Helen won the Pulitzer for the book Must We Find Meaning? of which “Must We Find Meaning?” the essay, served as the introduction. In addition to being a public intellectual and the chair of our university’s history department, she’s also a master glassblower. Did I mention that she has long, flowing white hair and wears green eyeliner and Chanel No. 5 at all times? I believe my hyperventilation over the course catalog was well merited.
During the year, we grew closer, and I calmed down a little, though never enough that the thrill went away completely. Helen grew up in Oregon too, in a town only about an hour from mine. Like me, she’d grown up secretly wanting to be a writer, and again, like me, her hair had once been a firebolt of red (hers had gone white; mine had lightened into a shade I called “strawberry blonde”). In addition to slogging through my thesis chapters on “Regret versus Remorse in the Works of Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen” (a topic for the ages), she generously volunteered to read and comment on my fiction. “I can smell Oregon when I read this,” she wrote in a note on a story about a girl who spends her summer working at a saltwater taffy shop on the waterfront in Yachats, only to find the shop burgled on her last day of work and then to discover months later that the burglar was her brother.
Midway through the year, Helen invited me to dinner at her home with her husband, Paul, and a few of her grad students. After a glass or two of wine, at the end of the night, standing next to her at the sink drying dishes, I goofily said, “You know you’re my hero.” She laughed, then turned serious. “That works very well, since I’ve started to think of you as my protégé.” I felt pinpricks of delight.
The summer after graduation, when I’d turned down law school and gone from being her bright protégé to being her ailing graduate who couldn’t get a job, she offered to let me stay with her and Paul, for free, in the glassblowing hut in their backyard.
I took them up on it for a few months. To be clear, “glassblowing hut” was a misnomer. Complete with two floors and indoor plumbing, the hut was a beautiful, scaled-down version of one of those ornate winter greenhouse palaces that make it possible for Icelandic princesses to eat oranges all year long. On afternoons when she came out to the glassblowing hut to work, she graciously listened to every sob story I had about jobs I wasn’t getting and Robert-related melodrama. On the nights she and Paul would invite me over to “the big house” for dinner, they offered thoughts on careers and grad school and writing.
At one of our dinners, when I lamented for perhaps the millionth time that maybe I should have gone to law school, Helen had finally had enough. She was gentle, but I remember her exact words. “You’d make a great lawyer, Dawn,” she said. “And you haven’t closed the door on law school. Not by a long shot. But if you’re going to try something else first, you need to stop second-guessing yourself. There’s a time for reflection and course correction if necessary, but you’re not there yet.”
When October arrived, I finally decided to move to New York, job or no job, and Helen left a note on my cot. (To be clear, “cot” was also a misnomer. It had feather padding and one-thousand-thread-count sheets.) On simple cream stationery in Helen’s sloping script, the note was just one line: “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 folded it and tucked it into my copy of Must We Find Meaning? and I’ve kept that book by my bedside every night since then.
On my last day before decamping to New York, I was poking around in Helen’s library (a favorite activity, made even more favorite by the fact that her library had one of those rolling ladders), when I found the framed Ten Girls to Watch award certificate on one of the upper shelves, Charm scripted out in vintage magenta font. She’d giggled and gushed through the details of the contest when I’d asked her about it the next day. She still remembered the platform boots they’d outfitted her in for her photos, seeing Grease on Broadway with the other winners, touring the UN, and lunching with Betty Friedan. When the magazine hit newsstands, she’d enjoyed the glow of minor celebrity. The suitcase full of beauty products she’d gone home with hadn’t hurt either.
_________
I knew Helen would be thrilled to hear about my new job. That night, just after I got the e-mail from XADI that assured me I hadn’t been hallucinating, I zipped off an e-mail:
Helen, you won’t believe it. I just got a job. An amazing job. A real job. I’m working at Charm Magazine, and my first assignment is to track down all the past Ten Girls to Watch winners for the contest’s 50th anniversary this year. TGTW winners—that means you! Talk later this week? Love, Dawn
After that I called my older sister, Sarah.
