Ten Girls to Watch (17 page)

Chapter
Seven

I
almost forgot about Elliot’s insidious Cankles Column until I got an e-mail from him Sunday afternoon.

Dawn,

My heartiest thanks to you for rescuing me from a night with the A-hole rich kids. I’m eternally in your debt. Let me at least try to repay you. Brunch when I’m back in town? (I’m heading to CA today to report on iPhone app competitions for
Grid.
Then a week in NV.) Say hello to fall with me in mid-ish Sept? S.A.R.

Not that I thought he was lying, but there was a part of me that worried he was delaying our next get-together not for work travel but because he was working on a column about me. He’d call me “City Slicker” and describe the way my face built up a less than alluring sheen as the night wore on. And what did “mid-ish” September mean anyway? Why was he already building in wiggle room?

But rather than being crazy (at least on the outside), I e-mailed back a short and sweet “Safe travels. We’re on for the fall hello,” and thereafter spent a while sprawled on my bed shamelessly fantasizing about crunchy leaves and belted cardigans and how cute I’d look in them on our future dates. It’d be Elliot’s loss if he missed my autumnal glory.

My phone pinged with a message in the middle of my daydreaming. “So, did you meet ‘the One’ last night? ;)” Lily had written.

I wanted to ignore the message, but that felt like an unnecessarily passive-aggressive move toward a woman who had just gotten me a job and invited me over for dinner. “Nah,” I wrote back. Then, sensing that was a little dismissive, I added a smiley face before sending it.

That evening I got one more notable message, from Helen.

Dawn, I would love to set up a time to talk. But even better, why don’t we do it in person? My new book is coming out in a couple of weeks, and I’m doing a reading at the bookstore across the street from campus. Come that weekend.

Helen had been working for the last few years on a new book on the connection between women’s suffrage and World War I. Like
Must We Find Meaning?
it also wove her personal history into the narrative. In her early twenties, Helen’s grandmother had been a suffragist in Oregon, and prior to the 1912 referendum that finally gave women the vote in Oregon, she had traveled all over the state, putting on suffrage shows in movie theaters. Then, in 1916, at the age of twenty-five, Helen’s grandmother had taken a train to Washington to stand in the sleet outside the White House with a banner that read “Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty.” Helen and I had talked about the book-in-progress a little during my weekly thesis meetings senior year, and she’d finalized the copy during the months I’d been living in the glassblowing hut.

On one of the nights during my hut stay, when the September weather had turned unexpectedly chilly, I’d crossed the leaf-covered yard from the hut to the house, my jacket collar pulled up to my ears. I tapped on the back door, and when Helen answered I didn’t say anything, just held up the little tin of gourmet hot chocolate I’d splurged on at the fancy import store down the road.

“Ooh, please do come in,” Helen intoned dramatically, swinging the door open. She’d warmed the cocoa on the stove, and instead of talking about jobs or plans or Helen’s work, we sat on the kitchen barstools, sipped from our mugs, and talked about a short story I’d given her to read. This one was about a woman who, after multiple miscarriages, makes herself feel better by putting on a one-woman version of
The Sound of Music.
I admitted to Helen that it was maybe 90 percent true and based on my grandmother, who’d done that very thing.

“I think it’s a wonderful story,” Helen said, “but I wonder what would happen if you made it one hundred percent true. Sometimes I think you’re hiding behind the safety of fiction, Dawn.”

It was advice straight out of her own playbook. That’s what Helen did—tell the true story. It’s what had made her career. It was flattering to hear she thought I could follow in her footsteps. But I wasn’t sure the true stories in my life were quite as interesting as the ones in hers. Not just that, I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up my dreams of writing fiction.

I gave a small, nervous laugh and took a big swig of cocoa. “I guess all I can do is try it and see,” I finally answered.

But I hadn’t done it. After I’d crunched back through the leaves to my cot that night, instead of working on the piece I’d e-mailed Robert. And so it had gone for a seemingly endless line of nights—not necessarily e-mailing Robert, but something, there was always something—and now the story had been lying in wait on my laptop for almost a whole year, untouched since that evening. Maybe reading Helen’s new book would give me the shove I needed to actually open the file again. Because clearly, I needed a shove.

