Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Oh, it’s so cute,” Becky said. “That’s going to be perfect for you!”

  Kelly scooped Oliver into her arms and planted a kiss on the top of his head. “I don’t care about perfect anymore. I just want good enough.”

  “Oh, Kelly,” I said. I put my hand on her arm and squeezed, and then, unable to help myself, I reached out and grabbed one of Oliver’s thighs. “Hey, Oliver.” There were the rolls I’d gotten used to—for the time I’d known him, Oliver had legs like squished loaves of Wonder Bread—but it felt as if one or two of them might have gone missing. I inspected the baby carefully. He’d gotten taller, and his face had gotten leaner. He’d grown more hair, too. And suddenly I realized: He was growing out of his babyness, turning into a little boy.

  I blinked to keep the tears back. They’d all changed so much. Ava had six teeth and, much to Mimi’s relief, some hair at last. At eleven months, Julian was tall and watchful, with a serious look about him, like a banker evaluating a mortgage application. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Caleb and how I wouldn’t get to see this, the growing up, filling out, the changing, the progression from bottles to baby food to real food, from rolling to crawling to walking to running.

  “Check him out,” said Kelly, her tone a mixture of pride and regret. “He’s getting thinner.”

  “He’s growing up.”

  “It’s so unbelievable,” said Kelly. “I guess that when it was really bad—you know, when Steve was home all day and I was just scrambling—I thought it would always be that way. That he’d always be a little guy. Well, a big little guy. But he’s changing,” she said, holding the baby against her chest. “And I am, too.”

  “We all did,” said Becky. “The miracle of motherhood.” She rolled her eyes.

  Kelly looked at me. “You’ll come back in July, won’t you? For Oliver’s and Ava’s birthdays?”

  “And then you’ll have to come back again in the fall,” said Becky. “For my birth day.”

  “Sure I will,” I said.

  Ayinde cleared her throat. “Lia,” she said. “I think your mother has arrived.”

  I saw Sam and my mother, walking toward me from Walnut Street, arm in arm. Wonders never do cease, I thought, as I got to my feet. “I’m really bad at good-byes,” I began.

  “Oh, bullshit,” said Becky, wrapping her arms around me. “We’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” I said, and now I wasn’t even bothering to pretend I wasn’t crying. “You guys . . . you don’t even know, but you saved my life.”

  “I think we all saved each other,” Becky said.

  I held all of them in my arms for a moment—Becky and Kelly and Ayinde, Oliver and Julian and Ava. “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, mommies,” I sang.

  “Cut it out with that goddamn song,” said Becky, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, babies,” I said.

  Ava stared. Oliver chewed solemnly on his thumb. “Bye!” said Julian, opening and closing his fist. “Bye bye bye bye bye.”

  “Oh my God,” said Kelly, her eyes widening, “did you all hear that?”

  “His first word!” said Becky. “Quick, Ayinde, did you bring your Baby Success! Success Stories book to write it down?”

  “No, it’s at home, I . . . oh, never mind.”

  “Ladies,” said Sam, greeting my friends. “And gentlemen, of course,” he said to Oliver and Julian.

  “Bye bye bye bye bye,” Julian babbled and waved his fist in the air.

  “Come on,” I said, “before I lose it.” And I took my husband’s arm.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Lia?”

  “Mmm,” I said. Sam had given me the window seat, and I was snuggled beside him, with a blanket pulled up to my waist and my cheek resting against the cool glass. We were somewhere over the middle of America. The sky was dark with clouds, and I was half asleep.

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  I shook my head, closed my eyes, and fell, almost instantly, into the old dream, the one I’d been having since I’d come home to Philadelphia. I was standing in the nursery that had been my son’s, white carpet and cream-colored walls and a sheer curtain blowing in front of an open window. My feet were bare as I walked across the floor, and I could feel the wind blowing the curtain against my cheek—warm and soft, like the promise of something wonderful, the kind of wind you only got at night in California.

  Only this time, the dream was different. This time, there was noise coming from the crib. Not crying, which would have been true to life, but soft cooing, nonsense syllables that were almost words, La la la and Ba ba ba. Noises I’d heard Ava and Oliver and Julian making as I’d watched them.

