An extra-dry gin martini on the rocks is the drink. Barely even a
drop of Vermouth. This is what 10-year-old Cee-Cee Bianco‘s father drinks. It’s also, coincidentally,
what my father drank. The other recurring beverage in Miracle Girls is Benadryl, which
Cee-Cee’s family constantly feeds her to take the edge off her visions. In this
way, father and daughter are equally stoned throughout the first third of the
novel.
The Kirkus review of Miracle
Girls points out the basic set up:
In upstate New York,
young girls go missing, nuns are revolting, Nixon is resigning, and young
Cee-Cee Bianco has visions of the Virgin Mary in this polished debut novel.
Ten-year-old Cee-Cee has a broken family: Father Frank goes on drunken benders,
mother Glory runs away for weeks at a time, middle brother Roadie is wracked
with guilt over his burgeoning homosexuality, and eldest Anthony is a little
off. Cee-Cee and Baby Pauly cling to each other, as close as twins.
The scene that got cut
during the final edit, in which Frank is in a bar getting sloshed, and Cee-Cee
is lying on a pool table drowsy with allergy medicine. Cee-Cee’s mother has taken off again, and Frank has paid the local cabbie
to pick his daughter up at home (it is Christmas break) and drop her off at the
Blanche’s Iron Door, the bar he frequents. She has a fever:
Frank has Cee-Cee lie
down on an empty pool table, bunching up his coat for a pillow. She can see the
shiny jukebox, squat and solid with its silver chrome and bright blue lights,
behind the mismatched tables and chairs shoved onto the dirty square of plastic
flooring. If her head didn’t hurt, she’d get up and use Blanche’s secret stash of
quarters.
The bar is empty. Under Cee-Cee’s limp
body, the green felt is comforting.
Frank takes a barstool. “Gin with a splash, Blanche. Extra dry.”
“No kidding.” Blanche takes a wad of
bubble gum from Cee-Cee’s mouth and feeds her two
baby aspirin, covering her with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, plastic
on one side, fuzzy on the other.
“I feel hot,” Cee-Cee tells her.
“Well ‘course you do, baby,” Blanche says. “That’s why Old Blanche never prays.”
Over Blanche’s pink turtleneck, a red sweater is stretched tight. Near one
shoulder, one reindeer says “Ho, Ho, Ho” in white stitching.
“Close your eyes now, bunny.” Blanche smooths her
hair. “Don’t go worrying yourself about Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They can take
care of themselves.”
Frank produces a bottle of the magic pink liquid and
tosses it to Blanche. “Give her some Benadryl.”
“You can’t just go around drugging
your kid,” Blanche says. “And then you wonder why
she hallucinates angels and talks to God?”
“It calms her down.” Frank shrugs.
Blanche sighs, gives
Cee-Cee a sip from the bottle.
Under the dark beams of
the old bank ceiling, Cee-Cee is swimming in and out of a heavy sleep, catching
snippets of the conversation.
“It’s this damn economy…And some new kind of bomb…”
“Hell of a thing…” Blanche snaps. “A bomb that can drop itself.”
Cee-Cee kicks off the tablecloth,
uncomfortable.
“I
grew up on that base,”
Frank is saying.
“…fancy severance package can’t be all bad.” Blanche comes around from behind the
bar and touches Cee-Cee’s
forehead, checking the fever.
Cee-Cee tries to tell Blanche about
the names Glory called Frank over Christmas dinner: Whiskey-dick, Asshole, Bum.
“What’s the matter? Can’t get comfy, kangaroo?” Blanche flicks on the TV. “Try the boob tube for awhile. That
always puts old Blanche right to sleep.”
A trio of violins from a daytime
soap opera fills the room. It’s
not one Cee-Cee knows. A man with a beard tells a blond woman, “Love will kill you.”
Frank and Blanche stare at the TV as
a newscaster comes on with a special report about the girl missing since
Christmas Eve.
A photograph comes on screen: a girl
with wavy red hair, freckles, a gap in her smile where Cee-Cee can see the
faintest flash of tongue. The reporter describes the pink sweater the girl was
wearing when she disappeared.
“Sure are a lot of sickos around here,” Frank says.
Kidnapped,
says the newscaster somberly.
“Shame,” Blanche says. “More girls go missing right here in
this part of New York State than anywhere else in the country. Heard it on the
radio.”
“Yeah.” Frank says.
