“Wow. I had no idea. So, what other trends should I be looking out for?”
“Actually, I quit the consulting gig a while ago.” He put his hands casually into his pockets, like a shy guy who was about to start kicking a rock. “I kept writing while I was doing that stuff, and I got lucky and published a book, which freed me from the shackles of consumer marketing research at least insofar as it helped me land better freelance gigs.”
“You published a book?” I grabbed his arm. Genuinely impressed and excited, and also aware that it was an excuse to touch him. How had I failed to google this man?
We stopped and leaned against the bridge’s railing, gazing out toward the bay and Governors Island.
“You’re not familiar with my masterwork?” he said. “I assumed that with the literally hundreds of copies in circulation, surely you would have heard of me.”
“So tell me about the book.” I smiled. “I’ll get a copy tomorrow, I swear.”
“I don’t know. They’re selling for a steep $1.97 on Amazon these days.”
“So are you going to tell me about it or not?”
He paused for a second and looked farther out at the bay. “It’s all about divorce. More specifically, my divorce.” And then he flashed a big smile. “It’s a new genre I like to call the antiromantic comedy.”
It was all queued up for my easy response. I was supposed to gracefully and almost imperceptibly acknowledge the revelation, then proceed immediately with the banter. But I couldn’t do it. I’d never thought about dating someone divorced. At twenty-three, it just hadn’t come up yet. And after my parents, it was the thing I scared myself with late at night. In the yellow glow of the furnace in Helen’s glassblowing hut, during peak postgraduation Robert breakup season, I’d tossed around on my cot, thinking, It could be worse. We could have gotten married. We could have had a whole bunch of kids, and then we could have ruined everyone’s lives by getting divorced. Breaking up now is a blessing! All the while smudging tears into my pillow. Now, in my crooked apartment, there were nights when I’d stare at the line of light under the door that meant Sylvia and Rodney were still up and think, Who needs to date? You’re better off alone. The highs aren’t worth the lows. You know what dating leads to? Marriage. And you know what marriage leads to? Divorce! Like divorce was an STD, and abstinence was the only surefire protection.
Hearing the D word scared me on a fundamental level, but more immediately, it put Elliot in a clear category. And that category was: old. He’d had time for marriage and divorce already. Obviously, I knew Elliot was older than me, but the gap suddenly felt like a chasm. Were this to progress any further, I’d be playing the part of the girl who needs someone older and wiser, telling her what to do.
When I didn’t respond as expected, he seemed not to know how to proceed. He looked at me searchingly.
“Go on,” I finally said.
He took a breath. “Well, I grew up in a really religious family, married young. Me deciding I wanted to be a writer coincided with a lot of things, including my wife and I realizing we disagreed about some fundamentals. And to be fair, she hadn’t exactly signed up for life with an impoverished writer. So in the end, there I was, a twenty-six-year-old guy who went from working at a swanky firm and living in a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side with his high school sweetheart–turned–wife to being a divorced guy living with strangers in a share in Bushwick and writing pharmaceutical copy and marketing reports. It was a lot, and a few years after the whole thing, I wrote a book about it.”
“I’m looking forward to reading it,” I said.
He leaned away from the railing, and I followed suit, the two of us continuing toward Brooklyn but now at no more than an amble.
“So, Dawn West, how did you become the Jane Smith googler for Charm?”
I laughed. “Go home and google Kelly Burns. You’ll find some masterworks to rival the Cultured Milk Report, I guarantee it.”
“And aside from these masterworks, you working on anything else?”
I wished I could say, Yes, some great stories. Check them out in literary magazine X. I wanted to impress Elliot. But the sad truth was I hadn’t really written any fiction in months. I thought about telling him about the profiles I’d been writing about past Ten Girls to Watch winners, but that didn’t feel like anything to talk about yet.
“Well, don’t you just love asking the hard questions,” I finally said. “Maybe I’m working on a few things here and there. Nothing too serious.”
He gave me an inquiring half smile that clearly said go on, but I didn’t. I felt suddenly, inexplicably, yet much too explicably, emotional. Like when you start crying for the smallest reason, like you open the fridge and see that you have no yogurt left, and your eyes suddenly puddle. Of course you know it’s not the yogurt, it’s hormones, or another breakup, or fatigue, or whatever. The rush of threatening teariness now felt similarly out of the blue, yet there was the obvious answer: Robert had been a great Dawn writing-career cheerleader—Robert had read and admired all my drafts. He’d cheered when I’d turned down law school and urged me to buckle down and write more. He’d known just what to say in a way my parents and other friends never had, how not to be pestering, and how to be positive without being pandering. And now Robert was gone.
Standing here on this bridge talking not with someone who knew and loved me, or who had once known and loved me, but with a stranger, more or less, and talking about writing, perhaps the area of my greatest need and want and aspiration, I couldn’t varnish over my vulnerability as easily as I could with other things. Besides which, everything I’d tried working on for the last year had sounded whiny or maudlin. Unemployed college graduates suffering from utterly tragic heartbreak kept creeping into every story I wrote—hardly golden material. The result was that I’d pretty much stopped writing. The tears pricking at my eyes made me want to cover myself back up. I wanted a shielding blanket. At the very least, I wanted to talk about something else.
