Ten Girls to Watch (29 page)

With Helen’s news, I felt like the kids in the families Alexandra described, losing this dream of perfection. But maybe the rest of what Alexandra said was true too. Maybe Helen’s divorce was going to free her to be who she ought to be. I remembered the time she’d asked whether I liked who I was with Robert. Maybe Helen was going to like herself a lot better without Paul. I couldn’t really imagine her being any more incredible, but maybe
she
could imagine it. Maybe in her inner world, she was clamoring to breathe free. I made a mental note: introduce Alexandra and Helen at the party. She probably already had a divorce lawyer, but knowing a good mediator never hurt.

A few days later I interviewed another woman I couldn’t leave at the office, Candace Chan, a 1986 winner who’d debuted as a cello soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony at sixteen and gone on to be the star of Princeton’s biology department. Now, she was an assistant professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Stanford, specializing in membrane-associated cell biological processes. None of that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about her, though. The reason came after all the talk about the long haul she’d been on—six years for her PhD, four for her postdoc research, and though she was now in a tenure-track position, tenure itself was still a hurdle to leap—when she turned the conversation to her daughter, Ana, who’d just turned twelve.

“I can’t believe I’m telling you this”—her voice shifted, emotion lifting her tone a touch—“but Ana is doing so well with her new stepdad. I’m so proud of her. Her father and I met during college, and we went all the way through our PhDs together. Life was just so intense for so many years, it wasn’t until Ana was in school and we were both professors that we even came up for air and realized something was missing. More than something. Almost everything. I actually didn’t realize it until I started playing the cello again. I’m a very analytical person, except when it comes to music—it’s really always been this tool for me to access my emotions—and when I got back to playing, I started to feel how unhappy I really was. I thought maybe if I changed instruments it’d help. So I decided to learn the mandolin, and it helped, just not the way I figured it would. That’s how I met Len. He’s in a bluegrass band. He’s also a lawyer for HP, but we met at a concert. Eric and I were still together, but with Len the world opened up. Everything sounded like music.”

She paused for the first time. “Telling Eric was hard,” she finally continued, “but telling Ana, knowing I was the one who made her cry like that, it was devastating. But it’s been a few years now, and it still feels like I finally just opened the windows and let life in. And I think Ana can finally see that too. What kind of cheater says she’s happy she set that kind of example for her daughter? But it’s weirdly true. I want her to see that life is full of happiness if she’s willing to risk it.”

In some ways, her story reminded me of Stephanie Linwood, her reminder that life is long and you can’t just look at one moment and judge your life based on that snapshot. If you’d looked at Candace with her first husband, things might have looked good. If you’d looked at her when she was having an affair, it might have all looked bad. But if you looked at the whole thing, a stretch of many years, you saw something else, a woman and a family emerging happier and more fulfilled. Sitting on my bed with my laptop on my knees, I realized that I’d pretty much been treating my parents as if their stories were encapsulated in a single snapshot, as if they were forever locked in place as the unhappy people they’d been when I was in high school. I needed to stop doing that. In the last seven years, I’d gone from being a kid who couldn’t drive to being a college graduate who paid her own bills. It seemed quite possible that they’d changed a little too.

A thunderstorm had arrived in Brooklyn. I listened to the rain pummeling my window while rereading the profile I’d just written for Candace. Then I called my mom.

“Hey, sweetie!” she said. “It’s late where you are!”

I told her I was still up working, and then I answered every single one of the million questions she asked. Usually, it wasn’t all that long before I felt a little tired of describing, again, exactly what my office looked like or what I was wearing that day or recounting verbatim a conversation I’d had. But tonight, her rapt attention felt supportive and caring, not suffocating.

“So how many identical cardigans would you say he has?” My mom laughed, cherishing this detail about Ralph’s wardrobe.

“I think I’ve seen it in five different colors so far, but who knows, there could be dozens more in his collection.”

I asked her about all the latest at Mary Kay (they had a really exciting new lipstick/lip gloss hybrid that was supposed to be shiny but not sticky), and all the news in the extended family. (One of my cousins was having twins, just like Sarah. “You better watch out,” she said. “You probably have the twin gene too.” Impressive how she was always able to work in her hopes for my future childbearing somehow . . .) Then, feigning a casual air, I asked if she’d been on any dates lately, a topic well outside our usual areas of discussion.

