Beaches

by Iris R. Dart

  The stage was very small, and the actors were so close to the audience that once Bertie actually thought Cee Cee looked right into her eyes during the “Mister Snow” song when the girls sang the part that went, What a day. What a day. Maybe Cee Cee recognized her. But then, Bertie hadn’t even told her when she and Neetie would arrive on the island. Up until the last minute, Bertie hadn’t even been sure she was coming, anyway. Her mother, Rosie, wanted her to get a job in Pittsburgh. And she tried. But just before she took the job at Nelson’s Children’s Store, Neetie convinced Rosie she needed Bertie’s company. Bertie could get a job in New Jersey and stay with Neetie while she mulled over her divorce.

  So there they were, still wearing their wrinkled clothes from the nine-hour drive from Pittsburgh. She’d talked Neetie into coming for a drive with her from the house in Ship Bottom, where they’d stopped just long enough to leave their luggage, to find the theater where Cee Cee was working. People were lining up to go in, and just on a whim Bertie decided to walk up to the box office and try to get seats. There was a cancellation—two seats in the third row. Neetie wanted a drink, to change clothes at least, but there was no time.

  “Please, Aunt Neet,” Bertie had begged. And now she was glad that Neetie had given in and was smiling as she watched the show.

  Bertie wished she could do something that somebody would refer to as talent. But she didn’t know what it could be. Talent. It obviously meant dancing or singing or playing a musical instrument, or even yodeling, and she couldn’t do any of those. When she talked about it with her mother, her mother would say, “Oh, Bertie, being beautiful and smart are talents, too.” Even though Bertie knew they weren’t. “And you can sew,” Rosie usually threw in when she saw Bertie’s pretty face fall. And Bertie would imagine herself on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour with Ted Mack spinning the wheel of fortune as he said, “And now, let’s give a big welcome to little Roberta White from Pittsburgh, who will show us how to hem a pleated skirt, by hand.”

  Talent. Cee Cee Bloom had talent. She was a great singer. And Bertie’s pen pal. Boy, would she be happy to see Bertie.

  Walk on through the wind

  Walk on through the rain

  Tho’ your dreams be tossed and blown….

  Some of the people in the audience were crying. This song gets everybody, Perry thought. He watched one of the young apprentices quietly sweeping the lobby with a pushbroom in preparation for the show’s end. Any minute, the audience would emerge. Thrilled, filled with superlatives, they would crowd around Perry, calling this year’s cast the best assembled, and then, in the traditional way, he would invite them all to Dukes Hotel for the party. The entire audience. Three hundred people at the opening night party. It was unheard of, but it was the kind of thing that brought them clamoring back every year.

  CEE CEE WAS DEPRESSED. She sat in front of the mirror in the tiny cramped dressing room after the show in her bra and pants and looked at herself. Body make-up on her arms stopped at the place where her sleeves had started. On her chest, it went down to the place where the round neckline began on that crummy yellow dress, and the rest of her was white. Ugh, that looked bad. And she was getting fat from all the starchy crap Godshell was feeding them. Macaroni and puddings, and other cheap, filling, goyishe food Leona would have laughed at.

  The others were already almost dressed when the tap on the wall and John Perry’s voice interrupted Cee Cee’s thoughts.

  “Someone to see you, Cee Cee,” Perry said.

  Who the hell…

  The curtains that separated the dressing room from the backstage area parted and a dark-haired girl walked in, her eyes scanning the others before they stopped at Cee Cee, who quickly wrapped a towel around herself.

  “Cee?” the girl said tentatively.

  Oh, now, wait a minute. This could not, no way, nohow, be Bertie White, the ponytailed little girl from Pittsburgh, standing here looking like maybe she was Audrey Hepburn, or I’ll throw up from being jealous, Cee Cee thought.

  “Bertie?”

  The girl nodded and squealed and hugged the sweaty, pansticked, chubby Cee Cee. The other girls watched and smiled happily.

  “My pen pal,” Cee Cee told them, still in the hug, sorry immediately she’d exposed such an asshole part of her personality.

  “My aunt is dying to get back to the house we rented in Ship Bottom, but I wanted to come to the party I heard they were giving for the cast at some restaurant—so if maybe someone could drive me home after the party, then I could come with you, and send Neetie back now. She’d let me do that,” Bertie said.

