“Tough gig,” I said. Grandma herself was spending eight hours a day sitting in the fake OR’s fake waiting room. Every day, from ten in the morning until six o’clock at night, with union-mandated breaks for lunch and snacks, she’d get paid to do what she might have done for free on a normal day—sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair with a tote bag of knitting in her lap, looking somewhere between bored and worried as she waited for her name to be called.
“You have to respect them,” she said, nibbling at the strawberry that sat on the side of the dessert plate. “Finding a way to get paid for sleeping. That’s initiative.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” I said, and flagged down our waiter, and paid the bill. Then Grandma had gone back to the Radford lot in the Valley, a neighborhood ten miles away from and ten degrees hotter than Hollywood, where a number of television shows and movies were shot, and I drove back to Hancock Park, a pretty neighborhood with spacious sidewalks and green lawns, to our apartment in an Art Deco building called the Moroccan, to wait.
The network had started picking up its comedies a week after our lunch. I’d spent my days with my phone in my hand, from the moment I opened my eyes to the moment I closed them. I would perch it on the edge of the sink while I showered or brushed my teeth, and sleep with it plugged in underneath my pillow. My thumb was permanently attached to the screen, hitting “Refresh” on Deadline Hollywood and L.A. Confidential and all of the websites that covered the industry. I’d quit going to the gym after I realized how much I was annoying my fellow swimmers by pausing at the end of each lap to check my phone, which I’d stowed in a waterproof plastic Ziploc bag and left by the deep end. I was too nervous to sit through a meal but I was snacking constantly, eating bags of pretzels and dehydrated carrot chips and Pirate’s Booty and sunflower seeds that I didn’t really want, and ignoring my boyfriend Gary’s phone calls, because there was, we’d learned, nothing he could say or do that would possibly calm me down.
Now here was my news, I thought, waiting for Lisa to get on the line, and the news wasn’t good. Oh, well. At least I’d be disappointed in private. After I’d made the mistake of telling Grandma that I should be hearing something this week, she’d announced her intention of giving me my space. “You don’t need an old woman breathing down your neck,” she’d said, all the while hovering within five feet of my person, dressed in her at-home attire of lounging pajamas or a vividly embroidered silk robe, her slippered feet noiseless on the wooden floors as she found one task after another to keep her busy. So far she’d polished the silver, rearranged the china, emptied, scrubbed, bleached and refilled the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator, and regrouted the powder-room tile. That morning while we drank the smoothies she’d made of pineapple and mango and Greek yogurt, she’d announced her plans to rent a steamer and replace the dining-room wallpaper, even though I’d begged her to leave that job to the professionals.
“Nu?” she’d ask casually, just once every night, as she served dinner to me and Maurice, her gentleman caller. As usual, her nerves were made manifest in the reemergence of her Boston accent and in her cooking. On Friday, when the first wave of pickups was announced, she’d prepared a standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes au gratin, and homemade horseradish sauce. On Saturday, she’d served a breast of veal stuffed with cornbread and sausage and studded with garlic and rosemary, and on Sunday, she’d produced an entire Thanksgiving dinner, complete with two kinds of potatoes and a turkey she’d brined in the hot tub (our down-the-hall neighbors, devoted fitness buffs, had howled when they’d gone up to the roof for a little post-hike relaxation and found, instead of clear water, a fragrant brew of bay leaves and garlic cloves and juniper berries, with a kosher turkey bobbing merrily in the middle).
I would pick at my food, then excuse myself, telling Grandma and Maurice that I needed to work, closing my bedroom door behind me. Of course, I wasn’t working. I was staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring, and when I wasn’t doing that I was dialing the first nine of the ten numbers that would have connected me with Dave.
“Ruth?” The voice on the other end of the line startled me so badly that I gave a little squeak. The assistant, who had probably grown accustomed to the quirks of neurotic writers, pretended not to notice. “I have Lisa on the line. Please hold for Tariq, and Lloyd and Joan from the network.” I got to my feet, my heart lifting as quickly as it had sunk. The network. Oh God oh God oh God. The network doesn’t call unless it’s a pickup, Dave had said. They give the bad news to the agent, not the writer, and probably you’ll read it online before someone has the decency of telling you to your face that your show is dead. But maybe Dave was wrong. It had been years since his own show was green-lit, years since he’d had to sit, in breathless, chest-pounding agony, waiting for the call, this call.
