The Half Life and Swim (2 page)

“College was terrific,” I told Caitlyn, and then, unable to help myself, I cupped my cheek with my palm.

She flicked her phone open and shut, open and shut, “I don’t know,” she said. “Berkeley’s so big? Every time I go there with my parents, I just feel . . .” Her voice trailed off. She put the phone into her tiny pink purse and slid her cup across the table, shifting if from her left hand to her right, then back again. “Lost?”

“You’ll make friends,” I said.

She shrugged. “Well, have you thought about other options? Maybe a smaller campus?”

“My parents,” she said. The sour little smirk on her pink lips made her look much older than seventeen. “They’re, like, obsessed. They both went there, you know.”

“They mentioned it,” I acknowledged.

Caitlyn bent her head and nibbled at a
ragged fingertip. “I don’t know,” she said again.

“Well, maybe you should make an appointment with your school’s guidance counselor. We’re still early in the process, you know. It’s not too late to change your mind.”

She nodded, looking unconvinced. “Next Saturday I’ll give you back the application. We’ll go over it together, and I’ll take a look at your personal statement.”

“Can I ask you something?” I felt my shoulders stiffen. After all this time, I’d developed a pretty good sense as to when strangers were going to pop the question.

“Sure.”

She swung one long leg over the other. “When you asked about volunteer work? I take care of my little brother sometimes? But it’s not, like, an official thing.”

“Well, that’s nice of you, but I don’t think babysitting’s going to impress the admissions committee too much,” I said, as gently as I could.

A pink flush crept up from her neck to her jawline. “Oh. Okay.”

“But we could put it in there anyhow. It couldn’t hurt.” She nodded, once, a princess dismissing a serf. Then she tucked her little purse under her arm and loped through the coffee shop, out to her fancy car with the Berkeley logo wrapped around the license plate. I wondered whether her parents paid her for the inordinate hardship of tending to her sibling. I bet myself that they did.

“So?” called my grandmother from her bedroom that night. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” I said, setting down my laptop and piling my folders next to the bowl of wax fruit on our kitchen table, a heavy clawfooted mahogany thing that had looked much
more at home in our four-bedroom colonial in Massachusetts than it did in our two-bedroom apartment in Hancock Park. I’d made it through five applicants that day, including an hour-long session with a boy who believed fervently—and, in my opinion, mistakenly— that he was going to get into Tufts, even though he had a B-minus average and had been suspended his sophomore year for selling oregano to his gullible classmates at a school dance. I rolled my shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension, as my grandmother shuffled into view, wearing her customary after-six attire: a lace-trimmed peach satin negligee, leopardprint mules, and Queen Helene’s Mint Julep Mud Masque, which, she swore, kept her looking not a day over sixty. She looked like Miss Havisham in blackface. Greenface.

She teetered across the linoleum over to the stove. “Flanken?”

“I’ll grab something on my way back from the pool,” I said. We’d been in Los Angeles for years now, but my grandmother still persisted in cooking like it was Christmas in New England and we were expecting a hockey team or two to show up for dinner. She’d regularly prepare flanken with kasha and bow ties, or clam chowder and peppery cheddar-cheese biscuits. At least once a month, she’d stuff an entire leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary and wrestle it on the little hibachi on our tiny tiled porch.

I went to my bedroom for my gym bag. Grandma followed me in, a plate in her hands, concern on her face.

“Ruthie, when do you think you’ll start writing again?” “I’m writing,” I protested, folding a pair of jeans and a black sleeveless turtleneck into my bag.

“Fixing college applications for spoiled rich kids is not writing, Ruth Anne.” First and middle name. She wasn’t messing around. When she set the plate down beside my bed,
the minty scent of her mud mask mixed with the smell of buckwheat, onion gravy, and roasted meat.

“It pays the bills,” I said.

“It’s not what you want,” she said.

“And where is it written that I get what I want?”

She grabbed my shoulders with her skinny hands and kissed my cheek, smearing me with green minty slime. “I wrote that,” she said, and kissed me again, and shooed me out the door.

