the kid, “situated conveniently in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. And,” he added, while Cee Cee sat there, knowitg things were going very wrong but feeling unable to stop them, “I’ve already sent the school a deposit in order to hold a place for the child, since I was certain you’d agree.”
Boarding school, she wanted to scream. Who the fuck goes to boarding school, you heartless little prick? Maybe Oliver Twist, and all those other characters from Shakespeare. Not my kid. Her kid. Now that’s what was the hardest to believe about all this. To really get it into her head that this funny little pain-in-the-ass creature, this little lost soul of a girl, who was an amazing combination of Bertie’s beauty and Michael’s steel-jawed iciness, was now in the care of Cee Cee not-exactly-the-odds-on-favorite-for-Mother-of-the-Year Bloom. And here she was, already proving she was no good at it by caving like an empty beer can at a fraternity party, and by her silence, agreeing to let Nina go to boarding school.
Yeah, it was definitely because the snotty little lawyer had scared her with that stuff about contesting her right to Nina, filled her head with terrors of courtroom scenes where she had to fight Bertie’s ex husband or Bertie’s aunt, two people who would jump at the chance of flinging a little mud about Cee Cee’s past. And it was the vision of those two coming after her that had made her sit there on the phone with the guy like some spineless blob, never saying what she should have, afraid to challenge him, and now it was killing her.
Filling her with guilt, because she knew that implicit in her pitch to Bertie to give the kid to her was a deathbed promise to show Nina a world filled with the kind of passion and spontaneity Bertie knew only Cee Cee could provide. And now, because she’d let the lawyer walk all over her, she wouldn’t even be around the kid, except during school vacations. Of course those other two phone calls she’d made during that first week hadn’t exactly helped her confidence in herself either. One of them was to her agent at the William Morris office, Larry Gold, and the other one was to her business manager, Wayne Gordon.
Each of them had been real sympathetic and sweet about her friend’s dying. And why wouldn’t they be? Their percentage of her earnings over the many years they’d represented her would put all of their kids through college. But after the words of sympathy, each of
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them had warned her in an ominous voice that her exit, in the middle of production, from her television special a few months earlier had damaged her career. And now that she was coming home, if she couldn’t make peace with the network, she could find herself in a tough spot.
“They’re pissed off, Cee Cee. You walked out on them, and there’s a real good chance they’ll say they don’t want to be in The Cee Cee Bloom business anymore.” If that was true, she’d definitely have some big financial problems. Have to live off her savings for a while and sell some of her stock and hustle a little to get work. And that could mean traveling anywhere the work was happening. Maybe to make a movie in some far-off place, or worse yet put together an act to take on the road, which was not exactly the life for somebody raising a kid. Which was another reason why, even though it felt so shitty, she had agreed to let Nina go to that boarding school. At least for now.
When they had reached the southernmost end of the Carmel Beach Cee Cee looked at her watch and already felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach, just thinking about having to say goodbye to this little girl whose screaming entry into the world she had watched in the hospital delivery room so long ago. All right, so she’d only watched part of the time, until she realized how bloody it was going to be, and then she’d fainted so the nurses had to peel her up off the floor in the middle of the whole thing. But that was just a detail. The point was that she and Nina were connected very deeply from way back.
“I think we’d better hit the road, kiddo,” Cee Cee said, hearing the lack of conviction in her own voice. An old lady wearing faded jeans and a fisherman’s knit sweater walked by with two little dogs the size of mice on leashes, and one of the dogs stopped, lifted its little leg, and peed in the sand. “Good boy,” the lady said, and they walked on. Nina stood looking down at her own pretty little toes as they curled up to scrunch bunches of sand under and between them and then released the sand and did it again. This really is the best thing for her, Cee Cee thought. For now this is the best thing. But it was hard to convince herself when she looked at Nina’s tiny face, because what she really wanted to do was to zip the kid inside of her Windbreaker and hide her there forever.
Last night they’d spent hours packing up the house Bertie had
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rented in Carmel. First they organized their own things and then they went throtgh all of Bertie’s. Her personal effects. “Is there any of this you want to wear now?” Cee Cee had asked Nina, sorting through some of Bertie’s jewelry, while a kind of slide show of the times she remembered Bertie wearing each piece played itself out in her mind.
