The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  “Helen!” I said when she answered. “Before I ask you any questions, I just have to say one more time how sorry I am about the weekend.”

  She assured me once again that it would have been great to have me, but I should stop worrying about it. The reading had gone well, and she’d already put a copy of the book in the mail for me. After a few words about the car and its ultimate return to functionality, I steered us toward TGTW, beginning with my standard spiel about the upcoming party, then shifting to questions.

  “So here’s what I wonder,” I began. “In 1972, what did you picture when you envisioned your future? Did it look like your life now? I mean, reading your profile, it sounds like you’re going to end up running Greenpeace. Are you surprised that you became an academic?”

  “This is going to sound a little grand,” she said, “but I feel like winning the Charm contest changed what I imagined for myself. It really was a big deal. This national magazine, picking me. And meeting Betty Friedan was huge. When I was in college, if you wanted to change the world, marching and organizing was the first thing you thought of. But Betty Friedan changed the world with a book, and meeting her, seeing that she was a real person—I don’t know. It realigned my thinking. I had always liked research and writing more than I liked marching, and thinking that I could make a difference through research and writing . . . that changed my direction. Actually, right after the contest, I got it in my head that I wanted to move to New York.”

  “Wait, I thought you stayed in Boston for grad school.”

  “I did. But I had this vision, and I’m not sure what I thought I’d do, but it wasn’t becoming a university professor. I thought I’d be a New York Times columnist or something.”

  “Did you ever think about moving here and trying it?” I asked, surprised. This was the first I’d ever heard of anything even close to an unrealized dream in Helen’s life.

  “Well, I applied to history PhD programs in New York, but NYU and Columbia didn’t take me. That’s the real truth, I guess! And at Harvard, I kept up my bookish ways and got lost in history instead of current events, and there you go. So I think I actually had a much more glamorous vision of where I was going to be now when I thought about it back in 1972.”

  “That’s so funny, since I think of you as pretty much the most glamorous person I know.”

  She laughed, then sighed.

  I wondered whether maybe I shouldn’t ask, but then I went ahead and did anyway. “Helen, I just wanted to make sure everything is okay with you. I’ve been worried. Not for any real reason. Just, I don’t know . . .”

  I heard her exhale.

  “Dawn, that’s really sweet of you. I’m fine. But you’re right, I may have been a little . . . off.” This next part she hurried through, like if she just said it fast enough, it would almost be as if she’d never spoken the words at all. “Paul and I have decided to separate. Just for the time being. But yes, I’m sorry if I’ve been preoccupied.”

  “Oh no, you haven’t been preoccupied,” I fumbled, trying to say the right thing. “Don’t apologize. I was just worried.”

  Neither of us said anything for a second.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Maybe I could come up for another weekend. And this time actually make it.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. The Ten Girls to Watch party is happening soon enough and then I’ll see you in New York.” The vulnerability in her voice was gone. There had been just that streak of a shaking moment, but it had hurtled by and already Helen had steadied the table.

  I could have asked her plenty more interview questions, and I could have asked her questions about Paul and how she was doing, I guess. But it felt like both those portions of our call were over.

  “Well, I’ll be thinking about you, just so you know.” I cringed a bit as I said it. It was so little to offer.

  Helen’s voice vibrated with surprising emotion. “Thank you, Dawn. That actually means a lot to me.”

  After we said good-bye, I felt suddenly fidgety. It took a few minutes of straightening up my desk and tapping my pencil mindlessly on the arm of my chair before I snapped out of it and e-mailed my list of ten women to Regina and XADI.

  While waiting for Regina’s and XADI’s replies, I began a new line of investigation. During our loll about on Sunday morning, Elliot had seen fit to pass along some info from a piece he wrote for Grid about identity theft. Straight googling would get me nowhere. I needed Zabasearch.com. It was where all baby thieves started, he said, so I should see what it could do for me. I started typing the names of some of the women who had heretofore eluded me into the Zabasearch database. Within three minutes I had four numbers to try for Betty Robinson, Pine Manor College ’64. And that was just the start of it. I searched away and came up with option after option for my mystery women.

  I was vaguely aware that I was Zabasearching instead of thinking about Helen. I mean, I was thinking about her, in terms of sending her positive energy or whatever, but I hadn’t really let her news sink in yet. I’d never known much about her and Paul. I knew he was an architect, that they’d been together for twenty-something years, that at dinner parties he told funny stories about clients and always had something to say about the new biography he was reading. I knew they liked to cook dinner together. They’d always seemed solid enough. But what did I know, really? I hoped she had someone else she was talking to. I was sure she did, I just wished I knew something more I could say or do. I said a little prayer for her. And then for him too. Though the prayer for her was bigger.

