Ten Girls to Watch (19 page)

Over the years, we got used to the buzz of tension. It just seemed normal. That’s how it had always been. Somehow, they went about disliking each other quietly enough that I had assumed they would go on that way forever.

That evening when Sarah’s ride arrived (a girl from her dorm who pulled up to the curb in her old Volvo station wagon and honked the horn), I walked to the end of the driveway and stood in the rain with her for a few seconds before she climbed inside. I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked pathetic. Sarah put her arms around me. “I’m not going to leave you alone,” she whispered in my ear.

Dad left that same night, just a couple of suitcases in his backseat. Mom put on a graying terry cloth bathrobe and stayed in it for what seemed like months. Alone in his new apartment, Dad didn’t fare much better. He left an omelette on the stove and burned his kitchen wall. Later, he left the faucet on in the bathroom, and the mildew that sprang up in the soaked floor never seemed to subside. But through it all, that whole year and the next, Sarah came home almost every weekend. Most of the time she didn’t spend the night—just day trips in cars she’d borrowed from friends—but she’d pick me up in the morning and we’d drive to the coast together. We’d get Styrofoam cups of hot apple cider and plastic sleeves full of powdered sugar donuts from a bakery we found in a strip mall near the beach, and then we’d park and walk to the edge of the sand, where we’d sit on rocks or logs overlooking the waves, our hoods up to keep the drizzling rain from our faces.

We talked about the whole Mom-and-Dad mess, but we also talked about school (Sarah had had all the same teachers I now had a few years earlier; “if you ask Mrs. Wilkinson for extra credit, she’ll always come up with something,” she offered) and we talked about boys (none for me at that point, something I attribute to my high school love of oversize sweaters and barrettes, but Sarah met her now-husband, Peter, in an elective called “Environmental Philosophy” that they’d both signed up for that spring semester) and about what we were going to do when we grew up. I said “lawyer,” even though I secretly wanted to say “writer”; Sarah had gone from saying “singer-songwriter” to saying “music therapist.” It never quite happened. After college, she took a job at a car rental company, which she stayed in up until the twins came. But even with full-time work, she kept singing with her band. It wasn’t her Manhattan fantasy, but her life had changed, and her dreams had changed too.

Even when we didn’t say much on those weekend drives, even when we just watched the yellow lines of the road and the green of the trees whizzing by, it still meant a lot that Sarah was there. She had kept her promise. I hadn’t been alone. If her visits had petered out, I probably wouldn’t have turned into a junkie-flunkie (much as they repelled boys, my barrettes also repelled kids cool enough to get into trouble; in inverse proportion, they attracted friends whose idea of a good time was really killing it on poster boards about photosynthesis). But without Sarah, I would have been sadder. I would have been lonelier. I would have missed out on a lot of stability—and hot cider—that I’d really needed.

I thought of all this because of an afternoon call with a 1991 Ten Girls to Watch winner named LeAnne Marston, a former volleyball star who’d gone on to become a coach.

“After college I wanted to go foreign and go pro,” LeAnne told me, her voice sweeter and softer than I would have expected from such a hard-core athlete. “There was a team in Sweden interested and another team in France. Women’s sports are bigger in Europe. But one afternoon I got a call from my old high school. They needed a biology teacher and a volleyball coach. It was a private school so they said they’d figure out all the certification stuff. I had really romantic notions about coaching. Mine were always bigger than life, and I kept thinking about all those movies where little high school or college teams fight the odds and rise to glory thanks to an amazing coach.

“But my little sister was just starting high school,” LeAnne continued, “and that’s what decided it for me. I think a lot of people right after school forget about their families. They’re off to live their own lives somewhere else and that’s it. But going home—I coached my sister in every game of her high school career. I helped her pick her prom dress and study for AP tests. All the things she watched me do, because she was younger, and that I would have missed out on if I’d gone somewhere else.”

After her sister graduated LeAnne left the school and went pro on the beach volleyball circuit for a few years. “It was a total blast,” she said, “but the WPVA went bankrupt in the late nineties, so that was that.”

When I asked her about what she was doing now, she laughed. “I’ve got two daughters, six and four, and so far they’re both giants like me, so I think there might be volleyball in their future. I’m only coaching part-time, but here’s the funny thing, my sister is a coach too, and our schools play each other sometimes. There’s a major family betting pool. Serious money changes hands over those games.”