Next on the T.V., a bunch of Vietnam
protesters with long hair shout at the camera. They hold up two-finger peace
signs and shake them at the screen.
A reporter interviews a nun in full
habit carrying a protest sign about the war.
“What’s this?” Frank says. “The Flying Nun? She looks like Sister
Bertrille.”
“Those Sisters from Our Lady of
Sorrows are always up to no good,”
Blanche says. ““Chaining
themselves to the gates of the military base when they’re supposed be teaching long division
and catechism. Vietnam protesters. How is that God’s work?”
“Who
do they think is protecting their sacred asses from communism?”
“Aren’t they friends with Marina? The
Sisters of Something-or-Other.”
Frank can’t stand God or Nonnie. “Glory’s mother is a holy roller.”
At
the commercial Blanche lowers the volume and smiles at Cee-Cee. “My Norbie sure is going to be glad to
see you lying there like a princess when he gets home.”
The
green fuzz beneath Cee-Cee’s
body is soft. She falls into a dream about red-haired girls in pink sweaters.
*
As
the afternoon wears on, the bar is shrouded in an eerie quiet. Mike hasn’t set foot in a church for years,
but sometimes the place seems vaguely hallowed to him.
He lifts his glass: “Amen.”
This
moment will soon be ruined by the onslaught of daily drunks and military men
from the lab with their briefcases and secrets for a liquid lunch: 9-to-5ers—not his category
any more.
Having
Cee-Cee nearby makes him feel strange, but also good.
No
one prepared him for being a father. He is plagued by the idea that he created
four little strangers out of his own body. He thinks the boys look like him,
and Cee-Cee is the spitting image of Glory, and therefore of Glory’s mother.
When
he and Glory were sweethearts, before they’d
even graduated high school, Mike worked in the Caxton Laboratory. It was still
called Romeville Labs then. He was the youngest nonenlisted technician in the
whole history of the base; younger even than his father was when he first
worked there.
After
Mike and Glory got married, they moved into a tiny efficiency apartment on the
compound. It had a hot plate and a bathtub in the kitchen. When Anthony was
born, they upgraded to a family unit. Mike was happy with just the three of
them. Things got crowded when Roadie and Baby Pauly came along, but he still
somehow managed a pretty good mood.
But
nothing was ever good enough for Glory. She accused him of not loving anyone
but Anthony. Said he didn’t
try hard enough with his other children. Eventually she found the old
ramshackle firetrap they live in now. She loved how it was snuggled between two
roadways and a creek. Mike thought it was a bad idea.
“The thing with kids,” he tells Blanche, “is that everything ends up being your
fault.”
Blanche
pours him another drink, fat fingers gripping the glass still steamy from the
dishwasher. “I
hear Anthony’s
in trouble again.”
Mike
grunts.
She
places the rest of the glasses upside-down on a little shelf behind her. “My Norbert says Anthony will flunk a
third time if he doesn’t
watch out.”
“What
does Fat Norbie know?” Mike hates being
reminded that his kids aren’t winners. “He’s got problems of his own.”
“If there's one thing my Norbert
knows, it’s
flunking. Two birthdays in the eighth grade already; he’s almost 16. Anyway, I enrolled him
in that special school, the one with the uniforms and the aides. Starts in
January.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Mike is getting drunk now. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“He’s slow upstairs when it comes to
thinking.”
Blanche stares off toward the window. “Those
special programs help.”
“They just need to give a person some
space.”
“There’s not that much space in the world.” Blanche chews on a toothpick. “I’m doing something real for Norbert.
You should do the same for your kid. They can't spend their lives in high
school, now can they?”
The
wind howls. Both Mike and Blanche turn to look at the white outside.
“Maybe
if we’d
stayed on base,”
Mike tells Blanche, slurring, “it
wouldn’t
have been so easy for the top brass to let me go.”
Glory
ended up pregnant with Cee-Cee when they thought she couldn’t possibly conceive again. That’s when all the trouble started. Of
course Cee-Cee was a girl, which was more than Mike could handle.
Counting
the inventory, Blanche marks down the numbers of bottles in a green ledger. “What’s the matter now?”
Mike
lifts his head. “Did
I ever tell you about that little intern over at Romeville Free’s gymnasium? Man, was she something.”
“You should leave them young ones
alone. “
Blanche sighs. “You
told me she stopped taking your calls.”
