Lily hadn’t missed the glassy Miss Texas look either, and being the gracious hostess that she was, she decided to rescue us both. “My sister was saying you just came back from a big trip to, was it Argentina?”
Cue Rachel’s interest in showing off, obviously much greater than her interest in roommate stories of yesteryear.
“Oh, we went to the most amazing wineries,” she cooed. And then she proceeded to extol the virtues of Argentina’s terroir. The Andean watershed, the altitude, the Malbecs!
After dinner I could have escaped, but a sort of pious perversity bound me to the evening, like I was a saint, praying for more arrows to mortify my flesh. We all retired to the living room, where Robert steered us toward his all-time favorite topic: celebrity doppelgängers. He had long been convinced he was a dead ringer for Hugh Grant, and based on his belief, he brought up celebrity doppelgängers whenever possible, then just waited for the Hugh Grant comments to roll in. The slim percentage of the time they did gave him enough fire to carry on till the next go-round. There was a certain something about the lines around his eyes, his flouncy hair, his longish face, but dead ringer? If the ringing were so high only dogs could hear it, maybe.
Lily said I reminded her a little of Cate Blanchett, which I thought was very nice. Feeling a strange flare-up of reciprocal generosity, I gave her back a Kate Beckinsale even though it was only vaguely true. And then Rachel announced that she sometimes got Hilary Swank.
After Rachel wished us all good night, Robert said to me, “Stick around and help us do dishes.” His voice was warm, like the night had been familial and fun and he hated for it to end. Lily added, in the exact same entreating tone, “We still have most of that last bottle we opened to finish . . .”
Was I the only one who hadn’t been happy tonight? But I’d come in the first place. I’d stayed all evening, despite my misery. So why would I start listening to my feelings and leave now?
Robert sudsed up a large pan that, I knew from last winter when I’d adventurously roasted a pheasant for his birthday, fit only awkwardly in his dishwasher. Lily sat on the counter with a glass of wine in her hand. I leaned against the cupboard, closer to the door.
“More like Hilary Skank,” Lily said, guffawing, apropos of nothing.
My eyes widened into round plates. The gracious hostess turning on her guest?
“Oh, come on,” Robert said. “She wasn’t at all skanky. Why is that the first thing women say when they want to criticize each other?”
“Robert, I appreciate your righteous feminist attitude,” Lily replied earnestly. “You’re right, she’s not Hilary Skank.”
So maybe Rachel wasn’t skanky, but her laser focus on Robert and nothing but Robert hadn’t engendered my affection either. I appreciated that Lily had noticed and commented on it. “More like Hairily Rank?” I offered.
Lily cackled again. Robert folded his arms, like a stern father preparing to chastise his overly rambunctious offspring.
“Fine, I was just trying to rhyme,” I said. “But Robert, didn’t you notice that the only person she was remotely interested in was you?”
“What can I say?” He unfolded his arms and kissed his biceps.
“Verily Stank?” I interjected, to no applause. “Okay, fine, that’s a stretch. Anyway, I think she’s one of those women who doesn’t know how to interact with other women. They’re the women who say things like ‘I just get along better with men,’ when what they really mean is that men pay attention to them because men pay attention to any woman who is remotely attractive, whereas women are discriminating. If you suck, we don’t want to be friends with you.”
“Exactly,” Lily said.
“Exactly,” I echoed, reaffirming Lily’s affirmation of me.
“But Rachel is friends with your sister, right, Lil?” Robert said.
“Actually, more roommates, less friends.”
“Why did they room together?”
“I think it was just a softball connection.”
“Maybe she just likes men better because men are more fun,” Robert said, flashing a showbiz grin.
I kissed my biceps and nodded. “That must be it.”
When I finally gathered my things and moved toward the door a few minutes later, Lily asked with concern, “You’re taking a cab home, right?”
