around in her suitcase, looking for one of her bathing suits, finally pulling one out and putting it on before she unpacked, which was unusually spontaneous for her. When she walked into the living room of the suite and Cee Cee looked at her, she was startled for a minute by her slim perfect legs and longwaisted body with high perfect round breasts poking their nipples forth under the bright blue nylon of the top, and astonished at how adult she looked.
So many times these days she found herself surprised by Nina’s growth. A pair of shoes left in the living room couldn’t possibly be little Nina’s, she would think in amazement. The shoes were bigger than Cee Cee’s now. In fact it was probably Nina’s hurtling toward womanhood that prompted Cee Cee to call her producer and insist on a few weeks’ vacation so she and Nina could take this trip during a school break. The time was moving fast and this person who was a little girl a minute ago was teetering on the edge of an age when her friends’ approval meant everything and, if the profusion of recent expressions of mouth turned down and eyes rolled heavenward meant anything, everything Cee Cee had to offer was worthless.
Junior high offspring spend a lot of time in their rooms, usually behind closed doors, wondering why their parents don’t understand them. And yet they give us little to go on, few chatty intimate revelations which could make the muddle clearer for everyone. When they do talk, it tends to come in an unexpected rush, a sort of hurrying to get everything said before the next secretive mood descends. And even during these moments, few personal thoughts are revealed.
That was true of Nina most of the time now. But occasionally if Cee Cee got her alone someplace where it was just the two of them, it was possible to get her to talk. To break through the wall she had always put up, even as a tiny child, and which adolescence had made more impenetrable.
Once over a dinner on trays in Cee Cee’s room in the Malibu house, the two of them gabbed while they ate and watched the sunset, and when the room became dark and they were deep in conversation, neither of them moved to turn on a light, as if the cover of the falling night was just what they needed to give them each license to tell the
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other what she felt. It was after Cee Cee had done some reminiscing about Bertie that Nina told her, “I’m starting to get to the point where I don’t even remember my mother. Sometimes I try but nothing comes. Just a vague picture of a lady with pretty hair who was always hovering over me.”
“Really?” Cee Cee asked, shaking her head in disbelief, as feelings of guilt and inadequacy rose in her chest. She had been sure that her efforts over the years to tell Nina stories about her mother and to have photos of Bert around were enough to keep the memories alive, and if that hadn’t worked then she hadn’t done her job or kept her promise. “I can’t believe you don’t remember. It hasn’t been that long.”
“Maybe for you it seems as if it hasn’t. But six years for me is a big part of my life.”
“Do you want to look at some old movies of her? I had all her eight millimeter movies of the two of you when you were a baby transferred to tape. Of course some of them are nearly impossible to watch because I was the one who shot them and believe me —”
“No,” Nina said, and it was unequivocal. “It doesn’t matter.” “Of course it matters.”
“Why should I set up a situation that makes me feel sad? To look at a picture of someone I’ll never be able to see or talk to or be with again?”
“So you can get who she was, and know where you come from.” Nina shrugged. “If I wanted to know more about that I would have gone looking for my dad, who’s alive. But I don’t care. Life goes on. I’m me. Knowing why doesn’t change that.”
“You really don’t ever want to meet your father?” Cee Cee asked, worried now because she had written many letters to Michael trying to convince him to see Nina, thinking it was big of her to be right out of the King Solomon story, the one who really loves the child is willing to share her and all that kind of bullshit. Michael’s response had come from a lawyer telling Cee Cee to fuck off. But somehow Cee Cee still harbored the hope that he would change his mind. Prayed secretly that somewhere along the line he would get a pang of conscience and want to know what his daughter had become.
“No. I really don’t care,” Nina said, running her finger around the rim of an empty glass on her tray.
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If the father never comes to see the children and they ask you why, I advocate that you tell the truth. If you dream up some cover story for him and the children find out later that you have lied, you will have destroyed your credibility with them.
