and waved to him from the window when he appeared on the sidewalk below. It was raining and he had turned up the collar of his overcoat.
Daddy waved up at us and then popped into a cab and was gone. We watched the taxi drive down Park Avenue.

“And have you had a merry Christmas?” Mother was standing in the doorway, holding two large, black trash bags. She spoke in a quiet, calm tone, but her clenched teeth gave me pause—this had to be a trick question.

“Yes, ma’am.” I took Robbie’s hand and waited for it to come.

“I want you to each take one of these.” She snapped the bags in the air, opening them with a violent crack. We each obediently took one. “You are to put all your old toys and your Christmas presents in these bags, including the one gift your father was kind enough to bring you. They will all be given away to children who deserve them.” Mother turned on her heel and started to leave the room.

“But why?” I asked, as Robin started to cry.

“Why?” Mother turned and looked at me, her eyes burning with anger. “Because you don’t appreciate anything you have.” Her voice grew louder and quavered slightly. Robbie and I instinctively took a step back.

“Did we do something wrong?” I didn’t understand what was happening, why she was so furious at us.

“Just put your toys in the bags.” She marched out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Terrified and sobbing, Robbie and I started taking our dolls, puzzles, and stuffed animals off the shelves and dropping them into the bags. We hid our favorites—which included the two angel dolls our father had just given us, my sister’s teddy bear,
Guthrie, and my Raggedy Andy—on top of the high bookshelf, which you could climb up like a ladder because it was built into the wall. Everything else, including our Christmas presents, went into the trash bags, and we were sent to bed with no dinner.

In the morning, Mother’s black mood was gone. She greeted us at breakfast as if nothing had happened. Robbie and I were confused. It was almost as if it had been a dream. Only the absence of our toys, the garbage bags, and the soda fountain told us it wasn’t.

Spring came and my mother started to talk about moving. Not just moving house again but moving away. She’d heard that Pop was seeing a girlfriend of hers, and suddenly it seemed there were ghosts and old boyfriends around every corner. New York was finished for her.

Two weeks later, Catherine came into our room in the middle of the night. She turned my bedside table light on and sat down next to me. She was crying.

“I just want you to know that your momma fired me and I love you both.”

I was still half-asleep as she gathered me up in her treelike arms and crushed me against her immense bosom. I reached my arms around her neck and held her. I remembered all the times she’d made us that special syrup when we were sick, cooked our breakfast, and helped us find our shoes. She tucked me back into bed and kissed the top of my head. Then she gave my sister the same farewell. She turned out the light and waddled to the door.

“Bless you, my lambie pies,” she said in the dark.

Catherine was leaving us, and we would never see her again. Feeling such sorrow that she wouldn’t be in the kitchen in the morning, or anyplace else in our lives, my heart felt pressed down upon, as if the heaviest book in the world had been placed there. Utterly bereft, my sister and I cried quietly into our pillows.

The next day, when Robbie and I came home from school, I spied a large pile of familiar-looking Louis Vuitton luggage heaped in a corner of the lobby as we walked through to the elevator. I glanced over at Johnny the doorman, wondering if he might want to tell me something, but he just clasped his arms behind his back and looked out through the door at the street. When we got upstairs, we discovered our front door open and the apartment completely empty.

“Is this our house?” my sister said. She took her coat off and, seeing nowhere to put it, plopped it down on the floor.

“I think so,” I said, looking around.

We were standing in the foyer wondering if we’d been robbed when Mother emerged from her bedroom with her mink coat over her arm.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, checking her watch.

“Where is . . . everything?” I asked. All that was left were the nails in the walls where the pictures had once hung, and little dust balls on the floor that had previously been trapped by pieces of furniture. Even the piano was gone. It made me think of what the Grinch did to Whoville.

“The movers came today and I had it all put into storage.”

The elevator man walked by with another suitcase and our cat, Maudie, in her carrier, yowling like an angry baby. Maudie was a chocolate-point Siamese and always meowed loudly like a person who wouldn’t be ignored. I ran to my room to see if anything had been left behind, but it was empty.

“Wendy? Where are you?” I heard my mother’s shoes clicking down the hallway toward me. I looked up to the top of the bookshelf where our stash of secret saved toys was hidden. They would have to stay behind now. Mother came into the empty room, her voice echoing off the bare walls: “You see, all gone. Now hurry because I have a taxi waiting downstairs.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I followed her down the hall and out the front door of the apartment. I imagined another little girl, the next little girl, finding the angel dolls and the teddy bear, like a hidden treasure.

We all got into the elevator and went downstairs, where we said good-bye to Johnny the doorman, who held open the door of the taxi that was to take us to our new home: the Croyden Hotel on East Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.

“You’ll love it there,” said Mother as we barreled down Park Avenue. “There’s a gift shop in the lobby, and there’s a movie theater right around the corner.”

My sister and I stared dumbly at her. This morning we’d left our home to go to school, and at the end of the day we had a new one. Maudie was wailing from her carrier on the
front seat next to the driver. I understood exactly how she felt.

As promised, a gift shop was in the lobby—more of a newsstand really—where Robbie and I lingered while Mother checked in. Our eyes roved over the
Tiger Beat
s,
True Romance
comics, Chiclets and Chunkys, as the reality of our collective fate sunk in.

“We can get room service,” I told Robbie, reverting to my Little Mary Sunshine routine as I always did at moments of massive upheaval.

“Like Eloise,” Robbie said glumly.

“And the maid will clean up our room,” I chirped.

