Ten Girls to Watch (33 page)

That night, I worked and worked, long into the hours when I should have turned out my lights and gone to bed. I’d still been following the thread of what I knew to be the true story, but now I added scenes that were pure invention. Elsie writing a newspaper ad to publicize her first show, Michael helping his mother cut the fabric for her nun’s habit. Now that I wasn’t writing about my actual grandmother, something that had been stuck came unstuck. Elsie could be as difficult or beguiling as the scenes demanded. I realized that another reason I might have put off working on the story for so long was fear of real-life hurt feelings if the “nonfiction” version were ever published. We Wests were sensitive. What most people would think of as an innocuous description of, say, a warbling singing voice could strike my family members as purest insult. But now that I was straying farther and farther from reality, I ran free.

The next morning Danny, Joel, and I hit the airport predawn and arrived in Phoenix at seven thirty. We’d made a trade—a night of rest after our cross-country flight in exchange for doubling up and interviewing Cindy Tollan, Paralympic gold medalist and world-class wheelchair marathoner, in Phoenix that morning and Dora Inouye, mayor of Seattle, in Seattle that afternoon. Danny and Joel felt put upon by the fast and furious flying. I, in contrast, felt like a glamorous globetrotter.

When I’d called Cindy Tollan to set up an interview time, I’d timidly suggested something around eight o’clock. Rather than balk, she’d said eight was absolutely perfect. She would have just gotten back from her morning run, which is what she called it, she said, even though it was actually a morning wheel, because who called it a morning wheel?

So that was that. Danny and Joel’s only recourse for expressing their displeasure at our second early morning in a row was hitting up a drive-through Starbucks and ordering gigantic coffees and excess amounts of pastries, all on
Charm
’s tab. I couldn’t believe we were allowed to order coffee on
Charm
’s tab in the first place. Business travel was really doing it for me.

Cindy Tollan had been nothing but lovely over the phone, albeit perhaps a little on the perky side, but I’d been secretly dreading the meeting anyway. I worried that I’d come off as an exploitative twenty-something interviewer asking the paraplegic athlete to testify for
Charm.

“You must be Mr. Tollan,” I said to the tan man in the golf shirt who opened the front door of the ridiculously vast stucco home.

“ ’Deed I am,” he said, shaking my hand. “You must be the folks from
Charm,
” he said, then hollered, “Ciii-ndy.”

“Co-ming,” she hollered back. Hollering was good. Usually people who hollered didn’t fault naive twenty-somethings for phrasing their questions imperfectly.

From the entryway, we could see out the living room windows, or, more properly, the living room wall, which was all windows and which overlooked a gorgeous lawn and terraced garden. Here were the warm-weather readers Kelly Burns needed! In the middle of the yard an inordinately long and thin pool, almost like a canal, sliced through the grass. Plantings of succulents, light green and dusky purple, thrived along its edges, height added here and there by lime-green ceramic pots.

“Good morning,” Cindy said as she wheeled into the living room. “Come in, sit down.” Her voice sounded a little lower than I remembered. Earthier. Almost before I could take in her face, I noticed the ropes of muscles in her forearms. Her husband slid open part of the window wall and said, “Why don’t ya’ll come out here on the patio. It’s such a nice morning.” We did, and moments later, Joel and Danny found their shot: Cindy facing south with a backdrop of yucca plants and silvery green Russian olive trees.

As luck would have it, I didn’t say anything dumb, and Cindy didn’t come off as even one bit ickily inspiring. She was just a carefree jock. If she were in ads for sunglasses or watches, the people of America, me included, would go wild for her shades and timepieces. She talked about racing (hard-core), her husband and their going-on-twenty-year relationship from college straight on through (soft-core), and competition in general.

“I’d been an athlete for a long time before Ten Girls to Watch,” she said. “I started swimming right after my accident, when I was eleven, and I was used to winning competitions, but not that kind of competition. I was going to have my picture in
Charm
?
Me
?” She laughed. “I felt stupid even sending in an application, and then, what do you know? I won. It started this whole chain reaction where I started doing things I’d never thought I could do. I married Mark. I took up marathoning. We left the Midwest and moved out here. We designed and built this house. I decided to try my hand at coaching. On and on, all these things that seemed scary or crazy or impossible, and I really feel like Ten Girls to Watch was the start of all that for me.”

