Riverside Park. Laura Wormer Van
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Celia and the-son-of-a-country-western-star finally got back to New York in late March, Celia knew she had better get a full-time job so she’d have some money saved toward school; she had to somehow soften the blow to her parents that she had dropped out. She figured she would pay them back, start school again in the fall and be only fifteen credits behind.
That was five years ago and Celia hadn’t been back to school since.
The week before Celia’s twenty-first birthday, the son-of-a-country-western-star ran away with the newlywed wife who lived on the fourth floor of their building. Celia was at first stunned, then disbelieving, and finally devastated. (The newlywed husband wasn’t so happy about it, either, although he did keep asking Celia if she wanted to come over to talk about it over drinks.)
Not long after that Rachel came into Celia’s bedroom for a talk. Rachel made a great show of wafting through the smoke and sat down on the foot of Celia’s bed. “You don’t have to pay me for the maid’s room anymore but someone has to pay the $1,703 for this room this month.”
“I start bartending at Captain Cook’s next week,” Celia said, blowing smoke to the ceiling. (She had just smoked a joint with one of the doormen on his break and was still a little out of it.)
“Celia—” Rachel jumped up and kicked her way through the clothes and junk all over the floor to retrieve a handheld mirror from the dresser. She’d brought it back to shove in Celia’s face. “Look at you!”
She hadn’t wanted to particularly, but Celia did. Her shoulder-length brown hair was unbrushed and her brown eyes had purple circles under them. Celia had also gained about fifteen pounds since she had replaced the-son-of-a-country-western-star with Oreo cookies, Cheez Doodles and Guinness in bed.
Celia sat up to stamp out her cigarette. “I’ll move if you want.”
“Oh, Celia, you never sleep anymore, you just keep doing drugs and drinking and locking yourself up in here.” Rachel’s eyes welled up with tears. “I want my friend back.”
Since Rachel had threatened to throw her out the year before Celia didn’t put too much on this threat. For whatever reason Rachel wanted to save their friendship, and did so with persistency which at that point had evoked from Celia mild contempt. Still, there was something about Rachel’s near hysteria that got to her.
“My littlest angel, what is wrong?” her mother asked Celia the next night in Darien, as Celia lay sobbing on her old bed in her old room.
“Everything,” she wailed. “I just feel like killing myself.”
The next morning she found herself in a psychiatrist’s office in Stamford. When she saw her mother’s hopeful expression when she came out she felt enraged. She wouldn’t tell her what she had told the man (which had been pretty much nothing). In the car, when her mother asked if they had discussed an antidepressant, Celia went ballistic, screaming, “I’m not going to be a high-tech zombie! So just forget it!”
“But, Celia—”
“The doctor said if I get all this sugar and nicotine and caffeine out of my system I’m going to feel better. And he said I had to exercise more and get more sunlight.”
“And what about the drinking, Celia?”
“He didn’t say anything about that,” she lied. Actually what he had said was how much alcohol would increase her depression when it wore off.
“I’m going to cut way back anyway,” she told her mother.
“Since you’re only turning twenty-one next week and are already vowing to cut back on your drinking I’m not sure how to take that, Celia,” her mother said, trying to remain focused on the road. This was how Celia remembered her childhood, her mother always driving Celia and her brothers somewhere. “But if you find changing these things doesn’t help, you have to promise me you’ll see the doctor again.”
Although Celia said nothing about it, the doctor had lectured Celia on what a death sentence cocaine could be for someone like her. “You lose the ability to experience wellbeing because the cocaine burns up the chemicals that create it. That’s why so many cocaine addicts kill themselves. They become physically incapable of feeling sensations of wellbeing. Think of a turtle whose shell has been ripped off.”
Rachel was irritatingly elated when Celia said she was going to reform her evil ways. She quit smoking, started running in the park and Rachel went with her to a couple of Weight Watchers meetings so they could both get their food under control. (Rachel tended to be on the heavy side.) Celia started working at Captain Cook’s and was amazed at how well the men tipped her; she was also perversely fascinated by people who drank too much. She swore off cocaine, stayed away from pot and began to sleep again.
All in all she started to feel whatever it was starting to lift. At least she could breathe without wanting to hang herself.
Her stint at Captain Cook’s had worked out well. Mark Cook, the owner (who had sailed on nothing but the Staten Island Ferry), liked Celia from the start because she was really popular with the customers. She also didn’t steal from the register like the other bartenders. Celia was made assistant manager of the bar. Not too long after that, when Celia lied to the other bartenders that the new guy was an undercover cop and the two worst offending thieves quit, Mark promoted her to manager of the bar.
In the meantime, Rachel got her B.A. and entered the master’s program at Columbia in American studies. Although Celia looked and acted a thousand times better since her more wayward days, Rachel still worried about her.
“Oh, Rach, now what?” Celia said, making a strawberry-banana smoothie in the blender. “I’ve given up smoking, drugs and junk food. What else do you want me to do?”
“It’s the stuff you’re dragging home. All this junk all over everywhere.”
It was true that Celia had found a renewed interest in well-made old things again. Finding and dragging home old things was something she had done even as a child. (Her parents said in her last life she must have been Queen Victoria.) “It’s not junk,” she protested, pouring some of the smoothie in a glass and sliding it to her roommate. She looked around and then snatched up a glass inkwell that had been drying next to the sink. “This is a mid-nineteenth century inkwell. It is not junk.”
“It doesn’t have a top, Celia, it’s just more junk. But at least that’s small. What are you going to do with that old window you dragged home the other day?”
“I’m taking it to storage,” Celia said.
“It’s weird, Ceil,” Rachel continued. “I don’t know anybody else who has a stone fireplace mantel lying on their bedroom floor. Do you?”
That made Celia laugh. And then Rachel laughed, too.
“We used to laugh all the time,” Rachel said. “Remember?”
Celia nodded, feeling a little sad. When had everything gotten to be so hard?
“You spend too much time alone,” Rachel continued. “If you didn’t go to work I don’t think you’d speak to anybody.”
It was true, she had gone from being outgoing to wishing most of the time that people would leave her alone. She made all kinds of excuses to get out of family things. Her oldest brother was a lawyer like her dad and the other was a research scientist. This did not leave a whole lot of room for Celia to talk about her career in bartending. Even her mother was working on a master’s degree at night at Fairfield University, in what Celia didn’t even know. (She was almost afraid to ask what a Cotillion debutante who hadn’t held a job in thirty years wanted a master’s degree in.) The whole Cavanaugh family was so programmed for success Celia’s throat tightened whenever she was around them.
At one time she had been a success in her family’s eyes. She had made the National Honor Society in high school and made the varsity soccer and tennis teams. She had always been a class officer, and as a senior had been voted most popular, most likely