Beaches

by Iris R. Dart

  Cee Cee looked in every room upstairs, then every room downstairs, then walked out onto the deck, even though she knew the kid couldn’t have gotten past her to go outside.

  “Nina?” Weird.

  Cee Cee walked in her bare feet down the few steps to the beach and looked both ways. To the north, the beach was empty of people as far as she could see. To the south were a few blankets of sunbathers in the distance, but none seemed to have a child with them.

  Cee Cee walked back up to the house and checked the garage and the road outside. Maybe Nina had somehow gone out to the beach and started walking, then couldn’t find her way back or recognize the house or…

  “Nina?”

  Cee Cee was out on the deck again. Kids. Christ. What was she doing with a kid around, anyway? Kids were nothin’ but trouble, and now this pain-in-the-ass kid with her weird hung-up personality was pulling some stupid disappearin’ act and Cee Cee had to find her. Had to. Shit. She was the goddamned babysitter, for chrissake. South. If the kid had any class she would have headed south. That was where the real fancy houses were. Cee Cee decided to walk south on the beach and look for her. She walked down to the water, thinking she would have a better view of the whole beach if she walked along the shoreline.

  Nina. Where the fuck was she?

  Later, when Cee Cee told Bertie how it happened, she said she wasn’t sure what it was that made her look back at the house, but when she did, something pink and very still caught her eye. Something under the deck of the old wooden Cape Cod house.

  “Nina,” Cee Cee yelled. And then she ran toward the house.

  Nina didn’t move. Just sat staring out at the sea. She was wearing bright pink baby-doll pajamas. “You okay, kid?” Cee Cee asked, out of breath now as she fell to a sitting position on the sand a few feet away from the little girl. Nina didn’t look at her.

  “Yeah,” Nina said.

  “When’d you come out here? I didn’t even see you,” Cee Cee said.

  “You were asleep,” Nina said. “It was real early.”

  “When your mom got up?” Cee Cee asked, edging a little closer, and realizing for the first time that she was still dressed in the terry cloth robe.

  “Right after,” Nina said. “But she didn’t see me neither ’cause she was on the telephone.”

  Oh, shit, Cee Cee thought. Oh, no.

  “So did you just come right out here, or did you go downstairs and have a glass of O.J.?” Cee Cee asked, and actually crossed her fingers behind her back, hoping what she knew was true might not be.

  “Huh-uh,” Nina answered, then reached down and started picking at the toenail on the big toe of her right foot. “I didn’t want breakfast ’cause I wasn’t hungry,” she said. “So I sat on the floor in the hallway for a while.”

  “Bet you could eat a horse now though, right?” Cee Cee said. “How ’bout I make a nice big breakfast?” Cee Cee tried.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Lunch, maybe? Great big plate of spaghetti? I like spaghetti. It doesn’t like me though. Gives me thunder thighs. But I’m crazy about it. Crazy enough to take you out for some right now. Want some spaghetti?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You gonna stay here all day or what?”

  Nina nodded.

  “Forever?”

  Nina nodded again.

  “Well, you’re gonna miss a lot of real good times if you do,” Cee Cee said, pulling a cigarette out of her pocket. No matches. “Parties. Like the one we’re having on Sunday.”

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” Nina said, looking at the cigarette. “My mom stopped last year.”

  “I know,” Cee Cee said, “but I can’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m too uptight,” she answered. Christ. Now she had to answer to a kid?

  “You mean like toonies?” Nina asked, brightening.

  “What?” Cee Cee asked her.

  “Toonies uptight.”

  Cee Cee was getting very uncomfortable. It was hot and musty under the deck, and she wanted to go inside and take a shower, and then have some lunch, for chrissake. She was starving.

  “Like in the song,” Nina said.

  Cee Cee had had enough. Kids could manipulate you after a while, just by pouting, and this one wanted to sit here under the goddamn deck and chat. She was just about to get up and say, Listen, you little brat, you woke up, you tiptoed around, and you probably heard your mother begging your father to meet you and you’re pissed off ’cause he said no. Well, you know what? Life is tough. Real tough. But as she started to stand, the meaning came to her.

