Ten Girls to Watch (3 page)

Then, two weeks ago, Robert had phoned. “I hope it’s not weird,” he said. “I invited Lily to the Pretzel Party. I mean, I hope you don’t think it’s weird that I invited
you
too. I want you to come. I want you to meet her.”

Every summer Robert’s parents threw a party at their house in the Hamptons, which they called the Summer Party, but which everyone else referred to as the Pretzel Party. Robert had called to tell me I’d be getting an invitation in the mail. I’d never gotten a formal invitation before. I’d just gone as Robert’s girlfriend.

Trying to pretend, to myself most of all, that I was cool and totally over it, I said sure, of course, I’d love to meet Lily. And then I put on my sneakers and ran four miles to try to shake off the awful feeling. It didn’t work. Robert was really, truly dating someone, who was not me. And I wasn’t dating anyone. Not that I would be guaranteed to feel better if I were, but that was the thought that reverberated in my head, like some big flashing scoreboard. Robert, 1; Dawn, 0. Or more accurately, Robert, infinity; Dawn, negative infinity.

The fact that Lily was going to be at the Pretzel Party meant I definitely shouldn’t go. Yet there I’d been, the morning of the party, getting ready in the so-hot-you-might-pass-out heat of my banged-up old Brooklyn apartment with my fan blowing straight into my face in order to avoid sweating off my eyeliner before it even dried. Anyone sane in New York has an air conditioner. I was sane—it was just that expenditures of more than, say, nine dollars weren’t in my temp-and-lawn-care-writer budget. My dress, a blue polyester number pretending to be silk, had, in fact, rung up for precisely nine dollars at H&M. With a vintage gold pin my grandmother had given me and a yellow belt I’d had since high school, I liked to imagine it could pass for Anthropologie, but that might have been wishful thinking.

“You look nice,” my roommate, Sylvia, said, standing at my door with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch in her hand. She took a slurpy bite, a Crunch Berry falling to the floor and rolling toward the center of the living room.

Turns out a lot of people will say no to an apartment with a twenty-degree slope to its floor. Not me, and not Sylvia, another Craigslist find. I’d rummaged her up with a posting that did its best to match honesty (“near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so a little noisy”) with salesmanship (“vintage details”). Other than the fact that Sylvia never, ever wore a bra (despite her rather voluptuous form) and sometimes went a day or two past the point where hair washing was truly necessary (even for a girl whose curly brown mop masked a lot of grease), she was all right.

That said, certain things about her frightened me. For instance, she was twenty-eight, and although she’d been working at a marketing firm in Soho for a few years now, she didn’t seem to have any more cash than I did. That seemed a worrisome indicator of what I could expect in New York in years to come. And then there was her boyfriend, Rodney, a linebacker-looking fellow she met back home over Christmas and who now flew in from Ohio every month or so. He responded to all my attempts at cordial conversation with one-word answers and a blank face, his eyes flashing to wherever Sylvia happened to be, whether she was grabbing her coat or behind the bathroom door. I’d never seen a single slitty-eyed look silently yell “hurry up” in another person’s direction quite so loudly.

“Where you going?” Sylvia said now, but since she had cereal in her mouth, it was more like “Wuh yu gwon?”

“A friend is having a party out on Long Island,” I heard myself say.

Ugh. “A friend.” And, ugh, “Long Island.” My first Pretzel Party, the one right after our freshman year, Robert told me his parents were having a get-together in the backyard of their house on Long Island. I’d never been to the Hamptons, but I’d watched a VH1 celebrity special or two, so a more specific geographic reference might have given me some hint as to the true nature of this party. But Robert wasn’t up for saying the H-word, which meant I got ready for this party like I would have any backyard barbecue back in Milldale, Oregon—just a T-shirt and jeans. When Robert picked me up for the drive from our summer dorms in Boston down to New York, the fact that he was outfitted in a sharp white linen concoction should have tipped me off. I did feel instantly nervous that perhaps the party was going to be a little fancier than I had guessed, but still, I didn’t quite get it.

When did I actually get it? Was it when we pulled up to the house, or should I say, estate? Not fully. Was it when we walked into the little backyard party, or should I say, extravaganza on the grounds? Nope. Was it when the first person at the party I made eye contact with was Alec Baldwin? Yes, I’d say that was the moment.

