The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  “Maybe it was just something kicked up by the tires that was banging around,” I said. We exchanged doubtful glances but drove on anyway. For the next hour, half listening to each other, half listening to the car, everything was fine. I’d told Helen I’d be arriving by eleven at the very latest. I was still very much hoping this would be the case. And then, just as we cruised past the last Hartford exit, the pinging kicked in again with a fervor that made it clear the previous rat-a-tat-tat had been nothing but an overture. This was the real symphony.

  The next exit was for Mashapaug, Connecticut.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re in a story?” he said. “Pulling off in a town called Mashapaug . . . You know nothing good is coming your way in Mashapaug.”

  “We’ve gotten ourselves into a real Mashapaug here,” I said. “Ha-ha.” Then I switched to my radio drama voice: “Dawn peered into the gloom. Was it possible? Could it be? A Mashapaug approaching through the mist?”

  “I was thinking more like the high school football team is called the Mashapaug Marauders, and they haven’t won a game in fifty years,” he said. “But the Monster of Mashapaug is pretty good too.”

  The car pinged and knocked and pinged and knocked, like an audience that starts clapping slowly and then breaks into wild applause. “Just keep your eyes peeled for a garage,” Elliot said. I kept figuring that around the next turn the frontage road we were following would reveal a splash of lights, and then fast-food joints, a gas station, and a town would appear. But no. When the din of pings was just too much, Elliot pulled the car to the soft shoulder of the road and killed the engine.

  He turned to me in the dark. “You don’t happen to moonlight as an automotive expert when you’re not on lawn duty, do you?”

  “Sadly, no,” I said.

  “I’m just going to let the car cool down for a minute and then turn it back on and see what happens.”

  I tried to keep calm. This wasn’t going to interfere with my plans to see Helen. Everything would be fine. We waited ten minutes, and the grand result was that when he turned the key the car didn’t make a sound. At all. It was fully and completely dead. I checked my cell phone—9:03 p.m. I wondered whether I should call Helen. But I didn’t want to yet. There was still time. Maybe this was going to be a quick fix.

  One AAA call and thirty minutes later, Elliot and I were smooshed into the cab of a tow truck from the nearest real town, Sturbridge. Reggie, the driver, informed us that none of the garages in town would be open till Saturday morning, but Wilson’s Automotive would take great care of us as soon as Mr. Wilson himself got in at eight the next morning.

  I finally called Helen.

  “Dawn! Hello! How’s the drive?”

  I told her the bad news.

  “Oh, no! I can come get you,” she said, and she sounded eager, like she meant it, but she also sounded tired, like I should say no.

  I assured her she didn’t need to do a three-hour round-trip drive to pick me up. The car would be fixed in the morning, and I’d be there bright and early.

  “I can send a car,” she said. The longer we talked, the more I could hear the weariness in her voice.

  I felt terrible. Not like I was just inconveniencing her. Not like I was just going to miss out on some fun times for me. Like she really wanted to see me. That worry I’d had a few weeks earlier, when she’d taken so long to reply to my e-mail, crept back in.

  “Helen, is everything okay?” I said.

  “Of course! I’m just sad to miss you.” I didn’t quite believe her. She sounded too cheery all of a sudden.

  “The car should be fixed in the morning. I’ll call you first thing with an update. I should still be there in time for the reading.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “If it’s not this weekend, we’ll find another one.”

  “I’ll call you in the morning. Sleep tight and see you soon,” I said.

  As we said our good-byes I turned back to Elliot. I felt terrible. I was supposed to be with Helen tonight. But I was surprised to find, once I was off the phone, that I also kind of didn’t feel terrible. This little breakdown extended the time I got to spend in Elliot’s company threefold, fourfold, who knew. Plus, me, Elliot, a hotel room in Sturbridge? Far worse things had happened. Though as we piled into the tow truck cab and the reality of the night descended on me, I turned clammy. I wasn’t really sure we were at the sharing-a-hotel-room stage. Was this going to be a one-room, one-bed situation? A forthright and well-adjusted woman would simply have stated her preferences. That’s what Robyn Jackson or Helen Hensley would have done. But I froze.

