I’d expected questions along the employment line, and I’d prepared my “lawn expert” answer in advance. LawnTalk.com hadn’t given me a title. It wasn’t like I had business cards. I didn’t even use my real name. And it certainly wasn’t a full-time gig. But I couldn’t stand saying “Well, actually, I graduated a year ago and I’m still looking for a real job.” That either stopped conversation or unleashed a river of comforting, even wistful advice from older adults, intoned as if my problems were a quaint reminder of their younger years.
“A lawn expert?” Regina smiled and leaned in. “Do you take care of lawns? Do you have a lawn?”
This was a much better approach.
“Actually, don’t ever tell anyone”—I leaned in conspiratorially—“but I’ve never had a lawn. I mean, my parents had a lawn for a while, though I never helped take care of it, but eventually my mom ripped it out and put in a rock garden. And now I guess I can see grass from my apartment window in Brooklyn . . .”
“So how did you become a lawn expert?” she asked, wide eyed.
I heard myself taking on a slightly swashbuckling tone. “Well, actually, Craigslist . . . This website was looking for a writer who could write about lawns, and I told them I’d seen neighbors mow their lawns, I’d run through sprinklers on lawns, I liked lawns, and somehow they were hard-up enough that they signed me. I have about half the Brooklyn Public Library system’s lawn care books on my floor at home right now. But I’ve been doing it for a few months now. I write a little weekly column and then answer all the questions users post, and somehow, it’s worked out.”
I expected a “Gosh, that’s kind of funny” reaction, but that’s not what Regina was giving me. As I talked, she actually bent toward me like a tennis player, crouching and tensed, ready to spring at the ball the second it left my racket. It made me nervous, and I wondered where things had gone wrong.
“I’m sure the lawn care expert world must be pretty small,” Regina rushed, “so I have to ask, do you know a writer named Kelly Burns?”
I felt a terrific zing all the way from my toes to my fingertips. “Kelly Burns?” I said. “I’m Kelly Burns! That’s my online pen name.”
She snatched my forearm. “No way. LawnTalk.com Kelly Burns? We just bought a house down the street, and my husband is obsessed with having the perfect lawn and has this total crazy need to do it himself. He seriously reads your site every night. He actually says ‘Time for Kelly Burns’ and cracks his knuckles as he sits down with his laptop. You’re Kelly Burns?! Oh, he’s going to love this.”
A few users on the site had sent me nice thank-you messages after I helped them diagnose their mysterious lawn diseases or choose the best grass type for their yard, but a real-life, in-person fan? I felt a glow of pride, the first time I’d felt any such thing in a long, long while. Forget my air conditioner–free digs, forget that Robert seemed to have found his dream sorority-girl counterpart, forget that I still wasn’t getting interviews and that the idea that I’d ever publish any fiction seemed totally laughable. Someone in this world cracked his knuckles every night, logged on to LawnTalk.com, and said “Time for Kelly Burns.”
Regina released her grip on my forearm, only to grab my bicep, mafia-escort style. “I think he’s out back. Let’s go find him,” she said, and just like that we were swerving through the crowd (I saw Alec Baldwin out of the corner of my eye), out onto the deck by the pool, and from there down to the west garden. We stopped at a table up near the band, where a group of handsome men, one of whom was apparently Regina’s husband, were sitting around enjoying fancy foreign beers and a bowl of Rolland’s Bavarians.
“Tony,” she said, looking at the curly-haired one with super-thick-framed nerd-cool glasses, “I’d like to introduce you to Kelly Burns, the lawn expert.” She waved her hand up and down over me, like a manic version of a model on The Price Is Right. The other men looked a little bewildered—who was this slightly sweaty, blushing lawn-expert person?—but Tony jumped up to shake my hand.
“Kelly Burns? Kelly Burns of Lawn Talk?” He beamed. “No way. I’m Buddy 7468.”
“For real?” I answered giddily. “Have you treated the bindweed yet?”
