The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “It hurts,” I managed, though it was agony to move my jaw and tongue enough to even get those words out.

  “I know,” said Grandma, stroking my hair. I picked up a pen with hands that felt as thick and clumsy as Mickey Mouse’s gloved extremities. I remembered Katie and her mother walking through the curtains, bathed in the sunset’s apricot glow, back to the world of normal people, where nobody stared, where girls got normal things I was already sensing would be off limits for me—friends, boyfriends, a husband, a home. I opened the notebook and wrote, I will never be beautiful. Then I shut my eyes, turned my face toward the wall, and pretended I’d fallen asleep.

  That was the only night I ever saw my grandmother cry. She picked up the notebook, read what I’d written, closed it slowly, and turned toward the window. I saw her reflection in the glass, saw her shoulders hitching up and down, saw tears shining on her cheeks as she whispered, fiercely, over and over, Not fair, not fair, not fair. I made myself stop looking, aware that what I was seeing was private, not meant for my eyes. The next morning, her cheeks were dry, her eyes were bright, her lipstick and mascara as perfect as ever. The page I’d written on was missing from the notebook. It had been ripped out so neatly that it took me the rest of the summer to even notice that it was gone.

  THREE

  I moved to Los Angeles six months after graduating from Grant College, a small and well-regarded liberal-arts institution in Connecticut that had the benefit of being a mere ninety minutes from Grandma and from home. I’d finished with a degree in English literature that I’d earned with highest honors. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that the degree qualified me to do precisely nothing except go to graduate school for more degrees. Instead of that, I set my sights on Hollywood, like plenty of people before me who were good writers, devoted viewers, and believed they could combine those skills into a profitable and glamorous career. What set me apart from my peers was that I was the only person I knew who’d made the trip out west with her grandmother.

  I wasn’t sure how Grandma would feel about my plan, so I’d broached it carefully, and only after doing weeks of research. I had money from the accident, more than enough to support me for the rest of my life, even if I never got a job, if I lived frugally. My parents might not have had the foresight to make out a will, but my father had two college friends who’d gone into the insurance business, and he had obligingly purchased policies from both of them. The settlement, carefully invested by my grandmother, had given me enough to pay all of my medical expenses, and for my college education, with plenty left over to launch me into a life of my own. I felt guilty about having it, knowing how many of my classmates had taken out loans to pay their tuition and were graduating with six figures’ worth of debt, but the one time I’d said so, Grandma’s lips had tightened, and she’d said, “Divide it by every year of your life you won’t have your parents, and you’ll see it’s not that much.” Divide it, I heard, for every year I won’t have my daughter. After that, I didn’t complain.

  One Friday night in June I laid out my plan, complete with charts and spreadsheets, my best estimations of how much it would cost to live in Los Angeles, with food and rent and car payments, and how long it would take for me to find a job. “I’ll give it a year,” I told Grandma as she sat, legs crossed, in a pale-pink dress printed with red-and-orange hibiscus flowers, a gold cuff bracelet on one of her narrow wrists and a comb ornamented with pale-pink crystals in her hair. “If I haven’t gotten a writing job by then, we can come back east and I’ll think about something more practical. Business school or law school.” It had never crossed my mind to go without her, to head west alone and leave her behind.

  Grandma frowned. “Why a year? Why not two? Why not five? Business school.” She shook her head, repeating the words as if they hurt her. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  I tried to explain. “I’m sure a lot of people think they can write television shows.”

  She shrugged. “Lots of people probably think it. But you actually can.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No ‘maybe.’ Do or do not. There is no try!” During moments of stress, Grandma had a tendency to sound like, or actually quote, Yoda. “I think you’re a very good writer.”

  I shrugged. I’d written for the school paper all through high school, and had won prizes for fiction and poetry in college, but secretly, I’d wondered whether I’d won because I’d been the only one who’d entered. Most of my classmates had enjoyed more active social lives than I’d had, and had spent significantly less time in the library. What did it matter that I’d been named the top student in the English department if I was the only one who was even trying?

