Life's a Beach (3 page)

“You snooze, you lose,” she said. “And why does Riley have to do everything we do, anyway?” Rebecca kept her eyes glued to her sister, who I hoped was a better role model in the flirt department than her mother had been for me.

The suit-and-sneaker man was back. “SAG?” he was saying repeatedly as he walked past the line, as if he were selling drugs.

I looked down at my chest. “Not yet, thank God,” I said.

“Gross! I can’t believe you said that in front of me, Aunt Ginger,” Becca said. “Mom would kill you.”

“Just living up to my reputation,” I said. “It takes focus
and
discipline.”

Riley bumped his way back into line. “Can we go home now?” he asked.

“Hey, no front cuts, Riley,” Becca said.

Rachel dragged her attention back to us and rolled her eyes. “What he means,” she said, “is that he’s looking for union members. Screen Actors Guild. Does anybody but me read?”

The boy Rachel had been flirting with stepped forward. “Do you have your card?” the man asked him. He nodded and they walked off importantly together.

Rachel watched him disappear. “Easy come, easy go,” I said.

“YES, I DO,
I do believe in miracles,” I said about twenty minutes later when I finally grabbed us a clipboard. I handed a sheet to each of the kids, and they huddled around me reading while I fished in my bag for more pens. “Union rate,” I read out loud. “One hundred eighteen dollars for eight hours; nonunion, seventy-five dollars for twelve hours.”

“Wow,” Becca said. “I think I make more than that with my paper route.”

I added up how much I made on my earrings on a bad day. It was close. “Okay,” I said. “Just check
all
under availability and write really messy where it asks who your agent is.”

“What do you think I should put under
special expertise
? Synchronized swimming?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, you so sucked at that, Rachel,” Becca said.

“Put it anyway,” I said. “And don’t forget that summer we all took sailing lessons.”

Rachel scrunched up her forehead. “You didn’t take sailing lessons with us.”

I was always doing that, forgetting for just a split second that the better part of a generation separated us. “Don’t do that—you’ll get wrinkles,” I said to change the subject. I was pretty sure that forgetting you weren’t still fifteen happened to everyone, but I certainly wasn’t going to call attention to it.

“What’s my inseam?” Rebecca asked. “And what should I put under
hat
?”

“I put baseball,” Riley said.

“Am I the only one in this family with a brain?” Rachel asked. “They’re looking for your wardrobe sizes, which is why it says ‘wardrobe sizes’ just above it.”

We were almost to the bathhouse. “Just do the best you can,” I said. “And listen, here’s the deal. If I get in, don’t worry, I’ll try to pull the rest of you in, too.”

There were two women and one man sitting behind a long table in front of the bathhouse. I made Riley go first, so I could listen to the questions and fine-tune my strategy.

Riley must have decided on an offensive approach. “How do you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?” he asked as he waved his sheet of paper at them.

One of the women took the paper and looked down at it. “I don’t know,” she said. “How
do
you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?”

Riley crossed his arms and waited just long enough. “Ve-ry carefully.”

They laughed. “Got anything else for us?” the same woman asked. She looked down. “Oh that’s so cute. He wrote ‘baseball’ under
hat
. Are you a baseball fan, honey?”

The man stuck out his hand. “My name is Manny, what’s yours?”

Riley shook his hand and said, “Pedro.”

The man smiled. He was probably in his early thirties, and when he turned his head, I could see he had a ponytail. “Tell me a little about yourself, Pedro.”

“Well, just a few years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree and didn’t have fifty cents to ride the bus.”

“Ohmigod, he’s doing Pedro,” Rachel said. The sisters rolled their eyes. Riley had been doing his Pedro imitation for three years now, since the Red Sox won the World Series when he was five.

The people behind the table were all leaning forward and smiling. “And now what, Pedro?” the ponytailed man named Manny asked.

“But now, Boston, I consider her my house. She is my house. And if I don’t come back here, it’s because she didn’t try hard enough to keep me.”

“Remind me never to negotiate with you, kid.”

And that was it. Riley was in. Or at least Pedro was. And the rest of us were out.

3

RACHEL CROSSED HER ARMS AND HUGGED HERSELF
while we walked and Riley ran ahead of us, punching his arms in the air like a triumphant little Rocky. “I so don’t get it. What’s Riley got that we don’t have?”

Becca twirled some hair around her finger and turned to look at her sister. “It’s so not fair. I don’t think he should get to be in it if we can’t. We’re a
family
.”

We caught up with Riley just as he reached Noah’s house. Noah was a glassblower. He made everything from champagne flutes, Christmas ornaments, and witches’ balls to elegant vases and the most amazing sculptures. Witches’ balls are glass balls that you hang in your window. They have weblike strands of glass inside them to catch evil spirits that might otherwise fly around your house. The name probably helps keep the spirits out, too.

Once a week, Noah opened the studio behind his house for a demonstration. Everybody who could fit would sit down at one of the three old wooden benches. The rest of the people would stand in the back with Noah’s dog.

Noah’s furnace would be glowing orange, and you could feel the heat even from the benches. He’d put on special sunglasses because, he’d say, the old glassblowers had all gotten cataracts. Then he’d pick up a long metal blowpipe and dip it into the bucket of molten glass in the furnace.

He’d dip that into a pan of brightly colored crushed glass. Then he’d heat it, and dip it, then heat it and dip it again. He’d sit down at a bench and roll the pipe back and forth along a rail while he shaped the glass blob with a charred applewood block.

Finally, he’d stand up and lift the long metal blowpipe to his mouth. The first time I saw it, I thought he’d blow the glass up like a balloon. But all he did was blow the tiniest puff of air into the pipe and then quickly cover the opening with his thumb. He rolled the pipe around, and the glass expanded so slowly you almost couldn’t see it.

