I'll Be There

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “What about Vail?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “On the break?”

  “Where?”

  “Vail, Colorado. Three years ago my morn took me there.” “Great, we’ll do it. I promise. Whatever you want.”

  “Ever been skiing?” Nina asked, and she took her dark glasses out of her little purse and put them on as the car chugged into the sunny day.

  “Moi? Are you joking? The thinnest book in the world is called Jewish Downhill Racers. May I quote my beloved friend Joan Rivers,

  18

  IRI RAINER DART

  who said, ‘I won’t participate in any sport that has an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.’”

  “Then I guess Vail’s out,” Nina said quietly.

  God, I’m a rat, Cee Cee thought. Like Miss Hannigan in Annie, or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. One of those villains in children’s stories who treat kids like dirt, but what in the hell else can I do? Santa Cruz. It’ll have to be okay. Just for now. She would explore the school with Nina, look it over, help her unpack, maybe even have lunch with her, and by the time she called tonight, the kid would be all settled in, with roommates and a whole new crew of pals, and that’s how it was supposed to be. Other parents did this. Families with real mothers and fathers sent kids away to school all the time because they thought it was good for the kids.

  “Ever snorkeled?” Nina asked.

  “Is that where they stick a tank on your back and you dive down and look at a fish?”

  “No. That’s scuba diving. Snorkeling is easy. You wear a little mask with a breathing tube, and mostly float on the surface of the water. It’s like watching fish on television.”

  “If I want to watch fish on television I’ll tune into The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” Cee Cee joked.

  “So much for Hawaii,” Nina said quietly.

  They were nearly at the turnoff to the school before Nina spoke again.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” she asked with real concern in her voice.

  “About what?”

  “Thanksgiving break.”

  “You know, I’ll bet you’re not goi’g to believe this,” Cee Cee said, “but at that time of year? November? There are very few places that can compare to Las Vegas.”

  Nina looked at Cee Cee’s face, and when she realized she’d been teasing, she smiled, and Cee Cee did too, and they held hands over the console.

  “We’ll work it out, kiddo,” Cee Cee told her. “I swear to God, we’ll work it out.”

  I’LL BE THERE

  19

  The school in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, on its acres of land with its college-like grounds, intimidated Cee Cee. Just the idea of a place where all those kids knew so much more than she did made her uneasy. In her own life, school had always been the place where she was either in trouble with the teachers because she’d been cutting to go into the city to auditions, or where she was thought of as a tap-dancing weirdo by the other kids. That was why she was quiet during the entire tour today, worrying the whole time that the headmistress who led them from building to building might ask her some question she couldn’t answer. Nina, as always, was aloof, her little face strained with feigned interest.

  “The amphitheater. Our productions of the classics are known for the authenticity of their costume and scene design. Recently we had productions of both Sophocles’ and Anouilh’s Antigones. I’m sure, Miss Bloom, that you, with your theatrical orientation, would have appreciated the detail and care with which they were mounted.”

  Yeah, sure. Sophocles and Anouilh, Cee Cee thought. I never got past Dick and Jane.

  “Are you interested in the theater?” Miss McCullough asked Nina. “I like movies better.”

  “We have a film society here. And what film is your favorite?”

  “Jilted, starring Cee Cee Bloom,” Nina said, and Cee Cee wanted to kiss her cute face.

  “Private bathrooms,” Cee Cee said after the tour. She was sitting on the chair across from the bed in Nina’s new dormitory room. She could see the sprawling campus all green and lush through the open window, and the parking lot in the distance, where the Chevy and its contents waited for her.

  “Cee Cee, they just showed us a huge science hall, a polo field, a language lab, and a big amphitheater, and all you keep talking about is the fact that the dorm rooms have private bathrooms.”

  “Hey, I’m impressed. You’re looking at someone who didn’t have a bathroom to herself till she was twenty-nine.”

