The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  He laughed. “No. I like reading them, not writing them.”

  “So you say, but I don’t know. Coolidge and Hoover both need better biographies!”

  “You’re right, there.” He laughed again. “And what about you?”

  I blinked with surprise. He never asked about my writing. “Well, I’m not much further along than you are. But remember that story you told me about Grandma, how when you were a kid she had that one-woman show of The Sound of Music and she made you travel around town with her, working the lights and handing her different hats when she needed them?”

  “I remember it too well!” he said.

  “Not that it’s a book, but I’m thinking about trying to write a short story sort of based on that.” I’d never actually shown anyone in my family my stories. They knew I’d written some, but they hadn’t clamored to get their hands on copies, though, in fairness, it wasn’t like I was advertising their availability. Nor had I ever said the words “I want to be a writer” to any of them, including Sarah. But maybe I’d show my dad this one when I was done with it.

  “That sounds interesting, honey,” he said. Not the most encouraging thing he could have said, but not exactly discouraging either.

  “Well, I better let you get back to your kitchen duties,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  I spent the rest of the day writing a little and then watching TV shows online, and even though this was a classic lonely-person activity, after my phone calls with my family, I didn’t feel as much of a sad solo ache as I’d expected. In fact, after the Sylvia intervention and all my weeks of working, a day off and the apartment to myself felt downright luxurious.

  On Friday I put a package in the mail for Helen. Just a goofy Thanksgiving card and a small pumpkin pie I’d baked, but Ralph’s pie had made me so happy, it seemed only appropriate to pass along the pie-related good cheer. Overnighting the package turned out to be a little pricey (twenty-seven dollars!), but you had to do what you had to do.

  On Saturday a book arrived for me in the mail. Bachelor Stew and Other Recipes for the Lonely Life, by Elliot Kaslowski. Even though Elliot had told me not to read it, after he’d left for Nevada I’d finally ordered a copy. I read the first line. “I was twenty-six before I made my first proper meal for myself.” Ridiculous. The secret ingredient in bachelor stew was capricious unreliability, and I didn’t want to read any more about it.

  Helen sent me a text Saturday afternoon: “THANK YOU!!!” I wrote back with a smiley face.

  Somehow, I made it through the rest of the weekend, and Monday, before I left for work, I left Sylvia, who was set to return that day, a note on the fridge:

  Hi, Hope you had a good trip! It’d be great if you could send in the rent check this month. I left an envelope with the address and a stamp on it on the table. Thanks and talk to you soon!

  I knew it was a long shot, but here was hoping.

  Teresa Anderson,

  University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1957

  _________

  THE BREEZY CHARMER

  A true midwestern beauty, Teresa loves sporty casual looks, but has learned to counterbalance her sprightly breeziness with the occasional gravitas of tailored jackets and elegant A-line skirts. Shiny black pumps are an “absolute must.” Other musts: plenty of time with her fiancé—they’ll be married next month—and just enough time for her university office job and her studies (a Dean’s List honors student, she makes do with “just enough time” quite nicely). In the few hours left each week, you’ll inevitably find her reading. “There’s no escape like a good book!” says Teresa. We couldn’t agree with her sentiment more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The woman at the front desk of the Super 8 in Burbank, California, handed me my room key. I’d never stayed in a hotel room by myself before, but I pretended I was always on the road for work. Business travel—old hat! I’m a pro! Then she looked to Joel and Danny, the cameraman/producer team from the film company Charm had hired. They stood surrounded by piles of equipment they’d just lugged in from our rental van. “I’m only showing one room for the two of you,” she said. “Is that right?”

  Charm had seen fit to book us on a 6:00 a.m. flight from JFK with two layovers, first Cincinnati and then Denver. I didn’t mind, but Joel and Danny had grumbled. But, apparently, Joel and Danny were too beat to grumble about this latest injustice. Joel just shrugged and took their key. The fact that we’d left behind the November gloom of New York for mid-seventies sunshine may have helped cushion the blow.

