The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  “’S okay,” I said as clearly as I could with the half of my mouth that moved. Distaste flickered across the woman’s face. I could see it before she turned away. I thought about how I must look, my head like a baseball, white and round, with stitches; my hair, normally long and pretty, in two greasy pigtails that lay limp and curled and crusted with blood and the reddish-gold stuff that oozed from my drains, because the doctors hadn’t yet given Grandma permission to wash it. It’s human nature, Grandma had told me when I asked her why people looked at me the way they did, why their eyes went cold, like they were insulted by my face, like it was my fault. People don’t like to see things that aren’t perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess. Their own mortality. When I’d asked what mortality meant, she had told me. We’re all going to die, but some people—most people—don’t want to think about that. They want to think they’ll live forever, but nobody does. Grandma did not believe, as she said, in sugarcoating things for me. Life was hard. I’d learned that much already.

  “We’ll leave you alone, then,” the woman said, and steered Katie back through the curtains, where I could hear the new-bike-owning Jared entertaining the crowd with details of how he’d been stricken. “I started feeling sick in fifth period, and I thought I could make it to the bathroom, but then . . .” He made an extremely realistic retching noise. “All over the hallway! Right in front of Mr. Palley’s room!”

  Everyone laughed. I closed my eyes, falling into a doze, waking to the click-click of Grandma’s heels in the hallway at six o’clock sharp. It was dinnertime. Every night, a nurse would place my meal on my table, removing the tan plastic cover to reveal whatever the cafeteria had deemed appropriate fare for patients on a soft diet: grayish-brown meatloaf, gummy mashed potatoes, overcooked canned carrots and peas, all of it whirled in a blender and reduced to a paste . . . and every night, Grandma would replace the lid, take the tray, and carry it back out into the hall. Her reasoning was that I was suffering enough that I deserved to have only my favorite things for dinner, and so that’s what she would bring me: macaroni and cheese, mashed by hand, matzoh-ball soup with the carrots and celery carefully strained out, corn cut off the cob, topped with a pat of salted butter, chopped up fine. When I could manage real food again, she’d bake cookies and rugelach for the whole floor, preparing tins of baked goods whenever one of the doctors or nurses had a birthday. She’d bring éclairs and glistening sugar-glazed fruit tarts from her favorite bakery on Newbury Street, and I’d tear them into tiny bites with my fingers, letting each bit of pastry or chocolate or cream dissolve slowly on my tongue, filling my mouth with the tastes: rich, salty, bitter, meltingly sweet.

  Dinner would be served each night on the china she’d brought from home. There would be real linens, napkins and tablecloths in bright patterns. Grandma would sit in the green plastic-cushioned armchair next to the bed and pick at her own dinner, keeping up a cheerful conversation about what she’d done that day. When she was younger, after my mother was in school, she had worked as a saleswoman at Mills Fine Furniture, the store her husband had founded in downtown Boston. When he’d died, she’d become the owner, but, after a year behind a desk in the back office, she’d decided that she preferred being out on the floor, helping customers decide on the perfect lamp or chair or a just-right dining-room table. She’d hired a manager to handle the payroll and the paperwork, the hiring and the firing, the vendors and the taxes and the rent, and had gone back to work as a saleswoman until she’d retired and moved down to Florida. There she had stayed, in the same gated community as some of the people she’d known in Boston, playing bridge and mah-jongg and canasta, going on power walks and attending water aerobics classes, until she came back to Massachusetts to take care of me.

  Grandma told me how when she’d been, as she put it, “a working girl,” she would unlock the store’s front doors each morning at ten o’clock, with her hair, in its modified beehive, perfectly arranged, her lipstick freshly applied and her nails manicured and polished pale pink. She would position herself at just the right distance, never hovering or crowding but never too far away, smiling at whoever came through the door: young couples, single women, sometimes entire families, with babies bundled into snowsuits and great-grandparents with walkers and canes. How can I help you? she would ask, always managing to sound as if helping them would be the highlight of her day, even if it was 7:55 and the store closed at 8:00 and she’d been on her feet since lunch. What do you love? she would ask, instead of What do you need?

