Ten Girls to Watch (9 page)

I needed something repetitive and calming to ease me back into it. I needed to make copies. I grabbed a couple of the bound volumes and walked quickly away from the phone.

One full track around the perimeter of floor –2 confirmed that there really was no one else down here, and I hadn’t found any signs of copy machines either. I didn’t feel an entirely rejuvenated sense of confidence yet, but I felt collected enough to at least reach for the phone. From his outpost somewhere in the building, Ralph answered . . . halfway through the first ring. Which made me wonder what Ralph did all day, other than wait for his phone to ring.

“Well hello there, Dawn,” he said before I had a chance to say anything. The copy machine, he informed me, was on floor –1, on the east side, and it was unlocked. I thanked Ralph and made my way upstairs.

After graduation, Helen had encouraged me to send pitches to magazines. I’d whipped up dozens of story ideas. Not a single editor replied to a single one of them, but I still liked some of what I’d come up with. Like “Tone Your Calves While Copying,” tip no. 6 in an article on office exercises I’d pitched to
Girl Talk.

During one particularly bleak stretch of temping as a legal secretary at a law firm (a job made all the more depressing by my decision not to go to law school, as if the universe had fated me for legal work and all I got by attempting to escape was a kick down to the lowest paid rung on the ladder), a junior associate had finally talked to me in the hallway. I said I’d just graduated, or graduated eight months earlier and was temping while I looked for a job, and after I revealed where I’d gone to school, he’d incredulously said, “What are you doing here?” A mad streak of toe raises in the copy room that afternoon was the only thing that kept me from turning into a fountain of tears, or at least postponed the outburst till I was out of the office.

The toe raises I did in the archives copy room today were similarly soothing—three hours of copying later, I’d done about three hundred—but the pages of TGTW were the real boost. I made eleven trips up and down the stairs and copied about thirty years of TGTW coverage, lovingly lingering over the best years. Like 1986.

That year,
Charm
’s editors thought the college girls of America should be using their smarts to rake in some extra cash. Suggestions included tutoring (yawn), typing (yawn), and my two favorites (no more yawning): selling art class seconds and late-night snacks. That ceramic pot may not have made the grade for class, but it could fetch a pretty penny as a “dorm decorator’s item,” and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, which
Charm
assured were a breeze to make with just a little tinfoil and a hot iron, were sure to be top sellers.

I took my own sandwich break around lunch (a grilled ham and cheese would have been a real upgrade from my pb&j), but by midafternoon even the fabulous oversize sweaters of the nineties weren’t enough to keep me interested in more copying, so I decided to take a quick break and look at the coverage of the most recent TGTW winners in last March’s issue. At least that’s what I told myself, but it was a total lie. I’d been listening for Elliot’s footfalls all day. A flicker of lights, the slightest hint of a sound, and I braced for him. But nothing. Now, I sat down at my desk with the issue and turned straight to Elliot’s March article. Secret Agent Romance’s dispatch title for that month: “I’m Finally Ready for a Real Relationship.”

I just turned 30. And somewhere between the cheesy party and inspecting my scalp for signs of thinning hair, I realized something: I’m finally ready for a real relationship. I’m not suddenly financially secure or mature or any of the other things that supposedly make guys get serious, and I’m not losing my hair either, thank you very much. I didn’t wake up one day transformed. It was more like I woke up day after day and realized I wasn’t quite as happy on my own as I thought. Turning 30 finally made me wake up and smell the stale coffee.

“I’m not ready for a serious relationship.” That’s the number one excuse guys give for breaking up. But I’m here to tell you, it’s not an excuse. It’s the only real reason I’ve had for breaking up with anyone for the past ten years. The actual excuses are a lot more ridiculous. In the spirit of looking back and seeing how far I’ve come, here’s a sampling of the totally bogus explanations I’ve had for breaking up with some pretty wonderful women when the real reason was my immaturity.