  Late that afternoon we loaded up the equipment again and drove over to Caltech in Pasadena. Our interviewee, Rebecca Karimi, ’89, was a tenured astrophysics professor who’d also been one of the air force’s very first female fighter pilots. The book she published in the late nineties about discrimination in the air force and why she ultimately chose to leave the military didn’t break the bestseller lists, but it had landed her on a slew of talk shows. I’d seen all the footage. She had straight-ironed the bejeezus out of her hair on every single appearance except a single MSNBC interview where her natural curls leapt fiercely out at the camera. Never having achieved aggressive hair myself, I loved that footage.

  I hadn’t actually spoken with Rebecca. I’d left messages, but she’d always e-mailed back instead of calling. In the recent photo she’d sent, her brown hair was now streaked with gray, and hair product technology had at last advanced enough to grant her lovely waves. She’d mentioned her father was Persian, and I thought I could see it in the architecture of her face, even in the fact that her face could be said to have architecture. Despite the softened hair, her photo looked formal and imperious.

  Which was why I hadn’t believed her when she’d warned that her office was not exactly film-friendly. Imperious people weren’t slobs. Except, apparently in her case, they were. The office assistant showed us to a small, dark, cluttered cubbyhole of an office, every surface piled high with books and papers, the sort of disarray that prompted office Secret Santas to gift things like “Genius Is Messy” cross-stitch samplers or mugs featuring cartoons of offices in disarray and captions like “Out of Order” or “It’s Shovel Ready!”

  Further evidence that I’d misjudged her formality arrived the second she opened her mouth. “So sorry I’m late. I had to pee. I’m pregnant”—she framed her belly with her hands—“and this little guy loves hanging out right on top of my bladder.”

  She had a deep, almost masculine laugh and blunt gestures thanks to her large wrists and stubby fingers, something I hadn’t noticed in any of the film footage of her. “God, this office is a mess,” she half shouted, a sliver of Gilbert Gottfried in her voice. “Also, it makes me look fat. Just kidding. I’m pregnant. Everything makes me look fat.” She wouldn’t have stood a chance in the contest’s dainty, poise-and-polish days, but here she was, one of TGTW’s brightest stars.

  “Outside is better, right?” she said. Joel, the lead producer, agreed, and luckily he’d believed her warnings about her office and had wisely gone to the trouble to get a film permit from the Caltech Public Affairs Office. Off we went to the lawn outside the physics building. Joel and Danny did their setup, a process involving endless cords and connections, while Rebecca and I chatted. Her partner, Keisha, was a few years younger, but Rebecca had wanted to be the one to carry their first child. “She can have all this fun next time around.” Rebecca smirked. Even though she was already six months along, the January event in New York was just before her no-fly cutoff. “I’ll be rolling in, but I’ll be there!” she promised.

  We were all ready to film when a police chopper parked itself in the air a few blocks away. We chatted some more while waiting for the helicopter to carry out its business. I asked her about the timing of her book—she’d waited until she’d been out of the military for six years before she put any of her experience to paper.

  “It took me that long to get my head on straight.” She laughed, her voice raised a little to be
heard over the helicopter. Then she leveled an appraising look at me. I passed whatever inspection she gave me, apparently, because she went on in a more serious tone. “I had a revelation after I became a professor here, and it’s basically this: sometimes there are excuses, and sometimes there are reasons. Even though I successfully flew missions for two years, I felt like such a failure when I quit. It wasn’t until I succeeded at something else and saw that I was exactly the same, it was the circumstances that were different, that I could even start to think of my experience in the air force as anything other than a personal failure. That I wasn’t just making excuses and that there were real reasons I left. I don’t know why most women blame themselves first, but we do, and it was a total revelation for me to look outside myself and see some other folks who deserved some blame.”

  Rebecca then laughed her great big laugh again. “You remember the Lawrence Summers Harvard controversy? When he said that maybe it was women’s fault—their limited abilities—that was the reason for so few female scientists? I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. I was like ‘For real? You’ve all been running things for how long, and you’re actually going to get up there and say it’s our fault?’ No wonder we women get stuck blaming ourselves for everything—everyone else is blaming us. What else are we supposed to do?”

