Natural Disaster Read online

  Then she started tousling the top, flipping and flopping it almost violently.

  “You need a little more rock and roll. Rock and roll, no?”

  I nodded in agreement, having zero idea what that meant and zero intention of asking. She was a scary woman.

  She turned me around to work on my hair, and when I was turned back to the mirror to see the final product two hours later, I had to choke back a scream.

  She had chopped my hair to about chin length and dyed it raven. I hated it but allowed her to parade me around the salon, boasting to all about how “fresh and rock and roll” I looked. She disappeared at the register, and I was left with a bill of $350. After tipping, it was almost $500 just to get out of there before I had a breakdown. I looked horrendous, like some sort of future sixty-something version of myself. I couldn’t believe it.

  BCG needed some retail therapy ASAP to make up for this traumatic experience.

  I bought expensive down pillows from Bloomingdale’s Home, loads of matching accessories for each room (I still have the bright blue creamer from Target that matched my kitchen), and beautiful large red-wine goblets for all the entertaining I would certainly be doing. I also gave myself a theme song. Every morning on the way to work (a five-minute drive) in the brand-new Mitsubishi Eclipse I didn’t need, I sang “Glamorous,” Fergie’s anthem for single ladies living the life, which of course was me. At the time I bought the car, Mitsubishi had a commercial running featuring four girls singing at the top of their lungs speeding down the highway at night. I knew I’d have my own entourage soon enough, so I’d need a car to take them driving in. In reality, I don’t think anybody ever rode in that car with me, and it would be a while before I finally made a friend. But I had my vision of this life I thought I was going to have in Chicago and all the stuff I thought I needed to make it come true. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of weeknights at home puttering around my Skittles Palace making up my own drinking games for The Bachelor.

  Pretty soon, there was no more stuff to buy, and I was left with something I’d never experienced in my entire life: loneliness. I didn’t even have Brad to talk to at night, like When Harry Met Sally. He was still at WOOD TV and in the process of moving to Detroit for a much bigger gig, and I’d pulled away and distanced myself, because as much as I cared about him, and as much of a natural disaster as I was, I still knew that a gay boyfriend was probably not a healthy life choice.

  During the day, I made building my wardrobe and maxing out my credit cards a full-time hobby. With every new suit from Marciano or wrap dress from BCBG, I convinced myself I was putting another piece of Big City Ginger together. And even though the sales ladies were super friendly and agreed with me that BCG was pretty hot, none of them wanted to be the girlfriends in my Mitsubishi commercial. Nothing in my vision for my new life had hinted at loneliness. I didn’t understand what was going on and had no idea where to go from here.

  And then one day I got a phone call. A meteorologist I’d worked with at WOOD TV, Bill Steffen, was calling to check in on me and see how I was doing. His thoughtfulness and concern was so parental and friendly and comforting, I wanted to cry. Instead, I told him the truth (that my job was going great) and lied (that I was happy). I think he knew something was up and asked if I’d called his daughter Julie, who also lived in Chicago.

  Before I left Grand Rapids, he had suggested I call her and make a date. All this time I’d been in Chicago I’d forgotten to do that. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s sort of like forgetting there’s really good ice cream in the freezer. (Well, I never do that, but some people probably do.) When he asked me to call her, I said I would, and meant it this time. There was no time to waste. I wasn’t sure if we’d be best friends, but I knew I needed a girls’ night more than I needed that apartment, that car, or even those down pillows.

  By the end of the day, Julie had responded to my e-mail, and we made a date to meet for drinks the next night. That part was my idea, and I wondered if I’d been too eager and should have played it cooler and waited for a few days.

  Just be cool, Ginger, I told myself. You’re going for drinks, not to the prom.

  Ironically, with all my shopping, finding something to wear was tricky, as I suddenly realized my entire wardrobe was designed to emulate Katie Couric, not Carrie Bradshaw. I probably wore a little too much makeup, because as I checked myself in the mirror by the door to my apartment, I thought I looked like I was going on a first date, not meeting a girl for drinks. Later I would see that Julie had dressed up, too, and both of us laughed about wanting to impress the other.

