Everything Leads to You

By page three, I’m infatuated.

Yes & Yes has two main characters, Juniper and George, both of whom work in a small Los Angeles market. George is in his mid-forties, and as the screenplay unfolds we learn that he’s been living in Oregon but has moved back to Los Angeles, into his childhood home, to care for his ailing father who ends up dying and leaving George the market. Now George is in a slump. He’s still living in the house he grew up in even though his parents have died, and he’s working in the store, something he never intended to do.

Juniper, who turns twenty in the film, wants to be a botanist. She’s taking community college classes while working in the market, and she’s been having a rough time since her elderly boss got sick and died. He had treated her like a daughter and she needed that because she’s a lonely and kind of fragile person.

Here is the moment everything begins: A woman, Miranda, walks into the market, picks up a basket, begins to roam the aisles. She takes a grapefruit, a box of oatmeal, a bar of chocolate. Juniper is shelving baby food only inches away when, without warning, Miranda drops to the floor and has a seizure. Juniper drops a jar of baby food and it breaks. George sprints over from his post at the register. A customer calls the paramedics, and as they wait for the sirens to come Juniper and George sit by her, both of them captivated and afraid.

Juniper and George don’t fall in love. Instead, they become friends. They bond over this experience and as they’re sitting around wondering who Miranda really is with a fervor that borders obsession, they’re really talking about what they imagined their lives would be and how their real lives aren’t measuring up. They learn about themselves and each other.

Finally, at the end, Miranda comes back into the store. She doesn’t even acknowledge them, which makes sense because even though it was a significant moment to Juniper and George, Miranda was having a seizure. She doesn’t remember them. She buys her fruit and then she leaves, and they’re stunned and feel slighted but we know by then that it was never really about Miranda. It was about the two of them all along.

“Charlotte,” I whisper at two in the morning. “Wake up. I need to tell you something.”

She opens her eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I have something amazing to tell you. Something incredible happened to me this afternoon.”

She sits up and rubs her face.

“I was with you earlier,” she says.

“Yeah, it was before that. I got offered a job as a production designer.”

“Turn on the light.”

I flip it on and she squints.

“Are you talking in your sleep?” she asks me.

“No,” I say, plopping down next to her. “I got offered a job by someone Morgan knows from film school—Rebecca, remember, who was with her when they picked up the couch?”

“Okay.”

“It’s for a film she wrote with her boyfriend. I just finished reading the screenplay.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to take the job. It’s the most beautiful story. There’s no way you could ever call it stupid. Will you read it?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Please. I know it’s two in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

“I was afraid that it was going to be a bad movie. I mean, me? A production designer? I thought it would be a joke. I didn’t want to act excited about something that was probably going to be terrible.”

She swings herself out of bed. “Make me coffee.”

“Seriously? You’ll read it now?”

“My best friend has just been offered a really important job for a project she thinks is beautiful. Of course I’m going to read it now.”

So she takes a seat in the orange chair and I make coffee for us both and she reads. She drinks her coffee, she turns the pages. At one point, she gets up to use the bathroom but then she comes straight back. I force myself not to look over her shoulder or ask her what she thinks. Instead, I start gathering my ideas for the sets. We’ll need to have George’s house and Juniper’s apartment; the market; a park. It’s a lot to get together in four weeks, but I’ll only have to work on decorating one location at a time.