Noah’s stuff was so gorgeous it often sold before it even made it out of his yard to one of the local gift shops. Today, he’d set up a table on the driveway between the street and my car, and it looked like he’d been doing a brisk business.

“Guess what?” Riley yelled. Noah was finishing waiting on two women. His dog, Sage, who today looked like a cross between a chocolate Lab, an Irish setter, and possibly a dachshund, kept her short-legged self lodged between Noah and her competition. Better Sage than me. One of the women was blond and the other brunette, and if you counted the redheaded dog, they surrounded Noah with the full female spectrum of hair color. The two-legged women hugged their purchases to their chests.

They both said thank you and started walking away. The brunette turned around for one last look at him. “We’ll tell all our friends about you,” she practically sang.

I couldn’t resist an understated eye roll, but nobody noticed, except possibly Sage. It was hard to tell. It was also hard to tell just why Noah always seemed to have this effect on women. He was tall, and basically handsome in kind of a geeky, rumpled way. He had dark hair, pale skin, and great eye contact, but there was also something unfinished about him. Maybe women were drawn to him the way they were drawn to a good home improvement project. A tweak here, a tweak there, and look what you’d have.

Riley was telling Noah his big news. “Nice,” Noah said. “Way to go, man.” They reached their fists out to each other and touched knuckles in the gesture that seemed to have replaced the high five, and not a moment too soon.

Riley started jumping up and down with excitement as he continued his story. “And they only wanted me. Aunt Ginger even tried to give the lady her earrings, but they still only wanted me.”

I reached my hands up to my ears. “Only because she was looking at them,” I said. “It wasn’t like it was a bribe or anything.”

“Yeah, big deal, Riley,” Rachel said. “So you’re shark bait.”

Becca’s eyes lit up for the first time since we’d been rejected. “Shark bait, shark bay-yayt.”

“Hey,” Noah said to me after the girls ran off with Riley chasing them. Apparently Sage didn’t see me as any real competition for Noah’s affections, because she took off after the kids, which meant we were alone.

“Hey,” I said back. I picked up a vase that pulled me in with its swirls of poppy red, indigo blue, and black. People were always saying Noah’s work reminded them of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, but I think what they meant was that pretty much everything he created looked vaguely like a vagina. Possibly this was another reason for his fan club.

Noah stuffed some bills into the empty tennis ball can where he kept his money. He stepped around the table and lifted my hair off my neck with one hand. He put his other hand on my shoulder and bent forward to give me a kiss just below my right ear. He smelled like propane gas and sweat, which was sexier than it should have been.

Noah’s hair was thick and messy, and he didn’t exactly have a beard, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him clean-shaven either. When I’d first met him and he told me he was a glassblower, I’d said something witty like
Oh, that’s so cool
. And he’d grinned like he was about Riley’s age and said, “No, actually it’s really hot.”

“So,” he said now.

“So,” I said back. He draped one of his arms across my shoulders a bit awkwardly, and I leaned into him, just a little.

“How’s life at the FROG?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Oh, no. Not you, too. I hate that word.”

“Okay, how’s life at the toad?”

“Much better,” I said. “Though I prefer to think of it as a penthouse. You know, with cars as the ground-floor tenants?”

Noah nodded. “Did you know all toads are frogs but not all frogs are toads?”

“Fascinating,” I said. “Did you know only the male croaks?”

“Charming,” he said. “Listen, I have to get back to the studio. I’m really close on something, and I just want to get a few more hours in.” One hand stayed on the small of my back.

I took a step away. “Perfect,” I said. “I’m really close on something, too.”

“HI, HONEY, WE’RE HOME,”
I yelled as the kids and I walked into their house. My sister, Geri, and her husband, Seth, were sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, and yes, they were going at it with their BlackBerrys. Since they also each had a glass of red wine within striking distance, I hoped it was the final check of the day. But, who knew, maybe they brought them to bed and woke up repeatedly throughout the night to pound the tiny keyboards with their thumbs. I shivered just a little at the thought.

“Guess what,” Riley yelled. “I get to be in the movie.”

While his parents congratulated him and his sisters started in again with the shark bait stuff, I tiptoed out to the kitchen to see what my chances were for some dinner before I had to consider cooking my own. I was in luck—meatballs simmered in their sauce on top of the stove. As quietly as I could, I pulled a hunk off the loaf of Italian bread and dipped it in. While I chewed, I gave the sleeve of white paper a twist so the remaining loaf wouldn’t start to get stale and even checked the level of the pasta water. I was considerate like that.

“Would you like to stay for dinner?” my sister asked behind me.

“No thanks, I’ve just eaten,” I mumbled.

Geri waited for me to turn around. Eventually I did, but not before I wiped the crumbs off my face. “You really should work on your boundaries,” she said.

I opened a drawer, took out a fork, and stabbed a meatball. “You really should work on raising your own children.”

It was pretty standard conversation for Geri and me, since we could never get along for more than a minute or two. Our whole lives, we’d been polar opposites. This might have been more complicated in a family of, say, six or eight siblings, where everybody would have to work harder to stake out niches that didn’t overlap, but with just Geri and me it was easy: she was the good girl and I was the rebel. She married her college sweetheart, and I broke up with mine to travel the world. She had kids and found a steady job. I had a series of boyfriends, an assortment of jobs, more trips.

She grabbed a fork and joined me. “Does that mean your nephew will have to miss out on his first chance at stardom?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. Time and a half stays. And I think an occasional bonus would be a nice gesture.” I stabbed another meatball to seal the deal. “Have you heard from Mom?”

“Company!” my mother yelled from the foyer.

“YOU’RE JUST
whistling Dixie here, Toots,” my father said. “I’m not going anywhere.”