The Half Life and Swim
Swim
Also by Jennifer Weiner
Good in Bed
In Her Shoes
Little Earthquakes
Goodnight Nobody
The Guy Not Taken
Certain Girls
Best Friends Forever
Fly Away Home
Then Came You
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Swim
An eShort Story
Jennifer Weiner
Washington Square Press / Atria Unbound
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Washington Square Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc.
Previously published in different format.
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First Washington Square Press ebook edition May 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-4516-9032-3 (ebook)
Table of Contents
The Jennifer Weiner Reader’s Companion
Swim
It’s always interesting to me, the way life imitates and intersects with art.
In 2006, I re-wrote a new version of an old story, about a young woman who made a living and fell in love writing other peoples’ classified ads. In my original version, which I wrote back in the 1990’s, my protagonist was writing personal ads for newspapers. In the retooled version, she was helping people with their online dating profiles, after she’d quit her job as a television writer because a fellow writer had broken her heart. In both versions, she was an interesting young woman, an orphan who felt more comfortable in the water than anywhere else, who was learning to navigate the world, to trust people, to be brave.
In 2011, I got the chance to go to Los Angeles and run a show that I’d written for ABC Family called “State of Georgia.” I found myself living a version of the story I’d written (luckily, minus the heartbreak!) And I found myself thinking about Ruth Saunders. Did things work out with the man whose ad she’d rewritten? Did she ever get to write for another TV show? Did she end up happy?
I knew I wanted to write about my time in Los Angeles . . . and Ruth’s voice, and her face, and her grandmother, all stuck in my head. So when I started writing the book that would become
The Next Best Thing
the worlds collided, and I found a way to continue Ruth’s story, with the real-world highs and heartbreaks of working in television as background that could inform her journey.
Writers aren’t supposed to pick favorites, but “Swim” was always one of my favorite short stories. I loved diving back into Ruth’s world, with all of the space a novel gave me. I hope you’ll enjoy meeting her here, in “Swim,” and seeing where her story takes her in
The Next Best Thing
.
T
he girl’s name was Caitlyn. That fall, it seemed like they were all Caitlyn, or some oddly spelled variation of the name. Judging from the way she kept crossing and recrossing her long, denim-clad legs and flipping her silver cell phone open to check the time, she wanted to be anywhere but in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Beverly and Robertson, sharing a table for two with my laptop and me.
“So in terms of a major? I’m thinking international relations? I want to be a diplomat?”
I nodded and typed it in. Every sentence out of her sparkly pink seventeen-year-old lips came out sounding like a question. I could just imagine her sitting across the table from some third-world potentate and toying with the silver ring through the cartilage of her left ear.
We’d like you to give up your weapons? Because biological warfare? Is bad?
Patience, Ruth,
I told myself. “Extracurriculars?” I asked, fingers hovering over the keyboard as the woman at the table next to mine, with bristly eyebrows and a bitter twist to her mouth, gave me a nasty look. I ignored her. Each Saturday I got to the coffee shop at seven o’clock, early enough to claim a prime corner table next to the big window, across the room from the blenders and the bathrooms,
right near the store’s single power outlet. The people who’d show up later—screenwriters or screenwriter-wannabes, most of them—were forced to play musical tables, inching closer and closer to my corner, stomping across the wide-planked hardwood floors or lingering ostentatiously beside the cream and sugar, their glares growing fiercer as their batteries slowly died. For six hours every Saturday, I would meet with my teenage clients, the ones who went to pricey private schools and whose parents had given them one more leg up on life by hiring an application consultant to help them get into college.
Caitlyn let go of her earring and tugged at a lock of glossy brown hair. She smelled intensely of coconuts—her shampoo, I figured—and the cloying, fruity scent emanating from the wad of Pepto-pink gum I glimpsed whenever she opened her mouth. I made a note to tell her not to chew gum at her interviews.
“Um, tennis?”
“You’re on the tennis team?” I asked.
Please,
I thought. Something. Anything. So far her extracurricular page was completely blank.
“Um, no? I just like to play? Or I used to?”
I typed
tennis.
“How about clubs? Musical instruments?” I stared at her hopefully. She gave me a blank look back. “Piano lessons?”
Caitlyn made a face, pink lips wincing above her sweetly rounded chin. “When I was, like, six?”
“Volunteer work?”