“Oh yeah, did exactly what you said. Double treatment of dicamba, cut off their water supply. Worked like a charm.” He turned to his wife. “How did . . . ?”
“Robert’s girlfriend just introduced us,” Regina said.
Robert’s girlfriend. Robert’s girlfriend. Robert’s girlfriend. The words were a cartoon echo in my head.
“And actually,” Regina continued, “it’s not Kelly Burns, it’s Dawn in real life, right?”
I nodded. “Kelly Burns is just a pen name.”
“Crazy,” Tony said. “I always figured Kelly Burns was a fifty-year-old dude living in Ohio.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m not,” I whispered.
Just then the band started playing “Blue Skies,” and Lily swung by our table and touched my shoulder, a dainty interruption. “Dawn, I wondered if I could grab you for a minute.”
I could have said no, but anything other than gracious acceptance would have sounded strident after Lily’s dulcet request.
“So great meeting you, Regina, Tony, everyone.” I put my hand up in a wave and turned toward Lily.
“I’m sure we’ll talk again before the night is over.” Regina smiled.
I nodded, smiles all around, and let Lily take my arm.
“I’m sorry to pull you away,” she said in a low tone as we made our way across the lawn. “I got stuck talking to this horrible horseradish distributor, and I needed an excuse to leave and I saw you across the way and told him I had to give you a message. I think the horseradish guy is still looking, so try to look superengrossed in conversation.”
Confident presumption seemed to define Lily. She talked to me like she naturally deserved to be in charge. And I recognized it because it reminded me of Robert. Like the time Robert picked me up after my last final sophomore year and drove us straight to Portland, Maine, where he insisted on instructing me in perfect lobster-eating technique. He’d sat down beside me and practically moved my hands for me. I’d loved it. It had felt so caring and fun. On the way home, though, he’d told me I should stop holding my head at an angle when I talked, and I felt assaulted by such minute criticism, so there’d always been both sides. But there was a gleam to it, being singled out for attention by someone so obviously striding wherever he pleased. I didn’t want to feel drawn in by Lily. I wanted to find her undynamic and dismissible. But she wasn’t either of those things.
Lily led us to a place by the pool, where she sat on the edge, took off her shoes, and dangled her feet in the water. I joined her.
“Robert says that after you guys broke up, you didn’t talk for a little while, but then it was pretty much normal and friendly.” She kicked the water and little droplets splashed back onto our dresses.
So, she wanted to get right into it, did she? I was surprised Robert had told such a massive lie. I held my breath, waiting for whatever was coming next.
“I think that’s awesome.” She splashed the water with her feet again, this time a little harder. “The guy I broke up with before Robert and I started dating—or who broke up with me, actually—I sent him squirrel heads in the mail and programmed my e-mail to send him a message every single morning for a whole month that just said ‘Fuck you,’ nothing else. I’m sure he figured out how to block it, but it felt great sending it anyway.”
None of this was what I expected from the rose of Texas.
“Rewind,” I interrupted, “squirrel heads?”
“Oh, it’s the best thing I ever discovered. Roguetaxidermy.com. They’ve got amazing stuff. Bags of bird wings. Pickled sheep brains. You can do cleaned squirrel heads so it’s just the bones, or mummified squirrel heads. Mummified is the way to go. Much freakier.”
“Wow.” I nodded with real admiration. “I mean, I guess the most I’ve ever really done is write mean e-mai
ls, but then not send them.”
“You’re a killer, Dawn,” she said, and then after a long and what seemed appraising pause, “I think we should be friends. That way you can give me the dirt on Robert.”
I smiled without saying anything, then looked away, almost embarrassed. Announcing friendship felt like too much, not just for us but for anyone. What was I supposed to do if I didn’t want to be friends? Say no? Then I’d seem confrontational when in fact she’d introduced the demands.
Robert arrived just then. “I wondered where you two disappeared to!” he said in his jocular host voice. I watched his eyes flick between us while his mouth held a steady smile.