“Oh, there’s no one around here!” she clipped.

“Did I tell you someone signed me up for TheOne?”

“You didn’t!” she said, as if I’d just admitted to something truly outrageous, like streaking through Times Square or sneaking out of a restaurant with salt and pepper shakers in my purse.

I told her all about Elliot, though I left out his age and prior marital status and the part about us sharing a hotel room. Then I said, “You know what I think? I think I should sign you up!”

She clucked, a don’t-be-silly sound. “I can’t imagine there’d be enough people around here to even put together a single party.”

“You might have to go up to Eugene for the party,” I mused. “I don’t know. But I’m sure TheOne has something. What do you say?”

“Let me think about it. I’m not saying no. Just, I’ll get back to you,” she wheedled.

As a family schooled in the passive arts, the Wests excelled in I’ll-get-back-to-you avoidance tactics.

“Yeah, right!” I laughed. “I’m not letting this go that easy.”

“Fine, fine!” she said, laughing too. “I’m serious. Just let me think about it for a little while.”

“Okay. Take your time,” I said.

She then asked me about Abigail and how she was doing. Last I’d heard, things were still humming along nicely with the birdsong guy, and the intestinal parasites seemed to have quieted themselves if not entirely moved on. My mom was glad to hear it.

After we said good-bye, I almost logged on to TheOne right then and there to create her profile. But I’d wait. I had a feeling after I gave her a little “time to think about it” she just might come around all on her own.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of the rain, pummeling away, and my mom’s “I love you” still lingering in my ears.

The next week, I brought home yet another profile to work on. Allison Katz, a 1997 winner who at age twenty had already explored more previously unexplored miles of cave than any other US caver under thirty. She’d also become a professional photographer as a teenager, with photos she’d taken of rare cave rock formations in
National Geographic, Outdoors
, and a handful of other magazines.

She had just finished her PhD in geology at Cornell a few months earlier. I tracked her down in Mexico completing a postdoc fellowship at the University of Mexico City, researching the Yucatán’s massive flooded caves. We talked for a while about Mexico, how great the food was, then somehow we got onto the subject of geology jokes—
Igneous is bliss; Sedimentary, my dear Watson, sedimentary.

Finally, I asked her the obvious: “Isn’t it scary? I’m sure you’re used to it now, but was it ever terrifying to squeeze into all those dark, unknown spaces, or you’re just . . .” I trailed off. “I dunno, fearless?”

She laughed. “I hate horror movies. Like if I watch one, I think there’s something on the other side of the shower curtain for days, so, no, I’m not fearless. I just got started caving young. My grandpa died in a mine collapse, and I think my daddy didn’t want me to grow up afraid of anything. So he took me hiking in caves starting forever ago.”

I asked her what it had been like, caving with her father.

“I remember the first time I ever pushed through into new area,” she said. “As in no map, and absolutely no one has ever been past this point before—and then there I was, my light shining into a whole new passage, my daddy yelling from the other side of the tiny space I squeezed through, telling me to describe what I saw. There’s no bigger rush.”

“It must be amazing to be able to call yourself an explorer,” I said. “I mean, how many people can say that about themselves and mean it literally?”

Instead of laughing it off as a compliment, she answered back seriously. “I’ve actually thought a lot about this. Some people are creators. That’s their thrill. I’ve got a quieter streak. I just want to uncover what’s there, I just want to marvel at what’s beneath my feet, this whole time it’s been there, just waiting for me to find it. That’s me. I think a lot of times people think explorers are the wild and crazy ones, but I don’t think so. We’re actually more reserved. We just want to find things and treasure them.”

I’d never made a distinction between creating and exploring before, but now it made me think of my own writing. Which kind of person was I? I felt like these profiles and all the work I was doing on Ten Girls to Watch was something closer to exploring. There were these women out there with amazing stories. All I had to do was find them. In some ways, that’s what Helen had been urging me to do with my own personal writing as well—find the truth and tell it. TGTW was a pleasure—really it was—I loved what I was doing. But it didn’t feel quite the same as writing fiction.