Yeah, right,
I told myself. Caitlyn stopped smacking her gum, flipped her phone shut, and straightened in her chair.
“I have this friend? She’s having surgery?” She lowered her voice. “A breast reduction? And I’m going to be taking care of her dog while she, you know, recuperates.”
Jesus wept. I typed it in anyhow.
“Well, not, you know, technically. They’ve got a dog walker? But I’ll be coming over to, you know, play with him?” She tugged the piece of hair down to her lips and started chewing it. “Or her?”
I made a note to remind her not to chew her hair during the interview, right beneath my note about gum. Then I saved her file, closed my laptop, took a gulp of the drink I’d ordered before this ordeal began, and gave her what I hoped was a friendly smile. She was all gangly limbs in tight jeans and a tiny pink T-shirt, with parents who’d happily agreed to my five-thousand-dollar fee. This guaranteed young Caitlyn three months’ worth of my services, an hour-long videotaped interview coaching session, and a full review of up to five essays. We’d be in this for the long haul. I might as well try to find something to like about her.
“Well!” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “This is plenty for me to start with!”
She fiddled with her paper coffee cup, wiping sparkly pink lipstick off the rim with her pinkie. “Where’d you go to college?” she asked.
“In Connecticut. A small liberal arts college called Grant. You’ve probably never heard of it.” Caitlyn’s parents had told me that she wasn’t considering any schools outside of California, and she had her heart set on Berkeley. It was a long shot, given her B average and solidly middle-of-the-pack test scores. Then again, Mom and Dad were both alums and, judging from the sleek gold Lexus their daughter drove, they could have been making major gifts to the endowment fund since Caitlyn was but a twinkle in their eyes.
“Did you like it?” She tilted her head, looking me straight in the eye, then letting her gaze drift sideways as she rested her cheek on her palm. My own hand inadvertently
rose to my own face. With the Dermablend, my grandmother swore, you couldn’t see the scar. With her vision, I told her, it was a wonder she could see anything.
“Yeah, I did. I liked it a lot.”
Lie.
My first week of college I’d gone to a party in a fraternity house basement. It was hot and crowded and noisy, and I’d gotten separated from my roommate as we made our way through the forest of bodies toward the keg. I’d gone upstairs to hide in the frat house’s library, which I’d figured, correctly, would be deserted. I was curled up in an armchair in a dark corner, planning on going back downstairs when the crowd had thinned out, when a girl and a guy had stumbled into the darkened room and flopped onto the couch.
“Jesus,” said the guy. “Did you see that girl with, like, a crater on her face?”
My hands flew to my cheek. It did look like a crater. A shiny pink crater, the size of the bottom of a soda can, slightly indented, like someone had scooped out the flesh. The scar tugged the corner of my right eye down and extended across my cheek to the corner of my mouth. I’d fooled myself into thinking that I looked all right that night. I’d worn a cute halter top, pink sandals, jeans my roommate had lent me, and perfume and lipstick and eyeliner on my good left eye and my droopy right one.
“I wonder what happened?” the girl mused.
What do you think happened, dumb-ass? I got hurt!
I wanted to say. I waited until they were too engrossed in each other to notice me. Then I crept out of the room, out of the frat house, down the sidewalk and over the hill and into the fitness center, which was open twenty-four hours a day and was one of the reasons I’d gone to Grant in the first place.
The pool was empty and glowing turquoise in the murky light. The familiar smell of chlorine, the feel of the water holding me up, eased my homesickness and my shame. I’d shucked off my borrowed finery, washed the makeup from my face in the
shower, scrubbing extra hard against the disk of pink that no cosmetic could ever erase and no surgery could restore, and swum laps for two hours. Later, after I’d gotten dressed again, I stared at myself in the mirror. My wet hair clung to my scalp, and the scar was livid against my water-bleached skin.
Smile!
my grandmother always told me, her own face lighting up in demonstration.
If you’d smile, they’d see the smile, not the scar!
In the mirror, I attempted a friendly smile. A flirtatious smile. A charming little nice-to-meet-you smile. I saw the same pale, lightly freckled skin that my mother had, in pictures, the same clear blue eyes; a straight nose, full lips, eyebrows that refused to arch no matter how I tried to coax them. Good teeth, thanks to the braces; no zits, thanks to the Accutane. A cute face, or it could have been, without, like, the crater. I sighed, and turned away from the mirror and trudged back up the hill to my dorm.
