The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  I was a little cheesed-out by the flag (nothing but love for America, but it felt a touch over-the-top), but Danny said “Lighting’s better by the flag” and put down the tripod.

  Dora herself was running a little late, the chief of staff informed us. She was walking back from the Seattle Climate Change Conference.

  Even though Seattle is mostly a car city, everything I’d read about Dora highlighted the fact that she never drove; she took public transportation or walked to and from every meeting, even in the rain. At the previous year’s Climate Change Conference—Dora had held one every year since she took office—college students from the University of Washington picketed the conference, up in arms about Seattle’s new “Bridges to the Future” campaign, which planned to widen several of the major bridges around Seattle in order to improve traffic flow. Each bridge would include a dedicated bus lane, but the students felt that was an inadequate gesture. Among the signs bobbing up and down in the protesters’ hands were “Bridges to our DOOM,” “The A-BRIDGED Plan: Destroy Seattle,” and less bridge-based but perhaps more to the point, “Light-Rail NOW!”

  When she walked out of the session and found herself confronted by the crowd, cameras trained on her, Dora looked beatifically upon the protesters, broke from her entourage, approached the student with the “Light-Rail NOW!” sign, and asked whether she could borrow it. With the sign and the students right behind her, Dora told the TV stations nothing was better than seeing civically engaged young people, that she had been urging the city council to adopt Light-Rail all along, and that if it hadn’t been clear already, the good people of Seattle overwhelmingly supported this measure.

  The last was not technically true. Most of the good people of Seattle still wanted to drive and weren’t eager to fund rails they didn’t think they’d actually use. Later, when one of the city council members confronted Dora on that, her reply was that she’d said the good people of Seattle, not the bad ones. She didn’t say it in a press conference, just a boring old meeting, but one of the Seattle papers ran the line anyway. In most cities that would have caused a holy ruckus. In Seattle, apparently, most people felt guilty enough about driving already that there was barely a peep—one or two letters to the editor, nothing more.

  The chief of staff’s BlackBerry buzzed. “Dora’s coming up the stairs,” he said, an edge of frenzy in his voice. And indeed, not ten seconds later Dora strode into the room. She had never looked like a typical political woman. No pearls or skirt suits. Short and athletic, she wore her long, black hair loose and usually outfitted herself in easy linen. Today’s shade: lavender. The political woman emerged in force, however, when it came to circling the room and pumping our hands. When she got to me, her grip came with fierce eye contact.

  “Dawn,” Dora said, “it’s so wonderful to meet you in person.” And even if she was a politician, she said it with such earnestness that I felt warm and rosy.

  After Joel hooked her into the mic and her team settled her into the yellow chair, I started with what I thought would be a warm-up question.

  “So how did you first hear about the contest?”

  Dora, apparently, needed no warming up. “I remember the exact issue of Charm. I still have it, in fact. I was in eighth grade, and we were on family vacation at my grandmother’s place. I was lying in the hammock on her back porch reading Charm’s College Issue, and there in the Ten Girls to Watch section was an Asian-American woman, Grace Chang. She was a scientist, and she was wearing a lab coat in her photo. And I remember thinking, I’m going to be one of those girls. I’m going to be like Grace Chang. And I started right then to do the things I needed to do to be ready to win. I was a journalist, not a scientist, but she was most definitely my inspiration. And you know, eight years later when I won, Charm arranged for me to meet Grace Chang. It was wonderful to get to tell her how much she’d meant to me.”

  I’d been on the phone with Grace Chang a few weeks before after tracking her down at UT Austin, and Dora and I briefly compared enthusiastic notes. In addition to building vehicles for surface exploration in space (“cars for Mars,” she said), Grace was also a recreational drag racer and had adopted three children. She and Dora apparently called each other on their birthdays every year.

  Before running for office, Dora spent seventeen years as a reporter for various Seattle newspapers, the last ten years covering the Seattle political beat. We talked about her time as a journalist, and then I asked what made her decide to run for mayor.

