Beaches

by Iris R. Dart

  Cee, you’re so lucky to have such an exciting life. I’ll probably always be the wife of someone, and I’m afraid.

  Right after I wrote that very last line, Michael called. He really loves me. Tonight we’re having dinner at his parents’. I think I’d better burn this, or mail it fast while I still have the nerve.

  Love,

  Bert

  MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA

  1983

  The Monterey airport was small and quiet. Right after the airplane landed, a man in a gray business suit who had been sitting across the aisle from Cee Cee helped her get her bag out of the compartment above her seat. He said, “I can’t wait to tell my kids I met Cee Cee Bloom,” and then blushed. A skycap smiled a huge smile when she passed him and said, “Now I can die happy, ’cause I seen you,” and the Hertz girl asked her for her autograph. But after that she was on her own. Driving this piece of tin, pain-in-the-ass rent-a-car.

  The sign said Highway 1 South. Was that right or was it supposed to be north? Shit, she was lucky she’d even started this car, but now she had to find the goddamned place, too. Without a driver. That would be a miracle. Jesus, it was starting to rain. Where the fuck were the windshield wipers? There. Okay, now just take it slow, she told herself. You’ll get there.

  Everyone back in L.A. would scream bloody murder when she called to tell them she wouldn’t be back for a few days. Well, fuck ’em.

  The rain was falling so hard now she could hardly see the road, and she wasn’t sure how to put the windshield wipers on a higher speed. She was afraid to take her eyes away from what she could see of the road to try and figure it out, so she slapped around madly at the dashboard. No. That button was the lights. Maybe she’d turn them on just to be safe. No. That was the turn signal. Aha! There. Windshield wipers always sounded like drumbeats to Cee Cee, so when she twisted the end of the turn signal and the tempo of the wipers changed from “Way down upon the Swanee River” to “Everybody Loves My Baby,” she sighed with relief.

  There it was. Ocean Avenue. Hoo-fuckin’-ray!

  Cee Cee fumbled with her purse with her right hand while her left hand clutched the wheel. She was searching for the piece of paper with the directions. DOWN OCEAN AVENUE. LEFT ON CARMELO.

  Carmelo. Carmelo. Come on, Carmelo. Left. Why weren’t there any addresses on the houses? Bertie said it would be easy to find. Third house on the right. An old Spanish one. The Frank House. There A sign. The Frank House. The Franks were the people Bertie was renting from. That’s what she’d explained on the phone. Cee Cee pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the engine. She sat for a minute just looking at the house, then she sighed a relieved sigh.

  She pushed open the door of the Chevy and decided she would leave her suitcase in the trunk for now. Every house as far as she could see in either direction looked perfect. Surrounded by a hedge or rosebushes or a white picket fence. Cee Cee crossed the street and walked up to the little tile porch of the Frank House. There was a note taped to the door.

  Jan

  Door open.

  Who was Jan? This had to be the place. But where was Bertie?

  Cee Cee opened the door and had to smile as she walked into the house. Bertie had great taste, even in rentals. The little house was beautiful. Hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, and lots of windows so the sunlight could come pouring in. Cee Cee walked to the coffee table. There were some magazines, a few ashtrays, and a small framed picture of a little girl of about six or maybe seven, surrounded by sand piles she’d made with the bucket she was holding. She was sitting on a beach. It was Bertie. Her mother must have taken it the summer Cee Cee and Bertie met in Atlantic City. Cee Cee looked more closely at the picture. It looked like a color Polaroid shot. But then, of course, it couldn’t be Bertie. Cee Cee grinned and put the picture back on the table.

  “Bert,” she called out. There was no response.

  There was a phone on a little table next to the sofa. Cee Cee picked up the receiver and dialed. First the area code, then the number she wanted.

  “William Morris Agency,” a voice answered.

  “Larry Gold,” Cee Cee said.

  A moment later, Larry Gold’s secretary picked up.

  “Larry Gold’s office.”

  “Yeah. It’s Cee Cee Bloom.”

