Ten Girls to Watch (13 page)

“You can’t tell in the photo of me from
Charm
—they blow-dried and ironed my hair within an inch of its life—but I have the most ridiculously frizzy hair. It’s been a lifelong battle. But then I discovered Japanese hair straightening. I’ve been doing it for about a year now, and it’s revolutionized my life.” Almost before she finished the words “Japanese hair straightening,” she’d zinged another photo to my inbox, this one embedded in an article from Northwestern’s alumni magazine, discussing the advances in pathology she had pioneered at Cook County.

She was right, her hair was marvelously straight and glossy, but I laughed to think it was her hair that she found remarkable in the article, not all the achievements chronicled. How telling, I thought, what seems like a given and what doesn’t. I guess if you’re a certain sort of strong-headed hard worker, of course you assume you’ll have a great career. It’s the more serendipitous things, like love and hair breakthroughs, that seem astonishing and noteworthy.

“We’re planning another trip for the spring,” Ellen said. “Uganda, to see the gorillas. I can’t wait to have frizz-free hair in the jungle.” We both chuckled, but I could tell how much she meant it.

It didn’t take that many calls with the phone cricked between my shoulder and my ear, my fingers typing swiftly at the keyboard, before I realized I should have been stretching my neck before each call, not my fingers. I dialed extension 1 for Ralph. He couldn’t have sounded happier to hear from me. When I asked if I could order a headset, he said, “You bet! We should be able to have one couriered over from the main office by tomorrow.” Just like that, my first professional requisition!

When we were kids, at the start of each school year, my mom would order Sarah and me pencils with our names on them. I’d check the mail daily in the weeks leading up to school, hoping for the arrival of the pencil package. You wouldn’t think ordering a headset, something that would allow me to perform the basic functions of my job without injury and with which Mandalay Carson rightfully ought to provide me, would have gotten me that excited. But for a moment, I was practically at pencil package levels. Just the fact that I had a job, and that that job entitled me to office supplies—it felt like a serious achievement.

Shortly after I placed my order with Ralph, I finally got an e-mail back from Helen:

Dawn—unbelievable! I worried the Ten Girls contest would come back to haunt me . . . but I was absolutely wrong!!! I’m so glad my past caught up with me. What an absolute pleasure it was to get your e-mail. CONGRATULATIONS on the new job! I can’t wait to hear all about it, and of course catch up with you.

She sounded like herself. Cheery and charming and wonderful. No explanation for the strange delay. And it had been strange. I don’t think I’d ever waited for more than twenty-four hours for a reply from Helen, and this had been almost two weeks. I’d worried. Other than vacation (which would have resulted in an out-of-office message), what would keep Helen off e-mail for so long? But here she was. I e-mailed back instantaneously. Was she free later in the week? I’d love to do a “formal” interview, I said. I ended with “I hope all’s well,” just to leave the door a tiny bit open for her to speak up in case it wasn’t.

It’s a strange thing, being a “protégé”—Helen and I were like friends. We laughed like friends, we chatted like friends. But only sort of. The difference was when my college roommate, Abigail, or my sister, Sarah, gave me advice about where to live or what to wear to dinner, I turned around and gave it back to her on similar subjects. Helen didn’t barricade her personal life off from me, nothing so stark as that, and, yes, she sometimes solicited my thoughts, but she wasn’t really looking for advice. If she needed answers, she probably wasn’t turning to me. Still, I could listen. Judging by my weeks at
Charm
so far, I was actually pretty good at it. When we talked, I’d do my best to open the conversational door and see if she stepped through.

You’d think this influx of good female cheer and wisdom and encouragement and office supplies would have made me feel fabulous, and it did, mostly, but there was something hanging around the edges. I decided it wasn’t Robert and Lily and my disbelief in the face of mounting evidence that he had really moved on. I decided it was Rachel Link. More accurately, the disappointment or at least sense of unfinished business I felt because Rachel and I hadn’t hit it off. Even if that wasn’t really it, of the two choices, it was the one I could do something about.

