Natural Disaster

by Ginger Zee

  For a girl from the Midwest, Chicago is kind of our nearby Hollywood. I decided I would manage my expectations and just assume it wouldn’t work out and that I should be happy just to be invited to interview. It seemed like sound self-talk, but it lasted until the second I saw the Chicago skyline.

  The sunlight was glistening off Lake Michigan as I rounded the curve on Lake Shore Drive, and I was instantly transported back to Dickhead’s house on Lake Michigan, where my love affair with the weather was born. If I wore hats, I definitely would have pulled the car over and tossed mine in the air as an homage to the ultimate career gal, Mary Tyler Moore. I felt like my life needed to begin here in Chicago, right now, and I needed this job to do it.

  I navigated the city traffic in my Mitsubishi Eclipse, sunroof open, like a teenager who’d just gotten her license. Everything about today felt new and I didn’t want to screw it up. I parked my car near the fancy Omni hotel on Michigan Avenue, where Fox had paid for my room. My family’s idea of traveling when I was a kid usually involved a tent and the great outdoors, so this was my “Eloise” moment. Everything about the hotel smelled like fresh linen and flowers. It seemed as if I were tripping on fresh flowers in the lobby, and in the hallways. When I touched the magnetic key to the door of my hotel room, I exhaled. This is what a hotel experience should be like. This is what life should be like. As much as I loved the air mattress I slept on every Memorial Day while camping in my dad’s old 1970s tent, I was staring at a king-size bed with pillows the size of ponies and white sheets as crisp as new hundred-dollar bills. The bathroom was even better, with free brand-name soap and a soaking tub that looked like it had come out of Architectural Digest. As far as I was concerned, these were the signposts of making it in life. I had arrived.

  And then I went for it like a kid in a movie. I dropped my bags and the very grown-up garment bag I had borrowed from my mom and swan-dived into the bed. I had never seen a king-size bed up close before. Who in the world needs all that room, but who cares, it’s all mine tonight.

  Turns out, arriving at the life you were always meant to have is exhausting. After a glorious bath, while wrapped up in my fluffy robe, with a belly full of room service, I hit that bed and its six-hundred-thread-count sheets and thought I’d pass out for the next twelve hours. But then something funny happened, and I was suddenly restless. After a few minutes of luxuriating (a new word that suddenly felt so natural to me), I got up to look out the window at the twinkling lights of Michigan Avenue, and this swelling feeling of light and joy and puppies and Santa Claus started growing inside of me.

  Everything is possible, Ginger, it said.

  Duh, I replied.

  Since I’d arrived in Chicago that afternoon, my life had already been different. Just being in this hotel room, being asked to come interview for this big job, made my old life seem so small. In this moment, staring out the window, I wanted to be walking these streets. I wanted to be coming home from work, picking up Indian food, waving to the guy who ran the local bodega, and looking forward to the weekend Cubs game with my new big-city girlfriends. I wanted to get on with my new life already, because I felt like I belonged in a room that smelled and felt exactly like this. The energy I felt in the city was palpable and kept me awake. This was the magic and fantasy that Brad and I were dreaming about, but now it was a real possibility. Truthfully, I didn’t want to live in a château in Italy with Brad and a nanny. I wanted to succeed in my career and live in this great city. There was no turning back. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t count on this, I wouldn’t want it too bad. But it was too late. I was ready for the next level of my life, and I wanted it to be here.

  The only person back at WOOD TV who knew I was going to interview in Chicago was Brad. I talked about it with Joe, but I don’t think either of us thought this was going to amount to much. Plus, I was under contract in Grand Rapids for the next two and a half years. It didn’t seem possible that a contract could be broken. But obviously it was possible, because I’d just heard the voice say exactly that: Everything is possible.