  “Furniture’s something people have to live with,” she explained to me that summer in the hospital. “A kitchen table, a dining-room chair, the couch in their living room, those are things they’re seeing and using every single day. It can’t be enough that things are functional,” she’d say as she plucked a wilted flower from the bouquet that stood on the table just inside the front door, or brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They have to be lovely. You have to feel good every time you look at them.”

  My grandma, I knew, was beautiful, even though she denied it. “Oh, you should have seen me at twenty. Then I was a looker!” She’d shown me pictures of herself on the beach in Atlantic City, in an old-fashioned swimsuit, modestly cut, but still displaying her tanned, rounded shoulders and the tops of her breasts. Her lips were dark with lipstick, and she smiled coyly, her brows lifted in a knowing expression and her hair thick and brown and wavy, the same hair my mother had inherited and passed down to me. Her figure was a perfect hourglass, full hips and bosom with a tiny waist between, and her face was heart-shaped, with generous features, wide-set eyes and full lips that looked pursed for a kiss. She loved clothes and dressed beautifully, in the cuts and fabrics she’d learned would complement her curves—A-line skirts and fitted jackets, narrow belts and blouses she’d have tailored to accommodate her chest.

  “Here we are on our honeymoon,” she would say, resting her fingertip on her younger self’s belly. “And in there . . .”

  “My mom!”

  “Your mom,” she would say, and pull me against her, settling my scarred cheek against the scented warmth of her clothes.

  After the accident, Grandma had stayed home with me for a year, and then, when I was four, she’d enrolled me in nursery school at the JCC and gone back to work part-time at Mills Furniture, which she’d sold before moving to Florida. (My father’s father had died when he was a child, and his mother, suffering a slow decline from Alzheimer’s, was in a nursing home in Maine and in no position to help.) That summer, the summer of my surgeries, Grandma’d go home after work to pick up the food she’d prepared the night before, and then come to the hospital to feed me. “Let’s get organized here,” she would say, snapping a tablecloth over the table, then wheeling it over to my bed, positioning it over my chest. She’d adjust the bed until I was sitting up, fussing with the books and flowers and water pitcher, straightening my slippers, hanging my robe in the closet. She’d unwrap silverware and napkins, setting me a place even if I was drinking dinner through a straw.

  “The Sitter came in again,” she’d say, perfectly erect in her chair, with her legs crossed at the ankles, the tip of her right pump resting on the tiled floor and her gold bracelets twinkling on her wrist. She would wear tweed suits in cool pinks and beiges, with sheer stockings and high-heeled T-strapped shoes and, always, a vintage Hermès scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck, because, as she’d confided, “the neck is always the first to go.” (Go where? I wondered, but I was twelve before I asked.)

  “What did you do?” I would ask. The Sitter was a man—Grandma and her coworkers had never been able to determine whether he was homeless or just odd—who would come into the store and then proceed from one chair to another, until he’d sat in every single chair in the entire place. Armchairs, easy chairs, Parsons chairs, and La-Z-Boy recliners—the Sitter would position himself just so, then sigh, and close his eyes, and rock back and forth, “like a man,” Grandma said, “who�
��s having a hard time in the bathroom.”

  “Bite first,” said Grandma. I lifted my straw to my lips and took a slurp of chicken-corn chowder, letting it slip down my throat, waiting until she pressed her lips together. “I offered him coffee.”

  “Really?” To my knowledge, the Sitter never spoke, never acknowledged the presence of other people in the store . . . he just moved from chair to chair, grunting his grunts, wiggling his hips deeper into the cushions, until it was closing time and one of the salesmen would take him by the shoulder and gently steer him out the door.

  “Really. I could see him thinking about it.” Grandma sank back into her own chair, letting her chin drift toward her chest, pooching out her lips and frowning, and, in that instant, she became the Sitter, a man I’d never seen but could easily imagine. It was a kind of magic she could do, a gesture, a shift in posture, a subtle rearrangement of her features that turned her into someone else. “I didn’t think he was going to answer me—you know, he never talks—but after a minute, he said . . .” I leaned forward, all of my pain forgotten, until she said, “‘Do you have tea?’”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Made him a cup of tea, of course, and I gave him some of those thumbprint cookies.”

  “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 cou
ld 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.”