because I don’t take any of the fancy classes, or use the tanning booths or the sauna or the steamroom, or drop off my dry cleaning at their in-house facility, or hang out and surf the Internet in the juice bar. I was there only for the pool, and the pool was almost always empty, and probably would continue to be until an enterprising Angeleno invented some underwater regimen guaranteed to lengthen, strengthen, and eradicate cellulite.
I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my black tank suit, and tugged on my cap and my goggles while I stood under the running water. In Massachusetts, we’d belonged to the JCC. Over their Olympic-size pool was a quote from the Talmud, rendered in blue and green tile: Some say a parent should teach a child to swim. Here, all the tiles were blinding white, the better for beautiful gym-goers to glimpse their reflections glimmering back at them. No Talmud. I held my breath and did a shallow dive into the deep end. I started off slowly, getting used to the water, pointed toes fluttering, arms pushing against the resistance.Breaststroke first, to warm up, ten easy laps with racing turns at each end of the pool. Once my muscles were loose, I’d move into the crawl, and maybe throw in some butterfly if the spirit moved me. It was Saturday night. My fellow fitness buffs had already finished their workouts while I was in the coffee shop grappling with big dreams and bad prose.
After eighty laps, I pushed my goggles up onto my forehead and rolled onto my back, doing a lazy backstroke down the length of the pool and staring at the ceiling. More white tiles; no windows, and no sky.
My grandmother and I had moved out west when I was twenty-three and she was seventy. She wanted warm weather, and a chance to live near the movie stars, in what she routinely referred to, without any irony whatsoever, as the Glamour Capital of the World. I wanted to be a writer—movies, sitcoms, jokes, maybe even greeting cards if things got desperate. Los Angeles felt like the place to be.
We’d sold the house in Framingham—the one where I’d lived with my parents, before the accident, and where I’d lived with my grandmother for twenty years after that. At her insistence, we’d shipped almost every piece of furniture crosscountry. I’d packed up the kitchen, the plates and pots and pans. She packed the photo albums, the precious handfuls of pictures of her daughter and son-in-law and me. “The Little Family,” my mother had written across the back of one of the shots. Her name was Cynthia, and she’d been so beautiful, with pale blue eyes and hair that fell from a widow’s peak high on her forehead. My father wore aviator sunglasses and had a goatee. I was usually snuggled somewhere between them, one thumb corkscrewed firmly in my mouth, my eyes wide and startled, one plump little starfish hand always touching one of them—my father’s shoulder, my mother’s hair.
My grandmother and I found a cozy apartment in a Spanish-style building in Hancock Park, with a tiled fountain tinkling in the lobby, terra-cotta floors, and high plaster arches dividing the rooms. Grandma signed up with a few of the agencies that hired extras for TV shows and movies, and worked three days a week. Just about every medical drama needed a few senior citizens to stick in the hospital beds for the background shots, and it made her enough money to kick in for the rent and, as she put it, keep herself in heels.
After a year of temping during the daytime and writing spec scripts at night, I found an agent. Three months after that, I landed a job writing for an hour-long drama (but a drama with jokes, our bosses anxiously insisted) called The Girls’ Room, which was about four best friends at a boarding school in some unnamed town in New England. The show achieved the near-impossible by (a) actually getting picked up by a network, and (b) not getting canceled after it failed to crack the Nielsen top twenty in its first three weeks. The
I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my black tank suit, and tugged on my cap and my goggles while I stood under the running water. In Massachusetts, we’d belonged to the JCC. Over their Olympic-size pool was a quote from the Talmud, rendered in blue and green tile: Some say a parent should teach a child to swim. Here, all the tiles were blinding white, the better for beautiful gym-goers to glimpse their reflections glimmering back at them. No Talmud. I held my breath and did a shallow dive into the deep end. I started off slowly, getting used to the water, pointed toes fluttering, arms pushing against the resistance.Breaststroke first, to warm up, ten easy laps with racing turns at each end of the pool. Once my muscles were loose, I’d move into the crawl, and maybe throw in some butterfly if the spirit moved me. It was Saturday night. My fellow fitness buffs had already finished their workouts while I was in the coffee shop grappling with big dreams and bad prose.
After eighty laps, I pushed my goggles up onto my forehead and rolled onto my back, doing a lazy backstroke down the length of the pool and staring at the ceiling. More white tiles; no windows, and no sky.
My grandmother and I had moved out west when I was twenty-three and she was seventy. She wanted warm weather, and a chance to live near the movie stars, in what she routinely referred to, without any irony whatsoever, as the Glamour Capital of the World. I wanted to be a writer—movies, sitcoms, jokes, maybe even greeting cards if things got desperate. Los Angeles felt like the place to be.
We’d sold the house in Framingham—the one where I’d lived with my parents, before the accident, and where I’d lived with my grandmother for twenty years after that. At her insistence, we’d shipped almost every piece of furniture crosscountry. I’d packed up the kitchen, the plates and pots and pans. She packed the photo albums, the precious handfuls of pictures of her daughter and son-in-law and me. “The Little Family,” my mother had written across the back of one of the shots. Her name was Cynthia, and she’d been so beautiful, with pale blue eyes and hair that fell from a widow’s peak high on her forehead. My father wore aviator sunglasses and had a goatee. I was usually snuggled somewhere between them, one thumb corkscrewed firmly in my mouth, my eyes wide and startled, one plump little starfish hand always touching one of them—my father’s shoulder, my mother’s hair.
My grandmother and I found a cozy apartment in a Spanish-style building in Hancock Park, with a tiled fountain tinkling in the lobby, terra-cotta floors, and high plaster arches dividing the rooms. Grandma signed up with a few of the agencies that hired extras for TV shows and movies, and worked three days a week. Just about every medical drama needed a few senior citizens to stick in the hospital beds for the background shots, and it made her enough money to kick in for the rent and, as she put it, keep herself in heels.
After a year of temping during the daytime and writing spec scripts at night, I found an agent. Three months after that, I landed a job writing for an hour-long drama (but a drama with jokes, our bosses anxiously insisted) called The Girls’ Room, which was about four best friends at a boarding school in some unnamed town in New England. The show achieved the near-impossible by (a) actually getting picked up by a network, and (b) not getting canceled after it failed to crack the Nielsen top twenty in its first three weeks. The
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