  She talks the same way she writes letters, Cee Cee thought. Just rambling. And she’s so damned…skinny. Leona would have said too skinny—but, boy, oh, boy. Even if I starved I couldn’t look like that.

  “Yeah, sure. Somebody’ll drive you.”

  Cee Cee watched Bertie run out of the dressing room to send her aunt back to Ship Bottom. She took her red cotton dress off the hook marked BLOOM. She wouldn’t bother to take off the body make-up. That dress could cover the lines, and at least the make-up made her look like she had a little color. A little life. Life. Bertie White had life. And a good haircut. “A good haircut is the most important thing a woman can have, after a clean purse,” Leona had told Cee Cee many times. And there was not once that Cee Cee ever remembered having had either, and certainly not both. Bertie’s purse was probably clean, too.

  “She’s beautiful,” Kaye, that skinny dancer, said to Cee Cee, looking out through the curtains where Bertie had gone.

  “Thanks,” Cee Cee said, pulling the red dress on. Thanks? Why had she said that? She had nothing to do with Bertie’s being beautiful. She looked at herself in the mirror. Maybe she’d put on just a little more blusher.

  Bertie was waiting for her in front of the theater. Most of the others had left for Dukes, and Cee Cee could hear the music from the jukebox at the old hotel, even though it was three blocks away.

  “Sorry I took so long,” Cee Cee said. Boy, it was funny. Here was this person standing in front of her who looked like a stranger, a girl who was so pretty that if she had—Cee Cee tried to stop herself from thinking the rest of that thought, which was that if Bertie had gone to high school with her in the Bronx, she would have been too popular to be Cee Cee’s friend, but she thought it, anyway. And instead of ignoring her, this girl was smiling at her and taking her arm so they could walk closer together.

  “It’s okay,” Bertie said. “I guess you probably need lots of time after a show to kind of unwind, huh?” she asked.

  “Uh…yeah. Sure,” Cee Cee said, noticing that for someone who hadn’t changed clothes in a whole day, Bertie looked real fresh, as if she had just had a shower.

  They walked in silence for about half a block.

  “Cee Cee,” Bertie said finally, “I’m really glad to be seeing you after all this time. I mean, can you even believe it? I mean, didn’t you think that maybe we’d never see each other again? That I was always going to be just a name on some stationery forever?”

  Cee Cee nodded.

  Dukes was mobbed. Every member of the cast was surrounded by groups of people from the audience. Probably, Cee Cee imagined, they were saying, “You were the best one,” to one actor and then moving on to say the same thing to the next actor.

  Bertie’s eyes were wide. “I want to meet everybody,” she said excitedly to Cee Cee. “But I have to go to the ladies’ room first.” She giggled and started off alone, leaving Cee Cee at the edge of the crowd watching her make her way across the room.

  “She’s very pretty,” John Perry said, coming up beside Cee Cee.

  Cee Cee was startled.

  “Your friend. That girl. She is your friend, right?”

  “Yes,” Cee Cee answered. She hated herself. She was jealous.

  “Actress?”

  “No,” Cee Cee said, maybe too harshly. I’m the one. I’m the actress. Me. Me. She’s just a plain ordinary person visiting here with her aunt w
ho was deserted by a bookie. But she didn’t say that part.

  “You did well tonight, Cee Cee,” Perry said.

  Cee Cee turned to look in his eyes. For the last ten days, he had practically ignored her, talking only to Peggy Longworth, who was playing Julie, or to cutesy Dinny Lee, who was playing Carrie. He called them “baby” or “honey” while Cee Cee, who had memorized the chorus music the first time she looked at it, stood and watched impatiently, wondering if her turn would ever come. But now, this second, looking in John Perry’s eyes, it was almost as if maybe he…

  “You’ll get your chance soon,” he said, as though he could read her mind. And he walked away.

  Shit, Cee Cee thought. Why hadn’t she said something funny, witty, even shocking to him? He had finally talked to her, and she had stood there like a blob. What could she say? That every night when the room was quiet, when she was positive the others were asleep and she moved her hand slowly into her pajama bottoms, through her wiry hair, to touch those throbbing little folds that ached to be caressed, she was thinking of him? Oh, sure.

