The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  I spent Monday morning composing the ad that would run on Craigslist. “College essays giving you grief?” I wrote. “Got the goods but not the words? Let a professional writer help you craft the perfect essay or personal statement for top colleges and universities. Reasonable rates. Happiness guaranteed.” (I’d added that last part, imagining that I could guarantee they’d be happy with their essay but that, of course, I could not make any claims about whether they’d get admitted to the schools of their choice.) The ad went live at noon. By three o’clock, I had my first email. Ten minutes later, I’d made my first appointment, and by six, I was booked for the week. “You’re doing what?” Grandma asked that night, one penciled eyebrow lifted.

  “It’s writing,” I said after I’d explained, daring her to contradict me. She shrugged, muttering to herself, and went to her bedroom to begin moving clothing from one plastic bag to another, a trick that served as the Jewish woman-of-a-certain-age’s version of meditation. The next morning, after blow-drying my hair and applying Dermablend to my cheek and putting on a skirt and boots and a jersey top, I packed up my laptop, got in my car, and staked out a table in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Beverly and Robertson, a perfect spot underneath a window and convenient to a power outlet. For the first time since that day when I’d gotten the news about Rob, I allowed myself to feel the tiniest hint of hope.

  I spent the next six months working with tongue-tied teenagers trying to get into college and, eventually, lonely friends of my grandmother’s who’d found only liars and heartache on Match.com or JDate.com and thought a spruced-up profile could change their luck. The senior citizens were my favorites (I’d start them off by showing them how to switch the font size on their screens to a clear and readable twenty-four points). Even Grandma asked for an ad, and insisted on writing me a check once I’d presented her with the finished product: “I Have My Own Teeth,” read the headline. “Young at heart, with a sparkle in her step and a spring in her eyes, loves to laugh, cook, and watch Desperate Housewives on Sunday nights, seeks a gentleman with at least a few of his original parts, who knows the words to ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird,’ appreciates a good roast chicken, knows the Lindy, and drives at night.”

  Grandma’s ad produced a few duds and, finally, a lovely retired banker named Maurice, pronounced Morris, who lived in a sprawling colonial house in Brentwood, loved to ballroom dance, and drove a vintage Cadillac Lincoln Mark V the size of most studio apartments, which he’d lovingly restored and drove even at night. Maurice, who was all of five foot two on a good day, and had bought his suits in the boys’ department of Barneys until he’d been able to afford bespoke clothing from London and Hong Kong, would squire both of us to his tennis club in Beverly Hills on Sunday mornings for brunch. He and Grandma would sit underneath an umbrella, sipping horseradish-spiced Bloody Marys and trading sections of the New York Times to the thwack of the tennis balls on the clay courts, while I’d do a shallow dive into the empty pool and swim laps, thinking about what adjectives could put the best possible spin on a pear-shaped fellow with a wispy mustache and a fondness for high-waisted jeans, or how to make the girl who’d confessed to never reading anything other than OK! magazine at the nail salon sound like she cared about the world as it existed beyond the tips of her eyelashes.

  I made a decent amount of money and even a few friends, and learned that first impressions, and beauty, could be deceiving. One of my clients was a pretty high-school senior, all long legs and highlighted hair and sentences that rose up at the end, turning statements into questions. When we’d met, I’d dismissed Caitlyn as a Beverly Hills bubblehead, privileged and protected, who had as much chance of getting into Berkeley as I did of being tapped for the Miss America pageant. “Extracurriculars?” I’d asked, and Caitlyn, using her pierced tongue to shift a wad of purple gum from one side of her mouth to the other, had mentioned helping pet-sit for a friend who’d had a breast reduction, and volunteered that she sometimes babysat her little brother, which I’d bet her parents paid her for. Then, in the Beverly Center, an enormous shopping mall, I’d met the brother. He had cerebral palsy and sat in a candy-apple-red wheelchair with a computerized board with words and pictures in his lap, his head rolling from side to side, giving the occasional yelp or moan. “Shh, honey,” Caitlyn said, pulling a folded napkin from her back pocket and wiping his lips with practiced, maternal efficiency. I watched her and marveled, burning with shame at the way I’d dismissed her, the way I’d seen all that glossy hair and tanned skin and heard her talk about tennis and Paris and thought shallow and silly and dumb.

