Ten Girls to Watch (25 page)

Then, more quietly, her diction still lyrical and percussive at the same time, she said, “I had a cancer scare a few years ago. There was a growth on my liver. I felt the change in my body almost immediately. Fortunately, because we found it so early, the growth was very small. And even more fortunately, it turned out to be benign. But I think about that a lot. What a gift it is to know my body, to pay enough attention to it that I can feel every little shift.”

At this point I concluded that even if she was a tiny touch self-righteous, I had just spent a weekend lying in bed and eating nothing other than bowls of cold cereal stolen from my roommate’s Cap’n Crunch box when she wasn’t looking. The part of me that considered this a reasonable way to deal with life needed to listen to Jessie Winston. I could sign up for all the weird sleep studies I wanted, but maybe if I left work a little earlier and went on a run every night, I wouldn’t need those little blue pills. For so long, I had been thinking success was only attainable if I pushed myself to the breaking point. Taking care of yourself was so easy to dismiss as a self-absorbed silly modern notion, and I did, obviously, all the time. But it wasn’t silly, and Jessie Winston was right, it actually wasn’t all that easy.

We talked for another twenty minutes, about her early career, about how she knew opera was right for her and stuck with it, even when all the easy early breaks didn’t come her way and she spent two years as a singing waitress and another year as an ESL tutor. Her early comments had chastened me, but I found this admission of youthful struggle supremely comforting. Not that I was going to blossom into an opera star, but that a year of fumbling didn’t necessarily rule out stardom of some sort. Maybe I wasn’t Mei Li Chan with a literary masterwork right out of the gates, but that didn’t mean that there was no hope for my writing.

The call with Jessie made me feel buoyant. It was the same way I felt when talking with Helen—like the high flyer I’d just spoken with had shared some of the magical air that lifted and carried her.

I made more calls, both to regular and famous women, and the days passed with more amazing Ten Girls’ life stories. Lacy Schwartz dropped out of medical school after her first year but then went on to be a playwright. It was fifteen rather painful years before her first play went up anywhere near Broadway. Her Pulitzer Prize for
Phaedon’s Philosophical Smile
came, she told me, twenty-three years after she walked away from Duke medical school. Did she feel vindicated? Sort of, but not really. If she’d been a success the next year or in the next five years, she said, sure, that’s what she would have felt. But twenty-three years later, it was just her life, not some point she was making. “It’s not like I think medical school would have been a bad thing. It was just like I was wearing shoes that didn’t fit. I had to get out of them,” she said. Joyce Halverston was entering her sixth year as a federal judge in Ohio. She said one of the best things about her job was having to wear a robe every day so she never had to worry about fashion. Katherine Mack, the editor in chief of the
San Francisco Chronicle,
cracked that she was just grateful to have a job.

And on and on the conversations went. Most were wonderful, most filled me with huge excitement to meet the women in person. Every now and again, a call would make me feel like I didn’t have much to show for myself (hello, winners with recording contracts at nineteen or jobs writing for TV shows at twenty-four). But mostly, they filled me with optimism. At this point, I knew that the
New Yorker
wasn’t going to put me on any 25 under 25 lists, and I wasn’t going to be one of those charmed souls who marries their college sweetheart. “Early Bloomer” wasn’t going to be the title of my success story. But there were plenty of these women for whom that hadn’t been the scenario either. There was Stephanie Linwood, with her years at a boring real estate law firm; there was Ellen Poloma, who fell madly in love with Randall whatever-his-last-name-was in her forties. There were lots of ways to do this. I didn’t want to say “hope” too loudly, but down in my basement storeroom, while no one was looking, I was starting to build a little stockpile of it.

Thursday morning, when I emerged from the subway in midtown, my cell phone vibrated with a new voice mail. “This is Becky from Somnilab,” the dreary voice said. Unfortunately, Becky continued, the sleep times I’d been phoning in every morning showed that I was sleeping too well. For this study they needed people with more severe insomnia. I would still be receiving a check for two hundred and fifty dollars to compensate me for my one overnight stay, but that was it. No fifteen hundred coming my way. I was out of the study.

