Free Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway Page B

through the ages of all the kids (thirty, twenty-six, twenty-four, and eighteen), how Kathy met her husband (grad student bowling league), how her mother died (a stroke), Kathy’s best family vacation (a safari in Kenya with her mother and kids in tow), and her academic and practical focus, which had started out as asthma and moved to AIDS.
    We made our way to talking about her teaching; she was restructuring her Principles of Epidemiology class for the fall.
    “Here’s an epidemiology metaphor I always found interesting,” she said. “Back when cars first hit it big-time, there weren’t traffic lights. There weren’t stop signs. When there were crashes, and there were lots of them in those years, people always tried to frame the crashes as a moral issue. They’d say, ‘People just need to slow down and stop being reckless. The value of courtesy and caution has eroded. If only we could bring back those virtues we’d be just fine and these tragic automobile deaths would go away.’ And those sorts of arguments went on for a while until we came up with stoplights and installed them all over the place, and then lo and behold, people stopped smashing into each other quite so often. I always remember that when I think about diseases today. We always want to blame people and their morals and say that we just need to be careful. But there’s usually more to it, so when it comes to any disease-related issue I’m working on, I always like to ask myself, ‘What are the stoplights in this situation?’ and then once I start to figure those out, I have something to really talk about.”
    I came to the end of the page in my notebook and flipped it quickly so I could write down every last word she was saying. And then I made her promise to send me her syllabus.
    She asked me whether I’d found anyone else from her year yet.
    “Not yet,” I said.
    “I have always wanted to get back in touch with Susan Frock. When you find her, please give her my information. We roomed together during our week in New York and our trip to Europe, and she was just amazing.”
    “Wait, Charm sent you on a trip to Europe?”
    “Oh, it was this grand tour. Paris, Rome, and then sort of weirdly backwater Ireland, which I think was just because one of our chaperones was from there. I distinctly remember our bus getting stuck in the mud and sheep swarming us. But I have to tell you my best Susan story. In New York, Charm sent us to all sorts of shows, and one night after a play we were at Sardi’s, and across the room there was Paul Newman. We all started tittering and looking over, and Susan just got up, walked over, and said we were the Charm girls and would he come have a drink with us. Poised as can be, like she was asking a schoolboy to dance. And of course he said yes, and I will never forget the way he smelled. Like Old Spice and cigarettes. When that man went into food it was a terrible thing for me. I slather on his dressings. I pop all his popcorn. I just can’t get enough of his face in my cupboard.”
    After joining her in another few moments of rhapsodizing about the particular pleasures of Newman’s Caesar, I told her how glad I was I’d found the right Kathy Knowlton and that I’d be back in touch as our plans for the anniversary celebration shaped up. We were planning something big. We just weren’t sure what yet.
    She told me to come visit if I was ever in Minneapolis. It was the lovey-doveyest of good-byes. I hung up smiling. And I couldn’t stop. It was just one call, but it had gone well. If I had to report to XADI or Regina now, I could say I’d “really been hitting it off” with the winners. It gave me hope for all the hundreds of calls to come. I didn’t need to say much, just Ten Girls to Watch, and the floodgates opened. It was like being in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, except I would always remember the magic words that opened the treasure cave. Kathy had been so happy to reminisce. Listening to her filled