When it was finally time to go, Mark and Cindy sent us on our way with cheek kisses all around, plus little Ziploc bags of nuts from their cashew tree.

_________

Shockingly, the sun was shining when we arrived in Seattle four hours later. Nice light glinted through the windows of Dora Inouye’s office as her staff gave us the rundown. Gesturing to a big American flag in front of a slim chair with yellow silk cushions, her chief of staff said, “That’s setup number one.” He then pointed to the window. “The other option is this view behind the desk. If you set up the camera at an angle, you get a shot of the Space Needle.”

I was a little cheesed-out by the flag (nothing but love for America, but it felt a touch over-the-top), but Danny said “Lighting’s better by the flag” and put down the tripod.

Dora herself was running a little late, the chief of staff informed us. She was walking back from the Seattle Climate Change Conference.

Even though Seattle is mostly a car city, everything I’d read about Dora highlighted the fact that she never drove; she took public transportation or walked to and from every meeting, even in the rain. At the previous year’s Climate Change Conference—Dora had held one every year since she took office—college students from the University of Washington picketed the conference, up in arms about Seattle’s new “Bridges to the Future” campaign, which planned to widen several of the major bridges around Seattle in order to improve traffic flow. Each bridge would include a dedicated bus lane, but the students felt that was an inadequate gesture. Among the signs bobbing up and down in the protesters’ hands were “Bridges to our DOOM,” “The A-BRIDGED Plan: Destroy Seattle,” and less bridge-based but perhaps more to the point, “Light-Rail NOW!”

When she walked out of the session and found herself confronted by the crowd, cameras trained on her, Dora looked beatifically upon the protesters, broke from her entourage, approached the student with the “Light-Rail NOW!” sign, and asked whether she could borrow it. With the sign and the students right behind her, Dora told the TV stations nothing was better than seeing civically engaged young people, that she had been urging the city council to adopt Light-Rail all along, and that if it hadn’t been clear already, the good people of Seattle overwhelmingly supported this measure.

The last was not technically true. Most of the good people of Seattle still wanted to drive and weren’t eager to fund rails they didn’t think they’d actually use. Later, when one of the city council members confronted Dora on that, her reply was that she’d said the good people of Seattle, not the bad ones. She didn’t say it in a press conference, just a boring old meeting, but one of the Seattle papers ran the line anyway. In most cities that would have caused a holy ruckus. In Seattle, apparently, most people felt guilty enough about driving already that there was barely a peep—one or two letters to the editor, nothing more.

The chief of staff’s BlackBerry buzzed. “Dora’s coming up the stairs,” he said, an edge of frenzy in his voice. And indeed, not ten seconds later Dora strode into the room. She had never looked like a typical political woman. No pearls or skirt suits. Short and athletic, she wore her long, black hair loose and usually outfitted herself in easy linen. Today’s shade: lavender. The political woman emerged in force, however, when it came to circling the room and pumping our hands. When she got to me, her grip came with fierce eye contact.

“Dawn,” Dora said, “it’s so wonderful to meet you in person.” And even if she was a politician, she said it with such earnestness that I felt warm and rosy.

After Joel hooked her into the mic and her team settled her into the yellow chair, I started with what I thought would be a warm-up question.

“So how did you first hear about the contest?”

Dora, apparently, needed no warming up. “I remember the exact issue of
Charm.
I still have it, in fact. I was in eighth grade, and we were on family vacation at my grandmother’s place. I was lying in the hammock on her back porch reading
Charm
’s College Issue, and there in the Ten Girls to Watch section was an Asian-American woman, Grace Chang. She was a scientist, and she was wearing a lab coat in her photo. And I remember thinking, I’m going to be one of those girls. I’m going to be like Grace Chang. And I started right then to do the things I needed to do to be ready to win. I was a journalist, not a scientist, but she was most definitely my inspiration. And you know, eight years later when I won,
Charm
arranged for me to meet Grace Chang. It was wonderful to get to tell her how much she’d meant to me.”

