“Oh, there’s no one around here!” she clipped.
“Did I tell you someone signed me up for TheOne?”
“You didn’t!” she said, as if I’d just admitted to something truly outrageous, like streaking through Times Square or sneaking out of a restaurant with salt and pepper shakers in my purse.
I told her all about Elliot, though I left out his age and prior marital status and the part about us sharing a hotel room. Then I said, “You know what I think? I think I should sign you up!”
She clucked, a don’t-be-silly sound. “I can’t imagine there’d be enough people around here to even put together a single party.”
“You might have to go up to Eugene for the party,” I mused. “I don’t know. But I’m sure TheOne has something. What do you say?”
“Let me think about it. I’m not saying no. Just, I’ll get back to you,” she wheedled.
As a family schooled in the passive arts, the Wests excelled in I’ll-get-back-to-you avoidance tactics.
“Yeah, right!” I laughed. “I’m not letting this go that easy.”
“Fine, fine!” she said, laughing too. “I’m serious. Just let me think about it for a little while.”
“Okay. Take your time,” I said.
She then asked me about Abigail and how she was doing. Last I’d heard, things were still humming along nicely with the birdsong guy, and the intestinal parasites seemed to have quieted themselves if not entirely moved on. My mom was glad to hear it.
After we said good-bye, I almost logged on to TheOne right then and there to create her profile. But I’d wait. I had a feeling after I gave her a little “time to think about it” she just might come around all on her own.
I fell asleep that night to the sound of the rain, pummeling away, and my mom’s “I love you” still lingering in my ears.
The next week, I brought home yet another profile to work on. Allison Katz, a 1997 winner who at age twenty had already explored more previously unexplored miles of cave than any other US caver under thirty. She’d also become a professional photographer as a teenager, with photos she’d taken of rare cave rock formations in National Geographic, Outdoors, and a handful of other magazines.
She had just finished her PhD in geology at Cornell a few months earlier. I tracked her down in Mexico completing a postdoc fellowship at the University of Mexico City, researching the Yucatán’s massive flooded caves. We talked for a while about Mexico, how great the food was, then somehow we got onto the subject of geology jokes—Igneous is bliss; Sedimentary, my dear Watson, sedimentary.
Finally, I asked her the obvious: “Isn’t it scary? I’m sure you’re used to it now, but was it ever terrifying to squeeze into all those dark, unknown spaces, or you’re just . . .” I trailed off. “I dunno, fearless?”
She laughed. “I hate horror movies. Like if I watch one, I think there’s something on the other side of the shower curtain for days, so, no, I’m not fearless. I just got started caving young. My grandpa died in a mine collapse, and I think my daddy didn’t want me to grow up afraid of anything. So he took me hiking in caves starting forever ago.”
I asked her what it had been like, caving with her father.
“I remember the first time I ever pushed through into new area,” she said. “As in no map, and absolutely no one has ever been past this point before—and then there I was, my light shining into a whole new passage, my daddy yelling from the other side of the tiny space I squeezed through, telling me to describe what I saw. There’s no bigger rush.”
“It must be amazing to be able to call yourself an explorer,” I said. “I mean, how many people can say that about themselves and mean it literally?”
Instead of laughing it off as a compliment, she answered back seriously. “I’ve actually thought a lot about this. Some people are creators. That’s their thrill. I’ve got a quieter streak. I just want to uncover what’s there, I just want to marvel at what’s beneath my feet, this whole time it’s been there, just waiting for me to find it. That’s me. I think a lot of times people think explorers are the wild and crazy ones, but I don’t think so. We’re actually more reserved. We just want to find things and treasure them.”
I’d never made a distinction between creating and exploring before, but now it made me think of my own writing. Which kind of person was I? I felt like these profiles and all the work I was doing on Ten Girls to Watch was something closer to exploring. There were these women out there with amazing stories. All I had to do was find them. In some ways, that’s what Helen had been urging me to do with my own personal writing as well—find the truth and tell it. TGTW was a pleasure—really it was—I loved what I was doing. But it didn’t feel quite the same as writing fiction.
