Ten Girls to Watch (27 page)

“The car repairs might be expensive,” I said after the tow truck dropped us at the Black Swan Inn. “Let me cover the room.”

“No way,” Elliot said. “You wouldn’t be stuck in Sturbridge if it weren’t for me and my dumb car. This is on me.”

He forged ahead to the counter. One room, he said, and when the clerk asked if we’d prefer a king or two doubles, he said doubles would be great. I liked that. A lot. When the bellman dropped us in our room, Elliot flopped onto one of the beds.

“I ruined your weekend. I’m so sorry,” he said. “And I’m sure your friends are totally bummed too.”

I flopped next to him on the bed. “It’s okay, we’ll get there tomorrow.”

He leaned over and kissed me.

I kissed him back.

In most of my dreams, I am outside myself, watching the action, like a patron in a movie theater. In real life, the same distance sometimes creeps in, a protective removal—I see myself doing things. But with Elliot, I didn’t feel any distance. There was just the warmth, the slight roughness of the edge of his fingers on my skin, the surprising span his palm and fingers covered. Just the bristle of his stubble on my neck. The smell of dryer sheets, deodorant, cologne, and beneath it all, as I ran my lips along the skin just above his collarbone, the smell of him, just him—faint, deep, masculine. I pressed my fingers into the muscles of his back. We only used one of the beds that night.

Alexandra Guerrero,

Harvard University, 1990

_________

THE SHOWSTOPPER

She’s played leading ladies from Lady Macbeth to Sweet Charity (she’s even played the occasional leading man—we hear her Coriolanus is Tony-worthy). But that’s just the start of Alex’s theatrical feats. In the past year and a half she directed and produced five plays, and her debut as a playwright comes this fall, when her one-act play
Mango Ladies
hits the college mainstage.

Chapter
Twelve

C
ozily, as if we did it every day, Elliot and I brushed our teeth together in the bathroom of the Black Swan Inn.

“Have any interesting dreams?” he said through the foam in his mouth.

“You wan me thoo tell you dow?” I laughed, equally foamy.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, still working my toothbrush, and we both looked at ourselves in the mirror. I noticed a sprinkling of gray hairs amid the stubble on his chin. His reflection winked at mine, and I laughed and dropped my face to rinse away the toothpaste.

Once we were all dressed and ready he took my hand and held it as we walked the four blocks to Wilson Automotive. In the waiting room, despite the smell of tires and motor oil, Elliot drank cup after cup of coffee. Didn’t the garage smell interfere with the flavor? I asked. He shrugged. His love of Styrofoam and prepackaged creamer seemed to know no bounds. By eleven his dented Honda was on the lift, and by eleven fifteen Mr. Wilson himself let us know he’d have to order in some transmission parts.

He could have a guy bring them down from Boston ASAP if we wanted, but he had a bunch of cars in line ahead of ours, and he probably couldn’t put any guys to work on the transmission until around two or three that afternoon. Elliot and I slumped back down in our chairs.

I’d been texting Helen with updates throughout the morning. Now I didn’t quite know what to say.

Helen didn’t give me much of a chance to say anything anyway.

“Don’t worry, Dawn,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out another weekend. I’d feel terrible if you left your friend all alone at a garage in the middle of nowhere.”

I protested and spewed half-formed thoughts about car rentals and Amtrak stations. But she stayed firm.

I said okay, told her again how sorry I was, and wished her luck on the reading.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Elliot said. I still could have called 411 and gotten the number for a rental car company in town. In fact, Mr. Wilson probably had the actual real-life Yellow Pages lying around somewhere. But I didn’t. Neither did Elliot. He refilled his coffee, and when he sat back down and put his arm around me I snuggled in close.

When the car was back in working order at six thirty that evening, we drove back to Brooklyn. Elliot asked whether I needed to rush right home. No, I said. I just needed to do a little work—some lawn care posting and coming up with my list of the ten most interesting Ten Girls to Watch for Regina—but I could do that from anywhere. And so he took me to his apartment, which was spacious for a studio, and swankily decked out for a freelance writer, with massive bookshelves packed with fabulous books, and mod glass spheres with clear lightbulbs hanging at various heights over the dining room table. What I thought to myself was
This is much cooler than Robert’s apartment.
What I said aloud was “You have excellent taste in lamps.”

“The better to see you with, my dear.”

I grimaced.

“Was that cheesy?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Stop being so critical and come over here,” he said.

I did.

After a Sunday morning spent in various states of lounging and making out with Elliot, I finally settled in at home, first to somewhat trudgingly answer lawn care questions, then to finish up my TGTW Top Ten bio compilation. During the weekend, in the lulls in the car-ride conversation and, later, the lulls in caressing, I’d been arguing with myself over certain women, making swaps, trying for diversity all around—age, geography, field of work, race. Now, after a few energetic rounds of cutting and pasting and comparing, I came up with the following:

Ten Girls to Watch 50th Anniversary—10 Most Prominent/Interesting Winners

1.
 
Rachel Link,
’97, Founder of
TheOne.com
, New York, NY

2.
 
Cindy Tollan,
’90, Two-Time Paralympic Games Gold Medalist for Women’s 400m Freestyle Swimming, Internationally Ranked Wheelchair Marathoner, Phoenix, AZ

3.
 
Rebecca Karimi,
’89, Former Fighter Pilot, Current Caltech Physics Professor, Pasadena, CA

4.
 
Jessica Winston,
’87, Soprano, Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY

5.
 