  That night, I walked into the sushi restaurant after valet parking at her condo. I had never eaten raw fish or given somebody else the keys to my car. I was popping my Chicago cherry all over the place and could not have been happier about it.

  I spotted Julie sitting at the sushi bar waving me over. She was excited to meet me too! Can you have butterflies from the possibility of making a new girlfriend? Had I just been among the cold natives of the big city for too long to recognize baseline human camaraderie? Who cares! I had girl talk to share, and we were out of the gate as soon as my butt hit that stool. We laughed, ate slippery raw fish, and drank for hours. We figured out we didn’t have only her dad in common, but that my oldest childhood friend was also her friend. Sake led to vodka led to wine and back to more vodka. She taught me the only way to eat wasabi—fresh. You have to request it, she instructed. Although Julie was an accountant, she knew all the hometown meteorologists I knew because of her dad. Gossip suddenly felt like air I hadn’t been able to breathe since I got to Chicago. There were guys flirting with us, but we ignored them. We didn’t want the night to end. We decided to go nearby to the Jefferson Tap & Grill, a bar Julie described as her Cheers.

  As we walked around the corner, snow was flying. I mentioned to Julie that tonight the snow was going to be bad, like legitimate-blizzard bad. She rolled her eyes at me, and I realized she had grown up with her dad detailing the distinction between snowstorm and blizzard and was one of the few people on Earth that I didn’t need to inform about this difference. (To be an official blizzard, winds of thirty-five miles per hour or higher for at least three straight hours are required. It drives me nuts when it snows a few inches and people say, “It’s a blizzard out there.”)

  I also told her I thought it was weird that I hadn’t been asked to cover the blizzard, but chalked it up to being the new gal. Plus, at this point, the beer at The Tap sounded much more enticing than sitting in a truck freezing myself through a newscast anyway.

  At The Tap we were the belles of the bar. Her friends were instantly my friends. Drinks started arriving from different tables, being bought for the gals who looked like they were the oldest of friends having the time of their lives. By the time we stumbled outside after shutting down the bar, the snow had piled up to about a foot, the wind was howling, and I knew I was in no shape to drive.

  Julie said it was fine to leave my car at her place and asked if I wanted to sleep at her apartment. Flashing my big-city skills, I said I would just take a cab home. I hugged my new friend, waved as I turned, and started walking toward where I thought I lived, desperately searching for a cab. My mood quickly went from jolly drunken happiness, so proud of myself for having a great first friend-date and finally “feelin’” the city, to quickly darting my eyes from side to side at every intersection searching desperately for a taxi. Not only had I not seen one cab in the ten minutes I had walked, but I hadn’t even seen another person. It was about three A.M., and the cute boots I had put on with my outfit were soaked through and my feet were losing more feeling by the moment. I had no hat or gloves, and my hair was starting to freeze in sticks. My jovial, inebriated mood disintegrated into fear. I am usually very happy when I have a few drinks, but I can quickly transition into some major drama. That tipping point had been met, and as I started running instead of walking, I was slipping and falling intermittently, crying, and at one point yelling, “Why me?
”

  Now, this was flip-phone days, not Internet smartphone days, and obviously way before Uber. There was nobody to call besides Julie, and I didn’t want to scare her away by revealing myself as such a mess so soon. So here I was, all alone again, under a bridge in the West Loop of Chicago. Because natural disasters come to grand conclusions in an instant, no matter the state of inebriation or weather conditions, I told myself that obviously moving to Chicago had been a bad idea. And then I backed up my conclusions with facts: I was behind in my rent; let’s face it, my apartment looked like a bunch of five-year-olds had gotten cracked out on sugar and had a paint party; my fancy new wardrobe would only be fashionable for this season, and I’d be paying it off for ten years; and I couldn’t even get to the end of “Glamorous” on my way to work in the car I didn’t need. Then I noticed that the L train was as silent as my surroundings. The L train never shuts down, but tonight, due to the snowstorm, it was down. And the only person stupid enough to be outside was a meteorologist. What other proof did I need that I was a complete and total failure? And then I heard a voice….

