Ten Girls to Watch (5 page)

“Looks like you sure
charmed
them, ha-ha, get it?” Lily said.

“Or was it
bedazzled
them?” Robert said.

“Wait, did Tony invent the bedazzler or something?” I asked, ready to be astounded if Tony or Regina were somehow affiliated with such a wardrobe revolutionizing tool.

“Uh, no,” Robert said.

“Then I don’t think I get your joke,” I said.

“I guess there wasn’t really one. Just that bedazzled is a funny word?” He shrugged and flashed a supplicating smile.

Lily splashed Robert with water from the pond, and I plopped back on the grass, turning my face away from them. The grass was soft and deep green—the loveliest fine fescue blend around. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d imagined Robert and me getting married and having kids and our kids running around on this lawn. In fact, I could still imagine it. But as Lily moved, her silver kitten heel sandals flashed into my periphery, and I suddenly had a crystalline vision of their wedding, right here, in this same yard. In the rest of my view, though, I saw fireflies, more and more of them every second, rising out of the grass with perfect blinking zips of gold.

Just a few minutes later, I said my good-byes. Robert offered to drive me to the train. I said no. He didn’t insist. The walk to the train station was just under a mile, but with Regina’s card tucked in my wallet, it felt like just a few blocks.

When I called her office Monday morning, she offered me Ten Girls to Watch.

_________

And like I said, I danced and power-pumped my fists the second I hung up. I wanted to sing. I did sing! But after the initial bright white surge of delight dimmed slightly, I saw a few other colors.

A job you find online and apply for and get through your own shining résumé—no one can say anything about that except congratulations, you deserve it. A job you get because you met someone at a party in the Hamptons—it has the taint of privilege, as if Regina hadn’t chosen me because I’d wowed her but because I’d been vouched for by the
right
people. I knew “that was how the world worked,” and after a year of searching, it wasn’t like I was going to turn down the job. It was just that this was the sort of thing I’d resented most about Robert. When he wanted a summer job on Capitol Hill, his dad called some friends. When I wanted a summer job anywhere other than Oregon, my dad said good luck. Meaning, I was usually the person who got screwed by “that’s how the world works.” Just shrugging and taking advantage of it now made me feel a little like I was pocketing an envelope full of dirty money. Pocketing gratefully, but still.

And then, of course, there was the fact that Lily had introduced me to Regina, which meant I now owed Lily. Lily, a woman I didn’t exactly wish bodily harm, but whose sudden disappearance from the world I would not mourn. I’d have to thank
both
Robert and Lily. Should I send one e-mail or e-mail them separately? Together felt like it solidified their status as a couple. Separately felt like I was attempting to further forge some sort of independent relationship with Lily. Bah, I’d figure it out later.

I marched out of the house to buy an air conditioner on credit. A much sweeter celebration than any cake.

That night, I sat on a blanket directly in front of the newly installed window unit and lapped up the cool while earning my day’s wages on
LawnTalk.com
. Even with the vague promise of a future
Charm
payday, I still desperately needed my eleven cents a word.

After a solid chunk answering questions about grubs and crabgrass, I gave myself a little e-mail break. I’d gotten this:

Dawn, Regina asked me to e-mail you

please come in tomorrow at 10am with the following

     1) your resume

     2) your passport

     3) a working knowledge of excel

     4) a can-do attitude

XADI Crockett

Senior Editor

Charm
magazine

From this e-mail, I determined the following:

1) Regina worked fast.

2) Xadi was my new boss.

3) Xadi liked lists.

4) Xadi didn’t like punctuation.

5) Xadi imagined that if I didn’t know how to use Excel, I would learn overnight.

6) XADI expected others to capitalize her name too.

I felt weird about all-caps names, so that was going to be an adjustment, but I was just the can-do girl she was looking for, so all caps it was. But those were the subtleties. What beamed out from the screen was this: I hadn’t made it up. The job was real.

Helen Thomas,

Harvard University, 1972

_________

THE CAMPUS CRUSADER

This straight-A history major is one for the record books herself. As president of Harvard Earth Day, Helen led a march of more than three thousand students in support of the environment. Next up, she worked with a local union to organize university service workers in a successful campaign for higher wages and increased benefits. “When I see problems, I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Helen says. We can’t wait to see what she’ll tackle next.

Chapter
Two

R
egina Greene’s call wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the Ten Girls to Watch Contest. The first time was a year earlier, in the home of Helen Hensley, my college thesis advisor. Helen Hensley, née Helen Thomas: 1972 Ten Girls to Watch awardee.

In a national poll from a few years back, 68 percent of US liberal arts colleges reported assigning their incoming freshmen to read one of two essays: “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Helen Hensley’s 1978 essay “Must We Find Meaning?” about the cultural and spiritual fallout of World War I. I was one of the college freshmen assigned to Helen’s essay.

“Remembering the Great War,” the essay opens, “requires modern man to face twin compulsions: the compulsion to find sense in tragedy and the compulsion to insist on its senselessness.” Ordinary enough, but by the time she was describing the smell of old artillery rust in the soil, farmers turning up gas masks in their fields fifty years after the war, and the way she tried to cope with the death of half her family in a fire when she was a teenager, I could feel the tops of my ears tingling and my entire body humming along with the resonance of the unfolding sentences and paragraphs. I was so enthralled that I hated to finish it, and when I came to the end of the essay I turned right back to the beginning and read it all over again.