He gave a flourishy little bow and offered his hand to Lily to pull her up. She took his hand and glided to his side. Before Robert could extend the same courtly hand to me, which would have been awkward, or leave me to get up from the pool deck by myself, which would have been even more awkward, Lily reached her own hand down to me. “Heave-ho, up we go!” she groaned as she pulled me up.
There was nothing dainty about her grip, and when I was finally standing beside her, she smiled and nodded, like we’d just sealed the deal on our agreement to be friends. I glanced at Robert. He looked away.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get some dinner.” And again, it was diffuse, an invitation to Lily, to me, to the air.
We got some of the chic pretzel pastrami sandwiches, put our feet in the pool again, and talked to Alec Baldwin. (In all my years at the party I’d never talked to him before. In real life he was nicer and had fatter fingers than expected.)
After sunset, crickets now chirping all around us, guests began to leave. Still in our awkward but seemingly inescapable trio, Robert, Lily, and I were sitting near the koi pond when Regina and Tony walked by. I popped up, and Regina saw me, waved, and quickly walked over. Gosh, she was stylish, her red dress swishing around her legs like she was some jazz-era singer as she moved across the lawn.
She gave me a quick air kiss on the cheek, then took a card from her purse and leaned in close. “Call me Monday, Kelly Burns.”
She pulled away and walked off with Tony, turning back to wave over her shoulder. I looked at the card. In big pink letters it said: Regina Greene, Editor in Chief, Charm. For years, I’d been reading Charm magazine in doctors’ offices and hair salons, and even, occasionally, off the periodicals shelf at the library when I just couldn’t study for one more second. (I’d always hid in one of the carrels in the back when I executed that move, since reading about lip liner and layering when you were supposed to be reading critical interpretations of King Lear struck me as embarrassing.) Surely, I’d seen Regina’s photo inset on the editor page any number of times. I felt dopey for not recognizing her.
“Looks like you sure charmed them, ha-ha, get it?” Lily said.
“Or was it bedazzled them?” Robert said.
“Wait, did Tony invent the bedazzler or something?” I asked, ready to be astounded if Tony or Regina were somehow affiliated with such a wardrobe revolutionizing tool.
“Uh, no,” Robert said.
“Then I don’t think I get your joke,” I said.
“I guess there wasn’t really one. Just that bedazzled is a funny word?” He shrugged and flashed a supplicating smile.
Lily splashed Robert with water from the pond, and I plopped back on the grass, turning my face away from them. The grass was soft and deep green—the loveliest fine fescue blend around. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d imagined Robert and me getting married and having kids and our kids running around on this lawn. In fact, I could still imagine it. But as Lily moved, her silver kitten heel sandals flashed into my periphery, and I suddenly had a crystalline vision of their wedding, right here, in this same yard. In the rest of my view, though, I saw fireflies, more and more of them every second, rising out of the grass with perfect blinking zips of gold.
Just a few minutes later, I said my good-byes. Robert offered to drive me to the train. I said no. He didn’t insist. The walk to the train station was just under a mile, but with Regina’s card tucked in my wallet, it felt like just a few blocks.
When I called her office Monday morning, she offered me Ten Girls to Watch.
_________
And like I said, I danced and power-pumped my fists the second I hung up. I wanted to sing. I did sing! But after the initial bright white surge of delight dimmed slightly, I saw a few other colors.
A job you find online and apply for and get through your own shining résumé—no one can say anything about that except congratulations, you deserve it. A job you get because you met someone at a party in the Hamptons—it has the taint of privilege, as if Regina hadn’t chosen me because I’d wowed her but because I’d been vouched for by the right people. I knew “that was how the world worked,” and after a year of searching, it wasn’t like I was going to turn down the job. It was just that this was the sort of thing I’d resented most about Robert. When he wanted a summer job on Capitol Hill, his dad called some friends. When I wanted a summer job anywhere other than Oregon, my dad said good luck. Meaning, I was usually the person who got screwed by “that’s how the world works.” Just shrugging and taking advantage of it now made me feel a little like I was pocketing an envelope full of dirty money. Pocketing gratefully, but still.
