Ten Girls to Watch (20 page)

And then there were the surprises. Danica Day, ’94, showed up in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
which wasn’t remarkable, but the article itself was: it detailed Dani’s murder conviction for killing her husband. They’d been separated, he’d come to her apartment, an argument had ensued, somehow a gun was fired. Both were medical researchers completing their PhDs at the University of California San Francisco. They’d both contributed to a paper published by a professor who was set to receive a Nobel Prize in Stockholm the week of the shooting, and they’d planned to attend the ceremony. Their tickets to Sweden went unused. The article didn’t run a mug shot or any grisly photos. Instead, it included a smiling picture of Danica in her lab coat, the grin and the curls around her face unsettlingly similar to her TGTW photo. After finding Danica I moved right back to the safety of the unfindable women of the sixties.

There, I found Sally Crenshaw, ’61, faster than I’d thought possible. Just a simple White Pages search, and there she was, still named Sally Crenshaw, still living in Illinois. I turned to her photo, the caption “Young watercolorist, swears she dreams Italian landscapes” in perfect line with the dark bob of her hair. How delighted she was that I’d found her, she said. How surprising it was to find a woman from
Charm
1961 who’d kept her name, I replied.

“Oh, that,” she said, her voice dropping. “I was actually Sally Henderson until last year. When my husband and I divorced I changed my name back.”

I tried to lighten the conversation and told her I’d love to hear about her adventures over the years and what she was doing now.

“Well, Roger and I moved to Phoenix when he retired, but then last year, after everything, I moved back to Chicago to live with my daughter. She and her husband have a little apartment in their basement, which works for one.”

“How terrific that you’re able to be close to your daughter,” I tried.

“Yes,” she said warily, “it’s something.”

“Do your daughter and her husband have children? Have you gotten to do any fun grandmother duty since you’ve been back in Chicago?”

“No, they’ve decided to put that off for now. They’re both filmmakers.”

I was striking out here, but then Sally went on, sparing me from firing another cheery question into the void.

“Roger and I were married for forty-two years, and I never worked. I was home with the children, and then I took care of him, took care of the house. So it took me some time to find a job—I’m learning to use the computer, but I wouldn’t be any good as a secretary. Since April or so, I’ve been at a Hallmark store in the mall near us. This is actually my first paid job. I’m supposed to wear jeans to work, which is a new thing for me. So I’m working on that.” She followed this with a laugh, not one that savored the dark humor of working to build a professional wardrobe comprised of jeans after a lifetime of ladylike skirt-suits and slacks, but a hollow, sad laugh, the kind that is more like a hiccup before a jag of emotion.

“I have to tell you,” I said, trying to be light, “new work wardrobes are tough. Before
Charm
I mostly worked from home. The fact that I can’t wear slippers to the office is still killing me a little bit.” Was this actually amusing given the circumstances that had pushed Sally into her new job? Probably not. She was gracious enough to chuckle a little anyway.

“I’d love to hear about some of your memories from the contest,” I picked up. “You were in New York for a few weeks, is that right?”

“That’s right. Every fashion and beauty company wanted to get our opinion. This was back before they did massive surveys, I suppose. So what they did instead was have girls like us all gathered in a room, and they’d show us all their latest products and see what we really oohed and aahed over.” She paused, a break longer than the normal moment or two between thoughts, then she said, “I remember the Europe trip most of all. I couldn’t wait for all those art museums. Which is funny now that I think of it. Roger is in Europe now, traveling with . . .” She stopped herself.

I asked a few more questions, said a few things about our plans for a party—we weren’t sure exactly what or when, but I’d be in touch. Then we said our good-byes. I looked at Sally Crenshaw’s smiling photo and tried to visualize her now. I imagined her still tall and lovely, her hair now shorter and gray, a smile pulled on her thin lips. But what I really saw was something more like a picture of the plains after a tornado, years of gentle building gnashed and dropped, broken timbers here and there among the scattered crops, ripped from the ground. There was a reason some wise prairie people built basement-only homes with tiny aboveground windows in a thin strip at the roofline offering a soil-level view from here to the horizon. I briefly conjured the other woman, dashing around Paris on the arm of her beau, this sudden whirlwind all giddiness and adventure for her. I didn’t highlight Sally in yellow or pink, but I did tack her photo to the board above my desk.

