Ten Girls to Watch (8 page)

Chapter
Three

I
n the end, I’d e-mailed Robert to tell him the news about my job and had asked him to forward along my profuse thanks to Lily. I’d said it just like that: “Please pass along my profuse thanks,” which you could read with utter sincerity or with an edge, like lace so starched it scratched. I meant it more or less both ways, because even if I didn’t want to be indebted to Lily, even if I wanted to dismiss and ignore her, she’d done something major for me, I had to begrudgingly acknowledge it. Though that didn’t mean I had to correspond with her directly.

Lily, however, didn’t seem to feel any such desire for distance. That night when I got home, she’d sent me a note from her fancy Craven & Swinton law firm e-mail:

Dawn, Robert told me the great news. I’m so excited for you! Also, another connection, turns out my sister’s college roommate was a Ten Girl. You know
TheOne.com?
She founded it. She’s in town from Dallas, and Robert and I are having her over for dinner tomorrow. I know this is absolutely last minute, but Robert and I are wondering if there’s any chance you’re free to join us?

Friendliness at the Pretzel Party was one thing. We all play parts at parties. But this? Was she really so secure that she didn’t see me as any sort of threat? Or maybe she was masking over a sort of perverse curiosity, wanting to know exactly what Robert’s old girlfriend was like, the way, in high school, I could never help looking at the disturbing pictures in my biology textbooks—burrowing parasitic worms, birth canals. I felt that way about Lily. Thoughts of her and Robert together were like a sore in my mouth I kept worrying, unable to keep myself from the precise and reliable pain they delivered.

Or maybe she was just generous. One of those famous connectors. Not that I read them, but I knew there were business books that categorized people like that. She was a maven or a hub or an axle, some moniker, the discussion of which was supposed to be worth the cover price. Maybe that was it.

But there was something else I didn’t like: “Robert and I are wondering . . .” I could just hear the words in her husky, alluring voice, the ease with which joint invitations were already rolling off her tongue.
Robert and I would like to invite you to dinner. Robert and I would like to invite you to our wedding. Robert and I would like to console you on the lifetime of loneliness ahead of you.

I thought about the time I had tried to host a party with Robert. A Christmas party, sophomore year of college, in his room. I’d used the dorm’s kitchen to bake cookies and cakes and cream puffs and thought it was all just spectacular. The pièce de résistance, just before guests arrived: I whipped up the punch my mother had made for every special occasion at home: four liters of Sprite with a half gallon of rainbow sherbet scooped in. I loved this punch. I made it without thinking that it might not fit in my new world. When Robert came into the room, he looked at the punch, and an awful smirk took possession of his face. I felt like I would have at age fourteen had someone caught me stuffing my bra—embarrassed for the act itself, but even more deeply humiliated to have been exposed as a person who wants to be something she’s not. I was a person who thought sherbet punch was elegant and festive, masquerading as someone who ordered cheese plates for dessert. The unmasking of my aspiration was horrifying. Lily, undoubtedly, bought cases of fine wine, and all their future parties would be smashing, catered affairs.

Enough reasons to decline the invitation right there. But the list went on. There was, of course, the other guest: the founder of
TheOne.com
. The company’s ads, plastered all over the subway, traumatized me on a daily basis. Each one was a famous painting, like Seurat’s
A Sunday Afternoon
or Hopper’s
Nighthawks,
edited so that two individuals in each picture, inevitably individuals who weren’t paying any attention to each other, were outlined in glowing white auras, with taglines like “Where’s Your One?” “Help Her Find Her One,” or, more ominous, “Don’t Miss Your One.” Mutated versions of the ads made their way into my dreams. I’d be glowing, a la TheOne’s Ones, but it wasn’t a good thing—I was always trying to escape from something and the giant aura made hiding impossible.

Self-preservation dictated that I should thank Lily but let her know I was busy tomorrow night and for the foreseeable future. But that’s not what I did. No, instead I disregarded all those rational instincts and wrote back saying I’d love to come to dinner.