  “You mean ‘Ballin’ the Jack’?” she asked Nina. “That song?”

  “Uh-huh,” Nina said. “I learned it in my dancing school class.”

  “You swing ’em to the left and you swing ’em to the right,” Cee Cee said, and Nina smiled, and then they both sang:

  Step around the floor kinda nice and light.

  And Cee Cee deliberately stopped as Nina’s perfect little voice sang:

  And then you twist around and twist around with all your might.

  Nina, proud of herself, grinned a grin Cee Cee hadn’t seen on her ever before. It was Bertie’s grin.

  “I learned it in my dancing school class, too,” Cee Cee said. “Did you do this with your hands?” she asked, holding her hands up to her face as if they were a frame.

  “No. We did this,” Nina said, putting her little hands on her little hips.

  “Why don’t you come up to the deck,” Cee Cee said, “and I’ll show you the way I learned it.”

  Nina got up slowly and shook the sand from her legs and the seat of her pajamas.

  “Race you,” she said.

  THE POLO LOUNGE WAS buzzing with people talking and laughing, and every table Bertie could see was full. She felt queasy and shaky and afraid. It was five years since she’d seen Michael. He sat at the bar facing away from the door. She looked for a moment at the curly hair, now with a lot of gray in it, and the spot on the back of his head which had been balding a tiny bit, showed much more scalp than she remembered. Then, as if he felt her looking at him, Michael turned, saw her, smiled, and stood.

  They walked toward one another and hugged, a formal hug. His smell, and the feeling of his arms, even the coldness of the hug felt familiar to Bertie. The maître d’ led them to a table in a far corner.

  “Well, how are you?” Michael asked, after a moment. And for that second, it seemed to Bertie as if he honestly wanted to know.

  “I’m good,” Bertie said. “This meeting feels a little odd, but I’m good.”

  A defensive look crossed Michael’s eyes. “Bert, you called me,” he said.

  Bertie wanted so badly to be cool. To say the right thing. To be able, without a scene, to let him know how she felt. Michael, of course it’s odd. You’re the absent father of our six-year-old child. She looks like you, behaves like you, reminds me every day of my life when I look at her that you’re not there and haven’t once seen her face or let her see yours. And every time she asks me why you don’t come to see her, I want to shriek, don’t ask me. Call him. Your father. Call the cold, withholding, repressed, self-important son of a bitch, and ask him why he won’t.

  But instead, Bertie put her hand over his and told him how glad she was to see him and how good she thought he looked. His eyes softened and the waitress came, and they ordered Bloody Marys. After they’d each had one and Michael ordered another round, he looked down at the table and asked Bertie, “What does she know about me?”

  “That you left before she was born, so it had nothing to do with her. That you’re a very busy man and that’s why you’ve never come to see her, and that maybe someday you will.” Bertie hoped he couldn’t hear the pleading in her voice.

  Michael didn’t say anything. Just took the pink Sweet’n Low packs from the little green holder and made small piles of them across the table in front of his place.

  “That’s true, I guess.
I mean, maybe someday I will.”

  Once when Bertie was in the third grade she saw a tough boy in her class, Daniel McNally, twist the arm of Sharon Acklin, who screamed, and then Donny Kraft took the girl’s other arm and twisted it. Bertie was horrified, and she ran at both boys with such fierce anger that even though she was a tiny little girl, she frightened them away. Later, when she described the event to her mother, she said she was always so afraid of those boys herself that she wasn’t sure what had made her suddenly so brave. Rosie laughed and told her that sometimes it was easier to have guts for someone else. Now she would have guts for Nina.

  “How about today, Michael? How about now? This week? Please. Not for me. Not for you—but for Nina. Even if it’s just so in school, when the kids make Father’s Day cards, she can make one, too, and send it off to you. She needs that, Michael. Just that little bit. I promise I won’t ask for more.”

  Michael’s face reddened.

  “No,” he said. “I told you my answer this morning on the phone. I thought about it all night, Bert, and I’m sorry, I don’t feel like she’s my child. I’ll support her all of her life, but I don’t have any feelings about her and I don’t want to.”