E-mails flew, and before the night was over, it was all set. I made the vast commitment of booking a fifteen-dollar ticket to Boston on the Chinatown bus.

_________

Back at work on Monday, when I arrived at my office door, I found a small box resting against the jamb—my headset! It couldn’t have been later than eight o’clock. Apparently, Ralph, man of mystery that he was, got to work even earlier than that.

No one was bothering to check when I arrived or left work (unless Ralph was somehow security-cam-monitoring me), but I found my hours creeping outward in both directions anyway. I was excited to get started on Ten Girls to Watch every morning, and at the end of the day, I almost hated to go. Maybe this was because of the veggie patty dinners that awaited me at home, but I didn’t think so. Ralph could have been arriving early for other reasons—I briefly imagined soap opera tragedies lurking in his life, his long hours at the office driven by the need to escape heartbreaking bedside vigils or scandals related to wanton stepchildren. But that seemed pretty unlikely. He was probably just a morning person.

Once I was all headsetted up, I picked a year in the middle of the pack—1982—and started working from there. By lunchtime I’d made a handful of contacts (and had experienced nary a neck kink). Jeneese Walker, an educator who’d just founded a new charter school in Atlanta; Kendra Fowler, who now ran the veterinary program at the University of Washington; Allison Bentson, a lawyer who had become the head of an environmental lobbying firm in D.C., and who had just had twins at the age of forty-five; and Elizabeth Irwin, who I adored the second she opened her mouth.

Elizabeth was from North Dakota and sounded just like Frances McDormand in
Fargo.
She’d become a pediatrician and gone back to her hometown, where she was immediately disturbed by the number of children she saw who were clearly being abused and the difficulty she had connecting them and their families with the social services they needed. Within a year she’d established a wholly integrated Family Center, complete with medical, social, and legal services, all housed in one facility. The number of child abuse cases reported in her county quadrupled within two years. Not because there was more abuse, but because people finally had a place to go to get real help.

She had two young children of her own, a husband who was a newspaper reporter, and a mother who had just begun to show the first stages of early-onset Alzheimer’s. The closer I listened the more I could hear the edge of exhaustion under her High Plains clip.

“I know people hate this question,” I said, “but I’m only asking because I’m wowed. How do you manage all of that?”

She laughed self-consciously. “It sounds like a lot when you summarize it, but I don’t do all of it every day. If you want to know the truth, most days I feel like I’m miserably behind and only doing about half of what I should be doing. But when you look back you can see that you’re building something. I think people who say ‘Don’t look back’ are crazy. I wouldn’t survive if I weren’t looking back and patting myself on the back all the time for making it this far. I’ve been thinking about memory a lot more these days, with my mom and all. And I think dwelling in the past can be . . . I don’t know, very good, I guess. I just know that if you look back at it, the days add up to something.”

After we said good-bye, I stared at my screen for a minute. I felt like I’d just listened to an aria—the kind of quiet that comes after musical lines rise and fall, then resolve with a question still in the air.
If you look back, the days add up to something,
I typed. Then I pulled the photo of Elizabeth Irwin from my 1982 binder and pinned it to the bulletin board. Day by day, the past year hadn’t felt like much, but looking back, I realized at least I’d gotten through it. I’d figured out how to rent an apartment in New York City, had installed my own air conditioner, and had managed to feed and clothe myself, perhaps not in high style, but nonetheless. And I was here now, working for
Charm.
Tracking down winners was slow going, but it was true, the interviews were adding up. The spreadsheet was spreading. This was all getting me somewhere.

I stood up to take a break (well earned, my affirmations assured me) when a strange thing happened—my phone rang. My first incoming call! I’d been leaving voice mails with women across the country, and a lot of my calls were scattershot. For women from the early years whose maiden names weren’t coming up on the Internet, I’d been making White Pages guesses based on state, date of birth, and middle initial. Apparently, I’d guessed right with one Mrs. Carol N. Stauffer of Birmingham, Alabama.