I belong to one of Los Angeles’s super-trendy fitness hot spots, a club on Wilshire Boulevard with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the cardio floor overlooking the bumper-to-bumper backup of luxury automobiles. It’s expensive, especially because I don’t take any of the fancy classes, or use the tanning booths or the sauna or the steamroom, or drop off my dry cleaning at their in-house facility, or hang out and surf the Internet in the juice bar. I was there only for the pool, and the pool was almost always empty, and probably would continue to be until an enterprising Angeleno invented some underwater regimen guaranteed to lengthen, strengthen, and eradicate cellulite.

I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my black tank suit, and tugged on my cap and my goggles while I stood under the running water. In Massachusetts, we’d belonged to the JCC. Over their Olympic-size pool was a quote from the Talmud, rendered in blue and green tile:
Some say a parent should teach a child to swim.
Here, all the tiles were blinding white, the better for beautiful gym-goers to glimpse their reflections glimmering back at them. No Talmud. I held my breath and did a shallow dive into the deep end.
I started off slowly, getting used to the water, pointed toes fluttering, arms pushing against the resistance. Breaststroke first, to warm up, ten easy laps with racing turns at each end of the pool. Once my muscles were loose, I’d move into the crawl, and maybe throw in some butterfly if the spirit moved me. It was Saturday night. My fellow fitness buffs had already finished their workouts while I was in the coffee shop grappling with big dreams and bad prose.

After eighty laps, I pushed my goggles up onto my forehead and rolled onto my back, doing a lazy backstroke down the length of the pool and staring at the ceiling. More white tiles; no windows, and no sky.

My grandmother and I had moved out west when I was twenty-three and she was seventy. She wanted warm weather, and a chance to live near the movie stars, in what she routinely referred to, without any irony whatsoever, as the Glamour Capital of the World. I wanted to be a writer—movies, sitcoms, jokes, maybe even greeting cards if things got desperate. Los Angeles felt like the place to be.

We’d sold the house in Framingham—the one where I’d lived with my parents, before the accident, and where I’d lived with my grandmother for twenty years after that. At her insistence, we’d shipped almost every piece of furniture crosscountry. I’d packed up the kitchen, the plates and pots and pans. She packed the photo albums, the precious handfuls of pictures of her daughter and son-in-law and me. “The Little Family,” my mother had written across the back of one of the shots. Her name was Cynthia, and she’d been so beautiful, with pale blue eyes and hair that fell from a widow’s peak high on her forehead. My father wore aviator sunglasses and had a goatee. I was usually snuggled somewhere between them, one thumb cork-screwed firmly in my mouth, my eyes wide and startled, one plump little starfish hand always touching one of them—my father’s shoulder, my mother’s hair.

My grandmother and I found a
cozy apartment in a Spanish-style building in Hancock Park, with a tiled fountain tinkling in the lobby, terra-cotta floors, and high plaster arches dividing the rooms. Grandma signed up with a few of the agencies that hired extras for TV shows and movies, and worked three days a week. Just about every medical drama needed a few senior citizens to stick in the hospital beds for the background shots, and it made her enough money to kick in for the rent and, as she put it, keep herself in heels.

After a year of temping during the daytime and writing spec scripts at night, I found an agent. Three months after that, I landed a job writing for an hour-long drama (but a drama with jokes, our bosses anxiously insisted) called
The Girls’ Room,
which was about four best friends at a boarding school in some unnamed town in New England. The show achieved the near-impossible by (a) actually getting picked up by a network, and (b) not getting canceled after it failed to crack the Nielsen top twenty in its first three weeks. The suits told us they wanted to give us time to find our way, to build an audience. They were giving us a chance.

Then one of the other writers, Robert Curtis—Robert with the crinkles at the corner of his eyes and the black hair laced with gray, Robert who smiled so rarely that you’d find yourself trying everything in your power to get to see him do it—parked himself in the chair next to mine during read-through one morning and asked if I’d help him with the scene he was working on. He leaned close to me and kept his voice low as he confided, “I’m having trouble thinking like a teenage girl.” His incisors were crooked, one was longer than the other, which only served to make him more adorable.

Rob was a few years older than I was, and he’d worked on three other shows before landing in
The Girls’ Room,
which, oddly enough, was written by a staff
of three women and eighteen men. “You’ve never had a writing partner?” he asked me that first day, leaning back in the fantastically ugly orange-and-gold-plaid Barcalounger that someone had placed (ironically, of course) in the corner of the gray-carpeted writers’ room, where it always smelled like garlic salami and dirty feet. “You want to give it a try?”