  Bertie sat for a moment, letting what he’d just said really sink in. Wanting to remember how hateful he was so she’d never in a weak moment think their divorce was a mistake. Then she stood.

  “Is the visit over?” Michael asked.

  Bertie didn’t respond. She made her way to the door of the Polo Lounge and out through the pink and green lobby of the hotel.

  “OKAY, SIT DOWN. Sit down, Mom. Sit down.”

  “Bert, for chrissake. Sit down and get ready for this.”

  “You all right, Mom? Sit down. Watch me. Watch this.”

  “Bert…you okay?”

  Bertie could only nod as Nina and Cee Cee pulled her to the deck chair, and then, full out, with the glorious ocean waves smashing to the shore as their backdrop, Cee Cee, in her green terry-cloth robe, a bathroom plunger for her cane, and Nina, still in her pink baby-doll pajamas, a yardstick from the local hardware store for her cane, sang:

  First you put your two knees close up tight…

  Michael. How could a man not want to see, even for a moment, a child he’d created?

  Then you swing ’em to the left

  And ya swing ’em to the right…

  Nina sang in her little girl version of Cee Cee’s soul voice. Cee Cee winked at Bertie as the two of them moved into the dance steps.

  Step around the floor kinda nice and light…

  And now they both shimmied. Nina wasn’t exactly sure how, but it was a good try.

  Twist around and twist around

  With all your might…

  That was a conversation she had waited nearly seven years to have. Always harboring the hope that there was some part of Michael that was loving or warm or tender and would reach out for Nina. The hopelessness of the situation began to depress her, but she stopped it, caught herself, shook it off, and refused to let it hurt.

  Fuck him, Bertie thought. It will be all right. We’ll be all right. It doesn’t matter what he does, and she grinned to herself, and then at her daughter, and at her very best wonderful friend.

  Nina was only as high as Cee Cee’s waist, and the picture of the two of them doing the same steps was the cutest thing Bertie had ever seen. Both Hollywood performers raised their arms, holding their canes above their heads, and then they did big high kicks.

  Spread your lovin’ arms way out in space

  And then do the eagle rock

  With style and grace…

  A few people had gathered on the beach below and were watching the musical number from the back.

  You put your left foot out

  And bring it back…

  Then Cee Cee gave Nina a nudge with her elbow, and Nina sang:

  And that’s what I call…

  Then Cee Cee sang:

  And that’s what I call…

  And then they sang together:

  And that’s what we call ballin’…

  And they did a spin.

  Ballin’ the jack!!!!!

  Their arms were in the air and their happy voices rang loud and true.

  The people on the beach applauded. Cee Cee and Nina bowed and hugged one another. Bertie gave them a standing ovation.

  After the “Three Musketeerettes,” as they decided to call themselves, had a lemonade and some sun, they went out to buy a few little things for Sunday’s party. Some beer, some soft drinks, some nuts for nibbling. Next to the supermarket was the Malibu kid’s store. Cee Cee saw Nina looking in the window at the clothes. While Bertie and the boy pushing the grocery cart walked out of the Market Basket and to the car where they unloaded the bags into the trunk, Cee Cee got Nina to try on, admit she looked great in, and decide maybe she’d been wrong about, jeans. And then, just so she’d have something new to wear to the party on Sunday, Cee Cee bought her a pair.

  DEAR AUNT CEE CEE,

  THIS IS A THANK YOU NOTE FOR ALL THE PRESENTS YOU SENT ME ON MY BIRTHDAY. I LIKE THE SWEATSHIRT THAT SAYS ROLLING STONES ON IT THE BEST. I LIKE THE EARRINGS BUT MY MOM SAYS I CAN’T WEAR THEM TILL I’M A LOT OLDER. THE GOLD TIGHTS WERE SO GOOD. AND THE FEATHER THING THAT MY MOM SAYS IS A BOA. AND I REMEMBER THAT BECAUSE IT IS LONG LIKE THE BOA THAT MRS. LIEBMAN MY TEACHER SOMETIMES CARRIES AROUND HER NECK NAMED LUMPY.

  LOVE,

  NINA B.