  If I jumped in and said two rooms, I’d be a total prude. And if I said two beds, would he think I was full of myself, assuming he was planning to put the moves on me? And maybe one bed was just fine. One bed did not equal sex. Sure, the Mashapaug Marauders would probably go for a touchdown, but certainly I could intercept their passes. Or maybe this was going to be their big winning season? No, no, it wasn’t. After all, it had taken Robert’s team a year to get into the end zone. One little drive to Boston and I was supposed to bench my defensive team? No siree.

  “The car repairs might be expensive,” I said after the tow truck dropped us at the Black Swan Inn. “Let me cover the room.”

  “No way,” Elliot said. “You wouldn’t be stuck in Sturbridge if it weren’t for me and my dumb car. This is on me.”

  He forged ahead to the counter. One room, he said, and when the clerk asked if we’d prefer a king or two doubles, he said doubles would be great. I liked that. A lot. When the bellman dropped us in our room, Elliot flopped onto one of the beds.

  “I ruined your weekend. I’m so sorry,” he said. “And I’m sure your friends are totally bummed too.”

  I flopped next to him on the bed. “It’s okay, we’ll get there tomorrow.”

  He leaned over and kissed me.

  I kissed him back.

  In most of my dreams, I am outside myself, watching the action, like a patron in a movie theater. In real life, the same distance sometimes creeps in, a protective removal—I see myself doing things. But with Elliot, I didn’t feel any distance. There was just the warmth, the slight roughness of the edge of his fingers on my skin, the surprising span his palm and fingers covered. Just the bristle of his stubble on my neck. The smell of dryer sheets, deodorant, cologne, and beneath it all, as I ran my lips along the skin just above his collarbone, the smell of him, just him—faint, deep, masculine. I pressed my fingers into the muscles of his back. We only used one of the beds that night.

  Alexandra Guerrero,

  Harvard University, 1990

  _________

  THE SHOWSTOPPER

  She’s played leading ladies from Lady Macbeth to Sweet Charity (she’s even played the occasional leading man—we hear her Coriolanus is Tony-worthy). But that’s just the start of Alex’s theatrical feats. In the past year and a half she directed and produced five plays, and her debut as a playwright comes this fall, when her one-act play Mango Ladies hits the college mainstage.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cozily, as if we did it every day, Elliot and I brushed our teeth together in the bathroom of the Black Swan Inn.

  “Have any interesting dreams?” he said through the foam in his mouth.

  “You wan me thoo tell you dow?” I laughed, equally foamy.

  I leaned my head on his shoulder, still working my toothbrush, and we both looked at ourselves in the mirror. I noticed a sprinkling of gray hairs amid the stubble on his chin. His reflection winked at mine, and I laughed and dropped my face to rinse away the toothpaste.

  Once we were all dressed and ready he took my hand and held it as we walked the four blocks to Wilson Automotive. In the waiting room, despite the smell of tires and motor oil, Elliot drank cup after cup of coffee. Didn’t the garage smell interfere with the flavor? I asked. He shrugged. His love of Styrofoam and prepackaged creamer seemed to know no bounds. By eleven his dented Honda was on the lift, and by elev
en fifteen Mr. Wilson himself let us know he’d have to order in some transmission parts.

  He could have a guy bring them down from Boston ASAP if we wanted, but he had a bunch of cars in line ahead of ours, and he probably couldn’t put any guys to work on the transmission until around two or three that afternoon. Elliot and I slumped back down in our chairs.

  I’d been texting Helen with updates throughout the morning. Now I didn’t quite know what to say.

  Helen didn’t give me much of a chance to say anything anyway.

  “Don’t worry, Dawn,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out another weekend. I’d feel terrible if you left your friend all alone at a garage in the middle of nowhere.”

  I protested and spewed half-formed thoughts about car rentals and Amtrak stations. But she stayed firm.

  I said okay, told her again how sorry I was, and wished her luck on the reading.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Elliot said. I still could have called 411 and gotten the number for a rental car company in town. In fact, Mr. Wilson probably had the actual real-life Yellow Pages lying around somewhere. But I didn’t. Neither did Elliot. He refilled his coffee, and when he sat back down and put his arm around me I snuggled in close.

