I'll Be There (3 page)

As they all sat together in the mission courtyard among the pink and lavender hydrangeas, each one told a story about something nice Bertie had done for her. At the end they stood in a circle with their arms around one another and held tightly for a long time. Now Nina pressed the automatic window button, and as it opened she closed her eyes to let the clean cool air blow against her curly bangs and serious face.

You have to talk to this child, Cee Cee thought to herself as the big Chevy rumbled and rattled up the highway. You were so busy every day trying not to lose control and to get all the details out of the way, then eve night you collapsed and fell asleep, so this is your last chance to say something to her before you dump her like a hot potato. Speak up, girl. But all she could get out was the question “You hungry?”

“No,” Nina answered and sighed a deep sigh. She wasn’t even looking out the window at the farms they were passing covered with neat green rows of leafy artichokes; instead she sat slumped low in the seat, and with great concentration picked at the cuticle of her right thumb with the curled index finger of her right hand. Kids. You had to be so careful with them. Their little minds were so delicate, if you did the wrong thing you could screw them up royally forever. In fact raising kids these days was a science. Cee Cee couldn’t believe her eyes

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a couple of weeks ago when she noticed a whole wall of books about it in Books, Inc.

It was on one of the rare outings she’d allowed herself to take during Bertie’s last days when she’d wandered numbly into the busy bookstore in the Carmel Plaza, and for a few minutes she’d stood in front of the wide rack of magazines, running her aching eyes past their splashy, glossy covcrs, seeing only the colors. Then, thinking she should buy one or two but too confuscd by all the choices, she started to leave cmpty-handed, until on the way out she found herself passing through the section on child care. Child care. She stopped and picked up one then another of the books whose titles intrigued her, and stood paging through them, skimming chapters that promised answers, and by the time she got to the checkout counter she was carrying a stack of books on child care.

Some of the books had titles about children and death, some had the words positive or winning in their titles, and all of them had pictures of kids on the covers. Kids whose huge smiles were obviously supposed to be evidence of their mental health. Back at the house, while Bertie slept Cee Cee had thumbed through the books, stopping to read long sections of each of them before she’d had the guts to ask Bertie to give her custody of Nina. In fact, she thought now, maybe it was reading those books that had made her think she’d be able to raise a kid. Made her wonder if it could be like following a recipe — first you do this, then you do that, and if you followed the recipe carefully, the kid would turn out just right. Like a cake. Of course she’d never baked a cake in her life.

The thing she decided she’d better read about first in those books, while she’d sat next to Bertie’s bed holding her hand and listening for every breath, was how to handle kids and death.

Most children find it difficult to mourn, unless they have been raised to express their feelings freely …. Share with them your own feelings of unhappiness, hurt, loneliness, abandonment, and even anger and this will make it easier for them.

“Your mother was the most special person I ever knew,” she said, finally breaking the silence in the car, “and she was different than everybody else I knew. I needed her in my life because when it came to me, she had X-ray vision. She saw through all the stuff I put on

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for the rest of the world, like so many different outfits from my closet.”

“What do you mean?” Nina asked, looking at Cee Cee.

“Well, let’s see. There was my I’m-Cee-Cee-the-Famous-St, ar-SoGiveMeWhateverI-Want outfit. Or my 1-Can’t-HandleThis-SoSomebodyDolta/br-Me outfit. I could pull those things off with other people, but never with her. Because she wouldn’t fall for it. She’d always look me in the eye and say, ‘No, Cee, that’s not going to work.’ You get what I’m saying?” Nina nodded.

“There’s a song from a great Broadway show,” Cee Cee went on, “and the lyrics are ‘Who else but your bosom buddy will tell you the whole stinkin’, truth?’ Well, your mother always told it to me. Whether I liked it or not, and I needed it to be told. Everybody does, but especially if you’re famous, because then what happens is that

people start telling you only what they think you want to hear.” “Why?”

“Lots of reasons. To keep you happy. To keep their jobs, if they work for you. To get you to like them so they can hang around with a star.”

