The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  Don’t I know it, I thought.

  “I’m like one of those mothers who makes their kid wear a helmet and knee pads to ride a tricycle down the driveway,” she said. “I didn’t do you any favors, living with you this long. I thought it was for your good, but really, I think it was for mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She held up her hand. Standing in the kitchen, in her nightgown, under the overhead lights in their flea-market milk-glass shades, she looked every year of her age. Overhead lighting, she’d once told me, is no woman’s friend. “I lost my husband. I lost my daughter. I didn’t want to lose anyone else. I didn’t think I could stand it. I didn’t want to be alone, so I didn’t let you go when I should have. And Ruthie, that wasn’t right.” She said, “I told myself I was doing it to protect you, but I was just selfish. A selfish, foolish old woman.”

  “Grandma—”

  She talked over me. “I should have pushed you out of the nest when it was time for you to go. I should have made you leave.”

  “So you’re pushing me out now.” I meant to sound lighthearted; instead I just sounded sullen and glum. Grandma must have heard that in my voice, because her own tone sharpened.

  “It’s not as if you’re Moses in the bulrushes,” she said. “I’m not leaving you on someone’s doorstep in a shoebox, Ruthie. You’ll have this place. Besides, you’ve got your TV show.”

  “That’s right,” I said quietly. “My show.”

  She closed the refrigerator and then the dishwasher, and turned off the lights. “So much to do!” she said as she made her way down the hallway, toward her bedroom. “We’ll have to figure out the guest list . . . and find a caterer . . . and music, of course . . .”

  I waited until she’d closed her bedroom door before I sat down on the living-room couch, in the darkness. Grandma getting married. It sounded like a punch line. I wondered if I could use it in The Next Best Thing. As to the bigger question, of how I’d live alone after years of being tended to, supported, encouraged, and fed—well, millions of women, some of them probably less equipped than I was, had managed that transition for thousands of years. I’d figure it out somehow. I curled on my side, closed my eyes, and tried to ignore that I felt exactly the way she’d described: a baby in a basket, like Moses in the bulrushes, abandoned on a perilous river, all alone.

  PART TWO

  The New World

  TEN

  The morning after my grandmother gave me her news, I was back at Maya’s office in Larchmont, starting with auditions all over again, only now we were looking for a woman in her sixties instead of a fresh-faced funny girl. “Good morning!” Maya’s assistant greeted me, handing me a bottle of water and a stack of head shots. “Wait till you see who we’ve got today!” I smiled back, even though I was having difficulty focusing on anything except what my life would be like without my grandmother.

  From nine o’clock sharp until our first break at ten-thirty, I sat motionless in the little back room on Maya’s uncomfortably itchy tweed couch (I suspected she’d picked an uncomfortable couch on purpose because it kept producers from falling asleep), watching the hopefuls read their lines. “You okay?” Maya asked after the appearance of an Oscar winner from the 1980s, who’d swanned through the door in costume and in character, wearing a silk robe and teetering heels, failed to earn even a smile. Normally I’d be dazzled and shy in the presence of the stars I’d grown up watching. I’d blush and offer flustered compliments and stare at them too hard, trying, in some cases, to determine if they’d had work done (most had), and if the work was working (mostly it wasn’t). Another candidate, a woman whose posters had adorned many a dorm-room wall, seemed to have undergone a procedure that had severed all connection between the upper and lower halves of her face. As she read Nana Trudy’s big speech, her forehead and eyes would move, and then, a split second later, her cheeks and jaw would catch up. It was very disconcerting, a kind of real-life time-lapse photography, and the actress’s agent seemed to know that things weren’t right. Prior to the audition, he’d called Maya with a heads-up, saying that the actress had had a recent bad experience with what he said was an “overly aggressive chemical peel.” (This, I had learned, was Hollywood code for anything from “bad Botox” to “just got out of rehab” to “needs to go back into rehab.”) While he admitted that, at present, she looked “a little strange,” he wanted to assure us that the effects were temporary. “As if,” Maya said, tossing the actress’s ten-year-old head shot into the recycling bin before turning back to me. We were in a ten-minute lull between prospectives, and she wanted to talk. “So what’s going on? Are you all right with Cady?”