  Nina was slowly and painstakingly making the single bed, lifting each corner of the light mattress in order to tuck in the hospital corners. Bertie had taught her to do that and everything else perfectly. Cee Cee tried to imagine the proper and orderly life Nina

  20

  IRIS RAINER DART

  would live here just to console herself, but still she felt like a rotten shit.

  Earlier in the week Cee Cee had called Hal Lieberman in Los Angeles. He was house-sitting at her place in Brentwood and she told him the news about Bertie’s death, knowing he was someone she could trust with her raw feelings. A mensch, her mother would have called him.

  “Cee, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to make your return here easier?” Hal’s own home was a studio apartment containing a bed, a chest of drawers, and the baby grand his grandfather gave him for his bar mitzvah, so he had readily accepted the assignment to stay at Cee Cee’s big, roomy rented house.

  “Keep the porchlight burning,” she told him. “I’m dropping Nina at school and coming home to try and glue my life back together. Am I still in the business?”

  “Are you kidding? You are the business,” he joked, then added gently: “Don’t be too tough on yourself. Everything will shake out and be okay.” Shake out and be okay. No chance. She was copping out on her promise to an orphan, how could anything make that okay?

  “Neen, this place is lovely,” she said, sounding like Jayne Meadows describing a float in the Rose Bowl Parade. “The classrooms are fancy, the other kids look great, you’ll wear the lovely plaid uniform so you don’t have to think about clothes every day. And that lovely woman who gave us the tour, seemed so…”

  “Cee,” Nina said stonefaced, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but anytime you use the word lovely three times in one breath … I know you’re freaked out. But it’s okay. I’ll settle in here. I’ll be with lots of kids, and you can call and tell me all your adventures, and I’ll mark off the days on the calendar until our trip to Las Vegas. You’d better pull yourself together or you’re going to hurt your career even more.”

  That little face. Those big-girl words coming out of that little sweet face, that look in her eyes which, now that Nina had removed the sunglasses, Cee Cee could see looked too old for someone so young.

  “You’re amazing,” Cee Cee said. “So amazing you make me feel like a complete jackass. And it must be in your blood, because your mother had a way of doing that to me too. On a regular basis.” She walked to Nina and hugged her and gave her a little kiss on the top of the head, and as she did she inhaled the sweet clean smell of the

  I’LL BE THERE

  21

  little girl’s hair. Then she held her at arm’s length and said, “I promise I’ll call you every day,” then, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she turned and walked out of the room. When she was about halfway down the hall, she thought she heard Nina say, in a voice that sounded like it was pushing to come off as cavalier, “Once a week will probably do it.” But she kept walking and when she got outside the building and moved toward her car, she could feel in the back of her neck that Nina was watching her from the window.

  For a while she sat behind the wheel, looking back at the school buildings, so torn apart she couldn’t even start the car. Finally she did and she drove slowly away, back to Highway 1 and south, this time toward the Monterey Peninsula Airport, with the memory of Nina’s little face lodged in t
he front of her brain and a burr of sadness stuck in her heart.

  According to the clock on the dashboard of the Chevy she was early, so she pulled into the parking lot of Del Monte Aviation, where she sat for a while looking out at all of the airplanes, then with a resigned deep breath she made herself get out of the car and walk around to the trunk, which she opened so she could take out the box wrapped in white paper.

  “Dying and flying,” she said, “my two biggest phobias, and you, the woman who called herself my best friend, have managed to make sure I had to deal with both of them at the same time. Well, don’t worry, Bert. I fully intend to get back at you for this, as soon as I find out how to reach you from Shirley MacLaine.” Then she got back into the car, put the box on the passenger seat, and sat looking out at the rows of private airplanes parked just beyond the fence, and finally too aware of its presence to ignore it, she .looked at the box again, leaned over, and tore at the wrapping paper to uncover the package inside. Then, filled with a mixture of horror and curiosity, she pulled up on the lid, and unwound the top of the plastic bag inside the box.

