The Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

  Before Lily and I had to sit down and undertake our not-at-all-agonizingly friendly tête-à-tête, the bathroom door opened down the hall, and a moment later an extraordinarily tall woman—she must have been six-one—walked into the room. She hadn’t seemed so tall in her old Charm photograph.

  “Rachel,” Lily said in a glittering tone, “I’m so excited for you to meet Dawn. Dawn, this is the amazing Rachel Link.” She handed Rachel a glass and poured another one for herself.

  Rachel’s dark hair had grown more voluminous since her photo—she now gave it the sort of height typically reserved for the pageant circuit. She had one of those full, almost exaggerated faces—a little like Geena Davis. Just a lot of everything. Not in the old photo, but in person now, with all of it put together, she reminded me of my cousin Renee, who, while going to community college, had briefly lived in an extra room in our house (this just before my parents’ divorce, when it was still our house, not my mom’s house; the extra room was, in fact, my sister Sarah’s room, only “extra” because she was already away at college). Renee had been queen of this, princess of that, and was in the running for Miss Oregon during her guestroom sojourn. In one of the most mortifying moments of my teenage years, my father had one night during her stay suggested that “Maybe Renee could show you a trick or two. Do up your makeup and hair. Maybe set you up with a nice boy she knows.” I did my chemistry homework with a special fervor that night.

  “Rachel, it’s so good to meet you,” I said as we shook hands.

  “I cracked up when Lily e-mailed me,” Rachel said. “I can’t believe Ten Girls to Watch is turning fifty.”

  “I just started working on the project this week, but I finished going through all the coverage today. It’s such good stuff! You were a winner in 1996, right?”

  She nodded.

  “I believe that was the year of the mom jeans?”

  She grinned without showing her teeth. Was that smile good or bad? Hard to tell, so undaunted, I forged ahead.

  “I think the shapeless white sweaters were even better than the jeans. Cable knit is so underrated.”

  Lily laughed and Rachel half laughed, or more like quarter laughed. It could have been a hiccup.

  Since my tepid attempts at humor weren’t doing it for her, I took the more serious tack. “Have you kept track of anyone from your year?” Stories about other women from her year had been such a winning line of conversation with Kathy Knowlton, I figured it might get a little something from Rachel.

  “I actually worked with Donetta Allen for a few years after college,” she said, “but we haven’t really kept in touch since then.” Again, she seemed rather unenthused.

  “Where were the two of you working?” I asked.

  “Zing.com,” she said, her smile spreading wide for the first time.

  “No way,” I chirped. “I loved you guys! I had my order down. Diet root beer, kettle corn, and a DVD. All at my door at ten thirty every Saturday night.”

  Robert came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray. “The rest of us were going out at ten thirty,” he said. “Dawn, she was settling in with a nice cold diet root beer.”

  “Hm. I’m having this memory,” I said. “Wait, wait, it’s becoming clearer. Oh yeah, it’s you, insisting that I rent Big like four different times and then—why am I becoming thirsty all of a sudden?—oh, probably because I’m remembering you drinking all my root beer.”

  Whoa—where had that come from? It was rare for me to have a sarcastic retort at the ready, and I immediately wondered whether I had gone a little too far, whether I was somehow rubbing Lily’s face in our four-year romance. Then I suddenly had a profoundly disorienting thought. Maybe Lily was so cool with me because Robert had downplayed our whole relationship as much as he’d downplayed our breakup. This didn’t sit well. Though I didn’t exactly like the present, I could adjust, or at least pretend to adjust. But I couldn’t adjust away the facts of the matter. We had a history. Robert wasn’t allowed to simply erase it. I turned a scrutinizing eye on him.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Robert jokingly said, not really clarifying anything. Last time he’d been in close quarters with me and Lily, he’d seemed flustered. This time, not at all. He set the tray he was holding down on the table and went to stand next to Lily. His lack of confusion felt like a betrayal.