  When the car was back in working order at six thirty that evening, we drove back to Brooklyn. Elliot asked whether I needed to rush right home. No, I said. I just needed to do a little work—some lawn care posting and coming up with my list of the ten most interesting Ten Girls to Watch for Regina—but I could do that from anywhere. And so he took me to his apartment, which was spacious for a studio, and swankily decked out for a freelance writer, with massive bookshelves packed with fabulous books, and mod glass spheres with clear lightbulbs hanging at various heights over the dining room table. What I thought to myself was This is much cooler than Robert’s apartment. What I said aloud was “You have excellent taste in lamps.”

  “The better to see you with, my dear.”

  I grimaced.

  “Was that cheesy?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Stop being so critical and come over here,” he said.

  I did.

  After a Sunday morning spent in various states of lounging and making out with Elliot, I finally settled in at home, first to somewhat trudgingly answer lawn care questions, then to finish up my TGTW Top Ten bio compilation. During the weekend, in the lulls in the car-ride conversation and, later, the lulls in caressing, I’d been arguing with myself over certain women, making swaps, trying for diversity all around—age, geography, field of work, race. Now, after a few energetic rounds of cutting and pasting and comparing, I came up with the following:

  Ten Girls to Watch 50th Anniversary—10 Most Prominent/Interesting Winners

  1. Rachel Link, ’97, Founder of TheOne.com, New York, NY

  2. Cindy Tollan, ’90, Two-Time Paralympic Games Gold Medalist for Women’s 400m Freestyle Swimming, Internationally Ranked Wheelchair Marathoner, Phoenix, AZ

  3. Rebecca Karimi, ’89, Former Fighter Pilot, Current Caltech Physics Professor, Pasadena, CA

  4. Jessica Winston, ’87, Soprano, Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY

  5. Dora Inouye, ’84, Mayor of Seattle, Seattle, WA

  6. Gerri Vans, ’83, Talk Show Host, Media Mogul, New York, NY

  7. Rita Tavenner, ’79, Architect, President of Tavenner Associates (Merck Building, American Express Building), Chicago, IL

  8. Robyn Jackson, ’68, President of Madison Capital, New York, NY

  9. Barbara Darby, ’64, bestselling novelist (Kiss Me, Kill Me, etc.), Augusta, GA

  10. Teresa Anderson, ’57, retired after 40 years as a first-grade teacher, Madison, WI

  I’d left off another dozen women who could have just as easily been on the list. There was Alexandra (Andy) Benson, a 1978 winner, who’d been the saxophonist in Prince’s band for over a decade. There was 1990 winner Anne Marie Chu, who headed the Los Alamos National Lab’s Infectious Disease Control Computer Simulation Project. There was a 2004 winner, Kate Carlisle, whose Gift of Sight Foundation had made glasses available to thousands upon thousands of people in the developing world. There were big doctors and lawyers and even a winner from the sixties, Marcy Evans, who’d played opposite Sean Connery in a movie called Hollywood Heartbreak. And then, of course, there was Helen. I’d only left her off the list because although she was a famous writer, the novelist Barbara Darby had slightly better name recognition.

  I wanted to call Helen, not to tell her I’d left her off the list, just to call. I did, and when she didn’t answer, I left a message. “If there’s any chance you’re free tonight, what about finally having our formal Ten Girls to Watch interview?” I said, then offered one more round of apologies for the failed trip.

  Even without Helen, I was pleased with the list. So pleased, in fact, that I sent Elliot an e-mail to tell him what a super job I’d done.

  All he wrote back was “miss you already.”

  Robert was the first person I’d ever really dated. Up until the previous morning, he was my first and only toothbrush-time companion. He’d been the only one I’d ever shared a mirror with, my only mutual reflection gazing. It had been freezing the winter night he’d first leaned in to kiss me outside my dorm. We’d been on three polite dates, enjoyable absolutely, but restrained. But once he kissed me, instead of saying good-bye and going inside, I’d clung to him, and we’d stayed in the cold together, walking and talking and walking and talking, holding each other’s gloved hands, the street feeling more private than either of our shared rooms. It was like our kissing had whisked aside the curtains we’d each been hiding behind.