  “Shh, baby,” I said, walking faster. “Shh, I’m here.” Now I’ll look down and the crib will be empty, I thought, as I bent over the railings the way I had a hundred times in a hundred dreams. Now I’ll look down and he’ll be gone.

  But the crib wasn’t empty. I leaned and looked, and there was Caleb, wearing his blue pajamas with a duck on the front, Caleb as he would have been at this age, his eyes bright, his skin pink and flushed, cheeks and legs and arms plump and sturdy, reddish-brown hair on his head, no longer looking like an angry, malnourished old man but like a baby. My baby.

  “Caleb,” I whispered, lifting him into my arms, where he fit like a key in an oiled lock. He felt familiar, like Ava, like Oliver, like Julian, but not like any of them. Like his own thing. My own thing. My baby. My boy.

  At that moment, I was both inside of the dream and outside of it; in the nursery and on the airplane, and I could see everything, could feel everything—my husband beside me, his hand warm on my knee, the window against my cheek cool from the air rushing against it, beaded with raindrops, the weight of the baby in my arms.

  Bye and bye, bye and bye,

  My darling baby, don’t you cry.

  The moon is still above the hill.

  The soft clouds gather in the sky.

  “Caleb,” I said. The country spread itself beneath me like a lady’s skirt, patches of brown and green stitched together with forgiveness, with hope, with love. I heard the wind blow through the open nursery window. Beside me, I felt my husband turning his body toward me, his breath gentle against my cheek, his hand warm over mine. In my dream, in my arms, my baby opened his eyes and smiled.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Little Earthquakes is a work of fiction but, like Becky, Kelly, and Ayinde, I was lucky enough to join a prenatal yoga class with a group of wonderful women who’ve been my friends and lifeline throughout the nine months of my own daughter’s life, and who were generous enough to share their own stories of labor and delivery, marriage, and new motherhood with me, and support me as I made the journey myself. Thanks to Gail Silver, Debbie Bilder and baby Max, Alexa Hymowitz and Zach, Carrie Coleman and James Rufus, Jeanette Andersson and Filippa, Kate Mackey and Jackson and Andrea Cipriani Mecchi and Anthony and Lucia.

  I am awed and humbled by the hard work of Joanna Pulcini, whose efforts on behalf of this book included poring over the manuscript in coffee shops and hotel rooms from Los Angeles to New York. Her diligent, thoughtful, rigorous editing, and occasional babysitting were invaluable. I am lucky to have her as my agent and even luckier to have her as my friend.

  My editor, Greer Kessel Hendricks, is worth a price above rubies for her skillful, compassionate reading, and a hundred kindnesses, large and small. I’m also very thankful to her assistant, Suzanne O’Neill, and everyone at Atria, especially Seale Ballenger, Ben Bruton, Tommy Semosh, Holly Bemiss, Shannon McKenna, Karen Mender and Judith Curr, the best publisher any writer could wish for.

  Kyra Ryan gave me an insightful read and invaluable edits of an early draft, and Alison Kolani helped smooth out the final product. I owe a debt of gratitude to both of them, and to Ann Marie Mendlow, whose generosity to Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania has earned her a place in posterity (insofar as this book constitu
tes posterity).

  I’m grateful to friends near and far: Susan Abrams Krevsky and Ben Krevsky, Alan Promer and Sharon Fenick, Charlie and Abby Glassenberg, Eric and Becky Spratford, Clare Epstein and Phil DiGennaro, Kim and Paul Niehaus, Steve and Andrea Hasegawa, Ginny Durham, Lisa Maslankowski and Robert DiCicco, Craig, Elizabeth, Alice and Arthur LaBan, and most especially Melinda McKibben Pedersen, one of the best and bravest women I know.

  The mothers of the Hall-Mercer playgroup shared their stories and listened to mine. I’m so glad that Lucy and I get to hang out with Linda Derbyshire, Jamie Cohen and Mia, Amy Schildt and Natalie, Shane Siegel and Carly, and Emily Birknes and Madeline.

  Thanks to the lactation consultants at Pennsylvania Hospital for helping with both my in-print and real-time babies, and to the staff at the Society Hill Cosi for the free coffee, and for never begrudging me and my laptop one of the tables near the window, and the power outlet.