  I gave a firm showrunner-ish nod. “I think Cady will be fine.” This was what I’d decided to tell myself after a troubled night’s sleep and an early-morning swim. The truth was, any actress was a gamble. The ability to kill in an audition didn’t necessarily mean that an actress could do the same thing on show night, in front of an audience . . . and even if she did great in front of the people, there were the cameras and the editors to consider. Drying off after my shower, I’d told myself that this was a case where the network knew best. It was, after all, their money on the line, their job to know which actress would get viewers to watch. And who knew? If Cady had consented to audition, it was entirely possible that she’d have been at the top of my list, that I’d have rooted for her as hard as I’d hoped for her competition the night before.

  “So what, then?” Maya sat down on the couch beside me, close enough that I could smell the lavender essential oil she rubbed on her wrists. I wondered about her interest. Was it a kind of professional courtesy she was extending, or had she come to think of me as a friend? We had traded the basics of our private lives, so I knew that she was single, that she had an eight-year-old, that her parents had sold their home and bought an RV that they parked for four weeks each summer in her driveway up on Laurel Canyon.

  “Well, my grandmother’s getting married,” I began.

  “Mazel tov,” said Maya. Maya wasn’t Jewish—at least, not as far as I knew—but in Hollywood almost everyone ended up what the Daves called Tribe by Osmosis, comfortable dropping the occasional phrase in Yiddish, and knowing better than to set lunch meetings on Yom Kippur or send a muffin basket during Passover. “Is that all?”

  I hesitated.

  “Not Cady,” said Maya, lifting one finger. “Grandma getting married, that’s a good thing.” She looked at me slyly. “Is it a guy?”

  When I didn’t answer, she leaned even closer. “Gary?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. I’d given Maya the bare-bones version of our breakup right after it had happened. She’d nodded, brewed me a cup of chamomile tea, and said, “This probably sounds harsh, but honestly? Better that it happened now than in the middle of production.”

  “But is it a guy?” she asked me now.

  I shrugged, thinking a guy would make more sense than explaining that I was upset about being abandoned by my grandmother. “Just a crush. Nothing serious. He doesn’t even know.”

  Maya plopped herself down on the couch, sending a stack of head shots spilling onto the floor, crossing her legs, in their two-toned tights, and kicking off her red patent leather clogs. Maya was in her early forties, a lifelong Los Angeleno with the wardrobe of an elementary-school art teacher who went every year to Burning Man: lots of loose, flowing tunics that she’d pair with natural-fiber skirts, cotton leggings, and clunky metal jewelry. Her brown hair was a frizzy corona, strands of which were constantly getting stuck in her lip gloss.

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  I shook my head, embarrassed.

  “It is someone you work with?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Which is the problem. I mean, I had a crush on a guy I worked with once. It didn’t end well.” I imagined that someone had probably filled her in on my history with Rob. It was too juicy a bit of gossip to remain in the small orbit of The Girls’ Room.

/>   Maya adjusted her serape. “It happens. People deal.” This was true. I knew of a few formerly married couples, actors and agents and talent managers, who’d managed to continue running film production companies side by side even after they’d broken up. I also was remembering the rest of Maya’s story, which I’d heard years ago from Big Dave. For ten years, Maya had dated an actor named Wes who spent half the year acting and auditioning in Los Angeles and the other half doing television and theater in Canada, where he’d been born and where he still maintained a residence (and got health insurance). Spotting this fellow in the shows Maya cast became an insider’s game of “Where’s Waldo?” He’d appear as a bartender, a party guest, a bouncer, a chauffeur, a well-meaning uncle on a Very Special Episode of a sitcom, the lead singer of the wedding band during sweeps week for a prime-time soap.

  The year that Maya turned thirty-nine, she presented Wes with an ultimatum, in the form of a positive pregnancy test. He told her he wanted to take the weekend to think about the life changes a family would entail. “And you can probably guess how that story ended,” Big Dave said. “He hightailed it up to Montreal and never came down again.” Now Maya had a son named Andrew and was raising him alone. Somehow, none of this had made her bitter. She was still cheery, always smiling, energetic enough to greet every actor who came through the door with a hug and a kiss and a compliment on the last thing she’d done, even if the last thing she’d done was a showcase that played in the basement of the Scientology Center or a direct-to-video remake of the horror film Swamp Thing.

