The Next Best Thing (20 page)

“Congratulations!” I said in a kind of beauty-queen squeal, too high and too loud, patently false. I got up and hugged her
with arms that felt frozen, all the while keeping a smile pinned to my face. Grandma hugged me back.

“We’re going to move into his place,” she said, and then took my face in her hands and looked at me. “You’ll be fine,” she said.

“What? Of course I’ll be fine! I’m so happy for you!” I turned away, taking my seat again, certain that I looked as if I’d been slapped.
No, I will not be fine
. I could barely stand to think about it. I would be alone, completely alone. My parents had died, Rob had married someone else, Gary had dumped me, Dave loved Shazia and didn’t think of me as anything more than a friend, and now my grandmother was ditching me, too?

Oh, grow up,
I thought. Here I was, twenty-eight years old, with a great apartment and a more-than-decent paycheck and, of course, a pilot I’d be shooting, all the standard trappings of grown-up life, and I was freaking out because my grandmother had announced that it was time for me to live on my own. This could not possibly be normal. I forced myself to look pleased, tried to manage delighted, then pulled back to merely not miserable. “When is all of this happening?” I made myself ask.

“Maybe in the fall,” she said. “I’ve got some work to do on that house, but once I get rid of the pictures of his late wife and throw out some of the potpourri, it’ll be fine.” She dropped her voice to a stage whisper that could have been heard on stages miles away. “You know that bathroom they added to the guest house is illegal.”

“I knew he looked shifty,” I said, half to myself.

“And upstairs, there’s all of those bedrooms . . .” Her voice trailed off. I wondered whether she and Maurice had ever considered offering me one of those empty rooms, rooms formerly inhabited by Maurice and his late wife’s children. But that was crazy. I wasn’t a child. I’d lived in a single in a dorm for my last two years of college. I was a grown-up, with responsibilities. A job. A show. I’d be fine by myself. Still, I couldn’t imagine this
apartment without her: eating meals by myself, coming home at night without greeting anyone who cared about how my day had gone, waiting to ask who I’d seen, what I’d done.

“I hope you’ll be happy,” I said stiffly. “What kind of wedding are you planning?”

“At our age?” She widened her eyes to indicate the ridiculousness of my question. “Something small. Maybe here, in the lobby. Just a few friends.” She then launched into a discussion about Maurice’s sons, who, it emerged, had not been thrilled to learn that their father was taking a bride. “Worried about their inheritance,” Grandma scoffed. She stood up and began loading the dishwasher as I sat, immobilized, at the table. Driving home, I’d been planning on having a glass of wine while I went through the Friday mail, which usually included my copies of
Us
and
People
and
Entertainment Weekly.
The stack was on the little table by the door and the wine was in the refrigerator, but I found I lacked the energy to stand, to sort, to pour. “Like I’m some kind of gold-digging floozy.” Maurice, I knew, still fondly referred to his two sons as “the boys,” even though one of them, a lawyer, was retired and the other was a podiatrist in Orange County, and both of them were married, with children and, in the podiatrist’s case, grandchildren of their own.

“They’re not happy for him?” For a moment I imagined calling them up, rallying them to my team, finding a way for the three of us to stop this marriage from happening. They’d keep the house they’d grown up in just the way they remembered it, complete with pictures of their mother on the mantel and dusty potpourri in the powder room, and I’d keep my grandma with me.

I shook my head at my own folly. “Well, I’m thrilled,” I made myself say. I should have been thrilled. Maurice was a gentleman, considerate and generous and kind, and he worshipped my grandmother. It was evident in the way he looked at her,
held doors for her, tucked a shawl over her shoulders when they watched TV, and sent back her soup and her coffee when he thought they weren’t hot enough for her liking. “Maurice is great.”

For a moment, Grandma didn’t answer, and when she spoke her voice was low and thoughtful, with its usual merry, teasing quality absent. “I wonder sometimes whether I did the right thing, staying with you for all this time,” she said. When I didn’t say anything, she continued, “I wanted what every parent wants. The thing you never get: for your children to never be hurt. And you’d been hurt so badly . . .”

I noticed with alarm that she was crying—my grandma, who I couldn’t remember crying since that long-ago night in the hospital. She raised her chin, brushing tears off her cheeks but not trying to hide them. “Hey,” I said, reaching for her hand, handing her a napkin. “Hey, everything’s okay.”

She pulled away, turning so her back was to me and she was facing the open window and the dark sky. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s not!” She took a deep breath, one hand on her chest, over the turquoise silk robe embroidered with red poppies. “I wanted you never to be hurt again,” she said. “But everyone gets hurt.”

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.

T
he 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.