Beaches (6 page)

“Hiya, Mr. Perry.”

It was Cee Cee Bloom.

“Place looks like a goddamned airplane hangar,” she said.

Perry had to laugh. The theater actually had been a warehouse before he bought it, the curved metal roof that held the heat and drove the dancers rehearsing in the afternoon to take salt pills made it look exactly like an airplane hangar.

“Welcome, Cee Cee,” he said. “Did you get all settled at the house?” Why hadn’t he noticed her body at the audition? Maybe because when she sang she was all face

and hands, with those long red fingernails. But now, in that burgundy leotard with the wrap skirt and mesh stockings . . .

“Yeah. What a dive!” she said, grinning. “You got some nerve packin’ ten of us in those two attic cells. Boy, if I didn’t need to sing so bad, I’d tell you to shove it, pal.”

The audacity! He loved her. The others would never have had the balls.

“Let’s go inside.”

The theater was cool, and the house lights were on. Cee Gee sat in the last row away from the others and lit a cigarette despite the four rather large NO
SMOKING
signs, one of which was hanging right next to where she sat. Perry took a folding chair and sat in the center of the small three-quarter thrust stage. He had given this speech so often that it bored him, but . . .

“Welcome to the Sunshine. I hope you’re all settled in your accommodations at the house. For those of you who haven’t forgotten, I’m John Perry. For those of you who have forgotten, you’re fired.” Beat. Laugh. “I own and operate this place. I produce and direct the shows. I make the policy here and I decide on the casting. If you have any problems, come to me. Don’t bitch and moan among yourselves.

“This is a repertory company. That means one week you may have a lead in a show and the next week you may have a lowly chorus part, but I expect the same enthusiasm, punctuality, and professionalism from you no matter what your standing in the cast is.

“Marilyn Loughlin is my choreographer. She is also the assistant manager here and she runs the cast house. The rules are-beds made daily, personal areas kept clean. Every Saturday morning there is a major cleanup, and each of you will be assigned a task. The bathroom, the kitchen, the yard, the laundry, et cetera. If you don’t do your job, I’ll personally drive you to the bus. Apprentices will do the cleanup jobs in the theater. Meals will be at

seven-thirty at the house, twelve-thirty at the theater, and six-thirty back at the house. If you like the food, tell old Mrs. Godshell, the cook, and she’ll give you an extra portion. If you don’t, keep it to yourself. No singing in the house, no television, no radio, and no sex.

“The first show, which will begin rehearsal tomorrow, is Carousel. The cast list will be on the bulletin board as you leave here. Today, I suggest you go down to the beach and enjoy yourselves. You probably won’t have much time for that after we start rehearsals. Any questions?”

Silence.

“See you tomorrow.”

The kids got up and made their way into the lobby to check the cast list. Only Cee Gee, now with her feet crossed and up on the chair in front of her, still sat, puffing on her second cigarette. Perry folded his chair and placed it against the wall. It bothered him that she didn’t even seem to feel the need to have the others like her. To stay with the group so she’d be in on it. He started out through the curtains.

“Where do you live?”

“What?”

“You. Where do you live?”

“I have my own house on Marion Avenue. It’s on the ocean about six blocks from the cast house.” Again he started out.

“Nice?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Is it nice?”

“I like it.”

“Good.”

Jesus Christ, she was pushy. He turned to walk into the lobby where the kids were congratulating and commiserating on the casting of the first show, but Cee Gee’s voice stopped him.

“I’m in the chorus. Right?” she asked coolly.

“How do you know that?”

” ‘Cause the Julie part’s a soprano, and the Carrie part’s an ingenue and I’m not either one of those.”

“Yes. You are in the chorus, Gee Cee-but it’s just the first week and there’s eleven other shows, and …” Why was he apologizing to her?

“I’m not a chorus singer.”

“You are now.”

Her green eyes flashed with anger and Perry steeled himself for an attack, but it passed.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I guess so.”

This was a real nice clambake

And we all had a real good time

We’ve said it afore

And we’ll say it agen

We all had a REAL-GOOD-TIME!

The applause was loud, and the summer people were loving the show. They had arrived in droves, some new, some old favorites of Perry’s, to buy season tickets and to stand around the bulletin board looking at the eight-by-ten glossies of the kids, wondering which of them would play what part in the list of shows Perry had posted for the season. The lucky ones who attended the opening night performance would come to the party and meet the amusing young crew of dancers and singers Perry had brought to the island this year.