When I wrote stories in college, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a perfectly formed phrase in my head. I’d be walking down the street, not even really thinking about a story, and an idea for a scene would come to me. There was a magic feeling to it all. That didn’t happen with the profiles I was writing now.
When Allison said she had a quieter streak, I’d instinctually nodded and thought, me too. After all, no one in the West family ever yelled, just silently seethed, and whereas Robert was the sort to noisily share his thoughts on things like the proper angle to hold one’s head while conversing, I was more likely to keep such opinions to myself. But maybe these weren’t the right comparisons. Maybe I had a loud streak, and I’d just never realized it. At night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, behind my closed eyes I’d spin fantasies, and they usually circled back to a vision of myself with gray hair and a floppy hat, coming in after an afternoon of gardening in the yard to a bookshelf lined with books I’d written. I’d never thought about it until now, but that fantasy shelf wasn’t full of journalistic nonfiction. Those books were novels. My novels. Maybe my loud streak translated to this: I didn’t want to find other people’s treasure. I wasn’t going to follow in Helen’s footsteps. I was happy to tell other people’s stories sometimes, but in the end, I wanted a story that was mine. Even writing a true story about myself wouldn’t cut it—I’d have to account for the people who’d shared the experience with me. If you make it up, though, it’s all yours. Maybe I was an explorer for now. But what I really wanted, someday, was to be a creator.
After I finished with Allison’s profile I took my copy of Must We Find Meaning? from my cardboard nightstand and pulled out Helen’s card from inside the pages.
“D, I believe in you, and what makes me really happy is I think you’re starting to believe in you too. Love, H.”
I thought about Helen’s advice to turn my short story into nonfiction. Maybe part of believing in myself was trusting my gut and not following her suggestion. That night, for the first time in more than a year, I opened the Sound of Music file on my laptop and started revising. I didn’t conduct any interviews or call a soul to fact-check anything. I just wrote and wrote. Not that I made a lot of progress, a couple of paragraphs maybe, but they were mine—all mine—and finally, I was writing again.
_________
During these weeks of hard work, neither Robert nor I ever acknowledged my pitiful e-mail, but throughout the days I occasionally sent Elliot funny tidbits about winners I’d talked to or links to events I thought sounded interesting and notes that said things like “Thought I might check this out. Care to join?” He almost always replied hours later via text message, reply being a loose description for his brief missives, which never directly addressed my attempts at making plans: “Hey there.” “Hello you.” “Guess who I’m thinking about . . .” “Paging Ms. West. Ms. West to the stage.” When he did actually e-mail, it was things like a link to the song “Secret Agent Man.” In the subject line. Body of the e-mail blank.
While Elliot’s electronic communication skills were somewhat lacking, he continued to please in person. After my first crazy week, he made me Saturday brunch. Lovely, non-takeout huevos rancheros at his dining room table. The next wee
k he took me out to a rooster-themed Peruvian place in Boerum Hill, pan flutes and salsa music alternating over the speakers as he introduced me to ceviche. He told me about accidentally dropping his keys down a subway grate outside his first New York apartment, then miraculously fishing them out with a wire clothes hanger. I told him about the odd jobs of my teenage years (bumper car attendant, ice cream scooper, janitor). He told me about his brother’s years in and out of rehab. I told him about Sarah’s twins. When we were together in public, we started holding hands. I didn’t send any more e-mails to Robert (though I still spent far too much time agonizingly imagining him frolicking around the city with Lily).
One night, Elliot invited me over to his place and cooked dinner for me. He poured the olive oil with dramatic flair and stirred the sautéing onions and garlic not with a spatula but with a flick of the pan that tossed them through the air, an ironic show-offy smile on his lips the whole time. When he was done, he plated the mushroom fettucini, adding pretty sprigs of parsley. At the dining room table, we both tucked into the delicious pasta, and he started telling me about an article he was working on, an investigative piece on bat flu versus bird flu. In the middle of talking, he stopped and put his fork down, his face suddenly stricken.