Finally, I said, “I don’t know if you ever felt this way before you published your book, but I feel like there’s something terrible about being an aspiring writer. Like everyone smiles and says good for you but they’re secretly cringing and hoping you never ask them to read anything you write, since they’re assuming it’ll be awful dreck.”
“And are you worried they’re right?”
I wrapped myself safely again in smiling, protective chattiness. “Of course not,” I said. “My delusions of grandeur know no bounds. Every year when they announce the MacArthur ‘genius awards’ I read the press release very carefully to make sure that I don’t miss my name, just in case. I imagine the lectures tenth-grade English teachers across America will give when they assign my books to their students.”
“I see.” He smiled. “What if I admitted that I clipped all the positive reviews of my book and anonymously sent them to my tenth-grade English teacher, just to show him he was wrong, advertising wasn’t the best route for aspiring writers?”
It was official. I liked Elliot. Even if he was old and divorced. We both smiled and held each other’s eyes, long enough to make it clear that something was happening on this bridge.
We’d made it just past the high point, the lights of downtown Brooklyn and the clock atop the Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower twinkling before us (9:37 PM. 71°). And just then his phone rang, a ringtone that took me a second to place, but then, oh, place it I did.
“Is that ‘Sexual Healing’?” I asked as he rifled through his pocket.
“Noooo . . .” he said in exaggerated denial. “I can’t believe you’d even think that.” At last he found the phone, pulled it out, and silenced the ringing without looking at the caller ID. Clearly, this was a special ringtone that required no caller verification.
“That was so totally ‘When I get that feeling I need, uh, sexual healing.’ ”
He smiled, sheepishly but encouragingly.
“Was that a Boots booty call?” I said.
“That had to be a Boots booty call.”
“You’ve been stalking me through my columns!” He clutched his hands to his chest in an impersonation of my flattered pose earlier in the evening.
I flicked his arm. “Absolutely not!”
And right then he leaned in and kissed me.
“Where are you from?” I said, a moment after our lips parted and he drew back to see my face.
“Like what planet?” he asked warily.
“No, like what state.”
“Nevada.”
“I knew it. You have rectilinear western state written all over you.” I leaned in and kissed him again.
Night lights have always made me feel dreamy. As a teenager I slept out on the trampoline and memorized the constellations using flash cards I got for Christmas. The first time I saw fireflies, which wasn’t till college, I made Robert pull the car over and sat by the side of the road, staring into the field where they glowed for what must have been a full thirty minutes. Standing there with Elliot, the lights of the bridge, the lights of the city, the lights of the cars streaming along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—it was all so beautiful. I’d felt so exposed just a few minutes earlier, but now it was like the world was twinkling warmly at me. Elliot and I kissed and kissed and kissed until my chin was sore from his stubble, and then we finished the walk across the bridge—11:02, the Watchtower said. He walked me all the way to Carroll Gardens, slowly, stopping here and there, kissing me again and again, and when we finally got to my building he kissed me one more time on my doorstep.
I gave him my phone number. “Swear you won’t assign it ‘Sexual Healing.’ You swear?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die. You have any preferences?”
“I want that Cake song, the one about the girl with the short skirt and the long jacket who has fingernails that shine like justice and who’s touring the facility and picking up slack.”
“The na-na-na-na-na-na one?” He sang the tune.
“That’s the one.”
We kissed again and I climbed my crooked stairs and walked into my crooked apartment and didn’t notice the slant at all. I felt better than any TheOne ad. I was in a Chagall painting, and the yellow goat was playing the violin and I was floating, full of hope, with the village spread out behind me.
Patricia Collins,
Ohio State University, 1967
_________
THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER
Patricia’s good looks are as American as apple pie. The daughter of a dairy farmer, she won her town’s Harvest Queen title in high school. In college, she can’t shake her All-American smile but has added a new level of sophistication to her style with tailored coats and the latest above-the-knee looks. A history major, she’s considering the Peace Corps after graduation. “I know I want to make a difference.” We can’t think of a better ambassador.
Chapter Seven
I almost forgot about Elliot’s insidious Cankles Column until I got an e-mail from him Sunday afternoon.
Dawn,
My heartiest thanks to you for rescuing me from a night with the A-hole rich kids. I’m eternally in your debt. Let me at least try to repay you. Brunch when I’m back in town? (I’m heading to CA today to report on iPhone app competitions for Grid. Then a week in NV.) Say hello to fall with me in mid-ish Sept? S.A.R.
Not that I thought he was lying, but there was a part of me that worried he was delaying our next get-together not for work travel but because he was working on a column about me. He’d call me “City Slicker” and describe the way my face built up a less than alluring sheen as the night wore on. And what did “mid-ish” September mean anyway? Why was he already building in wiggle room?
But rather than being crazy (at least on the outside), I e-mailed back a short and sweet “Safe travels. We’re on for the fall hello,” and thereafter spent a while sprawled on my bed shamelessly fantasizing about crunchy leaves and belted cardigans and how cute I’d look in them on our future dates. It’d be Elliot’s loss if he missed my autumnal glory.
