Ten Girls to Watch

by Charity Shumway

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A radiant debut novel about stumbling through the early years of adulthood — and a love letter to the role models who light the way. Like so many other recent graduates, Dawn West is trying to make her way in New York City. She’s got an ex-boyfriend she can’t quite stop seeing, a roommate who views rent checks and basic hygiene as optional, and a writing career that’s gotten as far as penning an online lawn care advice column. So when Dawn lands a job tracking down the past winners of Charm magazine’s “Ten Girls to Watch” contest, she’s thrilled. After all, she’s being paid to interview hundreds of fascinating women: once outstanding college students, they have gone on to become mayors, opera singers, and air force pilots. As Dawn gets to know their life stories, she’ll discover that success, love, and friendship can be found in the most unexpected of places. Most importantly, she’ll learn that while those who came before us can be role models, ultimately, we each have to create our own happy ending.

Release date: July 31, 2012

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

The Ten Girls to Watch

Chapter One

The Internet told me the temperature in Brooklyn was ninety-three degrees, but my fourth-floor apartment wrapped those ninety-three degrees in ancient plaster, a sweaty hug that pushed things that much closer to triple digits. The large windows could have helped, but this was a day when flags hung limp on their poles. Instead of offering a breeze, all the windows did was lap up sticky sunshine. Even standing motionless in front of my blaring fan, perspiration trickled down my temples and pooled around my waistband. Still, before I dialed, I flicked off the fan. I didn’t want to risk missing a word, and the beauty of phone calls is that the other person can’t see how damp you are.

I rehearsed what I’d say to whomever answered the phone. Hi, this is Dawn West. Regina should be expecting my call. Too formal. Hi, Regina asked me to give her a call this morning. My name is Dawn West. I said that one over and over a few times. If I got the words out fast, it sounded okay. And what to say to Regina? Hi, we met this weekend? You said to phone your office Monday? Why was I making everything sound like a question? And surely she’d remember me. It’d only been a day. Cross-legged in the corner that got the very best cell reception, I punched the numbers slowly, my mouth moving as I checked each digit against the ones on the card I held between my fingers: Regina Greene, Editor in Chief, Charm.

Her assistant answered on the first ring.

A whole new line of sweat bloomed on my upper lip. The words blurred together. “Hi Regina asked me to give her a call this morning my name is Dawn West.”

“What was your name again?” the assistant asked. I wiped my lip and enunciated a bit more clearly.

Moments later, Regina was on the line. “Dawn!” She answered like we were old friends. “So glad you called!”

Since college graduation more than a year earlier, I’d applied for 116 jobs. (I knew the exact number because I’d kept scrupulous track of every application in Excel.) I might as well have been paper-airplaning my many résumés into the Grand Canyon for all the good my rigorous applying had done me. But now, I was on the phone with Regina Greene, and surely she hadn’t asked me to call just to say hello. I could feel disappointment poised and ready to fire—after all those months of trying and trying and failing, I was riddled with bullet holes—but right there beside the potential dashed hopes was so much pulsing want and need that even if it had been fifty degrees, I would have been sweating.

We exchanged a pleasantry or two, and then she got right to it.

“Have you seen our Ten Girls to Watch issue, Dawn?”

Regina explained that every year Charm picked ten remarkable college women—violin prodigies who also discovered vaccines, Olympic archers who also ran orphanages, things like that—and this year marked the contest’s fiftieth anniversary.

“We’re looking to do some special coverage for the magazine,” she said. “Plus something for the web, and then an event. A fun gala or luncheon or something for all the past winners. The only trick is that we don’t know where the winners are. I mean, we know where a few of them are. For instance, Gerri Vans was a winner in the eighties.”

Gerri Vans, the talk show star turned media empress. I glanced over at my coffee table—a generous description of the cardboard box over which I’d thrown a folded sheet. There, like millions of other American women, I had multiple copies of both Gerri, Gerri’s original magazine, and G-Talk, her interview spin-off. Each issue featured Gerri’s beaming face on the cover, angled just so to show off her trademark dimples. On the cover of the G-Talk topping my pile, Gerri leaned her less dimply cheek on Bill Murray’s shoulder.