  The next morning, I went to the interview at WFLD. Unlike all the other TV stations I had worked at, this building was a beautiful skyscraper right on Michigan Avenue. Rick was waiting for me inside, as well as the news director, several reporters, producers, and a few anchors. Everybody at the station seemed intent on convincing me that they believed I could do this job. I’d never had that kind of experience before. Up until this point in my career, I’d done all the convincing for myself. This big group of successful people took me to lunch at the Ralph Lauren restaurant down the street. I had never been to such a fancy restaurant. You have to take an elevator to the bathrooms, which smell divine. And they don’t just have paper to dry your hands; they have the most plush folded, monogrammed paper napkins that feel like cloth, but you throw them away! The place just stinks of elegance and success. Tamron Hall was at the lunch. She was WFLD’s morning anchor at the time, and such a ravishing, magnetic woman. She sat next to me and was showing me something on her phone when a text popped up from her friend Dennis Rodman. I felt like I was sitting at the Golden Globes table closest to the stage. Tamron was (and still is) everything I want to be. This shift was happening inside my head, where a life I couldn’t have conceived of before was taking shape. It’s an interesting thing. I knew the job I wanted; I’d worked hard and set it as a goal for most of my life. But I never imagined talented professionals in my field taking me under their wings, mingling with tangential celebrities, and partaking of expense-account lunches. It was almost too much to process. I realize now that what was happening was simply a full-court press by the station to pull out all the stops to land a young, inexpensive employee. Even if I’d known at the time what a full-court press was, having it happen to me for the first time was like getting a bowl of cake icing for a two-year-old. Pretty awesome.

  By the end of the day, when I was riding an elevator up to the top of John Hancock Center for drinks with Rick DiMaio, I was sure I was getting the job. I was literally ascending to the top, thinking of these people I’d spent the day with as my future coworkers and throwing all my managed expectations off the ninety-sixth floor, because I wanted to be in this club. I was the girl who’d just figuratively tried on her first pair of red-soled Louboutins, and I didn’t want to give them back. Over my dead body.

  Turns out things would get a little more complicated.

  The Sunday morning after my interview in Chicago, I reached down to pick up the local newspaper in our driveway back in Grand Rapids and opened it up to the back page (I always read papers and magazines backward for some reason). And there was my face, my name, and a headline that made my no-longer-a-secret interview in Chicago look like the biggest betrayal since Brad left Jennifer for Angie. And then my phone rang. It was my boss Patti, and she was on fire.

  The picture in the paper was of me walking down Michigan Avenue with Rick DiMaio. My local paper had picked it up from a Chicago paper, where it was news that the station was looking to replace Michelle Lee, WFLD’s current morning weather anchor. But back in Grand Rapids, it was news that Ginger Zee was obviously looking to leave small-town WOOD TV for “windier pastures.” Clever.

  Dealing with Patti’s ire was the flip side of the full-court press back in Chicago. No more king-size beds or long boozy lunches with celebrities. I was now facing the wrath of a scorned employer, and it was painful.

  I felt guilty, like I’d cheated on Patti. I also felt bad about Michelle Lee back in Chicago, who, because of me, was finding out she was about to be fired. I met with Patti Monday morning, and she made it clear that under no circumstances would she let me out of my contract. I reluctantly called Rick and the news director at WFLD and explained that I was incredibly grateful for their hospitality and offer, but I had to decline. It was heartbreaking. All the fresh flowers, beautiful paper napkins, and fluffy robes started crashing down as I sat on the floor of the home Joe and I were renovating. Me, in a pile of disgusting ca
rpet goo, coming back to my reality. It wasn’t pretty.

  I got up off the floor, looked in that cracked mirror, and said to myself, This can’t be it. Even though it didn’t work out at Fox, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d outgrown this Michigan life. I’d seen my new, bigger life in Chicago. I’d felt it, I’d smelled it, I’d slept with it. It was mine. It belonged to me, and the strange part about all of it was that I wasn’t worried. I knew it was coming. I intuitively felt that the universe had used Chicago to show me a bigger part of myself. It was just a matter of time until it came together.

  And I was right. That day, I started getting calls from all the big stations, including ABC, NBC, and CBS. Everybody had seen that picture in the Chicago paper, and now they wanted to know who I was. If WFLD was interested, so were they. Obviously, they had no idea that Patti had already shut down my interest in Fox. Within forty-eight hours, I’d gone from thinking I was going to lose my job to fielding calls from every major network in America.