  “So Rachel, what did you do for Zing?” I asked, trying to plaster over the leaks in the dam of my heart with the quick cement of ordinary conversation.

  Rachel took a sip of her wine and tipped her head coquettishly toward Robert, leaning languidly against the sideboard so that she was, for the moment, just a bit shorter than he was. And suddenly I saw it, like the clouds parted and a ray of sunlight flooded down, and there, illuminated for all to see: Rachel Link was one of those. A woman who only cared about men. The way she suddenly moved and glowed, it was like Robert had pulled the string and started the doll walking. I would have been more bothered by this had I not been distracted by Robert’s hand. It dangled next to Lily’s silk skirt, the backs of his fingers ever so slightly brushing up against the fabric and her thigh beneath it.

  “I was a web engineer,” she said, to Robert, not me, and she said it with a drawl that I swear came out of nowhere.

  “And then after Zing you started TheOne?” Robert asked intently.

  “Excuse me,” Lily whispered, slipping away to the kitchen. Robert moved his hand to his pockets.

  “That’s right,” Rachel continued, but she’d turned all Georgia peach again so it came out “rahyt.” She giggled, and then, thankfully, Lily rescued us by returning with the rest of the food.

  “It’s filet, Dawn,” Lily said, “but it’s nice happy filet from a farm upstate.” So Robert must have told her that, at least—I’d been a vegetarian for most of college, but I’d recently started eating meat again, if it met certain criteria. It was thoughtful of her to mention, the act of a gracious hostess, which should have engendered gratitude and graciousness in me, but which was instead like a match to the tinderbox of my feelings. Why was Robert flaunting all this in my face? Why was I letting him? I wanted to furiously storm out of the apartment, slamming the door behind me. Instead, I robotically and politely took a seat.

  “I just love a good filet,” Rachel crooned in Robert’s direction.

  I finished my glass of wine before the beans and the potatoes and the rest of the meal made its way around the table, and I felt the loosening in my joints and muscles.

  For a few minutes no one said much, which helped as well. There was general mming and aahing about the meal, which was indeed delicious.

  I applied myself assiduously to a second glass of wine.

  Between bites, Robert, always one for delicately probing a subject, said, “So is TheOne really the evil social engineering scheme people make it out to be?”

  I glanced at Lily, who took another sip of wine, seemingly unflustered by her beau’s charming approach.

  Rachel put down her silverware and sat up to her full height. “I’ve always been an engineer,” she said, “and I built TheOne just the way I’ve tried to build everything else—so it would work. The fact that what works makes a few people uncomfortable? Don’t shoot the messenger is all I can say.”

  I had the feeling she’d delivered those very lines innumerable times.

  Lily jumped in. “So we have to back up. I actually don’t know very much about TheOne.”

  Without a pause, Rachel launched into her full stump speech. “I’d say there are four secrets to TheOne’s success. The first is that you can’t sign yourself up for it, someone else has to sign you up, so it takes away all the stigma of online dating. You’re not desperate if your mom signed you up. You just have an overbearing mother. And even though we’re sure about 75 percent of people fake it and just use two e-mail addresses to sign themselves up, it still works out just fine. Those people can just keep on pretending all the way through, who’s going to call them on it? The sec
ond is that we eliminate as much self-assessment bias as possible. We require five photos, and we don’t ask a lot of subjective personal questions. It’s more factual. How much do you make? What degrees do you hold and from where? How many times in the last month did you go to the gym? What magazines do you regularly read? Where did you go on your last vacation? All very yes/no and numerical. No questions like what’s your favorite band. Favorite bands are not a good predictor of compatibility. And third, it’s successful because most of what TheOne does is offline. You can’t search our database of profiles, which means you’re free of the hassle of trying to come up with a witty screen name and all that. What you get after someone signs you up and you or they provide all the necessary information about yourself is just an invitation to a party. That’s it.”

  “So are the parties just geographical?” Lily interrupted.