  _________

  By noon, Regina had replied with the list of winners she wanted highlighted in the magazine: everyone on my list. XADI came back with the basic format for the fiftieth anniversary article, a massive timeline of the past fifty years interweaving key dates in women’s history with details about the contest and various winners. She gave a short sampling of the sort of women’s landmarks she thought should be included:

  • 1960—the first FDA-approved birth control pills

  • 1963—first woman in space

  • 1972—Title IX bans discrimination against women in education programs and activities

  • 1972—first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company

  • 1975—Supreme Court rules that women can no longer be excluded from juries based on sex

  • 1981—first female Supreme Court justice

  • 1984—first year more women than men received bachelor degrees

  • 1997—the debut of the WNBA

  • 1997—census data shows women own one-quarter of all US businesses

  • 2001—first year more women than men entered law school

  She’d work with the photo department to pull images from the magazine archives. For now, she was leaving the actual writing and all the TGTW history to me. But getting the magazine copy in order was just the start.

  I still needed to find as many of the remaining women as possible—and there were still plenty of them to find—both for “fun fact” purposes and to fill them in on the event. Plus, there was the small matter of selecting this year’s new winners.

  Shortly after XADI’s first e-mail, outlining my assignments for the anniversary copy, she sent over this note:

  dawn, we need to select this year’s ten girls to watch. i am messengering over the applications. please narrow the field down to fifty and messenger those back as soon as possible. XADI

  Within the hour, Ralph hulloed from the hallway outside my door and began dollying box after box into my office, lining them up on both sides of my desk, creating a sort of cardboard pathway for me to navigate. I opened the first box. It must have had a hundred applications in it. By the time Ralph was done, I counted eleven boxes.

  “Good luck,” he said, with the sort of intonation that implied “You’re gonna need it.”

  The very first application I pulled from the box was from a nursing student who’d lost 117 pounds,
become a personal trainer, and launched an online fitness video company. She was the first in my “maybe” pile.

  Over the coming weeks, sunset came earlier and I stayed at work later and later. First my departures crept to seven o’clock, then eight, then nine. Soon, the only real interaction I had with daylight was during my morning walk to the subway. Thanks to my new Zabasearch sleuthing method, I found and spoke with more winners every day. I also worked away at pulling snippets from old issues and tallying TGTW trivia: eight winners from military academies; eleven winners from Juilliard; twenty-seven winners from Harvard; 18 percent of the winners (that we’d found so far) had gone on to law school. XADI pored through it all and asked for more. When I wasn’t doing all that, I read through applications.

  I didn’t have time to write postinterview profiles during my hours at work anymore, but I found myself wanting to write them in the evenings at home. For the first time in months, I fired up my laptop for something other than Facebook, YouTube, or Lawn Talk.

  One of the women I couldn’t stop thinking about was a lawyer specializing in divorce mediation, Alexandra Guerrero, though I’d expected my Google search to turn up something else entirely. Her profile in the magazine had been all about theater. I’d imagined playbills or an IMDb listing.

  On the phone I’d started carefully, not wanting to hit the wrong notes in case Alexandra had been disappointed by acting and playwriting and turned to lawyering as a sort of sad last resort. “So you’re a lawyer! Sounds like you have a really interesting area of practice,” I said enthusiastically, skirting the acting issue altogether.

  “I’m sure you expected an actress, right?” She laughed. “Oh my God, was that ever ages ago!” She sure didn’t sound disappointed. Though maybe that was still the actress at work?

  “So, did you go to law school right after college?” I asked. If there was a story to the end of the theater dreams, that nudge seemed gentle enough for her to either indulge or ignore, her choice.

  “Hardly!” she said. “After college I did what everyone expected me to do. I moved to New York and auditioned like mad. I did it for . . . well, it was about four years. Oh my God, I can’t believe I did it that long. I remember my last audition. It was for a gum commercial. I had to pop bubbles and shimmy, and it was me in a line with a bunch of other girls who looked just like me, all popping away and shaking our chests. And that was it. I’d had it.”

  Turned out, the law wasn’t a bummer of any sort for Alexandra. After the acting stint, she’d gone on to Stanford. “And now,” she crowed, “I’m one of the happiest lawyers around!” Before I could start reconsidering the legal profession myself, Alex added, “But I’m glad I didn’t go right out of college. If I hadn’t had those years of trying to make it as an actress first, I would have always wondered.”

  “Do you miss acting?” I asked. “Was it hard to give up?”

  She didn’t have to think about it for even a second. “It’s funny to say it, but even though giving up on acting was giving up on a dream, on a certain level it was also such a huge relief to let it go. I realized along the way that there was more to me than ‘Alex the Actress,’ and walking away from acting was like walking away from a chokehold. All these other parts of me could finally breathe.”

  She and her husband had three children. He was a furniture maker, but he’d put it on hold until their children were older. For now, he was a full-time dad while she practiced family law, with a focus on mediated divorce.

  “Most people think being a divorce lawyer must be depressing, but I’ll tell you two things about divorce,” she said. “The first is that I feel like what I do makes a real difference, supporting people in what can be one of the worst times of their lives. The second is that families come in all shapes and cope in all sorts of ways, and sometimes there is nothing like a divorce to liberate everyone. Parents and kids, they lose this dream of the perfect family, but sometimes—not always, definitely not always—but sometimes it finally clears out the junk and lets people be who they ought to be.”

