Chanel Bonfire Read Online Free PDF

my sister, grabbed her, and hugged her.

    Daddy, Robbie, and I were eating hot dogs and baked beans around the kitchen table when the phone rang. He was stillin full makeup from the matinee of Richard III , and I remember how strange it looked to see him answer. It was my mother. The public announcement of the affair and the uproar it had produced caused her to suffer another nervous breakdown, and she had checked into a hospital to “rest.”
    She told my father that she was sorry about all of it, and she wanted to come back home. The affair was over and she begged my father to forgive her. She had been so bored, so lonely—she had even warned my father that something like this might happen if he left her alone too much. So in a way it was partly his fault for being at the theater day and night.
    Daddy, although understandably shell-shocked, agreed to take her back, thinking it was best for Robbie and me to have a mother even if she was unbalanced and a faithless liar. This was the way people thought in the sixties—a mother, even a lousy one, was better than no mother at all. Parents stayed together for the sake of the children back then; his own mother and father had remained in their loveless marriage for the same reason. And so he forgave her. Mother told him she was tired of weaving baskets and making those goddamn pot holders in the recreational therapy room and could he bring her typewriter to the hospital the next day. Sure, he said, and he hung up.
    The next day, we all drove to the hospital to see Mother and bring her the typewriter, but she was gone.
    “She checked out with her husband,” the nurse said, looking at my dad like he was as screwy as everyone else inthe place. My sister and I looked down the empty hallways of the hospital, smelling the familiar medicinal chlorine odor.
    “But I’m her husband,” he yelled at her. Robbie and I sought each other’s hands.
    Mother had made a break for freedom, and if she planned to do any writing, it would have to be with a pen.
    A week later, a postcard arrived from the Caribbean. In my mother’s curly, perfect Catholic-school handwriting she wrote that she was there with my stepfather, she wanted a divorce, and that the weather was warm and sunny.
    Mother still had not returned when Daddy told us to sit on the sofa. He knelt in front of us and explained that Mother had decided to marry someone else. He said it was a good thing because it would make her happy. He told us the most important thing to remember was that he loved us and nothing would ever change that.
    “But who are you going to marry?” I asked. I didn’t want him to be alone.
    “No one right now, okay?”
    I nodded and felt the saddest I had ever felt, my eyes burning with tears. Robbie said nothing but buried her face in my shoulder, most likely trying to block out what our father was telling us.
    “You are going to go live in New York with your mother, and I’m going to stay here.”
    I bit my lip and looked down at my hands.
    “But when will we see you?” asked Robbie, her voice muffled by tears and my sweater.
    “Every summer, I promise.” Then Daddy gathered us in his arms and kissed us. Holding onto his neck, I smelled the starch on his shirt collar and numbly realized that there was nothing I could do to stop this from happening.
    Mother returned from the Caribbean, and my stepfather-to-be swept us all off to Manhattan. Daddy got his own two-bedroom apartment near the Guthrie. Once the divorces were final, my mother and stepfather were married in the apartment in the Dakota, which was his wedding present to her.
    On the morning of the wedding, Robin and I were summoned to Mother’s room to show her the new white dresses with lace trim she had chosen for us to wear to the ceremony. I held my breath, hoping we would pass inspection. Mother was sitting at her vanity table in front of her Clairol light-up mirror in a white silk bra, pearls, and a half-slip. She was teasing her hair,