There were a few reasons I was in New York. One was Robert. Another was the ostensible possibility of writing-related jobs. A third was Sarah. She’d never left Oregon. I mean, she’d left for vacation, but she’d never left left. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Her plan had been: New York City. She was five years older than me, and as a twelve-year-old listening to her talk about all the clubs she was going to sing in someday in Soho and the East Village, the place names had taken on the power of incantations. When she said “Manhattan,” I conjured people with sleek black forms, like ghosts, gliding down streets that glittered in the dark. I pictured Sarah becoming one of them. I could feel all those ghosts in the room when she played her guitar, their misty hands clapping when she finished each song. But then she’d gone to U of O, and then she’d met Peter, and then they’d moved to Eugene and gotten married and had kids. Sometimes I felt I was living in New York for both of us. And sometimes I thought I was in New York out of some sort of perverse sibling rivalry.
“Hi, Dawn!” Sarah said in a staccato when she answered. “I’ve only got like five minutes. Dinnertime.” I heard Peter murmur something in the background and one of their girls begin to howl. The twins, Holly and Hannah, had come a few months before I graduated from college.
“Takes less than five minutes to tell you I got a job!” I announced.
“Oh my gosh, I want to hear everything,” she squealed with real delight, and then, away from the phone, “Baby, just put it in for a minute and then pull it out to see if it’s hot. Yeah, just a minute, I promise.”
“Well, it’s at Charm magazine,” I said in a ritzy voice.
“Really? An assistant job? An editor job?” She got dimmer as she spoke—the telltale sign of the receiver slipping away. She must have been holding the phone with her shoulder, probably a kid in each arm.
I talked fast. I considered leaving out the part about meeting Regina at Robert’s Pretzel Party, but in the end I left it in, and she groaned at Robert’s name, as expected.
“Have you told Mom or Dad yet?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
The phone clattered from her ear to the floor. I listened to the faraway sounds of the kitchen, scuffling of feet, beeping of microwave, Sarah and Peter sweet-talking the twins as they buckled them into their high chairs. Only then did Sarah pick up the phone again.
“Sorry, sweetie,” she said.
I said it was okay and promised to tell her more after my first day of work.
“At least call Mom. She’ll be upset if she finds out you didn’t tell her right away.”
“Of course,” I said, though, in fact, if Sarah hadn’t ordered me to do it, I might have waited a day or two before calling.
_________
I read in some women’s magazine (maybe it was Charm) that it takes fifteen years for a kid to get over a divorce. So maybe in seven years I’d dial my parents right away. For the time being I was grateful Sarah always answered, even if she dropped the phone on me a few minutes later.
My dad was a high school history teacher. He’d been at the same school, in the town over from ours, for twenty-nine years, since just before Sarah was born, and his job advice always had a local slant. He’d heard they needed a secretary at the Ford dealership down the road from his school, or, if I was ever interested in
selling insurance, Sherry Fogel, from church, had a good business and she was looking to bring in some new blood . . .
My mom, on the other hand, hadn’t worked until the divorce, when I was in high school, at which point she’d become a Mary Kay lady, and her advice had a manic salesy tinge to it. You just have to march into the offices where you want to work with your résumé in hand, then wait till someone will see you!
My dad and I only spoke sporadically. Every month or so I’d call to update him. He never called. My mom, on the other hand, called a few times a week to share the latest town gossip. You got a lot of it as a Mary Kay lady. Sherry Fogel’s business must really have been doing okay, because rumor had it she’d gotten a face-lift, and if my mother’s powers of detection were as sharp as ever, breast implants too.
A couple of days before the Pretzel Party, my mom had called to tell me she had a great idea for me: “Have you thought about creating flyers? Just dropping them off at every business you can think of. Flyers have really done so much for my business,” she said.
I explained that résumés were sort of like flyers.
