Ten Girls to Watch (18 page)

I explained that I’d seen the ad and was transferred straightaway to an “intake specialist” named Becky.

They were looking for people who had trouble falling asleep, but not trouble staying asleep, she explained. Was that me? Would I be willing to stay overnight in a sleep lab? Was I willing to take medication that had proved safe in trials but was not yet FDA approved? Would I be willing to undergo regular urine and blood tests? Yes, yes, yes, yes, I answered. Maybe I still had Carol Stauffer’s chipper voice in my head, but somehow it all sounded kind of fun.

“Great!” Becky said, slipping out of her reading-a-form voice for the first time. She explained they had a six-week study she thought I’d be eligible for. Each week required one overnight stay in the sleep lab. I would be paid two hundred and fifty dollars per week, but there were progressive requirements each week, so I might be cut off at any point. If I made it through the full six weeks, that’d be fifteen hundred dollars. Either way, she wanted me to come in for the full battery of prestudy lab tests.

I felt like I’d discovered some vast hidden reservoir of talent, like I was a seven-foot-tall woman from the bush who’d been a local freak until basketball scouts discovered her and made her a star. An insomnia study was going to pay me almost as much as my actual job? Good golly!

I tried to maintain my cool until Becky and I said our good-byes, but my heart had scattered into a million pieces and was pounding ecstatically in every corner of my body. Fifteen hundred dollars?! I really hoped I’d pass those lab screens.

Though I also wondered what could happen from week to week to prevent my continued participation. Kidney failure? Sleep-drug-induced psychosis? But even those thoughts weren’t enough to dampen my spirits. After what I considered the most fruitful Craigslisting I’d had in months, I gleefully settled in to track down some more ladies.

I got another one on the phone—Felicia Calandra, 1976, a teacher turned stay-at-home mom turned Poughkeepsie, New York, city councilwoman. She’d started attending council meetings when she and her husband were having trouble with permits for their home renovation, but even after their garage extension and their driveway worked out, she kept going. It was only a few months before the election and she said, what the hay, I can do this. And she did. She won partly, she thought, because she’d connected with so many people through teaching their children. And it didn’t hurt that her father-in-law was Phil Calandra of Calandra’s, the much-loved Italian food shop in downtown Poughkeepsie. “You’re never going to go wrong being associated with good food,” she said. “That’s why everyone wants to slap their name on a recipe.” She offered to help with the catering for the TGTW party if we needed it. I suspected chicken parm, though delicious, might not be what Regina had in mind for the gala menu, but I told Felicia I’d let her know.

And then it was three fifteen. I called the number in XADI’s e-mail signature.

“Hi, Dawn,” she said. “Let’s just jump right in.”

I’d hardly expected pleasantries, but that was still a faster entrée than I’d expected. “Sounds good,” I fumbled, trying to recover.

“At our senior editors meeting this morning, Regina was very keen on discussing Ten Girls to Watch,” XADI said.

I had a picture of XADI sitting in her interior office, door closed, talking to me through her speakerphone with only her steepled hands visible in the small circle of light from her lamp, like a James Bond villain.

She explained that Regina wanted to bump the coverage up to January so it could run alongside a big “Real-Life Makeover” feature. We’d be meeting with her week after next to discuss, but in the meantime, XADI wanted the full details on my progress. She said all of this without pausing, without so much as waiting for an “uh-huh.” When at last she did pause, it felt like an appraising pause, as if she were leveling a look at me through the phone, trying to assess whether the rabble she had to work with could be made to perform at tolerable levels.

January was the first mention of any timeline. I felt that piece of information lodge in my brain, a painful wedge, splitting apart any sense of security I’d been amassing—so that was when I’d be back to scouring the world for employment. But I moved away from that thought and adopted my most efficient tone in order to give XADI the rundown. She’d seen the spreadsheet. I’d been working to populate it and had been making steady progress. I’d made contact, either by e-mail or phone, with thirty-eight women so far. Now that I was in the swing of things, I expected my pace to pick up.

“You’re doing great work,” she said in a clipped tone. Was that a compliment? It sounded so strange coming from her, like a yodel in an ice cave. I had half a second to revel in it before she’d moved on to telling me I should have a solid list of ideas for the anniversary event and coverage to present at the upcoming meeting—themes, possible keynote speakers, lots of ideas for titles and formats for the magazine—and that Regina wanted to have as much information as possible about as many women as possible before we met. XADI wanted to see it all by next Friday.

There was nothing to do but say yes, and with that XADI signed off. I gazed with unfocused eyes at the stacks of cardboard boxes beside my desk. The giddiness from Carol and the sleep-study phone call was a fuzzy memory. I had a lot of work to do.

_________

For the next two weeks, while regularly pausing to jot down potential themes and TGTW story titles—“50 Years of Wisdom,” though perhaps a little plain, was the one I kept returning to—I launched into all-day calling sessions and spreadsheet updates.

I spoke with Lucy Alexander, ’58. She’d married the fellow in the background of her photo in the magazine, a young man leaning against a truck with a cowboy hat tilted halfway over his face, a little like the Marlboro Man’s after a long day of lassoing.

Amy Brandt, ’72, was a lawyer in Kansas. She’d set up her own firm and now employed thirty-two other lawyers. She’d also taken up dancing and was on the road almost every weekend now for ballroom competitions.

Carly Schwartz, ’67, had been a model, then a food stylist—an easy transition, she explained, since the photographers she knew as a model introduced her to the photographers who shot food for advertisements and magazines. She and her husband had never been able to have children, she confided, and the sorrow in her voice when she explained this rang with feelings from another era. She didn’t cloak her emotion in humor and irony, and she lowered her voice as she spoke in a way that assumed we all understood the loss, the same hush you would use to break the news of a death.

