I developed a crush on Rex and Cherie adored Hugh so we paired off, sometimes going outside on the patio and making out. My mother was too far gone to care and Helen seemed to approve. I was now fourteen and Cherie was fifteen.
Helen had captured each and every one of us in her web, and she was so good at it that we didn’t even know what danger we were in.
After the dancing, Cherie and I were summoned into the living room to perform a skit or play the little organ Helen had bought just for this purpose. My favorite song to play was “Liebestrom,” a hauntingly sad, almost morose song. And I didn’t mind performing skits; in fact, I loved the chance to express myself and get some attention. But Cherie hated it. She hated standing up in front of others and preferred to stay in the background. And she knew her mother expected her to perform perfectly, so she and I had to practice our skits over and over to make sure we got them just right.
My favorite skit was one we performed to the Marty Robbins song “Rosa’s Cantina.” The song was about a man falling in love with a Mexican girl named Falina who danced at Rosa’s Cantina.
I loved whirling and dancing around as Falina, and both Cherie and I played the role of the cowboy who loved her but had to ride away on his horse to avoid the law, which was just as fun. We’d had a lot of experience galloping around the playground all through grammar school, and memories of this brought giggles from us.
There was another Marty Robbins song (Helen loved Marty Robbins) about cattle. The line we liked best described the cattle leaving their shackles. We loved pretending we were taking off our shackles, and we exaggerated the movements as we did it. Cherie especially liked doing it.
Dinner was always served far too late in the evening at these holiday parties. By then all the adults were drunk, especially my mother. I’ll never forget one infamous Thanksgiving dinner during my sophomore year. We had just sat down to dinner. Helen, at the head of the table, took all the credit for how beautiful all the food and the table looked and then announced that we should dig in.
I was starving, so I started shoveling food in my mouth right away. I looked up from my plate just in time to see my mother’s head drop forward, right into her plate. I was mortified. How could she do such a thing? How could my mother, who always cared so much what people thought, who always told me that your reputation was your most important asset, let herself stoop to such self-degradation? I wanted to disown her, pretend she wasn’t my mother. I wanted to run away and hide.
I sat transfixed as Danny and Rex got up from their seats and lifted my mother’s head up off her plate, wiped her face, and half-walked, half-carried her to the guest bedroom. They were more than kind, more than gracious. When they came back, Hugh made some joke to get us back into the holiday spirit and try to erase what had just happened. But nothing could erase that sight from my mind.
It seemed to me that that night was Helen’s ultimate triumph. My mother had been completely humiliated, and I had been made to witness it. My mother had lost all remnants of her self-respect—and she had lost some of my respect in the process. Helen, on the other hand, seemingly cold sober, was the exemplary hostess as she smiled graciously and led us in small talk.
Helen had seduced us all. She had made each of us cross boundaries we never should have crossed, behave in ways we normally would never behave. Her continual filling of my mother’s glass and insistence that she drink more even when she tried to decline had caused my mother to become drunker than I’d ever seen her, and to lose her dignity in the process. Her seductive talk and dancing had turned Danny and his friends on, and even though I already had a history of making out with older men, I was trying to close the door on that chapter of my life. But Helen had the power to make us all feel things and do things we shouldn’t do.
Usually my mother was the smartest person in the room, but she’d met her match with Helen. In fact, Helen was far more manipulative, far more cunning. My mother still had the good witch part of her intact. She basically had a good heart. Once she let you in, she could be kind and generous. But Helen was all bad witch. Looking back on it now, I realize that when she pretended to be generous, plying my mother with liquor and me with food, lavishing us with compliments and attention, what she was really doing was trying to control us.
I didn’t like seeing my mother as the victim. I was used to seeing her with all the power. On the other hand, I also felt vindicated. For once someone else was putting her down, humiliating her and making her feel small the way she always did to me.
My mother soon grew tired of Helen, and she didn’t like the fact that she always woke up the next day with a horrible hangover, so she began to decline her invitations. But Helen clamped onto my mother like a dog does a bone. My mother would make up excuses when Helen called, saying we were busy, but Helen was somehow always able to talk her into changing her mind. My mother actually got up enough nerve to give her a firm no one Thanksgiving, saying that she had to work, but even after that Helen continued to call and invite herself over to our apartment. This usually happened on a weeknight, and even though
