The Next Best Thing (5 page)

“Apricot or raspberry?”

“One of each,” she said. Reaching into the Tupperware container she had in her purse, she put two of the cookies in question onto my tray. As I began to crumble the cookies into manageable bits, she performed her nightly ritual, touching my face gently, examining the bandages, running her thumb from my forehead to my chin on the unblemished cheek. “Is it bad today?”

“Not so bad,” I would say, even if it wasn’t true. I knew what would happen if I told Grandma it hurt. She would rise instantly to her feet. “Excuse me for a moment,” she would say, her voice low, her face calm. I would hear the sound of her heels tapping briskly down the hall . . . and then I’d hear her voice, which would start off quiet and reasonable, then get louder and louder, her Boston accent growing more and more broad.
Why is my granddaughter in pain? Your job is to manage her pain. Now go do your job, or let’s find someone who can, because this situation is unacceptable. Ruth is eight years old and she’s been through enough.

I didn’t want the nurses or the doctors to be angry at me. I didn’t want them to think I was weak. If I couldn’t be pretty, in the manner of girls, I’d decided I could be brave, like a boy or a superhero, impressing strangers not with my beauty but by how much I could endure.

“I’m fine,” I would tell her. It was my ritual response, and once she’d heard it, Grandma would clear my dishes, scraping or pouring the leftovers into the trash can, rinsing cups and plates in the bathroom sink and piling them into the tote bag she’d
brought. Then, with the door closed and, if I had a roommate that night, the curtain around my bed drawn, she’d take off her shoes, turn on the television set, and get into bed beside me.

We would watch TV every night for an hour, from eight to nine, my daily allotment of what Grandma sometimes called “the idiot box.”
The Cosby Show
and
Who’s the Boss,
reruns of
Star Trek,
and
Murder, She Wrote,
my grandmother’s preferred program . . . but our favorite, shown in reruns, was
The Golden Girls.
I loved them all, sarcastic Bea Arthur and sexy Rue McClanahan and sweetly clueless Betty White. I loved that they were friends, sharing a house, in an eight-year-old’s fantasy of an every-night slumber party. I loved that Bea Arthur’s Dorothy still lived with her mother, and nobody thought it was strange. In my fantasies or, sometimes, in the strange and oddly vivid dreams I’d have after the nurses would give me painkillers, Grandma and I lived in that house. We’d sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee (which I’d never tasted, only seen), making jokes, waiting for Blanche to come home from whatever misadventures she’d had the night before, or for Rose to tell us a story about life in St. Olaf, or Dorothy to talk about her ex-husband, Stan Zbornak.

In Florida, where the Golden Girls lived, the weather was always warm and the skies were always sunny, and no crisis could not be managed in twenty-two minutes plus two commercial breaks. In that happy land, not everyone was beautiful, or young, or perfect. Not everyone had romantic love. But everyone had friends, a family they’d chosen. It was that love that sustained them, and that love, I imagined, could sustain me, too.

That was television for me, a dream of a perfect world, one where I fit in, one where I belonged. It was homemade butter cookies with dabs of jam in their centers, the sun setting outside my window and the air conditioner wheezing away and my grandmother next to me, smelling of Aqua Net and Shalimar, with one arm around my shoulders, her cheek resting on my
head. Some nights, exhausted and in pain, dopey with drugs, I would imagine that the glass of the TV set’s screen would soften like taffy. I’d stick one finger through the screen, then two fingers, then my hand, my wrist, my arm, my shoulder. I would part the glass as if it was a curtain, and I’d walk into the Golden Girls’ ranch house and emerge, in their kitchen or living room, dressed in my robe and pajamas and slippers, unbroken and unscarred, just a regular eight-year-old girl.

Dorothy, in her tunic and loose-fitting pants, would raise an eyebrow. “Well, where did you come from?” she’d ask.

“Oh, leave her alone,” Rose would say, bustling over with a cup of cocoa. “Poor thing, she’s up way past her bedtime!”

“Picture it,” Sophia would begin. “When I was a young girl back in Italy . . .”