I finally got Rachel Link’s lost acquaintance, Donetta Allen, on the phone. She was still a programmer in Silicon Valley. She’d also been one of Rachel’s first
TheOne.com
experiments. I told her about my party experience, playing down the part where I’d fled the scene, and she told me that Rachel had invited her to a party where all the women had D names and all the men had B names.

“Deborah, Daisy, Danielle,” she said, “and Bruce, Brian, Brad, Bernie, Bob, Bill . . . Buster. All names like that. She was testing out some article she’d read on people with names at the front of the alphabet having similar traits. All I’ll say is Buster was all busted. I don’t know how I ended up going out with him after the party. But that was the end of me and TheOne.” I poured forth pure sympathy.

Between calls, I labored over profiles. In the hurry XADI had put me in, I didn’t write them for every single woman, but some of the women had stories I just had to take the time to record. Like Patricia Collins, ’67.

She ran a winery in Napa Valley, and when I asked her how she’d wound up doing something so cool, she didn’t answer right away.

“There’s a short version, and a long version,” she finally said.

“I’m up for both,” I prompted.

“The short version is that I grew up on a farm and always wanted to get back to something like that. The long version is a little twistier.”

After college, Patty’s roommate had talked her into moving to Chicago, where Patty found a job in an advertising office. “That’s where I met Henry,” she said. “He was my boss’s son, and he worked at a bank right around the corner.” They started meeting for lunch, and then for dinner, and soon they were in love. And then Henry was drafted. He never came home from Vietnam.

“It wasn’t as if I never got over him,” Patty explained. “I did. But there was never anyone else like him.” After that, Patty left Chicago and followed friends to upstate New York, where they lived on a farm collective. Eventually, she and a friend from the collective moved to Northern California and found jobs at a winery. When she turned fifty, she bought fifty acres and started her own winery: “H.”

“My parents would never say this,” Patty said, “but living on a farm, your life is very sensual. You’re always tasting, touching, smelling, testing. And I think that’s part of why I love this. Wine is such a pure experience. For a few moments the only question in the whole world is how does this taste? Forget about politics, disasters, your life, forget about your history, your future, all your feelings—focus for a few seconds on just the taste, the smell, the feel of the wine. Just for those few seconds. I think that’s as close to heaven as we get.”

Later that week, a bottle arrived for me in the mail. The label was beautiful, the
H
embellished in purple and gold, like one of those ornate cardinal letters in a medieval illuminated manuscript. “Try this,” the note read. “I think you’ll like it. I always describe it as ‘crisp and full at the same time.’ Can’t wait to meet in person! Patty.”

I thought about calling Ralph right then to see whether he had a bottle opener, but instead I set the bottle aside, in a safe spot beside my desk. There would be a perfect day for that wine. I’d wait till then.

LeAnne Marston,

Indiana University, 1991

_________

THE ATHLETE

LeAnne powered IU’s volleyball team to the National Title in this year’s NCAA Division 1 Championships, demolishing records for individual “digs” and “kills” along the way (she’s ranked number one nationally for both). A true scholar-athlete, the 6’2” biology major’s near-perfect GPA puts her in the top 2% of her class. Off campus, she serves as a volunteer EMT and as a coach for the Special Olympics. “There’s nothing like seeing my team score,” she says. “You can just feel the joy.”

Chapter
Eight

S
arah had stayed close to home for college. The University of Oregon, just an hour up the road. She hadn’t come home that much during her first or second year, but her junior year, my sophomore year of high school, things changed. That was the year of the divorce.

They’d waited till Sarah’s birthday weekend, in February, to tell us. She’d come home for the day, and I suppose they figured it was a good time since we’d all be together. They’d even waited till after Sarah had blown out the candles and her cake had been cut and served. We were sitting around the dining room table, all of us dressed up for the occasion, Sarah especially so in a red shift dress and black patent heels I’d helped her pull out from the back of her closet that afternoon.

“Girls, we need to tell you something,” Dad said timidly, both of his hands gripping the table, as if it might jerk away from him at any moment. “There are going to be some changes.” He then looked to Mom, as if cueing her.

“Your dad is going to be moving to an apartment, in that complex by the freeway exit,” she said. It was the first time she’d ever said “your dad” instead of just “Dad.” After that, she’d never refer to him any other way.

Sarah blinked repeatedly. I could feel my own eyes doing the opposite, turning buggy. For a second, I felt like I had 360-degree vision. I could see the ice cream melting on the cake plates in front of us. I could see the rain plinking on the sidewalk through the window behind us. I could see the little lines around my mom’s mouth pulled taut. I could see my dad, shifting his heavy-lidded eyes from me to Sarah and back, waiting for one of us to move this forward since he couldn’t seem to.

“Are you . . . getting divorced?” my voice creaked.

“We are,” Mom said, trying to sound resolute but sounding instead like her words were riding waves, the pitch wobbling unsteadily.

It wasn’t a surprise. But it was. I couldn’t really remember our parents ever being
happy
together. Mom treated Dad as if he were some sort of petty villain, like he had a magic purse of gold coins he kept hidden away and if he’d just fish it out, we could finally
live.
Dad treated Mom as if she were a remedial student, her every suggestion laced with a feeble-mindedness he disdained. Mom would say, “I thought we could organize the garage on Saturday,” and Dad would roll his eyes, but because they were both fundamentally passive, he wouldn’t say no, he’d just be evasive, and she wouldn’t push it, she’d just go out and buy new shelves, and then he’d be furious about whatever she’d spent on the shelves, and she’d be furious that he wasn’t helping her set them up. But it wasn’t like they yelled. They just set their jaws and looked at each other with disgust and shot glances at Sarah and me that were supposed to confirm our sympathy for their side. Then everyone would tiptoe for hours until the contempt waned, though it never waned for long.