Free Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless Page B

anything Mother did.
    “Pack for a week. We leave in an hour,” she said.
    The next morning we were checked into the Hôtel Sydney Opéra, a stuffy little box of a hotel, not at all Mother’s usual style, and she was leaving us for her “business” meeting, which, it turned out, was at the Hôtel Ritz bar. I wondered about her choice of a clingy, fuchsia, Pucci print dress and an excessive amount of Chanel No. 19, but said nothing.
    Paris was having a heat wave and the Hôtel Sydney Opéra wasn’t air-conditioned, so Robbie and I lay around our room in our underwear. Unlike me, and much to my dismay, Robbie had started wearing a bra, having recently developed boobs. I was a little jealous.
    We dug into some cold roast chicken and chunks of Doux de Montagne from the restaurant downstairs.
    “Wait a minute,” she said, “why don’t we pretend that we’re Henry VIII and eat with our hands like they did back then?” Robbie was learning about the Tudors in her history class.
    “Yeah!” It sounded like fun. We stretched out on the bed, semi-naked, and chewed on chicken bones and bread, pretending to be English royalty. But what to do with the bones? Robbie informed me that in the great dining hall of Hampton Court, Henry simply tossed the bones over his shoulder onto the floor.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, like this.” Robin expertly flung her chicken bone over her shoulder out the open window.
    “Well done!” We both laughed and rolled on the bed, nibbling at the bones and then throwing them out the window with Tudoresque flourish.
    My sister’s fast track to puberty, and her rebellious nature, seemed to diminish the difference in our ages. While we had left New York very much the older and younger sisters, we were now becoming more of a unit—the dynamic duo, laughing and tossing our bones at the world.
    We were just finishing the last of the cheese, giggling and licking our fingers, when loud stomping and angry French voices came down the hall, followed by pounding on our door.
    “Ouvrez cette porte tout de suite, mesdemoiselles!”
    Thinking that a mob with torches and pitchforks was about to break in and see us naked—a fate worse than death—we screamed and threw on our clothes.
    A look through the peephole revealed the mob to be the concierge, manager, and room-service waiter. Despite that our school French hadn’t included so much cursing, we were able to decipher that our window opened onto the air shaft where the hotel dried its clean linen. We ran to the window and looked down to see white sheets stained with grease and strewn with chicken bones. Mortified and a little terrified, we slumped to the floor with our backs against the door, afraid to open it.
    The shouting continued until I heard a familiar voice arguing in French with the hotel staff. As the staff’s anger was checked and their grumbling voices moved away, the voiceswitched to English. “Jesus, Georgann, this place is a shithole! You’re damn lucky I’m here.”
    We opened the door to find Pop, our now ex-stepfather, standing there with Mother’s suitcase. “Hello, dearies, we’re getting you out of here,” he said happily, playing the knight in shining armor ready to whisk us all away from the dangers of a second-class hotel.
    We had heard that, after a brief shot at reconciling with his first wife, Pop had married that old girlfriend of Mother’s and they had had a child, so we were a little mystified by his arm around mother’s waist after a five-year hiatus. Being relatively young, and at times on the wrong side of her angry rages, I couldn’t fully appreciate Mother’s appeal to men or her ability to wield it. She may not have been much of a businessperson in the usual sense, but clearly she had struck quite a deal at the bar at the Ritz. So a half hour later, Robbie and I were in a spacious, sunlit room at the InterContinental, looking out at the Tuileries from our balcony window, and drinking Coca-Colas we’d ordered