The Continuity Girl.

Leah McLaren.

1.

A long night staggered into day. It was four a.m., the witching hour of the daily production schedule, and the crew was divided. They'd been shooting for fourteen hours and were now well into triple time. Tempers were either ready to break or soothed by mental calculations of the next pay stub. The collective energy was out of sync. It had been one of those days.

Dan Felsted, the director, was jogging back and forth between the set-a soggy card table and a couple of folding chairs arranged at the end of a rainy, wind-whipped pier in front of a swiveling camera and a floodlight mounted on a cherry picker-and the monitor tent, where Meredith Moore had been living like a gypsy in her caravan for the better part of the past three weeks.

Felsted was wearing a blue oilskin coat from Australia (for the Outback wild-man look) and a baseball cap (for the Spielberg-at-work look), and chomping on an unlit cigar-an affectation he had taken to since quitting smoking six months ago. To Meredith he looked absurd, but only in the way that half the people on movie sets look absurd.

The lighting technician looked on, slack-faced, as Felsted pointed at imaginary objects in the sky and on the ground. Beside him, the sound operator stood s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the handle of his boom together like an a.s.sa.s.sin a.s.sembling his gun.

"Okay? Guys?" Felsted shouted to no one particular in his folksiest Little Leaguecoach voice. He clapped his hands. "This is going to be wicked. It's going to be awesome. Best scene in the whole thing, I'm telling you. This is going to look better than anything we've done so far. You'll love it. They'll love it. Everyone will love it!"

He said something to the first a.s.sistant, then walked over, crunched his forehead against Meredith's Gore-Tex hood and whispered inside it. "We're going to do this all in one take, just to make it nice and easy for you."

"Great."

"Continuity girls need their beauty sleep."

"Do we?"

"Yup. And you know what actresses need?"

Meredith's blood redirected its flow toward the middle of her face, into the area beauticians call the "T-zone." Without moving her head, she shifted her gaze toward Helene, the twenty-two-year-old Quebecois model-turned-TV-star. Helene was wrapped in a blanket, shivering and blue-lipped after having jumped off the pier seventeen times that evening. Beneath her mackintosh, Meredith felt the first pinp.r.i.c.ks of sweat.

"What do actresses need?"

"To be controlled. But that's not what you thought I was going to say, was it."

Meredith looked down at her binder and noted the act, scene, shot and take number in a strict horizontal line. "For scene six you wanted to print takes four and eleven."

"Right you are. As always." Dan smiled his vulgar, handsome smile.

He was such an unapologetic and total b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you couldn't help but love him. At least Meredith couldn't. She'd had s.e.x with him once, in the storage locker of a producer's condo during a wrap party. That was over two years ago.

Everybody said Meredith was the perfect continuity girl. She wasn't just good at her job, she looked the part. From the crown of her glossy brown bob to her six pairs of identical flats, Meredith Moore was as eerily tidy and well composed as an Edward Hopper painting. It was her job to sit in front of the monitor during shooting and watch every single take of every single scene to make sure every last detail was consistent with that in the take before. She was the error-catcher. The needle-in-the-haystack finder.

While Meredith's coworkers were busy worrying about halfway-creative things like lenses and lights and line delivery, she watched for the tiny narrative aberrations everyone else was either too technically skilled or famous to worry about. It was her role to fret and nag the director like a dissatisfied wife. Her days were spent snapping and comparing a thousand Polaroids, smoothing the narrative and perspective into fictional consistency. A cigarette in the left hand when it should be in the right, a prematurely melted ice cube in a half-empty gla.s.s of Scotch, a stray lock of an actor's hair-these were the details by which Meredith measured her working life.

After a full day and night of shooting a publicly funded, narratively troubled TV movie of the week, Dan, the darling auteur who had been given creative carte blanche by a public broadcaster known mainly for funding historical dramas set in drizzly mining towns, decided what he needed was a surrealist poker game, at the end of the city pier, in the rain, between the main character (a cynical rogue much like the director himself and played by the director himself) and the father of the main character, a retired postal worker played by a septuagenarian summer-stock theater veteran with a prostate condition that had him shuffling to the Porta Potti on the quarter hour. This incomprehensible fantasy sequence was not in the script, but had occurred to Felsted while they were shooting the suicide scene in which the protagonist fails to prevent his heartbroken mistress (Helene) from throwing herself off the pier into the frigid black waters of the city harbor.

Felsted was generally pleased with himself, but he was especially proud of his half-c.o.c.ked late-night flights of postmodernist fancy. Like that of some b.l.o.o.d.y-minded First World War general, his own exhilaration for the job at hand grew in inverse proportion to the enthusiasm of the people around him. He sucked energy from his crew like a desert fugitive wringing out a dishrag over cracked lips. He was forty-two and had recently taken a Korean bride on the recommendation of his film school mentor.