“Is that Alec Baldwin?” I whispered to Robert.

He nodded, and then a second later as a waiter passed by with little spoonfuls of caviar on a silver tray, he whispered ferociously, “This is all tax deductible.” And I suppose he was trying to say that otherwise it’d be Ma and Pa Rolland flipping burgers themselves, which I almost believed until I met Ma and Pa Rolland.

But apparently, now I said “Long Island” too.

The fan blowing in my face didn’t do much good. Sweat ran from my upper lip into my lipstick, and the whole thing smeared when I attempted to wipe away the moisture. Thankfully, it was a mercifully short walk from my building to the subway and from the subway to the Long Island Rail Road. I cheered for every bit of air-conditioning along the way. Yay for air-conditioned train cars. Yay for the air-conditioned cab from the train, and yay for the waves of icy air I could practically see pouring from the Rollands’ house as we pulled up. I would have cheered more had I been arriving in Robert’s nicely air-conditioned BMW two-seater, which he undoubtedly drove in from the city that morning, but alas, my seat was taken.

Mr. and Mrs. Rolland hovered near what looked like wicker thrones on top of a fancy Oriental rug near their koi pond, greeting throngs of guests with cheek kisses for one and all. I joined the queue, ready for the somewhat strained familiarity that had marked our interactions since they’d first become aware of the turbulence of Robert’s relationship with me sometime during sophomore year. Before I got my chance to say hello, Robert and a woman who could only be Lily swooped in.

All lean angles as usual, Robert looked appropriately like a pretzel heir in his trim tan suit. His dark brown hair had a few lighter brown streaks, and his skin had a slightly golden, baked quality to it. He and Lily must have been picnicking or hiking or doing other summery, coupley activities for the last several weeks while I’d been inside doing single-person things like cleaning the hair out of my brushes.

“Dawn, darling, how lovely to see you,” Robert crooned.

Lily elbowed him. “He thinks it’s funny to imitate his parents. He’s been doing it all day to see who calls him on it and who takes him seriously.” She said it with such jocular ease, like the most popular girl at summer camp.

I looked her up and down. I should have been discreet, but I don’t think I was. I’d imagined being calm and cool, so cool and lovely that the Texas tart would walk away feeling wholly inadequate, trembling at the thought of trying to measure up to me. But I didn’t feel calm and cool. The sight of Lily in real life standing next to Robert tripped my adrenal glands. I felt shaky with nerves, like I was barely holding the reins of rearing horses. She was petite, or normal, but compared to my gangly five-nine she was a diminutive little darling. And while my wavy red hair was piled on top of my head in a way that seemed to advertise what a sweaty morning I’d had as well as what cheap spangly earrings I was wearing, her sleek brown bob announced an invincibility to summer humidity, showed off what I couldn’t imagine were anything other than real pearl earrings, and led your eye straight to her dainty freckled nose. (Of course her nose was that cute. What else could it be since my slightly crooked nose was one of my prime insecurities?) Decked out in a flip-collared seersucker jacket over a white cotton dress and a Tiffany charm bracelet, I thought she looked like polo-pony puke. I was glad to note she wasn’t skinnier than I was. Then I felt bad for noting this, like I was so brainwashed I thought that mattered. Though even after I felt bad, I noted it again from another angle.

“Lily,” I said, doing my best to impersonate a gracious person. “So nice to meet you.”

“So Robert tells me you’re a writer,” she said, leaning in like we were actually friends, not just people badly faking the parts. Her voice was lower and more compelling than I would have thought, a little husky even, without a trace of Texas in it. She sounded like she should be reading the news on the radio.

“That’s very generous of him,” I said, my own voice all of a sudden sounding tinny and irksome to my ear, the way it does when you listen to recordings of yourself.

I might have been flattered by this line of conversation, or relieved, since it at least steered us somewhat delicately around the topic of my actual employment, but instead, I cringed because I knew exactly where it was headed.

“He says you write wonderful short stories,” Lily said, carrying on politely.