“What’s wrong?” I asked anxiously. Had I said something? Had I not said something?
Sighing, he answered, “Do you ever worry that things just aren’t going to work out? I mean, I had these big dreams. Famous writer: Elliot Kaslowski. The more time passes the more I’m sure that’s not happening, and if that’s not happening, what else isn’t happening?”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “I worry about that all the time. I have this perfect vision of me alone at age fifty-five, selling Mary Kay, which is so mean to say, because that’s what my mom does and that’s like saying she’s a failure, but she actually really likes it! And she’s really good at it. And she has kids! But when I picture it, it’s just me, all alone with boxes and boxes of antiaging serum, and then I start hyperventilating.”
“I see this big billboard flashing FAILURE,” he said. “And I’m from Nevada, so when I say flashing, I’m talking megawatts.”
The few times I’d ever tried to describe what a looming fear of failure felt like to Robert, he’d had no idea what I was talking about. “But that’s crazy,” he’d say. Or even more helpfully, “Just don’t think that.” Elliot, on the other hand, seemed to understand this deep part of me.
We finished our pasta and the bottle of wine we’d been working on and then we retired to the couch, and my chin got rawer and rawer with more stubbly kissing, and when we pulled back and looked at each other, I wanted to tell him I loved him. I didn’t love him, not yet, and even if I did (which I didn’t), it would have been too soon to say anyway. I still wasn’t even sure we were really a couple. With Robert, I’d known it right away: curtain up, lights on, actors on the stage. With Elliot, I could tell we were in a theater and the overture was playing faintly—but those stage curtains were still tightly drawn. There was a chance I would never see behind them. Maybe there was nothing behind them at all. Still, the pesky words clomped loudly in my brain, like little rebels trying to defy my gag order by making so much noise that Elliot would hear them through my skull. I missed saying those words. More than that, I missed saying them and meaning them.
We never got around to doing the dishes that night. But who cared if they sat overnight? Before bed, Elliot took out his iPhone and replied to a bunch of e-mails. But who cared if he never answered mine? Answer to both questions: Dawn West, but then Elliot pulled my hair aside and gently, gently kissed my ear . . . and I certainly didn’t care right then.
Candace Chan,
Princeton University, 1986
_________
THE MUSICIAN
Candace debuted with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at 16 and has been a working cello soloist ever since. Now a double major in biology and chemistry, she represents the undergraduate community on the university science council. While she spends more hours in the lab than the practice room these days, she still finds time to perform with the Princeton University orchestra. “I come alive when I’m playing,” she says. “Music is what keeps me in balance and gives me perspective. Without it, nothing else in my life seems to make sense.”
Chapter Thirteen
With the arrival of November, I reached a predictable challenge in the Kelly Burns calendar, which I had nonetheless failed to foresee: the end of lawn care season. Sure, I still got a few questions from eager souls curious about when to stop mowing for the winter or from procrastinators who wondered whether it was too late for a fall fertilizer application. But their traffic was but a sorry little trickle. Why did I only seem to attract readers in cold-weather climates? Where were the Floridians when you needed them?
Unfortunately, the November chill also coincided with a fascinating vanishing act on the part of my roommate. I would have worried about her, except there were signs of Sylvia all over the apartment—dirty dishes in the sink, celebrity photo-stalking magazines on the floor by the couch, the double-fast diminishment of my shampoo—yet she never seemed to be in the apartment when I came home from work. In the mornings her door stayed closed and a steady silence poured from under the crack. Weekends were even weirder—no sign of her at all. Maybe Rodney was back from Toledo and she was shacking up at his place? Who knew. But what I did know was that she needed to pay her part of the rent.