  But this wasn’t luck. I have always believed that luck is just hard work meeting opportunity. Through all my “lucky breaks,” I have worked every holiday, almost every weekend, and more than a month at a time with no days off. Whatever career you choose, whatever dream you have, you just need to be committed, and dedicated, and go for it. I am so lucky to have had parents who, by example, instilled a strong work ethic in me and my siblings since the day we were born. I never questioned that I would be successful if I just worked as hard as they did. My dad worked sixteen- to twenty-hour days, six months a year, enduring difficult physical labor without a complaint. My mom is equally tireless. She is a neonatal nurse practitioner, and she can still save a baby’s life after working forty-eight hours straight. She can emotionally care for parents that have lost a newborn and still come home and make her children feel like the most special people in the world. These are the Midwestern, hardworking values that were instilled in me early, and I give my parents all the credit in the world for my stamina, productivity, and work ethic.

  When I ended my engagement to Joe, I saw no connection between that and this shift in what I wanted for my career. Intellectually, they didn’t have anything to do with each other. He wasn’t trying to stop me from going to Chicago, or any place. But my instincts and intuition were ringing every possible bell and whistle that I couldn’t go forward with marrying Joe. Brad had opened up the door to imagining a bigger life, even if it was ridiculous. That one interview and day in Chicago might not have worked out, but they showed me what was possible, and really, that is the biggest gift the universe can give us.

  Thanks to my pathological people-pleasing genes, I couldn’t allow myself to be too excited, because everybody was mad at me. Patti was still upset about the Chicago trip, and now that she knew I had several other suitors, she was threatening that I’d never be able to get out of my contract. Eventually, her threats softened to something along the lines of “Sure, you can leave, but not without having to pay twenty-five thousand dollars to break the contract,” which to me might as well have been asking for a million dollars. And then, of course, there was my fiancé and pretty much everybody in his family, who were all very frustrated with me for my hesitancy about our impending wedding.

  I made another trip to Chicago to “visit” WMAQ NBC Chicago. (Stations who don’t want to pay for your travel will invite you to “visit if you’re in the area.”) The visit went well, and I felt confident. But as my personal life blew up with the second and final cancellation of my engagement, I completely forgot about the meeting. It’s a weird blessing when all you can do is focus on what’s right in front of you, because it creates this space for the dust to settle and fate to step in and sort things out exactly the way they should be.

  And that’s what happened. The day before I had been supposed to get married, I was in my mom’s backyard by the pool with my cousins, kicking rocks and still feeling awful about hurting Joe, when I saw a Chicago area code pop up on my phone. I stepped away to take the call and put on my newsiest professional voice, hoping my midday buzz of Natural Light beer wouldn’t do its usual thing of strengthening my Michigan accent.

  The voice on the other end of the line was Frank Whittaker, the news director at WMAQ, and not only was he offering me a job plus moving expenses, but he offered to buy out the twenty-five thousand dollars left on my WOOD TV contract.

  I hung up the phone and collapsed right there on the lawn. Almost every human emotion was coursing through me, including joy, sadness, guilt, and relief. I lay there for a while and just kept staring up at the sky, thanking God, thanking Joe, thanking Brad, thanking the universe, thanking everything that had happened to lead up to this moment. For the first time in the three weeks since I’d called off the wedding, I felt like everything was going to be okay. I felt good about myself, my life, and my choices. The guilt washed away and was replaced by hope.

  It’s human nature that even when we find ourselves in a situation where a job or a relationship (or maybe both) just feels wrong, we still hold on. Letting go of what doesn’t fit, whether it’s people or situations, is one of the most difficult things to do, and it’s a skill I am still working to perfect.

