Ten Girls to Watch (30 page)

“What’s wrong?” I asked anxiously. Had I said something? Had I
not
said something?

Sighing, he answered, “Do you ever worry that things just aren’t going to work out? I mean, I had these big dreams. Famous writer: Elliot Kaslowski. The more time passes the more I’m sure that’s not happening, and if that’s not happening, what else isn’t happening?”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “I worry about that all the time. I have this perfect vision of me alone at age fifty-five, selling Mary Kay, which is so mean to say, because that’s what my mom does and that’s like saying she’s a failure, but she actually really likes it! And she’s really good at it. And she has kids! But when I picture it, it’s just me, all alone with boxes and boxes of antiaging serum, and then I start hyperventilating.”

“I see this big billboard flashing FAILURE,” he said. “And I’m from Nevada, so when I say flashing, I’m talking megawatts.”

The few times I’d ever tried to describe what a looming fear of failure felt like to Robert, he’d had no idea what I was talking about. “But that’s crazy,” he’d say. Or even more helpfully, “Just don’t think that.” Elliot, on the other hand, seemed to understand this deep part of me.

We finished our pasta and the bottle of wine we’d been working on and then we retired to the couch, and my chin got rawer and rawer with more stubbly kissing, and when we pulled back and looked at each other, I wanted to tell him I loved him. I didn’t love him, not yet, and even if I did (which I didn’t), it would have been too soon to say anyway. I still wasn’t even sure we were really a couple. With Robert, I’d known it right away: curtain up, lights on, actors on the stage. With Elliot, I could tell we were in a theater and the overture was playing faintly—but those stage curtains were still tightly drawn. There was a chance I would never see behind them. Maybe there was nothing behind them at all. Still, the pesky words clomped loudly in my brain, like little rebels trying to defy my gag order by making so much noise that Elliot would hear them through my skull. I missed saying those words. More than that, I missed saying them and meaning them.

We never got around to doing the dishes that night. But who cared if they sat overnight? Before bed, Elliot took out his iPhone and replied to a bunch of e-mails. But who cared if he never answered mine? Answer to both questions: Dawn West, but then Elliot pulled my hair aside and gently, gently kissed my ear . . . and I certainly didn’t care right then.

Candace Chan,

Princeton University, 1986

_________

THE MUSICIAN

Candace debuted with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at 16 and has been a working cello soloist ever since. Now a double major in biology and chemistry, she represents the undergraduate community on the university science council. While she spends more hours in the lab than the practice room these days, she still finds time to perform with the Princeton University orchestra. “I come alive when I’m playing,” she says. “Music is what keeps me in balance and gives me perspective. Without it, nothing else in my life seems to make sense.”

Chapter
Thirteen

W
ith the arrival of November, I reached a predictable challenge in the Kelly Burns calendar, which I had nonetheless failed to foresee: the end of lawn care season. Sure, I still got a few questions from eager souls curious about when to stop mowing for the winter or from procrastinators who wondered whether it was too late for a fall fertilizer application. But their traffic was but a sorry little trickle. Why did I only seem to attract readers in cold-weather climates? Where were the Floridians when you needed them?

Unfortunately, the November chill also coincided with a fascinating vanishing act on the part of my roommate. I would have worried about her, except there were signs of Sylvia all over the apartment—dirty dishes in the sink, celebrity photo-stalking magazines on the floor by the couch, the double-fast diminishment of my shampoo—yet she never seemed to be in the apartment when I came home from work. In the mornings her door stayed closed and a steady silence poured from under the crack. Weekends were even weirder—no sign of her at all. Maybe Rodney was back from Toledo and she was shacking up at his place? Who knew. But what I did know was that she needed to pay her part of the rent.

I started with a nice note on the fridge, tacked in place with a pineapple magnet (a goodwill gesture, the pineapple being the universal symbol of hospitality and all):

I don’t know how we keep missing each other! I hope everything’s going well with the job search! Just a quick reminder that I have to send in our rent check tomorrow, so if you could just leave a check for your part on the table, I’ll be sure to get it. Thanks!

No check appeared. Though several of my grapefruits disappeared. I went ahead and sent in the entirety of our rent on time, scrupulous tenant that I am, which slimmed my bank account to double digits until my next paycheck. I considered another note, but my sister, in a rare spare moment, had recently e-mailed me a link to a favorite new blog of hers,
passiveaggressivenotes.com
. Her fav pick:

Hay ladies,

(particularly Jaime . . . you know who you are) Last night, as Ames knows, I was
extremely
drunk. Yet I still washed my shot glasses and put them away. I happen 2 know some of u are mormons so you aren’t drunk when cooking. So the mess you so often leave in the kitchen is just inexcuseable. Please, rep the amazing strong young women that you are and clean up. Lots of love, Pamela.

With this reminder that roommate notes are a dangerous game, I decided further missives of this sort should be avoided. And so, the morning of November 6—six days, I waited six days!—I held off until nine o’clock, then knocked gingerly on Sylvia’s door. No response. I knocked louder. And then a little louder.

She cracked her door open and leaned out, her hair in a matted mess and her eyes only half open.

“Hey,” she said.

“I’m so sorry to wake you up,” I said in my hangover-friendliest quiet voice. “I just wanted to see if there’s any chance I could get you to write me a rent check.”

“Oh yeah, sorry, sorry,” she said, opening her door a bit more and shuffling over to her desk. She pulled out a checkbook, and a minute later I was on my way with her $950 check in my pocket.

