Only Flesh and Bones (20 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Only Flesh and Bones
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T
HAT evening, I phoned Cecelia to let her know about our appointment with Tina Schwartz. “She seems nice,” I told her. “I think you’ll like her.”
To this, Cecelia didn’t reply.
“Really,” I urged, turning on the old pep-rally spirit. “I liked her, and I don’t like shrinks. Not that I’d ever even spoken to one before last week,” I added, unconsciously assuring her that a date with a psychologist was indeed something over which to be embarrassed.
A heavy sigh came over the line.
“What is it, Celie? I’ll be there with you. It’ll be okay.”
Finally, on the verge of tears, she spoke. “Em, can’t it be
just
you? I mean, we’ve always gotten along pretty well, right?”
The frailty and longing in her tone etched slowly and deeply into my heart. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, you know I care. But Celie—”
“Then why can’t I just, like, hang out with you?”
“Well, you can,” I replied, immediately weighed down by the obviousness of this lie. “Okay, you’re right, I haven’t been around much for you in ages. I—” I what? I can’t seem to get my life sorted out? I can’t handle being that close? I miss the little girl you were and don’t know what to say to the young woman you are becoming?
“Please,” she whimpered.
Tears stung the edges of my closed eyelids. “I’m trying to find you a good person to help you.”
Her voice came as a faint breath: “I’ll try, Em. But I can’t talk to anyone like I talk to you.”
 
 
I spent Thursday morning getting my ducks in a row for the crosscountry flight. I had to figure time and distance, rate of fuel consumption, airspeed at various presumed wind speeds, adjusting for the crosswind I expected, and factor in allowances for extra time and fuel should I have to land somewhere other than planned. I was, after all, limited to VFR—visual flight rules—planning, in which I could fly only under skies clear enough to see where the hell I was going.
I worked with air charts and flight computer, checking my route for obstacles such as mountains and mesas over which my Piper could not fly. Saratoga looked like it would be a little complicated, as it sat in a wide notch between two mountain ranges, but there appeared to be safe passage in and out, with plenty of room for turning.
At noon, I broke for lunch. I found Betty downstairs speaking into the telephone at full roar, instructing Boulder’s city planners where to put their fencing setback regulations. “Such foolish people,” she said sweetly as she hung up the phone. “They think I shouldn’t be allowed the basic privacy and noise abatement afforded by a good old six-foot-tall fence along the Baseline Road side of my property. When I bought this place, it had a prim little three-foot picket job along the sidewalk, as quaint as a chipmunk’s tonsils. Now, I was so foolish as to check with the Planning Department before tearing it down and replacing it with a proper six-footer, and they had the temerity to inform me that I could not tear down and replace taller, as I must in such cases observe a greater setback from the sidewalk. ‘Oh,’ quoth I, ‘but may I instead repair the existing fence?’ ‘Certainly,’ they said, ‘thy fence is thine to repair.’ Repair it I did. Six feet tall. Now it seems someone has registered a complaint regarding its sculptural qualities. Heavens, their taste must be in their mouth.”
I glanced out the front window at the weird agglomeration of three-, four-, and six-foot pickets that graced the edge of the lawn. “I was wondering about that,” I said, “but
now tell me about your artistic selection of colors for said fence. I like what you did with the blaze orange and the fuchsia, but I’m not sure about the pea green and the chartreuse. And the barn red, isn’t that a bit retro?”
“Why Em,” said Betty Bloom, smiling her prettiest, “I just wanted the city to know how much I appreciated their regulations. And besides, what redhead is fully at home without such subtle hues?”
“Of course,” said I. “What was I thinking?”
We put together a lunch of kippers, whole-wheat bread, and mayonnaise (my contribution), and hummus, tabouli, and crisp fresh greens (hers) while Stanley chased cattle through the vast pastures of his dreams.