Bertie White was in the third row next to Aunt Neetie. Bertie was afraid she’d never recognize Cee Cee. It had been so long. It was funny to see Cee Gee’s name in the program next to the words SINGERS’
CHORUS
. Cee Gee’s name was first, probably because her last name started with a B, and there she was on stage. In that funny puffy-sleeved dress, trying to look like she lived in New England and enjoyed clambakes. She stood out. At first, Bertie thought maybe it was because she knew Cee Cee

and not the others, but that wasn’t why. Something else about Cee Cee made Bertie unable to take her eyes away from her. A confidence that didn’t fit with the others, who seemed to be working so hard at pretending that it showed.

The stage was very small, and the actors were so close to the audience that once Bertie actually thought Cee Cee looked right into her eyes during the “Mister Snow” song when the girls sang the part that went, What a day. What a day. Maybe Cee Cee recognized her. But then, Bertie hadn’t even told her when she and Neetie would arrive on the island. Up until the last minute, Bertie hadn’t even been sure she was coming, anyway. Her mother, Rosie, wanted her to get a job in Pittsburgh. And she tried. But just before she took the job at Nelson’s Children’s Store, Neetie convinced Rosie she needed Bertie’s company. Bertie could get a job in New Jersey and stay with Neetie while she mulled over her divorce.

So there they were, still wearing their wrinkled clothes from the nine-hour drive from Pittsburgh. She’d talked Neetie into coming for a drive with her from the house in Ship Bottom, where they’d stopped just long enough to leave their luggage, to find the theater where Cee Cee was working. People were lining up to go in, and just on a whim Bertie decided to walk up to the box office and try to get seats. There was a cancellation-two seats in the third row. Neetie wanted a drink, to change clothes at least, but there was no time.

“Please, Aunt Neet,” Bertie had begged. And now she was glad that Neetie had given in and was smiling as she watched the show.

Bertie wished she could do something that somebody would refer to as talent. But she didn’t know what it could be. Talent. It obviously meant dancing or singing or playing a musical instrument, or even yodeling, and she couldn’t do any of those. When she talked about it with her mother, her mother would say, “Oh, Bertie, being beautiful and smart are talents, too.” Even though Bertie knew they

weren’t. “And you can sew,” Rosie usually threw in when she saw Bertie’s pretty face fall. And Bertie would imagine herself on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour with Ted Mack spinning the wheel of fortune as he said, “And now, let’s give a big welcome to little Roberta White from Pittsburgh, who will show us how to hem a pleated skirt, by hand.”

Talent. Cee Cee Bloom had talent. She was a great singer. And Bertie’s pen pal. Boy, would she be happy to see Bertie.

Walk on through the wind

Walk on through the rain

Tho’ your dreams be tossed and blown….

Some of the people in the audience were crying. This song gets everybody, Perry thought. He watched one of the young apprentices quietly sweeping the lobby with a pushbroom in preparation for the show’s end. Any minute, the audience would emerge. Thrilled, filled with superlatives, they would crowd around Perry, calling this year’s cast the best assembled, and then, in the traditional way, he would invite them all to Dukes Hotel for the party. The entire audience. Three hundred people at the opening night party. It was unheard of, but it was the kind of thing that brought them clamoring back every year.

Cee Cee was depressed. She sat in front of the mirror in the tiny cramped dressing room after the show in her bra and pants and looked at herself. Body make-up on her arms stopped at the place where her sleeves had started. On her chest, it went down to the place where the round neckline began on that crummy yellow dress, and the rest of her was white. Ugh, that looked bad. And she was getting fat from all the starchy crap Godshell was feeding them. Macaroni and puddings, and other cheap, filling, goyishe food Leona would have laughed at.

The others were already almost dressed when the tap on the wall and John Perry’s voice interrupted Cee Cee’s thoughts.

“Someone to see you, Cee Cee,” Perry said.

Who the hell . . .

The curtains that separated the dressing room from the backstage area parted and a dark-haired girl walked in, her eyes scanning the others before they stopped at Cee Cee, who quickly wrapped a towel around herself.

“Gee?” the girl said tentatively.