“Not this one again,” Blanche would say, swooping into the room in a silk peignoir and high-heeled mules. She’d perch on the overstuffed couch, cross her legs, and then pat the cushion, inviting me to sit beside her. “Come here, honey. Take your shoes off. Stay awhile.”

When the show was over, Grandma and I would make up stories. What if Sophia and the rest of the girls took a trip back to Italy? What would happen if Blanche got married again and moved away? What was Dorothy’s son like, and would we ever get to see him? What if he moved to Florida, too, and fell in love with Blanche’s daughter? (Dorothy’s son eventually did arrive. He turned out to be gay, a revelation that sailed right over my eight-year-old head.) Grandma would bring me notebooks, leather-bound in robin’s-egg blue and pale pink, sometimes with the words
MY DIARY
in scrolling gold script on the cover. She’d bring boxes of felt-tipped pens, black and red and blue. “Write it down,” she would tell me. “Tell me a story.” When I’d complain that I didn’t know how to spell a word, didn’t know how to say what I wanted, or that I was tired, she’d put the pen in my hand,
open the notebook to a fresh page, and say, “You’re not being graded. Just try.”

So we would watch, and when I felt well enough, I would write the continuing adventures of the Golden Girls, sometimes guest-starring Grandma and me. Roommates would come and go, kids with broken legs or tonsil issues, just passing through. Once, I shared a room with a teenager recovering from her high-school-graduation-gift nose job. They wheeled her in just after a nurse had finished changing my bandages. The curtain was open, and, for a moment, we regarded each other. Both of her eyes were blackened, and her nose was in a splint, but, from her expression, I guessed that I looked even worse. “Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked in a froggy, nasal voice, taking in my eye patch and the bandages on my cheek. Her parents shushed her. Grandma glared and jerked the curtain shut. The next morning, the girl was gone, and Grandma and I and our television set were alone again.

The summer slipped by in a syrupy, pain-spiked haze. It was a season without weather, because the hospital always had an air-conditioned chill, a summer without any of the usual markers, picnics or fireworks or trips to the beach. On operation days, nurses would wake me up before dawn and wheel me into the operating room without so much as a sip of water. (“Why so early?” I asked, and my grandmother would make an uncharacteristically cynical face and say, “The doctors don’t want to miss their tee times.”) “You ready to go?” Grandma would whisper, bending close to me. Those mornings she didn’t bother with her makeup. I could see wrinkles around her lips, fanning out from the corners of her eyes, and grooves in her forehead that stretched from her nose to the corners of her lips. Her hair was still dark then—she dyed it, I knew; when I was home, I’d help her brush the solution onto the spots she couldn’t reach. She was old, and the doctors and fathers who’d give the pretty nurses
appreciative looks all ignored her, but to me, she was beautiful. I knew how she had looked, the beauty she’d once been. That beauty, I thought, was still there, like a layer of a shell hidden under subsequent accretions of mother-of-pearl, but you could see it if you looked closely enough.

“Remember,” she would tell me, “I’m going to be right there, waiting right outside.” She would hold my hand as they pushed my gurney down the hallway, letting go at the last possible moment, when the doors to the operating room swung open to let me through. Someone would poke a needle into the crook of my arm; someone else would position my head underneath the bright lights. “Count backward from ten,” a voice from nowhere would tell me, as the anesthesiologist put a mask over my mouth . . . but I’d never make it past seven. My eyelids would get heavy, my lips and tongue too thick to maneuver, and I’d be gone.

After my last operation I jolted awake, my arms and legs itching, not knowing how long I’d been unconscious—days? Weeks? The right side of my face felt as if it had been soaked in gasoline and set on fire, with the invisible hand back, squeezing, squeezing. My right eye was bandaged and my left eye was stuck shut, the lashes pasted to my cheek with tears and blood and Betadine. The inside of my mouth, where the surgeons did most of their stitching, was so tender that for days all I’d be able to manage would be puddings and ice cream and milk-soaked Life cereal. The television and the notebooks were my anchors, my constants. “Write it,” Grandma would tell me, her blouses perfectly pressed, in spite of a day in the August heat. “Write it all down.”

