Life's a Beach (6 page)

He had a point, but just in case it was a trick question, I said, “Oh, no, not at all. I’m completely fascinated.”

He held out his hand and said, “Tim Kelly.”

“Hi. Ginger Walsh.” He was probably my age, give or take. “So, what do you do?”

“I’m the gaffer.”

“Is that like a gopher?”

His eyes clouded over. “No,” he said like he’d said it many times before. “It’s like an electrician.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to meet an electrician.”

He laughed. “You’re here with one of the kids, right?”

“Yeah, my nephew.”

“You want me to get better lighting for him?”

Tim Kelly was seriously cute. I smiled. “I’ll talk to his makeup artist and get back to you.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

I made a wide circle so I could casually bypass Allison Flagg and sit at another mini picnic table. It was just a few feet closer to the action, but it made a big difference. I could see and hear everything much more clearly now, and even managed to give Riley a thumbs-up when he looked over. The technical advisors had apparently worked through their philosophical differences about the maypole dance, and each of the dozen or so kids was holding the end of a long ribbon. The girls’ ribbons were pink and the boys’ were green.

The girls and boys faced one another, and most of them managed to put their right feet back successfully. Then they bent their right knees, straightened them back out again, and slowly rose up on their toes. That seemed like a lot to expect from a group of kids who looked to me to be between the ages of six and eight, and when they had to do the same thing with their left feet, things got pretty shaky.

There were a bunch of rehearsals, and sometimes the kids were better and sometimes they were worse. They were playing what sounded like waltz music, which I thought might have been their first mistake. Something a bit more up-tempo might have helped all of us. I could feel my lower back stiffening from sitting so long. Finally, the AD guy who’d given me the dirty look yelled “Quiet.” Then somebody said “Rolling,” and after that a woman walked over and held a clapper in front of the kids. She touched the top part to the bottom part and said “Marker.”

Who knew? I’d always thought they said “Take one” or “Take four hundred and seventy-three,” but everything was actually written right on the clapper. And it wasn’t until he said “Action” that I realized the ponytailed guy from the casting call was the director. At least I thought the director was the one who got to say it. I felt like I’d landed in a foreign country and didn’t speak the language.

Allison Flagg was going to be hard to shake. She sat down at my picnic table and held out an empty bank deposit slip with a phone number written on the back of it. “He’s the best there is,” she whispered. “They call him the fertility god.”

“Catchy,” I whispered, without taking it. “Who’s that?” I asked to distract her, pointing to the ponytailed guy.

She reached over and tucked the bank slip between two fingers of my clenched fist. “That’s the director. Manny Muscadel.”

One of the dance people pushed a button on the CD player and the educational consultant said, “Okay, kids. Now.”

The director was sitting with a small group of people in a semicircle in front of a video moniter. “Cut,” he said when one of the girls tripped and the rest of the kids piled up like dominoes. He took off his headphones and buried his head in his hands.

Many, many attempts later, the sun was directly overhead, and I didn’t know about the kids, but I’d never been so bored in my entire life. A dance guy clapped his hands and said, “All right now, let’s focus.”

Riley started shaking his hand until little waves ran up the length of his ribbon. I tried to catch his eye. Geri would kill me if he got fired.

The director pushed himself out of his director’s chair. “That’s good. Have them all do that. And then just make them circle around the pole a little.”

“Technically—” the dance guy began.

“Just let them jump around and pretend they’re having fun. We can cut in the top of the pole with the ribbons weaving in and out afterward.”

So the kids got to shake their ribbons and skip around the pole, girls going one way and boys the other. Riley jumped up and clicked his heels together a few times, and then a couple of other kids started doing it, too.

“Cut,” the director said. “Print.” He looked over his shoulder at the other people in the chairs. “You know, there’s a point when one more take and it’s child abuse.”

NOT THAT THERE
was much competition, but lunch was by far the high point of the day. We piled into fifteen-seater vans and were transported all the way to the other side of the parking lot. There was a huge white tent, and several long tables loaded with chafing dishes were set out in front of that. We grabbed plastic trays and real plates and cloth napkins and silverware. I just couldn’t pick one thing, so I filled my plate with tiny piles of shrimp and pesto salad, steak tip salad, chinese chicken salad, and salad salad.

Riley made his way over to the adjacent fast-food trailer, where they handed his hamburger and french fries out to him through the trailer window. We carried our trays inside the tent and found a place at one of the long, cafeteria-style tables. There were white tablecloths on the tables, and it felt a little bit like being at a wedding with people we didn’t know very well. I’d been to a lot of weddings like that.

After a six-hour morning that dragged on for what felt like six days, our lunchtime flew by. I was trying to decide if I really should go back for dessert. I knew I couldn’t eat it, but I thought I could probably get away with wrapping it up and putting it in my pocketbook so I could eat it for dinner. I bet people who worked on movies never even had to go to the grocery store. I was surprised I didn’t see lots of really fat people, and when I looked around the tent I noticed everyone was in relatively good shape. I didn’t see many actors around either. Maybe there was a no-cal trailer somewhere. I’d have to find out, because by midweek I’d be ready for it.

“How long does lunch last anyway?” I asked the people sitting around us.

“Thirty minutes after the last person is served,” somebody said.

“Thanks.” I lowered my voice to talk just to Riley. “At least you’ll get to do something else this afternoon. That maypole thing is getting old.”

“You can say that again,” Riley said.

“That maypole thing is getting old.”

Riley laughed. “I knew you were going to do that, Aunt Ginger.”

