Beaches (28 page)

“How come you never promised me that?” Bertie asked, smiling. She couldn’t feel her body. She must have had some anesthetic or pain reliever, but she couldn’t remember.

Cee Cee smiled-a smile Bertie recognized as a forced one she sometimes gave when strangers were trying to her, or when she was about to say something that was difficult for her.

“Arthur’s getting married,” she said. “Right after the delivery, he came out to see if I was okay, and of course, once I got out of there away from all the gooey blood and placenta and stuff I was great, and-we told each other how wonderful we looked and all. I mean, Bert, I lost thirty pounds since I saw him, and he had, you’re not going to believe this”
and then Cee Cee looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was listening, looked back at Bertie and confided
“he had a hair transplant. More hair, Bert. I know he thinks that’s why I left. Because he was bald or short or whatever he’s unsure about, but that wasn’t why.”

Cee Cee was too much to take at a time like this. Bertie wanted to go back to sleep or go up to her room to see Nina. Little Nina Rose Barron.

“And Allan Jackson wasn’t why either, Bert. It was because I … you don’t want to hear this, do you?”

“Go on, Gee,” Bertie said. Poor Cee Cee.

“It was because it was possible, Bert, too possible, you know? Too much of a chance at realness. And I don’t do realness. When you get down to the blood and placenta, I’m gone. Only I didn’t tell him that. I just said congratulations. His mother really likes her, Bert. The girl he’s marrying. His mother likes her a lot. That’s what he said. Only I guarantee you that Aunt Fanny wishes it was me. Remember how crazy she was about me, Bert?”

Bertie was asleep.

Cee Cee stayed for a few more days. She slept a lot and came to Bertie’s room and sat at the bottom of the bed and watched Bertie nurse the baby. She helped Bertie compose a note to Michael about Nina’s birth.

Bertie thought Nina looked just like her grandmother Rosie. This made Bertie cry, and she said it was awful that her mother would never hold the baby in her arms. And that the baby would never have a grandmother to love her as only a grandmother can.

When the baby was one week old, Bertie and Cee Cee took a walk on the beach “to show Nina the water,” Cee Cee said. They moved slowly, Cee Cee carrying the baby and Bertie holding on to Cee Cee as they walked.

The beach was empty. Cee Cee stopped at a spot where three big jagged rocks stood on the sand near the shoreline. Then she straightened the little bonnet Bertie had put on Nina’s tiny head to protect her from the sun and sat. Bertie sat, too. Two sea gulls shrieked and flew in circles just a few yards out to sea. Cee Cee pulled the baby close to her chest, and then she sang:

Poor Butterfly,

‘Neath the blossoms waiting,

Poor Butterfly,

For she loved him so

The moments pass into hours . , .

The hours pass into years

And as she smiles through her tears

She murmurs low . . .

Then she stopped singing and smiled and said, “Hey, Bert, I think maybe I just became a grandmother.”

Bertie held more tightly on to Cee Cee’s arm and then, smiling, she tilted her face up so the warm sun could shine on it.

Dear Cee,

It’s two AM. and I just got Nina back down to sleep. She must have had a terrible nightmare, because she awakened with such a shriek that I was terrified. I ran into her room and she was trembling!! Poor baby.

Cee, sometimes when I sit alone (which is almost always), I think about some of the terrible choices I made for myself, and I worry about the wrong choices I could make for Nina, and that scares me.

How did I ever fall for the lie that mothers pass on to their daughters about marriage? The fantasy that makes us believe that somehow it will save us. That one man will be able to be ever-constant, ever-loving, ever-sexual (I would have been grateful for once a month).

One person can’t save another. We can only save ourselves. I made the mistake of expecting Michael to tend to me and to make me feel important, and when he didn’t, couldn’t, was having enough trouble with his own life, I resented him for trying to make me be “only a wife” for all those years. But he didn’t make me, Cee. I could have insisted on being something else. It was just easier not to try, just to shut up and be Mrs, Barren.

Sorry about all the self-pity. I’ve been reading a lot of feminist literature lately and feeling as if the world wronged me, when the truth is I wronged myself.

Boy, do I envy you your fabulous career. Nina and I will come to visit you and stay in the

pad you described in Hollywood as soon as she is more easily carted from place to place. (You can’t believe the paraphernalia required just to take a baby out for the day.)