Oh, now, wait a minute. This could not, no way, nohow, be Bertie White, the ponytailed little girl from Pittsburgh, standing here looking like maybe she was Audrey Hepburn, or I’ll throw up from being jealous, Cee Cee thought.

“Bertie?”

The girl nodded and squealed and hugged the sweaty, pansticked, chubby Cee Cee. The other girls watched and smiled happily.

“My pen pal,” Cee Cee told them, still in the hug, sorry immediately she’d exposed such an asshole part of her personality.

“My aunt is dying to get back to the house we rented in Ship Bottom, but I wanted to come to the party I heard they were giving for the cast at some restaurant-so if maybe someone could drive me home after the party, then I could come with you, and send Neetie back now. She’d let me do that,” Bertie said.

She talks the same way she writes letters, Cee Cee thought. Just rambling. And she’s so damned . . . skinny. Leona would have said too skinny-but, boy, oh, boy. Even if I starved I couldn’t look like that.

“Yeah, sure. Somebody‘11 drive you.”

Cee Cee watched Bertie run out of the dressing room to send her aunt back to Ship Bottom. She took her red cotton dress off the hook marked
BLOOM
. She wouldn’t bother to take off the body make-up. That dress could

cover the lines, and at least the make-up made her look like she had a little color. A little life. Life. Bertie White had life. And a good haircut. “A good haircut is the most important thing a woman can have, after a clean purse,” Leona had told Cee Cee many times. And there was not once that Cee Cee ever remembered having had either, and certainly not both. Bertie’s purse was probably clean, too.

“She’s beautiful,” Kaye, that skinny dancer, said to Cee Cee, looking out through the curtains where Bertie had gone.

“Thanks,” Cee Cee said, pulling the red dress on. Thanks? Why had she said that? She had nothing to do with Bertie’s being beautiful. She looked at herself in the mirror. Maybe she’d put on just a little more blusher.

Bertie was waiting for her in front of the theater. Most of the others had left for Dukes, and Cee Cee could hear the music from the jukebox at the old hotel, even though it was three blocks away.

“Sorry I took so long,” Cee Cee said. Boy, it was funny. Here was this person standing in front of her who looked like a stranger, a girl who was so pretty that if she had- Cee Cee tried to stop herself from thinking the rest of that thought, which was that if Bertie had gone to high school with her in the Bronx, she would have been too popular to be Cee Cee’s friend, but she thought it, anyway. And instead of ignoring her, this girl was smiling at her and taking her arm so they could walk closer together.

“It’s okay,” Bertie said. “I guess you probably need lots of time after a show to kind of unwind, huh?” she asked.

“Uh . . . yeah. Sure,” Cee Cee said, noticing that for someone who hadn’t changed clothes in a whole day, Bertie looked real fresh, as if she had just had a shower.

They walked in silence for about half a block.

“Cee Cee,” Bertie said finally, “I’m really glad to be seeing you after all this time. I mean, can you even

believe it? I mean, didn’t you think that maybe we’d never see each other again? That I was always going to be just a name on some stationery forever?”

Cee Gee nodded.

Dukes was mobbed Every member of the cast was surrounded by groups of people from the audience. Probably, Cee Cee imagined, they were saying, “You were the best one,” to one actor and then moving on to say the same thing to the next actor.

Bertie’s eyes were wide. “I want to meet everybody,” she said excitedly to Cee Cee. “But I have to go to the ladies’ room first.” She giggled and started off alone, leaving Cee Cee at the edge of the crowd watching her make her way across the room.

“She’s very pretty,” John Perry said, coming up beside Cee Cee.

Cee Cee was startled.

“Your friend. That girl. She is your friend, right?”

“Yes,” Cee Cee answered. She hated herself. She was jealous.

“Actress?”

“No,” Cee Cee said, maybe too harshly. I’m the one. I’m the actress. Me. Me. She’s just a plain ordinary person visiting here with her aunt who was deserted by a bookie. But she didn’t say that part.

“You did well tonight, Cee Cee,” Perry said.

Cee Cee turned to look in his eyes. For the last ten days, he had practically ignored her, talking only to Peggy Longworth, who was playing Julie, or to cutesy Dinny Lee, who was playing Carrie. He called them “baby” or “honey” while Cee Cee, who had memorized the chorus music the first time she looked at it, stood and watched impatiently, wondering if her turn would ever come. But now, this second, looking in John Perry’s eyes, it was almost as if maybe he …