She paused again, returning to the thoughtful silence she’d slipped into earlier, then said, “I’m really lucky to have such a great sister.”

I felt that way about Sarah. But there was also the flip side. What kind of sister was I? Sarah had been there for me, but when my turn at college came around, I’d booked it out of town on the first plane to Boston and barely looked back. Talking to LeAnne and thinking about Sarah, I felt . . . guilt. Not overwhelming guilt, but a dusting, like the powdered sugar from the donuts we’d shared, stuck to my fingertips.

After LeAnne and I said our good-byes, I took my hands off the keyboard and called Sarah. My cell phone reception was spotty in my basement abode, and though it made me feel a little out-of-bounds, I used my Mandalay Carson landline to dial. I was new at this job thing, but I assumed a personal call or two, even (scandal!) a long-distance one, had to be okay.

“Hello,” Sarah answered quietly.

The girls must have been napping.

“Hi, Sar, it’s Dawn,” I said.

“Oh, good, I can whisper then.” She dropped her voice even further. “What’s up?”

“I was just missing you,” I whispered back. “I thought I’d see if I could catch you and say hi.”

“How are all the interviews going?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her about every single woman, but who knew how long this nap time would last. Instead, I picked just a few. I told her about Lucy Alexander, who’d married the guy in the Stetson from her TGTW photo shoot; I told her about Elizabeth Irwin and days adding up to something; I told her about Jean Danton and how you couldn’t predict what you’d fall in love with; I told her about Ellen Poloma and Japanese hair straightening; and then I told her about Patty and her winery.

“I wish I could explain it just the way she did,” I said, “but basically, it’s that you have to take little moments, like when you’re tasting a glass of wine, and savor them. They’re pure experiences, and that’s a rare thing in life.”

“Do you know what we should do?” Sarah whispered. “Next time you’re home, we should drive down to Napa, just the two of us. Just a couple of days. Wouldn’t that be fun? We should go visit that woman’s winery.”

“That’d be great,” I answered back, and I knew it would be. Sarah and I in the car together again. Just the two of us.

Finally, we both whispered “Talk soon” and “Love you.”

I sent LeAnne a follow-up message to thank her for taking the time to chat and included a little P.S.: “After we got off the phone, I called my sister. Thanks so much for reminding me how amazing sisters can be.”

She wrote back a few seconds later: “I love it! Just called mine too!”

I smiled and felt even rosier than I’d been feeling a few seconds before, if that was possible. I liked hearing that I wasn’t the only one moved to thought or action by these phone calls, that these calls might be doing something for the winners as well.

_________

After a few more conversations with women from the nineties, I jumped ahead and sped my way through the girls of the 2000s. They were the easiest to track down, a few of them still in college, lots of others in grad school, their contact information usually turning up on some university club or organization’s website. Some even had their own—
MeghanMcNaught.com
(songwriter),
ReaganSimpsonInc.com
(inspirational speaker). For others, I just called their parents, whose contact information we often still had on file—I’d discovered a treasure trove of boxes labeled “TGTW applications,” which was ripe with such information (I had to keep myself from being distracted by the applications from the fifties and sixties, all of which rather unbelievably had blanks where the girls had been required to fill in their heights and weights and parents’ occupations).

Two thousand four winner Kate Carlisle, whose nonprofit provided eye exams and glasses for people in the developing world, was roommates at Stanford med school with 2005 winner Simran Malik, who was continuing her research on enzymes and cancer. After
Charm,
2001 winner Danni Chung won the Miss America pageant, which was a fun year out, she said, before she began her graduate vocal studies at Northwestern. She’d been performing ever since, and she’d just won a spot in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. Next, I went on a spree of Ten Girls winners who were current Oxford and Cambridge Marshall and Rhodes Scholars. I giggled hearing how many of them had developed faux-British diction. “You’re putting together a party then?” one after another said in Madonna-style accents. By the end of my afternoon of calls with them, I was halfway to adopting the accent myself.