What had Rachel really done, anyway? Had big hair? Been a little socially awkward and stuck on guys? Not cooed over our entire interaction? Maybe I was as much of an attention-craving baby as she was, and I was just upset that she’d paid more attention to Robert than she’d paid to me. Or that Robert had paid more attention to her or Lily or his green beans than he had to me. So maybe I verily stank too. All this I told myself as a means of building my resolve, prodding and haranguing that was intended to push me to actually call her. I had to do something to clear my funk.
New job, new job, new job
—I should have been feeling 100 percent fantastic. I’d finally gotten what I’d wanted. Maybe if I could just wipe away the Rachel smudges, I’d be able to see clearly.

_________

I googled TheOne’s corporate HQ number. I didn’t have a plan, exactly, but I continued on with the self-encouragement. Three layers of receptionists later, when Rachel finally picked up the line, her hello sounded like the hello of a much smaller-haired person.

I told her I hadn’t gotten a real chance to interview her at dinner, a much better intro than “I talked smack about you as soon as you left the party and am attempting, by way of this conversation, to redeem us both.” After a little chitchat about her memories of her New York trip—the highlight for her was the backstage tour of
Rent
on Broadway, where she’d, of course, gotten the guy who played Mark to sign her arm—I finally got to a good question.

“So what made you found TheOne? You must have had other ideas for good websites along the way. Why a dating website?”

After a long pause, during which I swallowed and felt the sound of it cartoonishly echo in the silence, Rachel answered. “I could say lots of things about the size of the market and the cost structure, and on and on, but I’ll tell you something, Dawn. My parents are very, very happy. Ups, downs, whatever, they’re crazy about each other. They haven’t been apart for more than three days in the last thirty-five years. My dad plants a rosebush every year for their anniversary, and their rose garden is unbelievable. Different colors and different scents. It’s this wonderful maze of flowers.”

And then she stopped. I was waiting for her to tell me that this all meant she believed in “the One,” and that she’d created TheOne to help her find her One or to bring the sort of love her parents had to millions of people. In short, I was waiting for a rehearsed sound bite. But it didn’t come.

What she finally said was, “I’ll pick a good party for you, Dawn.”

I felt like that sports commentator who, against his will, found himself rooting for Mike the-rapist-ear-biter Tyson after he found out dear Mike trained pigeons. Maybe she was a man-attention whore, and maybe she had created an entire dating empire in place of getting her own game in order, but whatever it was that had seemed so wrong at dinner, the flower talk shifted my feelings. Now I sort of wanted Rachel to win the Miss Texas pageant, or whatever cosmic contest she was in.

We said good-bye, and it took me a minute to realize I was staring blankly at my bulletin board, thinking about my favorite rose, a white hybrid tea rose called the Mrs. Herbert Stevens, which I’d discovered on a sniffing tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (the eight-dollar cost of entry had felt like an indulgence, but as the graduation year mark came and went with me still unemployed, I’d had to start doing little things to keep myself from sliding into complete catatonia). Whoever she was, Mrs. Herbert Stevens must have been the best-smelling person around, because her rose’s fragrance was unbeatable—like the standard rose scent, but simultaneously tangier and creamier. It was like the pied piper of smell. I hadn’t thought of that amazingly fragrant white rose in months, and it was a nice thought, a comforting thought. Even if I never met anyone, even if I failed at this job, there was still a rose that smelled that good.

I flipped through my stack of TGTW copies and found the page with 1996 girls in their mom jeans and shapeless sweaters, Rachel smack dab in the center of the crew. I pulled a tack from my drawer and pinned the photo to my bulletin board.

_________

Almost two weeks had elapsed since I’d seen XADI, and I wanted to remind her both that I was alive and that I needed to be paid, so I began crafting an e-mail. She’d only met me once, and this e-mail felt accordingly critical. First, it was too much of a blow-by-blow. Then it was a one-liner. Then it went back to being too long, but even worse, it was too long and too chatty. At last, a full thirty-seven minutes of foolishly wasted time later, it was reduced to an e-mail I deemed appropriately informative but not overly familiar, which seemed to be the balance most appropriate for communication with a woman like XADI.

XADI,

I wanted to update you on my progress. Attached is a spreadsheet with all the TGTW winners. It’s sortable by name, year, school, phone, and current state/country, as well as field of work and date of contact. I have filled in the information for the few women I have located so far, and this will be the file I will be working from and filling in as I make contact with winners. Please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions.

