The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  “It was a little crazy how close I got to describing my life now,” she said. “I didn’t remember having said all that stuff. But here I am now. I actually am an epidemiologist. What made me think I wanted to be an epidemiologist back then, I can’t tell you. But somehow I said it. I teach and I travel too, and I’ve been incredibly lucky—I don’t think I said this in the article, but I always wanted to have a family, and I’ve been lucky enough to have four wild and crazy kids.”

  “You have four? That’s wonderful! How do you—”

  “I always say you have to pick them right, and I lucked out. My husband’s a peach. And then we were also lucky—my mom took care of the kids for a lot of years.”

  We talked through the ages of all the kids (thirty, twenty-six, twenty-four, and eighteen), how Kathy met her husband (grad student bowling league), how her mother died (a stroke), Kathy’s best family vacation (a safari in Kenya with her mother and kids in tow), and her academic and practical focus, which had started out as asthma and moved to AIDS.

  We made our way to talking about her teaching; she was restructuring her Principles of Epidemiology class for the fall.

  “Here’s an epidemiology metaphor I always found interesting,” she said. “Back when cars first hit it big-time, there weren’t traffic lights. There weren’t stop signs. When there were crashes, and there were lots of them in those years, people always tried to frame the crashes as a moral issue. They’d say, ‘People just need to slow down and stop being reckless. The value of courtesy and caution has eroded. If only we could bring back those virtues we’d be just fine and these tragic automobile deaths would go away.’ And those sorts of arguments went on for a while until we came up with stoplights and installed them all over the place, and then lo and behold, people stopped smashing into each other quite so often. I always remember that when I think about diseases today. We always want to blame people and their morals and say that we just need to be careful. But there’s usually more to it, so when it comes to any disease-related issue I’m working on, I always like to ask myself, ‘What are the stoplights in this situation?’ and then once I start to figure those out, I have something to really talk about.”

  I came to the end of the page in my notebook and flipped it quickly so I could write down every last word she was saying. And then I made her promise to send me her syllabus.

  She asked me whether I’d found anyone else from her year yet.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “I have always wanted to get back in touch with Susan Frock. When you find her, please give her my information. We roomed together during our week in New York and our trip to Europe, and she was just amazing.”

  “Wait, Charm sent you on a trip to Europe?”

  “Oh, it was this grand tour. Paris, Rome, and then sort of weirdly backwater Ireland, which I think was just because one of our chaperones was from there. I distinctly remember our bus getting stuck in the mud and sheep swarming us. But I have to tell you my best Susan story. In New York, Charm sent us to all sorts of shows, and one night after a play we were at Sardi’s, and across the room there was Paul Newman. We all started tittering and looking over, and Susan just got up, walked over, and said we were the Charm girls and would he come have a drink with us. Poised as can be, like she was asking a schoolboy to dance. And of course he said yes, and I will never forget the way he smelled. Like Old Spice and cigarettes. When that man went into food it was a terrible thing for me. I slather on his dressings. I pop all his popcorn. I just can’t get enough of his face in my cupboard.”

  After joining her in another few moments of rhapsodizing about the particular pleasures of Newman’s Caesar, I told her how glad I was I’d found the right Kathy Knowlton and that I’d be back in touch as our plans for the anniversary celebration shaped up. We were planning something big. We just weren’t sure what yet.

  She told me to come visit if I was ever in Minneapolis. It was the lovey-doveyest of good-byes. I hung up smiling. And I couldn’t stop. It was just one call, but it had gone well. If I had to report to XADI or Regina now, I could say I’d “really been hitting it off” with the winners. It gave me hope for all the hundreds of calls to come. I didn’t need to say much, just Ten Girls to Watch, and the floodgates opened. It was like being in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, except I would always remember the magic words that opened the treasure cave. Kathy had been so happy to reminisce. Listening to her filled me with energy. Instead of my earlier, tattered self, I felt buoyant, like a pumped-up tire, ready to ride smoothly over whatever rocky roads came my way.