I continued on my merry way to work, feeling quite proud of my direct approach and its great success. This sense of accomplishment expired exactly three days later, when Sylvia’s check bounced.

November heralded another change too: Elliot landed a few big article assignments. In addition to his
Charm
column, he was writing a piece for
Grid
on the future of brain chip implants and a piece for the
Atavist
on a scientist and an industrial designer who had teamed up to try to build an underwater air-filled terrarium that could sustain human life.

I imagined the editors at
Charm
and
Grid
receiving doting five-word e-mails and texts from Elliot. Someone had to be, and it wasn’t me. At least before when he’d ignored e-mails, we’d seen each other in person, which more than made up for it. Now we turned into something that looked less like a romantic relationship and more like voice mail pals.

“Dawn West, I miss you,” his message would say. I’d listen on my way out of work at eight or nine o’clock. He worked late and turned his phone off so he could concentrate, so he claimed, so when I called back his voice mail answered, and I’d say things like “Elliot Kaslowski, are you eating fettucini without me?” I wondered why he didn’t come by after he finished writing for the day. Or why he didn’t ask me to come over and read in a corner while he worked. In college, Robert and I were never apart for long, even during finals we had studied across the table from each other in the library. “Let me know if you want me to come over and keep you company” was as far as my voice mails ever went in asking for such an arrangement. Days went by and he never “let me know.”

Meanwhile, I was as busy as ever in my basement. XADI and I finally filed the magazine copy. Next step, the TGTW video. Regina looked at a draft treatment XADI had put together, jotted a few notes, and passed it back to XADI. The major theme of her notes: Scrap the treatment. If the film was to be a show-stopper at the gala and a hit on the website thereafter, we’d need in-depth, in-person interviews with each of the ten women we’d chosen to highlight. Since it wasn’t feasible to send XADI on the road for any duration without large sections of the magazine falling apart, she’d stay put and cover the New York crowd—Robyn Jackson, Gerri Vans, Rachel Link, Jessica Winston—while I’d travel with the film crew and their cameras to interview the rest: Dora Inouye, Rebecca Karimi, Rita Tavenner, Cindy Tollan, Teresa Anderson, Barbara Darby. A business trip! The very idea of it made me giddy.

While I worked out a trip itinerary and set up filming dates with each of the women, the events team began to pull together the plans for the gala. Gerri Vans signed on for keynoting. They booked the Morgan Library, a museum in the East Thirties that housed J. P. Morgan’s art and book collections and which had just been updated with a soaring glass gallery between the old and new wings. The space was stunning, but it also fused historic and contemporary architecture in a way that felt just perfect for our gathering.

I forged ahead with my reviews of this year’s TGTW applications too. I was still several boxes away from the finish line, and the files looked like confetti thrown around my office, with various degrees of “maybes” sprinkled all over the floor. I couldn’t believe the women I was putting in the “no” pile. Volunteering at a school for girls in Mali? Meh. Did you also found the school? Oh, you were a basketball star at your university? Was the WNBA talking about drafting you? A gene therapy discovery? How big a gene therapy discovery? What was obvious from my brutal culling was that I never would have stood a chance in this competition. Though I suppose that thought could have made me feel bad, it didn’t. Strangely, I felt something closer to relief. I wasn’t in college anymore. I wasn’t even in my first year out of college anymore. I was in a different category from these girls. Reading about all their undergraduate accomplishments, I felt . . . older. I liked the feeling.

I started staying at the archives later and later every night, partly because I was busy and excited for the work, but also partly because I didn’t want to go home. With Elliot’s deadlines and ensuing silence, the nights just seemed so long. Late one Thursday evening, I finally finished reviewing the last box of TGTW applications, having winnowed the field from 1,211 hopefuls to the fifty XADI had asked for. As my final yes, I tossed in the application of an MIT student who had invented a portable and affordable disaster relief shelter, complete with a self-contained water supply, electricity, and an air filter, which was now being manufactured by a company in Denmark. She was also president of the MIT undergraduate association and the director of a science-focused after-school program for low-income children. I was switching out of my heels and into my sneakers (who I thought would be impressed by my heels down in the basement was unclear) when my phone rang. “S.A.R.,” said the caller ID.

“Hi, Elliot.” My voice sounded leery—it had been a full week since we’d actually talked—but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Hey there.”

“Are you home?” he said.

I told him I was heading that way, and he said, “Don’t go home. Come over to my house instead.”

“It’s so late,” I said. Had I been imagining the slow fade of Dawn and Elliot? Had it really only been a matter of collective busyness?

“But I have a surprise,” he said.

Walking up the stairs to his apartment, I smelled popcorn. When he opened the door, the whole room was dark except for the lamp beside the bed.

“Is the popcorn the surprise?” I said.

“Nooooo.” He pulled me toward the bed until he fell back onto it, pulling me down with him. He rolled me over and took off my coat and scarf, kissed me quickly, then said, “I got a book deal today.”

“What? I had no idea you were even working on a book,” I stammered, then said, “Congratulations!”

He smiled, stood up, and brought over the popcorn. “It’s a collection of short stories.”

“You write fiction? Is not telling me this stuff part of some weird Secret Agent complex?” I socked him in the arm.

“It’s a new thing for me. I didn’t really want to tell anyone unless it was real. And now it’s real.” His eyes were almost manically wide and bright.

“Are you going to let me read them?” I said.

“Not right now. You’re busy right now,” he said, kissing me.