  Grandma was still mid-soliloquy. “You’re the most determined person I’ve ever met.”

  “You don’t get out much,” I countered.

  Grandma ignored me. “If anyone can break in out there, it’s you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I figure I’ll give it a year.”

  “Give it two.”

  “Eighteen months?”

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m paying the rent.” She folded her hands in her lap, telling me that was that.

  “We’ll split it. I’ve got money—”

  “I do too,” she pointed out. “And I might not have long to live.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said. “Here we go with this again.” Whenever she was denied something she wanted—brunch at the Four Seasons for Mother’s Day, a freshwater-pearl necklace, an early-morning trip to Provincetown so she could secure street-side seating for the Mardi Gras parade—Grandma would recite her “I might not have long to live” speech, although from all indications she was perfectly healthy and would probably live, as her own mother had, well into her nineties.

  “At least let me enjoy my last days on this earth. Hollywood.” She stared dreamily into the distance, possibly picturing movie stars and red carpets, limousines and premieres. “I think I’ve always belonged there.”

  “Did you ever want to act?” It was embarrassing, but I’d never considered what my grandmother might have really wanted to be, besides a housewife, then a mother and a furniture saleswoman, and then the one who took care of me.

  She gave a little pfft through pursed lips and a single, dismissive shake of her head. “That wasn’t an option.”

  “Why not?”

  She was looking at me as if I’d asked why she hadn’t spent her young adulthood growing a second head. “It just wasn’t something you did. And I had to help my parents. And there was Miltie, of course.” Her face softened, the way it always did when she mentioned her baby brother, ten years younger than she was, the one she’d helped raise while her own mother had worked as a cashier in a candy store. “Maybe we could stop and see him on the way.”

  I had a temp job in a Boston law firm that had started two weeks after I’d graduated, a summer position that stretched into fall. Grandma gave notice at the furniture store, and together, we began the process of picking through fifteen years’ worth of possessions: the things my parents had bought, the things Grandma had shipped from Florida, the boxes of old clothes, report cards, and elementary-school art projects, rugs and dishes and pots and pans and hundreds of books. We held a tag sale at the end of September, and spent the following weekends driving trash bags and boxes to Goodwill and the Salvation Army, until the two-bedroom house stood almost empty, with a FOR SALE sign staked in the front yard.

  We started our trip just before Thanksgiving, thinking we would meander our way across the country and arrive in Los Angeles the second week of December. I’d found us a short-term furnished rental in what the Internet had assured me was a safe part of West Hollywood, a one-bedroom apartment with a couch in the living room, a full kitchen, and easy access to the 101, the highway that would take me to the Valley. In a crate in the back of Grandma’s Cadillac were printed stacks of my résumé and writing samples, the Golden Girls and Friends spec scripts I’d written, and a garment bag with two intervie
w outfits that I’d bought at Filene’s Basement. There was a navy-blue blazer with pants and a matching skirt, the short-sleeved sweaters I’d wear underneath, and the strand of pearls that had been Grandma’s wedding gift to her daughter and were now mine.

  We stayed at affordable places on the way, stopping off to see Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Milt, now well into his seventies, who lived in a condominium in Cleveland and left all three of his television sets on all day long, volume blaring, tuned to ESPN. We spent a single night in Vegas, where I treated us to tickets to see Bette Midler and a meal at a restaurant with actual Picassos on the wall. The next day we were in Los Angeles, where we stayed, at Grandma’s insistence, at the Regent Beverly Wilshire—“the Pretty Woman hotel!”—for our first three nights in California, at a rate Grandma had bargained for after presenting the bemused clerk with her AAA card and her AARP card and, I suspected, the story of what had happened to my face, while I was out in the cobblestone driveway collecting our luggage (I had managed the trip with a single nylon duffel, while my grandmother had two vintage Louis Vuitton suitcases, a trunk, a hatbox, and three zippered garment bags). “One room,” I’d told her, holding up my index finger for emphasis, before leaving her at the front desk. By the time I returned, Grandma was beaming, with the key card in her hand and a bellman waiting with a wheeled cart behind her.