I’d been on the phone with Grace Chang a few weeks before after tracking her down at UT Austin, and Dora and I briefly compared enthusiastic notes. In addition to building vehicles for surface exploration in space (“cars for Mars,” she said), Grace was also a recreational drag racer and had adopted three children. She and Dora apparently called each other on their birthdays every year.

Before running for office, Dora spent seventeen years as a reporter for various Seattle newspapers, the last ten years covering the Seattle political beat. We talked about her time as a journalist, and then I asked what made her decide to run for mayor.

“I’d been following the political scene for so many years that I knew it inside and out,” she said. “You can only write so many editorials trying to convince people from the outside. I finally decided it was time to go inside.” And then after a short pause, she said, “It turns out it’s exactly the same energy, the same drive, that gets you a spot in the Ten Girls to Watch that can one day get you a job as the mayor of Seattle.” Dora beamed as she said this. She knew it was gold. Thirty minutes from start to finish, and Dora was out of her mic and off to her next appointment. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York and watch the footage.

Our next stop, Chicago. We planned to take the red eye, check into our hotel, interview star architect Rita Tavenner, drive the two-something hours up to Madison, Wisconsin, interview Teresa Anderson from the 1957 class of winners, then back to Chicago for the night. Bright and early the next morning we’d fly to Georgia for our final interview with Barbara Darby and be back home in time to sleep in our own beds in New York that night. And all started off according to plan.

Rita Tavenner’s office was a gorgeous corner spread on the thirtieth floor of a downtown building, and better yet, it overlooked the Merck Building, which she’d designed. Perfect shot for our cameras. Rita herself was a tall, lean woman with short, no-nonsense salt-and-pepper hair and simple clothing but for a blue silk scarf tied elegantly around her neck, and she settled into her chair in front of the cameras comfortably, one more woman at ease in the hot seat. I asked her the standard questions, and she was smart and charismatic, everything you’d expect. She’d been the 1979 pick for the TGTW
Today
show interview, and I threw in a question about her TV interview just for fun.

“Do you know that’s how I met my husband?” She grinned. “
Charm
used to have a big party for all of us winners, and we spent all week getting ready for it—new hairdos and dresses, the whole works. And for the party,
Charm
arranged for each of us to have a nice college boy as an escort, someone cute we could dance with all evening. I was on the
Today
show a few days before the party, and what do you know, Ed was watching. He decided he had to meet me. And somehow in those two days he made enough phone calls and pulled enough strings that he wound up as my escort to the
Charm
party. I had a boyfriend at the time, but that didn’t matter to Ed. A year and a half later we were married. It’ll be our twenty-seventh anniversary next year.”

“That story is crazy,” Joel said to Rita after the interview.

“So crazy,” she said, showing him a picture of her family. “Here we are,” she said, turning and handing the photo to me. And there, courtesy of
Charm,
was Rita with a handsome husband and two children.

As she handed me the photo, she looked different than she’d looked on camera. She was clearly delighted, but there was something a little more delicate too. Maybe even something nervous, like she was handing me a photo of the one thing she wasn’t quite sure she deserved. Everything else she’d worked for. Everything else was hers. But this? Pure serendipity. And maybe that made it the most precious thing of all because it could so easily not have happened. Maybe, once chance plays so big a part in your life, you realize more is out of your control than you’d like to think.

Serendipity made me think of Robert. That had seemed fated. And then Elliot. I felt silly even saying it now that it had been thirteen full days since we’d spoken, but the circumstances had felt special. There he’d been, just waiting for me in the basement, and then there he’d been again, waltzing into TheOne party. But just because it felt like fate didn’t mean it actually
was
fate.

As we drove up I-39 toward Madison in our white Chevy minivan, Joel at the wheel, me in the shotgun seat, Danny in back with all the equipment, I said, “So guys, I need your help. I’m working on a new list. It’s a list of superheroes that don’t exist but should. My best one so far is the Emasculator. She’s a superhot chick who goes around to bars cutting cocky men down to size. I also have Wingman. He does what your average wingman does, just a lot better. And maybe he wears a chicken costume or something, which makes his ability to warm up prospects all the more impressive. Any other ideas?”