  Yes, I was also a tiny little bit worried that I might be doomed because unlike Kathy Knowlton as a young woman, I couldn’t say exactly what I wanted to do with my whole life, other than something vague like “be a writer” or “give back somehow” or “make enough money so I don’t have to move home.” But that was niggling. After melting away that morning, my confidence wasn’t quite firm yet, but it was re-forming, like Jell-O poured back into the mold and setting again quite nicely.

  XADI hadn’t given me any instructions for how to keep track of my interviews, but after Kathy I decided on an approach. I added a few short notes to my Excel spreadsheet, “Kathy Knowlton, Epidemiology Professor, University of Minnesota (married, four kids),” plus all the address, phone number, and e-mail information. Then I wrote up a profile. Nothing fancy, just a page, but I spent more than a few minutes on it, making sure I had Kathy’s quotes right, coming up with the right words to describe her enthusiasm for her research and her family. Who knew what good these profiles would do—I suspected XADI only wanted the spreadsheet—but after everything Kathy had told me, taking a little time felt appropriate. Besides which, wasn’t writing what I wanted to do with my life? Surely if Kathy Knowlton had wanted to be a writer, she wouldn’t have waited for an assignment. She would have seized whatever material came her way. I imagined a tidy pile of profiles, growing taller and taller. For just a second I pictured handing them all over to Regina, who’d read them in awe and immediately offer me a staff job.

  If I’d wanted someone to talk me further into fantasies like that one, I’d have called Helen. If I wanted someone to talk me back to reality, I’d call my dad. I decided a little reality was in order.

  Walking to the subway that night, I weaved past the tourists slowing up midtown’s pedestrian traffic, and then, hoping not to slow foot traffic myself, I stepped to the side of the sidewalk at a quiet spot between a Rolland’s Pretzel cart and a fire hydrant and dialed my dad.

  “Hello?” he said, as if he didn’t have caller ID.

  “Hi, Dad, it’s Dawn.”

  “Oh! How nice to hear your voice.”

  He was only in his fifties, but he’d been playing the part of a sweet old man for years. He got away with a lot because of it. “It was your birthday? Well, I plum forgot.”

  “So I guess Sarah told you my news,” I said.

  “That’s right! I was so pleased to hear it. So, tell me about the job.”

  When I talked to my mom, she always got a thrill out of the New York details—“They have sushi in convenience stores? My gosh!”—as if even the dingiest aspects of my life (like eating questionably fresh bodega sushi) were dusted with glamour. Not so with my dad. New York had no appeal for him. A fishing cabin on a lake in upstate New York, maybe. But the city? Nope. Add to that the fact that he just wasn’t a phone talker and could handle maybe seven minutes of chitchat max, and you had conditions that led to the development of good summarizing skills on my part. I hit the high points: fiftieth anniversary of contest, calls to women, office in basement of warehouse archives.

  “How nice that you have your own office,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I’d been pretty impressed by that too, even if it was in a basement. If I’d had to pick one detail out of everything I’d said, I probably would have picked that one too. Just another data point proving my dad and I shared more brain waves than I sometimes liked to admit.


  “Are you walking home right now?” he asked. The city’s geography wasn’t his strong suit. For all he knew, midtown and Brooklyn were just a few blocks apart.

  “Well, not quite walking home, but walking to the subway that will take me home.”

  “I better let you go so you can watch out for traffic then!” he said.

  We’d reached seven minutes.

  “All right, Dad. Glad to catch up a little.”

  “Dawn,” he said, then paused, as if he were working himself up to say something big. “You know, I’m proud of you.”

  It was the first time he’d said that since I’d moved to New York.

  That one sentence meant more to me than my whole gushing love fest with Kathy Knowlton.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “Love you, sweetie.”

  “Love you too.”