“Gerri Vans,” I said reverentially. “Wow.”

“I know. She’s great,” Regina said, pronouncing the word “great” as if she were Tony the Tiger: “Grrrreat!” The way you would say it if you were talking about an old pal you hadn’t seen in awhile but were dying to catch up with. From which I inferred this was exactly the case.

I drew the perfect picture of Gerri and Regina, giggling in a discreet corner of some swank, downtown restaurant. Then for good measure I made the table four-top, added some candles, and popped me and Bill Murray into the picture. I told a joke. They all laughed and laughed.

Regina went on. “So we know where the winners like Gerri are, but most of them are a mystery to us—1957 was a long time ago. And that’s where you’d start. Tracking down all five hundred of them, or as many as possible, interviewing them, and figuring out who’s worth featuring. And then figuring out what sort of celebration makes sense.”

That’s where I would start? Had she really just said that?

It was like a cold hand had grabbed my heart, like icy air had just poured through the windows. I felt like I might cry. I didn’t breathe for a few seconds. I closed my eyes.

Yes, she’d really just said it.

She didn’t get around to telling me when I would start. Or whether I’d work from home or get a desk at the office. Or how much Charm was planning to pay me. And it was pretty clear that whatever this was, it was temporary. But I said yes as fast as I could.

During the one year, two months, and fourteen days since college graduation, the closest I’d gotten to anything other than office-drone temping was a web marketing company I’d found on Craigslist that hired me as a “lawn care writer.” They paid me eleven cents a word to write columns and answer questions on their lawn care website, with the understanding that I would use the search engine keyword phrase “lawn fertilizer” as frequently as possible. I’d baked a cake the day I’d gotten that gig. This, though, this was worth a real celebration.

After I hung up, I leapt to my feet and hopped across the room, flinging droplets of sweat as I danced. I turned on the fan and said “I have a job” into the blades, the words echoing with grand Darth Vader distortion. I was tempted to shout it out the window, but I’m not really a shouter. Instead, I paced my apartment in giddy shock, hands held over my mouth like a girl who has just been given an engagement ring.

What I felt was something close to pure delight. Close to, but not quite pure delight, because there was a slight complication, above and beyond the fact that this job wasn’t a long-term proposition and might pay close to zero dollars. For this job, I had two people to thank: my ex-boyfriend Robert and Robert’s new girlfriend, Lily.

_________

Robert Rolland and I met second semester freshman year on a shared overnight shift at the student-run homeless shelter. We’d walked back to the dining hall together, shared waffles (I doctored mine with sloppy syrup, he carefully and lightly applied powdered sugar to his), and gone hardly a day without seeing each other for the rest of college.

It had taken him six months to admit to me that he was a pretzel baron. Pretzel baron, pretzel mogul, pretzel heir, however you said it, Robert was in line to inherit the Rolland Pretzel empire. His great-grandfather, the one who got the family into the pretzel business in the first place, owned just a single pretzel shop. But after World War II, his son, Grandpa Rolland, came back from France determined to do something big. He turned out to be a uniquely gifted pretzel entrepreneur, and anyone who’s ever been to New York and had a soft pretzel from any street cart has contributed to the Rolland family fortune. They expanded the empire to hard pretzels in the sixties, but only folks in the big beer-drinking states (the Rollands have beer-consumption coded maps up on the walls at HQ and also in their billiard room at home) get to see the full range of their products, readily available at grocery and liquor stores.

Over the four years of college, Robert and I broke up two or three times a year, then got back together, more or less instantaneously. We always broke up because of small things that really stood for big things. For example, Robert approached the world in a smooth-sailing, moneyed way. Whenever he needed help, be it movers, caterers, delivery services, he could buy it. I, on the other hand, could not. Once, we broke up because I walked home from a party at two in the morning and he thought this demonstrated incredible irresponsibility. What if we had kids? Would I traipse all over the city at night then too? I said wasting twenty dollars on a taxi was what was really irresponsible. We’d sharpened the tone of our voices and assessed our utter incompatibility as life partners from there, and though we’d gotten back together in less than seventy-two hours, it wasn’t like the argument went away.