Voices came back on the line, one after another, ringing like bells.
“I have Tariq,” said Tariq’s assistant.
“Holding for Joan,” said Joan’s.
“Ruth?” asked Lisa. “Still there?”
“I’m here.” My voice was faint and quivery. I stood up, clenching my fists, my jaw, my abdominal muscles, trying to keep from shaking.
“Please hold,” said a new voice, male and brusque and impatient, “for Chauncey McLaughlin.”
I reeled back toward the bed. It felt like Christmas morning, New Year’s Eve, a birthday cake blazing with candles, a man down on one knee with a diamond ring in his hand. Joan was ABS’s head of comedy, and Chauncey McLaughlin (rumor was, he’d been born Chaim Melmann, then changed it to Charles, then gone full WASP with Chauncey) was the president of the network, a man I’d glimpsed once at a holiday party and had spoken with precisely never. Chauncey McLaughlin was the man who ultimately decided which of the pilots would get shot and, of those, which would make it onto the air in the fall and which would die quietly in the springtime.
“Who’ve I got?” he asked in a booming voice. Names were reeled off—Tariq, Lisa, Lloyd, Joan. “And Ruth, of course.”
“Hi,” I managed.
“Chauncey McLaughlin. I don’t want to keep you waiting. We’re going to go ahead and shoot The Next Best Thing.”
I closed my eyes. My legs went watery with relief. “Thank you,” I said. With the phone still pressed to my ear, I got up and unlocked the bedroom door to find my grandmother standing there. Evidently she’d given up even pretending that she wasn’t waiting for the call. I flashed her a thumbs-up. She sprang into the air and actually clicked her heels together, a feat she couldn’t have managed before her hip replacement two years before. Then she held my face in both of her hands. I could feel her hand on my left cheek and felt, as usual, nothing on my scarred right side.
Grandma kissed me, first on one cheek, then the other, before stowing her cell phone in her brassiere (“God’s pocket,” she called it) and hurrying off to the kitchen, undoubtedly to start giving her hundred closest friends and relations the news. A moment later, Maurice appeared in the living-room doorway, dressed for golf, with his tanned hands clasped over his head. He stood on his tiptoes to kiss me—Maurice, while not technically a little person, is a long way from tall, and a good six inches shorter than I am—then turned back down the hallway. Maurice had two sons, no daughters, and even though he’d never said so, my sense was that he liked having a young lady in his life. He’d pull out my chair, hold doors open for me, ask me if my boyfriend was treating me well, and say that if he wasn’t, he, Maurice, would be happy to talk to him about it.
As congratulations spilled over the line, from Lisa and Tariq and Chauncey, I found myself wishing not for my boyfriend, Gary, but for Dave. Dave, one of the Two Daves, was my boss and my mentor, the one who’d helped me craft the concept for The Next Best Thing, who’d overseen each revision of the script and assured me that I had just as good a shot at writing my own show as any other writer in Hollywood, even if I’d never even been a staff writer, even if I was only twenty-eight. Dave’s promise to se
rve as my co-executive producer had gotten me the meeting with Joan, and Dave’s involvement, I was sure, had gotten the network to take a chance on an unknown quantity. A Hollywood veteran who’d cocreated and run a successful sitcom for the past five years, Dave would know what to do next. And Gary. I’d have to call Gary, my boyfriend, and let him know.
“Ruth?” Chauncey’s voice was deep and warm, the sound of your favorite uncle who’d come for the holidays with fancy barrettes and foil-wrapped chocolate kisses and the latest Baby-sitter’s Club book. “Did we lose you?”
“No, I’m still here. I’m just a little overwhelmed. I . . . oh, God, I don’t even know what to say except thank you.”
“And that the show will be brilliant,” Lisa quickly added.