  “Hey—hey…”

  I turned around, hoping it was an angel cabdriver sent from above. It wasn’t. It was a homeless woman chasing after me. And she was yelling. I thought for sure this would be my end. Good. She’d put me out of my misery. I slipped and fell, and when I looked up I saw her.

  She was somewhere in her fifties, the lines in her face full of stories I’d never hear, of struggles I’d never know. She handed me the knit purple cap from her head.

  “Take it. You need it more than I do,” she said.

  I couldn’t decide what the right thing to do was. I didn’t want to offend her, and I was cold. But I also didn’t want to take a hat from someone who didn’t have a place to sleep. While I debated all these middle-class privileged thoughts in my head, she said, “Fuck it,” put the hat back on her head, and walked off. Well played, homeless lady.

  I stopped crying and got myself home. And on the way, I knew that things had to change. But I worried I wouldn’t be able to follow through on those changes, because let’s face it, how many drunk people make big proclamations to themselves that they discard in the morning? I resolved to at least consider the possibility that maybe I could simply relax. Maybe reinventing myself was ruining any chance I had of enjoying this adventure. After all, the happiest I’d been in Chicago had been hanging out with Julie, who seemed to like me—the original small-town Ginger.

  When I got to my building, I snuck past the doorman, who never acknowledged me anyway. In the hallway outside my apartment, I realized I didn’t have my keys. They were with my car keys back at the valet. Of course they were. The perfect ending to the perfect night in teaching me what city life is really like. The only consolation I could come up with was that thank goodness I’d restrained myself from buying a pair of Louboutins, because they would have been trashed.

  In the end, I decided that the night wasn’t a total disaster. I’d gotten exactly what I’d needed: a raucous girls’ night out. I had to admit, I felt better, less alone. But it was time to make some changes.

  I moved out of my apartment a few weeks later into something not only more affordable, but actually a whole lot more cozy and me. With a roommate. Chicago was expensive, and the truth was, I was not making that much money. I made a habit of staying away from the mall, but without even noticing it, I realized I didn’t miss it at all.

  Years later, when I moved to New York City, the same pangs of stepping outside myself to figure out how to create a new version of me came up again, like they had in Chicago. I guess that’s normal; there’s a reason there are so many great movies about women moving to the big city. The sheer scope of the adventure becomes a very seductive opportunity to start over, to reinvent ourselves. And big cities can be lonely. Those Mitsubishi guys probably understand that better than anybody.

  Well before the messy night under the bridge in Chicago, I walked into work for the first day I would be on the air at WMAQ on a Saturday morning in the late fall of 2006. I was hired to do double weekend shifts for this NBC-owned and operated station, covering the six and ten A.M. and five and ten P.M. newscasts every Saturday and Sunday. This was the big leagues. This was what would make my giving up the safety net of Joe and WOOD TV in Grand Rapids worth it. It was an honor to join this newscast, and I was pleased with myself that I felt a little less like a puppy dog than I had at my last two jobs. I was ready to work and contribute to the team. At the time, I completely believed that Ginger Zee, self-proclaimed natural disaster, was ready to be a grown-up. Maybe I forgot that believing a natural disaster isn’t always the best idea.

  The studio had a side entrance that was separate from the NBC tower but still along the river, and as I entered on that first day, I was reminded of how unglamorous working in television really is. For example, all the on-camera talent were required to do our own makeup, which wasn’t a problem for me because I already felt pretty confident in cheekbone contouring and eye-shadow blending. As soon as I walked into the makeup room and met Zoraida Sambolin, the female anchor of the weekend morning show, I knew I had overrated my skills.