  “Oh, good!” the secretary said hastily. “He’s been looking for you.”

  I’ll bet, Cee Cee thought.

  A click. Another click.

  “Where the fuck are you?” Larry Gold’s angry voice asked.

  “None of your goddamned business,” Cee Cee replied. A cigarette. She looked around the room for one.

  “Cee Cee,” Gold said. “Don’t give me that shit. My ass is on the line. At three o’clock this afternoon, when it became apparent you were taking a very long lunch, I was with a director, a producer, two guest stars, eight dancers, and three network executives who were sitting in the fucking rehearsal hall, waiting for you to come back. To your own goddamned show. And you didn’t. By four, I was sweating blood, you self-indulgent cunt. Where the fuck are you?”

  “Gold, you little prick,” Cee Cee said, slowly and carefully. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that again. ’Cause if you do, you can take your ten percent and shove it up your greedy ass. I had something to do. Someone I had to see, and I don’t care if Jesus Christ Himself was there waiting for me.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Gold began, but Cee Cee went on.

  “No, you listen to me, you sawed-off little bastard,” she said, amazed by how calm she was feeling despite her words. “You postpone the rehearsals until I call you and let you know that I’m ready to come back.”

  “Cee Cee, you can’t just—”

  “I can, Larry,” she said. “I can. Because I’m hot shit and you know it. I’ll be there when I get there.”

  Cee Cee hung up the phone and sat down on the sofa. There. She’d handled it. Now she’d sit, read a magazine, and wait for Bertie to come and tell her what was going on.

  HAWAII

  1967

  Bertie closed the metal clasps on the front of her suitcase. Thank God they were leaving for Hawaii. Thank God they were getting out of Pittsburgh, even for a measly week. Maybe in Hawaii she could look at Michael across a dinner table without seeing a furrowed brow, and without having to hear his preoccupied voice give her perfunctory answers to questions he’d only half-heard.

  “No time,” he’d said when she told him she needed—they needed—to get away. For four solid years, Michael had worked every day at the big law firm. And for two of those years he had moonlighted every evening from a rented desk at an insurance office in Whitehall, as a way to build his own practice. The schedule exhausted him and made him finally say, as he sat on the bed one night in his bathrobe, staring at something he wasn’t watching on television, “You know what? I think you ought to book a vacation for us.”

  Hawaii was Bertie’s first choice; it was the place they had gone on their two-week honeymoon, four years ago. Island hopping. This time they would only have a few days. Time enough for one island, Oahu, where they would stay at the Kahala Hilton. That had been Bertie’s favorite spot during the last trip.

  The timing was perfect. It was February, never a great time to be in Pittsburgh, but worse this year, because the gray, slushy, leftover snow lined the riser of every curb and stayed lodged between the cobblestones and inside the streetcar tracks as a chilling reminder that the freezing temperatures might last for months.

  “The only way to get through a Pittsburgh winter is to be somewhere else,” was what Mrs. Ellis said. Mrs. Ellis was the owner of the Ellis Art Gallery, where Bertie had worked for two years in a job she loved. She loved learning about art, meeting the artists, and learning about the tastes of the collectors, but that was before Michael opened the night practice in Whitehall.

  “Tell her you have to be home at five, Bert. You have to have dinner on the table for me by six-fifteen, otherwise I can’t be in Whitehall by seven
-thirty.”

  “Michael, the reason Sylvia Ellis hired me was so that I could close up the gallery every night and she could be home at five to serve Jules dinner.”

  Michael shrugged. It was a shrug that meant Jules Ellis’s dinner was not his problem, and that day Bertie told Sylvia she’d have to quit the job at the gallery. Michael came first.

  After that she went looking for other jobs. Flair, the lingerie shop in Shadyside, needed someone three weekdays and Saturdays, but Michael was home on Saturdays, at least in the mornings, and he wanted Bertie to be home on Saturdays, too. The Pittsburgh Playhouse had a job opening in their box office but the hours were four P.M. to ten P.M. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t find a job that was convenient for him.