  “A guy’s a guy,” she told me. “Whether you work with him or not. And be honest. Where else are you going to meet someone?” Maya asked. “Working the hours we do?”

  I didn’t answer. The truth was, I hadn’t built much of a social life during my years in Los Angeles, even though I did what the experts suggested, putting myself in places where there were other young people around. I swam, I walked, I did yoga and went to the gym, but everyone I saw there seemed to have arrived with an existing circle of acquaintances, and I’d never figured out how to jump into conversation or even just say hi to the other women I’d see in the locker rooms, especially when we were all in the process of getting dressed, or undressed, and they could see my scars. I knew, too, from watching the Daves when Bunk Eight was in production, that my life was only going to get crazier when the pilot shoot began, and busier still if we got picked up. When shows were in production, showrunners had to keep a number of balls in the air. There was the episode that was being shot, the one you’d just shot and were editing, and the one being prepped for the following week . . . and it was almost a guarantee that if the network was okay with all three of them, the studio would have a problem, or the network would decide to flip the order, or the actor you’d cast for the crucial guest role who’d been so great during the audition would be awful in front of the cameras. There was always a crisis to handle, a fire to put out. Twelve-hour days were the norm, and it wasn’t unusual to hear about a showrunner grabbing a few hours’ sleep on an office couch, showering in the office gym, and not making it home for days at a time. If my life was a little empty, a little bereft of friends and confidantes, this wasn’t the time to fix it.

  “So who is it?” asked Maya, leaning forward, smiling. “Spill!”

  But before I could decide if I wanted to tell her, Deborah knocked at the door. “Oops! Renée’s here. More later.” Maya hopped off the couch and swung open the door to admit Renée, an actress who’d jettisoned her last name in the early 1990s, back when she’d starred as the straight-talking neighborhood matriarch in the sitcom ’Round the Way.

  “Ladies!” Renée sang, sashaying—that was really the only word to describe the way she moved—to the center of the room. She wore lizard-skin spike heels and a brilliant purple dress that clung to every curve of her ample figure. A mink stole draped her shoulders, and false eyelashes easily the length of my little finger fluttered against her cheeks. Renée was a woman of color—if she was great, the Daves and I had decided, we’d just say that Nana Trudy was a lifelong friend of the family rather than Daphne’s actual grandmother. “Welcome,” said Maya as Renée beamed at us. Glossy black curls—a wig, I figured—cascaded down her back. Her eyelids were shadowed in vivid purple, her lipstick was the shiny red of a Vaseline-coated stop sign, and beneath the mink, her V-neck dress was cut low, revealing a seam of cleavage deep enough to hide an iPad. Maya arched her eyebrows and pressed her lips together as Renée tossed her fur onto a chair in the corner. “You ready for me?” she asked. Her voice was the same girlish trill she’d had back in the day, and she was using all the cutesy-coy mannerisms that somehow still worked, even though she was old enough to be, and play, a grandmother.

  “The room is yours,” said Maya, spreading her hands wide with a welcoming smile on her clean-scrubbed face. In contrast with the women we saw all day long, Maya never wore makeup except a light lip gloss. It was as if, in response to all that artifice and beauty, the plastic surgery, the wigs, and the worked-on hair, she’d simply decided to take herself out of the game, wash her skin with Ivory, and go about her business.

  We sat on the couch, both of us with a copy of the script in our lap. Renée took a seat on the chair in the corner, clasped her hands at her bosom—her nails, I noticed, were painted three different shades of purple and sparkled with glitter—and began Nana’s speech to Daphne. “Hello, darling. Oh, now, what are you looking all downhearted about?”

  “I don’t think that interview went very well,” Maya mumbled, in character as Daphne, downhearted after confessing that she’d been turned down at a fancy French restaurant where she’d applied.

  “Sit down and tell Mama all about it,” said Renée, and then glanced at her watch. “Actually, can you give Mama the hundred-and-forty-character version? No offense, but this whole traveling-pants thing you’ve got going gets a little tired.”