  Jean Danton,

  Radcliffe College, 1960

  _________

  THE ELEGANT ORIENTALIST

  A true world traveler, Jean has visited more than 30 countries. Growing up in Hong Kong helped (her father is in international business). A political science major, she has a keen interest in international relations. This summer, she will study painting and language in France. Free-time pursuits: art, poetry, and sewing. “I was wholly unprepared for Massachusetts weather.” She quickly adapted, sewing herself an enviable collection of conservative wool dresses and tweedy British jackets, spiced with Oriental silks and real jewelry. In sum, her style is both artistic and mature. Above all, Jean impresses with a real womanliness—at only 20, she seems truly wise beyond her years.

  Chapter Four

  The next day, working away in the little circle of light from my desk lamp, I tracked down three winners, including Jean Danton from 1960. She’d grown up to be just about as worldly and sophisticated as Charm had expected.

  I found her at home, in Washington, D.C. She and her husband had moved back in 1990 after spending twenty-plus years off and on stationed in Russia with the foreign service. At first she hated Russia, or the USSR, as it was back then. “All I wanted was to get back to East Asia,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I actually fought learning the language and refused to remember even the simplest words. But bit by bit the country wore me down. And my children too, I suppose. They were all speaking Russian by then.” She took her first baby steps by reading Russian poets in translation. “Anna Akhmatova, Sophia Parnok . . . they were wonderful,” Jean reminisced. “As I became better with the language, I began to read their poems in the original Russian, and that’s how I first began to translate—painstakingly poring through my dictionary.” After their return to the States, Jean translated Anna Akhmatova’s collected works, the publication released to great fanfare in the poetry community. She told me about her current project, collecting and translating works written under Stalin by female Russian poets.

  I typed fast as she spoke, trying to capture every word for my profile and hoping I’d somehow be able to interpret the gibberish of typos later. “Three of my children now live in Russia, and the oldest is here in D.C. but works on Russia-related issues with the State Department. I would never have predicted it. In our early years in Russia I would have cried if you’d told me. Russia? What an insidious love! It took root against my will, and now its vines are in and around my heart and the hearts of my family. What you grow to love . . .” She drifted off, as if she were reflecting on this all for the very first time. “That might be one of life’s biggest surprises.”

  _________

  That great, life-changing happiness could come from something you started out thinking was terrible was a pretty comforting idea. The words “you never know what you’ll grow to love” echoed in my head as I walked uptown in the cloudy August heat that night for dinner with Robert, Lily, and Ms. Rachel Link, matchmaker to millions. Of course I’d looked up Rachel’s Ten Girls to Watch profile in advance of this get-together: “Rachel Link, Rice University, ‘The Computer Whiz.’” She’d been programming since age thirteen, and by the time she hit college in the mid-nineties, Charm reported that she’d won just about every computery competition you could think of and was also a softball star.

  I’d also done a little extra research on TheOne.com in anticipation of meeting Rachel, and the articles I’d browsed made three things clear: (1) TheOne was far and away the web’s most popular dating website, beating out Meet.com by more than a million users (largely, I wager, because of Meet’s unfortunate homophone); (2) Rachel Link was rolling in dough as a result, evidenced not only by the feature I found in Fine Living Decor on her faux home-on-the-range manse in Dallas and her so-shiny-it-looked-slippery pied-à-terre in San Francisco but also by the no. 3 listing I found for her in GRID’s “Where the Money’s at on the Web” rankings; and (3) as I had already been well aware, liberals of all stripes—in particular liberals who wrote for magazines, newspapers, blogs, television, or radio—loved to hate her because of TheOne’s old-school matching style. Interracial dating? Interclass dating? Homosexuals? All rabble-rousing nonsense in the world of TheOne.

  Dinner was at Robert’s place, and Robert lived in a fancy building near Columbus Circle with not one but two, sometimes three, white-gloved doormen. I’d never once had to turn the revolving door that led to the oh-so-elegant lobby thanks to said doormen. I’m just lazy and germ-phobic enough that I’m often a revolving-door freeloader, letting the folks in front of and behind me do the real pushing, but having a formal pusher so I didn’t have to go through the pretense of leaning into the push bar? Now that was something.

