Ten Girls to Watch (42 page)

I giggled a little. And then she laughed, and soon, weirdly, we both started howling uncontrollably. Eventually, there was some crying mixed in, but even then, it was minutes before we could keep the laughter down.

We slid to the kitchen floor, pushing aside wadded Kleenex, and then, with our backs leaning against the cupboards, we talked for another hour. Lily firmly believed that Trevor the fireman and I were meant to be together. Right after she ghost-wrote my retaliatory article about Elliot, she was going to engineer a way to bring us back together, even if it required arson.

Finally, I sighed and said I really had to go.

“That’s insane. Would you look at this place?” she said. “I have two guest bedrooms. Would you please do me a favor and take one of them?”

I spent the night.

The next morning I had breakfast with Helen, who offered to stay another few days to help me, but I reassured her that Sarah and I would be okay. I promised I’d call her with updates. Just before she got in the cab to go to the train station, she hugged me and said, “Someday you’ll write about this.”

I thought she was probably right.

I met Sarah at JFK that evening, and instead of a hotel, we stayed with Lily, who’d insisted it was the least a decent person with a three-bedroom apartment all to herself could do.

Sarah opened her suitcase in the living room. “Mom sent this for you,” she said, handing me a stuffed horse with yarn hair. Part of the stuffed animal collection I’d wisely left in Oregon. Instead of giving the horse an actual name, at age nine I’d just called him “the white stallion.”

“Look who’s here to save the day?” I said, laughing and tearing up.

Friday, at nine o’clock I left my sister at Lily’s place and went to XADI’s office, as requested.

She was wearing a bright green top, the first time I’d ever seen her in anything but black. I liked it on her.

Thanks to my sister, I was able to give her an envelope with the two hundred dollars cash I owed her.

XADI tucked it into her desk drawer without a word and said, “There’s an editorial assistant position opening up. I’d like you to apply for it.”

“Here? In this office?”

“Your desk would be in
the pod,
” she said, ironically inflecting the words.

“Wow,” I answered, half seriously, half with the same tone XADI had just used.

“It’s not glamorous. You’d be answering my phone and keeping my calendar and expenses. But you’d also have some chances to write for the magazine, and you’d get some experience editing features. The pay is not much more than you’ve been getting as a freelancer, but it’s full-time, so you’d have benefits, and you’d be on the masthead.”

The masthead—that page at the front of the magazine that listed the editorial staff. A page everyone but people who worked in publishing skipped right over. A page I was dying to be on.

“I’d love to apply,” I said.

“Good, send me your résumé. And whatever happens with the Gerri project, we’ll make sure you have time to work on that.” And that was the end of our conversation. She stood up, her usual signal that that was all, I was dismissed.

Back at the elevators, the receptionist tucked a pencil into her big white bun and crooned, “I’ve got something for you, honey. Remember that mint I promised you?”

She lifted a tiny pot with two sprigs of mint poking out of the dirt. “I knew I’d see you again soon,” she said, handing the plant to me.

“Thank you!” I said, putting the mint to my nose, the bright and cool scent making me instantly tingle with memories of home. “Wow, just,
thank you!
”

She hummed her deep “mm-hmm” and leaned back in her chair.

The next day, Sarah and I went to the DMV and got me a new driver’s license, we went to the library and got me a new library card, we replaced all my bank cards and credit cards, we got me a new cell phone, and we went on an Old Navy, cheap-but-acceptable-clothing shopping spree.

After everything she’d done for me, that night I channeled Sarah’s take-charge attitude and tried to do something for her. Following a quick dinner at a falafel place on Bedford Street, I pulled her a few blocks over to Cornelia Street Café, a little West Village spot known for its open mic nights. We listened to five or six numbers, and then I nudged Sarah toward the stage. She resisted for about half a second before she borrowed a guitar from the guy who’d gone just before her and settled into place in front of the microphone. I didn’t know what she’d play or sing. For a moment, she looked out into the crowd of tables, her dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders, her eyes wide, and it seemed like she might not play or sing anything at all. Then, without strumming a single note, she sang the first aching, soulful phrase of James Taylor’s “That Lonesome Road.”