I nodded. I liked the way he looked at me, the questions he’d ask about where I’d come from, the way he’d slide a Diet Coke across the table when we worked late into the night, anticipating down to the second when I’d need a fresh can. I liked the big black plastic glasses he wore, and his rusty Karmann Ghia, and the way he honestly didn’t seem to care at all what anyone thought of him (which, of course, made everyone like him, and want him to like them, too).

The first thing we wrote together was a prom scene, where Cara, one of the four girls of
The Girls’ Room,
accepts two different invitations to two different proms, while Elise, her room-mate, doesn’t get invited at all and agrees to stand in for Cara at one of the dances. “This is nonsense, isn’t it?” Rob asked, tossing his empty coffee cup into the trash can after six hours and four drafts.

“Don’t ask me,” I said, stretching and yawning (after six hours and four drafts, my self-consciousness had faded, right along with my Dermablend). “I never went to the prom.”

“My school didn’t even have one,” he told me.

“Where’d you go? Some military academy?”

“Swiss boarding school,” he said.

I stared at him. I thought he was kidding, but with Rob, you could never be sure. I didn’t know a single thing about his history: not where he’d grown up, not where he lived now, not whether he was married or involved with anyone.

“All this stuff about
dresses,” he grumbled, glaring at the notes we’d been given. “Girls really care that much?”

I sat back down in my own chair, trying for grace. “Girls do.” “You know what we need?” he asked. “Pie. Come on. I’m buying.”

“But this is due in...” “We’re not getting anywhere. We’re spinning our wheels. We need a break.” He jingled his car keys in the pocket of his khaki cutoffs that trailed threads down his hairy legs.

“You look like a lemon meringue kind of girl.”

I got up and followed him as he did an exaggerated cartoonish tiptoe past the model-slash-receptionist. “I got your back,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he pushed the heavy glass door open and we race-walked into the sunshine of the parking lot. “Head down, head down!” he whispered, opening his car’s door and hustling me inside. “If anyone sees us...”

“It’s curtains?” I said, getting into the spirit.

“Nah,” he said as the car rumbled to life. “They’d just want pie, too.”

We moved into a shared office a week later and worked together for the next six months, bouncing ideas off each other, reading dialogue across the table, even acting out the parts. Rob kept balled-up athletic socks in his desk, and he’d shove them down the front of his T-shirt to impersonate Cara, the most improbably endowed of the quartet, who was played by a twenty-four-year-old named Taryn Montaine. Rob swore he recognized her from a softcore porno that still aired late at night on Showtime. “I know it’s her,” he’d said after forty fruitless minutes scouring the Internet for a picture that would prove it. “She just got a new fake name to go with her new fake tits.” When he got bored with searching for pictures of a pre-implant Taryn, he’d look at me with a lazy smile.
“You know what you need?” he’d ask. He always did know, whether it was a burrito for lunch or a bag of chips or a butter rum LifeSaver, or a drive to Santa Monica. (Once he rented Rollerblades, and I sat on a bench and laughed at him stumbling around for half an hour.)

We were together for ten hours a day on normal days, something closer to twenty on the Thursday nights when we’d tape. I still didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew every T-shirt he had in his wardrobe. I knew that his cleaning ladies came on Tuesdays and that he had a poker game every other Friday, that his father had died of emphysema and his mother lived in Arizona. I knew how he looked first thing in the morning (rumpled, tired), and how he looked late at night (more rumpled, more tired, with more stubble). He called me Lemon Meringue, and once or twice he’d actually introduced me as his work wife, making my heart beat like a little girl who’s gotten just what she wanted for her birthday.

I tugged my goggles back down, flipped over again, and kicked toward the end of the pool, forcing my aching arms high over my head, then knifing them into the water. Five months after we’d written it, the first episode Rob and I had collaborated on was scheduled to air on a Thursday night. My grandmother, who’d been as charmed by Rob as I was, decided a party was in order. She’d invited a bunch of her extra friends over to our apartment, and spent two days making brisket and borscht and potato-and-onion pierogies, covering the dark wood of our dining room table and sideboard with lace doilies, then loading them with platters of food. “A feast fit for a czar,” I’d told her, straightening the plates, filling the ice bucket, too nervous to sit or eat a bite as her senior-citizen friends, with their canes and walkers and snap-brim hats, filed into the living room.