  “I’d been following the political scene for so many years that I knew it inside and out,” she said. “You can only write so many editorials trying to convince people from the outside. I finally decided it was time to go inside.” And then after a short pause, she said, “It turns out it’s exactly the same energy, the same drive, that gets you a spot in the Ten Girls to Watch that can one day get you a job as the mayor of Seattle.” Dora beamed as she said this. She knew it was gold. Thirty minutes from start to finish, and Dora was out of her mic and off to her next appointment. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York and watch the footage.

  Our next stop, Chicago. We planned to take the red eye, check into our hotel, interview star architect Rita Tavenner, drive the two-something hours up to Madison, Wisconsin, interview Teresa Anderson from the 1957 class of winners, then back to Chicago for the night. Bright and early the next morning we’d fly to Georgia for our final interview with Barbara Darby and be back home in time to sleep in our own beds in New York that night. And all started off according to plan.

  Rita Tavenner’s office was a gorgeous corner spread on the thirtieth floor of a downtown building, and better yet, it overlooked the Merck Building, which she’d designed. Perfect shot for our cameras. Rita herself was a tall, lean woman with short, no-nonsense salt-and-pepper hair and simple clothing but for a blue silk scarf tied elegantly around her neck, and she settled into her chair in front of the cameras comfortably, one more woman at ease in the hot seat. I asked her the standard questions, and she was smart and charismatic, everything you’d expect. She’d been the 1979 pick for the TGTW Today show interview, and I threw in a question about her TV interview just for fun.

  “Do you know that’s how I met my husband?” She grinned. “Charm used to have a big party for all of us winners, and we spent all week getting ready for it—new hairdos and dresses, the whole works. And for the party, Charm arranged for each of us to have a nice college boy as an escort, someone cute we could dance with all evening. I was on the Today show a few days before the party, and what do you know, Ed was watching. He decided he had to meet me. And somehow in those two days he made enough phone calls and pulled enough strings that he wound up as my escort to the Charm party. I had a boyfriend at the time, but that didn’t matter to Ed. A year and a half later we were married. It’ll be our twenty-seventh anniversary next year.”

  “That story is crazy,” Joel said to Rita after the interview.

  “So crazy,” she said, showing him a picture of her family. “Here we are,” she said, turning and handing the photo to me. And there, courtesy of Charm, was Rita with a handsome husband and two children.

  As she handed me the photo, she looked different than she’d looked on camera. She was clearly delighted, but there was something a little more delicate too. Maybe even something nervous, like she was handing me a photo of the one thing she wasn’t quite sure she deserved. Everything else she’d worked for. Everything else was hers. But this? Pure serendipity. And maybe that made it the most precious thing of all because it could so easily not have happened. Maybe, once chance plays so big a part in your life, you realize more is out of your control than you’d like to think.

  Serendipity made me think of Robert. That had seemed fated. And then Elliot. I felt silly even saying it now that it had been thirteen full days since we’d spoken, but the circumstances had felt special. There he’d been, just waiting for me in the basement, and then there he’d been again, waltzing into TheOne party. But just bec
ause it felt like fate didn’t mean it actually was fate.

  As we drove up I-39 toward Madison in our white Chevy minivan, Joel at the wheel, me in the shotgun seat, Danny in back with all the equipment, I said, “So guys, I need your help. I’m working on a new list. It’s a list of superheroes that don’t exist but should. My best one so far is the Emasculator. She’s a superhot chick who goes around to bars cutting cocky men down to size. I also have Wingman. He does what your average wingman does, just a lot better. And maybe he wears a chicken costume or something, which makes his ability to warm up prospects all the more impressive. Any other ideas?”

  “What?” Danny asked, sounding genuinely confused.

  “Ideas,” I urged. “Any ideas for new superheroes?”