Walk down that lonesome road, all by yourself.
The room fell silent except for her breathy, beautiful voice. She lifted up another a cappella phrase, arching her voice up and down the steps between notes—
Don’t turn your head back over your shoulder.
Only then did she join in with guitar chords. It seemed to me that even the waitresses raised their eyes from their trays to watch her. In the same way certain frequencies can make glass quiver and even break, I felt my whole self vibrating with the sound of Sarah’s singing. When she sat down beside me again, I squeezed her hand. She squeezed mine back.

Later, in the cold air on our way to the subway, we shivered as our misty breath mingled in front of us, and Sarah said, “Thanks for that, Dawn.”

“You were the best act all night,” I answered honestly.

She shrugged and gave a little I-don’t-know-about-that laugh, but then, after another minute she said, “Next time you come home, I’m going to make you drive to Portland with me, and I’m going to do that again.”

Back at Lily’s apartment, Sarah and I changed into our new matching pajama bottoms (no monkeys, but very cute end-of-season-sale penguins) and started trawling Craigslist for apartments. When Lily saw what we were doing, she piped up with her usual tenacity.

“Would you please just stay with me? I’ll charge you like five hundred bucks a month and we’ll call it a day.”

And that was how I came to be Lily Harris’s roommate.

I sent Sarah back to Oregon a day earlier than she’d planned, but only if she promised to get on Skype with the girls and say hello when she got home. She did, and we sang half a verse of “The Wheels on the Bus” together before the twins bolted, but it was still great, and we promised to do it more often. I told my dad not to come quite yet, and instead we planned a trip, his first ever to New York, for the February school break.

The next week, XADI called to tell me the job was officially mine if I wanted it. I did. I e-mailed Lily to tell her the news, and when she walked in the door that night, she was brandishing a bottle of champagne.

“This is to celebrate all the cool parties you’re going to get us into in the future.” She winked.

“I’ll do my best.” I laughed.

I’d brought home Patricia Collins’s bottle of wine, and while we waited for the champagne to cool, I decided this was the perfect occasion to sample it.

“It’s supposed to be crisp and full at the same time,” I said, pouring.

I told Lily all about Patty, and then we did our best impressions of wine connoisseurs, taking in the bouquet with our noses and rolling the wine around in our mouths. By the time we poured our next glasses, I’d regaled her with a handful of other TGTW winners’ life stories, including Tanisha Whitaker’s.

“We should go see her show,” I said. “You’d like her.”

“One better”—Lily raised her glass—“let’s just invite her to dinner.”

And so we invited Tanisha and a couple of Lily’s girlfriends over for dinner that weekend, and just like that, I was on my way to having three new friends. Not college friends.
New York
friends.

The assistant to Allen, the head of Gerri’s book division, called. I went in for a meeting. I was almost as nervous and excited as I’d been that first day at Mandalay Carson, but XADI had been good prep—no one would ever be as intimidating as she had been. As I waited in the reception area I thought about how Helen was right, once you have an experience under your belt, you’re more confident ever after. When Allen walked toward me, I stood nice and tall and shook his hand with a good, firm (but not weirdly firm) grip. It might have also helped that Lily loaned me her pearl earrings. We didn’t settle on anything that afternoon, but Allen promised he’d be back in touch after another internal meeting or two. For my part, I’d never imagined feeling so excited about sidebars.

My last day at the warehouse archives, Ralph must have been monitoring the security cameras again. I hadn’t seen him since I’d gotten the new job (or during any of the days I’d been in the office since the gala, for that matter), but XADI had cc’d me on the e-mail where she explained the timeline of my transfer from the archives to the main office, so he knew I was packing up. I gently took everything down from the bulletin board and placed it in a file folder, then tucked it in a bag with the rest of the files I planned to take with me to the pod, and not ten seconds after I’d finished this and stepped into the hallway outside my basement office, Ralph appeared.