But he was funny and handsome and almost painfully smart, and I’d never thought anybody smelled as good as he did. Undoubtedly it was something to do with his soap and deodorant and fabric softener, but it was more than that. I wanted to nuzzle my face between his neck and collarbone and breathe in that exact smell forever. That seemed important, not trivial, like the deep animal part of my brain had zeroed in on him and millions of years of evolution dictated that we belonged together.

He felt the same way about me, or so he said. “There’s no one for me but you,” he’d written, just a one-line e-mail, after a breakup junior year when he’d said my parents’ divorce made me skeptical and mistrusting. And since then, every so often, he’d say those words to me, never in a whisper, but always in a low voice that caught just the edge of his vocal cords, like sawteeth catching in wood. “There’s no one for me but you.”

And so, despite the fact that after graduation Robert’s parents had sent him on a six-week trip to Asia, then set him up in a nice apartment on the Upper West Side so he could take his place in the family pretzel empire—the exact opposite of my postcollegiate setup (which was limited to the twenty-five-dollar Red Lobster gift certificate my mother had sent along with her “Congrats, Grad!” card; nothing from my dad)—we persisted in our back-and-forth.

Until Lily.

During one of our postgraduation breaks, Robert started dating some nineteen-year-old NYU freshman, which made steam shoot from my ears and hot fountains pour from my eyes. I particularly hated that she was nineteen. Four years past being a college freshman, I would never date one. What would we talk about? Homesickness and final-exam jitters? But apparently that didn’t matter to Robert. I felt like a jilted middle-aged wife whose husband has taken up with some young trollop. I was only twenty-three, and already I was being cast in that part? A few friends tried to set me up. I went on a date or two, and even though I didn’t like the guys, I turned into a puppet, tap-dancing my way through the part of a girl pretending to have a good time on a date. When they phoned later, I dodged their calls. How was Robert so easily finding other people he wanted to date? Fortunately, the freshman didn’t last long, and, perhaps unfortunately, Robert and I continued “hanging out” until we lapsed into dating again.

Which had lasted a few months. Until nine weeks ago, to be precise. And yes, I was keeping track. Inside my head there was a mechanism like one of those elaborate clocks in the town squares of German villages. Each week, it was like a bunch of birds and a little wooden girl dressed in a dirndl whirled out of the clock and yodeled a bit, then announced how long it had been. One week, two weeks! With each calendar marker, I was supposed to feel better. And I kind of was feeling better, until week three, that is, when Robert started dating Lily Harris. Week three! The dirndl girl’s weekly cuckoo had not prepared me for that. At least Lily was our age, even if she was a University of Texas debutante sorority girl. Not that I’d Internet-stalked her and seen any stupid blowing-kisses-at-the-camera sorority-girl photos . . .

As always, Robert and I kept having dinner or going to the movies. Now, as “just friends,” though of course “just friends” had devolved back into more than just friends a dozen times before. I kept waiting for it to happen. At the movies, my arm next to his, tingling with anticipation. At dinner, waiting for the invitation to go on a walk after dessert or to go for another drink or to “watch a movie” back at his place. But he hadn’t leaned into me, and the invitation back to his place hadn’t come either, and even though my brain knew we were broken up and knew, furthermore, that he was seeing someone else, the loud glockenspiel of reason didn’t keep me from feeling rejected anew, every time.

Then, two weeks ago, Robert had phoned. “I hope it’s not weird,” he said. “I invited Lily to the Pretzel Party. I mean, I hope you don’t think it’s weird that I invited you too. I want you to come. I want you to meet her.”

Every summer Robert’s parents threw a party at their house in the Hamptons, which they called the Summer Party, but which everyone else referred to as the Pretzel Party. Robert had called to tell me I’d be getting an invitation in the mail. I’d never gotten a formal invitation before. I’d just gone as Robert’s girlfriend.