Ooh, I knew I had gossip. Ran into Artie Wechsler and his new wife in the drugstore when 1 went to get Pampers a day or so ago.

She is ordinary. A kind of washed-out-looking blonde. I think she must have known the story because when Artie said to her, “You remember, Marsha” or Marcy or whatever her name is, “I told you about Bertie,” a look of realization crossed her face, and after that she was very cold to me while we waited in line (they were behind me getting charcoal and paper plates!!), so I guess I shouldn’t count on the new Mrs. Wechsler inviting me for dinner in the near future. Should I? Oh, Cee, the tribulations of being your friend!!!

I miss you. Call or write to me soon, old girl.

I took new pictures of Nina to the drugstore to be developed the same day I saw Wechsler there. As soon as I get them back I’ll send some.

And so to sleep.

Bert

Dear Bert,

Whatever you do, cross your heart you won’t go to see Jilted. It comes out tomorrow and honest to God it is trasholafrom the first shot. I look like a tank, and I act like one, too, but I swear it wasn’t my fault. (That’s what they all say, right?) To begin with I wasn’t even fat when we shot it, I was at my low weight, and they dressed me in those tents so I look huge.

The director was a maniac, and after the first day of shooting when he tried to jump on me in my dressing room one night and I called him the usual (putz, schmuck, low-life and no-good dog), I was not, to say the least, his favorite persona.

Last week when you called you sounded so happy with little Nina-poo. I’m glad to hear she’s “almost talking,” whatever the fuck that means. No wait. I know what it means. It’s what I did in Jilted. Don’t see it, Bert.

Love, C.B.

THE
NEW
YORK
TIMES

Jilted

One hopes that Cee Cee Bloom, so brilliant in every past endeavor, will forgive director Jack Arquette for allowing her to be so badly dressed, abysmally lit, and insensitively photographed in Jilted. In the first moments of the film, it seemed as if some semblance of a performance by Bloom seemed to be struggling to emerge, but alas, never made it.

VARIETY

Jilted

Based on a recent news story about a man who married thirty-two women in fifteen years, Jilted optimistically bills itself as a comedy, but is completely devoid of same. Mostly due to the shrill, unpalatable, charmless performance of Cee Cee Bloom as the wife who catches on to the flimflam and brings the cad (Mel Blanchard) to justice.

Pebble Beach, California, 1979

Bertie couldn’t believe that a little four-year-old, fifty-pound person could take so much of her time and her energy. Mommy watch me, catch me, fix this. Look, Mom. Help me, Mommy. She was busier now than she had ever been working with fourteen children.

She barely had an instant that wasn’t full. Of Nina. Of Nina’s needs. Nina’s demands. Nina’s hunger, tears. And lots of huggings, which is what Nina called it when she threw her pudgy little arms around Bertie’s neck. Perfect, beautiful, precious Nma. The child she’d waited for all her life.

Wasn’t she lucky, after all, to have Michael’s support and the tidy sum Rosie had saved over the years now left to Bertie, working for her, paying her bills, so she could devote herself to raising her child. Just the way she’d always hoped it would be. She had everything any woman could want. But a man. In a few of the articles she’d read, some of the feminists seemed to think that was the good news. Not that fatherless children were a good thing, but

it was better than having fathers who didn’t care. Guilty men who made strained, insincere visits to their children. Of course, the children felt the hypocrisy in their little bones.

Her whole marriage with Michael had been strained and insincere. Then why did she still think about him? Thrill to the expressions in Nina’s face that were like his expressions? The pout that Nina assumed when she felt hurt. The eyebrow she raised when she felt insecure. And the shape of her tiny thumb. That sweet thumb that was exactly the same, a miniature version of Michael’s thumb. Bertie remembered Sunday mornings at brunch in Pittsburgh with Michael, when the two of them were still newlyweds. How she’d held Michael’s hands and touched his fingers, one by one, memorizing them. Even now, she thought, if Michael exploded and all that was left of him was his hands she could identify him by them. That was such an insane thought, it made her laugh out loud.

If Michael exploded . . . the sound of her own giggle brought her back to reality. She was sitting in the bathtub trying to relax while Nina took an afternoon nap, and was so lost in her thoughts she hadn’t even noticed that the once steaming water had cooled. God, she loved sitting in the bathtub. It had become her favorite thing to do.