  We took the elevator up to the sixth floor of the Wilshire wing. The manager had put us in a suite, with a sprawling living room with a marble bar and a bedroom with two queen-size beds draped in crisp linen coverlets. He’d even sent up a tray of chocolate-covered strawberries, bite-size petits fours, miniature éclairs, and a bottle of sparkling wine.

  “What a sweet man,” Grandma said, bending down to unbuckle her shoes before sinking onto the gold-velvet-covered sofa with a sigh. The bellman had opened the curtains, and we could see the lights of Rodeo Drive through the windows. There were Chanel, Gucci, and Tiffany, and just up the street, I knew, were Saks and Barneys. I’d have to get Grandma’s credit card out of her wallet before I left the next day, I thought as she patted the cushion beside her.

  “We’re here!” she said. I sat down and gave her hand a squeeze. I thought about what an odd pair we made, me in my jeans and navy-blue long-sleeved T-shirt, running shoes on my feet, my hair pulled back into a bun, and Grandma in her creamy white wool dress, her narrow lipstick-red patent-leather belt, a gold locket at her throat and gold bangles around her wrist and her husband’s wedding ring, on its own gold chain, tucked against her heart. I probably looked like her helper, the paid companion to one of the frail little old ladies who lunched. The thought of it made me smile.

  I rested my head on her shoulder, with all the miles that we’d driven humming through my body. Grandma could and did drive, but never on highways, not since my parents’ accident. I’d have to find us a place to live permanently, one within walking distance of a supermarket and a movie theater and a park, one with a well-equipped kitchen—no dorm-size refrigerator or two-burner stove for my grandmother. Ideally, we would have our own space and our own bedrooms. I’d have to find doctors for the both of us, switch my driver’s license from Massachusetts to California, and figure out which grocery stores sold Empire kosher chickens. Focusing on these details let me ignore, for now, the bigger picture: that I had left the only place I’d lived, the only home I’d known, that I had risked everything to come here and try to find work in an industry where there were many more applicants than jobs. But, in that moment, I squeezed her hand again and didn’t complain when she picked up the phone to order room service, sliders and quesadillas, a cheese plate, a lobster Cobb salad, and a bottle of white wine.

  * * *

  I got lucky on the apartment hunt. Waiting in line at the DMV, I’d overheard a woman talking about how her brother and his wife had split and had to sublet their place. I excused myself for eavesdropping, then told the bemused woman that my grandmother and I were in the market for a two-bedroom, that we had excellent credit and would be wonderful tenants. The apartment turned out to be a beautiful bilevel in a ten-story building right where Hancock Park became Koreatown. It had a living room and dining room, hardwood floors, a good-size galley kitchen with white subway tiles, two full bathrooms—one with an ancient claw-foot tub—a wrought-iron balcony just big enough for a single chair and half a dozen flowerpots, decent closet space, and big windows to let in the light. The rent was more than I’d planned on spending, but I felt better about writing the checks when I came home on our second night at the hotel and learned that my grandmother had gotten a job.

  “Ruthie, look at this!” she said after I’d pushed the door open and found her barefoot in the living room, waving a sheet of paper triumphantly over her head.

  “What’s that?” I’d asked.

  “My call sheet!”

  “Your what?”

  She grabbed my hands, pulled me down to the couch, and explained. There were services, one of which was actually called Central Casting, where regular people without a single day’s acting experience could register. They would submit a picture, give their height and weight and measurements, and list any special skills: juggling, or riding horseback, or even things like being able to speak with a Southern or a Southie accent, or owning a car and possessing a valid driver’s license. “Then,” Grandma said, “there’s a number you call every day, and you hear what parts are available, and you submit yourself, and then . . . you get picked!”

  “You got picked!”

  “I got picked!” she confirmed. “I’m going to be an extra tomorrow on Major Medical.”

