Investment shoes, smuggled out of the photo department: stiletto heels worn only once, by a model for a cover shoot.
The fashion mistake, it seemed, was turning forty.
It was a time in her life when no one ever said, I don’t know how you can work here.
The great unspoken irony of that job, which strikes her even today, was that a person raised in a trailer could be hired to do it. Not that she trumpeted this fact about herself, then or ever. At twenty-three, she was like a gangster in the Program. Discretion was the central imperative of her life.
She was good at the job, to the extent anyone could be. Her heds and deks were clever, her ledes witty. Her qualifications were the same as anyone’s: she had been raised a girl. As a child she’d pinned diapers on a doll that wet itself. She dressed Barbie in bikinis and evening gowns, matched tiny plastic handbags to tiny plastic shoes.
The dolls taught you what you were supposed to want.
The dolls loomed large in her memory. As a child she’d preferred Barbie to the other type, the chubby baby doll, with its nifty faux-urination feature. Claudia’s was a hand-me-down from an older cousin, and she never quite knew what to do with it. （You changed its diaper and then what? Carried it around with you?）
Deb considered toys a waste of money and took pleasure in saying so, but every year, for as long as Claudia can remember and somewhat against her mother’s will, some unseen higher power sent a box of them a few days before Christmas. They weren’t gift-wrapped and weren’t meant to be surprises; Claudia had chosen them herself, after weeks of deliberation, from the pages of the Sears Christmas Wish Book. At her mother’s insistence, she put her requests in writing—letters to Santa Claus and later, bulleted shopping lists, complete with item numbers and prices. When the package arrived, it would be the most momentous thing that happened all year.
The toys were shipped directly from Sears, and Claudia did not for many years understand that they were paid for by her father, that this was what he gave Deb in lieu of child support, a few twenty-dollar toys at Christmas.
For Christmas 1980 she chose a popular board game called The Bride Game. It quickly became her favorite, outranking a game called What Shall I Wear? and another one licensed by the Miss America Pageant, in which two to four girls, aged eight to twelve, competed for the crown. Claudia knew about these games entirely thanks to Justine Webster, who lived up the hill and whom she believed to be wealthy because she owned all three.
The games taught you what you were supposed to want.
At Damsel she passed on her knowledge. Have a professional tooth bleaching, a salon blowout, a session on the Reformer. A low-carb diet prevented bloating, premenstrual breakouts, mood swings, existential anguish. A low-carb diet was your friend for life.
She edited a column called Ask Damsel, in which leading beauty experts answered readers’ questions. Because readers stubbornly refused to ask questions that appealed to Damsel’s advertisers, Claudia invented the questions herself.
At the salon ask for highlights, ask for lowlights. Have a mani-pedi, a scalp massage, a Brazilian. How much money could be spent in the quest for perfection, the care and maintenance of a single female body? An upper limit has not been established.
You taught them what to want and so they wanted it.
Get a facial, a seaweed wrap, a few zaps with the pulse-dye laser. Do a five-day cleanse, a juice fast. Have your colon irrigated.
The upper limit was equal to the GDP of a small island nation.
The upper limit was an illusion. There was no upper limit. There was always more you could do. A woman could, theoretically, spend every waking moment making herself look better, as demonstrated by the one percent: the model/actresses, the pop stars, a small handful of elite prostitutes. The ornamental wives who could not, dared not, let themselves go.
Ask for highlights, ask for lowlights. Claudia knew the job was bullshit, but for a long time she didn’t care. She had escaped her mother’s trailer. She was performing a flattering version of her life.