Trying to pretend, to myself most of all, that I was cool and totally over it, I said sure, of course, I’d love to meet Lily. And then I put on my sneakers and ran four miles to try to shake off the awful feeling. It didn’t work. Robert was really, truly dating someone, who was not me. And I wasn’t dating anyone. Not that I would be guaranteed to feel better if I were, but that was the thought that reverberated in my head, like some big flashing scoreboard. Robert, 1; Dawn, 0. Or more accurately, Robert, infinity; Dawn, negative infinity.

The fact that Lily was going to be at the Pretzel Party meant I definitely shouldn’t go. Yet there I’d been, the morning of the party, getting ready in the so-hot-you-might-pass-out heat of my banged-up old Brooklyn apartment with my fan blowing straight into my face in order to avoid sweating off my eyeliner before it even dried. Anyone sane in New York has an air conditioner. I was sane—it was just that expenditures of more than, say, nine dollars weren’t in my temp-and-lawn-care-writer budget. My dress, a blue polyester number pretending to be silk, had, in fact, rung up for precisely nine dollars at H&M. With a vintage gold pin my grandmother had given me and a yellow belt I’d had since high school, I liked to imagine it could pass for Anthropologie, but that might have been wishful thinking.

“You look nice,” my roommate, Sylvia, said, standing at my door with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch in her hand. She took a slurpy bite, a Crunch Berry falling to the floor and rolling toward the center of the living room.

Turns out a lot of people will say no to an apartment with a twenty-degree slope to its floor. Not me, and not Sylvia, another Craigslist find. I’d rummaged her up with a posting that did its best to match honesty (“near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so a little noisy”) with salesmanship (“vintage details”). Other than the fact that Sylvia never, ever wore a bra (despite her rather voluptuous form) and sometimes went a day or two past the point where hair washing was truly necessary (even for a girl whose curly brown mop masked a lot of grease), she was all right.

That said, certain things about her frightened me. For instance, she was twenty-eight, and although she’d been working at a marketing firm in Soho for a few years now, she didn’t seem to have any more cash than I did. That seemed a worrisome indicator of what I could expect in New York in years to come. And then there was her boyfriend, Rodney, a linebacker-looking fellow she met back home over Christmas and who now flew in from Ohio every month or so. He responded to all my attempts at cordial conversation with one-word answers and a blank face, his eyes flashing to wherever Sylvia happened to be, whether she was grabbing her coat or behind the bathroom door. I’d never seen a single slitty-eyed look silently yell “hurry up” in another person’s direction quite so loudly.

“Where you going?” Sylvia said now, but since she had cereal in her mouth, it was more like “Wuh yu gwon?”

“A friend is having a party out on Long Island,” I heard myself say.

Ugh. “A friend.” And, ugh, “Long Island.” My first Pretzel Party, the one right after our freshman year, Robert told me his parents were having a get-together in the backyard of their house on Long Island. I’d never been to the Hamptons, but I’d watched a VH1 celebrity special or two, so a more specific geographic reference might have given me some hint as to the true nature of this party. But Robert wasn’t up for saying the H-word, which meant I got ready for this party like I would have any backyard barbecue back in Milldale, Oregon—just a T-shirt and jeans. When Robert picked me up for the drive from our summer dorms in Boston down to New York, the fact that he was outfitted in a sharp white linen concoction should have tipped me off. I did feel instantly nervous that perhaps the party was going to be a little fancier than I had guessed, but still, I didn’t quite get it.

When did I actually get it? Was it when we pulled up to the house, or should I say, estate? Not fully. Was it when we walked into the little backyard party, or should I say, extravaganza on the grounds? Nope. Was it when the first person at the party I made eye contact with was Alec Baldwin? Yes, I’d say that was the moment.

“Is that Alec Baldwin?” I whispered to Robert.

He nodded, and then a second later as a waiter passed by with little spoonfuls of caviar on a silver tray, he whispered ferociously, “This is all tax deductible.” And I suppose he was trying to say that otherwise it’d be Ma and Pa Rolland flipping burgers themselves, which I almost believed until I met Ma and Pa Rolland.