  On e-mail she mentioned that she’d lost her copy of the ’89 TGTW issue, and so I’d color-copied the entire issue for her. When I pulled it out of my bag she gasped, then lunged for it. “No frickin’ way,” she said, thumbing through the pages. “This is amazing.” She wrapped her arms around me and pressed me into her stomach.

  “Oh, this was hilarious,” she said, opening to the page with her photo. “The magazine asked us all these questions about balancing a career with motherhood. We were all these dumb twenty-year-olds pontificating about something we knew absolutely nothing about. I think I said something like ‘Women can have it all!’” She did Rosie the Riveter with her arm as she said it.

  “Actually that’s exactly what you said.” I laughed, pointing to the quote next to her photo.

  “Yeah, right. All I can say is that now I’m forty and I can barely balance being pregnant. Thank goodness I have an amazing partner, but even with both of us pitching in, things are going to get real interesting when this little rascal comes out of the easy bake.”

  The helicopter finally moved on, and the boys hooked Rebecca into her microphone while I stepped outside the shot. We wanted the video to open with a run of all the women saying what they did, so that was the first thing I asked her to say.

  “I’m a professor of physics at Caltech. My area of expertise is observational high-energy astrophysics, which means, basically, that I scan the universe for things like gamma-ray bursts and neutron stars, and then try to draw inferences based on those observations. And before I was a physicist, I was one of the very first female fighter pilots in the US Air Force.” She looked away from the camera toward me. “How was that?”

  “Awesome,” I said.

  The guys nodded.

  She looked back to the camera, then turned sideways to highlight her belly. “And I’m also pregnant.” She beamed and raised her fists in the air like Rocky.

  _________

  Back at the hotel I changed into my pajamas and pulled out my laptop. Even though lawn care questions were only trickling in at this point, I was still responsible for the trickle. I answered a question about how to fight moss (answer: aerate the soil and cut back on the overwatering), and then I opened the Sound of Music story file. I reread the opening paragraphs as they stood so far:

  On one of Elsie’s turnaround days (her name for the days when she finally kissed Ron again and forced herself to put on a dress, set her hair, and pat on lipstick), right between her fourth and fifth miscarriages, she went downtown to Brennan’s Music to pick up new piano books for Laura and Michael’s lessons.

  She hadn’t meant to buy anything other than Laura and Michael’s books, really she hadn’t, but behind the register, a cover had caught her eye. A woman, arms out, twirling on a green hilltop. “I’ll take that too,” she said to Mr. Brennan, impulsively, gesturing to the title above his shoulder.

  That night, after dinner and dishes, she pulled her purchase from its brown paper bag. The Sound of Music Songbook! declared the cheerful green lettering atop the cover. Acting happy was the first step toward being happy, Elsie always said, and so she opened the book and played and sang through one song, and then the next . . .

  I thought about what Rebecca had said that afternoon about excuses versus reasons. For the past year, I’d been coming up with excuse after excuse not to write, which segued right into berating myself for being so lazy or undisciplined. But maybe they weren’t all excuses. It had been a hard year. Maybe there’d been some reasons hiding in there too.

  That night, I worked and worked, long into the hours when I should have turned out my lights and gone to bed. I’d still been following the thread of what I knew to be the true story, but now I added scenes that were pure invention. Elsie writing a newspaper ad to publicize her first show, Michael helping his mother cut the fabric for her nun’s habit. Now that I wasn’t writing about my actual grandmother, something that had been stuck came unstuck. Elsie could be as difficult or beguiling as the scenes demanded. I realized that another reason I might have put off working on the story for so long was fear of real-life hurt feelings if the “nonfiction” version were ever published. We Wests were sensitive. What most people would think of as an innocuous description of, say, a warbling singing voice could strike my family members as purest insult. But now that I was straying farther and farther from reality, I ran free.