  “Get a goddamned volunteer job,” he told her. “The little bit of cash you bring in doesn’t matter.” Bertie felt as if she’d been slapped. She’d been so proud of her checks from the Ellis Gallery.

  “Ahh, come on, Bert,” Michael said, noticing her look. “For God’s sake, you knew that.”

  Bertie had driven past the Home for Crippled Children many times, and just the name of the place made her sad. One morning at the corner of Northumberland Street, instead of taking a right to go to the market, she took a left into the parking lot of the Home. Something made her. A voice that said, Go on. You like children. Want to have dozens of your own. That’s what you always say about yourself. And you would, too, if you could only conceive. She hadn’t used her diaphragm in two years, and yet her period appeared every twenty-eight days like clockwork. And she was developing what she called a “niggling fear” that maybe she would never be pregnant. Oh, go on, Bert, the voice said. This is just what you’re looking for.

  The heels of her sandals tapped along the linoleum floor of the lobby, and she followed the sign with the arrow that said RECEPTION into a tiny office, where an older gray-haired woman wearing a nurse’s uniform looked up from her typing and over the eyeglasses which had slipped almost to the tip of her nose.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Roberta Barron, and I live in the…I live down the…”

  Bertie was very nervous. It was as if she were about to ask the woman to give her something she needed badly, but didn’t deserve.

  “Do you, I mean, do you have a volunteer program here?”

  “Not officially,” the woman said, “but we can always use help.”

  On the following Monday, Bertie started work at the Home for Crippled Children. She went every Monday and Friday morning and stayed for a few hours. She had various duties, but her favorite job was reading stories to the younger children. She would push them in their wheelchairs into a semicircle in the recreation room. Sometimes there would be five or six children, sometimes more, depending on how they were feeling that day. She would read to them from little Golden Books—Scuffy The Tugboat, The Little Engine That Could—and hold up the books so the children could see the pictures. Not one of the children looked the way Bertie thought a child was supposed to look, probably because their faces were so weary. She tried hard to read with a lot of expression, hoping that if she made the story exciting or funny she could elicit a childlike reaction from them. But rarely did they do anything other than listen quietly and nod when she asked if she was talking loud enough, or when she asked if they could see the pictures from where they were sitting.

  Carla was six years old, and she liked to stroke Bertie’s long brown hair. At first, it had made Bertie nervous, but when she saw that letting the child touch her hair made a tiny smile appear on Carla’s face, Bertie let her continue. One day she gave Carla a brush and let her happily run the bristles through her hair again and again.

  Just before she fell asleep one night, Bertie remembered a doll that Rosie had given her when she was Carla’s age. It was called a Toni doll, and it had hair that could be washed and curled and combed. Bertie remembered playing “beauty parlor” every day for weeks with the doll. Little girls like pretty hair.

  The next morning, Bertie telephoned every toy store that was listed in the Yellow Pages, looking for a doll with hair that could be washed, combed, and set. Not one of the stores had anything like that. Chatty Cathy, Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears, “but nothin’ with no hair, lady.”

  Bertie got into her car and drove to Rosie’s house.

  “Hi, darling.”

  “Hi,” Bertie answered distractedly. “Looking for something.” She raced past her mother and down into the cold, damp cellar that smelled of detergent and ammonia.

  She pulled boxes from shelves and out of storage bins. Clothes, dishes, photo albums, holiday items, all carefully labeled in Rosie’s neat hand. Ah! A large cardboard box with the word Clorox printed on all four sides, and underneath the word Clorox, also on all four sides, and on the top and bottom just to be sure, Rosie had labeled the box BW’s TOYS.

  Bertie ripped off the packing tape and opened the box. One look at the contents filled her with memories of her childhood.

  Blackie, the furry little stuffed scotty, a baby toy that had sat on her night table even when she was in high school. Lula, oh, sweet Lula, the faded Kewpie doll her father had won for her at Kennywood Park right after her third birthday. Just before he died. Jake or Joco or JoJo, a teddy bear with no face; she couldn’t remember what she’d called him. Mr. Muggs, a stuffed monkey wearing tennis shoes. Four storybook dolls in their native costumes of Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Spain. And Lisa, the beautiful Toni doll. Bertie had given the doll the name she’d wished her mother had given her. Instead of Roberta. Ick. A girl version of Robert.

