The Next Best Thing (30 page)

For days, I’d tried to warn her. The morning of the viewing party, I’d found her out on the balcony in clam-diggers and a loose cotton blouse and her gardening gloves, weeding and watering her container garden. “Grandma,” I began. She looked up at me, with her gardening shears in her hand.

“I’m so excited,” she said. “I can’t even tell you.” She snipped a stalk of basil and added it to the pile in the wicker basket resting beside her. There was a dab of sunscreen she hadn’t blended on the tip of her nose and, ripening in a paper bag in a corner of the balcony, a dozen avocados that one of her friends had dropped off two days earlier so Grandma could make her famous guacamole.

“I have to tell you—” I said, but before I could get another word out, she shook her head and held up her hand to stop me.

“No, no, don’t tell me anything. I was there when they filmed it, of course, but I want to pretend that I don’t know anything . . . that I’m seeing it for the very first time, just like anyone else.”

“Okay,” I said, and slunk back inside, telling myself that I’d done my duty, that I’d tried to warn her, and if she didn’t like what she saw, she had only herself to blame.

Now the moment had arrived. In the bathroom, I gulped down an airline-size bottle of vodka: liquid courage. Then I opened the door and found my grandmother, in one of her old furniture-store suits, a scarf at her neck, her hair shining from an afternoon trip to the beauty parlor. “Can I borrow you for a minute?” I asked. It was her hair, secured with the mother-of-pearl combs that had been the last birthday gift her husband had given her, that broke my heart. The combs meant that this was an occasion on the grandest scale . . . and she was going to be so disappointed.

She grabbed my hands. “Look! You won’t believe it!” She pulled me into the living room. Bowls and platters were set up on the coffee table, my favorite olives wrapped and baked in cheese dough on a tray, alongside skewered shrimp and chicken . . . and on the wall, draped in a sheet, was what appeared to be an enormous new flat-screen TV.

“Oh. Oh, wow. That’s really . . .”

“Maurice got it for me,” Grandma said. “It’s an early wedding gift. He didn’t want me to miss a thing!”

The words I’d meant to say, everything I’d planned on telling her about the pilot, shriveled and died in my mouth. Grandma eyed me. “Don’t you want to change?”

I had on the same jeans and loose-fitting tunic and scarf and clogs I’d worn to work. “I’m fine,” I said, and took a seat in the corner as the doorbell rang and Grandma hurried to answer it.

Ten minutes later, the crowd was assembled, with Grandma established in the center of the couch. Her friend Elsa sat beside her, along with Georgia and Joe, a married pair of extras who frequently played spouses in the various hospital waiting rooms and restaurants where they worked. There was Martine, our across-the-hall neighbor, and Chloe and Sybil from water aerobics at the JCC, and Ernesto, who managed the meat counter at the Whole Foods on Fairfax. The dining-room table was draped in an embroidered cloth and spread with platters of appetizers: shrimp ceviche, fresh-made chips and tortillas, salsas made with smoky roasted peppers, tiny grilled lamb chops and mole-marinated drumsticks, fresh guacamole Grandma had made that afternoon.

“Come in, come in!” she said, shepherding her guests into the living room. I swallowed hard, trying to vanish into the armchair in the corner as people took their seats in front of the big new set. “Ladies and gentlemen!” Grandma said, beaming. “The Next Best Thing!” There was nothing to do but push the
power button and then, with the remote in my hand, listen to the audience as they watched what I had made.

The first scene, Daphne losing her job, played fine. When Daphne went back and forth with the chef, the picture was so crisp you could see the instant when her cheeks began to flush, and the glitter of a tear well before it fell. Grandma slipped across the room to squeeze my hand. “I love it,” she said. Her eyes were shining, her face wreathed in a smile.

“Thanks,” I croaked.
Wait,
I thought.
Oh, just wait.

The next scene took place in the house Nana Trudy had shared with her beloved. As Annie Tait made her grand entrance down the staircase, dressed in a flowing silk robe and fur-trimmed mules, one of the actors playing the boyfriend’s sons snickered. “She looks like she’s been ridden hard and put away wet,” he said.

I heard the hiss of my grandmother’s inhalation. Across the room, I saw Maurice take her hand. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Nor, I found, did I want to.