I nodded, though of course I wasn’t planning on taking a cab. A cab from the Upper West Side to my house might have been, what, forty dollars? I didn’t know exactly, but I knew it was more than I had. Before Lily, on the nights when I’d stay late at Robert’s but feel compelled to sleep in my own apartment, Robert had started out trying to force cab money on me. His face twisting with distress, he’d hold twenties out to me. “Just take the money,” he’d say. And I’d flatly refuse. Robert taking me to dinner was one thing. Robert handing me cash felt like another. And besides, there was some pleasure in my showy refusal. We aren’t all pampered, we aren’t all coddled, I felt like I was saying, as if I were hardened and streetwise. Though whatever pleasure I took always faded over the course of the hour-plus I spent getting home on the subway late at night. After too many failed attempts, Robert had stopped holding out the cash. He’d taken on a resigned, withdrawn look, a take-your-chances, I’ve-done-all-I-can look, as if I were a recidivist junkie.
Tonight, he smiled pleasantly and waved me off, which turned my heart to sinking lead. His fussy, irrational worry for my safety had meant he cared. And just like that, the light blinked off, and his concern was all elsewhere, in his apartment, with Lily. The door closed and they retreated inside together while I waited for the elevator to come. I barely nodded at the doormen as they pushed the revolving door for me.
Ellen Poloma,
Northwestern University, 1970
_________
THE PROBLEM SOLVER
Ellen loves the lab. A top-of-her-class biochemistry major at Northwestern, she plans to attend medical school after graduation. She’s gained hands-on experience already, volunteering at a free clinic in Chicago. But even though she enjoys patients, the scientific aspects of medicine are her favorite. “I’m addicted to solving puzzles,” she says.
Chapter Five
Labor Day approached, and at work in the basement again, with still no signs of anyone in the building but me and Ralph and no repeat visits from Secret Agent Romance, I took deep breaths of cardboard-scented air, stretched my dialing fingers, and began making phone calls in earnest. I spoke with Stephanie Linwood, a 1969 winner who became a lawyer and told me about staying in a boring job at a real estate law firm in New Jersey for almost a decade after law school before landing a position as counsel for a fair housing advocacy organization, then becoming a professor of housing law and urban housing policy at NYU.
“We get so used to thinking success means one thing,” she said. “Like you can take a snapshot and see if you have it. It’s not like that. It’s your whole life, and you have years and years to work with. I always want to tell young people, don’t be so hard on yourself. Life is long. Be patient.”
Years and years to work with . . . The years and years part sounded daunting, but in general these were words that made me want to holler “Amen!” Being a pale girl from the Pacific Northwest, I did something more like nod and blink vigorously as I clutched the receiver, my eyelids acting as windshield wipers to whisk away the sudden mist.
“I’ll tell you,” I said when she finally paused, “as a young person I really appreciate hearing that.”
“Well, it’s true! Take it to heart,” she answered.
In addition to being slightly crooked, my nose troubles me by turning red anytime my emotions rise. For what I was sure wouldn’t be the last time, I thanked my lucky stars that this was a phone interview and that my nose could glow Rudolph-bright in this basement without a soul to see it.
After Stephanie Linwood, I talked with Kirsten Nantz, a 1982 winner and graphic designer who became one of the country’s foremost creators of new fonts. She told me
that she knew she’d made it when she started throwing away invitations to events that were printed in her fonts. “For the first couple of years, every time I got one I saved it. It was this rare thing, and it felt like I might never get another. But then, I remember, it was actually a birthday card from my insurance agent, I was thirty-eight, and somehow I was finally confident that this wouldn’t be the last card I’d get with my font. Throwing that card away was a real personal milestone.”
After that, I tracked down Ellen Poloma, who was now the Chief of Pathology at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. I told her she was one of the first winners I’d come across, working my way from the fifties forward, who’d gone into medicine. “I bet that’s right,” she said. “When I went to medical school it seemed like this outrageous thing to my family. And there were only a few women in my class. I felt like a trailblazer.”