  Cee Cee watched Perry move through the crowd. The men envied him, she could tell, and the women were all over him. Even the older ones. He flirted and joked and kissed them lightly on the cheek and moved on to the next, scattering a bit of attention on each, so no one would leave unsatisfied.

  A waiter with a little round tray passed out glasses of champagne. Cee Cee spotted Bertie as she emerged from the ladies’ room. Bertie took a glass from the tray, and her eyes sought out Cee Cee as she made her way across the room. Cee Cee thought it was amazing what poise Bertie had, just reaching for the glass like that. I mean, after all, she was only—what? Sixteen? Holy shit. She was so…Cee Cee took a deep breath, and just as Bertie was about halfway back, John Perry, on his way through the crowd, caught her arm.

  Bertie looked at him and flushed. Perry said something with a smile. Bertie nodded and laughed. Cee Cee was straining to hear, but the fucking jukebox was blaring The Supremes and she couldn’t hear anything. Should she walk over there? Should she stay where she was and grit her teeth in silence? Goddamn it. Bertie didn’t even belong here, and she wouldn’t have even come here if Cee Cee hadn’t told her she’d be doing summer stock here. She would have stayed in Pittsburgh, where Cee Cee wished she’d go back to, right now.

  “Perry said he’d drive me to Ship Bottom,” Bertie said breathlessly as she reached Cee Cee.

  “Great.”

  “He’s adorable. Looks so young. Offered me a job at the theater. What’s an apprentice?”

  “Cleans the theater, builds scenery, works props and costumes. No pay.”

  “He said he’d pay me.”

  “Great,” Cee Cee said.

  “I may get to be here all summer. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  The waiter with the tray walked by. He had one glass of champagne left. Cee Cee reached for it. A woman in a white dress reached for it, too, and Cee Cee was left holding out an empty hand. As she lowered the hand, Bertie took it and squeezed it.

  “I’m so glad to be here, Cee,” Bertie said, and Cee Cee heard the exclamation points in her voice. “Now you and I will get to be real friends. You know?”

  Cee Cee knew, but as much as she wanted to be real friends with somebody, especially somebody who once told her she was proud of her, she didn’t know if that could ever happen.

  The next day, Perry put Bertie to work on costumes because she told him sewing was her specialty. And it was. Right from the start she had good ideas about how to add a little row of sequins here or a little piece of satin there to make a frumpy dress or suit look glamorous on stage. But it was to her friend Cee Cee’s costumes that she paid the most attention.

  Bertie was very thoughtful. That was the word Leona used when she talked about Cee Cee’s cousin Myra. Myra was thoughtful, too. She sent Cee Cee a card every year on her birthday, and every year Cee Cee would open the card and feel a pang of guilt because not only did she not know when Myra’s birthday was, she didn’t even know the names of Myra’s three children. (Sherry, Beth, Evan? Susan, Bobbie, Kevin?)

  Even when Cee Cee was only in the chorus of My Fair Lady (“Sorry, Cee, maybe next week,” Bertie said sweetly when the cast list went up and Peggy Longworth was playing Eliza), Bertie had made sure Cee Cee had the prettiest dress in the “Ascot Gavotte” number. And she always gave Cee Cee a little gift on opening night. Even if it was just a flower with a “break a leg” note attached to it. And she was an expert with hair. She would meet Cee Cee early at the theater and help her work on her hair. First she’d set it with big giant rollers to straighten all the frizz, and later she would brush it out so the top was straight and help Cee Cee pin up the back so she had an elegant up-do.

  Sometimes, after the shows, on nights when Cee Cee was too keyed up to sleep, the two girls would go out for coffee and talk.

  “Do you ever wonder about men?” Bertie asked one night, making circles with her spoon in her coffee, stirring it again and again, even though she drank it black.

  “Who?” Cee Cee asked.

  “Men,” Bertie said. “Like the ones you go out with on dates?”

  It took a minute to sink in. Cee Cee didn’t go out on many dates, and when she did, she still thought of the guys who came nervously to her door not as men, but as boys. Men were Mr. Solomon, Mr. Colfax, and Mr. Cooperman, her father’s gin rummy club.

  Bertie put the spoon down on the table and put her two hands around the coffee cup.

  “I mean,” she said, “when you look at a man, doesn’t it ever go through your mind what it would be like to be—”

  “Doing it with him?” Cee Cee blurted out, finishing Bertie’s sentence, at the same time Bertie was finishing the sentence by saying, “married to him.”

  Cee Cee was embarrassed. Sex was something she wondered about all the time. Not just about how it would be with the boys she went out with on dates, but about ones she saw on television, or in the pizza place or sometimes on the subway. But marriage. No. Never. She didn’t want to get married.

  “I’m too busy thinkin’ about my career,” Cee Cee said, shaking her head. “No gettin’ married for me till I’m so old and feeble I need someone to wheel me into the sun at the old folks’ home. That’s when I’ll get married.”

  Bertie was serious.

  “But what about all those years without a man? Won’t you get—”

  “Horny?” Cee Cee said.

  “Lonely,” Bertie said. “I mean, sometimes I think about my poor mother…”

  Cee Cee remembered from a letter long ago that Bertie’s father died when Bertie was only three.

  “Now there’s a woman who, even though she would never tell anyone, is probably desperately—”

  “Lonely,” Cee Cee said.

  “No,” Bertie said. “Horny,” and they both laughed, Bertie with a close-mouthed giggle that made her face red, and Cee Cee with a guffaw so loud that the few other people in the coffee shop turned to look at her.

  Bertie never ate dinner at the cast house. She always ate with Neetie before the show, and then Neetie would drive her to the theater. One night, she asked Cee Cee to join them. Neetie picked them both up in her station wagon after the afternoon rehearsal.

  It was Cee Cee’s first glimpse of her. She was dark-haired and skinny like Bertie, and she had a very good tan. But she was very quiet. Even though she drove with both hands on the wheel, she still managed to hold a cigarette in the right hand and a handkerchief in the left hand, and as they drove silently to Ship Bottom, she would alternate. First the right hand to her face so she could puff on the cigarette, then back to the wheel, then the left hand to her eyes so she could wipe away a tear, then back to the wheel, then the cigarette again.

  Cee Cee watched her, fascinated. Jesus Christ! If she made a mistake she would go puff on the handkerchief and put the cigarette in her eye. She giggled at the thought.

  Cee Cee noticed that Bertie was thoughtful of Neetie, too
. She helped get dinner on the table and wash the dishes, even though she’d been sewing all day and Neetie had only been sitting on the beach puffing and wiping. Neetie never said one word to Cee Cee until she dropped the girls back at the theater. Cee Cee said, “Nice meeting you,” and Neetie said, “Yeah.”

  Boy, you’d think living in that house would depress anybody, but Bertie was always cheerful and a pleasure to be around, and there was no doubt about it. She and Cee Cee were becoming best friends, even though Cee Cee thought that was an asshole way to describe it.

  CEE CEE WOKE UP with a start and looked around. The first few times she’d done this in the middle of the night, it had taken her a few sleepy minutes to remember where she was. This time she knew immediately where she was and she felt fine, but she was wide awake and it was one forty-five. She could see the little travel clock her father had bought her, after she came home breathlessly that day to tell him she got the job.

  “Luminous dial,” he said proudly, as though he’d invented it himself. She would have to write and tell him how valuable the luminous dial was to her when she woke up in the middle of the night. Maybe not. He would worry she wasn’t getting enough rest. He worried about everything. That Leona was pushing Cee Cee too much, to which Leona always said, “Butt out.” That Leona was eating too much, to which Leona always said, “Too bad.” That Cee Cee had no interest in college, to which Leona always said, “So what?” And then Nathan, Cee Cee’s sweet father, would shrug and sit down and open the newspaper in front of his face, not so much because he was interested in the news, but to hide. She should write to him and tell him how well she was doing, finally. He would be glad.

  She would tell him about Bertie and how much fun they had. And how she was making other friends, too. How every morning at breakfast Richie Day, who was very cute, would tease her by singing (badly), “Does your mu-ther know you’re out—Cecilia? Does she know that I’m a-bout ta steal ya?” And how, when after all those weeks of playing crummy chorus parts, Cee Cee finally got the part of Lola in Damn Yankees, Peggy Longworth hugged her and said, “You deserve it.” And how when Mrs. Godshell made macaroni and cheese (puke) for dinner last Friday and all the dancers decided to go out for dinner instead, they invited Cee Cee to come along. Everything was perfect.