Realizing that made her smile again. You know you’re aging when . . . She remembered those articles from the Mad Magazines one of her college roommates had read endlessly. That would be a perfect article for Mad Magazine. You know you’re aging when your favorite place to be is in your bathtub. Alone. At noon. Noon? Bertie looked at her watch. Twelve-fifteen. No, she’d better not add more hot water. She’d better get out, dry off, dress, get Nina dressed, and hurry over to the Seaside Tennis Club. She’d promised Libby Collins that she’d come there, dressed in tennis clothes. And maybe if there was a teenager available to take care of Nina for an hour or so, she would hit a few tennis balls with Libby. Libby Collins was

about fifty, blond, bubbly, and what Bertie’s mother would have called “a pistol.”

Libby barraged Bertie with questions one day when they were both volunteers in the bookstore. She seemed sincerely interested in Bertie’s welfare, and Bertie answered her frank questions, thinking later she owed Cee Cee a debt of gratitude for teaching her that people could be like that. Could just say anything. After her own upbringing, in which one’s buttocks were referred to as a “bum,” female sex organs as “girl parts,” and real feelings seldom if ever confronted.

“Being single,” Libby said, and tsked, “who in the hell loves you up, honey?” Bertie blushed. “I mean, if I didn’t have Wally’s fuzzy legs next to me every night, I’d never fall asleep. Take my word for it, a girl needs fur. And I don’t mean the kind you put in cold storage every summer.”

Bertie allowed a smile.

“Hey. I know you don’t want all kinds of creeps traipsing through your bedroom. Hell, no. Giving your daughter the wrong idea about how a woman’s supposed to conduct herself. But find yourself one good, strong, healthy, sexy man and get him to come by your bedroom on a steady basis.”

One good, strong, healthy, sexy man. For nearly a year after Nina was born, Bertie had barely thought about men. Except, of course, for Michael. And even though she hated herself for wanting it, and knew in her heart it was impossible, she fantasized a great deal about a reunion. Sometimes late at night in a half-asleep state, she would think she heard a car pull up outside, and imagine that it was Michael coming home. He’d say, what a fool I’ve been, or some other bad movie line like that, only he wouldn’t be the cold, indifferent Michael; he would have undergone some enormous transformation and he’d be funny and warm. But then the car outside was only passing by, and eventually she would fall asleep, sometimes

with the thoughts of Michael moving into her dreams. Dreams where he ran and played with Nina on the beach, and when the blazing morning sun pried her eyes open, she would be overcome with the grief that they would never be a family and at the same time the relief that she was free of those tension-filled years she’d spent with him.

One good, strong, healthy, sexy man. She hadn’t met one. Not the first year. When Nina was a year old, Bertie met Donald Solow in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office. Donald was with his son Jason, five, who was coughing so much Bertie was terrified that the germs were filling the room and spraying on baby Nina.

“The cough is my fault,” Donald said apologetically. “I mean my fault that he has it. That’s why I had to bring him here, ‘cause it’s my fault.”

Bertie nodded and looked into the reception window, hoping she could catch the nurse’s eye and tell her they just had to hurry Nina, who was only there for a routine checkup, in to see the doctor. But the nurse was on the phone and too busy, and Nina was shifting around uncomfortably in Bertie’s lap. Bertie picked up Nina’s bottle of apple juice from the side table where Nina had pushed it, to give the baby a drink. Just as she did, Jason Solow let out another belt of a cough. Bertie put the bottle back down. It must be covered with Jason’s germs now, too.

“He was playing outside in the rain, naked, at my house,” Donald said to Bertie. “His mother would never let him do things like that, which is why she and I aren’t together anymore. You see, I’m a free spirit, and she isn’t. Right, Jase? Don’t you have more fun with Daddy?”

Jason responded with a simultaneous nod and a cough so powerful it made his little face bright red.

“See,” his father said to Bertie. As if she cared.

“Does your little boy have a divorce?” Jason asked Bertie, moving closer to look at Nina. Bertie wanted to push him away.

“She’s a girl,” Bertie said, “and yes, she does.”

The next day, Patty, the nurse who worked for the pediatrician, called her.