Standing Room Only Read online

  “He wants to do the movie,” Garrett said.

  Lala thought she might not have heard him correctly. Because nothing had been quite this easy for her since . . . well, certainly since she could remember.

  Wait. Second grade was, in actual fact, fairly easy, Lala silently reflected. I had no problem mastering any of the subjects, as I recall. I didn’t much like dodgeball, that’s true. That wasn’t especially anxiety-free or effortless. But aside from that—

  “Yeah, I really wanna play Terry,” Clive said. In a perfect mid-Western twang.

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “Nice accent. That’s exactly how I hear Terry in my head.”

  Clive smiled at Zoe, and Lala noted that she was indeed being left out of any flirting that was going on in the room.

  Unless Garrett’s ceaseless frowning is his edgy way of courting me, Lala thought.

  Just as Lala was about to return to savoring how bizarrely and unexpectedly smoothly this was all going, the door to the conference room opened and a deliveryman entered pulling a cart laden with multiple platters overflowing with all kinds of sandwiches and spreads and a wide selection of fancy beverages.

  “Ohh, how nice of you,” Lala said. “I didn’t have an appetite all day because I was so nervous about meeting you, but now that you’re being so enthusiastic about the project, I think I just realized I’m starving!”

  “No!” Garrett suddenly screamed, lunging across the conference table and grabbing the closest platter away from Lala’s orbit.

  “Are there peanuts anywhere in there?” Clive yelled.

  “Are there peanuts?” Garrett demanded.

  “Or pineapple?” Clive bleated, keeping the frenzy going and reverting to his native Cockney.

  Did he say poi-nah-pa? Lala thought. What the fuck is poi-nah-pa? What the fuck are they yelling about?

  “Or super hot salsa? She’s probably allergic to everything, damn it!” Garrett panted. “She dies here, and I have to go before the grand jury again? No WAY am I going before the grand jury again!”

  “Holy shit!” Aunt Geraldine said. “What happened? Have you been crying? Didn’t the meeting go well? Have you been crying because the meeting didn’t go well? With your face in a bucket of red wine vinegar while you were crying because the meeting didn’t go well?”

  Lala spent the immediate hours after their brief and astonishingly successful (other than the brouhaha over her freakish eyes and the fact that she had to watch everyone else eat the delicious catered food while she was only allowed water because “that’s probably safe for her”) meeting at Sony sitting with Zoe at a charming oceanside café near her home in Manhattan Beach. They drank a sublimely refreshing bottle of Prosecco on an empty stomach, and then Lala placed her dear producing partner and adopted niece in a car service to head home to the east side.

  Lala walked the short distance to her lovely apartment in the fourplex owned by her treasured adopted Auntie Geraldine so she could, as she explained to Zoe before the car drove off, “clear my head and maybe start making some sense again, if that cute bartender’s quizzical look at my repeated attempts at flirtation were any indication of the state of my actual degree of intoxication, which I was apparently too hammered to be aware of.” For some reason, Lala felt she had to repeat that monologue aloud in a loud tone of wonder and awe as she walked home, to the confusion of the adorable dogs she passed on her trip and the tentative amusement of their owners.

  Lala’s Aunt Geraldine was sitting in the lush courtyard of her fourplex—a classic Southern California, mission-style, two-floor real estate marvel—waiting for her adopted niece, the child of her best friends who had passed away a few years earlier at a comfortably old age, to get back from her meeting at the movie studio. Lala walked in, stumbling far less than she expected to—perhaps thanks to the sea air—and saw Geraldine surrounded by Lala’s four dogs and by the other residents of the fourplex.

  With Geraldine were Stephanie and Chuck, a married couple who met in veterinary school and who were, as described by Lala, often and with great affection, “the most earnest youngsters I have ever met. Seriously, they have no concept of irony, and I love that about them.”

  Chuck was cradling their brand new baby, named Trixie because they thought—without a trace of irony—that it sounded empowering.