The idea for the poker scene had emerged a couple of hours ago. "It'll be like Banquo's ghost storming the set of Vertigo," he'd shouted, emerging from his trailer mussy-capped after taking Helene up on her shyly lisped offer of an "East Indian head ma.s.sage" during the dinner break.

The props mistress waddled out of her trailer and produced a deck of cards and a whisky bottle filled with flat, watered-down Coca-Cola. She divested Dan of his director props-the raincoat, ball cap and cigar-and replaced them with his character props-a different ball cap (this one New York Yankees instead of Boston Red Sox), a wine-colored oilskin jacket (this one from Scotland) and an unlit cigarillo to allow better enunciation. Several floodlights combusted to life. The actors were powdered. Reels began to roll.

Meredith scrutinized the action. Not the actual action, but the eight-by-eight-inch video feed before her face. She was beyond tired. It was as if her right eyeball were winding itself up in its socket and untwisting in a brain-gouging whirl. She watched the pint-size Dan Felsted through the monitor, acting up a hurricane, improvising every second line, slapping down the playing cards, dealing hands with the arrogance (if not dexterity) of a Vegas shark. Meanwhile, Glen, the theater veteran playing his dead father, did everything in his power to react to Dan's impa.s.sioned tour de force without making use of the adult diaper lurking below his blue mailman's uniform. When Dan laid down his hand (a full house) and scooped the pot against his chest, he waited a triumphant beat before shouting his second favorite word in the English language: "Cut!"

"Unf.u.c.kingbelievable, was that not?" He stuck his head under the tarpaulin and beamed at Meredith. "Now, on second thought, maybe we could use a few close-ups after all."

An hour and a half later, when the first a.s.sistant director barked things a wrap, half the crew was silently crying while the other functioned in a waking coma. Dan, in a moment of touchdown glory, ran up to the camera and pretended to hump the lens.

From where she sat in front of the monitor, Meredith saw something bad.

"Sir?"

"Yeah, baby, yeah!"

"Seriously, Dan. Could you please come over here now. Please?"

The crew was already packing up, coiling wires and disa.s.sembling metal rods into black trunks. In their minds they were already on the highway and halfway home to the warm b.u.ms of their sleeping girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands and wives.

Dan's disembodied head poked around the edge of the tarp.

"What."

"Your pants."

He made a sooky-baby face. "You don't like my pants? I got them at Banana Republic. I mean, maybe they're not the most stylish thing in the world, but really, Meredith, I think you're being a bit harsh-"

"No, Dan. Before, you were wearing cords. Now you're in khakis. They're not the same pants you were wearing in the earlier scenes, the ones we shot before dinner, which means- You know what it means. Nothing will match. We have to reshoot."

Dan looked down at his drizzle-splattered khakis, and when he slowly lifted his face he was the other him-the bully.

"Are you admitting to the fact that you personally wasted three hours of triple time? Do you have any idea how many tax dollars you just p.i.s.sed away, sweetheart?"

"Me?" Meredith sputtered. Unfortunately, she was a sputterer. "But, but-you."

"No, honey-you. You did this on purpose."

Without taking his reptile eyes off her, Dan Felsted called out for the crew to halt packing. The set froze in tableau. "f.u.c.ked-up sabotaging b.i.t.c.h," he hissed.

"You think I let you screw up for fun?"

Felsted rolled his eyes theatrically. "Not think. Know. I know you did."

"f.u.c.k you," Meredith said quietly.

"Actually, doll, I wish I never had." He turned to stride back to his trailer. "Let's do it again!"

For the first time in weeks a cold tide rose over Meredith. She swiveled her indented bottom around on the milk crate that functioned as her desk chair and began gathering the things she could reach from under the tarpaulin: two empty notebooks, one swollen paperback collection of Mavis Gallant short stories, a woolly hairbrush, half a bag of organic baby carrots. She gathered the meager detritus of her life as a continuity girl and dumped it in her bag. Then Meredith walked off the set and down the pier toward the deserted taxi stand. Behind her, the wind off the lake distorted Dan Felsted's shouts. He was, she knew, threatening the worst thing he could imagine, which was to fire her. She would never have lunch in this town again, blah, blah, blah. Which was fine with her. She could stand to lose a couple of pounds anyway.

2.

Meredith opened her eyes and spoke aloud a terrible, startling confession: "Today is my thirty-fifth birthday." The words froze her where she lay, her muscles rigid. She'd heard of a tropical fish-was it blowfish?-that contained a poison that could do this to you. And, Christ, she had eaten takeout sushi for dinner last night. No blowfish, though, as far as she could recall. The toxic shock of being thirty-five was enough to immobilize her.

