The Next Best Thing Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 nursesappreciative 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’sgloved 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.

THREE
     
    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.