Dora Inouye,
’84, Mayor of Seattle, Seattle, WA

6.
 
Gerri Vans,
’83, Talk Show Host, Media Mogul, New York, NY

7.
 
Rita Tavenner,
’79, Architect, President of Tavenner Associates (Merck Building, American Express Building), Chicago, IL

8.
Robyn Jackson,
’68, President of Madison Capital, New York, NY

9.
 
Barbara Darby,
’64, bestselling novelist
(Kiss Me, Kill Me,
etc.), Augusta, GA

10.
 
Teresa Anderson,
’57, retired after 40 years as a first-grade teacher, Madison, WI

I’d left off another dozen women who could have just as easily been on the list. There was Alexandra (Andy) Benson, a 1978 winner, who’d been the saxophonist in Prince’s band for over a decade. There was 1990 winner Anne Marie Chu, who headed the Los Alamos National Lab’s Infectious Disease Control Computer Simulation Project. There was a 2004 winner, Kate Carlisle, whose Gift of Sight Foundation had made glasses available to thousands upon thousands of people in the developing world. There were big doctors and lawyers and even a winner from the sixties, Marcy Evans, who’d played opposite Sean Connery in a movie called
Hollywood Heartbreak.
And then, of course, there was Helen. I’d only left her off the list because although she was a famous writer, the novelist Barbara Darby had slightly better name recognition.

I wanted to call Helen, not to tell her I’d left her off the list, just to call. I did, and when she didn’t answer, I left a message. “If there’s any chance you’re free tonight, what about finally having our formal Ten Girls to Watch interview?” I said, then offered one more round of apologies for the failed trip.

Even without Helen, I was pleased with the list. So pleased, in fact, that I sent Elliot an e-mail to tell him what a super job I’d done.

All he wrote back was “miss you already.”

Robert was the first person I’d ever really dated. Up until the previous morning, he was my first and only toothbrush-time companion. He’d been the only one I’d ever shared a mirror with, my only mutual reflection gazing. It had been freezing the winter night he’d first leaned in to kiss me outside my dorm. We’d been on three polite dates, enjoyable absolutely, but restrained. But once he kissed me, instead of saying good-bye and going inside, I’d clung to him, and we’d stayed in the cold together, walking and talking and walking and talking, holding each other’s gloved hands, the street feeling more private than either of our shared rooms. It was like our kissing had whisked aside the curtains we’d each been hiding behind.

“So when did you first like me?” he’d asked, beaming.

I looked at him slyly, as if I weren’t going to answer, and then I broke into the same smile he had. “The morning we first went to brunch. You ate your fancy powdered-sugar waffles
so
daintily. After I got home, I told Abigail it was like eating brunch with Little Lord Fauntleroy. She still calls you that.”

“I was nervous!” he protested, though his grin didn’t fade at all. “You want to know when I first liked you?” he asked eagerly.

I shrugged, playing at being all cool again, but I could only keep up the act for about half a second. “Of course!” I said.

“First week of freshman year. I saw you across the dining hall. You were carrying this whole tray full of sodas—it looked like you were going to spill them all any minute, but you didn’t and then you sat down and passed them around to everyone at your table. I signed up for that shift at the shelter just so we’d be volunteering together. I’d been trying to come up with ways to meet you for months.” The words rushed out giddily, like he was an excited kid who’d been dying to share his secret.

I glowed, hardly noticing the cold anymore. The curtains were up, and there in the spotlights of center stage was this new thing. Us. Just like that, we were a couple.

The weekend with Elliot had been good. It had been great, really. But where that first kiss had illuminated everything between me and Robert, a whole weekend with Elliot hadn’t shed any such light. Was Elliot my boyfriend? That seemed a reach. You can trip and fall pretty easily when you’re fumbling around in the darkness. I was hoping to avoid bruising here, feeling bruised enough from Robert already. Even though I wanted to grip Elliot’s “miss you already” like it was some sort of candle lighting the way to our golden future together, I decided to try to relax. We’d see. This was the way grown-ups did these things—cool, casual, easy come, easy go—wasn’t it?

Afternoon turned to evening and Helen hadn’t returned my message, and I began to feel a familiar desperate loneliness. The sort of loneliness that paws awkwardly for any sort of relief. Who could I call? What video clips could I watch? What could I do to make this ache go away? I couldn’t call or e-mail Elliot. I’d just left him. And he wasn’t my boyfriend. I couldn’t call Helen. I’d already left my voice mail. I read the
New York Times
online. I watched some episodes of
The Daily Show
on Hulu. I called my mom, who didn’t answer. I called my dad, who didn’t answer either. I checked for more
LawnTalk.com
forum questions. I answered a few. The feeling didn’t abate.

Finally, I started typing an e-mail to Robert.

In one of the lawn care books I’d checked out from the library, I’d learned something about soil. If you work it too much, you can kill it. Clumps are a sign of active fungi, helpful bacteria, and moisture that allow for chemical binding and nutrient transfer. If you break up all the clumps, if you rake it and turn it and rake it and turn it some more, eventually, instead of a tidy, tended-to plot, you end up with desolate earth. Thoughts of Robert were dirt I’d turned over and over. And now, even with whatever it was with Elliot flitting about in the air, Robert was still the territory my mind turned to in its loneliness. In fact, if anything, Elliot made me think of Robert even more. Robert and Lily. I wanted what I felt between Robert and me to be lifeless. I fantasized that if I turned it over one more time, if I raked my fingers through it, if I rubbed it between my hands into finer and finer grains, at last it would lose its power.