  In my apartment, my laptop open in front of me, I wrote about Alexandra and the surprise career she’d found in divorce mediation, but while I was typing I was thinking about Helen, wondering why the news of her separation had shaken me like it did. It was more than just sympathy and concern. Truth be told, I’d started counting on Helen in ways I’d stopped counting on my parents. I didn’t look to them as role models anymore. Whenever I thought about them, I thought about how things had a way of falling apart—not exactly an inspiring conclusion—so I looked to Helen instead. Even though she was this glamorous intellectual now, I knew she’d started from a place awfully similar to mine, and she’d made her whole life happen. Usually, when I thought of her, it was like I was whispering to myself, You can do it too. But now? Now it seemed maybe things fell apart for everyone, no matter how smart you were or how hard you worked, no matter how far away you got from Milldale, Oregon.

  With Helen’s news, I felt like the kids in the families Alexandra described, losing this dream of perfection. But maybe the rest of what Alexandra said was true too. Maybe Helen’s divorce was going to free her to be who she ought to be. I remembered the time she’d asked whether I liked who I was with Robert. Maybe Helen was going to like herself a lot better without Paul. I couldn’t really imagine her being any more incredible, but maybe she could imagine it. Maybe in her inner world, she was clamoring to breathe free. I made a mental note: introduce Alexandra and Helen at the party. She probably already had a divorce lawyer, but knowing a good mediator never hurt.

  A few days later I interviewed another woman I couldn’t leave at the office, Candace Chan, a 1986 winner who’d debuted as a cello soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony at sixteen and gone on to be the star of Princeton’s biology department. Now, she was an assistant professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Stanford, specializing in membrane-associated cell biological processes. None of that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about her, though. The reason came after all the talk about the long haul she’d been on—six years for her PhD, four for her postdoc research, and though she was now in a tenure-track position, tenure itself was still a hurdle to leap—when she turned the conversation to her daughter, Ana, who’d just turned twelve.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you this”—her voice shifted, emotion lifting her tone a touch—“but Ana is doing so well with her new stepdad. I’m so proud of her. Her father and I met during college, and we went all the way through our PhDs together. Life was just so intense for so many years, it wasn’t until Ana was in school and we were both professors that we even came up for air and realized something was missing. More than something. Almost everything. I actually didn’t realize it until I started playing the cello again. I’m a very analytical person, except when it comes to music—it’s really always been this tool for me to access my emotions—and when I got back to playing, I started to feel how unhappy I really was. I thought maybe if I changed instruments it’d help. So I decided to learn the mandolin, and it helped, just not the way I figured it would. That’s how I met Len. He’s in a bluegrass band. He’s also a lawyer for HP, but we met at a concert. Eric and I were still together, but with Len the world opened up. Everything sounded like music.”

  She paused for the first time. “Telling Eric was hard,” she finally continued, “but telling Ana, knowing I was the one who made her cry like that, it was devastating. But it’s been a few years now, and it still feels like I finally just opened the windows and let life in. And I think Ana can finally see that too. What kind of cheater says she’s happy she set that kind of example for her daughter? But it’s weirdly true. I want her to see that life is full of happiness if she’s willing to risk it.”

  In some ways, her story reminded me of Stephanie Linwood, her reminder that life is long and you can’t just look at one moment and judge your life based on that snapshot. If you’d looked at Candace with her first husband, things might have looked good. If you�
�d looked at her when she was having an affair, it might have all looked bad. But if you looked at the whole thing, a stretch of many years, you saw something else, a woman and a family emerging happier and more fulfilled. Sitting on my bed with my laptop on my knees, I realized that I’d pretty much been treating my parents as if their stories were encapsulated in a single snapshot, as if they were forever locked in place as the unhappy people they’d been when I was in high school. I needed to stop doing that. In the last seven years, I’d gone from being a kid who couldn’t drive to being a college graduate who paid her own bills. It seemed quite possible that they’d changed a little too.

  A thunderstorm had arrived in Brooklyn. I listened to the rain pummeling my window while rereading the profile I’d just written for Candace. Then I called my mom.

  “Hey, sweetie!” she said. “It’s late where you are!”

  I told her I was still up working, and then I answered every single one of the million questions she asked. Usually, it wasn’t all that long before I felt a little tired of describing, again, exactly what my office looked like or what I was wearing that day or recounting verbatim a conversation I’d had. But tonight, her rapt attention felt supportive and caring, not suffocating.

  “So how many identical cardigans would you say he has?” My mom laughed, cherishing this detail about Ralph’s wardrobe.

  “I think I’ve seen it in five different colors so far, but who knows, there could be dozens more in his collection.”

  I asked her about all the latest at Mary Kay (they had a really exciting new lipstick/lip gloss hybrid that was supposed to be shiny but not sticky), and all the news in the extended family. (One of my cousins was having twins, just like Sarah. “You better watch out,” she said. “You probably have the twin gene too.” Impressive how she was always able to work in her hopes for my future childbearing somehow . . .) Then, feigning a casual air, I asked if she’d been on any dates lately, a topic well outside our usual areas of discussion.