  I made small changes to my life, the way the experts advised. Slowly, I would add or subtract one thing, one activity, one habit, each week. Instead of swimming for hours, I’d swim for ninety minutes, then just sixty, and some days I’d take a yoga class or go for a hike or just let my body recover and do nothing at all. I made myself stop Googling Rob and Taryn obsessively, but I was still aware of their lives, especially since a few of the gossip websites insisted on chronicling their every move and vacation and trip down the red carpet. I had read in Us Weekly about the postnuptial party they’d thrown at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and People had printed the news when they’d given birth to a little boy named Jack. I told myself I didn’t care. I even considered sending a wedding gift, but when I went to their online registry and found myself browsing knives, I decided that maybe I shouldn’t.

  I had walked off the set of The Girls’ Room in January. It was June when I finally forced myself to call Shelly, my agent, the woman who’d gotten me the job. I dialed her office number at eight o’clock at night, after she’d left for the day, so I could leave my apology on her voice mail instead of dealing with her in person. Reading a speech that I’d written out beforehand, I explained that I’d been going through a tough time (those were the words I’d chosen, after considering and rejecting the phrase “personal issues”). “But now everything’s fine,” I said, hoping I sounded cheerful and confident and, above all, sane, “and I’m ready to work again.”

  “Ruth Saunders,” Shelly said when she called me first thing the next morning. “Look who’s back on the face of the earth.” Shelly was in her thirties, a tiny girl who’d been born in China and adopted by a Jewish couple on the Upper West Side in New York City. She had doll-size hands and feet and blunt-cut bangs and the most astonishing collection of purses I’d ever seen. She’d gone to Spence, then NYU, and if you closed your eyes when she talked, you could imagine you were speaking to an old-school theatrical agent, a fast-talking fella in a grimy fedora who’d call you Toots and say things like such a bargain, and she always referred to me by my first and last names.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,” I began, even though I was sure Shelly knew what had happened, and why I’d stayed quiet for so long. “The Girls’ Room turned out not to be the best fit.” A total euphemism, and we both knew it, but there was no way I was going to spell out the specifics.

  “And now I suppose,” she said with a sigh, “that you would like to be gainfully employed.”

  “I’m not a flake,” I said, even though it was precisely what a flaky artiste would say.

  “Were you in love with him?” she asked me, her voice gentle.

  I winced. There were no gossips like showbiz gossips, which meant that everyone in my little world knew, if not the specifics then at least the generalities, about what had happened and what a fool I’d been.

  “Never mind,” said Shelly before I could answer. “It’s none of my business. I could try to find you a lady showrunner . . .” I laughed, knowing, as Shelly surely did, that women-run shows, especially comedies, were still a distinct minority. After all these years of feminism and presumed equality, there still wasn’t a woman hosting a late-night network show, and only a handful of ladies were writing for those male hosts. Sitcoms weren’t much better. Male writers and showrunners were the rule, women writers and showrunners were still the exception, and while every writers’ room had a fe
w females and at least one person of color, comedy was still very much a white man’s world.

  “Don’t worry,” I told my agent. “I can work with another guy. I promise, I can keep it zipped.” We had ourselves a chuckle over that, even though I’d certainly worked (and I was sure that Shelly had, too) with a few guys who couldn’t keep it zipped, guys who viewed the women they worked with as just as accessible to them as the bagels and doughnuts set out for their selection at craft services every morning.

  “You’ll probably have to start as an assistant again,” she said.

  I winced, even though it was what I’d been expecting. I’d never actually made it to staff on The Girls’ Room; I’d just been hired as a freelancer to write my single episode. The assumption was that I’d make the jump to staff the next season, after my episode had aired. That, of course, was before my supervisor married the show’s star and I’d taken my cardboard box and broken heart off to the deep end to heal.

  “But don’t worry. You’ve got great writing samples. You’ll get on staff eventually. And believe it or not, I think I’ve actually got something that could be perfect for you.”