  “Wow.” It sounded too good to be true. Grandma looked like she couldn’t believe it, either, happy and almost dazed as she smoothed her skirt (black cotton, pleated, trimmed in black eyelet lace) and said, “I wonder if I’ll get to meet Brock Cantrell.” Brock Cantrell was the star of the show. He played a hunky neurosurgeon tormented by his wife’s tragic death (she’d been beheaded by a helicopter’s blades on a sightseeing trip to Hawaii).

  “I’m not sure how that works.” I didn’t want her to expect too much. My suspicion, as yet unconfirmed by any real-life TV experience, was that extras were treated in the same manner as furniture and props, that they were kept as far away as possible from the stars and were actively discouraged from making conversation, or even eye contact, with them. But the next day, Grandma came home beaming, dressed in her very best Chanel suit, the one she’d bought for my bat mitzvah, with a signed headshot of Brock in her hand. “To Beautiful Rae,” he’d written, then scribbled his signature. Better yet, she’d booked a week’s worth of work on Major Medical.

  As it turned out, senior citizens like my grandmother, the ones who were both ambulatory and with-it enough to get themselves to a set, read a script, and take direction, were in great demand as extras. For our first three months, while I looked for a job, she was the one who’d earned a steady paycheck, starting with background parts and working her way up to actual speaking roles. She made a bunch of extra-friends and learned to speak Variety. Words like sides and stand-ins and blocking began to pop up in her conversation. “Can’t stay up late,” she would announce, getting up from the table to begin loading the dishwasher. “I’ve got an early call.” She knew the names of the men, and the handful of women, who ran the studios, who headed comedy and drama development, who had “ankled” their jobs at the big agencies to set up shop on their own, who’d had his or her development deal force-majeured during the writers’ strike of 2008, and who, of the seven writers credited for a movie’s script, had actually done the writing (as opposed to who had merely gotten his name on the credits because of Guild arbitration). It was like living with Walter Winchell, but I didn’t mind.

  In six weeks’ time Grandma played a feisty old lady with a heart condition on Grey’s Anatomy, a feisty old lady with an STD on House, and a feisty old lady with a shoplifting problem on Law & Order: LA. (“Let go of me, pig!” she’d cried when the security guards had nabbe
d her in Macy’s.) Even on days when she didn’t have a single line, when all she had to do was show up, spend an hour in hair and makeup, and then sit under the lights in a pretend restaurant mouthing the words radishes cabbages broccoli to the extra sitting across from her, she was happy to do it. She liked being out of the house, spending the day with her fellow extras, close enough to the business of making entertainment that she could have a whiff of the glamour and the fame. She also came home with stories: the tale of the actor who refused to learn writers’ names and would make them wear numbered placards during table reads, or the executive who’d thrown a can of Diet Coke at her assistant’s head when she’d booked a car service for the wrong day of the week.

  While Grandma worked and cooked and established herself, I made the rounds with my résumé, hope in my heart and concealer on my scars. I would wear my Filene’s clothes, my skirt and jacket and heels and, on my head, a fedora the color of coffee with cream, accented with an ivory ribbon around the band, that Grandma had found at a boutique on Melrose and bought me as a good-luck gift. She’d shown me how to wear it, tilted to cast a shadow over my disfigured cheek, angled just so. “There,” she’d say, giving the brim a final tug before sending me out the door.

  I applied to every show, network, and production company that might have use for a hardworking English major who loved to tell funny stories and did not mind fetching coffee or taking her boss’s car to be detailed, or even doing the detailing itself, if it came to that. I’d provide my own toothbrush and Q-tips and Armor All for the wheels. I wasn’t proud. Day after day, I’d present myself to receptionists and watch their eyes widen when they took in my face. I would find a seat in a room invariably filled with young men and women dressed in their best, although I quickly realized that in Hollywood what constituted one’s “best” was jeans with no visible rips or stains and T-shirts without anything too obscene written on the front. I retired my lined navy-blue jacket and skirt and invested in a bright fuchsia cardigan, cropped khakis, and metallic-gold ballet flats. “Polished and pretty,” Grandma decreed, nodding her approval.