  But there’s also something weird about doormen, other than the weirdness of having people to wait on you—they remember you. And I knew that all three men on duty that day knew that not so many months ago, I’d been spending night after night in Robert’s apartment. And that I had then stopped spending nights. And now Lily was spending nights. And now Lily and I were both arriving. Plus some other chick. I smiled somewhat grimly when they said hello and tried to pretend I wasn’t pained. Undoubtedly they’d brand Robert a Lothario and give him high fives later. The female role in such dramas is much less flattering.

  After one of the doormen called up and gave me the go-ahead, I took the elevator up to the seventh floor. When Robert’s parents bought the apartment for him, he’d earnestly explained their bargain-hunting prowess: “I get the exact same service as the guy who lives in the twenty-million-dollar penthouse, but the price goes down a few million every floor. It’s really an unbeatable deal.” This was while I was staying with him and apartment hunting, with a negative budget. The bargains I was looking at were more like “Who needs a pesky window in their bedroom?” or “Not exactly a bedroom, but the ladder is sturdy, the crawl space fits a mattress, and you can almost sit up without hitting your head on the ceiling.” The moderately wretched though to-my-standards livable apartment I finally found cost less than Robert’s parking space.

  Outside the door of 7C, I adjusted my dress, a simple black sheath that no one would think much of, except Robert had said I looked beautiful in it every time I’d ever worn it. Lily opened the door a mere second after I knocked. “Perfect timing!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She smelled like perfume. Not the sort of lightweight perfume I dared to wear. Something muskier, woodsier. It gave her a gravitas and sexiness I resented. “Robert is just finishing up in the kitchen, and Rachel already arrived. Don’t worry, she just got here. She’s freshening up.” Her delivery was so breezy and comfortable, her lines delivered like we were best friends, and like a forensics team wouldn’t turn up many more of my fingerprints in the apartment than hers.

  Despite the fact that the knot in my stomach—which had been present since the day I first learned Lily existed but which had been growing increasingly tangled all the way up the elevator—was now tightening even further in the face of her ease, I managed to lob the polite, charming, so-cool-with-everything ball back at her. “Excellent,” I said. “What’s cooking? It smells g
reat!”

  “I’m not sure,” Lily said. “Robert’s in charge of dinner.”

  Robert? In charge of dinner? In all our time together, Robert’s being “in charge of dinner” had involved, at most, choosing a restaurant. Though that wasn’t quite fair. He’d extended himself to boiling pasta . . . once.

  We walked by the kitchen and Robert, in an apron, with green beans in one hand and kitchen scissors in the other, semishouted hello.

  “Need any help?” I said, slowing at the door.

  Before he could answer, Lily looped her arm through mine. “He’s fine. We worked it all out. He’s on last-minute meal-prep duty, I’m on entertaining-our-guests duty.”

  “I have my orders!” Robert cheerily said.

  I’d never given Robert orders. That just hadn’t been how it worked. It had always felt like he would have bridled had I even thought to. Though he’d condescended and dominated me plenty. But with Lily, it was clear he liked it. Like he could trust her to captain. And in painful contrast, I thought, like he’d never trusted me. She’d probably grown up yachting or horse jumping or some other similarly chichi hobby that had instilled her with the power to jauntily shout commands.

  The living room looked just like always, meaning complete with real rugs and furniture and artwork as opposed to my apartment and the secondhand Ikea furniture I’d prayed didn’t have bedbugs before I bought it off Craigslist. It looked like always, that is, except one change I noticed immediately: on the wall by the bookshelves, the grouping of nicely framed photos of college friends—which had prominently featured me—was gone, replaced by a big art photo of a diner.

  Lily walked straight to the sideboard and poured a couple of glasses of wine for us, again with complete ease, as if she had already moved in, as if it were her apartment as much as Robert’s. I wondered whether she’d had anything to do with the changing of the photos or whether Robert had undertaken my removal all on his own.