  “I believe this is the part where things get good,” Robert goaded.

  Rachel lashed back with what I’m sure she thought was flirtatious fervor. “You’re exactly right, Robert. This is where things get good.” Unfortunately, her flirtatious fervor sounded like real fury, leading me to infer that in addition to being insatiably hungry for male attention, she was among the poor, misguided souls who confused outright assault with coy banter. Akin to my problem of slight meanness in place of real flirting, but a much more virulent form of the disease.

  “The way the parties are designed is the fourth pillar of our success,” Rachel said. “We work very hard to get the right group of people at each party.”

  “So it’s a program you wrote that matches certain characteristics?” Lily asked, trying to keep things on course.

  “We’re always refining the program, but the honest truth is that it’s a lot easier to predict compatibility than people think. People who are similarly attractive are more likely to be compatible. People whose parents are still married are more likely to be good matches for other people whose parents are still married. People with similar incomes are more likely to be compatible, as are people whose parents had similar incomes when they were growing up. The list goes on and on. TheOne team did a lot of research, and we built it into our reviewing system, and that’s how we decide who gets invited to what party. As I mentioned, we’ve been refining the system, so now every party has a few wild cards.”

  I winced inside as she went through her list. It sounded like I was supposed to move home and marry one of my second cousins. And even though I’d diagnosed the troubles between me and Robert on dozens of occasions, I hated hearing our compatibility so publicly condemned. And hearing his and Lily’s so publicly affirmed. And seeing it so blatantly affirmed as well. They just seemed so natural together. Like I’d never even existed.

  “Let’s look at you two, for instance,” Rachel said, gesturing toward Lily and Robert. My heart seized. Really? Was she going to say it all out loud?

  Robert at least had the sense to intervene.

  “Wait, I have a much better idea,” Robert said. “Let’s look at Dawn.”

  That wasn’t exactly the intervention I had hoped for.

  “Hold on, wait a second here, how did I get involved in all this?” I protested, panic clomping through me. “I’m an innocent bystander. My only role here is journalistic.”

  “We could look at you, Rachel, that could be fun,” Lily said divertingly. Maybe Lily would be spared some discomfort of her own if we skipped analyzing me, but I was still grateful.

  “Fine,” Rachel said, ignoring both me and Lily. “Let’s look at Dawn.”

  “Please don’t make me go down the list and answer all of The One’s questions. I can tell you that I’ve stayed in my apartment in Brooklyn for all my recent vacations.”

  “I’m going to guess a few other details,” Rachel began. “Ivy League degree, creative professional, income—not high.”

  Ouch. And true.

  “Parents . . . divorced? Not originally from New York.”

  I silently grimaced my assent. Was everything about me really that obvious? Did I reek of broken home and redneck America?

  “So let me tell you who would most likely be at your party,” Rachel continued. “It’d be men in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine range. Well educated, either in somewhat creative fields or who score high in other ‘humanist’ areas like significant book ownership or playing instruments, things like that. They’d be decent looking. And to compensate for the fact that you’re a redhead and that there’s a significant minority of men who say no redheads, we’d tilt the ratio and throw in an extra man or two.”

  How generous. She said all this without even a hint of a pause, making it clear that categorization better than “decent looking” hadn’t even flickered across her imagination, nor had much concern for the potential thwack to my feelings from her “no redheads” comment. You had to give it up to her for not mincing words, though. I felt myself slouching.

  “And there’d be a lot of midwesterner-gone-east types,” she continued. “Nice guys, middle-class families, that sort of thing. And then we’d throw in a few wild cards. A few well-educated folks from tougher backgrounds. A few doctors. A handful of engineers and banker types. One or two working-class characters. Maybe a surfer type. And you’d pretty much be guaranteed to find a good match at that party.”

  “Most of that sounds reasonable,” Lily said. I was glad she said “most.” “But I’m not sure you’re describing Dawn’s type.”