But apparently, now I said “Long Island” too.

The fan blowing in my face didn’t do much good. Sweat ran from my upper lip into my lipstick, and the whole thing smeared when I attempted to wipe away the moisture. Thankfully, it was a mercifully short walk from my building to the subway and from the subway to the Long Island Rail Road. I cheered for every bit of air-conditioning along the way. Yay for air-conditioned train cars. Yay for the air-conditioned cab from the train, and yay for the waves of icy air I could practically see pouring from the Rollands’ house as we pulled up. I would have cheered more had I been arriving in Robert’s nicely air-conditioned BMW two-seater, which he undoubtedly drove in from the city that morning, but alas, my seat was taken.

Mr. and Mrs. Rolland hovered near what looked like wicker thrones on top of a fancy Oriental rug near their koi pond, greeting throngs of guests with cheek kisses for one and all. I joined the queue, ready for the somewhat strained familiarity that had marked our interactions since they’d first become aware of the turbulence of Robert’s relationship with me sometime during sophomore year. Before I got my chance to say hello, Robert and a woman who could only be Lily swooped in.

All lean angles as usual, Robert looked appropriately like a pretzel heir in his trim tan suit. His dark brown hair had a few lighter brown streaks, and his skin had a slightly golden, baked quality to it. He and Lily must have been picnicking or hiking or doing other summery, coupley activities for the last several weeks while I’d been inside doing single-person things like cleaning the hair out of my brushes.

“Dawn, darling, how lovely to see you,” Robert crooned.

Lily elbowed him. “He thinks it’s funny to imitate his parents. He’s been doing it all day to see who calls him on it and who takes him seriously.” She said it with such jocular ease, like the most popular girl at summer camp.

I looked her up and down. I should have been discreet, but I don’t think I was. I’d imagined being calm and cool, so cool and lovely that the Texas tart would walk away feeling wholly inadequate, trembling at the thought of trying to measure up to me. But I didn’t feel calm and cool. The sight of Lily in real life standing next to Robert tripped my adrenal glands. I felt shaky with nerves, like I was barely holding the reins of rearing horses. She was petite, or normal, but compared to my gangly five-nine she was a diminutive little darling. And while my wavy red hair was piled on top of my head in a way that seemed to advertise what a sweaty morning I’d had as well as what cheap spangly earrings I was wearing, her sleek brown bob announced an invincibility to summer humidity, showed off what I couldn’t imagine were anything other than real pearl earrings, and led your eye straight to her dainty freckled nose. (Of course her nose was that cute. What else could it be since my slightly crooked nose was one of my prime insecurities?) Decked out in a flip-collared seersucker jacket over a white cotton dress and a Tiffany charm bracelet, I thought she looked like polo-pony puke. I was glad to note she wasn’t skinnier than I was. Then I felt bad for noting this, like I was so brainwashed I thought that mattered. Though even after I felt bad, I noted it again from another angle.

“Lily,” I said, doing my best to impersonate a gracious person. “So nice to meet you.”

“So Robert tells me you’re a writer,” she said, leaning in like we were actually friends, not just people badly faking the parts. Her voice was lower and more compelling than I would have thought, a little husky even, without a trace of Texas in it. She sounded like she should be reading the news on the radio.

“That’s very generous of him,” I said, my own voice all of a sudden sounding tinny and irksome to my ear, the way it does when you listen to recordings of yourself.

I might have been flattered by this line of conversation, or relieved, since it at least steered us somewhat delicately around the topic of my actual employment, but instead, I cringed because I knew exactly where it was headed.

“He says you write wonderful short stories,” Lily said, carrying on politely.

“It’s true, she does,” Robert piped up, as if he were just getting his bearings. Usually, when Robert and I were together we generated a sort of undeniable heat, like the waves that radiate from the hood of an idling car. You could practically see it, and everything got hazy, and breathing in the haze was like breathing in a potion that magically pulled us together again. But with Lily here, the heat was diffuse, whatever waves were there refracted and sent bouncing in strange directions. At best, you could get a whiff of the magic. I detected a definite note of fluster in Robert’s voice, and it was like he didn’t know which one of us to look at when he talked, me or Lily. He kept shifting on his feet.