We dropped off our trays on our way out of the tent. “Maybe just one tiny bit of chocolate,” I suggested.

Riley saw them first. A whole row of gumball machines. One was filled with peanut M&M’s, one with cashews, another with a kind of snack mix. And, get this, you didn’t need any money to make them work. “Score,” Riley said. “I’m glad I have pockets.”

Riley and the other kids went back to their circle, and Allison Flagg stalked me to our cozy little picnic table. I ignored her and focused on my M&M’s. As soon as I ran out, it was déjà vu all over again. One of my old boyfriends was always quoting Yogi Berra, and I still had occasional flashbacks. He’d say the one about the future not being what it used to be or something about when you come to a fork in the road, take it. It wasn’t really why we broke up, but by the fourth or fifth time he rolled over after making love and said, “I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four,” I was pretty much over Yogi. Not to mention the boyfriend.

They’d only done that stupid maypole dance about a million times, and now they had to do it about a million more times to get the close-ups. Why would anyone even want to be a movie actor? I was ready for a two-hour nap from one to four myself, but apparently lunch had had the opposite effect on some of the kids.

One of the little boys started jumping up and down. “Sugar high, sugar high,” he kept saying.

The director pushed himself out of his chair, and once he was out of the way I could see that it said
MANUEL MUSCADEL
. He walked over to the technical advisors for what looked like a consult. The educational consultant pulled the sugar-high kid out of the circle, and one of the ADs took his place.

“What happened to the other kid?” Riley asked him.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a minute,” the AD said. “Just do everything I do, okay?” He was well over six feet tall and looked like he’d wandered off the set of
Big
and into the wrong movie.

I leaned over to Allison. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

“It’s a close-up. You won’t see him at all. He’s just in there to try to control the kids who are
amateurs
.”

It worked pretty well. Until they brought a boom mike in and held it over the kids. “Just talk for a while,” the director said. “Say the normal kinds of things you would say.”

One of the little girls jumped up to touch the microphone.

“Don’t touch that,” the dance guy said.

“Are
you
the teacher?” the same little boy asked.

“
I’m
the teacher,” the educational consultant said. “Don’t touch that.”

“Testing,” another kid said to the microphone. “Testing one two three.”

One of the twins stood up. “Tomorrow,” she belted out. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s a day today . . .”

“Somehow that doesn’t sound quite right,” I said to her mother.

Riley jumped up. “And now it’s time for a commercial break.”

“She was still singing,” Allison Flagg said to me.

The sugar-high kid was back. “Sugar high, sugar high,” he chanted as he hopped around.

Riley stood on his tiptoes to get closer to the boom mike. “In the rare case an erection lasts more than four hours,” he said, “seek immediate medical attention.”

7

“HE SAID WHAT?” GERI ASKED AFTER RILEY WAS OUT OF
earshot and I could tell her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope.” I opened Geri’s refrigerator and closed it again. I couldn’t possibly be hungry. “He’s a natural mimic, that’s all. I think he gets it from my side of the family.”

Geri shook her head. “You’re the aunt. You don’t have a side of the family. But it’s not like they don’t show the commercial all day long.”

“Yeah, I think I even saw it on Nickelodeon once. Anyway, he got a big laugh, and I heard somebody say he thought the kid was ready to direct.”

“Do you think he knows what it means?”

“Directing?”

Geri gave me a look. “Uh, no.”

“Oh, that. How would I know? He’s your kid. I just drive him.”

“Well, it’s certainly a teaching moment. And one I’m going to hand right over to Seth as soon as he gets home.”

I refused to allow myself to picture Seth discussing four-hour erections with Riley for even one millisecond. Geri sat down at her kitchen counter and opened a plastic file bulging with newspaper clippings and computer printouts. I knew I’d better wrap it up quick or Geri would be obsessing about her fiftieth again. “Well, anyway, Riley was fine, especially compared to the sugar-high kid. After listening to that one, I was thinking maybe I’d get my tubes tied, just for extra insurance.”

As soon as it came out of my mouth, I regretted it. Geri’s eyes lit up. “You know, if you got rid of Noah now, you could still have kids,” she said.

I wondered if my sister and Allison Flagg were in cahoots. “What is it with the kid stuff today? Is there something in the water? Plus,
if
I wanted to have kids, which I don’t, why couldn’t I have them with Noah?”

“Come on. Noah’s far too self-absorbed to have children. He can’t even remember he has you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She nodded. “Of course, it’s your fault as much as his. People treat us the way we let them.”

“Why do you hate Noah so much?”

Geri flipped through her file for a minute, then looked up again. “It’s not so much that I don’t like him personally. I just can’t stand his type. You know, artsy-fartsy, full of himself, too-cool-for-school. He thinks he’s such an original, but he’s really just as much of a cliché as the rest of us.”

“Wow,” I said. “You have way too much time on your hands. Maybe you should have a few more kids yourself, just to keep from overanalyzing people who are none of your business. You’re not even close, by the way. Noah’s nothing like that. And, just to set the record straight, from where I sit, Seth isn’t exactly a prize.”

Geri didn’t even have the good sense to be insulted. She just leaned toward me the way brides do when they’re throwing a bouquet. “It’s not too late if you change your mind, you know. How about that fifty-six-year-old woman who just got pregnant?”

“Give me a break, I’m only forty-one. And, anyway, didn’t it turn out she was faking it?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”

When it came to these conversations with my sister, you pretty much had to give her something. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have kids.”

Geri’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

“Sure, if you take care of them for me. I mean, fair’s fair.”