My phone pinged with a message in the middle of my daydreaming. “So, did you meet ‘the One’ last night? ;)” Lily had written.
I wanted to ignore the message, but that felt like an unnecessarily passive-aggressive move toward a woman who had just gotten me a job and invited me over for dinner. “Nah,” I wrote back. Then, sensing that was a little dismissive, I added a smiley face before sending it.
That evening I got one more notable message, from Helen.
Dawn, I would love to set up a time to talk. But even better, why don’t we do it in person? My new book is coming out in a couple of weeks, and I’m doing a reading at the bookstore across the street from campus. Come that weekend.
Helen had been working for the last few years on a new book on the connection between women’s suffrage and World War I. Like Must We Find Meaning? it also wove her personal history into the narrative. In her early twenties, Helen’s grandmother had been a suffragist in Oregon, and prior to the 1912 referendum that finally gave women the vote in Oregon, she had traveled all over the state, putting on suffrage shows in movie theaters. Then, in 1916, at the age of twenty-five, Helen’s grandmother had taken a train to Washington to stand in the sleet outside the White House with a banner that read “Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty.” Helen and I had talked about the book-in-progress a little during my weekly thesis meetings senior year, and she’d finalized the copy during the months I’d been living in the glassblowing hut.
On one of the nights during my hut stay, when the September weather had turned unexpectedly chilly, I’d crossed the leaf-covered yard from the hut to the house, my jacket collar pulled up to my ears. I tapped on the back door, and when Helen answered I didn’t say anything, just held up the little tin of gourmet hot chocolate I’d splurged on at the fancy import store down the road.
“Ooh, please do come in,” Helen intoned dramatically, swinging the door open. She’d warmed the cocoa on the stove, and instead of talking about jobs or plans or Helen’s work, we sat on the kitchen barstools, sipped from our mugs, and talked about a short story I’d given her to read. This one was about a woman who, after multiple miscarriages, makes herself feel better by putting on a one-woman version of The Sound of Music. I admitted to Helen that it was maybe 90 percent true and based on my grandmother, who’d done that very thing.
“I think it’s a wonderful story,” Helen said, “but I wonder what would happen if you made it one hundred percent true. Sometimes I think you’re hiding behind the safety of fiction, Dawn.”
It was advice straight out of her own playbook. That’s what Helen did—tell the true story. It’s what had made her career. It was flattering to hear she thought I could follow in her footsteps. But I wasn’t sure the true stories in my life were quite as interesting as the ones in hers. Not just that, I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up my dreams of writing fiction.
I gave a small, nervous laugh and took a big swig of cocoa. “I guess all I can do is try it and see,” I finally answered.
But I hadn’t done it. After I’d crunched back through the leaves to my cot that night, instead of working on the piece I’d e-mailed Robert. And so it had gone for a seemingly endless line of nights—not necessarily e-mailing Robert, but something, there was always something—and now the story had been lying in wait on my laptop for almost a whole year, untouched since that evening. Maybe reading Helen’s new book would give me the shove I needed to actually open the file again. Because clearly, I needed a shove.
E-mails flew, and before the night was over, it was all set. I made the vast commitment of booking a fifteen-dollar ticket to Boston on the Chinatown bus.
_________
Back at work on Monday, when I arrived at my office door, I found a small box resting against the jamb—my headset! It couldn’t have been later than eight o’clock. Apparently, Ralph, man of mystery that he was, got to work even earlier than that.
No one was bot
hering to check when I arrived or left work (unless Ralph was somehow security-cam-monitoring me), but I found my hours creeping outward in both directions anyway. I was excited to get started on Ten Girls to Watch every morning, and at the end of the day, I almost hated to go. Maybe this was because of the veggie patty dinners that awaited me at home, but I didn’t think so. Ralph could have been arriving early for other reasons—I briefly imagined soap opera tragedies lurking in his life, his long hours at the office driven by the need to escape heartbreaking bedside vigils or scandals related to wanton stepchildren. But that seemed pretty unlikely. He was probably just a morning person.
Once I was all headsetted up, I picked a year in the middle of the pack—1982—and started working from there. By lunchtime I’d made a handful of contacts (and had experienced nary a neck kink). Jeneese Walker, an educator who’d just founded a new charter school in Atlanta; Kendra Fowler, who now ran the veterinary program at the University of Washington; Allison Bentson, a lawyer who had become the head of an environmental lobbying firm in D.C., and who had just had twins at the age of forty-five; and Elizabeth Irwin, who I adored the second she opened her mouth.
Elizabeth was from North Dakota and sounded just like Frances McDormand in Fargo. She’d become a pediatrician and gone back to her hometown, where she was immediately disturbed by the number of children she saw who were clearly being abused and the difficulty she had connecting them and their families with the social services they needed. Within a year she’d established a wholly integrated Family Center, complete with medical, social, and legal services, all housed in one facility. The number of child abuse cases reported in her county quadrupled within two years. Not because there was more abuse, but because people finally had a place to go to get real help.
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