_________

The Friday of my check-in meeting with XADI rolled around. I sent her a document, we had a short phone call, and it was all dispatched in about five minutes, per usual. She liked my ideas. We were cleared for a meeting with Regina on Monday.

I should have been ecstatic—my return to the company of the lovely Regina and a chance to show off all the work I’d done!—and yes, I was excited. But my brain was much busier thinking about the fact that it was now officially mid-ish September, and Elliot Kaslowski had not yet e-mailed. Nor had he called or stopped by my office/closet.

Thanks to Abigail, who had decided back in college that if I wasn’t going to heed her advice and break up with Robert (or stay broken up, that is), I should at least develop as much of a backbone within the relationship as I could, I had my very own copy of both
The Rules
and
Why Men Love Bitches.
Not a lot of good came of them on the Robert front, but at least they meant I knew better than to harass Mr. Kaslowski in hopes of rekindling whatever it was we’d had that night on the bridge. But that didn’t mean I didn’t look at my e-mail every few minutes and wonder what was wrong with me. It had to be either my looks or my personality, and neither was a good answer.

On the plus side, the results from my visit to the sleep lab earlier in the week had cleared me for takeoff, so though my weekend plans included nary a magazine columnist, they did include a date with an insomnia study. I considered that far from a bust.

I started gathering my things before realizing I’d forgotten to ask XADI a critical question. Calling again seemed excessively familiar, and so I e-mailed.

Hi XADI,

I’m looking forward to the meeting. In the meantime, I’m wondering if there’s any sort of special process for VIPs. For example, would you prefer to call the mayor of Seattle or can I go ahead and give her office a ring? Other prominent winners I have yet to call, pending your input, include Robyn Jackson, Jessica Winston, Barbara Darby, and Gerri Vans.

Thanks in advance for your guidance,

Dawn

I reread the e-mail before I sent it and paused at the second sentence: “I’m wondering . . .” On one of the rotten days of the Dawn-Robert romance, Robert and I hit up the National Air and Space Museum together during a little D.C. trip. There was a fab-looking exhibit on Barbie in Flight, and after some time unsuccessfully trying to follow the arrows pointing to it, I approached a nice security guard and said, “I’m wondering if you could point me in the direction of the Barbie exhibit,” which he obligingly did.

“Why do you always do that?” Robert asked as we were walking away.

“Do what?”

“Start every question with ‘I’m wondering’ instead of just asking the question.”

We broke up later that night. Though we also got back together even later that night. I sent the e-mail to XADI exactly as it was, glad to wonder away freely.

XADI replied to my e-mail within three seconds: “Don’t call. We’ll discuss next week. X”

How had she even read my e-mail that quickly? Perhaps she’d hit send too soon and she’d actually meant to write yes, she thought I was the perfect person to chat up Gerri. Perhaps that message would be momentarily forthcoming.

Sadly, it wasn’t. But it was now six o’clock, and my overnight bag and I exited the building and began a leisurely amble toward the subway downtown, where the sleep lab and an incredible fifteen hundred dollars awaited me.

Chapter
Nine

“Y
ou here for an overnight?” the Somnilab security guard said, giving me a once-over.

I nodded.

“Sign in and head on up,” he said. “Somnilab’s on ten.”

The Somnilab building stood on a scrubby corner of far-west Soho, which, in fact, felt rather like the scrubby corner of far-west Hell’s Kitchen where the Mandalay Carson archives resided. As I walked toward it, the building’s lights cast a clinical glow out onto the dark street, all the more glaring because of the orange security lamps of the surrounding barbed-wire-protected parking lots. Given the generally ominous vibe, I was relieved to hear that Somnilab shared the building, meaning all ten floors weren’t dedicated to the sleep-disordered (sleepwalkers on 2, night screamers on 3).

