I'll Be There
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Nina shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me.” Again there was silence. “When Cee Cee acts that way at home, how do you deal with it?” “I don’t.”
“Do you hide?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it hiding, but 1 try to stay away from her.”
“And what do you do the other times? The times when you can’t stay away?”
“The other times… I guess I tell her what I know she wants to hear.”
“Good heavens!” Florrie Kagan, the family therapist Cee Cee had tracked down after frantic phone calls all over town, sat back in her chair, and Nina saw a pleased-with-herself expression on the woman’s face that meant she thought she’d found an inroad. “You must have to play a role all the time. What role do you play with her?”
Nina took a long look at her. The woman was about Cee Cee’s age, but much prettier with pouffy blond hair and giant piercing blue eyes. She wore a sweater that came down past her narrow hips over a long skirt and boots. “Is it the role of the people-pleaser, or the role of the good daughter? Tell me who you play.” Nina wasn’t sure where this was going or even what she was going to answer, until she heard it
come out of herself as she said it. “I play my mother.” “What does that mean?”
“It means I guess I act like I’m her friend who thinks she’s great. Her loyal, perfect friend.”
“And that’s who you think your mother was to Cee Cee?” “I know that’s who she was.” “What happened to your mother?” Nina looked down at her lap.
“You know what, Nina? I just saw a wall come down. This must
be so hard for you. How did your morn die?”
Nina didn’t look up.
“Nina. I know this must be tough. Can you tell me what happened to your mom?”
“She died of cancer.”
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“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“How long was the process of dying?” “She was sick off and on for two years.” “Did you realize what was happening?”
Nina spoke but didn’t look up. “At the end.., she had this plan? To go off to Carmel? So I wouldn’t have to see her the way she wasl when she was real bad at the end. But Cee Cee went to Carmel to be with her and Cee Cee told her she had to send for me. So she did and
I got to be with her for the last few months.”
“And how was that for you?”
“Well, you can trust me, it wasn’t the prom,” she said, and as her answer rang through the office she thought how much she sounded like Cee Cee.
“Did you have a chance to say goodbye?”
“At the time I didn’t even know what that meant. I guess I always
thought she was going to come back.”
“And now?”
Nina’s eyes looked up, but far away and not at the doctor. “Now I know she’s not.”
“Nina, these are tough times for kids your age in terms of the availability of drugs and the peer pressure to use. Cee Cee called me because she found cocaine in your room, which you said you didn’t know was there. Do you know of any of your friends who are using?”
“Do you know any kids at your school who are?”
“I’m sure it’s around,” she said, “but …” She shrugged as an end to the sentence.
“You and Cee Cee have been through quite a few painful experiences together. Your mother’s death, your father’s abandonment, Cee Cee’s personal problems and career problems. All very heavy for a girl your age. Can you talk about any of that?”
Cee Cee sat in the waiting room staring at the same page in Better Homes and Gardens she’d been staring at for the last fifteen minutes, her insides throbbing with fear, knowing this could be a turning point from which she and Nina might never come back. A break between them that could never be repaired. She remembered the way it hap
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pened with Leona. How one day in 1956 or ‘57 she had looked at her mother and said to herself, I’ll tolerate my life with her until I can get the fuck out, but that’s it. I’ll never tell her one more thing about me. Never let myself care about her, never. Never confide in her or let her know who 1 am. And now she had the agonizing certainty that Nina was not only having those feelings about her, but was taking drugs to dull the pain.
When after nearly an hour had passed and the door from the inner office opened, Cee Cee jumped to her feet, and after Florrie gestured gently for her to come in, she walked slowly toward the inner office wondering what had transpired while she’d been sitting out there imagining the worst.
“Cee Cee, Nina says she thinks you’re overreacting. She says she doesn’t use drugs and has even agreed to be tested to prove it. What do you think of that?”
I think she’s lying through her perfectly straight teeth, Cee Cee thought, then thought, Thank you, God, then wasn’t sure what she thought. “What do you think of that?” she asked the lady shrink.
“Well, I suggested that even though there may not be drugs involved, the two of you might want to continue to come in here together a few times just to work on your relationship, and she agreed to that.”
“She did?” Cec Cee’s heart jumped with hope. Nina’s face was expressionless.
“How about if we set a time in a week or so for the two of you to come back?” Florrie asked.
Nina nodded. Florrie opened a calendar book and mentioned some possible appointment times. None of them were good for Cee Cee, who was scheduled up to her ears at work, but she didn’t say that. “Whichever one is good for Nina is good for me.” Nina picked a Friday appointment in a week at three thirty.
That week was crazy busy for Cee Cee. The Oscar nomination had created a flurry of events in her career, offers to field, magazine layouts to do, phone calls from Barbara Walters wanting her to tape a show in a few days which would run on Oscar night. Thankfully, and unusually, everything at home was so calm and almost back to pleasant, she didn’t even mention the idea of drug testing for fear of stirring up an argument.
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“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“How long was the process of dying?” “She was sick off and on for two years.” “Did you realize what was happening?”