After Cee Cee had found that advice in one of her books years ago, any time Michael’s name came up, she called on the speech she’d practiced in her head at)out him. You re a fabulous gtrl. But your fathe s screwed up. So badly he can’t let himself see you. The poor guy doesn’t know what he’s missing. By now she had said those things to Nina many times, and the response was always a kind of absent “uh-huh,” which made Cee Cee back off, thinking the “uh-huh” meant the subject was too painful. Now Nina was telling her it was genuine lack of interest. Cee Cee wasn’t sure she believed her, but she was surprised at the enormous relief she felt hearing it, because in spite of her efforts to reach out to Michael, the fear that sometimes woke her at four in the morning and other times kept her from falling asleep to begin with was that some day he would show up at her door, push past her, and before she could get to the stairs he’d be on his way out of the house arm in arm with a willing Nina, leaving Cee Cee to that lonely abyss she had called a life before Nina was in it.
“There are a few beaches at this place,” Nina said reading from a pamphlet on the coffee table. “One of them is a few blocks down, and the closest one, the Red Sand Beach, is just on the other side of that cliff,” she said, pointing out the window.
“Cliff?” Cee Cee said. “That’s a word I usually put in the same column as rope-tow and hang-glider. The heading on the column is ‘Things to Stay Away From.’” Nina, who knew enough about Cee Cee by now to ignore her protests, handed her her tennis shoes, slipped a pair of rubber thongs on her own feet, and they were out the door to the Red Sand Beach. Over the path past a few other bungalows like theirs, to the cliff above the cove.
Nina walked in front down the steep path, reaching back to hold Cee Cee’s hand, and Cee Cee, who managed even with her rubbersoled shoes to slip twice, crept along trying to keep her eyes closed so she didn’t have to look over the steep drop at the crashing surf on her right, letting Nina’s hand guide her until they reached the bottom and stood on the Red Sand Beach.
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The sand was a burnt rust color, and after Nina spread her towel out, she sat on it and opened a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic oil, which smelled so powerfully of coconut and pineapple it made Cee Cee’s stomach rumble, while she squirted her own white number-fifteen sun protection cream on to her hand and spread it everywhere on herself, then lay back on the big white towel. She loved the sun, even though she’d read all the articles that said it was dangerous and aging, but she didn’t care. With a sigh of satisfaction over her wise choice to take a vacation, she stretched out on her back and welcomed the rays of heat, grinning as if the warmth was from the heated body of a lover moving on top of her.
Nina stayed arched up on her elbows watching the waves, then looking at the clusters of people gathered in various spots on the beach. Far off in a cove she could see a tan, lean couple wearing very tiny bathing suits and oiling one another’s bodies, and her eyes lingered on them for a long curious time, then moved to the young family from the airport van having a picnic lunch, then to four ladies who had big bellies and varying shades of frizzy hair and who sat on a blanket playing a four-handed game of cards.
“I’m going in the water,” Nina said after a while to Cee Cee’s inert body, then stood, brushed some sand from her legs, and ran down
to the shore, her long curly hair flying behind her.
Cee Cee dozed and woke every few minutes to look out at the water to be sure she could spot Nina bobbing among the waves. Nina was swimming vigorously with a powerful stroke Cee Cee had seen her use in the pool at home, and confident that all was well, she was about to turn on her stomach again when she caught a glimpse of the family who was now coming down the path to the beach.
What must have stopped her eye was the resemblance the woman had to Bertie, something about her that reminded Cee Cee of her instantly. Not feature for feature, in fact the woman was a blond and Bertie’s hair had been a chestnut brown, but she definitely had Bertie’s carriage, her style. In the last few years Cee Cee’s nearsightedness had worsened decidedly so she could never really trust what she saw from a distance, but this woman really was a Bertie-type, holding on to her little girl’s hand in the same no-nonsense grip Cee Cee remembered Bertie using with Nina.