The elevator doors on the tenth floor opened to what looked like a normal doctor’s office waiting room, with me as the lone patient in waiting. The receptionist placed a quick call back to the lab, and with that, the thin facade of normalcy fell away—a woman in green scrubs appeared and led me behind the doors to the “main facility,” where we approached another reception desk, this one humming with activity. A man in an orange jumpsuit walked by followed by a woman in a blue flannel nightgown with lace around the collar. The flannel woman held a straight out of
The Matrix
switch box in her hand connected to a rope of electrode cords springing from the back of her head.

My bescrubbed guide checked a chart and led me to room eleven, my home for the night. When we arrived, the room appeared to be in the midst of an identity crisis. Was it a hospital room? Was it the Econolodge? The bed said medical, the lamp and desk said budget travel.

“Get yourself settled in and change into your pajamas,” the woman instructed. “Your lab tech will be here in a few minutes to get you set for the night.”

A camera mounted on the wall above the bed stared right at me, but I figured it probably wasn’t on yet, and even if it was, oh well. I did a quick change into a raggedy sweatshirt and my favorite flannel pajama bottoms featuring monkeys holding bunches of bananas and the words “I love you a bunch” over and over, a Christmas present from my mother. I was pulling on some thick knit socks with crocheted butterflies attached at the ankles (again, courtesy of my dear mother) when after the quickest of knocks, in strolled a man in scrubs, pushing what in another context would have been a bar cart but which, here in the lab, was piled high with wires and tubes of glue.

So this was my lab tech. Young, with smooth coffee-colored skin, sharp cheekbones, black rectangular-framed glasses, and thick twists in his dark chin-length hair, he was, in short, superhot. He put out his hand and introduced himself—Raymond. I could call him Ray or Raymond, either way was cool. Had he just seen me change on camera? Although I regretted the butterfly socks, I was instantly grateful I’d kept my bra on.

“So it’s your first night on this study, I see.” He held some sort of chart. “Let me help you drag that chair over here and we’ll get started.” He explained that for the next hour and a half or so, he’d be hooking electrodes to my legs, chest, and head, so that he could then monitor my brain waves while I slept.

I nodded, feeling awkward in that junior high dance sort of way. He, obviously feeling no such thing, started right in on my unfortunately stubbly legs. I threaded the wires down through my shirt and waistband, then pushed them out the bottom of my pajamas.

“Just cuff those for me, will you?” he said, holding up some electrodes and glue. “I need access to your shins. We have to make sure you don’t have restless leg syndrome,” he said. Sure, sure, I nodded. No one had ever asked for access to my shins before.

While he glued we chatted. I tried to be cool, and as I settled in, the whole experience started to feel beauty treatment–ish, the sort of half-distracted conversation you have at the hair salon.

“So you don’t sleep well?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

“No, not so well lately,” I said. That topic covered, we moved right along. He’d started at Somnilab six months before. He was an architecture grad student, and this was the only job that didn’t interfere with his academic schedule. Under a similar premise, I informed him, I had taken a 5:30 a.m. job at the campus paper my freshman year of college, stuffing the sports or culture section into the main body of the newspaper. It was true, I had no schedule conflicts . . . except sleep, which became sadly apparent when, the month after I started the job, I looked around my room one paper-writing afternoon and saw the wreckage of an empty two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, an empty six-pack, and two empty twenty-ounce Diet Dr Peppers. The rather critical sleep conflict became doubly apparent when I read the title I’d given said paper: “Longing and Loss in Bartelby the Scribbler.” Raymond didn’t really laugh. “The Scribbler? Not the Scrivener,” I said. “Ha-ha.” Nothing. We went back to him.