At 3:30, I pulled into the parking lot in front of the main building of Cecelia’s chic girl’s prep school. As it was another splendid spring day and school had just let out, the front steps of the building were awash with adolescent females, most clothed and brushed and primped within a gnat’s eyelash of looking like they were preparing for a photo shoot for some fashion magazine. As I mentally calculated the expense some of these creatures had gone to to turn themselves out for school, I began to understand why Cecelia had spent so much time, once her tears had dried, in telling me what I should wear to this event.
Some of the girls were bright-eyed and lively, others proud and haughty, still others painfully depressed. My charge fell in the latter category, I decided, as I moved into the throng.
I didn’t see Cecelia anywhere along the steps, which was the place we had agreed to meet. Stopping a smooth-faced blonde with half-lowered eyelids, I asked if she had seen her. “Oh,
her?
I don’t keep track of
her
.”
I tried another girl, an athletic-looking sort with a glisteningly oily face and nice manners, and another, a plump asthmatic with braces, but no one had seen Cecelia. “We’re just waiting for our mothers,” a redhead in pea green leggings offered, as if that should be all the information I
needed. I found a seat on a stone bench at one end of the steps and prepared to wait.
As I waited, a long procession of BMWs, Volvo station wagons, and Mercedes coupes found their way down the long drive and circled in front of the steps, and girl after girl peeled out to be wafted away in her carriage. It was great theater, as each deb came up with her own variant on studied boredom while she dropped lazily into the waiting cushions of her parents’ forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar runabout. Before long, my eyes glazed with the ostentatiousness of the displays and I found myself eavesdropping on the conversations.
“Who’s she?” one six-foot-and-rail-skinny type asked the blonde with the dropping eyelids as she eyed me suspiciously.
“Oh, just someone looking for that Cecelia slut.”
“Oh,” said the rail.
A second blonde turned and joined the discussion, saying, “Oh, Heather, you’re just fascinated with sex yourself.”
“Am not.”
“Are.”
“Slut.”
“Whore.”
“Just where do you get off, Lily? I hear you’re doing it with that Jamison pig. Don’t his zits pop all over you when he
comes
?”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Oh,
sure
.”
Fascinated as I was by the verbal sophistication of their repartee, I got up and began to pace. Where was Cecelia? Had she forgotten the timing of our plans?
Just then, one of the enormous glass doors at the top of the steps crashed open, and all those jaded eyes involuntarily turned to see who had thrown it open. There, triumphant in a cloak of haughtiness a deeper shade of blue-black than any other present there that day, stood Cecelia Menken, my charge. I had the good sense not to call out,
Get a move on,
Celie, or we’ll be late for our appointment with that shrink!
Seeing me, Cecelia began to pick her way down through the mass of gawking onlookers, carrying herself in a fair parody of the regent allowing her subjects to observe her. I played along with things a little, meeting her halfway up the staircase with a gentle kiss and a half hug. Nodding gravely, Cecelia acknowledged me. “The outfit’s pretty good,” she whispered, “but did you have to bring that
truck
?”
“Hang in there,” I whispered back, and then, loudly enough so that every pair of ears could hear me, I said, “Sorry, Cecelia, but my Jaguar is in the shop today getting the leather seats oiled, and my man took my Cherokee to A Basin, so I had to bring the truck I use to haul compost for my herb garden. But perhaps you’d like to drive it, as practice. You know, for when your dad gets you a new truck so you can trailer your horse to the shows.”
Cecelia’s eyes lighted up. “Sure,” she chirped.
After we’d loaded up and Cecelia had treated me to a neck-snapping job of gearshifting that miraculously shot us through the gate and a mile down the road without backfiring the engine, I told her to pull over. “Enough practice for today,” I said evenly. “And besides, we’re late. Gotta put old Bessie here to the mistress’s hand.”
“Thanks, Em,” was all Cecelia had to say, as she settled back into her usual depressed glower.
“Did you like driving it?”
“No, it sucked. Why don’t you trade this in for something with an automatic? Coulda broken my shoulder trying to shift this thing.”
We argued the comparative merits of automatic versus standard shifts the rest of the way into Denver, where I stowed the reviled pickup in a lot and goosed Cecelia up the steps to Tina Schwartz’s second-story counseling rooms. Tina met us at the door and gave Cecelia a greeting that was full of gentle smiles. “Why don’t you sit wherever you feel comfortable,” she said.
I looked around the large room and saw a few padded
swivel chairs and a broad camelback couch, but there were also piles of soft, inviting cushions in other corners of the room, should anyone feel more comfortable on the floor. A wide table was decked with modeling clay and stacks of craft paper and marking crayons, and there were weird creative output of very upset clients all along the walls and on the bookcases.
Cecelia dumped herself at one end of the couch and glared suspiciously around the room.
“I’ll just sit on one of these swivel chairs, Cecelia,” Tina said, “and Em, you sit wherever you’d like. Maybe Cecelia would like you to sit with her on the couch, to keep her company.”
I sat, and Tina got Cecelia talking enough to ask about the paints and drawing supplies on the table. Tina explained that many of her clients found it helpful to put their feelings into pictures. Cecelia looked doubtful but interested. In a few minutes, we moved to the topic that had brought us through the door: Cecelia’s trauma. “It must be awful to lose your mother, and lose her in that way, Cecelia,” Tina said. “Em tells me you can’t remember the event.”
Cecelia began to pick viciously at her cuticles. “No,” she mumbled. “But it’s behind me, you know? I don’t like to talk about it.”
Tina nodded respectfully. “Your call. Is there anything else on your mind you’d like to talk about? How about school, or your friends?”
Cecelia drew in her shoulders, looked furtively around the room. “Who cares about those bitches?” she said.
“They were really something,” I said.
Cecelia shot me a look of warning or thanks—I was not sure which.
I kept talking. “I mean, Tina, I went to pick her up and there were all these stuck-up babes with expensive haircuts, all standing around accusing one another of being interested in sex, like that’s something sick or abnormal. How’s an adolescent girl with a reasonably healthy endocrine system supposed to have anything else on her mind?”
Tina nodded. “I know, it’s a tough age.”
Cecelia began to search her hair for split ends, making a great show of ignoring us, but she had shrunk even farther down into the couch, and the one long, skinny leg she had slung over the other was now hooked tightly back behind the other heel like she was trying to twist herself into a knot.
Tina said, “Cecelia, you’re here to find out if you want us to work together. What do you need to know about me?”
Cecelia stared at the floor, said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”
Tina rose and showed her to the door. “It’s right down the hall to the left,” she said.
When Cecelia was well out of earshot, I said, “Tina, I brought that up to try to get Cecelia talking, but those girls really horrified me. Why do they call each other names like ‘whore’ and ‘slut’? Okay, some of them looked like they were on the way down to Colfax Avenue for an afternoon of soliciting, but that’s just the style, right?”
Tina shook her head. “The good old double standard’s still alive and well. We don’t treat girls with a whole lot of respect as they become women, don’t say, ‘Hey, you’re a woman now; congratulations!’ Instead, we say, ‘Now, don’t you get in trouble.’ We give girls such confused, devaluating messages. Where are our positive role models? Can’t think of many other than a chaste Madonna, eh? Next stop: Mother Teresa. Most children’s books that show someone being clever or adventuresome or leading others are about boys, so what does that tell us?”
“But why are women nasty to women?”
“Well, as we move toward middle age, women usually do start being more supportive of each other. We all know the punch line by then, know the joke was on us. But when we’re young, we’re really, honestly competing for the male of the species. And what’s the image we aspire to? We’re supposed to be pure and giving, but also drop-dead sexually attractive. When we grow old, we fear we’ll be castoffs. My uncle used to have a joke that went, ‘When your aunt gets to be fifty, I’m going to trade her in on two twenty-fives.’”

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