I started with a nice note on the fridge, tacked in place with a pineapple magnet (a goodwill gesture, the pineapple being the universal symbol of hospitality and all):
I don’t know how we keep missing each other! I hope everything’s going well with the job search! Just a quick reminder that I have to send in our rent check tomorrow, so if you could just leave a check for your part on the table, I’ll be sure to get it. Thanks!
No check appeared. Though several of my grapefruits disappeared. I went ahead and sent in the entirety of our rent on time, scrupulous tenant that I am, which slimmed my bank account to double digits until my next paycheck. I considered another note, but my sister, in a rare spare moment, had recently e-mailed me a link to a favorite new blog of hers, passiveaggressivenotes.com. Her fav pick:
Hay ladies,
(particularly Jaime . . . you know who you are) Last night, as Ames knows, I was extremely drunk. Yet I still washed my shot glasses and put them away. I happen 2 know some of u are mormons so you aren’t drunk when cooking. So the mess you so often leave in the kitchen is just inexcuseable. Please, rep the amazing strong young women that you are and clean up. Lots of love, Pamela.
With this reminder that roommate notes are a dangerous game, I decided further missives of this sort should be avoided. And so, the morning of November 6—six days, I waited six days!—I held off until nine o’clock, then knocked gingerly on Sylvia’s door. No response. I knocked louder. And then a little louder.
She cracked her door open and leaned out, her hair in a matted mess and her eyes only half open.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m so sorry to wake you up,” I said in my hangover-friendliest quiet voice. “I just wanted to see if there’s any chance I could get you to write me a rent check.”
“Oh yeah, sorry, sorry,” she said, opening her door a bit more and shuffling over to her desk. She pulled out a checkbook, and a minute later I was on my way with her $950 check in my pocket.
I continued on my merry way to work, feeling quite proud of my direct approach and its great success. This sense of accomplishment expired exactly three days later, when Sylvia’s check bounced.
November heralded another change too: Elliot landed a few big article assignments. In addition to his Charm column, he was writing a piece for Grid on the future of brain chip implants and a piece for the Atavist on a scientist and an industrial designer who had teamed up to try to build an underwater air-filled terrarium that could sustain human life.
I imagined the editor
s at Charm and Grid receiving doting five-word e-mails and texts from Elliot. Someone had to be, and it wasn’t me. At least before when he’d ignored e-mails, we’d seen each other in person, which more than made up for it. Now we turned into something that looked less like a romantic relationship and more like voice mail pals.
“Dawn West, I miss you,” his message would say. I’d listen on my way out of work at eight or nine o’clock. He worked late and turned his phone off so he could concentrate, so he claimed, so when I called back his voice mail answered, and I’d say things like “Elliot Kaslowski, are you eating fettucini without me?” I wondered why he didn’t come by after he finished writing for the day. Or why he didn’t ask me to come over and read in a corner while he worked. In college, Robert and I were never apart for long, even during finals we had studied across the table from each other in the library. “Let me know if you want me to come over and keep you company” was as far as my voice mails ever went in asking for such an arrangement. Days went by and he never “let me know.”
Meanwhile, I was as busy as ever in my basement. XADI and I finally filed the magazine copy. Next step, the TGTW video. Regina looked at a draft treatment XADI had put together, jotted a few notes, and passed it back to XADI. The major theme of her notes: Scrap the treatment. If the film was to be a show-stopper at the gala and a hit on the website thereafter, we’d need in-depth, in-person interviews with each of the ten women we’d chosen to highlight. Since it wasn’t feasible to send XADI on the road for any duration without large sections of the magazine falling apart, she’d stay put and cover the New York crowd—Robyn Jackson, Gerri Vans, Rachel Link, Jessica Winston—while I’d travel with the film crew and their cameras to interview the rest: Dora Inouye, Rebecca Karimi, Rita Tavenner, Cindy Tollan, Teresa Anderson, Barbara Darby. A business trip! The very idea of it made me giddy.
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