Being upset by my boyfriend’s new girlfriend just felt so
typical.
I wanted to be the sort of self-possessed person who didn’t have such feelings or, at the very least, kept such feelings folded up and tucked in a private closet. And finally, though undoubtedly there was an element of masochism in it, I wanted to see Robert. Or maybe more than to see him, to smell him. Why I thought
that
was a good idea was a real mystery.

E-mail answered, I microwaved a veggie pattie and continued my pretending by faking that I wasn’t depressed by my dinner. Then I headed off to the coffee shop around the corner to dole out lawn care advice. On one of the eight or so ratty couches at Tea Lounge, I sipped a café au lait (a whole dollar cheaper than a latte!) and took advantage of their generous seating policy (one hot beverage bought you as many hours of free Internet and blaring Fugees music as you liked) to struggle through some brutal weed identification questions. Next, I wrote a column on planting a new lawn, complete with ample keyword usage. The sort of
lawn fertilizer
typically sold for mature lawns won’t give newly seeded lawns the boost they need. Starter
lawn fertilizer,
which has more potassium and phosphorus than the average
lawn fertilizer,
is key. Starter
lawn fertilizer
should be applied at the same time you seed. Somehow the soft, yellow lamplight and the company of strangers and Lauryn Hill almost made me feel like I’d had a night out on the town rather than a shift of work.

Once my search engine optimization efforts were over, I headed home and climbed right into bed. Had I not snagged back issues of
Charm,
I might have spent some time on sites that I’d become quite familiar with in recent months, like
adoptapet.com
or
cashmerebathrobeemporium.com
, researching the possibility of cats and warm and fuzzy clothing as reasonable alternatives to human companionship. Instead, I flipped pages till I found Elliot Kaslowski’s old columns.

August’s column was cute, but ho-hum. Your basic, went on a date, it was pretty bad, here’s how, ha-ha. July was pretty similar. But June, oh, June had meat. The column told the tale of a night out with an old flame, code name “Boots.”

Boots looks good in all lights, but in candlelight she’s like a painting. When she looks at me across the table, her eyes brown and glowing, I don’t know why we’re not together.

He rambled on for a bit about commitment and temperament, standard stuff, then got back to Boots.

I kept wanting each part of the meal to last longer—no, don’t bring the dessert yet. Yes, pour another cup of coffee. But finally the check arrived, that dread signal of the end. Boots reached for it. “No, let me,” I said. And she shot me back a withering look. “I don’t think so,” she said, and put down her credit card.

Why are checks so fraught? I knew Boots thought that I thought that if I paid, I’d somehow taken her on a date and that I’d expect something, but if she paid, she was in control of the night. I’ve never been any match for her withering looks—I learned that long ago—so I sighed and said fine. She signaled the waiter right away.

I had fooled myself into thinking she was having the same kind of night I was—a night of longing and wondering—but the speed with which she disposed of the bill put an end to the illusion. She stood up and reached for her bag. “Nice seeing you,” she said. And only a few seconds later she was walking down the sidewalk away from me.

Reading Secret Agent Romance’s dispatch, I did a calculation. If the June issue went to press in May, that meant the night out was probably sometime in March or April. Which meant he was possibly over this woman by now . . . or possibly still deeply into her. I also calculated that this woman and I were likely about 180 degrees apart in personality. I wanted to give withering looks, I practiced giving withering looks in the mirror, but when faced with withering-look-inspiring situations in real life, my face always failed to fully cooperate. Or less my face, more my whole person.

After spending a few minutes trying on various expressions, I finally called my mom back and listened to her crow. In actuality, that part of the call only took a minute, though as predicted, she seemed to think I’d done some sort of soft shoe followed by a hard sell.

“Well, I don’t know exactly how it happened,” I said, “but I’m excited.”

Then she sighed, her voice cracking a little, and said, “I’ve been so worried.”