I would have been grouchier about my dismissal except, it was true, I had been using the pills to sleep as much as humanly possible. Also, the dismissal conveniently allowed me to avoid ever seeing Raymond again. Also, I got to keep the pills. Also, two hundred and fifty dollars was pretty good all on its own.

Back at the archives, an air of abandonment hovered in the hallways as usual. From the doorway of my closet, I spotted the blinking voice mail light. More voice mail? Great, what was this going to be? XADI telling me I’d been doing such a good job they decided they didn’t need me anymore? Elliot telling me he’d decided he didn’t want to be “friends” anymore either? (Maybe I was a little more disappointed by my sleep-study rejection than I’d let myself admit.) Fortunately, the voice mail was from Robyn Jackson’s assistant. She’d called just a few minutes before I arrived. I dialed her back immediately, and she patched me right through to Robyn.

In 1968, Robyn Jackson became the first black woman ever to grace the cover of a major women’s magazine. In the photo her skin was smooth, her cheeks peachy and glowing over the top of her burnt-orange turtleneck sweater. From her perfectly peaceful smile, you’d think it was nothing to crash through barriers. She was just another girl, heading to a football game. Except she wasn’t. She never was. She started her own business as a teenager. By the time she was in college, the cleaning service she ran employed over a hundred maids, including her mother and all her aunts.

These days, she wasn’t exactly famous, but she was if you talked to the right people. Anyone who knew money knew Robyn Jackson. Her company, Madison Capital, invested its gazillions in real estate, renewable energy, biotech, and retail. In my reading I even came across several reports of Madison’s rumored bids for Mandalay Carson.

“So glad we’re connecting!” Robyn girlishly chirped. I felt a little embarrassed for having imagined she’d have more of a husky Aretha Franklin voice.

After some initial chitchat, she told me the story of the magazine cover. The editor who took over
Charm
in 1967 apparently imagined a different approach than her forebearers; at her direction, in 1968 academics joined the criteria upon which the Ten Girls to Watch were judged, a factor that certainly helped Robyn.

That year each of the ten girls had been photographed individually during their weeklong trip to New York, and a few days later the editor called Robyn aside during one of their lunches and said, quick as can be, “Your photo is running on the cover. It was the most beautiful shot, hands down.”

Robyn stopped her story at that point and said, “I always appreciated that—her emphasizing that the beauty of the photo was the deciding factor, not anything political. I think she was telling the truth, though it’s now obvious to me that it was a little more complicated than that—she took a huge risk when she made that judgment. But she was devoted to beauty and empowering women, and I endlessly admire people who keep themselves to the standards they set.”

I told her how exciting it was to see a woman at the top of what was so often thought of as a men’s profession.

“Let me tell you, Dawn,” she said, chuckling a bit, “money is power. Anyone who tells you it isn’t—they’re kidding themselves. Most women won’t tell you they want power. There’s something ugly in that word for women. And I understand that. Believe me, as a black woman I particularly understand that. But power is only a dirty word when you don’t have any. Women are never going to rise up and take their rightful place as long as they’re afraid of power.”

I felt the weight of my fingers clacking as I typed her words. I wanted to say money didn’t matter. I had really believed that as a college student, back when I didn’t have money but had all the access to libraries and leather couches and boathouses and institutional legitimacy I could have ever wanted. But now, I was pretty sure she was right. I felt keenly aware that Robyn was only talking to me because I was calling on behalf of
Charm,
which was part of Mandalay Carson, which was rolling in dough. I tried not to think about how the conversation would, or rather wouldn’t, have gone if I, Dawn West of Milldale, Oregon, had just called her up on my own.

But I was indeed calling from
Charm,
and so we continued pleasantly along and turned the conversation to Robyn’s family. She told me about her daughter who’d just started college and wanted to become a journalist. Perhaps because this made me feel validated, even if my hold in the field of journalism was currently tenuous at best, I immediately offered up my contact information and the contact information of every friend from college who had gotten even close to having a journalism-related job. I hoped I offered not because Robyn owned half the office towers in Manhattan but because she crooned and giggled as she talked about her kid with such obvious adoration, but I couldn’t be sure.