And then, of course, there was the fact that Lily had introduced me to Regina, which meant I now owed Lily. Lily, a woman I didn’t exactly wish bodily harm, but whose sudden disappearance from the world I would not mourn. I’d have to thank both Robert and Lily. Should I send one e-mail or e-mail them separately? Together felt like it solidified their status as a couple. Separately felt like I was attempting to further forge some sort of independent relationship with Lily. Bah, I’d figure it out later.
I marched out of the house to buy an air conditioner on credit. A much sweeter celebration than any cake.
That night, I sat on a blanket directly in front of the newly installed window unit and lapped up the cool while earning my day’s wages on LawnTalk.com. Even with the vague promise of a future Charm payday, I still desperately needed my eleven cents a word.
After a solid chunk answering questions about grubs and crabgrass, I gave myself a little e-mail break. I’d gotten this:
Dawn, Regina asked me to e-mail you
please come in tomorrow at 10am with the following
1) your resume
2) your passport
3) a working knowledge of excel
4) a can-do attitude
XADI Crockett
Senior Editor
Charm magazine
From this e-mail, I determined the following:
1) Regina worked fast.
2) Xadi was my new boss.
3) Xadi liked lists.
4) Xadi didn’t like punctuation.
5) Xadi imagined that if I didn’t know how to use Excel, I would learn overnight.
6) XADI expected others to capitalize her name too.
I felt weird about all-caps names, so that was going to be an adjustment, but I was just the can-do girl she was looking for, so all caps it was. But those were the subtleties. What beamed out from the screen was this: I hadn’t made it up. The job was real.
Helen Thomas,
Harvard University, 1972
_________
THE CAMPUS CRUSADER
This straight-A history major is one for the record books herself. As president of Harvard Earth Day, Helen led a march of more than three thousand students in support of the environment. Next up, she worked with a local union to organize university service workers in a successful campaign for higher wages and increased benefits. “When I see problems, I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Helen says. We can’t wait to see what she’ll tackle next.
Chapter Two
Regina Greene’s call wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the Ten Girls to Watch Contest. The first time was a year earlier, in the home of Helen Hensley, my college thesis advisor. H
elen Hensley, née Helen Thomas: 1972 Ten Girls to Watch awardee.
In a national poll from a few years back, 68 percent of US liberal arts colleges reported assigning their incoming freshmen to read one of two essays: “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Helen Hensley’s 1978 essay “Must We Find Meaning?” about the cultural and spiritual fallout of World War I. I was one of the college freshmen assigned to Helen’s essay.
“Remembering the Great War,” the essay opens, “requires modern man to face twin compulsions: the compulsion to find sense in tragedy and the compulsion to insist on its senselessness.” Ordinary enough, but by the time she was describing the smell of old artillery rust in the soil, farmers turning up gas masks in their fields fifty years after the war, and the way she tried to cope with the death of half her family in a fire when she was a teenager, I could feel the tops of my ears tingling and my entire body humming along with the resonance of the unfolding sentences and paragraphs. I was so enthralled that I hated to finish it, and when I came to the end of the essay I turned right back to the beginning and read it all over again.
And then I read it about twenty more times over the next four years. It turned out Helen Hensley was a professor in the history department at my university, a discovery that led to my near hyperventilation in the library—certainly the last time the course catalog got me that excited. I took every class Professor Hensley offered for the next six semesters, and, after many nervous courting visits to her office hours, finally asked her to be my thesis advisor, which, despite the fact that I was a literature major, was possible if I wrote a “History and Literature” thesis. (Literature major didn’t exactly spell postcollegiate big bucks, but history and literature? A combo that ensured I’d have to beat away employers.)
During our first official weekly thesis meeting my senior year, she told me to call her Helen. I was the equivalent of a screaming Beatles teenager. The second I left her office, I called Robert to tell him the news. “Call her Helen?!” I screeched. “Does it get any better than that?”
The Ten Girls to Watch Page 3