  SIX

  There might have been places in the world where it was normal to see kids being raised by their grandparents, but Framingham, Massachusetts, in the 1980s was not one of them. In that suburb of Boston, it was the good old nuclear family, mom and dad and however many kids could be packed into the back of the minivan or SUV, at soccer games and school plays, Girl Scout camping trips, father-daughter pancake breakfasts. Even the couples who had divorced would put on a show of togetherness for the sake of the children, which meant that the children I saw moved in constellations of parents and siblings, where for me it was just the two of us: my grandmother, the sun, bright and fiery, and me, the little planet in orbit.

  Grandma did what she could to make up for my lack of parents. After she went back to work, she hired a series of young women from the area colleges to take care of me, knowing that these babysitters, with their high-heeled boots, their sparkly eye shadow and feathered earrings, their scents of perfume and patchouli oil and cigarette smoke, and the boyfriends who’d drop them off and pick them up and call when they were over, would be a lure to my female classmates. After school, Kate or Melissa or Judy or Elaine would pick me up and walk me and sometimes a friend back home. Under the sitter’s indulgent eye, we would make toasted-cheese sandwiches, do our homework, give each other manicures, or French-braid each other’s hair. We’d watch the forbidden soap operas and leaf through the pages of Seventeen and Mademoiselle and Vogue, discussing whether we were high- or short-waisted, whether our faces were round or oval or heart-shaped, whether we could wear the latest layered bob, or if the newest shades of lipstick would work for us.

  “You’re so lucky,” my best friend, Sarah Graham, told me. Sarah had moved to Framingham just before the start of fourth grade. By then, the rest of my classmates had more or less gotten used to my face. They didn’t stare and they rarely teased. The cruelty-prone boys had figured out that Marissa Marsh, who had a weak chin and stringy hair and already wore an adult size twelve, was much more prone to tattling and tears when they called her Blubber than I was when they called me Frankenstein.

  Sarah was a misfit, too. She had an overbite that was being corrected by braces and headgear, a body that was all knobby elbows and protruding knees, and a face that we had decided was heart-shaped, with brown eyes and brown hair and glasses. She was the first person I’d met who had allergies (wheat, eggs, dairy), and she sniffled year-round, except for a few brief weeks in the wintertime, when pollen season was over and before she’d caught her first cold.

  Sarah’s mother was a nurse who worked in a gastroenterologist’s office, and her father was an engineer at MIT. They were strict with Sarah and her two older brothers. The Graham kids couldn’t watch television unless it was PBS, they couldn’t eat sandwiches that weren’t made with whole grain breads . . . and, of course, fashion magazines were forbidden in the Grahams’ house. “They reinforce gender norms,” Sarah said gloomily, flipping through my grandmother’s September issue of Vogue. She paused at a picture of an evening gown made of ecru lace, the model’s eyes darkly shadowed, her short hair covered with a feathered cloche, and sighed, brightening only after Elaine, the day’s sitter, asked if we wanted to toast marshmallows over the gas burner and make s’mores.

  Sarah might not have been the friend I’d chosen if the choice had been mine to make. I loved to read and was deeply involved in the half-dozen television shows I watched. Sarah liked the Red Sox and video games, and could have happily spent all her free time and every quarter she could cadge at the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the back of Papa Gino’s, where we’d stop after school for a slice and a soda. She got antsy and bored after half an hour at the mall, while I could spend entire afternoons there, pitching pennies into the fountain, watching people—teenage couples with their bodies tucked around each other, mothers wearily pushing infants in strollers, old men towing oxygen tanks, senior citizens with fanny packs and puffy white sneakers, pumping their arms as they did their daily laps. Sarah liked horror films and boy bands and spray cheese right from the can. I preferred romantic comedies and Terms of Endearment and thought spray cheese looked like extruded orange snot. Still, we were friends, spending afternoons and Friday-night sleepovers together, possessors of each other’s secrets. I knew not only that Sarah had discovered her mother’s vibrator, tucked under a pile of washcloths in a bathroom drawer, but that she’d been using it since her eleventh birthday. She knew that I had a desperate crush on Mr. Herman, who’d been our substitute science teacher for six weeks while Ms. Van Rijn recovered from a mastectomy, and that, in the top drawer of my jewelry box, I had six Polaroid pictures that I’d taken of just the good side of my face, wearing the lipstick and eye shadow and false eyelashes that Cheryl, my sitter, had helped me apply. She was the one who read the stories I’d write in the journals my grandmother kept buying me, my own versions of the Baby-sitters Club and Nancy Drew, stories about twelve-year-old girls with no parents and missing limbs, girls who were blind or deaf or otherwise disfigured who discovered they had superpowers, or sixteen-year-olds falling in love.