  The color. The first thing that struck her was the color. Not black or gray the way she pictured it would look. Not at all like cigarette ashes. But a light color. Like chopped coral, or seashells. Coarse and uneven pieces of what looked like.., oh God. Bones. She closed her eyes.

  “Bert,” she said, “I always told you I loved you to pieces, but I

  22

  IRIS RAINER DART

  didn’t mean as small as these.” Hearing herself say that made he laugh, a horrified laugh at her own black humor. The kirid Berti, loved. And she knew Bertie would have laughed her ass off at that What would ever be funny again? Hysterical, the way things used t be when she was with Bertie. Even things that didn’t seem funm when she was alone, somehow, when they were together, could makq them both laugh like idiots. Like that dopey running gag they had fo years where Cee Cee would say, “If one of us dies, I’m moving t Miami Beach.” It had been Nathan and Leona’s joke that Cee Cee usec to overhear all the time when she was a kid. And after she told it t Bertie, the two of them had adopted it as their own.

  One night when she wasn’t kidding,, but long before she ever go sick, Bertie said, “Cee, you know I was thinking recently, | hope I di before you do.” It must have been one of those times Cee Cee wa, visiting her in Sarasota. Yeah. It was one of those conversations they had until four in the morning. Bertie was real maudlin that night, probably because she was pregnant and her hormones were on the fritz. And after talking the night away they had decided to make some popcorn because it was a low-calorie snack. Of course they’d smothered it in butter and Cee Cee had washed hers down with a little Sara Lee chocolate cake she’d found in the freezer and defrosted in the oven. “Because if you ever died first and I was still on this earth without you, I’d be miserable.”

  “I’ll tell you what, kiddo,” Cee Cee had offered, polishing off the last bite of the cake, “just to make sure that doesn’t happen, if I ever get real sick.., we’ll have you killed.” Bertie had laughed a lot at that one. So look what happened. She got her wish. She died first and it was Cee Cee who was left to go on without her. And now they wouldn’t get old together the way they always swore they would, from the time they had noticed two little old ladies together, walking arm and arm down a street, maybe it was in Hawaii.

  One of the ladies walked with the help of a cane, and the other one was very rounded forward at the shoulders, so it wasn’t exactly clear which of the two was holding the other up, and Bertie had elbowed Cee Cee, making her stop and look at the ladies, and whispered, “That’s us in fifty years.” Now there wouldn’t be any Bertie in fifty years to hold her up and walk slowly with her when nobody else wanted to. No Bertie who would remind her to suck in her stomach

  I’LL BE THERE

  2 3

  when she forgot, or to tell her when she had lipstick on her teeth, or food on her chin, or to point out that one of her shoulder pads had slipped back so far she looked like Quasimodo, or that she was acting too desperate with some man, or spending too much money on dumb things. No Bertie who believed in her, and always had from the day they met. She used to sign her letters YOUR FAN CLUB, B.W.B. And it wasn’t just because she believed in Cee Cee’s future as a star the way Leona did. Bertie believed in Cee Cee as a person. Bertie had pressured her to stop snorting cocaine. Shrieked at her in an unBertie-like way to stop destroying herself because she had too much to offer the world, and Cee Cee had stopped.

  Well, maybe she’d slid back to it after that once or twice, but it was always Bertie’s letters to her begging PLEASE, CEE, YOUR TALENT IS SO BIG, DON’T DO SOMETHING THAT WILL EAT AWAY AT IT! that had helped her to feel strong, knowing in order to accomplish what she wanted to do, she had to force herself to be more disciplined. It had changed her life having Bertie out there to remind her, pound into her head the reasons she needed to stay away from cocaine, avoid pig-outs on food, and be sure to keep the list of passionate strangers short, though that one was the easiest to control, since the number of volunteers was so small.

  “Do what I do,” Bertie said, advising her about men.

  “I do do what you do, honey, and it’s lonelier than hell.”

  “Find other outlets. For example two nights a week, I’m taking a course on how to repair my car.”

  “The only way they’ll get me under a car is with the mechanic,”

  Cee Cee said. “Look for our feet locked together in love.”