  Lala and Geraldine had been in the hospital waiting room while Stephanie gave birth and Lala had, upon Chuck’s entrance to announce that it was a girl and after hugging Chuck, informed him that he should make sure his daughter knows as soon as she can comprehend that she is Lala’s adopted grandniece and that she will be “taking care of me in my dotage.”

  Thomas, who lived in the last of the fourplex apartments, was also eagerly awaiting news of the meeting.

  Thomas bore a shocking resemblance to Salman Rushdie, but was not in fact Salman Rushdie—a fact that Geraldine could not, even in the face of all the convincing her husband and friends and family had tried to do over several years, and in the face of actual government-issued documentation to the contrary, accept or acknowledge.

  “He’s in hiding,” Geraldine would always whisper. “He has to say he’s not who he actually is. Because of that nasty fatwā on his precious keppie.”

  “The fatwā has been lifted,” Lala would sigh. “The real Salman Rushdie appears on television.”

  “That’s a body double,” Geraldine would crow. “And a face double, obviously. And that proves my point!”

  Geraldine’s second husband Monty was away, having gone on a motorcycle ride up the coast with Lala’s boyfriend David, who lived with her at her gorgeous apartment in the fourplex. Geraldine and Lala had been invited on the trip, but then the meeting at Sony came up, and the ladies decided to let their men make it a Boys’ Journey.

  “I didn’t really want to ride for miles on the back of a motorcycle,” Geraldine had said as they smiled and stood by the road, waving their men off.

  “God, neither did I,” Lala agreed, smiling and waving in a wide arc, and speaking through clenched teeth so David couldn’t turn around and lip-read her betrayal. “It sounds like Hell on God’s Earth. They’re going to be camping. Outdoors. I, for one, need a clean and spacious bathroom nearby if I’m going to be enjoying any kind of travel adventure.”

  As soon as Lala entered the courtyard after her meeting, Geraldine rushed over to her and wrapped her in a hug.

  “My god, darling, you look like hell. Thank goodness David isn’t here to see you like this. I’m so sorry your meeting didn’t go well.”

  “I don’t need a consoling hug, Auntie Geraldine,” Lala said, “but I appreciate the impulse.”

  Lala noticed that Stephanie and Chuck were giving her what appeared to be the visual assessment of medical professionals, albeit medical professionals whose area of expertise encompassed life forms with fur, fins, and feathers.

  “Did you, in a moment of understandable confusion, given how important this meeting was, put those drops we prescribed for Petunia in your eyes?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes, you dear young veterinarian!” Lala said. “That’s why I look like hell! The meeting was great! We’re moving forward with the project! There is NO business like SHOW business! I have got exclamation points jumping around in my head like so many Tasmanian Devils!”

  Geraldine led the mood of the group as it moved from concern over a dream dashed and a mild horror at Lala’s eyes, to exuberance and starting to plan what to wear to the Academy Awards ceremony, by executing a sudden and quite odd sliding motion back and forth on the polished stones of the courtyard while fluttering her hands together in an odd rhythm, which seemed to be trying, quite unsuccessfully, to approximate clapping, that made Lala, for a terrifying moment, fear that her beloved aunt was having a stroke. She was greatly relieved when Geraldine articulated her joy in crisp and clear words.

  “Ohhh, we’ve got to celebrat
e! I’m thinking road trip! Road trip to Paradise! With nice bathrooms!”

  Heaven

  David and Monty wanted to get started on their celebratory drive up the spectacular California coast early in the morning. Very early. Ridiculously early.

  “I don’t wanna get up at five o’clock!” Lala whined.

  The four of them were relaxing in Geraldine and Monty’s apartment after having enjoyed a simple but elegant impromptu meal that Geraldine had whipped up from a box of risotto, a jar of capers, and a can of Kalamata olives that were just this side of their sell-by date.

  Before the announcement of their departure time that sent Lala into a siren-like snit, Lala had cheerfully dubbed the dinner “so sinfully sodium-laden, I think I can hear my blood pressure rising.”

  “Seeing the waves crashing as the sky brightens is going to be worth it,” David said, ignoring Lala’s protests by not looking away from the documentary about scaling the north face of the Grand Teton that he was watching with Monty.