  A special shout-out to Jamie Seibert, who came into my life like a gift from heaven and takes wonderful care of Lucy when I’m writing.

  None of this would have been possible without the support of my family. My husband, Adam, my mother, Fran Frumin, and my Nanna, Faye Frumin, Jake, April, Olivia, Molly and Joe Weiner, and Warren Bonin, Ebbie Bonin, and Todd Bonin gave me love, support, and material (and, in Olivia’s case, hand-me-downs). My daughter, Lucy Jane, made this book possible, and made my life wonderful.

  And I will always be grateful for the support and love of one of my first editors, my friend Liza Nelligan, who died last spring.

  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much Liza’s faith in me made my writing life possible, but I believe that her spirit and her love of laughter, and good stories, lives on in this story, and in every other story I’ll tell. The lullabye that Lia sings is from The Rainbabies, one of the books that Liza sent to Lucy a few days after she was born. I’ve used it in this book in tribute to Liza.

  THE NEXT BEST THING

  Actors aren’t the only ones trying to make it in Hollywood . . .

  At twenty-three, Ruth Saunders left her childhood home in Massachusetts and headed west with her seventy-year-old grandma in tow, hoping to make it as a screenwriter. Six years later, she has hit the jackpot when she gets The Call: the sitcom she wrote, The Next Best Thing, has gotten the green light, and Ruthie’s going to be the showrunner. But her dreams of Hollywood happiness are threatened by demanding actors, number-crunching executives, an unrequited crush on her boss, and her grandmother’s impending nuptials.

  Set against the fascinating backdrop of Los Angeles show business culture, with an insider’s ear for writer’s room showdowns and an eye for bad backstage behavior and set politics, Jennifer Weiner’s new novel is a rollicking ride on the Hollywood roller coaster, a heartfelt story about what it’s like for a young woman to love, and lose, in the land where dreams come true.

  Read on for a look at Jennifer Weiner’s new novel

  Available in July 2012 from Atria Books

  Excerpt from The Next Best Thing copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Weiner

  Chapter One

  The telephone rang.

  If it’s good news, there’s going to be a lot of people on the call, Dave had told me. Bad news, it’ll just be one person from the studio, the executive in charge of the project. I lifted the phone to my ear, feeling like the air had gained weight and my arm was moving through something with the consistency of tar. My heartbeat hammered in my ears. My jeans and T-shirt felt too small, my bedroom looked too bright, and the atmosphere felt thin, as if I was working harder than I normally did to pull oxygen into my lungs. Please, God, I thought—me, the girl who hadn’t been in a synagogue since my grandma and I had left Massachusetts, who’d barely remembered to fast last Yom Kippur. But still. I was a woman who’d lost her parents, who’d survived a dozen surgeries and emerged with metal implants in my jaw, the right side of my face sunken and scarred, and an eye that drooped. In my twenty-eight years, I hadn’t gotten much. I deserved this.

  “Hello?”

  “Hold for Lisa Stark, please!” came Lisa’s assistant’s sing-song. My breath rushed out of me. Lisa was my executive at the studio. If she was the only one on the call, then this was the end of the road: the pass, the thanks-but-no-thanks. The no. I pushed my hair—lank, brown, unwashed for the last three days—behind my ears and sat on the bed. I would keep my dignity intact. I would not cry until the call was over.

  I had told myself to expect bad news; told myself, a thousand times, that the numbers were not in my favor. Each year, the network ordered hundreds of potential new programs, giving writers the thumbs-up and the money to go off and write a pilot script. Of those hundreds of scripts, anywhere from two to three dozen would actually be filmed, and of those, only a handful—maybe four, maybe six, maybe as many as ten—would get ordered to series. My sitcom, The Next Best Thing, loosely based on my own life with my grandmother, had made the first cut three months ago. I’d quit my job as an assistant at Two Daves Productions in order to work full-time on the script, progressing through the steps from a single-sentence pitch—a college graduate who’s been laid off and her grandmother who’s been dumped, move to an upscale assisted-living facility in Miami, where the girl tries to make it as a chef and the grandmother tries to live without a boyfriend— to a paragraph-long pilot summary, then a beat sheet detailing each scene, then a twelve-page outline, and, finally, a forty-page script.