On-screen, Annie Tait walked gracefully toward them, eyes narrowed as she considered the three middle-aged men in suits waiting for her at the dining-room table. “Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” she said, her voice arch and teasing. “What can I do for you this fine morning?”

“We want you out,” one of the men said.

On-screen, Annie Tait stiffened. In the living room, I stiffened, too. “Why, I don’t believe that’s for you to say,” Annie told them. “This is your father’s house.”

“Dad’s done with you. As soon as he gets out of the hospital, he’s going into a nursing home,” the second son told her. “He left us power of attorney. Us, not you. We’re putting the place on the market. You’ve got until the end of the day to pack up your broom and your Viagra and hit the road.”

From the couch, somebody—it might have been Ernesto—
gave a snort of laughter. I cringed against the wall, afraid to look at my grandmother.

“I’ll thank you not to speak to me like that,” said Annie Tait.

“Oh, we’d be happy if we didn’t have to speak to you at all,” said the actor playing the first son, an incredibly nice man named Gabriel Arden, who had worked on TV and in movies for decades because of his ability to compress his mouth into an especially cruel slit. “We never could figure out what Dad saw in you.”

“I mean, an Anna Nicole Smith, that, at least, we could have understood,” said Son Number Two.

Annie lifted her chin. “I know things that woman would have taken another decade to figure out.”

“Oh, yeah?” leered the third son. “Like how to get around Boston by horse-drawn carriage?”

The laugh track cackled and blared. I snuck a look toward the couch. Grandma was holding herself perfectly still, spine straight, head erect. “Oh, they’re being so awful to her!” she whispered.

Annie licked her lips slowly and said, “You want to know something about your father? He didn’t really need that cane he used.” She waited until the three brothers had exchanged a puzzled glance and then leered at the camera as she spread her hands a good eighteen inches apart. “I take it you boys didn’t inherit his talents?” she asked. Their looks of confusion turned to shame and fury as she said, “Or maybe you did, and it’s just been divided in thirds . . .”

“Get to steppin’,” said the first brother.

“And don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out,” said the second.

“Like the door’s even big enough,” said Son Number Three. More shrieks of glee rose up from the laugh track. Had it always been this loud, or did it just sound that way in the dead silence of the living room?

Annie’s hand tightened on the banister. “What do I do now?” she asked. “Where do I go?”

“Go put on something low-cut and hang out by the VFW hall,” said Son Number One. “You’ll probably find someone else by dinnertime,” said Brother Number Two.

“Which is at five-thirty,” said Brother Three.

The laugh track brayed its approval. Annie Tait’s shoulders slumped. Without another word she began to make her way back up the stairs. Then she turned—I imagined I could feel my grandmother tense—and uttered a line that had struck me as, if not funny, then maybe as at least close to funny and the best I could do with what I’d been given, the dog’s dinner that Loud Lloyd had handed me: “Bite my Boniva!” There was more laughter, and applause, as the show’s temporary track, Sara Bareilles’s “King of Anything,” started playing, and the picture faded into the space the editors had left for commercials.

I sat in my chair, legs folded, hands clenched in my lap, telling myself that what she was seeing on the screen wasn’t that different from what I’d written. Sure, there were a few more double entendres, a couple of not-so-subtle hints that Nana Trudy might, in fact, have been either a sex addict or an alcoholic or both, a joke about how she didn’t actually know the name of her only daughter’s father because she’d gotten pregnant during what she referred to as her “Long Lost Weekend,” but other than that, things were pretty much as she would have remembered them from the night of the shoot. Nana Trudy loved Daphne. Daphne loved her right back. Best of all, the show ended just the way it had in every version of the script that I’d written: with the two of them together in the home they’d made, comfortable and happy, with Daphne saying the line I hoped would close each episode: “We’re all right for now.”

I remained seated until the credits played, and forced myself to breathe as the words—“Created by Ruth Saunders”—flashed
on the screen. Once they had faded, I hazarded another look at my grandmother. Still seated on the couch, in her beauty-parlor coif, and her combs glittering in her hair, she raised her head, the way she’d told me to do a thousand times, since I was old enough to walk, old enough to understand her.
Chin up!
she would tell me, brisk as a drill sergeant.
Never let them see you looking mopy.
“Well!” she said, and tried on a smile that did not touch her eyes. “Wasn’t that something?” She crossed the room, plucked the remote from my nerveless fingers, and clicked the set into silence. Then, without looking at me, she sailed into the dining room, calling, “Who’s ready for some dinner?”