“We’re counting on it,” said Tariq. I could hear, or thought I could, the edge of desperation in his voice. Last year, Tariq shepherded five pilots through the development process. The network had green-lit only one of them, a trippy hourlong dramedy set in an alternate universe where the dinosaurs were not extinct. The network had lavished millions of dollars on the sets and had cast a big-name former movie star as the lead. Even with all that, the show had lasted for exactly three episodes. Dave had told me, and the commentators on Deadline had confirmed, that if Tariq failed to improve his game, he’d be looking for a new job by the fall.
“Thank you,” I said again. “Thank you all so much for believing in me.”
“Of course,” said Chauncey casually, “we might need you to make some changes. Nothing drastic, just a little rewriting.”
“Oh my God. Of course. Absolutely. Whatever you need.” I’d thought the script was perfect when I turned it in, but obviously I’d be willing to tweak or cut or change it in whatever way the network deemed necessary to get it on the air.
There was another round of congratulations, and Chauncey said, “Got more calls,, kiddo,” and, just like that, the moment was over, and I sank onto my bed, clutching my telephone in one sweaty hand. I’d survived the first round of cuts. I would get to hire a cast, find my star, build the sets, shoot my show. Instead of competing against dozens of scripts, I was up against maybe twenty-four . . . and even if the show never made it on the air, I’d have a lovely souvenir, a DVD of my dream made real.
I got to my feet, the same person I’d been ten minutes ago: average height and average weight (which made me practically obese in Hollywood), with thick, shoulder-length hair that could be coaxed to hang, sleek and glossy, when I spent the time or money to have it straightened. I had brown eyes, my Grandma’s full, pink lips, features that might have been almost pretty before the accident, broad shoulders and curvy hips, a solid torso thanks to years of swimming, and olive skin that tanned easily and stayed that way, even in what passed for winter out here. Except for the scars, which my clothes covered, and my face, which my clothes did not, I was normal—even, from certain angles, pretty. It was a problem. Sometimes, people would react to me after they’d seen me from behind, or from my good side. Hey, baby, lookin’ good! construction workers would shout when I was walking with my gym bag over my shoulder and a baseball cap’s brim shadowing my face . . . or, if I was meeting my grandmother at a restaurant, a man would approach from my left side at the bar and start chatting me up. I’d turn as quickly as I could, pulling off my hat, pulling back my hair. I would show them the truth, who I really was. The catcalls would stop abruptly, and the man at the bar would suck in his breath, then scowl as if it were my fault, as if I was somehow playing a joke on him. Once, a homeless man had asked me for change, ignoring my muttered “sorry” and chasing me down Sunset, until I’d turned. His eyes had gotten big as he’d taken in my face. Then he’d pulled a dollar out of his pocket. And handed it to me.
I had learned to dress to deflect attention, to make myself as unobtrusive as possible, even though my grandmother was always encouraging me to show off. “You have such a pretty figure!” she’d say, and I’d smile at her old-fashioned compliment and pull on a boxy button-down a size too big, and loose-fitting jeans, and clogs, with my hair pulled into a ponytail or tucked up underneath a hat.
I started to punch the button that would connect me to Gary. Then I stopped. Should I tell Dave first? I certainly could, now that I’d gotten the Call. He’d want to know. Maybe he’d even want to celebrate. Or maybe I should sneak out of the house, head to the airport, and buy myself a ticket to Hawaii, where he was vacationing, to tell him in person. I knew where he was staying, which flights he’d taken, where he was eating dinner the nights he’d asked me to make reservations. Whether I’d be a good showrunner remained to be seen, but I had been an excellent assistant. The hard part would be getting past Grandma. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” she’d say, and point out that I had already had my heart broken once by a Hollywood writer and that I should endeavor to make new and interesting mistakes rather than repeating the ones I’d made before.
She was right, I thought, and picked up the phone and called Gary. “Good news?” he asked, and I bounced on the bed, smiling as I said, “The best.”
Chapter Two
My love affair with television began when I was eight years old. It started—as so many things do—with The Golden Girls.