  The day after the job offer was finalized, I attended my non-wedding with my family and friends, and instead of celebrating a marriage, we celebrated my new job. The spinach artichoke dip was delicious, and the hugs and “I’m so proud of you” speeches from countless friends and family made the day better than I could have ever imagined. If we’d had more than twenty-four hours, we would have refrosted the cake to read CONGRATULATIONS ON LETTING GO AND JUMPING INTO YOUR LIFE.

  My mom has this odd knack of allowing the absolute worst photos to make it in to her slide show on the computer in the kitchen that everyone sees. I still see this photo of me on the day of the non-wedding, gaunt, chunky highlights, and a Michelob Light in hand. I’m smiling through my swollen eyes, and in that image of myself I see the beginning of a transition into the woman I am so proud to be today. I also see a woman who thought the drama was behind her, but as the MTV series Diary warns, “You think you know me, but you have no idea.” Turns out it was only just beginning.

  The fanciest store in Grand Rapids was Macy’s. We didn’t have Whole Foods, and our nicest restaurant was Bonefish Grill. For the longest time, I thought Bonefish Grill was ours and ours alone. I would obviously learn later that it was a chain. We were far from starving, but my stepdad definitely used every coupon in the paper—and still takes great pride in his savings at Meijer (our superstore; it’s like Walmart). There really is no other way to define my family and my town except to say we were fantastically middle class. Both my parents worked, our bills got paid, the lights stayed on, and Santa managed to show up at our house each year with at least one thing from my list. My childhood was pretty great, and it was safe, but it was small. This was way before the Internet made the Kardashians’ lifestyle an aspiration, the way it is now for so many teenagers. In fact, last year I gave my fourteen-year-old sister a necklace from Tiffany’s, and she squealed at the box before she opened it. I never would have known what the robin’s-egg blue box meant as a kid. In retrospect, maybe I should have given her just the box for Christmas. (Just kidding, Elaina.) Which is all to say that moving to a big city like Chicago at the age of twenty-five was as exciting as it was slightly terrifying.

  I wasn’t nervous at all about being able to handle the job. I’ve loved meteorology for so long that I never question any chance I have to practice it, and I know I’m pretty good at it. But I already knew I was a natural disaster, and I decided to do everything in my power to avoid screwing up, which meant fitting in with the sophisticated denizens of the Windy City I had met that one glorious afternoon when I interviewed for the job I didn’t get.

  That day in Chicago was all I had to use as a road map for what it was like to live in a big city. Of course it was unrealistic and ridiculous, because when you’re being given the full-court press, all the bells
and whistles are rung. It’s not an ordinary day. And yet, when I thought about how I would blend into life in Chicago, I thought about Tamron Hall, red-soled shoes, linen bathroom napkins, and prosecco-soaked afternoons.

  The first thing I decided was that Big City Ginger (BCG) would definitely live in a high-rise apartment. I also decided that BCG makes so much money that she doesn’t have time to bother to figure out what her take-home pay after taxes will be, because it’s more than three times what she made at the last job, so she couldn’t possibly spend it all if she tried. I chose my twenty-seventh floor, Lake Michigan–facing apartment online with about as much consideration as I use to order a latte. Who cares what it costs? What else can I get with it? In the case of my apartment, I clicked yes on the option to have them paint it and make every single room a different color. That means on top of my first month of rent plus security deposit ($2,700 each), I added $200 per room, because why not? It looked awful. But I wouldn’t admit that to anybody, not even my dad. When he first stepped inside my Skittles Palace, all he could say was, “Wow. You can taste the rainbow in here.”

  The assistant news director in Chicago strongly suggested that I go see “the best hairstylist in the city.” Of course I agreed that BCG needed “the best.” I arrived on time for my appointment, already pretty confident with my current layered shoulder-length light-brown hair. I figured this magician would just make me an even better version of myself.

  I waited more than thirty minutes before she emerged from behind a black curtain. The room went quiet. Everyone acted as if the “queen of all strands of hair” were holding court. She came to the chair they had prepped me in and didn’t even introduce herself. She just started fluffing my hair. Finally, she looked at me in the mirror and said, “It’s terrible. Your hair, it’s like curtains. Like very bad curtains.”