  Maya-as-Daphne sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe Florida was a bad idea. Maybe we should just go home.”

  “What was that?” When no answer came, Renée straightened her shoulders, gave her glossy curls a toss, stood, and marched into the center of the room. “You’re giving up on Miami after four hours and one job interview? I didn’t raise you any better than that?” Without waiting for the answer, she said, “Your mother—God rest her soul—didn’t want you to have a little life, Daphne. She wanted you to have a big life. She wanted you to go out into the world and push yourself, and get your heart broken, and fail, and fall down, and get hurt, and get up again.”

  “It’s too hard,” said Maya-as-Daphne.

  “Too hard?” Renée repeated. “Too hard?” At this point, her voice had risen to the point that I would not have been shocked to see the windows shaking in their casings. I glanced at Renée’s résumé and was unsurprised to see that she’d been touring with various Broadway productions since her show had been canceled. She was playing to the cheap seats, except there weren’t any cheap seats in Maya’s office, and there wouldn’t be any on our stage.

  Renée pulled in a deep breath. She tossed her head. One of her false eyelashes slowly unpeeled itself from her eyelid and fell, tumbling first onto her cheek, then into the crevasse of her cleavage. Maya pressed her lips together and leaned forward as if she’d suddenly been seized with a stomach cramp. I made myself look away, forcing myself not to laugh. “Do you think,” Renée began, in pealing, bell-like tones, “that I gave up when that tramp Mitzie Yosselman beat me in the election for head of Hadassah?” I bit back a smile. This was a line, and an incident, I’d stolen from my grandma’s life, although the names had been changed to protect the guilty, and it sounded very strange coming from Renée’s shiny red lips. “Did your mother give up when your father said he wanted a small, intimate wedding? Did Barbra Streisand”—and here, Renée rested one hand on the vertiginous slope of her bosom and looked up, as if she’d invoked God—“give up when they told her that she needed a nose job if she wanted to be a star? No
,” she said. “No, they did not.” She planted her fists on her hips, rolled her neck, and declaimed at top volume, “And I’m not letting you give up, either. Now, you wipe that poor-me look off your face, and you think about who you are and what you’ve got, and you get back out there and you use it.”

  “You’re right,” said Maya. “You’re right. I will.”

  Renée held her pose for a beat and then relaxed, fanning her chest (she didn’t seem to have registered the eyelash’s escape). “Whew!” she said. “How’d I do?”

  “That was great!” I said.

  “Want it again?” she asked. “Any notes?”

  Maya started shaking her head before Renée finished speaking, possibly because she was worried about the structural integrity of her office and whether it would withstand another go-round. “No, no, that was just fine. Any questions for us?”

  “What’s Hadassah?” Renée asked.

  “Um, it’s a Jewish women’s organization,” I answered. “They get together and, you know, raise money for charity.” Renée stared at me blankly. “We’d be open to changing it to something else, obviously.”

  “Got it,” said Renée. She pulled on her wrap and sailed out the door. My telephone buzzed, and Dave’s face flashed on the screen. “Excuse me,” I murmured. “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Ruth. Do you have a moment to talk?” That was Dave—a little bit formal, invariably polite.

  “Sure,” I said. “Dave,” I mouthed to Maya, pointing at my phone.

  “Take your lunch,” she whispered back. I pushed through the door, out of the dim hallway and into the sunshine.

  There was the usual cluster of actors hanging around Maya’s back porch: Today it was a clutch of reedy twentysomething guys in statement eyeglasses and scruffy plaid shirts who were probably auditioning to play Hipster Number One (or, barring that, his line-free friends Hipsters Two, Three, and Four) on the nighttime soap that Maya cast. There were also three little boys, ten-year-olds who could play seven or eight, bright-eyed and meticulously groomed, hair combed, fingernails clean, each with a parent nearby. The hipsters smoked and paced and muttered their lines. The boys bent over schoolbooks or gaming devices. The boys’ parents ostentatiously fanned smoke away from their children’s paycheck-earning lungs and worked their phones, having conversations with agents and spouses, looking for Junior’s next gig.