  I pretended not to stare, but she was a knockout. I set up my little makeup kit next to Zoraida, who was in the middle of putting on her own makeup. This woman’s resting face was a gentle, warm smile. All my confidence went out the window, and I fantasized that a MAC employee from the nearby mall would show up instantly to help me pull myself together. It seemed like every TV station where I worked had at least one woman who just shone with the immaculate image I always yearned for but never felt I could achieve. Zoraida was definitely added to the list of ladies I wanted to be when I grew up, along with Erin Looby, and Tamron Hall.

  Zoraida introduced herself and peppered our first conversation with the word “girl,” like we were old friends catching up on high school gossip. I loved her. We talked about her kids and she asked if I was married. Without filling in any of the dramatic details of how close I’d come, I said I wasn’t. I wanted to save that story for when we went out for cocktails sometime in the very near future (I hoped).

  “Good, you are young,” she replied.

  I was no dummy. I heard the subtext, and it went something like…Marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be, girl. You keep being you, girl, and wait until it is right, girl.

  When we were done with our makeup, we kept talking as we walked into the studio together. And when I say “studio,” I mean like the tiny box of a New York City first apartment, or like a corner cubicle in an office dressed up as a studio. But I didn’t care. It was the first day of my new job. I was finally a full-time anchor. No more sitting at a computer sending myself e-mails to look busy. No more pitching stories to all the eye-rolling older reporters. I was going to master that green screen and make all of Chicago fall in love with me. I also made it a goal to take Zoraida’s advice and live the single life for as long as I could. The latter goal didn’t work out quite as well as the first thanks to another role I would soon take on: environmental reporter.

  NBC was big into “Going Green,” and as a meteorologist and adorer of the atmosphere it only made sense that I become WMAQ’s environmental reporter. I grew up with a compost pile surrounded by acres of fruits and vegetables; plus our first home used geothermal heat. So, it just fit.

  One of my first stories, however, brought me into a world where politics and the environment intersect. As my photographer and I headed toward the office of the politician we were supposed to interview, I thought, This is really it. This is the big city, I am going to ask the questions, get the answers, and hopefully change this world for the better. So cute.

  As we ascended in the elevator, I was not prepared to see what greeted me on the other side of the door. The politician we were there to meet was leaning over his assistant’s desk. He looked up with the most gorgeous eyes I had seen in quite some time. He was exquisitely dressed, with a dreamy smile. And as he reached out his h
and, wrapping it around mine, it felt like a full-body hug from a long-lost friend—I mean lover. And of course all of my resolutions and convictions about being a grown-up jumped out the window and crashed to their death upon impact. I would have told Zoraida right then and there that she was wrong. Marriage was beautiful and when you know you know.

  My head felt fluffy and fluttery and I couldn’t concentrate. The only thing I could see was my immediate daydream that had me in pearls and a powder-blue suit walking the steps of the White House with this politician, because he would absolutely be the president of the United States someday. First Lady Ginger Zee I saw scribed across the daydream. Chanel suits, children’s charities choosing the eco-friendly China for our state dinners. In less than a minute I had it all planned and thought this guy was my soul mate.

  That is exactly how volatile I am. That is how quickly I jump—I mean dive—into any and everything. It usually starts as a joke, like, oh, He is going to be my perfect first husband. And then I engage…aim…and fire. He will be mine. I had the new awesome career; I deserved a new guy to match, right?

  Thankfully, my photographer pierced my fantasy bubble with a loud “nice to meet you” reaching out his hand. Then my work brain took over. Thank goodness one of the positive qualities of a natural disaster is that we have different parts of our brains that can work at the same time. So while my reptilian sex/romance brain kept her eye on the politician, my meteorology/career brain did its thing and engaged in what felt like a pretty deep dive into the city of Chicago’s environmental issues. I felt good about the interview and even better about my chemistry with the politician. Later that day, my inner dialogue went something like this: