Ten Girls to Watch (6 page)

“Hi, Dawn!” Sarah said in a staccato when she answered. “I’ve only got like five minutes. Dinnertime.” I heard Peter murmur something in the background and one of their girls begin to howl. The twins, Holly and Hannah, had come a few months before I graduated from college.

“Takes less than five minutes to tell you I got a job!” I announced.

“Oh my gosh, I want to hear everything,” she squealed with real delight, and then, away from the phone, “Baby, just put it in for a minute and then pull it out to see if it’s hot. Yeah, just a minute, I promise.”

“Well, it’s at
Charm
magazine,” I said in a ritzy voice.

“Really? An assistant job? An editor job?” She got dimmer as she spoke—the telltale sign of the receiver slipping away. She must have been holding the phone with her shoulder, probably a kid in each arm.

I talked fast. I considered leaving out the part about meeting Regina at Robert’s Pretzel Party, but in the end I left it in, and she groaned at Robert’s name, as expected.

“Have you told Mom or Dad yet?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

The phone clattered from her ear to the floor. I listened to the faraway sounds of the kitchen, scuffling of feet, beeping of microwave, Sarah and Peter sweet-talking the twins as they buckled them into their high chairs. Only then did Sarah pick up the phone again.

“Sorry, sweetie,” she said.

I said it was okay and promised to tell her more after my first day of work.

“At least call Mom. She’ll be upset if she finds out you didn’t tell her right away.”

“Of course,” I said, though, in fact, if Sarah hadn’t ordered me to do it, I might have waited a day or two before calling.

_________

I read in some women’s magazine (maybe it was
Charm
) that it takes fifteen years for a kid to get over a divorce. So maybe in seven years I’d dial my parents right away. For the time being I was grateful Sarah always answered, even if she dropped the phone on me a few minutes later.

My dad was a high school history teacher. He’d been at the same school, in the town over from ours, for twenty-nine years, since just before Sarah was born, and his job advice always had a local slant. He’d heard they needed a secretary at the Ford dealership down the road from his school, or, if I was ever interested in selling insurance, Sherry Fogel, from church, had a good business and she was looking to bring in some new blood . . .

My mom, on the other hand, hadn’t worked until the divorce, when I was in high school, at which point she’d become a Mary Kay lady, and her advice had a manic salesy tinge to it.
You just have to march into the offices where you want to work with your résumé in hand, then wait till someone will see you!

My dad and I only spoke sporadically. Every month or so I’d call to update him. He never called. My mom, on the other hand, called a few times a week to share the latest town gossip. You got a lot of it as a Mary Kay lady. Sherry Fogel’s business must really have been doing okay, because rumor had it she’d gotten a face-lift, and if my mother’s powers of detection were as sharp as ever, breast implants too.

A couple of days before the Pretzel Party, my mom had called to tell me she had a great idea for me: “Have you thought about creating flyers? Just dropping them off at every business you can think of. Flyers have really done so much for my business,” she said.

I explained that résumés were sort of like flyers.

“Well, just think about it,” she implored.

You’d think I’d be thrilled to share the job news with her. But landing a job at a party was way too Mary Kay. I could already hear her crowing voice. “
See! It’s all about putting yourself out there!
” It sounded just like “I told you so,” with that little barb wrapped up in a big hug. The big hug almost made it worse, since it’s hard to stay irked at someone who’s smooshing you so energetically into their arms, even if you’re feeling the prick all the while.

But my big sister was right, you can’t get a job and not call your mom.

I dialed, and the phone rang and rang. Leaving a message—the best of both worlds!

“Guess what? I’ve got some good news for you. A job! I got a job!” My voice went into a singsong, exactly like my mom’s when she knocked on a door and said “Yoo-hoo! Mary Kay!” I couldn’t help it.

It was late, and I turned my phone to vibrate for the night. I knew she’d call back but I’d listen to her message later. And I’d call my dad soon enough.

Then I sent one more e-mail, to Abigail Wei, my best friend and college roommate. She was marooned in the jungles of El Salvador working for the Peace Corps, and it might be a week, or maybe two, before she was able to take the seven-hour bus ride to town to check her e-mail. But I knew, when she finally did, that she’d sleep a little easier in her hammock knowing something had finally happened for me.

