Lies, Love, and Breakfast at Tiffany's

by Julie Wright

  But he’d left me in.

  Not that he really could have cropped me out. We were standing close together, our arms over each other’s shoulders. He would have had to cut off his own limb to remove me from the picture. So if he’d wanted a photo of him with Mickey, he really had no choice but to leave me in it, too. But . . . to have it on his fridge?

  I stared for several moments at this thing I couldn’t make sense of and realized it was time to leave. If Ben woke up and found me mesmerized by his large appliances, we’d both have some explaining to do.

  I was too exhausted for explanations.

  I left the sticky note next to the picture. I wanted Ben to know I had seen it, because it was definitely a conversation we needed to have. Pictures on fridges were signs of intimacy. The only people who had my face taking up space on their fridges were my parents, my grandma, and Emma.

  I tiptoed to the front door and pulled it open as quietly as possible. I thumbed the lock so he wouldn’t get murdered in his sleep after I left and wondered what the odds were of being murdered in your bed. Ben would likely have the answer, but I decided not to ask him. Some things were better left unknown.

  I regretted leaving almost as soon as the door skimmed over the carpet and clicked shut. What if it didn’t mean anything that my face was on his fridge? What if he didn’t think a conversation was necessary?

  What if he liked this girl who never laughed, and my leaving too soon took me out of the equation? Because, though I had decided to stay away from him and let Alison win, I’d changed my mind. Him putting me on his fridge changed things for me because it meant he was thinking about me too.

  I frowned as I worked my way down his sidewalk between two tidy rows of daylilies to my car. A sleepy fog still occupied too much space in my head for me to question or fret for long.

  I could not allow myself to speculate on anything, good or bad, and I definitely would not give the girl who didn’t laugh a second thought. She could no longer be part of the equation between Ben and me. Ben has me on his fridge. I slid behind the wheel of my car and thought about the weirdness of such a thing. Another giggle bubbled up and led to full-on laughter. Whereas Alison didn’t really laugh, I probably laughed too much.

  I really needed to get some quality sleep.

  “You don’t have to be friendly to work together. Acquainted will do.”

  —Jo Stockton, played by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face

  I went straight home and crashed hard for nine hours. I didn’t wake for Emma’s four texts, Ben’s three texts, or my grandma’s one phone call and voice message.

  The doorbell finally won in reviving me. The UPS driver rang the doorbell to deliver a package from my parents. I used a knife to cut through the packing tape and discovered a new snorkel mask and a note from my mom informing me that she’d seen this in one of the seaside shops in Washington and thought I might like a new one. Mom bought me little things all the time as her way of staying in contact with me. I sent her a quick email letting her know how much I loved the mask and promising to send pictures when it made its maiden voyage. Then I texted Emma, assuring her of my safety, ignored Ben, because I wasn’t sure how to tackle that mountain, and called Grandma, because no one ignored Grandma.

  “I need help unpacking,” she declared when she picked up the phone.

  “You wouldn’t if you hadn’t moved,” I said and popped the last bite of butter-slathered toast in my mouth.

  “Don’t get sassy. Just come help.” She pretty much hung up on me after that.

  And she called me sassy?

  I considered putting off the shower for a while longer, since I was going to help unpack boxes and move furniture, but the way I kept running into people made me rethink shower avoidance. I could barely stand to be around myself. I showered, shaved my legs, brushed my teeth, and even took the time to do a side braid just so it would look like I’d put some effort into my appearance. By the time I arrived at Grandma’s new address, I could have passed as a human.

  Grandma reintroduced me to the meaning of hard labor. While we worked, I told her about the film, about Dean, and about my options now that Dean pretty much hated me for standing up for myself, even though I’d saved his job and he owed me.

  “Hollywood is filled with liars and thieves. It’s absolutely no place for a lady. I think you should find a different line of work.”

  Such were the wise words of my grandmother on the subject of Dean Thomas. She’d apparently been talking to Old Ben Kenobi about hives of scum and villainy. Her advice might have been helpful had it not been for the fact that I was holding a forty-pound, framed-and-matted painting of Paris against the wall above her couch. We’d, or rather I’d, moved the picture seven times already, and no amount of time spent in Emma’s gym had prepared me for the task. My arms shook with the exertion.

  “Can we focus on finding a home for your art before we criticize my job, Grandma?” I asked.

  “Don’t pull your Sassy Silvia out on me, young lady. I’m not your mother.”

  “Thank heavens,” I said, irritated to be scolded like a teenager when I was into my third decade of life.

  Gut instinct said she’d tacked on the “young lady” part to her nickname for me to reinforce the fact that a lady like me didn’t belong in villainous Hollywood. I stretched my neck to look over my left shoulder, barely catching a glimpse of her cotton-swab white hair. “You’re the one who worked in Hollywood for most of your life,” I reminded her. “Are you trying to tell me you lost lady points from the whole ordeal?”

  She ignored the question and kept up the lecture. “If your mother knew about your boss trying to take credit for your work, and you putting up with his treatment of you, she’d chain you up in a room full of Virginia Woolf writings until you came back to feminism with a protest sign declaring your apology.”