Nina took a bracelet of seed pearls out of the box and looked at it for a while, then handed it to Cee Cee, who opened the clasp and looped the delicate thing carefully around the girl’s wrist, which she needn’t have done because Nina could have easily slipped her tiny hand and wrist into the bracelet without opening it. Then both of them looked back into the box at what was clearly the most special piece of jewelry there. It was the ring Bertie had worn every day of her life since 1970, when Rosie, her own mother, died and left it to her.
It had a platinum band and a small round emerald that was such a brilliant green it always used to catch the eye of people who saw it on Bertie’s long slim finger. Nina slipped the ring over her own ring finger. “Much too big,” she said, disappointed.
“Nina, the ring is yours, and it’s insured. It’s very valuable, but if you want to wear it, I have a chain with a good safety clasp in the back, and you could wear it hanging from the chain, at least for now.”
Nina thought about it and then turned the ring over and over in her hand. “I’d like that,” she said.
Cee Cee found her chain, slippec the ring onto it, and had Nina hold her hair up so that she could fasten the chain around her neck.
“How do I look?” she asked Cee Cee, and stood to see herself in the oval pine mirror above the dresser. She was so much the picture of Bertie at that moment Cee Cee had to take a deep breath before she answered.
“More beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen.”
This morning when they got back to the house and squirted the sand from their feet with the hose at the side door, Cee Cee went inside and found her car keys on the hall table, then she picked up the small suitcases they had piled up last night in the hallway near the front door and carried them out to the car, with Nina following her carrying another, her two hands wrapped around the handle as the suitcase bumped against her legs.
When the car was loaded she climbed into the passenger seat, and
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Cee Cee went back to lock the front door of the house, remembering the first day she arrived, summoned hy Bertie, not knowing then what the reason was for the urgency, never imagining it would be months before she would leave. With Nina and without Bertie. “Goodbye, house,” she said softly. Then she got into the car, made sure Nina was bcltcd in, fastened the seat belt around hcrsclf, and started the engine of the big Chevy she’d rented the day she arrived.
“I gotta get gas,” she said, looking at the gauge on the dashboard as she pulled away from the curb, then turned the car up to Ocean Avenue, and after a while made a right turn and drove a few blocks down one of the streets of Hansel and Gretel shops, to the gas station.
“It’s a good thing we’re getting out of this place,” Cee Cee said. “I’m about to overdose on quaint. What about you?”
Nina didn’t answer. The gas station was busy and they waited in line behind a camper with the bumper sticker that said PROTI;CTEI)
BY
SMITH AND WESSON.
“How do I get to Santa Cruz?” Cee Cee asked the gas station attendant while he was cleaning the windshield. She had mostly used the big clunky car to take Bertie from the house down the few blocks to the Carmel Beach after the time had come during the illness when Bertie was too weak to walk that far. Now the gas station attendant had to push down hard on the scraper because the windshield was thick with a residue of salt air and leaves as a result of the car sitting unused for so long.
“You go up to Highway One, then get on it going north and you can’t miss it.”
“Got any maps?”
In a few minutes the man came back with a map and Cee Cee opened it, turned it and folded it, then unfolded it and muttered to herself, because she didn’t have a clue how to read it. All those little blue and red lines and numbers and letters were the same blur they always were when she looked at maps.
“Where the erring hell is Santa Cruz?” she said impatiently. “The guy must have brought me the wrong map because it’s not on here.”
“May I help?” Nina asked, and she spotted Santa Cruz on the map before the map was even in her hands, but politely took a minute to act as if she was searching for it so Cee Cee wouldn’t feel too stupid.
“Here it is,” Nina said, holding the map so Cee Cee could see it.
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“Oh yeah,” Cee Cee said. While the gas station attendant was processing her Master Charge, she tried a couple of times to refold the map to the original size, but finally she gave up and tossed the large open piece of paper over her shoulder into the backseat and started the car. Nina wasn’t saying a word, and Cee Cee knew it was up to her to saw something first, something important or reassuring, but she couldn’t think of anything so she drove through Carmel in silence.
Just as they reached the end of one of the long tree-lined residential streets and drove around the bend, the stone dome of the adobe Carmel Mission rose against the blue sky ahead of them. The mission was the place they had chosen a few days ago to have their own little memorial service for Bertie. Janice Carnes, the lady from the hospice, had been there and Jessica, the nurse who had been hired to take care of Bertie before Cee Cee came to take over, showed up too, and Made line, the cleaning girl, arrived carrying a little bouquet of flowers from her garden for Nina.
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, t
urned 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.
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