The Ten Girls to Watch Read online

  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.

  “An insightful, funny take on postgrad tribulations that thoughtfully mines the wisdom of women.”

  —Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries

  “A sparkling novel about how we find our friends, our mentors, and our way in the world.”

  —Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of Admission: A Novel

  “This novel captures that time right after college, when we all feel overwhelmed and adrift. Shumway expertly guides us through a young woman’s love life, her family, friends, and career as she proves that perfect endings aren’t the only happy ones.”

  —Lauren Weisberger, bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada

  “A thoroughly charming, sassy, highly satisfying debut from a writer with a rare gift: She sounds like your best friend, telling a story you don’t ever want to end. I adored this book.”

  —Sarah Pekkanen, author of These Girls

  “A heartwarming story about a gathering of extraordinary women who offer wisdom, warmth, and humanity. I can’t wait to give this book to my sisters and best girlfriends.”

  —Nicolle Wallace, bestselling author of Eighteen Acres

  “Lively, smart, and funny … What I loved about this coming-of-age story was its realistic and confirming celebration of female resilience, brilliance, and generosity. Not your stereotypical single gal novel, Shumway’s book is a passion-stirring breath of fresh air.”

  —Helen Schulman, bestselling author of This Beautiful Life

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  ©STACY YOUNG

  CHARITY SHUMWAY received an MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University and a BA in English from Harvard College. Among other publications, her writing has appeared in Glamour, where she reported on the 50th anniversary of the magazine’s “Top Ten College Women” contest. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  TEN

  GIRLS

  to

  WATCH

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Charity Shumway

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Washington Square Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition July 2012

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Jaime Putorti

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shumway, Charity.

  Ten girls to watch : a novel / Charity Shumway.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Women authors—Fiction. 3. Women college graduates—Fiction. 4. Self-acceptance—Fiction. 5. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. New York—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.H866T46 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2011048888

  ISBN 978-1-4516-7341-8

  ISBN 978-1-4516-7342-5 (ebook)

  For Donna and Loa Jean

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two: Helen Thomas

  Chapter Three: Kathy Knowlton

  Chapter Four: Jean Danton

  Chapter Five: Ellen Poloma

  Chapter Six: Jane Smith

  Chapter Seven: Patricia Collins

  Chapter Eight: LeAnne Marston

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten: Sandra Seru

  Chapter Eleven: Tanya King

  Chapter Twelve: Alexandra Guerrero

  Chapter Thirteen: Candace Chan

  Chapter Fourteen: Teresa Anderson

  Chapter Fifteen: Tanisha Whitaker

  Chapter Sixteen: Danni Chung

  Chapter Seventeen: Geraldine Van Steenkiste

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Readers Group Guide

  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.