Thanks,

Dawn

I was actually proud of the marathon of data entry I’d completed to compile said spreadsheet. Information had been helter-skelter, and now, here it was, nice and tidy. It was the same satisfaction I felt after neatly folding laundry or organizing my silverware drawer. Though perhaps my pace during this marathon had been less than astonishing, how could I be expected to do more than turkey trot when there, staring out at me from the page in her fancy pillbox hat and yellow gloves, was a darling 1962 winner who closer inspection revealed to be Barbara Darby, the bestselling thriller writer whose name and face I recognized from countless airport bookstore rotating racks? Or there in her flouncy floral dress and feathered hair, Dora Inouye, who one quick google confirmed was indeed, as I detected despite the hair, Dora married-name Wei, the mayor of Seattle, a politician whose every move featured in papers throughout Washington and seeped all the way down to my hometown in Oregon. And just a few pages over, TV-radio-book-magazine giant Gerri Vans, trademark dimples and not-so-trademark Rapunzelesque-length of curly hair—very Alicia Keys crazy curls. I wondered just when “Geraldine Van Steenkiste” cropped both her hair and her name.

After my extended labor over my e-mail to XADI, I felt like taking a summer afternoon nap on my laurels. But XADI wasn’t really a summer afternoon type. Her reply instantaneously lit up my inbox.

“Looks good. Move ahead. XADI”

Her overly friendly, excessively lengthy e-mails were really getting out of hand.

I was about to “move ahead” as instructed when Ralph knocked gently on my door.

“Pay day!” he announced as cheerily as always, today with a yellow cardigan to match his mood. “It’s direct deposit, but you still get the stub.”

“Thanks,” I said calmly, even though I felt like a vampire trying to keep my frenzy at the smell of human blood in check. He didn’t linger, and I ripped open the envelope.

Here it was, the moment of truth. I’d gone this far without an inkling of whether this was an I’m-not-in-this-for-the-money situation where I had to lie to myself and everyone else and pretend I had the luxury of not caring about the paycheck, or whether this was actually a sweet gig chatting up old
Charm
ladies, plus,
finally,
freedom from the imperiled terror I tried to tamp down daily regarding my financial footing in the world.

I pulled the pay stub from the envelope, and ding, ding, ding, the winner was I’m-not-in-this-for-the-money. Oh, Regina. My paycheck left me a grand total of twelve dollars richer than I’d been as a seat-warmer temp. So nothing was better. I could say I had a job, and that felt good, but the check sucked away my dreams of relaxing and finally being able to count on paying my bills. Every month that went by I slowly but steadily built credit card debt. I’d been hoping to reverse that. More than hoping, I’d been
desperate
to reverse that, sick and churning about it every day for a year. I’d really thought getting a job would do the trick.

My motivation to “move ahead,” unsurprisingly, faltered. I half-heartedly googled names from the spreadsheet for the next couple of hours, logging some phone numbers to try on Monday. But my real focus was on scattered, anxious, scheming thoughts of money and what I could do immediately to either spend less or make more.

This was familiar territory. Before I landed the lawn care writing gig and started bringing in a few extra dollars, I’d gone so far as to consider reusing mouse traps in my occasionally rodent-plagued apartment in order to save money. Stop and think about what that entails. I’d put off any such horrible measures thanks to the start of my Lawn Talk gig, but there’d been a backlog of questions then. I’d raked in the dough that month. Now it was slower and steadier. Still, it would help if I could go home and do some lawn care writing. Lawn care writing and trawling Craigslist for more evening and weekend jobs.
Lawn care, lawn care, Craigslist. Lawn care, lawn care, Craigslist.
I felt like my brain was a car with the tires lifted off the ground, the engine revving and revving and getting nowhere.

When I got home that night, despite my bout of panicky worry over my finances, I couldn’t bring myself to log in to Lawn Talk. Though it was the one thing that might have made me feel better, I felt too keyed up. I went on a long walk through my favorite parts of Brownstone Brooklyn, my eyes alternating between examining the beautiful chandelier medallions on the parlor-floor ceilings of the town houses and glancing at the uneven sidewalks to avoid tripping. Somehow, despite the wonderful first hint of turning leaves and the scenes of Brooklyny domestic bliss—kids riding scooters with helmets and pads attached to their every joint, families sitting out on their stoops—my hands stayed balled up in the pockets of my jeans. Instead of melting into the happy picture, I felt like an outsider, gawking at a vision of stability and comfort that seemed impossibly out of reach.