I pointed out to her that this meant no more being chased around by Catherine telling us our room was a pigsty and trying to smack our bottoms with a tea towel as we screamed and ran away. I was trying to melt Robbie’s sadness through sheer perkiness and it worked.

She looked at me and her mouth popped open. “We can make as many spitballs as we want.”

Catherine used to get furious when we threw wet wads of toilet paper up onto the ceiling. The balls either fell to the floor, making a ploppy mess, or fused to the ceiling, making them impossible to remove.

Now, breakfast was an Entenmann’s chocolate doughnut and a glass of Tropicana orange juice from the little fridge in our kitchenette. All our other meals were ordered over the phone from the restaurant in the lobby, and the hotel did our laundry.

Four weeks later, on our last day of school, we came home and couldn’t find Maudie. She usually ran to the door to greet us, meowing hello and rubbing against our kneesocks. We looked under the bed, in the closets, and even in the hallway outside the door. We were about to call the front desk to report her missing when Mother came home. Robbie and I ran up to her and told her we couldn’t find Maudie.

“I had to give her away,” Mother said. She stood by the hall table, dressed in a khaki-colored Yves Saint Laurent linen trouser suit with her Vuitton purse hanging in the crook of her arm, and started to remove her thin leather gloves, pulling at them one finger at a time. “But don’t worry, she’ll be fine. I gave her to Joy Wallace, remember her? She has three girls so Maudie will have lots of playmates.”

“But why did you give her away?” Joy Wallace’s bratty kids weren’t deserving playmates for our Maudie. The youngest one, Caroline, had pulled her pants down and bent over to show her tushie at the dinner table the last time we were over at their house.

Mother explained that we couldn’t take Maudie with us because of a quarantine on animals coming from America. I didn’t know what she was talking about. From her purse she produced three pieces of paper. She placed them down on the table with a snap, raised her eyebrows, and glanced down at us as if she had produced the winning hand in a high-stakes card game. I looked at them. They were tickets to sail on the
Queen Elizabeth 2
—boarding in two days. “We’re moving to England. London, to be exact.” Mother thrust her
gloves into her handbag and walked down the long hallway to her bedroom. Robbie and I followed her.

“What about the summer with Daddy?” I asked.

She started taking off her jewelry as she kicked off her shoes. “Well, you’re not going this summer. Your father’s getting remarried and he’s too busy to take care of you.”

“Did he say that?” I asked, suddenly worried and trying to puzzle it out.

“How come he doesn’t want to see us?” Robbie asked.

“He has a new family now, I guess. New wife, a new son, and two daughters, from what I hear.” Mother shrugged her shoulders as if it were just too bad. Robbie and I stood watching her get undressed. She put on a peach-colored silk robe and went into her bathroom. I heard the faucets turn on and water running into the tub. I felt as if we were on a speeding train that was going so fast we couldn’t see the scenery hurtling by—it was just a blur and any second we would jump the rails. A hundred questions raced through my mind and yet I couldn’t think of what to say.

The water stopped running and Mother reentered the room. She lit a cigarette and paced up and down on the white carpet for a moment, regarding us forlornly.

“I can see that you’re both upset.” She stamped the cigarette out in the hotel ashtray by her bed. “I can’t think of any other way to tell you this.”

“Tell us what?” For a second I thought that maybe Daddy was dead.

Then she opened her arms and gathered us to her. She
sighed, hugging us tight. “I know it’s hard,” she whispered. “But you girls are just going to have to accept the fact that your father doesn’t really care about you.” She loosened her grip and looked in our eyes.

“That’s not true,” Robbie said, chin trembling.

I looked at her, surprised, not sure if this was defiance or disbelief. She may have felt, like me, as if it all couldn’t be happening. But unlike me, she had voiced it.

Mother, her mind halfway across the Atlantic already, took it in stride. “I’m afraid it is true, and I love you both too much to lie to you anymore.” She shook her head slowly while she said this to us, as if she had to tell us that the cookie jar was empty and there wasn’t anything left for us. “One day, when you’re older, you’ll see that I’m doing what’s best. We’ll go far away where he can’t hurt us anymore.”

“But we don’t want to go far away,” I said.

“How far away?” Robbie asked. “Can we call him on the telephone and say good-bye?”

“Yes, I want to say good-bye to Daddy, too,” I pleaded.

Mother’s shoulders drooped slightly and she looked back and forth between me and Robbie, clearly weighing something in her mind. She sighed deeply, then said, “I had hoped to wait until you were older, but maybe it’s best this way.”

She went to her vanity table, removed her wallet from her purse, and unzipped it. She pulled out a black-and-white photograph of herself with a strange man. We stared at the picture in her hand. The man was slim and darkly handsome,
dressed in a suit. His hair was slicked back like a crooner’s. I could tell from Mother’s dress and hairdo that the picture had been taken some time ago. In the photo, they were looking at each other with one arm around each other’s waist like they were the only two people in the world.

“Who is that?” Robbie’s brow furrowed as she peered at the snapshot.

Mother looked hard at my sister and said to her, “That’s your father, your real father.” We both looked at the picture for another moment, then Mother put it back in her wallet. She told us his name was Nick and he was an old boyfriend of hers. He was Greek. “Your father was gone so much and I was lonely. I warned him that something might happen. But he didn’t care.” She said this as if it were all Daddy’s fault. My sister started to whimper and my mother smiled at her and knelt in front of her, shushing her. “You know,” Mother said, stroking my sister’s hair, “you shouldn’t be sad, because you were truly a child of love.”