  Joel jumped to the rescue. “How about the Cabbie. His superpower is intuitively knowing which streets will have the least traffic so he always gets you where you need to go just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “I like it, I like it,” I said. “Okay, I’ve got another one,” I continued. “The Pope Tart. He looks like an ordinary breakfast pastry, but when there’s danger, he kicks into action and starts hurling blessings right and left. Eh? Eh?”

  “I don’t know about that one,” Danny said.

  “Okay, maybe we should go back to the job theme. Like the Cabbie. That was a good one.”

  We all sat in silence for a minute until I jumped in again. “Ooh, ooh. How about the Cow Hand? He actually has a cow for a hand. Which totally scares criminals when he takes off his gloves, and which means dairy whenever anyone needs it.”

  “You are a unique individual, Dawn.” Danny chuckled.

  Joel flipped on the radio, and thus ended the superheroes list. I’d been hoping to prove Elliot was nothing special when it came to car conversation, and by extension, nothing special in general. I’d failed, but I was still pretty pleased with myself for coming up with the Cow Hand.

  _________

  When we arrived at Teresa Anderson’s home, she showed us into the kitchen. The whole house smelled just like my grandparents’—a mix of lemon cleaning products, leather, and baked goods—and the kitchen gleamed in red and white, the table itself a vision in light green Formica. The Andersons, it appeared, had succeeded in waiting out the trends of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Now, their sixties kitchen was retro chic. Every frugal instinct in me rejoiced.

  In 1957, Teresa had been the pretty girl in the blue velvet tea-length dress, peeking out from under an umbrella held by the fellow in a tuxedo. She was seventy now, but her white hair was cut to the chin in almost the exact same style she’d sported in the magazine, and she still had that same look of investigation about her. When she trained her eyes on you, you felt her attention keenly. She was really looking, and you couldn’t help but notice the energy of it.

  I got her to deliver her opening lines, prompting her just the way I’d prompted everyone else.

  “I’m Teresa Anderson, I was one of Charm’s very first Ten Girls to Watch back in 1957,” she said, “and I retired eight years ago after teaching first grade for forty years.”

  For a few minutes she told tales of that first year of the contest. Charm had organized a party for the girls at the penthouse of some famous designer. Teresa had never seen a home so opulent. It had curved staircases like the ones in the von Trapps’ house in The Sound of Music, and wildest of all, in the center of the party was a splashing fountain of perfumed water. “The entire place smelled of White Shoulders,” she said, giggling.

  They’d spent a month in the city and another two weeks touring Europe. They’d been the toast of the town—concerts organized for their benefit, outings put together for their amusement—and they’d gone home famous. For years, she’d carried her Charm reputation with her. When she’d started teaching, all her students’ parents had clamored to meet her, the famous and elegant Charm girl.

  I asked her about teaching all those decades, what kept her going. Forty years of anything amazed me.

  “I suppose I just never got over the pleasure of watching a child learn to read. You’re watching the world open. It’s a miracle every single time.”

  “Was that what drew you to teaching in the first place?” I said.

  “This might sound funny to a modern ear,” she said. “But I feel like teaching was a calling for me. I’ve always been good with children. Maybe I’m just too patient.” She laughed. “That was the start, and then to be honest, I prayed and asked God to tell me what I should do with my life.”

  There was no way a thread about prayer was making it into the final video, and I could practically feel Danny and Joel giving me the evil eye when I kept her going. But she was quieter, calmer, surer in a way than any of the other women. I wasn’t going to cut this short.

  “And then you just knew?”

  “I remember when I was in college and I just couldn’t stop thinking about teaching. It was just always there, in the back of my head. I have always been a voracious reader. I always loved school. So that was the start of my answer. And then we had a nice life here. Three kids, and my husband owned a car dealership just down the road. The rhythm of the school year was just the rhythm of life. And I guess that was the rest of the answer. And it still is in a way, now it’s just all about our grandchildren. I take care of my daughter’s children most afternoons. You’re sitting at the homework table right now.”