  The next morning Danny, Joel, and I hit the airport predawn and arrived in Phoenix at seven thirty. We’d made a trade—a night of rest after our cross-country flight in exchange for doubling up and interviewing Cindy Tollan, Paralympic gold medalist and world-class wheelchair marathoner, in Phoenix that morning and Dora Inouye, mayor of Seattle, in Seattle that afternoon. Danny and Joel felt put upon by the fast and furious flying. I, in contrast, felt like a glamorous globetrotter.

  When I’d called Cindy Tollan to set up an interview time, I’d timidly suggested something around eight o’clock. Rather than balk, she’d said eight was absolutely perfect. She would have just gotten back from her morning run, which is what she called it, she said, even though it was actually a morning wheel, because who called it a morning wheel?

  So that was that. Danny and Joel’s only recourse for expressing their displeasure at our second early morning in a row was hitting up a drive-through Starbucks and ordering gigantic coffees and excess amounts of pastries, all on Charm’s tab. I couldn’t believe we were allowed to order coffee on Charm’s tab in the first place. Business travel was really doing it for me.

  Cindy Tollan had been nothing but lovely over the phone, albeit perhaps a little on the perky side, but I’d been secretly dreading the meeting anyway. I worried that I’d come off as an exploitative twenty-something interviewer asking the paraplegic athlete to testify for Charm.

  “You must be Mr. Tollan,” I said to the tan man in the golf shirt who opened the front door of the ridiculously vast stucco home.

  “ ’Deed I am,” he said, shaking my hand. “You must be the folks from Charm,” he said, then hollered, “Ciii-ndy.”

  “Co-ming,” she hollered back. Hollering was good. Usually people who hollered didn’t fault naive twenty-somethings for phrasing their questions imperfectly.

  From the entryway, we could see out the living room windows, or, more properly, the living room wall, which was all windows and which overlooked a gorgeous lawn and terraced garden. Here were the warm-weather readers Kelly Burns needed! In the middle of the yard an inordinately long and thin pool, almost like a canal, sliced through the grass. Plantings of succulents, light green and dusky purple, thrived along its edges, height added here and there by lime-green ceramic pots.

  “Good morning
,” Cindy said as she wheeled into the living room. “Come in, sit down.” Her voice sounded a little lower than I remembered. Earthier. Almost before I could take in her face, I noticed the ropes of muscles in her forearms. Her husband slid open part of the window wall and said, “Why don’t ya’ll come out here on the patio. It’s such a nice morning.” We did, and moments later, Joel and Danny found their shot: Cindy facing south with a backdrop of yucca plants and silvery green Russian olive trees.

  As luck would have it, I didn’t say anything dumb, and Cindy didn’t come off as even one bit ickily inspiring. She was just a carefree jock. If she were in ads for sunglasses or watches, the people of America, me included, would go wild for her shades and timepieces. She talked about racing (hard-core), her husband and their going-on-twenty-year relationship from college straight on through (soft-core), and competition in general.

  “I’d been an athlete for a long time before Ten Girls to Watch,” she said. “I started swimming right after my accident, when I was eleven, and I was used to winning competitions, but not that kind of competition. I was going to have my picture in Charm? Me?” She laughed. “I felt stupid even sending in an application, and then, what do you know? I won. It started this whole chain reaction where I started doing things I’d never thought I could do. I married Mark. I took up marathoning. We left the Midwest and moved out here. We designed and built this house. I decided to try my hand at coaching. On and on, all these things that seemed scary or crazy or impossible, and I really feel like Ten Girls to Watch was the start of all that for me.”

  When it was finally time to go, Mark and Cindy sent us on our way with cheek kisses all around, plus little Ziploc bags of nuts from their cashew tree.

  _________

  Shockingly, the sun was shining when we arrived in Seattle four hours later. Nice light glinted through the windows of Dora Inouye’s office as her staff gave us the rundown. Gesturing to a big American flag in front of a slim chair with yellow silk cushions, her chief of staff said, “That’s setup number one.” He then pointed to the window. “The other option is this view behind the desk. If you set up the camera at an angle, you get a shot of the Space Needle.”