After Thursday’s Robyn Jackson talk, Friday was all discouragement. E-mails sent to addresses that bounced back. Lost trails and fruitless phone calls. No bigwigs returning my messages. And the saddest story about a 1985 winner. On tanyakingscholarship.org, I found this:

My sister Tanya was my best friend. She taught me to love life and shoot for the stars. This website is dedicated to Tanya’s art, to her memory, and to helping deserving young people who are following in her footsteps. It’s also dedicated to raising awareness of depression and prescription drug dependence. Tanya didn’t hold back in life, and I know she would want me to share her story in hopes of helping others through their struggles.

The scholarship section of the website detailed the application process. Undergraduate women of color studying either music or film were encouraged to apply for one of three ten-thousand-dollar scholarships to be given out annually. “About Tanya” featured clips of films and shows she’d directed, including a number of episodes of the PBS show
American Experience.
In one short film, she strung together clips of dozens of women who remembered lynchings of their family members. “About Tanya” also included a section called “Tanya’s Story” written by her sister.

In 1998, Tanya adopted a six-year-old boy, Anthony. In 2000, Tony disappeared from their Baltimore backyard. Two weeks later, his body was found mutilated and abandoned in the woods less than a half mile from their home. The murder case was still open when Tanya was killed in a car accident in 2002. Earlier that year Tanya had been caught seeing multiple doctors in order to receive multiple prescriptions for antianxiety medication, painkillers, and antidepressants. The morning she’d driven into the Patapsco River, the autopsy reported, she’d taken a massive overdose of Xanax. Tanya’s sister encouraged everyone struggling through pain, battling depression, or feeling themselves in the clutches of darkness to reach out, to seek help, to pray. She then listed resources: narcotics anonymous web listings, grief counseling referral sites, suicide help lines, support groups for parents who’ve lost children. At the end of the page, she wrote, “My love, Tanya and Tony’s love, and God’s love to you all.”

I slowly scrolled through the site with one of my hands half covering my face, as if not fully reading the words could somehow undo them. I’d been looking at Tanya’s photo from the magazine, an artsy profile shot, expecting to have the beautiful woman from the picture on the phone any minute. Instead, I blinked the mist away from my eyes, then left my desk and walked aimlessly through the shelves of floor –2 for a while. When I returned, I made a simple note in my spreadsheet. “Tanya King: deceased.” Then, thinking that wasn’t enough, I added “music and film memorial scholarship: tanyaking scholarship.org.” Maybe one of the TGTW winners for this year could apply, or perhaps we could invite Tanya’s sister to the gala in her stead.

Finally, after a day of so much discouragement, five o’clock arrived, and Elliot once again knocked on my door, this time to take me to Boston. I’d been jumpy all day, imagining I was hearing his footsteps every time I detected the slightest rustle. I turned at what seemed like an imagined footfall, the hundredth time I’d turned thinking I’d heard him, but this time, I hadn’t imagined him. I caught him a second before his hand touched my door. He knocked anyway, holding my eyes as his knuckles lightly rapped on the wood.

“Hey there,” he said. “What do you say we blow this joint?”

“I was thinking I’d stick it out until six.”

“
Charm
’s turning the screws?” He winked. “Oh, come on. We don’t want to pull in at midnight.”

“Okay, okay. Give me a minute to grab my stuff.” I surrendered.

Elliot walked my way and perched on the edge of a stack of boxes.

I attempted to close out of my e-mail and stack my notes and printouts with some semblance of grace, but I couldn’t shake the outside-myself awkward-actress feeling.

I had packed the night before with the greatest of care. I’d made white chocolate cranberry scones for Helen and tied them up in a box with a gold satin bow. I’d picked up the latest collection of Alice Munro short stories for her and nicely wrapped and tucked that in my weekend bag as well. I’d cleaned my shoes. I’d packed two possible outfits for the reading, one dress, one pants and sweater combination. I’d folded everything fastidiously, as if I were the butler from
The Remains of the Day.