“Those are dumb reasons.”

“So now every time it hits me that she’s not going to be here to tell me the truth anymore, I get mad at her. Real mad that my one true friend is gone. Is that how you feel? Mad that she left you?”

Now Nina couldn’t look at her. She turned her face to the passenger window, but after a moment Cee Cee heard her answer, “Yes,” in a very small voice.

“I lost my morn too, a long time ago, and my husband, John … he left me … and after that I figured it was just my fate to get left by anyone I loved,” Cee Cee said. “Matter of fact, once when I lived in New York I had this cat named Tufty. She was orange with a bushy tail, and believe me when I tell you I’m no animal lover but I was crazy about her. Anyhow, one day she just walked across the fire escape into my neighbor’s apartment and never came back. I couldn’t believe it. I even tried to bribe her by leaving out some caviar some guy I was dating gave me, but she came by that morning, sniffed it, turned her little whiskers up, and walked away, and I cried my eyes out. Can you imagine?” she asked. “Abandoned by a cat?”

The memory made her laugh now, with a giggle that built into a

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guffaw, and the laughter felt good for a minute, but then she felt guilty about laughing until she saw Nina’s back shaking with giggles too and when Nina turned to look at her, the child’s eyes were wet, but her mouth was smiling.

“Well, you know I’m not going to leave you because I’ve got no place else to go,” the little girl said.

“And I’m not going to ever leave you either, honey,” Cee Cee said, and just as she did the sun went behind a cloud and the sky dimmed and Cee Cee felt more guilt shoot through her, as if the sun disappearing just then was God’s way of saying, You’re lying, Bloom. Because the truth was she was already about to leave the kid, at some hootsy-snootsy boarding school, and she felt her mouth starting to turn down involuntarily the way it sometimes did just before she cried.

Where the fuck was my mind when I begged Bert to give me this child? she thought. Shallow me was thinking about going out to buy pink party dresses and patent leather shoes for her as if that was what being a mother was all about. I was already imagining how cute we were gonna look together at the celebrity mother-and-daughter luncheon. But how in the hell can I be a mother to somebody else when I’m bleeding to death mysdf? Maybe by the time her first school vacation comes along I’ll be feeling a little better.

“We’ll go away somewhere together on your first school break. Thanksgiving. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” she said, knowing Nina had to be able to tell how forced this life-isjusta-bowlof-cherries voice was that she was using. But if she did, she didn’t say anything, in fact she seemed to perk up at the idea of a shared vacation.

“What about Vail?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“On the break?”

“Where?”

“Vail, Colorado. Three years ago my morn took me there.” “Great, we’ll do it. I promise. Whatever you want.”

“Ever been skiing?” Nina asked, and she took her dark glasses out of her little purse and put them on as the car chugged into the sunny day.

“Moi? Are you joking? The thinnest book in the world is called Jewish Downhill Racers. May I quote my beloved friend Joan Rivers,

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who said, ‘I won’t participate in any sport that has an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.’”

“Then I guess Vail’s out,” Nina said quietly.

God, I’m a rat, Cee Cee thought. Like Miss Hannigan in Annie, or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. One of those villains in children’s stories who treat kids like dirt, but what in the hell else can I do? Santa Cruz. It’ll have to be okay. Just for now. She would explore the school with Nina, look it over, help her unpack, maybe even have lunch with her, and by the time she called tonight, the kid would be all settled in, with roommates and a whole new crew of pals, and that’s how it was supposed to be. Other parents did this. Families with real mothers and fathers sent kids away to school all the time because they thought it was good for the kids.

“Ever snorkeled?” Nina asked.

“Is that where they stick a tank on your back and you dive down and look at a fish?”

“No. That’s scuba diving. Snorkeling is easy. You wear a little mask with a breathing tube, and mostly float on the surface of the water. It’s like watching fish on television.”

“If I want to watch fish on television I’ll tune into The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” Cee Cee joked.

“So much for Hawaii,” Nina said quietly.