The overall highlight of the 2000s, though, was Tanisha Whitaker. She was working as an SAT tutor in New York while trying to make it as a stand-up comic. I hadn’t spoken with her yet, just her mother, but Gayle Whitaker brought me up to speed on her daughter’s post-
Charm
activities, including the ins and outs of her love life, which were manifold and of great interest to Gayle. Jason had been “fiiine.” And Chaz was “a rat.” Gayle had one of the richest, easiest laughs I’d ever heard, punctuated by little gasps and screams, and I could imagine why her daughter would have wanted to get her laughing whenever possible. As we chatted away she said, “Girl, you are a hoot.
Charm
sure found the right woman for this job.” I wanted to keep her on the phone all afternoon.

It turned out I actually knew a few of the winners from the 2000s as well. I’d met Aditi Tyagi at a party in Boston. She and my friend Suresh had been dating at the time. He’d moved to New York after graduation. I didn’t know about her, but I hoped they weren’t dating anymore, since the last time I’d seen Suresh he’d had his arm around the waist of a brunette who was most definitely not Aditi. Another winner, Mei Li Chan, had been in a creative writing class with me in college. A quiet girl with thick glasses and a perpetual braid in her hair, she’d added little to discussions, but then she’d submitted devastating stories about maids and factory workers in nameless Chinese cities. She’d made me feel inadequate then, but now, Google quickly revealed that she’d turned those stories into a novel, which, despite the fact that she was a mere one year older than me, had just been published to significant fanfare. It made me want to quit trying, move home, and become a waitress at our local IHOP. Instead, I forced a big fake quavering smile and dialed her up. Thankfully, at least for the time being, all I got was her voice mail.

I hoped, a misery-likes-company hope, that one of the younger women would admit to mucking through the first years after college before hitting upon her supersuccessful stride. But no such luck. If they’d mucked through like me, they certainly weren’t admitting it now.

During one of my daylong phoneathons, I got a special surprise.

“Boo,” went my Gchat.

“Abigail!” I wrote back.

“Bus ride was totally worth it for your news!” she said.

“I’m at work right now! In my
office.
”

“Fancy. I’m in an Internet café that also sells lottery tickets and fried dough. So, is the job as amazing as it sounds?”

I explained that I was, in fact, working on floor –2 in a corner of the Mandalay Carson world where fashionistas did not tread, but that my one coworker, Ralph, seemed nice enough. Then I rattled off a quickie list of some of the women I’d talked with: “Rachel Link, the founder of TheOne. This amazing woman who translates Russian poetry, a radio station owner, an epidemiologist, if I play my cards right maybe Gerri Vans . . .”

“Really?!”

Probably not, I explained. But she was a winner, and maybe at some point I’d see her from across the room.

“On to more interesting subjects,” I wrote, “have you found love in the jungle?”

“Well . . . :)”

Apparently, she had. He was a graduate student, studying dopamine and its connection to birdsong in birds’ brains, and he was in El Salvador for another three months, conducting field research.

“And when he’s not in El Salvador?” I asked.

“He’s in Michigan. Blech.”

Abigail was from Wisconsin. Half the reason she’d wanted to go to El Salvador was to skip winter.

We chatted for another twenty minutes or so, enough for each of us to know the other was alive and well (or “well” in our own way—I was still poor and Abigail was still suffering from intestinal parasites, but neither of those facts was unexpected).

Once we signed off, I got back to real work. After each call, I highlighted the women who were particularly interesting to talk with in pink (e.g., Susan Frock, the woman whose information Kathy Knowlton had asked me to share; turned out Susan ran a 250-acre cherry orchard in the Ozarks and had a series of books about back-to-farm cooking). And I highlighted women who seemed particularly high profile in yellow (e.g., Jane Novey, president of the National Women’s Health Coalition). For every woman I spoke to, I e-mailed one or two others whose e-mail addresses I’d sniffed out but whose phone numbers eluded me.

Patterns emerged. Lawyers and professors were the easiest to find. Their bios and contact information were published on the firm’s or school’s website. Doctors were cake as well. Bigwig businesswomen and leaders of nonprofits were easy too—their bios were online or at least their names and affiliations were featured in articles. Women from my college were a snap, just one easy check with the alumni directory. Women in later years were most likely to have kept their names or to have at least kept their last names as middle names. The women who were proving toughest were the women of the fifties and sixties. Betty Robinson, Pine Manor College ’64, where were you? My
whitepages.com
searches were only proving so useful.