_________

Charm
magazine is a Mandalay Carson publication. I’d applied for at least ten jobs at the company (everything from assistant to the editor in chief of
Outdoor Living
to web marketing assistant at
Modern Mom
), and while I’d seen photos and walked by the Carson building and looked through the windows, I’d never been in. Apparently, they were interviewing recent grads who had previous experience doing something other than writing legal briefs. The outrage. At the center of the all-white five-story atrium lobby stands a sixty-foot silver tree sculpture by Guier Loudon, complete with thousands of delicately carved silver leaves individually attached with tiny hooks so that they shimmer and quake in the artificial breeze circulating through the atrium’s upper levels.

The next morning as I walked through the doors, I avoided all staring and gasping so that anyone who happened to be looking would think I was an old pro rather than some neophyte. At the front desk I asked for XADI Crockett, and after flashing a photo ID I was directed up to eighteen.

Like the main lobby,
Charm
’s waiting area was bright white, and at the far end behind a shiny bright counter sat the receptionist and, behind her on the wall, a giant blowup of
Charm
’s most recent cover featuring Reese Witherspoon, hung in a way that gave the impression that Reese served as a coreceptionist, but one whose choice of workplace attire might be suspect, boobalicious purple satin dresses typically not on the list of office-approved apparel.

I asked for XADI and took a seat as the receptionist called back. Of course I’d googled XADI that morning. The Internet had very quickly verified that she was indeed an editor at
Charm,
but that was about it—my image search had been fruitless. I perched anxiously on the chair.

And then, there she was, holding open the glass door that led to the offices, the word
CHARM
in giant letters emblazoned on the wall behind her. XADI Crockett. The second I saw her, any remaining strains of resistance to capitalizing her name vanished. In her forties, with solid square shoulders, she looked like a masseuse at a Turkish bath, the kind whose massive hands could really work out all your kinks. Her hair was mousy brown and bluntly cut to her chin, with wiry strands of gray running through it. Her facial features were broad and unmitigated by makeup, save one savage dash of magenta lipstick. Her black shirt and slacks hung shapelessly on her broad frame. She had the sort of presence that could quiet a whole gym full of unruly seventh graders with one blow of a whistle. Not exactly the woman my teenage self had imagined on the other side of the
Charm
advice I memorized monthly, but clearly a force. She radiated competence. Meanwhile, the white pencil skirt, green tank, and yellow cardigan I’d come up with that morning, feeling like an ad for a bright young working professional who knew a thing or two about color blocking, suddenly seemed cartoonish.

XADI led me down a long hallway adorned with photo after photo of old
Charm
covers—Grace Kelly with red lipstick in 1960; Candice Bergen with a staggeringly tall updo in 1964.

“Amazing photos!” I said. Nothing like a little winning chitchat to break the ice.

“Aren’t they?” XADI said, her tone clearly ending that line of conversation. Apparently she didn’t hail from the chitchat school of get-to-know-you.

As we sped along I imagined that the hallway would soon open on a buzzing newsroom where, in my dream version of the day, I would first be shown into Regina’s office for a friendly tête-à-tête, following which I would be presented with my shiny new desk. Alas, no such thing. XADI led us immediately to an internal office.

“You’re just here today to fill out paperwork,” she said. “You’ll be starting tomorrow at the archives warehouse.”

“Archives warehouse?” I said as cheerily as possible.

“It’s on Fiftieth and Eleventh. The address is in your packet. They’ll be expecting you in the morning. I thought it would be easier for you to work from there. They have all the back issues and the relevant Ten Girls to Watch materials.”

I nodded as my dream of a shiny new desk shriveled up and disappeared, leaving me feeling embarrassed to have had the vision in the first place.

“Your first job is to get to know all of the Ten Girls to Watch back issues,” XADI continued. “You’ll start in the fifties and work forward.” At this unnecessary chronological guidance, I felt a pang of worry—had I come across as incompetent? Already? I did my best to look alert and alive.

“The contest ran in the August issues until 1973,” XADI continued in her stern voice. “Then it moved to September until 1981, and it’s been in March ever since. Just to orient you.”