  “What is wrong with you boys?” Geraldine huffed. “When did you both become so rugged? I did not sign up for rugged, Monty.”

  “Gerry,” Monty chuckled affectionately, also not taking his eyes off the television, “nothing rugged about early morning waves when you’re watching them from a Lexus.”

  Lala and Geraldine slept soundly through the magnificent sight of dawn on the Pacific as Monty’s Lexus, driven by David, cruised up Highway 1.

  Stephanie and Chuck and Trixie—who were so much like family that the distinction between de facto and de jure had been rendered irrelevant—were of course invited to join them on their trip, as was Thomas, also a member of the extended family. But Stephanie and Chuck had to stay home to host a visit from Stephanie’s parents, who lived in Michigan and found an excuse to visit their beloved first grandchild on an almost bi-weekly basis, and Thomas was going away to New Orleans for the week with his new girlfriend.

  “Mazel Tov!” Geraldine said when Thomas shared his travel plans. “When do we meet her?”

  “So happy for you!” Lala added. “When do we meet her?”

  Lala’s dogs would be staying with Stephanie and Chuck because Trixie loved them, and Stephanie and Chuck, of course, knew exactly how to care for geriatric pets. Stephanie’s parents were volunteers for the Humane Society of Huron Valley in Ann Arbor and were, according to Stephanie, “maybe more excited about spending time with your dogs than they are about seeing Trixie for the second time this month. I’m being ironic, of course.”

  “I don’t think that’s irony,” Lala said. “And I just love you, you earnest and adorable young gal.”

  And then she hugged Stephanie and added, “You know, half the time I’m not really sure what constitutes irony anyway. Which, given how self-righteous I am about words and syntax and grammar and punctuation ’n’ stuff, might be ironic. Or not. I’m not entirely sure.”

  By the time the Lexus got to Santa Barbara, and they stopped for lunch at a cute little bistro right on the beach, Lala was awake and crowing about charitable giving as she shoved big bites of a delicious veggie burger in her mouth.

  “Why are you taking a picture of my profile while I’m eating?” she demanded of David.

  “Because you look like a chipmunk storing up veggie burger for the winter,” David said from behind the safety of his iPhone.

  “If you weren’t so adorable, I’d smack you right now,” Lala giggled. “I’m kidding, of course. This may be the best veggie burger I’ve ever had. OMIGOD, look at that Doge de Bordeaux!”

  Lala jumped up and assaulted a young couple who were walking a dog, which could have functioned as a pony for toddlers, on the path skirting the beach. Monty poured Geraldine and David another glass of iced tea from a large carafe as they watched Lala bob her head and chat animatedly with the dog and his owners. Apparently her question of “Is he/she friendly?”—which was always Lala’s first query when she met a new dog to adore—had been answered in the affirmative, because they saw Lala fall down to her knees and proceed to rub her face in the cheerful beast’s endless jowls.

  “I am COVERED in drool!” Lala cheerfully announced when she bounded back to the table. “Is this California coast HEAVEN, or what? Okay, okay, on to business.”

  She pulled out her cell phone and started pounding on it with her index finger.

  “Wait. Wait. I just need to find that notepad thingie. Got it. Okay, so we’ll donate as much as we’re spending on this luxurious celebratory weekend, yes?”

  “Yup,” David said.

  “Mmm hmm,” Geraldine echoed.

  “Sure, of course,” Monty concluded.

  “Charities?” Lala demanded. “I’ll go first. Compassion Without Borders for me. They help animals everywhere, and I love them.”

  “Excellent,” David said. “This time around, I’m going with a foundation that helps the Chicago public schools.”

  “I love you,” Lala drawled as she jabbed at her phone. “Auntie Geraldine?”

  “The Nature Conservancy.”

  “Lovely. Monty?”

  “My favorite. Habitat for Humanity.”

  Lala stood and waved her cell phone at the large crowd of tourists and smiled as she yelled.

  “A village! It takes a village, people!”

  They arrived at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur just as the sun was starting to set. Geraldine was awake for the impressive sight. Lala was also conscious and somewhat out of her mind.