Nina spoke but didn’t look up. “At the end.., she had this plan? To go off to Carmel? So I wouldn’t have to see her the way she was when she was real bad at the end. But Cee Cee went to Carmel to be with her and Cee Cee told her she had to send for me. So she did and
I got to be with her for the last few months.”
“And how was that for you?”
“Well, you can trust me, it wasn’t the prom,” she said, and as her answer rang through the office she thought how much she sounded like Cee Cee.
“Did you have a chance to say goodbye?”
“At the time I didn’t even know what that meant. I guess I always
thought she was going to come back.”
“And now?”
Nina’s eyes looked up, but far away and not at the doctor. “Now I know she’s not.”
“Nina, these are tough times for kids your age in terms of the availability of drugs and the peer pressure to use. Cee Cee called me because she found cocaine in your room, which you said you didn’t know was there. Do you know of any of your friends who are using?”
“No.”
“Do you know any kids at your school who are?”
“I’m sure it’s around,” she said, “but…” She shrugged as an end to the sentence.
“You and Cee Cee have been through quite a few painful experiences together. Your mother’s death, your father’s abandonment, Cee Cee’s personal problems and career problems. All very heavy for a girl your age. Can you talk about any of that?”
“No.”
Cee Cee sat in the waiting room staring at the same page in Better Homes and Gardens she’d been staring at for the last fiftee
n minutes, her insides throbbing with fear, knowing this could be a turning point from which she and Nina might never come back. A break between them that could never be repaired. She remembered the way it hap
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pened with Leona. How one day in 1956 or ‘57 she had looked at her mother and said to herself, I’ll tolerate my life with her until I can get the fuck out, but that’s it. I’ll never tell her one more thing about me. Never let myself care about her, never. Never confide in her or let her know who I am. And now she had the agonizing certainty that Nina was not only having those feelings about her, but was taking drugs to dull the pain.
When after nearly an hour had passed and the door from the inner office opened, Cee Cee jumped to her feet, and after Florric gestured gently for her to come in, she walked slowly toward the inner office wondering what had transpired while she’d been sitting out there imagining the worst.
“Cee Cee, Nina says she thinks you’re overreacting. She says she doesn’t use drugs and has even agreed to be tested to prove it. What do you think of that?”
I think she’s lying through her perfectly straight teeth, Cee Cee thought, then thought, Thank you, God, then wasn’t sure what she thought. “What do you think of that?” she as[ed the lady shrink.
“Well, I suggested that even though there may not be drugs involved, the two of you might want to continue to come in here together a few times just to work on your relationship, and she agreed to that.”
“She did?” Cee Cee’s heart jumped with hope. Nina’s face was expressionless.
“How about if we set a time in a week or so for the two of you to come back?” Florrie asked.
Nina nodded. Florrie opened a calendar book and mentioned some possible appointment times. None of them were good for Cee Cee, who was scheduled up to her ears at work, but she didn’t say that. “Whichever one is good for Nina is good for me.” Nina picked a Friday appointment in a week at three thirty.
That week was crazy busy for Cee Cee. The Oscar nomination had created a flurry of events in her career, offers to field, magazine layouts to do, phone calls from Barbara Waiters wanting her to tape a show in a few days which would run on Oscar night. Thankfully, and unusually, everything at home was so calm and almost back to pleasant, she didn’t even mention the idea of drug testing for fear of stirring up an argument.
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In fact, she was starting to feel as if maybe the whole drug thing had been her paranoia, another example of her going too far, and that finding the drugs one of those bratty little girls had hidden in Nina’s room had been God’s way of getting the two of them to counseling so their mother-daughter problems could get fixed. On the morning of the appointment with Doctor Kagan, the shrink, Cce Cee told Nina she would pick her up at school at three o’clock.
She was early so she was able to get a parking spot right in front of the school where she sat for a while thinking about what the two of them might say to one another in today’s session, feeling hopeful that things between them were on the mend. It was hot in the car, so after a while she got out and leaned against the door and watched the kids pouring out of the building. For a long time her eyes followed one particular group of girls who were a little older than Nina, walking along laughing and talking, and she was impressed with how womanly and sophisticated they seemed. More sophisticated than she had ever been at that age. At any age, she thought to herself, and wondered how those girls got along with their parents. In another passing group she noticed a tall straight-haired blond girl dressed in a plaid skirt and green sweater who was clearly the focal point of her friends. The girl was talking away and gesturing, and as she did, Cee Cee noticed that on the third finger of her right hand was Bertie’s emerald ring.
The answer, the cash. That’s how she got it. Goddammit. Goddamn her. I won’t fucking have it. A crashing rush of adrenaline flooded through her. Stop it, she told herself. You’re imagining things. The girl had walked by pretty fast, so she could be mistaken. There were a lot of emerald rings in the world. In fact the emerald was the birthstone for the month of May, so maybe the girl’s birthday was in May and it was her own ring, which just happened to resemble Her tie’s from a distance. But instead of staying by her parked car where she had promised Nina she’d meet her, Cee Cee moved quickly after the girl and her friends who were now about a half a block away. You’re crazy, she told herself, you’re going to make an asshole of yourself and of Nina because you’re a certifiable lock-up case.