I nodded vigorously and jotted notes. The note taking seemed to garner some approval.

“I’m not actually going through any of the paperwork with you,” she said. “HR takes care of that. They’re expecting you in a few minutes. I just wanted to meet in person since I’ll be your editor for this project.”

Ah, so here came the get-to-know-you. I cleared my throat and smiled eagerly in preparation. But no. With that, XADI stopped. When she said “meet in person,” apparently that’s all she meant. Just meeting.

“Well, it’s great to meet you,” I said, trying to build a bridge over the awkwardness.

“You too. This should be fun,” she said, smiling without showing her teeth. And then she stood up and walked me back to the reception area. “They’re expecting you on ten. Just tell the receptionist your name, and she’ll know what to do. And they’ll be expecting you at the archives tomorrow at nine a.m.”

So that was
Charm
Day One. It could have gone better. It could have gone worse.

Day Two began with the long walk from the subway to the distant fringes of Hell’s Kitchen. When you get that far west the city gets scrubby, the office towers giving way to barbed-wire-protected parking lots and hulking windowless warehouses. I double checked the address, then rang the buzzer at one such warehouse, though this one was on the diminutive side compared to some of its neighbors, more like a sliver of a warehouse, the width of a town house. Somebody somewhere in the building pressed a button that buzzed me in, and I walked into a small gray room, with stained industrial beige carpet and no receptionist in sight. It felt like the waiting area at a car mechanic’s garage.

I looked around expectantly, not sure what to do next. After a minute I contemplated taking a seat in one of the chairs. Certainly I was on some sort of surveillance camera, and whoever had buzzed me into the building would send someone to the waiting room eventually? Mindful of the theoretical cameras, I avoided worrying my cuticles or looking for split ends or any of the other biding-time behaviors I typically engaged in when unsurveilled. I smoothed my skirt and adjusted my cardigan (today’s outfit was a combo of red, pink, and tan, which was hard for a redhead to pull off and which may have made me look like a valentine, but which I hoped nonetheless read as capable with a side of pizzazz), and then I waited with what I believed was a look of polite expectation on my face.

At last a door at the back of the room opened, and in walked a toweringly tall forty-something man who bore a notable resemblance to Eddie Munster in a tan cardigan, though a friendly-seeming Eddie Munster to be sure.

“Dawn?” he said.

I nodded, noting our matching cardigans, and we shook hands vigorously as he said, “I’m Ralph, the head librarian. Pleased to meet you. If you’ll follow me back, I’ll show you where we’ve got you set up.”

He held the door for me, and I followed him into an expanse of neon lights, buzzing above steel cages that separated us from shelves and shelves of books and magazines. Our footsteps clicked and clacked on the cement floor. The smell was the exact slightly musty but glittering-with-possibility smell of the stacks in my college library.

“The archival materials for
Charm
are all on level two,” Ralph said, passing me to take the lead. My, what a lot of neck hair he had.

When we entered the elevator, he pressed –2, which seemed to imply that level two was in the basement. Down we went. So far, Ralph and I appeared to be the only two people in the building, no other signs of life. I expected that maybe level –2 housed all the action, but when we arrived, the elevator opened on an identically barren-of-persons-but-full-of-books landscape. He unlocked one of the steel cages, and I followed him through sets of shelves. Upon closer inspection, I realized that all the books were bound volumes of magazines. First we passed the back issues of
Invest,
then came the back issues of
Couture.

After these shelves, we reached an open area with a grouping of four desks, all equipped with computers and scanners. No sign or sound of people near the desks, however.

“We’re working on digitizing everything,” Ralph said. “In addition to overseeing the library, I also oversee the online archives project.” And then perhaps sensing my confusion given the lack of bodies, he said, “Most of the scanning team works the night shift.”

So maybe it really was just me and Ralph, and “head librarian” actually meant “only librarian.” Finally, we reached the shelves where the back issues of
Charm
resided. The warehouse archives had up to this point proved far from the gleaming Mandalay Carson experience I’d fantasized about, but the bound volumes of
Charm
gleamed in their own way. White spined, with the capital letters C-H-A-R-M emblazoned in gold down each one, they looked like treasure.