He
chuckles. “The
secretary kept saying she was on lunch duty, and I’d say:
‘It’s 3:30! What damn time do these kids
eat?’”
Blanche
smiles. “She
got your number right quick.”
“I
always say the wrong thing to women.”
Cee-Cee
feels the gust of cold air, a nervous chill that swirls into the warm bar.
“I
have to hand it to you, Mike,”
Blanche clucks her tongue. “You
have some lousy luck with the opposite sex.”
Blanche’s points over Mike’s shoulder toward the darkened door
where Glory is brushing snow off her coat.
“Oh shit,” Mike says.
Glory’s voice: “How drunk are you, Mike?”
Cee-Cee
tries to sit up, but Mike’s
pink syrup has her feeling slow.
“I hope you’re not too drunk to hear what I have
to say.”
Glory says, “Because
I’m done with you, Mike. I’m leaving.”
Blanche
clinks some bottles together and clears her throat. “I’ll be in the back room, folks;
inventory.”
Mike
stumbles over to the jukebox, taking the conversation to the far end of the
room. Cee-Cee has to strain to make out the words.
“C’mon, Glory,” Mike pleads. “Give me a break.”
“You’re here all day long instead of
looking for work!"
“Down
on my luck is all. I can change….turn it around.”
Outside,
the wind whips against the building.
Glory’s voice goes soft. “Every person in Oneida County has
been laid off from that stupid lab. Who cares? You can get another engineering
job. What about Xerox, or even Kodak?
Moonie's been there a long time; he'll help you get a job. Anyway, what
kind of work is it anyway? Figuring out better ways to kill people?”
“I need you, Glory.”
“Think about your children,” she says. “What are they supposed to do while
you’re
throwing everything away?”
Mike
cries, not quiet and embarrassed the way most fathers probably cry, but loud
with long howling noises coming from his throat.
Cee-Cee
tries to roll over, but nothing moves.
Tears
muffle Glory’s voice. “You need a shower, Mike.”
Cee-Cee
knows that Glory is brushing her fingers through Mike’s hair, a sign that she is about to forgive him. The air shifts
again, this time almost imperceptibly, from tense and angry to unbearably sad.
“Look,
here’s a twenty. Okay?” Glory says. “Let’s go home, right now. We can call a cab.”
“I’ll get a new job.” Mike sounds happy. “We’ll do Christmas all over again, the right way. Things will get
better. Let me buy you a drink: We can toast to second chances.”
“All
right, Mike.”
Blanche
lugs a carton out of the old bank vault storeroom with its wall of safety
deposit boxes, plus the little black gun Blanche always talks about. She keeps
it in in the first box on the bottom row. Says she’ll use it if there’s any funny business at
her bar.
“I have
to step outside for a minute,” Glory says. “Let go of my coat, Mike. Just one minute. I have to take care of
something. Then I’ll be back, and Blanche will call a cab, and we’ll all go home.”
“Hurry,” Mike says.
Glory
comes over to Cee-Cee on the pool table and gives her a big hug with plenty of
kisses. “Hi, Baby. Are you sick again? I’m sorry about this morning. But now
we’ll
all go home together, okay?”
Like
magic, Cee-Cee’s
eyelids unstick. “Hi,
Glory. I feel better now.”
“Back in a flash,” Glory promises as she breezes back
toward the door.
Blanche
crosses the room, stopping to peer through the diamond cutout window of the
front door after Glory; she holds a few bottles of whiskey in her hand.
Mike
starts talking as if nothing happened. “Damndest
thing, Blanche, I had to pee like the devil for the last half hour. And now–––nothing!”
Blanche
snorts.
“Poor me, poor me.” He slaps Roadie’s money on the bar. “Pour me a drink!”
Blanche
comes around the backside of the bar with a bottle of Beefeater. She collects
Mike’s
money and fills his glass.
Mike
works his mouth into a dry smile.
“Glory gone?” Blanche pours to the rim.
Mike
bares his teeth at the whiskey. “Gone
is exactly what Glory is.”
*
It
gets dark a few minutes before the dinnertime rush. Blanche opens the back door
to let her son in.
Norbie
walks fast on the heels of a girl with ponytails and scraped knees. He pulls
off his coat and scarf, giving his mother a kiss, then looks across the room. “Cee-Cee! Have you been here praying?”
“I’m sick.”
His
looming rubbery face is red from the cold and big as a moon.
