Free Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway Page A

may be a little too glossy. I’m giving it a real go anyway. Mature of me, right?
Secret Agent Romance
     
    First off, Elliot was thirty. Officially, too old for me. But much more than that, it was easy to imagine, after that column, why Elliot was lurking around at the archives rather than hanging out in the Mandalay Carson building. He had to be running scared. Half the women on the list were probably Charm staffers or friends thereof. Thick ankles? While Secret Agent Romance claimed that was the excuse, what woman hears a single thing after the sonic boom of thick ankles? I had no idea who Roller Girl was, other than that she certainly wasn’t me. Nonetheless, I crossed my ankles as I read the words. How thick is thick? How much crying is too much crying? Was it bad that I knew Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their kids liked to picnic? The column was insidious.
    I smacked the magazine closed as if it were the pages’ fault and not Elliot’s. I needed some positive, supportive womanly cheerleading immediately.
    I picked another winner, Kathy Knowlton, ’69. I’d waited long enough.
    You can do this. I actually whispered the words, psyching myself up. I started with Google, hoping that if there were an obituary to be found, I’d find it before calling the grieving spouse. No obituary, but Kathy Knowlton’s faculty profile at the University of Minnesota came right up. You can do this, I mouthed again. I dialed.
    “Hello,” a woman’s voice answered.
    “Hi, is this Kathy Knowlton?” I hated the timid sound of my voice.
    “Yes.”
    I consciously spoke a touch louder, with a slight salesy lilt, what I thought of as the voice of enthusiasm. “Kathy, this is Dawn West, I’m calling from Charm magazine. I’m hoping I have the right Kathy Knowlton—were you one of Charm ’s 1969 Ten Girls to Watch?”
    “Well, I certainly was.”
    Success! I explained it was the fiftieth anniversary of the contest, that we were doing a retrospective and were starting by tracking down all the past winners, that we were trying to figure out where all those incredible young women had ended up.
    I looked at her college photo as we spoke. She had long, dark hair, full, pretty lips, and was posed leaning against a tree. In the photo, she appeared to be wearing tweed bell bottoms.
    “How wild,” she said, clear delight in her voice. “It’s such a funny coincidence, actually. My mother passed away recently and I was going through her attic with my sister just the other day, and we found a big stack of Charm s up there. Copy after copy of my Ten Girls to Watch issue. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and I just laughed and laughed. My mother must have bought every issue in the county. And then there was that photo . . .”
    “I’m looking at it right now. Groovy pants.”
    “Oh, they were awesome.”
    We both giggled, and then she went on, no prompting necessary. “The thing that was funniest, though, was looking back at what I said I was going to do.”
    I glanced at the block of text alongside her photo: “Future work: Kathy wants to be a teacher or a doctor. Epidemiology—the study of the spread of diseases—excites her the most. Future play: There’s no place she doesn’t want to travel.”
    “It was a little crazy how close I got to describing my life now,” she said. “I didn’t remember having said all that stuff. But here I am now. I actually am an epidemiologist. What made me think I wanted to be an epidemiologist back then, I can’t tell you. But somehow I said it. I teach and I travel too, and I’ve been incredibly lucky—I don’t think I said this in the article, but I always wanted to have a family, and I’ve been lucky enough to have four wild and crazy kids.”
    “You have four? That’s wonderful! How do you—”
    “I always say you have to pick them right, and I lucked out. My husband’s a peach. And then we were also lucky—my mom took care of the kids for a lot of years.”
    We talked