The Hopefuls(12)

“Well, I’m sure you will,” Babs said. “You must be going crazy sitting in that apartment all day.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said. I took a large bite of kale and willed the conversation to be over. Babs had the ability to make me feel worthless just by tilting her head, and she wasn’t the person I wanted to discuss my job options with.

“You know, we could always use another person at the store,” Nellie said. She smiled at me across the table, and I tried to smile back. I knew she was just being nice, but the thought of selling monogrammed towels to women like Babs made my stomach hurt.

“It’s true. The summer sale is coming up,” Jenny said. “Meg, we got a bunch of those makeup bags you liked. Supercute patterns.”

I knew Jenny was changing the subject for me, and I appreciated it. I concentrated on my dinner while she continued to talk about makeup bags. Matt turned to Michael and started telling him how everyone was already worrying about the 2012 election. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “This one’s barely over and they’re getting ready to do it again.” Babs perked up and turned her attention to him, and for the moment, I was free.

—

When we got in the car that night, I said, “I didn’t know you told your mom about my interview.”

“Oh, I just mentioned it to her last week. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, I don’t mind. I just didn’t want to talk about it in case I don’t get it,” I said, although that wasn’t quite what it was. Babs had never been all that impressed with my career in magazines. I’d never been comfortable talking about it with her because she made it sound like it was a hobby I was trying out. When I’d gotten laid off, she’d just sighed and said, “Well, that’s no surprise. Print is dying.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it,” Matt said, giving my hand a quick squeeze. My optimistic husband, always so sure that things would work out.

—

Colleen had moved to DC a couple of years earlier to cover the Hill as an on-air reporter for Bloomberg. She’d gotten her big break reporting the transit strike for NY1, standing at the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge and doing man-on-the-street interviews with all the pissed-off New Yorkers who had to walk to work that day. When the offer came from Bloomberg, she didn’t hesitate. I couldn’t believe she’d leave New York and move to a random city. “You don’t know anyone there,” I said. She just gave me a strange look and said, “This is my dream job.” I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have taken it, wouldn’t have left New York no matter what job was offered to me. But that was the difference between us, I guess.

I’d seen Colleen just once since I’d gotten to DC—she was always busy, had already canceled on me a few times, sending me short texts that she was “treading water” and “swamped with work.” But that Wednesday she called to say she was sneaking out of the office early. “Let’s get our nails done,” she said. “Meet me at that place right by you, Qwest. Do you know it? It’s on Eighteenth.” I was so happy to have something to break up my afternoon that I wasn’t even a little bit annoyed at how bossy she sounded.

When I got to Qwest, Colleen already had her feet soaking in a tub and was tapping away on her BlackBerry. She held up her hand and called my name, then resumed typing, pausing again when I walked over to her to pucker her lips for a cheek kiss.

I slipped off my flip-flops and sat in the chair next to her, smiling at the woman who was filling my tub. “You pick color?” the woman asked, and I handed her a bottle of bright red polish called Jelly Apple. “Oooh, I like that,” Colleen said, fully putting her phone down for the first time. “I’ll do that one too.”

“Who names these things?” I said. “I think I’d be good at that job.”

“I’d be great at it,” she said. She pressed a button on the arm of her chair and sighed happily as it started massaging her neck.

“Well, I’m the one who needs a job,” I said, a little sharper than I intended. She looked over at me and I just shrugged.

“Well, of course you need a job,” she said. “Have you heard back from DCLOVE yet?”

I shook my head and answered, “Not yet.” Colleen was friendly with one of the founders of DCLOVE and had helped me get the interview there. The website’s mission statement said it was “committed to showcasing the unique personality of our nation’s capital,” and the irony of applying to work at such a place wasn’t lost on me.

“Well, I’m sure you will,” she said. “But in the meantime, let’s figure out who else you should meet. I know someone at National Geographic. That would be a good one. Oh, and I just met someone who works for the Wildlife Fund magazine.”

“The Wildlife Fund magazine?”

“Don’t be a snob. This isn’t New York. You’re not going to find a job like Vanity Fair here. But you’ll find something interesting. What you really need to do at this point is meet as many people as possible to figure out what opportunities are out there. Here, I’m introducing you to this person over e-mail now, okay? You can get lunch and talk.”

Colleen was someone who actually enjoyed networking, was great at meeting random people and connecting them to one another. For all of her talk about New York being the best city, DC really was a better fit for her. She loved knowing the important players, loved knowing gossip about them even more. She was also drawn to anything exclusive—the harder it was to join, the more she wanted to be a part of it. When she first moved, she called to tell me she’d been recruited by a group called the Madison DC. She went on to explain the rules of the group, how the membership was capped at one hundred women, how you had to be between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, unmarried, successful, and pretty. The whole thing sounded like a club that was dreamt up by a group of thirteen-year-old girls, which is what I told her.