“Oh no!” He curls his long pink tongue and
rubs his hands together in a special coded motion above his head, as if
applying some magic lotion. “This
is my best friend, Mary Margaret. She’s
real smart. Aren’t
you, Mary Margaret? She lives five houses over.”
The
girl eyes Cee-Cee’s
pajamas and hair. “You’ve been lying there all day? On a
pool table?”
Feeling
her fever lift, Cee-Cee pops up on an elbow. “Yeah, so?”
“What if someone wanted to play and
knocked you off with a cue stick?”
“Hasn’t happened yet,” she says.
Norbert
exhales a long, sour breath. “The
angels watch over Cee-Cee.”
Mary
Margaret twists her cherry mouth into a frown. “What’s that mean?”
But
Cee-Cee is not about to tell her anything. She just smiles.
Mary
Margaret is skinny and has two jagged front teeth growing in crooked. Her face
is small and mouse-like, sharp but pretty, and splattered with freckles. Her
brown hair is tied into matching braids behind each ear.
“What grade are you in?” she asks. “Second?”
“Fourth,” Cee-Cee says. “They almost skipped me to Fifth but I
wanted to stay with my brother.”
“Public school?”
Cee-Cee
nods.
Norbert
watches them. “Mary
Margaret goes to Catholic school with the nuns from church.”
“My Nonnie lives across from Our Lady,” Cee-Cee says. “She’s friends with the Mother Superior
there.”
“Mother Stephen!” Mary Margaret seems vaguely
impressed. “She’s the school principal. Do you know
she has burns on most of her body? If you get on her good side, she’ll show you the scars—they’re real bad.”
Nonnie
has Mother Stephen over for tea and cookies when Cee-Cee and her brothers are
visiting, but she has never seen any scars. “I think she’s pretty.”
“Her face, sure, and she's younger
than most of them.”
Mary Margaret turns to Norbert. “You
know what those Sisters are called, don’t
you?”
Norbert’s eyes get big. “The Sisters of Christ’s Most Precious Wounds?”
“The
Spooky Sisters!”
Mary Margaret says. “And
I’ll tell you what: they are a big pain
in my ass.”
Laughing,
Norbert lumbers to the bar to pat Mike’s
back, as if he’s
the genius responsible for all his good luck. “Cee-Cee’s here! I love Cee-Cee.”
“She’s our girl.” Mike raises his glass.
Mary
Margaret studies Cee-Cee. “Next
year, I’m
going to get a pair of platform shoes and wear them at school. Let those holy
Wounds try and stop me!”
“Glory twisted her ankle wearing
platforms once. She had to rest her foot in a bucket of ice.”
“So?” Mary Margaret says. Then, curious: “Who’s Glory?”
Blanche
signals to them. “Dinner
upstairs—then
I’ll take you girls home. Mike’s in no shape to do anything except
sleep it off in the store room.”
Blanche
never lets children sleep over, but she will feed just about anyone.
A
house on two main highways and a creek that floods every year is her idea of
bad news, she always says—and
she doesn’t
like boys running around like wild Indians, either. She doesn’t let Norbert go to Cee-Cee’s house too often.
Dragging
his bad leg, Norbert makes a path through the crowd toward the arched doorway
behind the bar that leads to the little apartment above. The Iron Door is alive
with customers and music as the afternoon lull draws to a close.
“One of you lesser drunks watch the
bar for me.”
Blanche tucks the cash box under her arm. “I’ve got to feed these kids.”
“Unwise calling your customers drunks,” Mike says.
“Nah.” Blanche looks around. “You know I think of you as folks with
cancer, sorry cases, except some of you still got hair.”
Laughter
ripples through the room. It is always cheerful at the beginning of a shift.
But these are the very same men, Cee-Cee knows, who will be hunched and silent
at the end of the night.
One
guy comes around to the back of the bar. “You
love us, Blanche. You know you do.”
Blanche
leans into the guy. “Pretend
to care, my husband always said, may he rest. That’s all people want. And that’s what I do: pretend.”
The
guy pushes a dollar bill into Blanche’s
psychedelic sweater. “Damn
good bartender, your husband was.”
Blanche
slaps the guy’s
hand away, but pinches the dollar. “What’s this for?”
“For your kid. Because he’s…simple –– or something.”
“Oh, he’s
something all right.”
She beams.
Blanche
herds them up the stairs to the cramped apartment above. “The first rule of alcohol is never
get close; you’ll
only get hurt.”
She nods at Cee-Cee and Mary Margaret. “The
second is: never try to fill up a drunk; it can’t be done.”
Holding
Norbert’s
damp meaty hand, Cee-Cee watches the mole at the corner of Blanche’s mouth disappear and reappear as she
talks. She knows what Blanche means: Most of the time, Mike is as hollow as a
drum.
Norbert
pulls both Cee-Cee’s
and Mary Margaret’s
hand to his chest, rubbing them together. Blanche stoops, weighed down by her
enormous body.
“Can Mary Margaret eat over too?” Norbert asks. He stops on the
landing, dropping their hands, so he can rub his knuckles together in the
strange familiar motion at his forehead.
“Don’t see why not.” Blanche heaves her body up the
steps. “‘Less
Mary Margaret’s
mother is making dinner at her home?”
“Mom’s got a new baby,” Mary Margaret reports. “No dinners for a while.”
“Dear heavens, another one?” Blanche squeezes by to unlock the
apartment door. “Where
does that woman get the heart?”
Mary
Margaret shrugs. “She
stays in her room.”
“You must be a comfort to her.”
“I’m the only one who’s made it so far,” Mary Margaret says. “We’re not even naming this baby until we’re sure he's going to live."
She
looks at Cee-Cee meaningfully.
In
a flash, Cee-Cee sees the little baby graveyard behind Mary Margaret's house,
matchstick stones rising up to mark the graves. She counts: one, two, three,
four of them.
Blanche
pats Mary Margaret’s
bony arm, then caresses Norbert’s
cheek until he unfurls his long pink flag of a tongue and wags it outside his
mouth.
“Well, I hope you like soup, Mary
Margaret, because we’ve
got to get our little Cee-Cee here back on her feet.”
“Okay by me,” Mary Margaret says.
Norbert
rests his big moony face on his mother’s
breast, making Cee-Cee’s
heartache exactly in the middle.
In
Blanche’s
apartment, they turn on the lights, start a fire in the stove, and open several
cans of soup. Blanche parks Cee-Cee on the sofa with an afghan and flips on the
local news.
On
a tiny black and white set that looks like it was made for a doll, the
newscaster gives an update on the kidnapping. A piece of pink sweater was found
on a chain link fence down by the railroad tracks.
The
missing girl’s
name is Eileena Brice Iaccamo.
Blanche
clucks her tongue. “Don’t those Iaccamo kids go to Catholic
school with you at Queen of Sorrows, Mary Margaret?”
“A bunch do,” Mary Margaret answers. “There’s about a million of them, all with
Irish first and middle names. The older ones go to public school at Romeville
Free.”
“Missing girl’s 14, the paper says. She must be up
at the high school.”
Mary
Margaret hovers close by, waiting for Cee-Cee to look up from the T.V. “Last year this girl in my
neighborhood disappeared. In the spring, they found the snow piled up right
over a set of fresh bones. Turned out to be a dead dog though. She was never
heard from again.”
Cee-Cee
chews a fresh piece of gum.
Mary
Margaret watches for signs of weakness and comes up with a lie: “She was my best friend.”
Norbert
chants in a loud voice: “They
have to find this missing girl. They have to find her.”
Cee-Cee
can see someone pulling a girl out of a ditch. “Jesus brought St. Martha’s brother back to life. Maybe you
should pray for her.”
Mary
Margaret bites her nails and frowns. “You
don’t
believe that crap.”
“Why not?” Cee-Cee says.
Mary
Margaret thinks this over. “We could be best
friends. You’d
have to wear my neckerchief and call me on the phone.”
“How would I get your number?”
Mary Margaret pulls a pen out of her bag and
writes her phone number on Cee-Cee’s
hand.
The
anchorman’s
confident tone agitates Norbert. He crosses the room, thighs rubbing together
in his gigantic green corduroy pants. He stands near the TV and shifts his
weight from good leg to bad leg.
Blanche
watches her son as she stirs the soup. He will be okay because he is giant and
almost already a man. “Remember,
girls, it’s
just as unsafe in some houses as it is outside them.”
“Do
you think they’ll
ever find this kid, Missus?”
Mary Margaret asks.
Though
the pale sun is almost entirely burned out in the winter sky, Cee-Cee feels it
blaze in her heart when Mary Margaret turns and smiles.
“Don’t worry, baby.” Blanch say. “They find everyone sooner or later.”
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