The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  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.

  I needed something repetitive and calming to ease me back into it. I needed to make copies. I grabbed a couple of the bound volumes and walked quickly away from the phone.

  One full track around the perimeter of floor –2 confirmed that there really was no one else down here, and I hadn’t found any signs of copy machines either. I didn’t feel an entirely rejuvenated sense of confidence yet, but I felt collected enough to at least reach for the phone. From his outpost somewhere in the building, Ralph answered . . . halfway through the first ring. Which made me wonder what Ralph did all day, other than wait for his phone to ring.

  “Well hello there, Dawn,” he said before I had a chance to say anything. The copy machine, he informed me, was on floor –1, on the east side, and it was unlocked. I thanked Ralph and made my way upstairs.

  After graduation, Helen had encouraged me to send pitches to magazines. I’d whipped up dozens of story ideas. Not a single editor replied to a single one of them, but I still liked some of what I’d come up with. Like “Tone Your Calves While Copying,” tip no. 6 in an article on office exercises I’d pitched to Girl Talk.

  During one particularly bleak stretch of temping as a legal secretary at a law firm (a job made all the more depressing by my decision not to go to law school, as if the universe had fated me for legal work and all I got by attempting to escape was a kick down to the lowest paid rung on the ladder), a junior associate had finally talked to me in the hallway. I said I’d just graduated, or graduated eight months earlier and was temping while I looked for a job, and after I revealed where I’d gone to school, he’d incredulously said, “What are you doing here?” A mad streak of toe raises in the copy room that afternoon was the only thing that kept me from turning into a fountain of tears, or at least postponed the outburst till I was out of the office.

  The toe raises I did in the archives copy room today were similarly soothing—three hours of copying later, I’d done about three hundred—but the pages of TGTW were the real boost. I made eleven trips up and down the stairs and copied about thirty years of TGTW coverage, lovingly lingering over the best years. Like 1986.

  That year, Charm’s editors thought the college girls of America should be using their smarts to rake in some extra cash. Suggestions included tutoring (yawn), typing (yawn), and my two favorites (no more yawning): selling art class seconds and late-night snacks. That ceramic pot may not have made the grade for class, but it could fetch a pretty penny as a “dorm decorator’s item,” and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, which Charm assured were a breeze to make with just a little tinfoil and a hot iron, were sure to be top sellers.

  I took my own sandwich break around lunch (a grilled ham and cheese would have been a real upgrade from my pb&j), but by midafternoon even the fabulous oversize sweaters of the nineties weren’t enough to keep me interested in more copying, so I decided to take a quick break and look at the coverage of the most recent TGTW winners in last March’s issue. At least that’s what I told myself, but it was a total lie. I’d been listening for Elliot’s footfalls all day. A flicker of lights, the slightest hint of a sound, and I braced for him. But nothing. Now, I sat down at my desk with the issue and turned straight to Elliot’s March article. Secret Agent Romance’s dispatch title for that month: “I’m Finally Ready for a Real Relationship.”

  I just turned 30. And somewhere between the cheesy party and inspecting my scalp for signs of thinning hair, I realized something: I’m finally ready for a real relationship. I’m not suddenly financially secure or mature or any of the other things that supposedly make guys get serious, and I’m not losing my hair either, thank you very much. I didn’t wake up one day transformed. It was more like I woke up day after day and realized I wasn’t quite as happy on my own as I thought. Turning 30 finally made me wake up and smell the stale coffee.

  “I’m not ready for a serious relationship.” That’s the number one excuse guys give for breaking up. But I’m here to tell you, it’s not an excuse. It’s the only real reason I’ve had for breaking up with anyone for the past ten years. The actual excuses are a lot more ridiculous. In the spirit of looking back and seeing how far I’ve come, here’s a sampling of the totally bogus explanations I’ve had for breaking up with some pretty wonderful women when the real reason was my immaturity.

  • Willow—Started wearing cutesy aprons while cooking. Looked too much like my mom in them.

  • Roller Girl—Beneath those roller blades her ankles were a touch thick.

  • Banking Beauty—So driven and productive she was bound to have a breakdown sooner or later.

  • Speed Racer—All that running, what was she really running from?

  • Dandy Lion—Tone-deaf but loved to sing.

  • Mandolin—So much crying. Why so much crying?

  • Velvet Ropes—Knew way too much about celebrities.

  What an idiot I’ve been. I met someone new a few weeks ago. Let’s call her Boots. She flips her hair. Her lips may be a little too glossy. I’m giving it a real go anyway. Mature of me, right?

  Secret Agent Romance

  First off, Elliot was thirty. Officially, too old for me. But much more than that, it was easy to imagine, after that column, why Elliot was lurking around at the archives rather than hanging out in the Mandalay Carson building. He had to be running scared. Half the women on the list were probably Charm staffers or friends thereof. Thick ankles? While Secret Agent Romance claimed that was the excuse, what woman hears a single thing after the sonic boom of thick ankles? I had no idea who Roller Girl was, other than that she certainly wasn’t me. Nonetheless, I crossed my ankles as I read the words. How thick is thick? How much crying is too much crying? Was it bad that I knew Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their kids liked to picnic? The column was insidious.

  I smacked the magazine closed as if it were the pages’ fault and not Elliot’s. I needed some positive, supportive womanly cheerleading immediately.

  I picked another winner, Kathy Knowlton, ’69. I’d waited long enough.

  You can do this. I actually whispered the words, psyching myself up. I started with Google, hoping that if there were an obituary to be found, I’d find it before calling the g
rieving spouse. No obituary, but Kathy Knowlton’s faculty profile at the University of Minnesota came right up. You can do this, I mouthed again. I dialed.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice answered.

  “Hi, is this Kathy Knowlton?” I hated the timid sound of my voice.

  “Yes.”

  I consciously spoke a touch louder, with a slight salesy lilt, what I thought of as the voice of enthusiasm. “Kathy, this is Dawn West, I’m calling from Charm magazine. I’m hoping I have the right Kathy Knowlton—were you one of Charm’s 1969 Ten Girls to Watch?”

  “Well, I certainly was.”

  Success! I explained it was the fiftieth anniversary of the contest, that we were doing a retrospective and were starting by tracking down all the past winners, that we were trying to figure out where all those incredible young women had ended up.

  I looked at her college photo as we spoke. She had long, dark hair, full, pretty lips, and was posed leaning against a tree. In the photo, she appeared to be wearing tweed bell bottoms.

  “How wild,” she said, clear delight in her voice. “It’s such a funny coincidence, actually. My mother passed away recently and I was going through her attic with my sister just the other day, and we found a big stack of Charms up there. Copy after copy of my Ten Girls to Watch issue. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and I just laughed and laughed. My mother must have bought every issue in the county. And then there was that photo . . .”

  “I’m looking at it right now. Groovy pants.”

  “Oh, they were awesome.”

  We both giggled, and then she went on, no prompting necessary. “The thing that was funniest, though, was looking back at what I said I was going to do.”

  I glanced at the block of text alongside her photo: “Future work: Kathy wants to be a teacher or a doctor. Epidemiology—the study of the spread of diseases—excites her the most. Future play: There’s no place she doesn’t want to travel.”