  Lisa. The doll was smaller than Bertie remembered. She was dressed in the red and white ruffled dress Rosie had made in order to teach Bertie how to use the Singer sewing machine that later replaced all of the toys in Bertie’s affection. Lisa had peach skin and yellow blond hair and green eyes. Bertie used to wish she looked like Lisa.

  On Monday morning, Bertie took Lisa from the top shelf of her closet where she’d put her; she had waited until Michael left for work so she wouldn’t have to discuss this with him. Then she gently wrapped Lisa in tissue paper and put her in a large cardboard box. She wrapped the box in more tissue paper and sat it on the passenger seat of her car as she drove to the Home.

  Carla was gone. Her parents had picked her up to take her on a weekend outing, and on Sunday when things were going well they decided that they didn’t want their little girl to live at the Home for Crippled Children anymore. That maybe they were capable of caring for her after all.

  “Isn’t that great for Carla!” Bertie said to the nurse who gave her the news.

  But she felt cheated, as if something had been stolen from her. She felt like crying. It was a feeling she had a lot lately. Wanting to cry from frustration.

  “I’d like to have Carla Berns’s address,” she said to the receptionist at the front office. She was trying to sound calm. “I have something I’d like to send to her.”

  Dr. Esther Shaw, the child psychologist at the Home, was in the office when Bertie asked for the address. Dr. Shaw was tall and thin and had blue-black hair with square-cut bangs. She was always very serious. Bertie told Dr. Shaw how Carla liked brushing her hair and how she’d gone and looked for the doll and…She wasn’t sure why, but suddenly she felt herself talking very fast. Maybe it was because of the look on Dr. Shaw’s face.

  “I’m very sorry, Roberta,” the doctor said when Bertie finished, “I’m afraid we can’t give you the girl’s address. Sending Carla the doll now would be entirely too intrusive.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Intrusive. You see, Carla’s parents couldn’t afford to buy her the kind of toy you’re thinking of sending. If she gets a toy like that in the mail from someone who works here, those parents could think we’re trying to seduce Carla into being happier here than she is at home, and the truth is, Carla’s already ambivalent about living in the care of her parents because they’ve been known to be extremely negligent. So, even though I’m delighted
that you became so attached to one of our children, I feel that at this time—Roberta?”

  Bertie was crying. Hard. Intrusive? She wanted to help Carla. Make a little girl smile. Not be intrusive. For God’s sake. What was the problem? “I’m sorry,” she said, embarrassed at her own outburst. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Is it possible, Roberta,” Dr. Shaw said gently, “that maybe you’re not able to detach yourself enough emotionally from these children to be doing this kind of work? What do you think?”

  Bertie didn’t answer. She tried, but she couldn’t answer. Not without crying. She turned and walked out of the building, still carrying the box with Lisa inside. Then she got into her car and drove home.

  Later that week, she wrote a note to the Home thanking them for the time during which she had worked there, apologizing for her error in judgment and telling them that she wouldn’t be back. When she put the note into the mailbox at the corner she felt awful.

  Why had she behaved like that? Maybe it was because she hadn’t felt really useful to anyone since her summer at the Sunshine Theater. The Sunshine. She still wasn’t sure what she felt about her summer there. After she’d left Beach Haven, there was no doubt in her mind that she and Cee Cee were going to be lifelong friends, even if they did live far apart. But then she got the news of Cee Cee and John’s marriage. No, she thought. This has to be a joke. Out of nowhere. John and Cee Cee. Impossible. She felt left out and deserted. By both of them. She stayed alone in her room for days. Rosie begged her to talk about it. Finally, when Bertie wouldn’t acknowledge her mother’s presence in the room, Rosie announced in a hurt voice, “I know this has something to do with sex, Roberta, and I certainly hope you’re not in trouble.”