“So have you published any of your stories?” Lily asked, all innocent-like. And there it was, just as predicted: the dreaded moment. Almost as bad as “So what do you do?” Not having an answer you can be proud of for questions like that makes ordinary conversation agonizing, like having a blister on your heel and a shoe that cuts further into your skin with every should-be-painless step.

“Ah, well, I’m still working on the publishing part . . .” I said.

Robert fiddled with his drink.

“I’m sure it’ll be any day now,” Lily said, like she was some wise old woman who knew the ways of the world and was patting naive little me on the head.

I flashed a look of recrimination at Robert while Lily flagged down a waiter with a tray of champagne. He wouldn’t let me catch his eye, and he had a single flushed spot on one cheek.

As we drank our champagne, I shifted the conversation to law school. Lily had just finished her first year at Columbia. I would have been starting law school in the fall, except that I’d decided I just couldn’t do it.

I’d been very close. As a teenager, I’d been hooked on shows like Ally McBeal and The Practice, and maybe the more reasonable conclusion to draw from being attracted to TV programs about lawyers is not that you want to be a lawyer, but rather that you want to be an actor or a writer of shows about lawyers. Alas, that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. Peering into those big-city lives through the television screen was like watching my teenage dreams line up on a slot machine, each piece like a cherry inextricably tied to the next. Ambition 1: Glamour. Ambition 2: Prestige. Ambition 3: Lawyer? Bingo! There weren’t a lot of competing bingos presenting themselves to my imagination in small-town Oregon, other than being a writer, which seemed about as unlikely as being a movie star, and was therefore off the list. Being an attorney seemed exciting and attainable, so the idea stuck.

My first two summers of college, I went home and worked at a law firm in Eugene, drafting affidavits and motions for summary judgment for workers’ compensation cases. I liked it, or liked it well enough. Figuring out the formal structure of each document I had to write was like solving a puzzle, satisfying and vaguely enjoyable in a crosswordy sort of way, and I lapped up all the “Good job, Dawn!” comments my work garnered. Plus, it was my first experience with business attire—turned out pencil skirts and I got along quite nicely. Junior year, I stayed in Boston so I could be with Robert. He spent the summer interning for a business school professor, and I got a job as a camp counselor at a city camp for low-income kids, but I still spent my every free moment studying for the LSAT. And then I did the whole thing. I took the test, I applied, and I got in. I had options in D.C., Boston, and New York. But a strange thing happened. Spring of senior year, I stared at the “Yes, I will attend” box on each of the acceptance forms, and I couldn’t bring myself to check a single one of them.

I’d always told myself writing was just a hobby, but it had started to feel like more than that. I’d been churning out stories during creative writing seminars all through college, and a few of my professors had made “I think you have talent” type remarks. They probably thought nothing of their words, but I couldn’t let them go. It wasn’t just their compliments; it was the way I felt when I was writing. When I put together a fifteen-page paper about imagery in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, the whole point was breaking down and analyzing his ideas. When I wrote a short story, the whole point was breathing life into my ideas. It was like the difference between rummaging around in someone else’s old house and designing and building a whole new house of my own. There is pleasure in rummaging, but nothing like the grand, expansive feeling of creating.

Bit by bit, writing dreams crept into my brain, and now, those dreams were like squatters yelling loudly for their rights. When I looked at law school acceptance forms, it was as if the “Yes” box did not say “Yes, I will attend,” but instead boomed in a draconian voice, “Yes, I will crush all the creativity in my soul.” I checked the “No” box. Robert had applauded my creative ambitions. My parents, on the other hand, fell into a category closer to worried-slash-perplexed. Maybe they were right, after all, since that pen mark had led me directly to the delightful world of unemployment and disappointment I was currently enjoying. My various collegiate activities were fine for grad school, but if you want a job, turns out some summer experience in fields other than playing at law or playing with kids can be helpful. Oops.

But Lily had checked th