  “It’s so NIIIIIIICE!” she trilled, leaning out the window as the entrance to the insanely lush and environmentally conscious hotel loomed before them. Geraldine and Monty had loved the place when they honeymooned there, and this would be Lala and David’s first visit.

  “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Briller!” Lars, the dashing manager of the Post Ranch said as he opened the passenger side door to the Lexus. “We’re so happy to see you again.”

  Monty’s last name had been Miller for all of his life until he married Geraldine after losing his first wife several years earlier. Geraldine, also widowed, had taken her first husband’s surname when she married. She had been born into a family named Kaplan and had become Geraldine Bronson. When they married, Geraldine and Monty decided to “mash our names together and create a new beginning, because that’s very sexy and bold, isn’t it?” as Geraldine explained to Lala. “I considered melding my first last name with Monty’s only last name, but then we would end up with Maplan or Killer, neither of which sounded very charming. I like Briller because it sounds like someone from Ireland is pronouncing Brillo. And I think that’s adorable, don’t you?”

  Lars escorted his special guests to the Pacific Suite, a two-story edifice with a private suite on each floor that looked out on the ocean and was—as Lala would later describe to her many actual and adopted nieces and nephews who were caring for her in her rambunctious dotage during many a “Day-Long Happy Hour, because why should the party ever stop, huh, kids, huh?”—“a prime example of the reason the masses rise up to overthrow the aristocracy.”

  Lars showed them the details of the suites and left them with a promise to bring his signature macadamia nut bread pudding to their table for dessert.

  On the drive up, Lala had been enumerating all the things she planned to do in and around beautiful Big Sur, including going shopping in nearby Carmel, walking down the literary legend that is Cannery Row in Monterey, hiking at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, and ogling the real estate along 17-Mile Drive.

  When the door closed behind wonderfully gracious Lars, Lala turned to her boyfriend and her adopted aunt and uncle.

  “I am not leaving here. I shall never leave the Post Ranch Inn. My nieces and nephews, all of them, shall have to journey here to care for me, for I shall grow old here, and I shall die here.”

  Not two days would pass before Lala came to deeply regret that last choice of
verb.

  “Okay, so here’s the deal,” Geraldine said. She slipped her arm under her dear husband’s and clutched him close to her. “We’re gonna go off to our magnificent, thankfully sound-proofed suite and fuck. Fuck all over the many luxurious variations of all nine-hundred-and-seventy gorgeous square feet, until the last second we can, leaving just enough time to get cleaned up and make it to the incomparable Sierra Mar restaurant for our reservation. We’ll see you at dinner.”

  Lala smiled at her aunt. She reflected on what a fun quartet they were. There was Geraldine with her entirely timeless elegance. Geraldine was lithe and striking, and she could easily put her chin on the top of her pixie adopted niece’s head and would, in fact, probably have to stoop a bit to get it there. And there was Monty, a strapping, adorable man with all the grace of a diplomat. And her David. So handsome. When Lala met him, he was sporting a modernized mullet, and still, she couldn’t resist him. Thankfully, the mullet had been replaced, at Lala’s very unsubtle urging (“No, seriously. That thing has got to go. I mean, like, now.”), by a short cut that was quite flattering.

  And here I am, Lala thought. Still no grey hair. And still the most short-waisted woman on the planet. What can you do? Genetics. They’ll work for you, they’ll work against you. Look at us. The Fab Four. Living proof that sexy just gets better in your forties. And seventies. Yay!

  And then, still smiling, she huffed at her aunt as Geraldine and Monty were walking out the door.

  “Damn it, Auntie Geraldine, I was just going to say exactly that same fetching and saucy thing about fucking all over the place, and you beat me to it! You always get the jump on being a sexy, edgy woman in her prime. Next time I want a head start.”

  The California wines at dinner were quite possibly the best Lala had ever tasted, and the bread pudding Lars had promised was indeed incredible.

  “This delicious dessert might soak up some of this wonderful wine,” Lala mused as she hoisted yet another overflowing forkful. “I could end the evening on a relatively coherent note.”