  What happened to us was a classic story, one that most women have their own versions of: “The Tale of the Lost Friend.” Sarah and I sat together at lunch, we played together at recess, we spent as many afternoons together as our schedules would allow. (Sarah had recorder lessons and, with her brothers, took fencing classes in Cambridge; I had piano and ice-skating lessons in the winter, and between my face and her allergies, there was usually a doctor’s visit once or twice a month.) Starting in junior high, we’d call each other every night to talk about what we were wearing the next day, and whether Jared Marsh (my crush) or Jason Biller (Sarah’s) had noticed what we’d worn the day before. The summer before high school, we spent afternoons in my backyard on towels, in bikinis, with Hawaiian Tropic oil on our bodies and Sun-In in our hair. I was planning on joining the swim team, and Sarah, still tall but much less gawky, with her braces off and her headgear reserved for nights, had traded her glasses for contacts and was thinking about volleyball or maybe basketball. “And then there’s homecoming,” Sarah said, as if I could have forgotten. The homecoming dance, the first dance of the school year, the Saturday night after the fourth football game of the season, in the school gym. Any student with the ten dollars for a ticket could attend.

  On our first day of ninth grade we wore the outfits we’d shopped for and chosen together: Calvin Klein jeans, ribbed sweaters (red for her, plum for me), rubber-soled suede work boots—a fad that had swept through Framingham the previous spring—and oversize gold hoop earrings. My bus got to school first, and I waited for her by the front door, eager for her opinion: I’d gotten up at five-thirty to be sure that my hair, which I’d set in hot rollers, and my makeup were both perfect. I’d curled my lashes and smoothed on foundation under my grandmother’s supervision, and sh
e’d allowed me a squirt of her Shalimar. Following her instructions, I sprayed the perfume in front of me, then walked through it, allowing the scent to adhere to my clothes, my skin, my hair. Now I waited, squinting, peering over the tops of my classmates’ heads, the boys in varsity jackets, the girls squealing laughter, smacking gum. I saw the top of her head first, then her ponytail, bobbing with each step. As Sarah drew closer, I saw she was talking to a boy named Derek Nooney, who lived in her neighborhood and rode her bus. Derek had gotten taller over the summer and had a juicy crop of acne spread over his forehead and his nose.

  I pushed myself off the waist-high brick wall where I’d been sitting and stood by the door, where I knew she couldn’t miss me. Sarah was wearing her Calvins and her red sweater, like we’d planned, and a floating silver heart around her neck that I’d given her for her birthday after saving up to buy it at Tiffany. “Hey, Sarah!” I said, and waved. She looked up. Her face was closed. “Ohhi,” she said, running the words together like she was desperate to get them out of her mouth. She turned, bending her head back down to Derek, saying something I couldn’t hear. Her remark was followed by the bellow of his goatish laughter. The two of them slipped past me as the bell rang, joining the throngs of students streaming through the doors.

  Sarah and I didn’t have lunch together. Rather than try to find people I knew in the wilds of the enormous cafeteria, a high-ceilinged room that clanged with the noise of a hundred different conversations, forks and knives, salad greens being chewed and sandwich bags unwrapped, I took my lunch to the lawn outside. It was mild and sunny, the temperature still in the eighties, and I had a copy of Black Beauty tucked into my backpack, which I’d bought with a birthday gift card at the L.L.Bean outlet store two weeks earlier, after Sarah’s mother had dropped us off for a back-to-school shopping trip. My diary was in there, too. Write it down, I heard my grandmother say . . . but I couldn’t think of the words I needed. Derek Nooney was in the remedial math class. Up close, he smelled like spoiled yogurt, and he used to throw clods of dirt at the short bus that took the handicapped kids to the vo-tech after lunch. The only thing he had to recommend him was that he was a boy. Maybe that was all that mattered.