Nina was still stroking away in the water, splashing and jumping
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up out of the waves every now and then as sleekly as a dolphin. Cee Cee wondered if when Nina saw the woman who looked like Bertie, it would evoke the memories she said she no longer had. Behind the woman trotted a little boy who was whining about something as they passed and behind the boy came a thick-waisted husband who wore mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap with the letter “P” on it. The father was reprimanding the boy as they passed, and Cee Cee caught the words “I decide what this family is doing and not you, and if you don’t get that…”
She turned on her stomach now and after a few minutes fell into a sweet warm sleep, which was interrupted by the drops of cold water falling all over her from Nina, who was shaking herself like a dog to dry off, and laughing. “The waves are awesome,” she said when she sat, the water beading on her oiled body. “You should go in.” She had brought A Tale of Two Cities with her because she was reading it for school. After she dried her hands, she opened the book to the page she had turned down on the flight to Maui from Los Angeles. For a while she read quietly to herself, and when she looked up, something she saw startled her. “Oh, my God,” she said with such drama in her voice that Cee Cee, who had been trying to drift back to sleep, opened her eyes thinking Nina must have spotted the woman who looked like Bertie.
But that wasn’t where she was looking at all. Her eyes were wide at the sight of a long-haired bony-looking woman a few yards away from them who had removed her muumuu and was jaybird naked underneath it, and now was unselfconsciously spreading her blanket on the beach. Next to her, holding a baby, was her muscular, goldenbrown husband, who was also stark naked. Cee Cee noticed now that the couple who had been oiling one another down the beach had both removed their suits too. Nina giggled. “Oh my God,” she said again, with an openmouthed, outraged grin.
“They didn’t mention this in the brochure,” Cee Cee said, as the naked man handed the woman the baby, then took off in a run down the beach to the water.
“Or you would have been here sooner,” Nina said with the perfect timing of a girl who had spent the last six years of her life listening to jokes being delivered by the best comics in the business. Then she stood. “Well … I’m going up to the room,” she said.
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“Is this making you uncomfortable, honey?” Cee Cee asked, looking up at her seriously and shielding her own eyes, which even behind her dark glasses felt scorched by the blazing sun.
“Oh no,” Nina said with a wave of dismissal. “Does it bother you?” “I don’t even notice it,” Cee Cee said. Nina slid a T-shirt on over her still-wet suit. “I’m just running up to get myself a Coke. What can I get you?”
“How ‘bout a penis colada?” Cee Cee said, heard herself, and let out a burst of laughter, and Nina looked at her the same way Bertie used to when she said something funny but too outrageous to laugh at, without first giving her a sideways glance of disapproval. Then she broke up, laughing so hard too that she had to sit back down on the towel for a minute to recover, and Cee Cee laughed to see her reaction, and their laughter continued to set one another off until Cee Cee said, “And hold the colada,” and Nina, still giggling, was off up the hill to the room.
Cee Cee sat up, squeezed the suntan lotion bottle, and felt the hot cream squirt into her hand, then spread another coat of cream all over herself and decided that maybe she should at least dip a toe or two in the water. She was, after all, in Hawaii, and the water wouldn’t be like the freeze-your-toes-off water in Malibu. So she stood and moved down toward the shore, passing the naked woman who was now nursing the baby at her breast, and the four fat card-playing women, two of whom reminded her of the De John Sisters, an act she’d worked with in the Catskills. “Thank God they’re not naked,” she mused.
In spite of the layers of protective lotion, her face was stinging from the heat, with the cream feeling as if it was bubbling. I should have worn a hat, she thought, as she passed the blanket of the family with the wife who looked like Bertie. What reminded her of the hat was seeing the father remove the baseball hat with the “P” on it, revealing his partly bald head with gray and brown hair surrounding it like a fuzzy cloud, and this time she heard him say to his son, who was whimpering softly, “You keep whining, pal, and you’ll spend the rest of the day in the room without fi)od.”