She studied the fine network of cracks in the slab of raw concrete suspended twelve feet above her bed. As on every other morning, she experienced a sweet flush of relief that the ceiling had not crumbled to dust while she slept. After a time she managed to raise her head on one hand and, in a sweeping glance, a.s.sess the entirety of her living quarters. While most people would look at the room and see a clean, ordered s.p.a.ce decorated in Swedish pine and stainless steel finishings, Meredith saw nothing but disorder and grit-a progressive deterioration back to the mud of the original construction site from which her building had sprung, fully formed, two years prior. A cashmere throw-blanket grown nubbly, half falling off the side of her Bauhaus-style armless sofa. Her book smushed open on the coffee table, where she'd left it the day before. A single white ceramic coffee mug on the counter beside the sink from the morning before that. She knew that when she looked into it she would see a thin film of baked-on brown tar at the bottom. She would fill it with water to soak before she left for yoga cla.s.s. She hated to admit it-she would never tell a soul-but the soaking coffee mug would nag her thoughts all day.

Try as she might to think of her place in the soothing, advertorial terms she had in mind when she moved in ("home," "loft," "lifestyle") she had never been able to see it as anything other than a wall-less ("open-concept") condo with exposed ductwork the developers were too cheap to cover up. Meredith felt about this place, which she bought three years ago from a drawing in a model suite for the same price as a four-bedroom house on a leafy street a half-hour drive in any direction out of the downtown core, the way most people feel about a misguided purchase of a bit of spangled nightclub stretch-gear-specifically, For what sinister hidden purpose did an alien enter my body and buy this thing? All the same, for the past two and a half years, these eight hundred square feet in the howling industrial wind tunnel just west of the city's business district had been her home. As a matter of principle, she was attached to the place. The more the cheap new construction deteriorated, the more at home she secretly felt. Deterioration made her anxious. Anxious was normal. Normal was home.

Thirty-five, she thought. My eggs are thirty-five today.

Having once heard the gynecologist on a morning talk show impart the following facts, Meredith had never been without them: A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have in her life. With each menstrual cycle, an egg is discarded, never to be replaced. At the age of twenty-seven a woman's fertility begins to decline. After thirty-five things deteriorate rapidly. By forty she has half the chance of getting pregnant that she had a decade before. Beyond forty, the odds approach the hopeless ones of winning a lottery jackpot.

Meredith felt a great yawn in her belly and a flush through her veins that fizzed and came out salt.w.a.ter at the corners of her eyes. Her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s ached with expectation.

Sat.u.r.day morning prenatal yoga cla.s.s was packed. Expecting mums wielded their bellies around the room like competing cigarette girls. They handed off toddlers and toddler-related equipment to nannies who whisked their wards into a government-safety-code-approved play area in the next room. The instructor, a beaming blonde, switched on the lute music as the women found their places. Meredith and the instructor were the only nonpregnant women present. They smiled at each other.

Meredith had been coming to the cla.s.s for more than three months now with her friend Mish. At the age of thirty-seven, after months of turkey basters and technological intervention, Mish had finally succeeded in getting pregnant by the seed of her roommate, Shane, a gay interior decorator and Chinese pug collector with a strong male biological clock. While Mish had conceived only two months ago, she had started attending at least six weeks earlier than that, in the hope of "good fertility juju" rubbing off on her during her prenatal sun salutations. Meredith was just along for the ride.

After a while, Meredith came to enjoy the cla.s.s for reasons of her own. It was close to her place and at a convenient time, but more than that, it afforded her a chance to eavesdrop on the Yummies.

The Yummies were the women who, next to the Starlets and Pro-fessional Have-It-Alls, Meredith envied most, and therefore half-despised. You could see them at the latte bars, drinking green tea smoothies, hoisting their fat-cheeked offspring from one hip to the other, comparing notes on washable diapers and baby-friendly resorts. But here in prenatal yoga you could truly study the Yummy in her entire evolution-from initial b.u.mp to stroller-wielding mother of three. Eventually, every Yummy ended up at Sat.u.r.day morning prenatal yoga.

Here the hierarchy of the outside world did not apply. Second- and third-time Yummies were the gurus, wise lionesses licking their young and calmly answering the anxious questions of the younger, inexperienced first-timers. Listening in on their queries in the change room (Is it all right to have soy milk with my cereal? Drink decaf? Smoke a bit of pot?), Meredith could not believe how much more she knew about managing the modern pregnancy than most of the pregnant Yummies around her. Had they never read baby books in their spare time? Spent time with their mummy friends? Still, they must know something she didn't-they were Yummy while she was UnYummy, thirty-five, her Fallopian tubes like a pair of half-empty Pez dispensers.

Her project was to study the Yummies in the hope that she might one day learn the secret of their effortless perfection. That is: how to get knocked up.

She a.s.sumed the lotus position, placing one hand palm up on her knee, the other cupping her belly just above her pubic bone, and in unison with the Yummies, commenced her first set of cleansing breaths.

Halfway through her second toe stand, Meredith heard a familiar hiss. She turned and saw Mish standing in the doorway, dressed in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, her face raw and unfamiliar without its usual makeup. Meredith disentangled her limbs and scurried to the door. Mish pulled her into the hall.

"I tried to call you all night but your phone was turned off," Mish whispered. "I couldn't- I didn't know where you were."

"I was shooting. What's wrong?"

Her friend's face squashed in on itself. "Shane was away at a design show in Philadelphia. I called my doula and she was away too. The doctor said..."

Meredith put her arms around her friend as the last of Mish's words twisted in a sob. ". . . She said-just to ride it out."

"You need a drink."

"No," said Mish, wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. "I need six."

Forty-five minutes and two b.l.o.o.d.y Caesars later Mish and Meredith sat huddled outside a crowded brunch spot. Mish was smoking hungrily, lighting each new cigarette from the smoldering b.u.t.t of the last.

"Turkey f.u.c.k," said Meredith.

Mish's head bobbed up and down at the end of her neck like a marionette's. "Huh?"

"That's what my mum used to call it when you light one cigarette from another. Some sixties term. She thought it was so hilarious. Made me want to die of embarra.s.sment."

This got a snort out of Mish. "Do you think I would have made an even more embarra.s.sing mother than yours?"

"I'm sure you will yet."

"f.u.c.k it. I'm done. This in vitro thing's a come-on. These fertility doctors make real estate agents look like straight shooters. Pun intended."

"But, hon, you were so close. I'm sure next time."

Mish looked at Meredith and sucked so hard on her smoke it crackled.

"f.u.c.k next time. I can't go through this again. I'd rather die."

"Maybe you shouldn't, then."

"I wish I'd never even tried in the first place."

This was not the first lost baby for Mish. In her twenties, she'd had two abortions-the first ten weeks after a one-night stand with the former ba.s.sist in a semi-famous Detroit thrash band, the second the result of a desperate year-long love affair with a married psychotherapist whom her girlfriends had disapprovingly nicknamed "Herr Doktor." Like most of the women in her postal code (thirty-odd, unmarried, urban-dwelling, career focused in an aesthetic rather than hard-nosed way), Mish had never pondered, even for a millisecond, the thought of having a baby until she was thirty-five. In her case, the hunger came on suddenly in the middle of being dumped, for the third and definitive time, by an Israeli merchant banker whom she had been faithfully dating for two years but in whose company she had probably collectively spent only a week and a half.

"It was as if I woke up one day and my leg was hollow," she had told Meredith.

In the two years since, while taking time out from her job as a freelance wardrobe stylist, Mish had tried to get pregnant, finally employing the sympathetic sperm of Shane, the man with a pompadour whom she referred to (somewhat depressingly, Meredith thought) as her "gay husband."

Now, seven months, six thousand dollars, five botched inseminations and two miscarriages later, Mish-a gal famous for her ability to chug a bottle of tequila only to get up the next morning and run a half-marathon-was finally exhausted. Meredith could see it in her eyes: she looked beaten.

"Guess we better head out," Mish said.

It was their friend Elle's daughter's fifth birthday party this morning. The party, which was being thrown at Elle's and her husband Andrew's house uptown, had started off as a birthday dinner party for Meredith but had evolved into a daytime reception with hired magicians and a Barbie ice-cream cake for Elle's daughter. Zoe and Meredith shared a birthday-a coincidence Meredith had thought mystical when Elle called her from the hospital in the midst of her thirtieth birthday celebration and asked Meredith (happily stoned off a mother lode of birthday Moroccan Gold Seal) to be G.o.dmother of her firstborn. Meredith had cried sisterly tears and reminisced about the days when the three of them-Mish, Elle and Mere-were kids at school, sneaking smokes in the furnace room at lunch hour. She went on in this slightly embarra.s.sing but unstoppable vein until Elle, exhausted after twenty-six hours of labor and an emergency Caesarian, said she loved her too, and hung up.

Since that moment, Meredith's birthday had become a shadow of its former self. Gone were the dope and hired DJs, replaced by goody bags and gla.s.ses of supportive sangria for Elle (now a mother of two).

"You sure you want to go?" asked Meredith.

"We can't miss your birthday party." Mish managed a small, wet smile. "Mommy would kill us."

3.