“Well, just think about it,” she implored.
You’d think I’d be thrilled to share the job news with her. But landing a job at a party was way too Mary Kay. I could already hear her crowing voice. “See! It’s all about putting yourself out there!” It sounded just like “I told you so,” with that little barb wrapped up in a big hug. The big hug almost made it worse, since it’s hard to stay irked at someone who’s smooshing you so energetically into their arms, even if you’re feeling the prick all the while.
But my big sister was right, you can’t get a job and not call your mom.
I dialed, and the phone rang and rang. Leaving a message—the best of both worlds!
“Guess what? I’ve got some good news for you. A job! I got a job!” My voice went into a singsong, exactly like my mom’s when she knocked on a door and said “Yoo-hoo! Mary Kay!” I couldn’t help it.
It was late, and I turned my phone to vibrate for the night. I knew she’d call back but I’d listen to her message later. And I’d call my dad soon enough.
Then I sent one more e-mail, to Abigail Wei, my best friend and college roommate. She was marooned in the jungles of El Salvador working for the Peace Corps, and it might be a week, or maybe two, before she was able to take the seven-hour bus ride to town to check her e-mail. But I knew, when she finally did, that she’d sleep a little easier in her hammock knowing something had finally happened for me.
_________
Charm magazine is a Mandalay Carson publication. I’d applied for at least ten jobs at the company (everything from assistant to the editor in chief of Outdoor Living to web marketing assistant at Modern Mom), and while I’d seen photos and walked by the Carson building and looked through the windows, I’d never been in. Apparently, they were interviewing recent grads who had previous experience doing something other than writing legal briefs. The outrage. At the center of the all-white five-story atrium lobby stands a sixty-foot silver tree sculpture by Guier Loudon, complete with thousands of delicately carved silver leaves individually attached with tiny hooks so that they shimmer and quake in the artificial breeze circulating through the atrium’s upper levels.
The next morning as I walked through the doors, I avoided all staring and gasping so that anyone who happened to be looking would think I was an old pro rather than some neophyte. At the front desk I asked for XADI Crockett, and after flashing a photo ID I was directed up to eighteen.
Like the main lobby, Charm’s waiting area was bright white, and at the far end behind a shiny bright counter sat the receptionist and, behind her on the wall, a giant blowup of Charm’s most recent cover featuring Reese Witherspoon, hung in a way that gave the impression that Reese served as a coreceptionist, but one whose choice of workplace attire might be suspect, boobalicious purple satin dresses typically not on the list of office-approved apparel.
I asked for XADI and took a seat as the receptionist called back. Of course I’d googled XADI that morning. The Internet had very quickly verified that she was indeed an editor at Charm, but that was about it—my image search had been fruitless. I perched anxiously on the chair.
And then, there she was, holding open the glass door that led to the offices, the word CHARM in giant letters emblazoned on the wall behind her. XADI Crockett. The second I saw her, any remaining strains of resistance to capitalizing her name vanished. In her forties, with solid square shoulders, she looked like a masseuse at a Turkish bath, the kind whose massive hands could really work out all your kinks. Her hair was mousy brown and bluntly cut to her chin, with wiry strands of gray running through it. Her facial features were broad and unmitigated by makeup, save one savage dash of magenta lipstick. Her black shirt and slacks hung shapelessly on her broad frame. She had the sort of presence that could quiet a whole gym full of unruly seventh graders with one blow of a whistle. Not exactly the woman my teenage self had imagined on the other side of the Charm advice I memorized monthly, but clearly a force. She radiated competence. Meanwhile, the white pencil skirt, green tank, and yellow cardigan I’d come up with that morning, feeling like an ad for a bright young working professional who knew a thing or two about color blocking, suddenly seemed cartoonish.
XADI led me down a long hallway adorned with photo after photo of old Charm covers—Grace Kelly with red lipstick in 1960; Candice Bergen with a staggeringly tall updo in 1964.