I didn’t know whether Ralph bothered to read any of the magazines he added to the archives every month. He probably hadn’t seen Elliot’s latest
Charm
dispatch, but maybe he had. At the very least he must have noticed Elliot had been scarce around the building. I’d thought back to the smirk on his face the night I’d left the office with Elliot, and I’d constructed all these scenarios for what he’d say to me now. It went something like “He didn’t deserve you” or “I could have told you he was no good months ago” or “In your honor, I’m going to rip that page out of the archival copy.”

Of course he didn’t say any of those things.

“Dawn,” he said, putting out his hand for a shake, “it’s been a pleasure working with you.”

He wasn’t smirking now. He was smiling warmly, though there was still something not entirely straightforward about it. Suddenly I realized I’d miss Ralph. Chances were the little lingering something in his smile was the fact that he’d miss me too.

“I have the key for you,” I said.

“Terrific,” he answered.

“I also have something else for you,” I said. I juggled my bags and pulled a plastic-wrapped pie from the canvas tote on my arm.

“It’s pumpkin, probably not as good as your pecan, but I did my best.”

He took it graciously, his head slightly bowed, as if I were handing him something noble like an heirloom family sword.

“Anytime you need anything from the archives, you just call me,” he said. And then, just like he’d walked me in a few months earlier, Ralph now walked me out. He gave me a little hug at the door, and I noticed that he’d shaved his neck hair.

_________

When I finally e-mailed Abigail to tell her about the fire, I made it sound like a big, funny story. Which it wasn’t quite yet, but was on its way to becoming.

A couple of weeks after I moved in with Lily, Robert got around to calling me back. When he appeared on my caller ID, Lily was in the kitchen and I was in my bedroom. I could have easily flipped open the phone and closed my door. But I didn’t. Once, I might have screened out that first call and then eventually called him back, and we would have begun our whole stupid cycle again. Now I didn’t call for a week, and then another week, and then a month. I still haven’t called.

Lily wants to sign us both up for TheOne together. I haven’t said yes yet, but I’m considering it. I told my mom, and she promised she would if I would. It’s winter now, but it won’t be forever, and Lily and I are also making plans for a garden on the terrace. Or more properly, I am making plans for the garden, Lily is making plans for garden parties. “I know it’s crazy,” I’ve told her, “but I want to have at least one planter full of grass, even if I have to trim it with scissors.” She has assented.

I got my first real paycheck for my new job, and I groaned when I saw the after-tax amount. I was a grand total of forty dollars a week richer than I was when I worked in the basement. And XADI hadn’t been lying—the job
was
largely an exercise in secretarial drudgery. But at least I was on a path. Not a straight shot to literary fame, but it was like so many of the Ten Girls to Watch women had told me—each door you pass through opens the next, and sometimes you don’t know what’s on the other side till you get there. Saying no to law school had led me to Lawn Talk, which had miraculously led me to Regina. Now I was officially part of
Charm.
Someday an assistant editor position would open up, and although working at a magazine wasn’t the same as writing novels, for now, it was a way to write and get paid.

In the meantime, I was doing my best to inch myself along from explorer to creator. I finished my new and improved and radically fictionalized version of the Sound of Music story and sent out two copies: one in an e-mail to Helen, the other in a crisp manila envelope to a little lit mag called
17th Letter.
With Helen’s I included a note. “Remember this story? I decided
not
to follow your advice. It’s more fictional than ever. Huge mistake? I’d love your thoughts.”

She wrote back that very night. “Ignoring me was a genius move! This has turned into a gorgeous piece!” I beamed with pride.

A few weeks later, I got a rejection in the mail from
17th Letter,
but at the bottom, after the standard thanks-but-no-thanks text, there was a note, scrawled in blue ink:

This isn’t quite right for us, but please send more. I like your voice. You’re a writer I’ll watch for.

The editor’s name was signed below. Not an acceptance, not even exactly the promise of a future acceptance, but an editor out there thought I was someone to watch.

_________

Maybe the real progress started when I met Regina, or Lily, or when I spoke to my first Ten Girl, or on some other small occasion I hardly noticed at the time. In fact, I’m sure it did. But I felt so up and down during all those months that I couldn’t see what was happening. In fact, I don’t think I saw how far I’d actually come until I peeked out of the bombshell crater of Elliot and my apartment fire.