“It hurts,” I managed, though it was agony to move my jaw and tongue enough to even get those words out.

“I know,” said Grandma, stroking my hair. I picked up a pen with hands that felt as thick and clumsy as Mickey Mouse’s
gloved extremities. I remembered Katie and her mother walking through the curtains, bathed in the sunset’s apricot glow, back to the world of normal people, where nobody stared, where girls got normal things I was already sensing would be off limits for me—friends, boyfriends, a husband, a home. I opened the notebook and wrote,
I will never be beautiful
. Then I shut my eyes, turned my face toward the wall, and pretended I’d fallen asleep.

That was the only night I ever saw my grandmother cry. She picked up the notebook, read what I’d written, closed it slowly, and turned toward the window. I saw her reflection in the glass, saw her shoulders hitching up and down, saw tears shining on her cheeks as she whispered, fiercely, over and over,
Not fair, not fair, not fair.
I made myself stop looking, aware that what I was seeing was private, not meant for my eyes. The next morning, her cheeks were dry, her eyes were bright, her lipstick and mascara as perfect as ever. The page I’d written on was missing from the notebook. It had been ripped out so neatly that it took me the rest of the summer to even notice that it was gone.

I
moved to Los Angeles six months after graduating from Grant College, a small and well-regarded liberal-arts institution in Connecticut that had the benefit of being a mere ninety minutes from Grandma and from home. I’d finished with a degree in English literature that I’d earned with highest honors. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that the degree qualified me to do precisely nothing except go to graduate school for more degrees. Instead of that, I set my sights on Hollywood, like plenty of people before me who were good writers, devoted viewers, and believed they could combine those skills into a profitable and glamorous career. What set me apart from my peers was that I was the only person I knew who’d made the trip out west with her grandmother.

I wasn’t sure how Grandma would feel about my plan, so I’d broached it carefully, and only after doing weeks of research. I had money from the accident, more than enough to support me for the rest of my life, even if I never got a job, if I lived frugally. My parents might not have had the foresight to make out a will, but my father had two college friends who’d gone into the insurance business, and he had obligingly purchased policies from both of them. The settlement, carefully invested by my grandmother, had given me enough to pay all of my medical expenses,
and for my college education, with plenty left over to launch me into a life of my own. I felt guilty about having it, knowing how many of my classmates had taken out loans to pay their tuition and were graduating with six figures’ worth of debt, but the one time I’d said so, Grandma’s lips had tightened, and she’d said, “Divide it by every year of your life you won’t have your parents, and you’ll see it’s not that much.”
Divide it,
I heard,
for every year I won’t have my daughter.
After that, I didn’t complain.

One Friday night in June I laid out my plan, complete with charts and spreadsheets, my best estimations of how much it would cost to live in Los Angeles, with food and rent and car payments, and how long it would take for me to find a job. “I’ll give it a year,” I told Grandma as she sat, legs crossed, in a pale-pink dress printed with red-and-orange hibiscus flowers, a gold cuff bracelet on one of her narrow wrists and a comb ornamented with pale-pink crystals in her hair. “If I haven’t gotten a writing job by then, we can come back east and I’ll think about something more practical. Business school or law school.” It had never crossed my mind to go without her, to head west alone and leave her behind.

Grandma frowned. “Why a year? Why not two? Why not five? Business school.” She shook her head, repeating the words as if they hurt her. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

I tried to explain. “I’m sure a lot of people think they can write television shows.”

She shrugged. “Lots of people probably think it. But you actually can.”

“Maybe.”

“No ‘maybe.’ Do or do not. There is no try!” During moments of stress, Grandma had a tendency to sound like, or actually quote, Yoda. “I think you’re a very good writer.”

I shrugged. I’d written for the school paper all through high school, and had won prizes for fiction and poetry in college, but
secretly, I’d wondered whether I’d won because I’d been the only one who’d entered. Most of my classmates had enjoyed more active social lives than I’d had, and had spent significantly less time in the library. What did it matter that I’d been named the top student in the English department if I was the only one who was even trying?