  For months I’d been writing, holed up in my bedroom, or doing the clichéd thing of bringing my laptop to a neighborhood coffee shop, where I was surrounded by my more attractive peers, the ones who carried on long, loud telephone conversations in which they used the words my agent as often as possible, and did everything but prop tip cups and WRITER AT WORK signs in front of their laptops. I wrote draft after draft, turning each one over to the studio that had funded my efforts and to the network that would, I hoped, eventually air them. I considered each round of notes; I cut and edited, rewrote and rewrote again. I pored over books for expectant parents to give my characters just the right names, and spent days in the kitchens of local restaurants so I could nail the details of my heroine’s job.

  Two weeks ago I’d delivered the absolutely, positively final final draft. I’d brushed my lips against every single one of the pages, kissing each one lightly before I slid the script into the hole-puncher, then slipped the brass brads through the holes and pushed them shut.. To celebrate, I’d taken Grandma out to lunch at the Ivy, at her insistence. My grandmother, a petite and stylish woman of a certain age, was a great fan of the tabloids. Any restaurant where the paparazzi were a regular presence on the sidewalk was a place she wanted to be.

  When we walked up to the stand, the maitre d’ looked at me—in a plain cotton shift dress and five-year-old zippered black leather boots, with my laptop tucked under my arm—and gave a small but discernible shrug. My grandmother stepped toward him, smiling. If I dressed to maximize comfort and minimize attention, in shades of black and gray and blue, with a single necklace or a single bracelet and sensible shoes, my grandmother had style enough for the both of us. That day she wore a black-and-white cotton dress with a black patent-leather belt and black canvas espadrilles with bows that tied at her ankles. Her necklace was made of vintage Bakelite beads in poppy red, and she had a matching red patent-leather clutch in her hand and a red silk flower tucked behind one ear.

  “How are you today?” she asked.

  “Fine.” The host’s eyes lingered on her face as he tried to figure out if she was someone he should know, a screen star of yesteryear or one of the Real Housewives’ mothers. “This is my granddaughter,” said Grandma, and gave me a brisk poke in the small of my back. I stumbled obediently toward the podium with a can-you-believe-her look on my face, wishing I’d worn a necklace or a flower, or had thought to carry a pretty purse, or to have purchased one in the first place. “Ruthie is a writer.” The man behind the podium could barely suppress his wince. Wr
iter, of course, was not the magic word that would cause him to usher us to the finest table in the restaurant and send over a bottle of free Champagne. Maybe writing for TV was a big deal elsewhere in America. In Hollywood, it meant less than nothing. Television writers were as common as cat dirt, and anyone with a working laptop and a version of Final Draft on her hard drive could claim to be one. You could almost see the word nobodies in a balloon floating above the man’s neatly barbered head as he led us to a table so far in the back it was practically in the kitchen. “Ladies,” he said.

  Grandma paused and rested her hand on the man’s forearm. She tilted her face up toward his, batted her eyelashes, and gave him her gentle smile.

  “Would it be possible for us to have a booth? Or a table with a little more light?” Even at her age—seventy-six, although she’d have shot me if I’d said it out loud—her skin was still smooth, her eyes still bright, face vivid with rouge and lipstick, eyeliner and curling false lashes. Her waist was still slim, and her teeth were all her own. “We’re celebrating.”

  He smiled back—it is, I have learned over the years, almost impossible to resist my grandma’s smile—and led us to a booth halfway between the open front porch, where the stars would pose and preen for the cameras, and the dim back room, where the nobodies were sequestered. We shared pasta and a chopped salad, had a glass of wine apiece, and split tiramisu for dessert. As we ate, Grandma told me stories from the set of OR, the medical drama where she’d been working as an extra that week. “The kids they bring in,” she complained, running the edge of her spoon along the ridge of whipped cream that topped the tiramisu. “They’re out partying all night, so by the time they get in their gurneys they’re exhausted. One of the ADs has to run around set five minutes before every take just making sure they’re not sleeping.”