They were nearly at the turnoff to the school before Nina spoke again.

“Well, what are we going to do?” she asked with real concern in her voice.

“About what?”

“Thanksgiving break.”

“You know, I’ll bet you’re not goi’g to believe this,” Cee Cee said, “but at that time of year? November? There are very few places that can compare to Las Vegas.”

Nina looked at Cee Cee’s face, and when she realized she’d been teasing, she smiled, and Cee Cee did too, and they held hands over the console.

“We’ll work it out, kiddo,” Cee Cee told her. “I swear to God, we’ll work it out.”

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The school in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, on its acres of land with its college-like grounds, intimidated Cee Cee. Just the idea of a place where all those kids knew so much more than she did made her uneasy. In her own life, school had always been the place where she was either in trouble with the teachers because she’d been cutting to go into the city to auditions, or where she was thought of as a tap-dancing weirdo by the other kids. That was why she was quiet during the entire tour today, worrying the whole time that the headmistress who led them from building to building might ask her some question she couldn’t answer. Nina, as always, was aloof, her little face strained with feigned interest.

“The amphitheater. Our productions of the classics are known for the authenticity of their costume and scene design. Recently we had productions of both Sophocles’ and Anouilh’s Antigones. I’m sure, Miss Bloom, that you, with your theatrical orientation, would have appreciated the detail and care with which they were mounted.”

Yeah, sure. Sophocles and Anouilh, Cee Cee thought. I never got past Dick and Jane.

“Are you interested in the theater?” Miss McCullough asked Nina. “I like movies better.”

“We have a film society here. And what film is your favorite?”

“Jilted, starring Cee Cee Bloom,” Nina said, and Cee Cee wanted to kiss her cute face.

“Private bathrooms,” Cee Cee said after the tour. She was sitting on the chair across from the bed in Nina’s new dormitory room. She could see the sprawling campus all green and lush through the open window, and the parking lot in the distance, where the Chevy and its contents waited for her.

“Cee Cee, they just showed us a huge science hall, a polo field, a language lab, and a big amphitheater, and all you keep talking about is the fact that the dorm rooms have private bathrooms.”

“Hey, I’m impressed. You’re looking at someone who didn’t have a bathroom to herself till she was twenty-nine.”

Nina was slowly and painstakingly making the single bed, lifting each corner of the light mattress in order to tuck in the hospital corners. Bertie had taught her to do that and everything else perfectly. Cee Cee tried to imagine the proper and orderly life Nina

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would live here just to console herself, but still she felt like a rotten shit.

Earlier in the week Cee Cee had called Hal Lieberman in Los Angeles. He was house-sitting at her place in Brentwood and she told him the news about Bertie’s death, knowing he was someone she could trust with her raw feelings. A mensch, her mother would have called him.

“Cee, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to make your return here easier?” Hal’s own home was a studio apartment containing a bed, a chest of drawers, and the baby grand his grandfather gave him for his bar mitzvah, so he had readily accepted the assignment to stay at Cee Cee’s big, roomy rented house.

“Keep the porchlight burning,” she told him. “I’m dropping Nina at school and coming home to try and glue my life back together. Am I still in the business?”

“Are you kidding? You are the business,” he joked, then added gently: “Don’t be too tough on yourself. Everything will shake out and be okay.” Shake out and be okay. No chance. She was copping out on her promise to an orphan, how could anything make that okay?

“Neen, this place is lovely,” she said, sounding like Jayne Meadows describing a float in the Rose Bowl Parade. “The classrooms are fancy, the other kids look great, you’ll wear the lovely plaid uniform so you don’t have to think about clothes every day. And that lovely woman who gave us the tour, seemed so…”

“Cee,” Nina said stonefaced, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but anytime you use the word lovely three times in one breath … I know you’re freaked out. But it’s okay. I’ll settle in here. I’ll be with lots of kids, and you can call and tell me all your adventures, and I’ll mark off the days on the calendar until our trip to Las Vegas. You’d better pull yourself together or you’re going to hurt your career even more.”