“Amazing photos!” I said. Nothing like a little winning chitchat to break the ice.
“Aren’t they?” XADI said, her tone clearly ending that line of conversation. Apparently she didn’t hail from the chitchat school of get-to-know-you.
As we sped along I imagined that the hallway would soon open on a buzzing newsroom where, in my dream version of the day, I would first be shown into Regina’s office for a friendly tête-à-tête, following which I would be presented with my shiny new desk. Alas, no such thing. XADI led us immediately to an internal office.
“You’re just here today to fill out paperwork,” she said. “You’ll be starting tomorrow at the archives warehouse.”
“Archives warehouse?” I said as cheerily as possible.
“It’s on Fiftieth and Eleventh. The address is in your packet. They’ll be expecting you in the morning. I thought it would be easier for you to work from there. They have all the back issues and the relevant Ten Girls to Watch materials.”
I nodded as my dream of a shiny new desk shriveled up and disappeared, leaving me feeling embarrassed to have had the vision in the first place.
“Your first job is to get to know all of the Ten Girls to Watch back issues,” XADI continued. “You’ll start in the fifties and work forward.” At this unnecessary chronological guidance, I felt a pang of worry—had I come across as incompetent? Already? I did my best to look alert and alive.
“The contest ran in the August issues until 1973,” XADI continued in her stern voice. “Then it moved to September until 1981, and it’s been in March ever since. Just to orient you.”
I nodded vigorously and jotted notes. The note taking seemed to garner some approval.
“I’m not actually going through any of the paperwork with you,” she said. “HR takes care of that. They’re expecting you in a few minutes. I just wanted to meet in person since I’ll be your editor for this project.”
Ah, so here came the get-to-know-you. I cleared my throat and smiled eagerly in preparation. But no. With that, XADI stopped. When she said “meet in person,” apparently that’s all she meant. Just meeting.
“Well, it’s great to meet you,” I said, trying to build a bridge over the awkwardness.
“You too. This should be fun,” she said, smiling without showing her teeth. And then she stood up and walked me back to the reception area. “They’re expecting you on ten. Just tell the receptionist your name, and she’ll know what to do. And they’ll be expecting you at the archives tomorrow at nine a.m.�
��
So that was Charm Day One. It could have gone better. It could have gone worse.
Day Two began with the long walk from the subway to the distant fringes of Hell’s Kitchen. When you get that far west the city gets scrubby, the office towers giving way to barbed-wire-protected parking lots and hulking windowless warehouses. I double checked the address, then rang the buzzer at one such warehouse, though this one was on the diminutive side compared to some of its neighbors, more like a sliver of a warehouse, the width of a town house. Somebody somewhere in the building pressed a button that buzzed me in, and I walked into a small gray room, with stained industrial beige carpet and no receptionist in sight. It felt like the waiting area at a car mechanic’s garage.
I looked around expectantly, not sure what to do next. After a minute I contemplated taking a seat in one of the chairs. Certainly I was on some sort of surveillance camera, and whoever had buzzed me into the building would send someone to the waiting room eventually? Mindful of the theoretical cameras, I avoided worrying my cuticles or looking for split ends or any of the other biding-time behaviors I typically engaged in when unsurveilled. I smoothed my skirt and adjusted my cardigan (today’s outfit was a combo of red, pink, and tan, which was hard for a redhead to pull off and which may have made me look like a valentine, but which I hoped nonetheless read as capable with a side of pizzazz), and then I waited with what I believed was a look of polite expectation on my face.
At last a door at the back of the room opened, and in walked a toweringly tall forty-something man who bore a notable resemblance to Eddie Munster in a tan cardigan, though a friendly-seeming Eddie Munster to be sure.
“Dawn?” he said.
I nodded, noting our matching cardigans, and we shook hands vigorously as he said, “I’m Ralph, the head librarian. Pleased to meet you. If you’ll follow me back, I’ll show you where we’ve got you set up.”
The Ten Girls to Watch Page 4