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  oooooooooooooooooooooooo

  Dear Bert,

  I tried to call you last night and that babysitter there said something about your being in the hospital. Then when I asked what hospital she got all weird and wouldn’t tell me anything. Hope you were just visiting a sick friend.

  I’ll call again tonight.

  Meanwhile, watch Channel Four next Thursday because Sarah! is on, and you can sing along with Cee Cee, and if you let her stay up that late, Nina can watch me ham it up, too.

  I just signed to do a new picture opposite Burt Reynolds. It’s a great part and the studio says they’re going to promote the shit out of it. So things are looking good for me, kiddo. My weight is down and my hopes are up. (That sentence shows you why I sing and act and don’t write for a living.)

  Come visit and I’ll introduce you to Burt Reynolds. You two would be cute together. When you got married it would say Burt and Bertie on your cocktail napkins.

  C.

  SARASOTA JUNIOR DANCE GROUP SPRING RECITAL

  SLEEPY TIME GALS…

  Erin Laughlin, Maria Dawes, Marcia Carsey.

  HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY…

  Stacey Bishop.

  RAT-A-TAT-TAT…

  Bobby Lennox, Richard Dean, Mike Halloran.

  TAPPERS ON PARADE…

  Susan Moll, Heidi Brotman, Nina Barron, Gail Andrews.

  Dear Cee—

  She was terrific.

  B.

  CARMEL, CALIFORNIA

  1983

  In a matter of minutes, fueled by exhilaration, Cee Cee was guiding the big Chevy down the highway, approaching the Ocean Avenue turnoff. Shit, she didn’t have those written directions with her anymore. Must have left them in the house. And she wasn’t sure she remembered the name of the street now, or even if she’d recognize the house. Right turn on Ocean. But what was it? Ahh. Carmelo. And left and…This time she didn’t take her suitcase out of the car because she was rushing.

  When she pushed the front door open, the fire in the fireplace was dwindling and Jessica was no longer in the living room.

  “Hello,” Cee Cee called out, hoping the nurse would hear her, but that she wouldn’t disturb Bertie. She walked up the stairs. The bedroom door was closed. The bathroom door opened and Jessica emerged. She looked surprised to see Cee Cee.

  “Why, I thought you were…”

  “Jessica,” Cee Cee said, feeling the flame of her conviction rising in her cheeks. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re fired.
”

  The older woman’s eyes opened wide and she looked blankly at Cee Cee.

  “I mean, Bertie doesn’t need you here. Won’t be needing you here anymore, because I’m here, and I’m gonna do it and I’m her friend. So that way it won’t be so nursey, Jessica, it’ll be friendly because…”

  Cee Cee was crying, and Jessica pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her white uniform and handed it to her. Cee Cee wiped her eyes and went on. “Because I love her,” she said. “So you’ll have to teach me to be her primary-care giver. You and Janice. About pills and bathroom detail and rubdowns and CPR, whatever that is. And I guess you’ll even have to teach me what to do when she finally hits the road,” she said, not believing these words were coming from her mouth. “Like the details about who I gotta call to come and get the remains.” That thought made her shiver, but she went on. “You know what I’m sayin’, Jessica? I mean I’m talkin’ about me doin’ the whole enchilada. On my own.” Cee Cee blew her nose into Jessica’s handkerchief.

  “That’s very lovely,” the nurse said, “but are you sure you—”

  “Sure?” Cee Cee said, and laughed a little laugh. “Let me put it this way, hon. Once, when I was a kid, a bird fell off a wire, and I watched it die on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. I was twelve, and that was the only dead creature I’ve ever seen in my whole life before or since. I say the only one because when my mother died, by the time I got back from summer stock to the funeral, there was this closed coffin. You know? It coulda been empty for all I knew. And the other people I knew who died? I was too chicken to go to their funerals. Thought it was too spooky. Too weird. So that’s my experience with the dyin’. What I’m tryin’ to tell ya is, that I’m not sure one bit, and in fact I don’t have a clue here. So do me a favor, okay, and lay it on me real slow and careful. And get ready to hear the dumbest questions you ever heard, and for me to make like there’s no way in America I’m ever gonna get through it. And for me to make dumb mistakes, and maybe even puke ’cause I’m scared or turned off or both.”