  She smiled, and then she went on. “It’s just in me. I’m always going to be a teacher. Actually, once I thought of trying to be a writer like you, Dawn.”

  My heart tightened when she said my name and “writer.”

  “But it didn’t last. I didn’t want it enough. And when I got over that, the idea of teaching was still there. And so that’s who I became.”

  So many of the other winners had had these larger-than-life ambitions and careers, and truth be told, Teresa Anderson wouldn’t have made the cut in 2007’s contest. But the scale of her achievement seemed as great as anyone’s. How many children had she taught to read over all the years of her career, after all? There was such radiant purpose in Teresa Anderson’s modesty. Here she was, fifty years later, clearly fulfilled and at peace with her choices. Next time I started fixating on splashy success, I wanted to remember the sense of steadiness and contentment I felt sitting at Teresa’s table.

  I could have stayed with Teresa all day, but we had a flight to catch. We finished the interview, and after Joel and Danny packed up their gear she walked us to the door. I’d hugged all the rest of the women—I was an instinctual hugger—but Teresa put her hand out, and we took turns shaking her hand farewell. The formality of it felt right. I even bowed my head just a little bit as we walked out through her front door.

  _________

  After yet another flight and yet another drive, we set up the shot for Barbara Darby, spy novelist (and former CIA agent), in her Augusta, Georgia, garden, surrounded by Spanish moss.

  “Of course you know when I won the contest, it was a best-dressed contest,” Barbara said with pride, as if to say, Who cares about all my bestselling books. What really matters is that I look fabulous! And it was true, she did.

  She won the contest in 1962, which meant she had to be in her sixties. But she didn’t look it. She looked more like a mysterious forty-something, draped in a beautiful red silk shell that showed off her triceps.

  “I spent months sewing my outfits,” she said. “One school outfit, one weekend outfit, and one party dress. I had to wear them all in a fashion show in the dining hall while a bunch of department heads, deans, and club presidents scored me.”

  I barely had to ask any questions. She just rolled along.

  “I think I won the school contest because I wore a white wool skirt suit with kick pleats, red piping, and red spangle buttons. I was this close to wearing a brown herringbone skirt and jacket. I really couldn’t decide. But at the last minute I went with the bold choice. Ever since then, when I have a hard decision, I ask myself
, ‘What’s the red spangle button choice?’ And whatever it is, that’s what I do.”

  She laughed a little, which made her sleek brown bob and square-cut bangs swing a bit. Her cheekbones sat so high and full that I couldn’t look away. Whatever her age, Barbara still had the loveliest facial structure I’d ever seen. Until meeting her, I’d disbelieved the cheekbones theory of beauty, but she stood as such a compelling case that I was now entirely convinced.

  I didn’t know how, but I hoped upon hope we’d be able to get that spangled-button line in the final video.

  Before I could say anything, Barbara went right on. “You know I was on the cover in 1962? Well, the day I hit the stands, I got eleven calls for modeling jobs. And that’s what started it all.

  “I meant to turn the jobs down,” she said. “I talked it over with my fiancé, Tom, and we decided that’s what I would do—say no and get right back to Augusta. But that’s not what I did. I told him Charm had invited me to stay on for another couple of weeks, and I scheduled every last one of the jobs, one after another. But of course they just turned into more jobs, and at the end of the two weeks, I had to fess up. Later on, when they first approached me about spying, I thought, no way, I could never carry on that kind of double life. I couldn’t lie like that. But I thought back to what happened with Tom, the way he would call and how I would tell him all about what the Charm editors and I had been up to that day even though I had spent all day on a modeling job, and I knew, actually, that I could lie quite well.”

  Danny, who was holding the boom mic, was starting to tremble, the boom, an extension of his arm, shaking with exaggerated fatigue. I wanted to give him a rest, but I didn’t want Barbara to stop.