Sunday, June 27, 1999
EXT. BUNGALOW BACKYARD - NIGHT

Last Sunday dinner in the house. Everybody came: Suzanne, Martin, Nick, Hannah, Frankie. We ate outside under the lemon tree at the card table with the wobbly leg. I made pot roast, which is ridiculous in June. Everybody ate it.

After dinner Hannah found the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe where I've measured her and Nick every visit since they could stand up. Nick's stop at fourteen, when he got too tall and too dignified. The new people will paint over them. So Hannah stood against the doorframe one last time, and I made one last line, and wrote the date next to it, and Nick filmed the whole thing like it was the moon landing.

Escrow closes July 9. The movers come July 10. It's all on a call sheet on the refrigerator, in my handwriting, with times. I can do this. It's only a very long day with a company move at the end.

Sunday, May 23, 1999
INT. BUNGALOW BEDROOM - BERNIE'S CLOSET - DAY

Bernie's closet. I have been not doing it for eight years.

His suits went to a thrift shop that dresses men for job interviews. His good shoes the same. His boom operator's gloves, leather, worn through at the thumbs from twenty years of holding a pole over actors' heads, I'm keeping. His paper hat from the Precinct Nine wrap party was in a shoebox on the top shelf with his reading glasses, which is where I left them in 1991, apparently.

Nick stood in line all Tuesday night for the new space picture and slept through most of Wednesday. Suzanne was beside herself. I told her that in 1940 I stood in line all afternoon in Stockton with my sister to see Gone With the Wind, in the cold, and my mother was beside herself too. Some things run in families. So does the patience for them.

The binders go to Suzanne's garage in a rented truck next weekend. Martin has built shelves for them. He built them himself, on a Saturday, without being asked. I cried a little when I saw them. Don't tell him.

Sunday, May 2, 1999
EXT. BUNGALOW FRONT PORCH - DAY

Seventy-two today, and the house is sold. Brittany called Wednesday: an offer, over asking, from a young couple who came to the open house twice. Escrow closes July 9.

I met them Friday. Brittany said I didn't have to, but I wanted to see who gets the lemon tree. She's a writer on a television comedy, he teaches music at a middle school, and they have a baby coming in September. She walked into the kitchen and said, "Oh, the light," exactly the way I did in 1969. So that's fine. That's fine.

I told her one thing, one professional to another: be nice to your script supervisor. She laughed and promised she would. She has no idea yet how much she's going to need to.

Frankie took me to the deli for my birthday lunch and made the waiters sing. Then Suzanne and the kids came over with a cake shaped like a movie slate that said SCENE 72, TAKE 1. Nick designed it. That boy.

Sunday, April 11, 1999
FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 7: FOUR HUNDRED BINDERS
INT. BUNGALOW GARAGE - DAY

Packing thirty years is like cutting a picture. You keep less than you shot, and you cry over what's on the floor.

In the garage, on the metal shelves Bernie put up in 1972, are my lined scripts. Every episode I ever worked that I was allowed to keep: four hundred and some binders. For the young man in Texas, as promised: a lined script is the script supervisor's copy of the shooting script, with a line drawn down the page for every camera setup, showing which lines of dialogue that shot covers. Straight where the actor is on camera, wavy where he's off. On the facing page go the notes: take numbers, timings, lenses, which take the director liked and what went wrong in the others. When the editor sits down with the film, that binder is his map.

Brittany says the garage has to be "broom clean" by July. Suzanne has given me one closet. Four hundred binders do not go in one closet.

Nick came over Saturday and sat on the garage floor and read Precinct Nine, 1976, for three hours without moving. When he looked up he said, "Grandma, can I have these?" All of them. For his room. For "research." Martin has been informed. Martin said, "Of course," in the voice of a man watching his garage fill up again.

Sunday, March 14, 1999
INT. BUNGALOW LIVING ROOM - DAY

The house goes on the market Friday. The real estate girl is named Brittany. She's about twenty-six, calls me "hon," and drives a white car with her own face on the door. She walked through every room with a clipboard saying, "Love this, love this, love this," and in the bathroom she said, "Love the tile. We'll call it vintage." It's from 1969. I suppose that's vintage now. So am I.

She said a number for the asking price that made me sit down on the edge of the tub. I won't write it here. I'll only say that Bernie and I paid $31,500, and if Bernie could hear this number he'd go find the man who sold it to us and apologize.

She says I have to "depersonalize" before the open house, which means take down the family pictures so the buyers can "picture themselves." I took down thirty years of pictures today. The nail holes look like a map of something. On Sunday I'll be hiding at Frankie's.

Sunday, February 14, 1999
INT. BUNGALOW DEN - NIGHT

A year tomorrow since the first entry on this page.

Valentine's Day. Every year Bernie gave me a lemon off our own tree with a red ribbon tied around it, which was either very romantic or very cheap, and I never did decide which.

This afternoon I called Suzanne and said, "Tell Martin not to move his desk back into the den." There was a long quiet on the line. Then she said, "Mom?" And I said, "I'm going to sell the house." And my daughter, who is forty-four years old and a school librarian and very sensible, cried on the phone like she was six.

Then I went out in the dark and stood by the lemon tree and told Bernie. I think he'd say it's about time. He'd also say don't take a penny less than asking.

Sunday, January 31, 1999
EXT. BUNGALOW FRONT STEPS - MORNING - RAIN

It rained most of the week. Wednesday morning I went out for the paper, and on the second step my cane went one way and my new hip went the other, and for a second I was nowhere at all, and then I had the rail in both hands. I did not fall. I want that on the record. I did not fall.

But I sat down on the wet step in my robe in the rain for about ten minutes, because my legs weren't taking questions. Nobody saw. The young man across the street, who writes for a cartoon show, had already gone to work. The newspaper was in its plastic sleeve, so it stayed dry, which is more than I can say for me.

I haven't told Suzanne. I'm telling you, whoever you are, because I have to tell somebody and you're far away.

I've been thinking about the difference between a script supervisor and a stubborn old woman. On the set, you don't get to decide what's true. You watch, and you write down what happened. What happened on Wednesday is that I sat on my own front steps in the rain for ten minutes. I have to write that down too.

Sunday, January 10, 1999
INT. DELI ON VENTURA BOULEVARD - LUNCH

Pink pages. Second revision.

Suzanne took me to lunch yesterday and brought it up again, properly this time, with a list. Suzanne makes lists. She gets that from me.

1. No steps. 2. Somebody home if you fall. 3. Hannah wants you. 4. Nick wants you. 5. Martin says it's fine. (Martin, it turns out, said so himself. She showed me a note in his handwriting, which is how Martin does feelings.) 6. The money from the house, for your old age.

I said, "Suzanne, this is my old age."

I said no. I said it nicely, and I said it twice. I'm seventy-one years old and I can still do my own steps most mornings, and I'm not ready to be somebody's den.

When I told Frankie, she said, "Good for you." Then she said, "Also, she's not wrong." Everybody's so reasonable. I can't stand it.