  “Exactly. Which is why I didn’t tell her about it; I told you. Honestly, Grandma, out of everybody in my life, I really expected you to have my back.” I blew away a strand of hair that had fallen loose from my braid.

  “I do have your back,” she insisted. “Opening your eyes to the truth of what you’ve gotten yourself into is the best way I can support you.”

  “You mean prying my eyes open with a crowbar.” I thought the words muttered under my breath were too low to be heard, but Grandma harrumphed from behind me.

  “You’re sassing again.”

  “Do you like the painting here?” I asked, changing the subject, since my arms weren’t likely to hold up for too much longer. She didn’t respond. I grunted. “I can’t see if you’re nodding or shaking your head. You’re in my blind spot.”

  She made a noise of irritation. “I don’t like it there at all. It diminishes the couches.”

  I lowered the painting, carefully stepped down from my perch on the back of the couch I’d been using as a makeshift ladder, and bit my tongue to keep from asking how long she’d known she didn’t want the painting above the couch. My arms were jiggly bags of unhappy muscle. I could actually feel them frowning at me. “So where do you think you will like it?”

  She pursed her lips and plucked at the necklace dangling down her front. Several silver jangly bracelets slid down to her elbow as she twirled the long chain of her necklace in a slow circle while she contemplated where she wanted her picture. “The entry hall over the table,” she said finally.

  She hadn’t liked it there at the very beginning of this whole decorate-Grandma’s-new-retirement-villa scheme, but I didn’t mention it. She had to know she was killing me, and she probably found some dark, twisted humor in the act. I turned to face her directly, and smiled despite myself.

  Grandma’s hair had gone gray when she was still in her thirties. By the time she’d hit sixty, it had gone white. She kept it cropped short and used styling gel to spike it on top, which I’d loved as a little girl because the
sharp ends were pokey and fun to pat. Grandma wasn’t one of those double-­chinned, housecoat-wearing grandmas. She was a hipster-­jeans-and-sassy-T-shirt-wearing grandma. Today, she was wearing the jeans she bought the last time we’d gone to the mall for ­pedicures—the jeans with stylishly placed rips and tears—and her shirt sported the Lakers logo. Grandma loved the NBA.

  I went to work getting the picture hung. Once done, I put an arm around her as we stepped back to admire my handiwork, along with the handiwork of the artist. “You know where I liked it best, Grandma?” I asked.

  “Where’s that?”

  “In your actual house.”

  “We’ve been through all that.” She wriggled out from under my arm and scooted away from me as if, by being in my physical proximity, she might catch the disease of common sense and change her mind about the move.

  “Going through it and making sense of it are not the same thing,” I reminded her. “You are not a decrepit geriatric in need of frequent diaper changes by pinch-faced nurses. You’re in better physical and mental condition than most forty-year-olds I know. Assisted living is for people who need assistance.”

  “I do need assistance,” she said as she ripped the tape off a box.

  “You do not need someone to puree your food so you can eat. You might need someone to schedule your hair appointments, but that’s it. I could totally use an assistant like that, too, but you don’t see me moving into a last-resting-place-before-the-final-resting-place joint. This villa is a tenth of the size of your home. Their community pool is half the size of the personal pool at your house.”

  She sighed and looked away. “A house that big echoes loneliness with every step inside its halls.”

  I stared at her, but she refused to meet my gaze. Grandma never mentioned feeling any kind of loneliness. Not once in my whole life. “But I visit you all the time. I practically live there with you.” My high-pitched protests came with the intense desire to defend myself. No one could ever compare me to one of those crummy grandkids who didn’t care about their grandparents. Grandma was my life and breath. She was the reason I hadn’t run away to Peru when I was a teenager and clashing with Mom. Well, her and Emma, though I’d planned on taking Emma with me if and when I ever did run away.

  Grandma went back to unpacking the boxes containing her movie collection.

  “You’re lonely?” I asked when she started pulling old DVDs out of the box and placing them on her shelves in an order that must have made sense to her but made no sense to me.

  She moved the now-empty box to the floor and opened up the one underneath it without responding. When she exclaimed, “My Audrey Hepburn collection!” I knew she’d slammed the door closed on the lonely conversation forever.

  Grandma felt lonely.

  And she wouldn’t talk to me about it.

  “You know they have an Audrey Hepburn society here at Ocean View? I plan on joining as soon as I get settled.”

  Things were worse than I thought. She was not only lonely and moving into an assisted-living complex called Ocean View when there was no ocean view from any window in the entire complex, but she planned to join clubs at the assisted-living home? “Next you’re going to ask me to order you some Vicks VapoRub. Grandma, what is going on with you?”

  She whirled on me with demon fire in her eyes. “Don’t you dare compare Audrey Hepburn to Vicks VapoRub!”

  I actually fell back in surprise at her ferocity, but I kept my verbal ground even after losing my physical ground. “Oh, come on, you spent the last hour telling me how Hollywood is nothing but lies with beautiful set dressing, and how I should run—not walk—to any other form of employment, but now you want to join a society fanning themselves over an icon from that same Hollywood? Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t get it. I totally did. Audrey was the reason I existed in my current state. Without her, I would have been someone totally different. Today, with my career going well, I didn’t actually mind.