  What was happening? Based on the gravitational pull he’d exerted on me for the last four years, my type was Robert. But were we really going to say that out loud? Or maybe, I thought again, Lily didn’t even really know that.

  “And she’s still single, right?” Rachel replied, without a pause.

  “Um, wait a second,” I finally burst in, a little bit like a fireman axing open a door just as he realizes he left his hose downstairs. “I don’t think we’ve established that I’m single,” I fumbled. “I mean fine, I am. But Geez Louise.”

  “See that right there,” Lily said. “I think that’s why you have Dawn at the wrong party. Robert and I are the type of people who find ‘Geez Louise’ to be very cute. I don’t think any of those breadbasket boys would appreciate it like we would. She should definitely be at our party.”

  This was getting worse and worse. First, she was announcing that she and Robert had collective tastes. And then she was making me sound like a collectible you could carry around in your pocket. Any minute now someone was going to comment on how well I cleaned up.

  “I think you should send Dawn to the new immigrant party,” Robert said. “Or maybe the hip-hop superstar party. Or wait, is there a party for people with aliases? That one would definitely do the trick. DJ McJammin, meet Kelly Burns.” I peeked at the wine bottle across the table and noted both that it was sitting right next to Robert and that it was totally empty.

  Rachel skated right past the Kelly Burns comment, which must have sounded like pure gibberish to her given the gibberishy ring it had even to those of us who knew about my pen name. “If she didn’t find anybody she liked at the first party,” Rachel said, “we’d start by sending her to another party along the same lines but with new people. And if that still didn’t work, we’d put her in our wild-card group.”

  I didn’t want to go to any parties. I just wanted to go home.

  “So, let’s sign her up and see,” Robert said.

  “Wait, don’t I have to consent to be signed up?”

  “Come on, it’ll be an experiment,” he said. “You can write an article on it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “About 482 people already wrote that article.”

  “Then you can write one of your little stories about it.”

  Lily interjected, “I can’t believe you just called them ‘little stories.’ They’re not little stories.”

  So Lily was sticking up for me now? Had I said anything to Robert directly, he would have said, “You’re so sensitive. Why are you so sensitive? You need to be more confide
nt. If you were more confident, you wouldn’t care what anyone said. You know who’s successful? Confident people.” Like some Glengarry Glen Ross lecture he was warming up for the pretzel salesforce. And I would have gotten increasingly angry in the back-and-forth, and he would have retrenched even further into his position, and then I would have started crying, and then we would have broken up. I knew, because we’d performed almost that exact script more than once.

  “Stories, short stories, great stories,” he said, responding to Lily.

  She gave him a slight approving head nod, and just like that we moved on. No escalation. No tears.

  “But I agree with Robert,” Lily continued. “I think you should do it, Dawn. It’ll be interesting.”

  “Fine,” I said. Partly because of the wine, and partly because all of this—the back-and-forth, the eagle-eyed watching for signs of Robert and Lily’s blooming love, the attempts at conversation with Rachel—had dispirited me. I said fine to be done with it.

  Lily clapped, and not like she was happy to be pawning Robert’s old girlfriend (of whatever significance) off on some men from the Internet. Like she thought it was actually fun. “Done! We’ll sign you up tonight!” she cheered.

  Robert smiled at Lily, clearly admiring her enthusiasm.

  Rachel, on the other hand, looked annoyed, or, rather, like a person who had been annoyed at some point in the past, a point that had corresponded perfectly with a swift hit to the back that froze her face that way. She’d then been covered in a fine glaze and put in a kiln overnight to set. She was the perfect annoyance-themed mannequin. It had, after all, been a full minute since Robert, or anyone for that matter, directly attended to her.

  “So Rachel,” I said halfheartedly, “Lily was telling me that you and her sister were roommates during college?” This turned out to be rather weak as far as annoyance interventions were concerned. Rachel barely registered that I’d said anything at all.