I said approximately five words—“hello” and “I’d love to hear . . .”—before Carol cut me off and began drawling through the story of her post-
Charm
life. “Oh, dear, let me tell you!” she began.

Carol Newbold became Carol Stauffer nine days after college graduation, and she and her husband, Richard, moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where his uncle owned a pop music radio station. Richard worked for him, selling ads and balancing the books, and when the uncle was ready to retire, Richard and Carol bought the station from him.

“Our youngest was about ten at the time, and I talked Richard into letting me host the late-night show, after the kids were in bed.” Carol paused here and there in full back-porch storytelling mode. “Just for two months, I said. Just to try it. And, oh, it was a riot. I loved it! And it turned out I was pretty good at it. My littlest one, when she was about fourteen, I remember her coming home and mimicking the kids at school: ‘Your mom is so funny. We love your mom’s show.’ Goodness, how she hated that! What’s so funny is that now she hosts the number one morning show in Tallahassee, after getting her start on our station.”

Eventually, Carol told me, she and Richard bought two other stations, one a country music station, the other a news station. “He won’t ever retire, despite my begging, but I don’t exactly have room to talk, since I’m still producing a couple of segments myself, one on Alabama education, the other on local restaurants. I can tell you where to find the best fried anything in town!”

Throughout all of this, I barely prompted her. I laughed when she laughed and said “How great” a few times, but that was about it. Finally, Carol gave another bighearted chuckle and summed it all up: “I’ve always had fun,” she declared. “If I had to tell you the secret to life, that’s what I’d say. Just have fun. What more can you ask for?”

“Sounds like it’s worked for you!” I said, unable to resist her enthusiasm.

“You try it! You’ll see!”

I could have happily spent another half hour listening to her, but Carol announced she had an appointment at the salon to have her hair “set,” so off she had to go.

There was nothing to do after hanging up but smile and feel a little bewildered. It was like a dust devil had touched down in my office, scattering midcentury southern belle charm everywhere, then spun off as fast as it had arrived.

I spent ten cheery minutes writing up Carol’s profile, and then clicked into my e-mail. I’d received yet another loving missive from XADI:

Dawn, Let’s talk at 3:15 today. I want to discuss coverage of TGTW.

I noted the absence of question marks in the e-mail.

My roommate, Sylvia, had e-mailed as well:

Hi Dawn, I hope things are going well at your new job. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be moving back to Toledo on October 1. I’m happy to help look for a replacement.

Roommate abandonment? In two short sentences? Couldn’t she have said something in person? Was she moving home for Rodney? We were hardly best friends, but we certainly brushed our teeth together some nights. I would have thought we’d have had at least one roommatey heart-to-heart about all this. And she was “happy to help” look for a replacement? It should have been promises that she’d take care of it entirely. If Sylvia didn’t find a replacement ASAP, where exactly did that leave me? There was nothing plummy or plush or able-to-cover-anything about my bank account right now.

For the next solid chunk of the morning, I took advantage of the fact that I worked alone in a closet to put up a roommate-wanted posting on Craigslist for a “cute room in Brooklyn” (cute being the catchall word for things like sloping floors and plumbing with a personality) and to frantically scan the Craigslist jobs “ETC” section. In the past year, I’d participated in focus groups for razors, soda, and and air fresheners, each one raking in seventy-five dollars for a mere ninety minutes of my time. I would have done one every night if only I’d qualified. That was the thing, you had to pass all these screens, and marketers were only minimally interested in single, college-educated, white twenty-three-year-old girls too poor to actually buy anything for themselves or others.

I scanned postings: “Earn $70 for owning a Tablet PC.” Alas, I owned a Mac. “Elite Egg Donation Agency Seeks GREEK Egg Donors.” Alas, again. “Dealing with TOENAIL FUNGUS?” Thankfully, no. “Pretty Girls Needed For Thursday Foot Fetish Event.” Maybe . . . uh, no. “Have trouble falling asleep? Adults 18–65 Needed For Paid Research $500+” What? Yes! I clicked through and immediately called the number listed for some place called Somnilab.