*  *  *

I had been on the receiving end of my grandmother’s silent treatment only a handful of times in my life—once when I was fifteen and I’d borrowed her gold bracelet without her permission and lost it, and again when I was sixteen and I’d taken the T to Boston for a concert I’d been forbidden to attend. What I’d learned from those instances was that my grandmother was capable of ignoring me in the midst of a roomful of people without making anyone else uncomfortable, or even noticing the tension. But I noticed. “Great job!” said Ernesto, through a mouthful of mole. “You must be so proud of Ruthie!” Instead of answering or agreeing, Grandma gave him a tight smile and then turned to Martine and started talking about whether the city council had done anything about changing the traffic patterns to Griffith Park during the summertime concerts. “I’ll bet you’re excited!” said Georgia, and Grandma gave a little sniff that only I could hear, excused herself, and took the half-empty guacamole bowl to the kitchen for refilling. Sybil wanted to tell me about her nephew, a recent art-school graduate who was hoping to get a job as a film editor, and I promised to pass along his résumé the moment it hit my in-box. “It was very funny,” said Chloe, and Grandma, who’d just emerged from the kitchen with a platter of
sugar-dusted churros, set it down on the table and asked Maurice if he wouldn’t mind stepping onto the balcony with her. “I think,” she announced, “that I could use some fresh air.”

I nibbled at my ceviche and chips and drank too much sangria, alternately looking forward to and dreading the moment when the apartment was finally empty and Grandma and I would be alone. By ten o’clock the last of the guests had made her way down the carpeted hallway to the elevator, with Maurice to guide her and drive her home. My grandmother went to the living room and started gathering up plates and cups and napkins.

“So!” I said. I’d decided to play it straight. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d imagined her shock and dismay when she’d seen the finished product, and had misread the way she’d been ignoring me all night. “What’d you think?”

“I think,” she said, without looking up, “that Bea Arthur would be ashamed of you.”

I felt my face redden as if she’d slapped it. I had expected a harsh review, but not that. Never that. “I think you’re overreacting,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even.

“Am I?” Her voice quavered as she held her armload of plates. “Because I’ve watched a lot of television in my time . . . oh, never mind,” she said, pushing past me into the kitchen. “Why would you want to listen to—how did you put it again?—some dried-up old sack who wants you to bite her Boniva?”

I winced. I hadn’t been proud of myself, writing that line, but it had gotten a big laugh in the room when Annie had read it, and God knew, it was funnier than the three jokes Loud Lloyd had proposed, all of which had to do with erections. “I’m not sure that line’s going to make the final cut,” I said. “We’re still waiting to hear back from the Boniva people.”

“Wonderful,” she said, yanking out the drawer containing the trash can harder than she needed to. “I can’t wait.”

“Listen,” I said, scooping up a few dirty plates and joining her in the kitchen. “It’s a process, you know?” I was trying to remember what Dave had told me, to parrot a few of his most reasonable-sounding lines. “You have to give a little to get a little. I know right now it feels maybe a little bit big and jokey . . .”

She glared at me, hands on her hips. “Do you know how it feels?” she asked. “I don’t think you have any idea. It feels like . . .” She drew a shuddering breath, and her voice caught. “It feels like you think that I’m a joke,” she said. “Like I’m a joke, and you’re putting me out there for the world to laugh at.”

I felt my heart crack open as I realized the enormity of what I’d done, the awfulness of it . . . and that, in a few months’ time, if everything went well, this awful thing I’d done was going to be on television for all the world to see. Critics and random viewers and teenagers whose worldviews would be shaped by what they saw would all be tuning in and feasting on the televised version of my grandmother’s debasement, laughing (or not) at a character who was just one more version of the oversexed, foulmouthed granny.
Bite my Boniva
. What in the world had I been thinking? The answer came, almost immediately.
Anything. I will do anything.
Write those lines, change the character, let Lloyd replace my words with his own, let the network insist on the actors and the scenes that it wanted, even if it meant selling out my own grandmother, the woman who’d raised me, who’d loved me? Sure thing. Why not. As long as it gets my show on the air.