When I was three, my parents were driving on the Massachusetts Pike, on their way from their house in Framingham to dinner with friends in Worcester, when their station wagon hit a patch of black ice. The car skidded over the guardrail, flipped over twice, and then burst into flames. My mom and dad died, and my car seat broke free of its straps and went flying through the windshield. I broke the arm and leg and most of my ribs on the right side of my body—the side I’d landed on—but most of the damage had been caused by going face-first through all that glass.
My mother’s mother, Rae, had spent her life in Boston but was living in Coral Gables when the accident happened. She came north for the funeral and never left, arranging the sale of her condominium over the phone, having her furniture and clothes and dishes shipped up, moving into my parents’ house, and taking over the business of raising her granddaughter.
I’d spent chunks of my childhood in hospitals, undergoing and then recovering from various surgeries intended to repair the damage the accident had done. The longest stint was the summer between second and third grades, when I stayed at Shriners Hospital of Boston. The doctors there had big plans, a series of operations that would stretch from June to August. First, I was to have a titanium rod implanted in my jaw, to replace the shattered bone that had been reinforced with pins when I was five but was failing to grow properly. “You’ll be like the bionic girl!” my orthopedic surgeon, a jolly man named Dr. Caine, had announced. Of all my doctors, I liked him best. He had a shiny bald head that glowed under the hospital lights. He carried peppermints and plastic-wrapped caramel squares in the pocket of his white coat, and he looked at me, all of me, not just the parts he’d be cutting and sewing.
Three weeks after Dr. Caine finished up, I would have surgery on my face, a free-flap skin graft during which doctors would remove a rectangular piece of skin from my hip and graft it onto my cheek and chin. The danger there was reabsorption, the body taking the relocated skin and basically sucking it back into itself. I’d gone to the library after school, had snuck into the adult section and found medical textbooks there. In some cases, patients who’d had this kind of surgery looked almost normal—the new skin raised or stretched or discolored or lumpy, but the shape of their faces essentially correct. Others looked bizarre, grotesque, like they’d had bites taken out of their faces, grinding and swallowing bones and flesh. This, though, my grandmother told me, in a phrase that never varied by a word, was “a state-of-the-art procedure.” I would have it, and we’d hope for the best.
Finally, the ophthalmologist and the plastic surgeon together would work on my right eye, which drooped and watered and had a tendency to wander when I wasn’t paying strict attention. By the first week of September, I’d be, if not heal
ed, then “on the road to recovery” (another one of my grandmother’s phrases). The doctors had talked about sending me back to school in some kind of protective plastic mask, which I had privately decided to pocket as soon as I was out of my grandmother’s eyesight. Hope for the best, I told myself.
In those days, the television sets that patients could rent were little boxes that were bolted to the ceiling and got three channels. This might have been fine for regular people, but Grandma decided that it wasn’t good enough for me. When I checked in on a sunny afternoon in June, I arrived with a twenty-four-inch top-of-the-line Zenith, housed in shiny walnut paneling, with a remote control and stereo speakers. Grandma would prevail upon one of the orderlies she’d plied with baked goods to carry it into my room and set it up on a table that she’d convinced a friendly nurse to lend us.
The week before, Grandma and I had gone shopping together at Lord & Taylor downtown, buying pretty new pajamas and nightgowns, three new robes, slippers, and socks. We’d packed a reading lamp to plug into the wall, and board games: checkers and chess, Boggle and backgammon, decks of cards so we could play Crazy Eights. Instead of the ugly green plastic water pitchers most patients used, Grandma brought me one made of acrylic, with a candy-pink swirl that ran through it, and a matching drinking cup and a pink bendy straw to match. The night before I checked in, we went to the library and chose a dozen books: Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia. “I’ll read them to you,” Grandma promised, because the doctors had told us there would be times when reading would be uncomfortable. My face would be swollen, stitched up, and bandaged after the jaw operation. I’d wear compression bandages once the plastic surgeon did what he could for my cheek, and I’d have a patch to let my eye heal, when I wasn’t doing exercises to learn how to track and focus with it again. “Eye gym classes,” Grandma called them.
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