God, she hated anyone who could talk to a poor child that way. With a stony, unsympathetic delivery that was so unfeeling it reminded her of someone in her past for whom she’d felt this same kind of heart-tearing anger, but she couldn’t think who. And when
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she realized, she stopped right there on the sand that was burning her feet, and standing on that fiery-hot beach where there was not even a whisper of a breeze, she was covered with goose bumps because she knew now the “P” on the cap stood for Pirates. Pittsburgh Pirates, and the balding man whose second wife looked ironically like Bertie was Michael Barron. Nina’s father, whom the child had never seen.
It had been years since Cee Cee had seen him, but there was no mistaking him. She turned to face the ocean, trying to collect herself, feeling simultaneously sickened and thrilled. She peeked once back over her shoulder at Michael and his second family, hoping none of them would look up and catch her staring. The baldness that had been promised even by the time Michael was in his early twenties had arrived. In fact, Cee Cee watched him pour some Coppertone into his hand and rub it into his bare scalp. When his little girl picked up his baseball hat and put it on her own head, he grabbed it away and put it back on himself. That’s him all right, Cee Cee thought. Still Mister Nice Guy.
When the wife looked right at her, Cee Cee turned quickly and waded into the water, which for the first few minutes felt icy cold on her feet as she walked farther in, trying to decide what to do. Well, how about that? It looked as if Michael was married and had two kids. Jesus. No one ever told her that, or told Nina. I must finally have grown up, Cee Cee thought. Because the old me would have reeled around the minute I realized it was him, run over, grabbed the sonof-a-bitch by the face and shrieked into it, “How can a man abandon a beautiful child and never have the guts to look her in the face and tell her why ?” But now I’m acting like a big girl, weighing my choices. The grownup Cee Cee Bloom is actually giving it thought. Oh God, stop me from going over and kicking the stinking little slimy bastard right in the balls.
Thank God he didn’t recognize me, she thought, but that can’t last. Everywhere she went, once people realized she was there they ran up and asked for autographs, surrounded her, spread the word. And this was a small hotel; soon the news would be around that she was there, and the people who were her fans would be looking for her in the lobby, in the gift shop, or out here on the beach. Now the water was up to her knees and she tried to tell herself to be calm. To get clearheaded about what to do. Soon the water was up to her waist and her
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shoulders were sizzling from the sun reflecting off the water as she watched Michael-that-asshole-Barron sitting in the sand stiil griping at his poor children, while their mother spread oil on their little bodies.
Cee Cee stood feeling the waves push against her back, watching the members of the Barron family, their oiling tasks complete, lying down across their blanket like a line of gingerbread cookies ready to bake. When they seemed to be at rest, she waded slowly out of the water up onto the beach and then close to their blanket, where she stopped quietly and looked at their closed-eyed faces as they sunbathed.
The wife was sweet-looking and pretty with that same Audrey Hepburn elegance for which Michael clearly had a taste, but at closer range she was not as pretty as Bertie had been. The tiny girl looked alarmingly the way Nina had when she was that age. The boy was on his stomach so Cee Cee couldn’t see what he looked like, and Michael, you dirty dog, Cee Cee thought, when she looked down at his wedding band. Filigreed gold, it was the one Bertie had given him. The cheap schmuck.
When she noticed that the little girl’s eyes were open and looking at her curiously, Cee Cee turned and walked back to her towel. From a distance she glanced over at them a few times, unsure how she was going to handle their horribly coincidental presence here with Nina, feeling relieved that the girl was taking so long back at the cottage. But when nearly an hour had passed and she wasn’t back and the Barron family was hitting a beach ball back and forth, Cee Cee gathered up her towel and Nina’s, and the sunscreen and Nina’s book, and navigated up the narrow hillside path as though there was no frightening drop-off next to it at all. A mission, she thought as she got to the top, realizing she’d been so afraid of the same walk earlier. That’s me. Not much on the everyday stuff, but when there’s a mission, I put my boots on and jump into the trenches.
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