•
 Willow—Started wearing cutesy aprons while cooking. Looked too much like my mom in them.

•
 Roller Girl—Beneath those roller blades her ankles were a touch thick.

•
 Banking Beauty—So driven and productive she was bound to have a breakdown sooner or later.

•
 Speed Racer—All that running, what was she really running from?

•
 Dandy Lion—Tone-deaf but loved to sing.

•
 Mandolin—So much crying. Why so much crying?

•
 Velvet Ropes—Knew way too much about celebrities.

What an idiot I’ve been. I met someone new a few weeks ago. Let’s call her Boots. She flips her hair. Her lips may be a little too glossy. I’m giving it a real go anyway. Mature of me, right?

Secret Agent Romance

First off, Elliot was thirty. Officially, too old for me. But much more than that, it was easy to imagine, after that column, why Elliot was lurking around at the archives rather than hanging out in the Mandalay Carson building. He had to be running scared. Half the women on the list were probably
Charm
staffers or friends thereof. Thick ankles? While Secret Agent Romance claimed that was the excuse, what woman hears a single thing after the sonic boom of thick ankles? I had no idea who Roller Girl was, other than that she certainly wasn’t me. Nonetheless, I crossed my ankles as I read the words. How thick is thick? How much crying is too much crying? Was it bad that I knew Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their kids liked to picnic? The column was insidious.

I smacked the magazine closed as if it were the pages’ fault and not Elliot’s. I needed some positive, supportive womanly cheerleading immediately.

I picked another winner, Kathy Knowlton, ’69. I’d waited long enough.

You can do this.
I actually whispered the words, psyching myself up. I started with Google, hoping that if there were an obituary to be found, I’d find it before calling the grieving spouse. No obituary, but Kathy Knowlton’s faculty profile at the University of Minnesota came right up.
You can do this,
I mouthed again. I dialed.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice answered.

“Hi, is this Kathy Knowlton?” I hated the timid sound of my voice.

“Yes.”

I consciously spoke a touch louder, with a slight salesy lilt, what I thought of as the voice of enthusiasm. “Kathy, this is Dawn West, I’m calling from
Charm
magazine. I’m hoping I have the right Kathy Knowlton—were you one of
Charm
’s 1969 Ten Girls to Watch?”

“Well, I certainly was.”

Success! I explained it was the fiftieth anniversary of the contest, that we were doing a retrospective and were starting by tracking down all the past winners, that we were trying to figure out where all those incredible young women had ended up.

I looked at her college photo as we spoke. She had long, dark hair, full, pretty lips, and was posed leaning against a tree. In the photo, she appeared to be wearing tweed bell bottoms.

“How wild,” she said, clear delight in her voice. “It’s such a funny coincidence, actually. My mother passed away recently and I was going through her attic with my sister just the other day, and we found a big stack of
Charm
s up there. Copy after copy of my Ten Girls to Watch issue. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and I just laughed and laughed. My mother must have bought every issue in the county. And then there was that photo . . .”

“I’m looking at it right now. Groovy pants.”

“Oh, they were awesome.”

We both giggled, and then she went on, no prompting necessary. “The thing that was funniest, though, was looking back at what I said I was going to do.”

I glanced at the block of text alongside her photo: “Future work: Kathy wants to be a teacher or a doctor. Epidemiology—the study of the spread of diseases—excites her the most. Future play: There’s no place she doesn’t want to travel.”

“It was a little crazy how close I got to describing my life now,” she said. “I didn’t remember having said all that stuff. But here I am now. I actually
am
an epidemiologist. What made me think I wanted to be an epidemiologist back then, I can’t tell you. But somehow I said it. I teach and I travel too, and I’ve been incredibly lucky—I don’t think I said this in the article, but I always wanted to have a family, and I’ve been lucky enough to have four wild and crazy kids.”