And then I read it about twenty more times over the next four years. It turned out Helen Hensley was a professor in the history department at my university, a discovery that led to my near hyperventilation in the library—certainly the last time the course catalog got me
that
excited. I took every class Professor Hensley offered for the next six semesters, and, after many nervous courting visits to her office hours, finally asked her to be my thesis advisor, which, despite the fact that I was a literature major, was possible if I wrote a “History and Literature” thesis. (Literature major didn’t exactly spell postcollegiate big bucks, but history and literature? A combo that ensured I’d have to beat away employers.)

During our first official weekly thesis meeting my senior year, she told me to call her Helen. I was the equivalent of a screaming Beatles teenager. The second I left her office, I called Robert to tell him the news. “Call her Helen?!” I screeched. “Does it get any better than that?”

Helen won the Pulitzer for the book
Must We Find Meaning?
of which “Must We Find Meaning?” the essay, served as the introduction. In addition to being a public intellectual and the chair of our university’s history department, she’s also a master glassblower. Did I mention that she has long, flowing white hair and wears green eyeliner and Chanel No. 5 at all times? I believe my hyperventilation over the course catalog was well merited.

During the year, we grew closer, and I calmed down a little, though never enough that the thrill went away completely. Helen grew up in Oregon too, in a town only about an hour from mine. Like me, she’d grown up secretly wanting to be a writer, and again, like me, her hair had once been a firebolt of red (hers had gone white; mine had lightened into a shade I called “strawberry blonde”). In addition to slogging through my thesis chapters on “Regret versus Remorse in the Works of Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen” (a topic for the ages), she generously volunteered to read and comment on my fiction. “I can smell Oregon when I read this,” she wrote in a note on a story about a girl who spends her summer working at a saltwater taffy shop on the waterfront in Yachats, only to find the shop burgled on her last day of work and then to discover months later that the burglar was her brother.

Midway through the year, Helen invited me to dinner at her home with her husband, Paul, and a few of her grad students. After a glass or two of wine, at the end of the night, standing next to her at the sink drying dishes, I goofily said, “You know you’re my hero.” She laughed, then turned serious. “That works very well, since I’ve started to think of you as my protégé.” I felt pinpricks of delight.

The summer after graduation, when I’d turned down law school and gone from being her bright protégé to being her ailing graduate who couldn’t get a job, she offered to let me stay with her and Paul, for free, in the glassblowing hut in their backyard.

I took them up on it for a few months. To be clear, “glassblowing hut” was a misnomer. Complete with two floors and indoor plumbing, the hut was a beautiful, scaled-down version of one of those ornate winter greenhouse palaces that make it possible for Icelandic princesses to eat oranges all year long. On afternoons when she came out to the glassblowing hut to work, she graciously listened to every sob story I had about jobs I wasn’t getting and Robert-related melodrama. On the nights she and Paul would invite me over to “the big house” for dinner, they offered thoughts on careers and grad school and writing.

At one of our dinners, when I lamented for perhaps the millionth time that
maybe I should have gone to law school,
Helen had finally had enough. She was gentle, but I remember her exact words. “You’d make a great lawyer, Dawn,” she said. “And you haven’t closed the door on law school. Not by a long shot. But if you’re going to try something else first, you need to stop second-guessing yourself. There’s a time for reflection and course correction if necessary, but
you’re not there yet.
”

When October arrived, I finally decided to move to New York, job or no job, and Helen left a note on my cot. (To be clear, “cot” was also a misnomer. It had feather padding and one-thousand-thread-count sheets.) On simple cream stationery in Helen’s sloping script, the note was just one line: “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 folded it and tucked it into my copy of
Must We Find Meaning?
and I’ve kept that book by my bedside every night since then.

On my last day before decamping to New York, I was poking around in Helen’s library (a favorite activity, made even more favorite by the fact that her library had one of those rolling ladders), when I found the framed Ten Girls to Watch award certificate on one of the upper shelves,
Charm
scripted out in vintage magenta font. She’d giggled and gushed through the details of the contest when I’d asked her about it the next day. She still remembered the platform boots they’d outfitted her in for her photos, seeing
Grease
on Broadway with the other winners, touring the UN, and lunching with Betty Friedan. When the magazine hit newsstands, she’d enjoyed the glow of minor celebrity. The suitcase full of beauty products she’d gone home with hadn’t hurt either.

_________

I knew Helen would be thrilled to hear about my new job. That night, just after I got the e-mail from XADI that assured me I hadn’t been hallucinating, I zipped off an e-mail:

Helen, you won’t believe it. I just got a job. An amazing job. A real job. I’m working at Charm Magazine, and my first assignment is to track down all the past Ten Girls to Watch winners for the contest’s 50th anniversary this year. TGTW winners—that means you! Talk later this week? Love, Dawn

After that I called my older sister, Sarah.

There were a few reasons I was in New York. One was Robert. Another was the ostensible possibility of writing-related jobs. A third was Sarah. She’d never left Oregon. I mean, she’d left for vacation, but she’d never
left
left. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Her plan had been: New York City. She was five years older than me, and as a twelve-year-old listening to her talk about all the clubs she was going to sing in someday in Soho and the East Village, the place names had taken on the power of incantations. When she said “Manhattan,” I conjured people with sleek black forms, like ghosts, gliding down streets that glittered in the dark. I pictured Sarah becoming one of them. I could feel all those ghosts in the room when she played her guitar, their misty hands clapping when she finished each song. But then she’d gone to U of O, and then she’d met Peter, and then they’d moved to Eugene and gotten married and had kids. Sometimes I felt I was living in New York for both of us. And sometimes I thought I was in New York out of some sort of perverse sibling rivalry.