With his constant, lowing “come back home,” I’d known my dad had been worried all along (though never quite worried enough to offer to help with rent), but my mom had always sounded like she thought I was some sort of plucky adventuress, even if her idea of what it meant to be a plucky adventuress was straight out of
Thoroughly Modern Millie.

“Don’t be worried, this is a great job,” I told her. I left out the part about the job being temporary.

“And they’re paying you good money?” she said.

“Enough,” I said. Though, of course, I had yet to find out how much “enough” was going to be.

After we said our good-byes, I texted Sarah. “Did you tell Dad about my job yet?”

My phone buzzed hours later, in the middle of the night. “Yep. He’s really excited!”

Maybe one of the reasons my parents hadn’t been a good match was that my dad could be really excited but would probably still wait three weeks to call, whereas my mom had left three voice mail messages the night I phoned with the news.

The next morning I buzzed at the archives warehouse door, and the mysterious someone let me in again. No sign of Ralph or anyone else as I made my way back to my area and unlocked my door to find everything just where I’d left it. The trash had not even been emptied. Fortunately, that meant only that my empty sandwich bag and a few scraps of paper had spent the night, but I made a note to carry anything with rot potential to a more central trash in the future.

All this solitude might have made me lonely, but in fact, I liked it. Unlike all the offices I’d painfully temped in over the last year (the law office, the life insurance office, the accounting office) where I’d been a ghost, the girl no one really notices or acknowledges—you’ll be there a day, maybe a week, who wants to exert effort for that?—here, I was official. I had keys. I belonged. And as the only person in this office, other than Ralph, I was the alpha ruler of my domain. No gingerly stepping, no polite, restrained smiling. In the quiet of my new office, I could roar. Not that I did, but I felt myself uncoiling.

All year, everyone had said “You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the end,” and I’d wanted to throw things at them and remind them that was easy for them to say since they were in the enviable positions of having more than twenty-eight dollars in their bank accounts. All year, it felt like I was barely catching shallow, ragged breaths. But as a sense of command over floor –2 seeped into me, I could feel a physical change. I knew this job wasn’t permanent—that after I found these five hundred women I was most likely going to find myself hurling résumés into the void again—but finally, at least for the moment, the buzz of anxiety lifted.

I needed to spend the day photocopying the collected TGTW coverage so I’d have handy access at my desk, but before I did anything so boring, I wanted to further put down roots and actually talk to one of these women. I went to the shelves, pulled a volume from the seventies, and picked a winner. Cicely Ross, ’78. She’d do just fine.
Charm
had done her up in a long prairie dress, which drew my eye, but I also zoned in on Ms. Ross because she’d gone to my college, which meant that, unlike the other women I was going to have to aimlessly google, for Cicely Ross I could simply log in to the alumni directory, type her name, and voilà. Which is exactly what I did. And just like that, Dr. Cicely Ross Rumbachand appeared, complete with street address, e-mail, and phone number.

I dialed and a man’s voice answered. When I asked if Cicely was available he said, “I’m sorry, she’s not.”

“It would be great if I could leave a message,” I cheerily replied, just thrilled with myself for having so swiftly and successfully tracked her down.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “That won’t be possible. Cicely passed away a few weeks ago.”

I put my hand over my mouth. Then I apologized and got off the phone as quickly as possible, all the gusto drained right out of me. Maybe I was by myself in this basement, but XADI and Regina were out there, and at some point they were going to want to know how things were going. And suddenly, it seemed possible my reports might not be so great. Not that all the women were going to be dead, obviously, but there was a chance these conversations might be a little less smooth and sunny than I’d imagined.

I should have just moved right along and dialed another woman, but I felt suddenly phone shy. I tried to practice a theoretical call, rehearsing lines. “Hello, I’m calling from
Charm
magazine. Hello, I’m calling about
Charm
magazine’s Ten Girls to Watch contest.” I even mouthed the words. Nope, still not ready to dial again.