  “So when did you first like me?” he’d asked, beaming.

  I looked at him slyly, as if I weren’t going to answer, and then I broke into the same smile he had. “The morning we first went to brunch. You ate your fancy powdered-sugar waffles so daintily. After I got home, I told Abigail it was like eating brunch with Little Lord Fauntleroy. She still calls you that.”

  “I was nervous!” he protested, though his grin didn’t fade at all. “You want to know when I first liked you?” he asked eagerly.

  I shrugged, playing at being all cool again, but I could only keep up the act for about half a second. “Of course!” I said.

  “First week of freshman year. I saw you across the dining hall. You were carrying this whole tray full of sodas—it looked like you were going to spill them all any minute, but you didn’t and then you sat down and passed them around to everyone at your table. I signed up for that shift at the shelter just so we’d be volunteering together. I’d been trying to come up with ways to meet you for months.” The words rushed out giddily, like he was an excited kid who’d been dying to share his secret.

  I glowed, hardly noticing the cold anymore. The curtains were up, and there in the spotlights of center stage was this new thing. Us. Just like that, we were a couple.

  The weekend with Elliot had been good. It had been great, really. But where that first kiss had illuminated everything between me and Robert, a whole weekend with Elliot hadn’t shed any such light. Was Elliot my boyfriend? That seemed a reach. You can trip and fall pretty easily when you’re fumbling around in the darkness. I was hoping to avoid bruising here, feeling bruised enough from Robert already. Even though I wanted to grip Elliot’s “miss you already” like it was some sort of candle lighting the way to our golden future together, I decided to try to relax. We’d see. This was the way grown-ups did these things—cool, casual, easy come, easy go—wasn’t it?

  Afternoon turned to evening and Helen hadn’t returned my message, and I began to feel a familiar desperate loneliness. The sort of loneliness that paws awkwardly for any sort of relief. Who could I call? What video clips could I watch? What could I do to make this ache go away? I couldn’t call or e-mail Elliot. I’d just left him. And he wasn’t my boyfriend. I couldn’t call Helen. I’d already left my voice mail. I read the New York Times online. I watched some episodes of Th
e Daily Show on Hulu. I called my mom, who didn’t answer. I called my dad, who didn’t answer either. I checked for more LawnTalk.com forum questions. I answered a few. The feeling didn’t abate.

  Finally, I started typing an e-mail to Robert.

  In one of the lawn care books I’d checked out from the library, I’d learned something about soil. If you work it too much, you can kill it. Clumps are a sign of active fungi, helpful bacteria, and moisture that allow for chemical binding and nutrient transfer. If you break up all the clumps, if you rake it and turn it and rake it and turn it some more, eventually, instead of a tidy, tended-to plot, you end up with desolate earth. Thoughts of Robert were dirt I’d turned over and over. And now, even with whatever it was with Elliot flitting about in the air, Robert was still the territory my mind turned to in its loneliness. In fact, if anything, Elliot made me think of Robert even more. Robert and Lily. I wanted what I felt between Robert and me to be lifeless. I fantasized that if I turned it over one more time, if I raked my fingers through it, if I rubbed it between my hands into finer and finer grains, at last it would lose its power.

  So I wrote an e-mail. I didn’t plan to send it. I imagined how pathetic I’d feel if I sent it.

  “I hope you and Lily had a great weekend.”

  That’s all. It might as well have said “Please write to me.”

  I sent it.

  After a weekend of Elliot, I shouldn’t have needed it, but I waited another hour, then took a sleeping pill and fell asleep.

  _________

  Monday morning, Robert still hadn’t responded, and I was delighted to go to work, a place where I’d have plenty of other things to think about. On my way to the archives, I dropped a box in the mail for Helen—here was hoping the scones would still be fresh when they arrived.

  Just like that, as if my package had cosmically summoned her, Helen appeared on my caller ID. I answered and asked whether she could give me five minutes, which I figured would be just enough time to hustle to my office, turn on my computer, and strap on my headset. She said five minutes was just fine, and I jogged the rest of the way to the warehouse. One more benefit of no coworkers (other than Ralph): no one to see me arrive at work sweaty and disheveled.