Read Online I'll Be There by Iris Rainer Dart - Free Book Online
Authors: Iris Rainer Dart
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Malibu wearing a frayed white terry cloth robe she’d had for so long it might have belonged to her ex-husband. She always pulled the now ratty thing out of the closet and wrapped herself in it when she needed to be near something familiar and homey. The breakfast tray she and Nina had shared earlier still sat on the glass and wrought-iron table piled up with their dirty breakfast dishes and the empty milk glasses they had clicked together in a toast to their own cleverness for moving to the beach.
The toast was one Nathan used to say when he drank his rare glass of schnapps on one of the Jewish holidays. “Look out teeth, look out gums, look out kishkes, here it comes.” Nina had never heard the word kishkes before and the sound of it made her laugh so hard, her milk bubbled up in her mouth and her eyes watered. Cee Cee loved the way the kid was starting to learn to be silly, giddy, childlike. And as odd as it seemed, so was Cee Cee for the first time in her life. Neither of them, in the years before their union, had ever learned much about playing or really letting go. Nina because most of her life had been filled with grownup problems, and Cee Cee because her own childhood had been so focused on the pursuit of a career.
“I’m getting this mother thing down to a science,” she told Hal one day. “For example, I already know that you can’t go to the playground in three-inch pumps. The goddamned heels stick in the grass and the next thing you know, you’re still walking, but the shoes are a half a mile back! After I figured that out, all was well until yesterday when my tiny little ass fell right through the humongous hole in the tire
I’LL BE THERE
45
swing. In fact it took two very attractive single fathers to pull me out. Did I mention that the park is a veritable treasure trove of parents without partners?”
This norning Nina was down the road at the home of one of her new friends and Cee Cee scrunched down a little lower in the lounge chair wondering how she’d hccn crazy’ enough to put herself so deeply in debt by impulsively buying this big expensive house on the beach. At first when her business manager grumbled about it being more than she could afford, she used the excuse that she was buying it because of Nina. That she wanted the child to feel at home after living near water all her life in Sarasota.
Then she said it was because the house was on a street protected by a guard gate and that would keep the paparazzi out. Which it did, for a while, though an army of them seemed somehow to know where she was going at all times and managed to show up everywherc, snapping and flashing away at her and at Nina, immediately selling the pictures to the tabloids, which printed them constantly. But her real reason for buying the house was much more selfish than any of those.
She had come back to Hollywood feeling like an alien. Realizing, though nothing there had changed, that after her months in Carmel she was seeing it all through new eyes. A perspective that had been changed by the lesson of those bleak and endless days and nights of sitting at Bertie bedside where under fire she had learned about how fragile the line was between life and death. And the time with nothing to do but care for someone else had given her the opportunity to think about the unimportant attitudes and ridiculous posturing that got in the way of most people’s living their lives.
So when the painful vigil was over and she came home and looked at the years stretching before her, her first impulse was to goddamn enjoy them in a big way, to live it up. There were no men who interested her and vice versa, she knew from past experience that indulging in too much food would be bad for her career, she already had a great car, so she bought a house, a big gorgeous house on the beach for herself and for Nina.
Every day since they’d left Carmel she had taken an emotional tally of how they were doing together, watching and
The toast was one Nathan used to say when he drank his rare glass of schnapps on one of the Jewish holidays. “Look out teeth, look out gums, look out kishkes, here it comes.” Nina had never heard the word kishkes before and the sound of it made her laugh so hard, her milk bubbled up in her mouth and her eyes watered. Cee Cee loved the way the kid was starting to learn to be silly, giddy, childlike. And as odd as it seemed, so was Cee Cee for the first time in her life. Neither of them, in the years before their union, had ever learned much about playing or really letting go. Nina because most of her life had been filled with grownup problems, and Cee Cee because her own childhood had been so focused on the pursuit of a career.
“I’m getting this mother thing down to a science,” she told Hal one day. “For example, I already know that you can’t go to the playground in three-inch pumps. The goddamned heels stick in the grass and the next thing you know, you’re still walking, but the shoes are a half a mile back! After I figured that out, all was well until yesterday when my tiny little ass fell right through the humongous hole in the tire
I’LL BE THERE
45
swing. In fact it took two very attractive single fathers to pull me out. Did I mention that the park is a veritable treasure trove of parents without partners?”
This norning Nina was down the road at the home of one of her new friends and Cee Cee scrunched down a little lower in the lounge chair wondering how she’d hccn crazy’ enough to put herself so deeply in debt by impulsively buying this big expensive house on the beach. At first when her business manager grumbled about it being more than she could afford, she used the excuse that she was buying it because of Nina. That she wanted the child to feel at home after living near water all her life in Sarasota.
Then she said it was because the house was on a street protected by a guard gate and that would keep the paparazzi out. Which it did, for a while, though an army of them seemed somehow to know where she was going at all times and managed to show up everywherc, snapping and flashing away at her and at Nina, immediately selling the pictures to the tabloids, which printed them constantly. But her real reason for buying the house was much more selfish than any of those.
She had come back to Hollywood feeling like an alien. Realizing, though nothing there had changed, that after her months in Carmel she was seeing it all through new eyes. A perspective that had been changed by the lesson of those bleak and endless days and nights of sitting at Bertie bedside where under fire she had learned about how fragile the line was between life and death. And the time with nothing to do but care for someone else had given her the opportunity to think about the unimportant attitudes and ridiculous posturing that got in the way of most people’s living their lives.
So when the painful vigil was over and she came home and looked at the years stretching before her, her first impulse was to goddamn enjoy them in a big way, to live it up. There were no men who interested her and vice versa, she knew from past experience that indulging in too much food would be bad for her career, she already had a great car, so she bought a house, a big gorgeous house on the beach for herself and for Nina.
Every day since they’d left Carmel she had taken an emotional tally of how they were doing together, watching and
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