“Hi, Nance,” she heard a boy’s voice yell from across the street, and Cee Cee saw the girl who was wearing the ring raise a hand high
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to wave at the boy. The wave gave Cee Cee another look at the ring, and this time, even from the distance, she was sure it was Bertie’s ring. Nina’s ring. Now she moved faster, and when she was a few feet behind the girls who had now turned the corner she shouted, “Nancy!” The girl turned around to look at her and so did her three friends. Cee Cee noticed the friends exchange looks when they saw who had stopped them. When they realized it was Cee Cee Bloom, not just anybody’s mother but a movie star, they looked nervous. That gave Cee Cee enough of a feeling of power to move closer to the girl
with the ring, who, she could now see, looked as guilty as sin.
“I need to talk to you,” Cee Cee said.
“Okay,” the girl replied and gave one of those nods to the others that a gangleader in a bad crime movie gives to the gang to tell them “It’s okay to leave, but don’t go too far away, just in case.”
Cee Cee braced herself as the girl walked farther down the block next to her, with a brash confident walk that only a girl who looks that good can, and the minute the other girls were out of earshot she said, “She told me it belonged to her, not you. That she needed the money. She said that her real mother left it to her when she died so she could do whatever she wanted with it.”
“She told you the truth,” Cee Cee said, looking down at the girl’s perfect hand holding on to a history book, and there was the ring, looking just the way it had once looked on Bertie. Cee Cee flashed on that time in Miami when she’d spotted the ring on Neetie’s hand and had gone bananas over it, and how that night when they had arrived at home in Malibu and Nina put the ring back into her musical pink ballerina jewelry box that plunked out “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” she had thanked Cee Cee gratefully for retrieving it.
For so many years Nina’s hand had been too small to wear the beautiful piece of jewelry on her ring finger, even with ring guards, but last year she tried it on and came running in to Cee Cee’s room to show her that it fit her on the same finger where Bertie had always worn it, and it was like a rite of passage. Coincidentally, two days later she got her first menstrual period. Since then she’d worn the ring for special occasions, always when she did stopping frequently to look down at her hand to admire it.
“It did belong to her. But her mother was my best friend, and it
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belonged to her grandmother first, and it would mean a lot if you would sell it back to me.”
The girl sighed a sigh which said, I don’t want to do what you’rel asking, but you’re an adult and if I don’t you’ll probably start a big stink about it.
“How much did you pay for it?” Cee Ccc pressed.
“Seven hundred dollars.” The goddamned ring was worth a hell of a lot more than that.
‘I’ll give you nine hundred.” The girl was pouting and looked as if she was thinking about giving Cee Cee a hard time. “I don’t have that much cash on me,” Cee Cee apologized, knowing the girl might just get up and storm away if she didn’t handle her properly. “But if you give me the ring now, I’ll have my secretary meet you here tomorrow at this time on this spot with the money.”
As if she was ending an engagement, the girl reluctantly slid the ring from her finger and
handed it over to Cee Cee. “Tomorrow at this time on this spot,” she said looking into Cee Cee’s eyes.
“You got it,” Cee Cee said, and turned to go when the girl’s voice stopped her.
“She threw this into the deal too.”
Cee Cee turned back. In the girl’s hand was a compact. It had fake rhinestones on the lid, and had been a gift from someone at the studio to Cee Cee for Christmas. Kept in her room, in her own jewelry box. The kind of glitzy item teenagers liked, and Nina had taken it to sweeten the deal when she sold the ring. Stole it from Cee Cee and sold it. It was hard for Cee Cee to think those words. When she got back to her car, stinging with the ugly truth, Nina was sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for her.
“Where’d you go?” Nina asked.
“Down the street,” Cee Cee answered and got into the car.
In Doctor Kagan’s waiting room, Cee Cee, too numb to even think about what she was going to say when they got inside the office with the cool I’ve-seen-it-all lady doctor, watched through a veil of fear as Nina paged through some schoolbook, a legitimate way to aw)id conversation with Cee Cee. She was wearing a nearly angelic look on her face, and looking at her sitting there, Cee Cee remembered when she was a kid and Leona took her to see Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed
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on Broadway. When the mother in the play realized her child was a murderer passing herself off as an innocent, the look Nancy Kelly who played the part wore on her face had to be the same one Cee Cee wore now. Stiff, pained, shocked, hurt.
“Well, now,” Florrie said, leading them into her office, and Cee Cee felt a terror of what would happen next, because she knew she was about to break open the blister of lies that would have to release the poison into their lives. Had to tell Nina now that she knew her secret. And after she did there was no outcome she could imagine that wouldn’t be painful. Every ending for the scene she had played in her mind as she drove blindly to Brentwood and parked and rode up in the elevator to this office was horrible.