“It’s true, she does,” Robert piped up, as if he were just getting his bearings. Usually, when Robert and I were together we generated a sort of undeniable heat, like the waves that radiate from the hood of an idling car. You could practically see it, and everything got hazy, and breathing in the haze was like breathing in a potion that magically pulled us together again. But with Lily here, the heat was diffuse, whatever waves were there refracted and sent bouncing in strange directions. At best, you could get a whiff of the magic. I detected a definite note of fluster in Robert’s voice, and it was like he didn’t know which one of us to look at when he talked, me or Lily. He kept shifting on his feet.

“So have you published any of your stories?” Lily asked, all innocent-like. And there it was, just as predicted: the dreaded moment. Almost as bad as “So what do you do?” Not having an answer you can be proud of for questions like that makes ordinary conversation agonizing, like having a blister on your heel and a shoe that cuts further into your skin with every should-be-painless step.

“Ah, well, I’m still working on the publishing part . . .” I said.

Robert fiddled with his drink.

“I’m sure it’ll be any day now,” Lily said, like she was some wise old woman who knew the ways of the world and was patting naive little me on the head.

I flashed a look of recrimination at Robert while Lily flagged down a waiter with a tray of champagne. He wouldn’t let me catch his eye, and he had a single flushed spot on one cheek.

As we drank our champagne, I shifted the conversation to law school. Lily had just finished her first year at Columbia. I would have been starting law school in the fall, except that I’d decided I just couldn’t do it.

I’d been very close. As a teenager, I’d been hooked on shows like
Ally McBeal
and
The Practice,
and maybe the more reasonable conclusion to draw from being attracted to TV programs about lawyers is not that you want to be a lawyer, but rather that you want to be an actor or a writer of shows about lawyers. Alas, that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. Peering into those big-city lives through the television screen was like watching my teenage dreams line up on a slot machine, each piece like a cherry inextricably tied to the next. Ambition 1: Glamour. Ambition 2: Prestige. Ambition 3: Lawyer? Bingo! There weren’t a lot of competing bingos presenting themselves to my imagination in small-town Oregon, other than being a writer, which seemed about as unlikely as being a movie star, and was therefore off the list. Being an attorney seemed exciting
and
attainable, so the idea stuck.

My first two summers of college, I went home and worked at a law firm in Eugene, drafting affidavits and motions for summary judgment for workers’ compensation cases. I liked it, or liked it well enough. Figuring out the formal structure of each document I had to write was like solving a puzzle, satisfying and vaguely enjoyable in a crosswordy sort of way, and I lapped up all the “Good job, Dawn!” comments my work garnered. Plus, it was my first experience with business attire—turned out pencil skirts and I got along quite nicely. Junior year, I stayed in Boston so I could be with Robert. He spent the summer interning for a business school professor, and I got a job as a camp counselor at a city camp for low-income kids, but I still spent my every free moment studying for the LSAT. And then I did the whole thing. I took the test, I applied, and I got in. I had options in D.C., Boston, and New York. But a strange thing happened. Spring of senior year, I stared at the “Yes, I will attend” box on each of the acceptance forms, and I couldn’t bring myself to check a single one of them.

I’d always told myself writing was just a hobby, but it had started to feel like more than that. I’d been churning out stories during creative writing seminars all through college, and a few of my professors had made “I think you have talent” type remarks. They probably thought nothing of their words, but I couldn’t let them go. It wasn’t just their compliments; it was the way I felt when I was writing. When I put together a fifteen-page paper about imagery in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, the whole point was breaking down and analyzing his ideas. When I wrote a short story, the whole point was breathing life into
my
ideas. It was like the difference between rummaging around in someone else’s old house and designing and building a whole new house of my own. There is pleasure in rummaging, but nothing like the grand, expansive feeling of creating.

Bit by bit, writing dreams crept into my brain, and now, those dreams were like squatters yelling loudly for their rights. When I looked at law school acceptance forms, it was as if the “Yes” box did not say “Yes, I will attend,” but instead boomed in a draconian voice, “Yes, I will crush all the creativity in my soul.” I checked the “No” box. Robert had applauded my creative ambitions. My parents, on the other hand, fell into a category closer to worried-slash-perplexed. Maybe they were right, after all, since that pen mark had led me directly to the delightful world of unemployment and disappointment I was currently enjoying. My various collegiate activities were fine for grad school, but if you want a job, turns out some summer experience in fields other than playing at law or playing with kids can be helpful. Oops.