Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless Page B

comical with their helmets on, Mother clinging to Pop’s bearish midsection, looking panicked in her safari suit and white Gucci pumps. Pop, decked out in Levi’s and a denim jacket, revved the engine to scare her. As I looked at them, the difference in their ages seemed more pronounced to me now. He had gone all gray and wore a woolly Ernest Hemingway beard. She was the same, her beautiful self. Off they went, Mother shrieking as Pop peeled out of the club driveway.
    Robbie and I walked down to the beach, looking around in the dark. There was a flashlight beam under a palm tree.
    “Nat? Tommy? Is it you?” The ocean drowned out the sound of our voices.
    Then Nat put the flashlight under his chin so that it lit up his face in a creepy way. “Ooooooo,” he said, making a ghoul face.
    Tommy grabbed the flashlight and they started fighting over it. “Give it!” Tommy said. We ran over to them and fell down onto the sand under the tree.
    “What do you want to do?”
    “I brought an empty 7UP bottle.” Nat held it up. “We could play spin the bottle.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Robbie said. I giggled.
    “So who wants to go first?” Nat asked. There was a silence, then Nat said quickly, “Okay, I’ll go.”
    We smoothed out the sand and sat in a circle. Nat placed the bottle down. On the first spin it pointed to Tommy.
    “Hey, no way am I kissing you.” Tommy guffawed. We all laughed. I nervously wondered who was going to get kissed first. The bottle spun again and pointed at Robbie. I felt a shiver of disappointment.
    Robbie lifted her face up, going in for the lip-lock, when suddenly gunshots rang out over our heads. Instinctively, we all ducked down, only to be hit with a huge searchlight beam and then surrounded by men in burnooses armed with rifles yelling in French.
    “Halte! Stop! Cette zone est interdite!” they shouted.
    Squinting in the intense light, we all raised our hands like we’d seen in the movies. More men rode up on horses. They had rifles, too. Combining all our years of French to aid in translation, we figured out that the beach was off-limits at night and had to be patrolled to keep away the boats with drug runners on them.
    “Oops,” said Robbie, her eyes wide.
    “Pardonnez-nous, s’il vous plaît,” uttered Nat meekly.
    Tommy, scared shitless, was crying, ropes of snot coming out of his nose. “Omigod, they were gonna kill us,” he choked out.
    “Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?” the men demanded.
    “Nous sommes désolées, messieurs,” I whispered.
    The men then smiled, lowering their weapons and patting us on our heads, as if we were lost children. It then occurred to me that I had peed in my pants. We stumbled back to the hotel and went straight to our rooms, where Robbie and I sat watching Moroccan TV in French.
    “I can’t believe I didn’t get to kiss Nat,” Robbie pouted.
    “Yeah. Too bad.” Of course, I was happy because she hadn’t.
    When Pop couldn’t find what he was looking for, we said a sad good-bye to the boys, regretting the kisses we never got to have, and headed off across the Atlas Mountains in the washing-machine car. After a dusty drive with many goat and camel sightings, we arrived at the eleventh-century walled city of Marrakech. Always a famously exotic city, Marrakech, in the late sixties and early seventies, was a symbol of every Westerner’s romantic, hashish-fueled dreams of North Africa.
    We checked into the best hotel in the city, La Mamounia, just inside the city walls. La Mamounia was a rose-colored stone palace that had been built in the 1920s by a prince; it was surrounded by a lush two-hundred-acre garden. My sister and I had a room with a terrace that looked out over the agaves and bougainvillea and the palm, olive, and Savoy orange trees that surrounded the hotel.
    With Mother and Pop we walked through the twisty streets of the city, with three or four children hanging on each arm, begging for money. Moving like a big protozoan, we toured