  Bertie laughed. “You are such a slut.”

  “Talk is cheap,” Cee Cee said, “and so, dear girl, am I.” But teasing aside, finally Bertie had proven without a doubt how much she believed in Cee Cee by changing her will and declaring Cee Cee Nina’s guardian, instead of the aunt and uncle in Miami Beach. So what if, in a way, Cee Cee had pushed her into making that decision? There was no doubt in the world it was the right one for the kid, and Cee Cee would prove it to anyone who didn’t think so.

  “Bert,” she said to the box of ashes, “I swear you did the right thing by giving me Nina. I promise I won’t smother her the way Leona did me. I’ll be understanding, but I won’t spoil her, I’ll be tough, but I

  24

  IRIS RAINER DART

  won’t lean on her too much. In fact I’ve been reading a lot about wha to do with kids because I know somewhere up there you’re worriec that I won’t be able to pull this off. But you’re wrong, Bert, becaus I’m here to tell you that I’ll be such a good influence you’ll think I’r Mary Fucking Popp,‘ns. Hah!” That made her laugh. That and th fact that she was talking animatedly to a box. Dear God, this wa., bizarre. Now she patted the box warmly.

  “Ahh, Bert, if this wasn’t so sad it would be truly hilarious. If you were here with me, I mean really here, we’d be killing ourselve., laughing the way we always did about this kind of stuff. You alway., loved those sick jokes I made when you were on the way out of thi., life, like when I said we should date two ambulance drivers just i case, or that maybe I should do it with a mortician so we could get a discount.” That brought a laugh which caught in her throat and turned into a cry she tried to hold inside. Dear God, this was toc weird, too fucking over-the-top weird. This was not exactly your runof-the-mill way to pass the time, sitting in a car talking to a box full of your dead best friend. Finally she wiped away the crying tears and the laughing tears with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, looked at her watch, and saw it was time to go into the charter office.

  “I figure if you’re graying at the temples, you must have been doing this for a long time,” she said to the pilot, noticing how high-pitched and nervous her voice sounded as the two of them walked out through he glass doors to the tarmac. He was a husky man in his fifties who hadn’t said a word but “Howdy” when they were introduced, and it he knew or cared who Cee Cee was she couldn’t see it in his eyes. Now, as they made the long walk across the airfield, she jabbered unthinkingly in her terror, trying to elicit s
ome assurance from him, but there wasn’t a shot this guy was gonna make it easy for her.

  “I’m a real white-knuckler,” she tried. “I worry about every noise. Once on a flight to New York, I heard this snap and then a hiss and I grabbed my piano player’s hand and said, ‘Oh my God. What was that sound?’ and he said, really calmly, ‘It was the sound of the stewardess opening a cola can!’ Hah! Of course there probably won’t be any stewardesses on this flight though, so I guess I don’t have to worry.”

  They were moving in the direction of a herd of small planes

  I’LL BE THERE

  2 5

  grouped together like a bunch of seagulls on the beach. Their whiteness flashed the sun’s glare in Cee Cee’s eyes, and when she could make them out clearly she said eeny meeny miney mo, trying to figure out which one of those metal pieces of crap was about to fly her out over the ocean.

  “The plane’s a Cessna one seventy-two,” the pilot said, stopping at a funny-looking little job with the wings high up on the top. The silly

  little son-of-a-bitch airplane was almost as tiny as a toy. Not exactly

  the streamlined craft in which she thought she’d be sitting slouched tragically in the co-pilot’s seat when she’d pictured herself doing this, and it occurred to her there was still time to back out of it. To hand the pilot the box of ashes and a big wad of dough, say, “Good luck to you,” then drive down the coast to Big Sur and watch as he flew over.

  “We’ll fly out down the coast, somewhere over Big Sur, and that’s probably the best place to do what you want to do,” he said, unlocking the door on his side first.

  “What are those things?” Cee Cee asked pointing to two small

  wheels that extended on either side of the plane.