When I wrote stories in college, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a perfectly formed phrase in my head. I’d be walking down the street, not even really thinking about a story, and an idea for a scene would come to me. There was a magic feeling to it all. That didn’t happen with the profiles I was writing now.

When Allison said she had a quieter streak, I’d instinctually nodded and thought,
me too.
After all, no one in the West family ever yelled, just silently seethed, and whereas Robert was the sort to noisily share his thoughts on things like the proper angle to hold one’s head while conversing, I was more likely to keep such opinions to myself. But maybe these weren’t the right comparisons. Maybe I had a loud streak, and I’d just never realized it. At night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, behind my closed eyes I’d spin fantasies, and they usually circled back to a vision of myself with gray hair and a floppy hat, coming in after an afternoon of gardening in the yard to a bookshelf lined with books I’d written. I’d never thought about it until now, but that fantasy shelf wasn’t full of journalistic nonfiction. Those books were novels. My novels. Maybe my loud streak translated to this: I didn’t want to find other people’s treasure. I wasn’t going to follow in Helen’s footsteps. I was happy to tell other people’s stories sometimes, but in the end, I wanted a story that was mine. Even writing a true story about myself wouldn’t cut it—I’d have to account for the people who’d shared the experience with me. If you make it up, though, it’s all yours. Maybe I was an explorer for now. But what I really wanted, someday, was to be a creator.

After I finished with Allison’s profile I took my copy of
Must We Find Meaning?
from my cardboard nightstand and pulled out Helen’s card from inside the pages.

“D, I believe in you, and what makes me really happy is I think you’re starting to believe in you too. Love, H.”

I thought about Helen’s advice to turn my short story into nonfiction. Maybe part of believing in myself was trusting my gut and
not
following her suggestion. That night, for the first time in more than a year, I opened the Sound of Music file on my laptop and started revising. I didn’t conduct any interviews or call a soul to fact-check anything. I just wrote and wrote. Not that I made a lot of progress, a couple of paragraphs maybe, but they were mine—all mine—and finally, I was writing again.

_________

During these weeks of hard work, neither Robert nor I ever acknowledged my pitiful e-mail, but throughout the days I occasionally sent Elliot funny tidbits about winners I’d talked to or links to events I thought sounded interesting and notes that said things like “Thought I might check this out. Care to join?” He almost always replied hours later via text message, reply being a loose description for his brief missives, which never directly addressed my attempts at making plans: “Hey there.” “Hello you.” “Guess who I’m thinking about . . .” “Paging Ms. West. Ms. West to the stage.” When he did actually e-mail, it was things like a link to the song “Secret Agent Man.” In the subject line. Body of the e-mail blank.

While Elliot’s electronic communication skills were somewhat lacking, he continued to please in person. After my first crazy week, he made me Saturday brunch. Lovely, non-takeout huevos rancheros at his dining room table. The next week he took me out to a rooster-themed Peruvian place in Boerum Hill, pan flutes and salsa music alternating over the speakers as he introduced me to ceviche. He told me about accidentally dropping his keys down a subway grate outside his first New York apartment, then miraculously fishing them out with a wire clothes hanger. I told him about the odd jobs of my teenage years (bumper car attendant, ice cream scooper, janitor). He told me about his brother’s years in and out of rehab. I told him about Sarah’s twins. When we were together in public, we started holding hands. I didn’t send any more e-mails to Robert (though I still spent far too much time agonizingly imagining him frolicking around the city with Lily).

One night, Elliot invited me over to his place and cooked dinner for me. He poured the olive oil with dramatic flair and stirred the sautéing onions and garlic not with a spatula but with a flick of the pan that tossed them through the air, an ironic show-offy smile on his lips the whole time. When he was done, he plated the mushroom fettucini, adding pretty sprigs of parsley. At the dining room table, we both tucked into the delicious pasta, and he started telling me about an article he was working on, an investigative piece on bat flu versus bird flu. In the middle of talking, he stopped and put his fork down, his face suddenly stricken.