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Chapter Two
    R egina Greene’s call wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the Ten Girls to Watch Contest. The first time was a year earlier, in the home of Helen Hensley, my college thesis advisor. Helen Hensley, née Helen Thomas: 1972 Ten Girls to Watch awardee.
    In a national poll from a few years back, 68 percent of US liberal arts colleges reported assigning their incoming freshmen to read one of two essays: “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Helen Hensley’s 1978 essay “Must We Find Meaning?” about the cultural and spiritual fallout of World War I. I was one of the college freshmen assigned to Helen’s essay.
    “Remembering the Great War,” the essay opens, “requires modern man to face twin compulsions: the compulsion to find sense in tragedy and the compulsion to insist on its senselessness.” Ordinary enough, but by the time she was describing the smell of old artillery rust in the soil, farmers turning up gas masks in their fields fifty years after the war, and the way she tried to cope with the death of half her family in a fire when she was a teenager, I could feel the tops of my ears tingling and my entire body humming along with the resonance of the unfolding sentences and paragraphs. I was so enthralled that I hated to finish it, and when I came to the end of the essay I turned right back to the beginning and read it all over again.
    And then I read it about twenty more times over the next four years. It turned out Helen Hensley was a professor in the history department at my university, a discovery that led to my near hyperventilation in the library—certainly the last time the course catalog got me that excited. I took every class Professor Hensley offered for the next six semesters, and, after many nervous courting visits to her office hours, finally asked her to be my thesis advisor, which, despite the fact that I was a literature major, was possible if I wrote a “History and Literature” thesis. (Literature major didn’t exactly spell postcollegiate big bucks, but history and literature? A combo that ensured I’d have to beat away employers.)
    During our first official weekly thesis meeting my senior year, she told me to call her Helen. I was the equivalent of a screaming Beatles teenager. The second I left her office, I called Robert to tell him the news. “Call her Helen?!” I screeched. “Does it get any better than that?”
    Helen won the Pulitzer for the book Must We Find Meaning? of which “Must We Find Meaning?” the essay, served as the introduction. In addition to being a public intellectual and the chair of our university’s history department, she’s also a master glassblower. Did I mention that she has long, flowing white hair and wears green eyeliner and Chanel No. 5 at all times? I believe my hyperventilation over the course catalog was well merited.
    During the year, we grew closer, and I calmed down a little, though never enough that the thrill went away completely. Helen grew up in Oregon too, in a town only about an hour from mine. Like me, she’d grown up secretly wanting to be a writer, and again, like me, her hair had once been a firebolt of red (hers had gone white; mine had lightened into a shade I called “strawberry blonde”). In addition to slogging through my thesis chapters on “Regret versus Remorse in the Works of Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen” (a topic for the ages), she generously volunteered to read and comment on my fiction. “I can smell Oregon when I read this,” she wrote in a note on a story about a girl who spends her summer working at a saltwater taffy shop on the waterfront in Yachats, only to find the shop burgled on her last day of work and then to discover months later that the burglar was her brother.
    Midway through the year, Helen invited me to dinner at her home with her husband, Paul, and a few of her grad students. After a glass or two of wine, at the end of the night, standing next to her at the sink