She told me a little about her job, the slides she examined, how fascinated she was by cell tissue, but when I asked about her life outside work, she grew much more animated. Turned out, she had two things she wanted to discuss. First, Randall; second, Japanese hair straightening. She and Randall had been married for just four years. “I thought I was never going to meet the man of my dreams.” She drew out each word with drama. “Little did I know I just had to wait for him!” Ellen and Randall had just returned from a trip to Antarctica, and while we continued talking, Ellen whipped off an e-mail to me, attaching a few photos of the two of them in pounds of coats, crouching near penguins. Then she moved us right along to her hair.
“You can’t tell in the photo of me from Charm—they blow-dried and ironed my hair within an inch of its life—but I have the most ridiculously frizzy hair. It’s been a lifelong battle. But then I discovered Japanese hair straightening. I’ve been doing it for about a year now, and it’s revolutionized my life.” Almost before she finished the words “Japanese hair straightening,” she’d zinged another photo to my inbox, this one embedded in an article from Northwestern’s alumni magazine, discussing the advances in pathology she had pioneered at Cook County.
She was right, her hair was marvelously straight and glossy, but I laughed to think it was her hair that she found remarkable in the article, not all the achievements chronicled. How telling, I thought, what seems like a given and what doesn’t. I guess if you’re a certain sort of strong-headed hard worker, of course you assume you’ll have a great career. It’s the more serendipitous things, like love and hair breakthroughs, that seem astonishing and noteworthy.
“We’re planning another trip for the spring,” Ellen said. “Uganda, to see the gorillas. I can’t wait to have frizz-free hair in the jungle.” We both chuckled, but I could tell how much she meant it.
It didn’t take that many calls with the phone cricked between my shoulder and my ear, my fingers typing swiftly at the keyboard, before I realized I should have been stretching my neck before each call, not my fingers. I dialed extension 1 for Ralph. He couldn’t have sounded happier to hear from me. When I asked if I could order a headset, he said, “You bet! We should be able to have one couriered over from the main office by tomorrow.” Just like that, my first professional requisition!
When we were kids, at the start of each school year, my mom would order Sarah and me pencils with our names on them. I’d check the mail daily in the weeks leading up to school, hoping for the arrival of the pencil package. You wouldn’t think ordering a headset, something that would allow me to perform the basic functions of my job without injury and with which Mandalay Carson rightfully ought to provide me, would have gotten me that excited. But for a moment, I was practically at pencil package levels. Just the fact that I had a job, and that that job entitled me to office supplies—it felt like a serious achievement.
Shortly after I placed my order with Ralph, I finally got an e-mail back from Helen:
Dawn—unbelievable! I worried the Ten Girls contest would come back to haunt me . . . but I was absolutely wrong!!! I’m so glad my past caught up with me. What an absolute pleasure it was to get your e-mail. CONGRATULATIONS on the new job! I can’t wait to hear all about it, and of course catch up with you.
She sounded like herself. Cheery and charming and wonderful. No explanation for the strange delay. And it had been strange. I don’t think I’d ever waited for more than twenty-four hours for a reply from Helen, and this had been almost two weeks. I’d worried. Other than vacation (which would have resulted in an out-of-office message), what would keep Helen off e-mail for so long? But here she was. I e-mailed back instantaneously. Was she free later in the week? I’d love to do a “formal” interview, I said. I ended with “I hope all’s well,” just to leave the door a tiny bit open for her to speak up in case it wasn’t.
It’s a strange thing, being a “protégé”—Helen and I were like friends. We laughed like friends, we chatted like friends. But only sort of. The difference was when my college roommate, Abigail, or my sister, Sarah, gave me advice about where to live or what to wear to dinner, I turned around and gave it back to her on similar subjects. Helen didn’t barricade her personal life off from me, nothing so stark as that, and, yes, she sometimes solicited my thoughts, but she wasn’t really looking for advice. If she needed answers, she probably wasn’t turning to me. Still, I could listen. Judging by my weeks at Charm so far, I was actually pretty good at it. When we talked, I’d do my best to open the conversational door and see if she stepped through.