  “Audrey’s different,” Grandma said reverentially. “She was never like the rest of them.” And then she smiled for the first time that day. “She was like you, actually. Dark hair, dark eyes, big heart, hidden insecurities—”

  “I am not insecure.” I interrupted only because my insecurities didn’t like being poked. Grandma had told me all this before. She had known Audrey personally from a movie set where Grandma had worked as a makeup artist at a time when Audrey was winding down in her career. Audrey had cupped my grandmother’s chin in her hand and said, “You are lovely.” My grandma described it as similar to the moment in My Fair Lady when the queen of Transylvania declares Eliza Doolittle as charming. No one before or since had ever said anything to my grandma that meant as much.

  The fact that Grandma compared me to Audrey was always a compliment to me. But today, I didn’t feel like hearing it, not when Grandma was moving into a retirement community. Not when she was hinting at being lonely and making plans to join a club that sounded like something someone made up to keep the almost-deceased busy until they were no longer in need of trivial entertainment.

  “If you want to be part of an Audrey Hepburn society, why don’t you volunteer to work with needy children?” I asked.

  “You don’t understand my purposes. I’m looking for social interactions as well as social good.”

  “And volunteering isn’t social?” I was being petty because I didn’t like her moving into this place with a bunch of other old people. It made her mortality a little too real for me.

  “Volunteering is a different kind of social. Oh! Be careful with that!”

  I glanced at the box I’d selected from the stack. “Why?”

  She tugged the box from my arms as if, by questioning her motives, I had declared my intentions to put explosives in the box and ignite them immediately. “It’s my movie collection.”

  “I thought we already put your movies away.” I lifted the lid and peeked inside as she pulled the box back in an act of genuine distrust. My mouth fell open when I saw the contents. “Okay, I knew you had old movie cans, but you have actual movies in them? We’re talking reel-to-reel movies?”

  She nodded.

  I stared at the box with a new interest. “Seriously? How cool is that? And you never told me? Reel-to-reels are awesome.” I glanced up at her, legitimately intrigued at the idea of this relic from my chosen profession. “Do you have a projector that can play them?”

  She harrumphed and set the box on the couch, then she carefully removed each canister and set them on a shelf near the fireplace. “I’m an old woman moving into a retirement home. Of course I have a projector that can play these. I’ll bet everyone in this complex has a projector that can play these.”

  I frowned at her putting such incredible antiques so close to the fireplace. Was she serious? Shouldn’t they be kept in a fireproof room somewhere? “Maybe we should move these to your bedroom—”

  When she faced me with a dramatic roll of her eyes, I grinned. I loved it when my wrinkly, old grandmother rolled her eyes at me. She harrumphed again when she saw my smile. “I’ve had these since before you were born. I think I know how to care for them properly.”

  I decided not to argue the point. “What movies do you have?”

  She shrugged and flipped through the cans in a casual way that made me cringe. Did she not realize the value of such antiques if the movies inside were high-profile films?

  “Mary Poppins, To Kill a Mockingbird, Vertigo, Charade, some Abbott and Costello, Tammy and the Bachelor—you know . . . movies.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously? How did I not know that you had these? What’s happening between us? First, you move into a retirement home when you’re in better physical condition than I am. Then, you tell me you have cool stuff that you’ve never shown me before. Next, you’ll probably tell me you know who D. B. Cooper was.” I wa
s only half-joking.

  She bent down to settle the last of the cans onto the shelf before straightening and fixing me with her eagle-eye. That eye was the bane of my childhood. It knew everything about me, guessing my darkest secrets and misdeeds. “How do you even know about D. B. Cooper at your age?”

  “One of the first films I ever edited was about D. B. Cooper.” I sighed, remembering the hatchet job I’d done simply because I was new and inexperienced and working with the single worst budget ever.

  “I don’t remember that movie,” she said.

  I moved to get another box and see if she had any other cool things she’d failed to tell me about. “That’s because I never let anyone see it. I was too embarrassed. The only thing worse than a film editor not getting work is a film editor having to put their name on work done badly.”

  “I bet you’re exaggerating.” She stretched her five-foot-two frame. I wasn’t a tall woman by anyone’s standards, but next to my grandma, I looked like a giant. “Well then,” she said, “we’ve had a long day of working. I think we could use a break.”

  A break to my grandmother usually involved lots of bad-for-you foods and a movie. This was usually appreciated, but after the grueling schedule I’d endured, I really needed to get back home and actually pay attention to my apartment and all the things inside it that had been neglected while I finished Sliver of Midnight.

  I smiled at her. “I love the idea. You know I do. But I really can’t today. We’re unpacking, remember?”

  She waved my words away. “I have the rest of my life to unpack. Let’s watch a movie. We can get back to it when the movie’s over.”

  “I’m not making excuses. You know I love hanging out with you, but I do have to get home sometime before the neighbors call the board of health on me.”

  “If you had a date, that might be an acceptable reason to bail on an old woman. The cleaning-your-house excuse is just offensive.”