“You have four? That’s wonderful! How do you—”

“I always say you have to pick them right, and I lucked out. My husband’s a peach. And then we were also lucky—my mom took care of the kids for a lot of years.”

We talked through the ages of all the kids (thirty, twenty-six, twenty-four, and eighteen), how Kathy met her husband (grad student bowling league), how her mother died (a stroke), Kathy’s best family vacation (a safari in Kenya with her mother and kids in tow), and her academic and practical focus, which had started out as asthma and moved to AIDS.

We made our way to talking about her teaching; she was restructuring her Principles of Epidemiology class for the fall.

“Here’s an epidemiology metaphor I always found interesting,” she said. “Back when cars first hit it big-time, there weren’t traffic lights. There weren’t stop signs. When there were crashes, and there were lots of them in those years, people always tried to frame the crashes as a moral issue. They’d say, ‘People just need to slow down and stop being reckless. The value of courtesy and caution has eroded. If only we could bring back those virtues we’d be just fine and these tragic automobile deaths would go away.’ And those sorts of arguments went on for a while until we came up with stoplights and installed them all over the place, and then lo and behold, people stopped smashing into each other quite so often. I always remember that when I think about diseases today. We always want to blame people and their morals and say that we just need to be careful. But there’s usually more to it, so when it comes to any disease-related issue I’m working on, I always like to ask myself, ‘What are the stoplights in this situation?’ and then once I start to figure those out, I have something to really talk about.”

I came to the end of the page in my notebook and flipped it quickly so I could write down every last word she was saying. And then I made her promise to send me her syllabus.

She asked me whether I’d found anyone else from her year yet.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I have always wanted to get back in touch with Susan Frock. When you find her, please give her my information. We roomed together during our week in New York and our trip to Europe, and she was just amazing.”

“Wait,
Charm
sent you on a trip to Europe?”

“Oh, it was this grand tour. Paris, Rome, and then sort of weirdly backwater Ireland, which I think was just because one of our chaperones was from there. I distinctly remember our bus getting stuck in the mud and sheep swarming us. But I have to tell you my best Susan story. In New York,
Charm
sent us to all sorts of shows, and one night after a play we were at Sardi’s, and across the room there was Paul Newman. We all started tittering and looking over, and Susan just got up, walked over, and said we were the
Charm
girls and would he come have a drink with us. Poised as can be, like she was asking a schoolboy to dance. And of course he said yes, and I will never forget the way he smelled. Like Old Spice and cigarettes. When that man went into food it was a terrible thing for me. I slather on his dressings. I pop all his popcorn. I just can’t get enough of his face in my cupboard.”

After joining her in another few moments of rhapsodizing about the particular pleasures of Newman’s Caesar, I told her how glad I was I’d found the right Kathy Knowlton and that I’d be back in touch as our plans for the anniversary celebration shaped up. We were planning something big. We just weren’t sure what yet.

She told me to come visit if I was ever in Minneapolis. It was the lovey-doveyest of good-byes. I hung up smiling. And I couldn’t stop. It was just one call, but it had gone well. If I had to report to XADI or Regina now, I could say I’d “really been hitting it off” with the winners. It gave me hope for all the hundreds of calls to come. I didn’t need to say much, just Ten Girls to Watch, and the floodgates opened. It was like being in
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,
except I would always remember the magic words that opened the treasure cave. Kathy had been so happy to reminisce. Listening to her filled me with energy. Instead of my earlier, tattered self, I felt buoyant, like a pumped-up tire, ready to ride smoothly over whatever rocky roads came my way.

Yes, I was also a tiny little bit worried that I might be doomed because unlike Kathy Knowlton as a young woman, I couldn’t say exactly what I wanted to do with my whole life, other than something vague like “be a writer” or “give back somehow” or “make enough money so I don’t have to move home.” But that was niggling. After melting away that morning, my confidence wasn’t quite firm yet, but it was re-forming, like Jell-O poured back into the mold and setting again quite nicely.