You’d think this influx of good female cheer and wisdom and encouragement and office supplies would have made me feel fabulous, and it did, mostly, but there was something hanging around the edges. I decided it wasn’t Robert and Lily and my disbelief in the face of mounting evidence that he had really moved on. I decided it was Rachel Link. More accurately, the disappointment or at least sense of unfinished business I felt because Rachel and I hadn’t hit it off. Even if that wasn’t really it, of the two choices, it was the one I could do something about.
What had Rachel really done, anyway? Had big hair? Been a little socially awkward and stuck on guys? Not cooed over our entire interaction? Maybe I was as much of an attention-craving baby as she was, and I was just upset that she’d paid more attention to Robert than she’d paid to me. Or that Robert had paid more attention to her or Lily or his green beans than he had to me. So maybe I verily stank too. All this I told myself as a means of building my resolve, prodding and haranguing that was intended to push me to actually call her. I had to do something to clear my funk. New job, new job, new job—I should have been feeling 100 percent fantastic. I’d finally gotten what I’d wanted. Maybe if I could just wipe away the Rachel smudges, I’d be able to see clearly.
_________
I googled TheOne’s corporate HQ number. I didn’t have a plan, exactly, but I continued on with the self-encouragement. Three layers of receptionists later, when Rachel finally picked up the line, her hello sounded like the hello of a much smaller-haired person.
I told her I hadn’t gotten a real chance to interview her at dinner, a much better intro than “I talked smack about you as soon as you left the party and am attempting, by way of this conversation, to redeem us both.” After a little chitchat about her memories of her New York trip—the highlight for her was the backstage tour of Rent on Broadway, where she’d, of course, gotten the guy who played Mark to sign her arm—I finally got to a good question.
“So what made you found TheOne? You must have had other ideas for good websites along the way. Why a dating website?”
After a long pause, during which I swallowed and felt the sound of it cartoonishly echo in the silence, Rachel answered. “I could say lots of things about the size of the market and the cost structure, and on and on, but I’ll tell you something, Dawn. My parents are very, very happy. Ups, downs, whatever, they’re crazy about each other. They haven’t been apart for more than three days in the last thirty-five years. My dad plants a rosebush every year for their anniversary, and their rose garden is unbelievable. Different colors
and different scents. It’s this wonderful maze of flowers.”
And then she stopped. I was waiting for her to tell me that this all meant she believed in “the One,” and that she’d created TheOne to help her find her One or to bring the sort of love her parents had to millions of people. In short, I was waiting for a rehearsed sound bite. But it didn’t come.
What she finally said was, “I’ll pick a good party for you, Dawn.”
I felt like that sports commentator who, against his will, found himself rooting for Mike the-rapist-ear-biter Tyson after he found out dear Mike trained pigeons. Maybe she was a man-attention whore, and maybe she had created an entire dating empire in place of getting her own game in order, but whatever it was that had seemed so wrong at dinner, the flower talk shifted my feelings. Now I sort of wanted Rachel to win the Miss Texas pageant, or whatever cosmic contest she was in.
We said good-bye, and it took me a minute to realize I was staring blankly at my bulletin board, thinking about my favorite rose, a white hybrid tea rose called the Mrs. Herbert Stevens, which I’d discovered on a sniffing tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (the eight-dollar cost of entry had felt like an indulgence, but as the graduation year mark came and went with me still unemployed, I’d had to start doing little things to keep myself from sliding into complete catatonia). Whoever she was, Mrs. Herbert Stevens must have been the best-smelling person around, because her rose’s fragrance was unbeatable—like the standard rose scent, but simultaneously tangier and creamier. It was like the pied piper of smell. I hadn’t thought of that amazingly fragrant white rose in months, and it was a nice thought, a comforting thought. Even if I never met anyone, even if I failed at this job, there was still a rose that smelled that good.
I flipped through my stack of TGTW copies and found the page with 1996 girls in their mom jeans and shapeless sweaters, Rachel smack dab in the center of the crew. I pulled a tack from my drawer and pinned the photo to my bulletin board.
The Ten Girls to Watch Page 9
