“What have you done?” he would ask. “Nothing. You’ve done nothing.”
8.
I knew from a young age that I hadn’t done anything to earn my beauty, just as my grandfather had pointed out to my mother. Was it, then, that my beauty was a thing my mother had given to me? I sensed at times that she felt entitled to it in some way, like a piece of bequeathed jewelry, one that was once hers, one that she’d lived with her entire life. It had been passed down to me heavy with all the tragedies and victories she had experienced with it.
9.
“Wear whatever you want, Ems,” my mother would always tell me. “Don’t worry about other people.” She wanted me to be free of shame, to be able to embrace the way I looked and whatever opportunities it presented.
At thirteen, I was sent home from a formal dance because the chaperones deemed my dress too sexy. My mother had bought it with me. It was baby blue and made of a stretchy lace material that clung to my newly developed breasts and hips. When I came out of the dressing room, unsure of myself, she stood up and hugged me.
“You look absolutely lovely,” she said, smiling warmly.
“It’s not too sexy?” I asked.
“Not at all. You have a beautiful figure.” My mother never wanted me to think that my body or my beauty was too much. “If people have an issue with it, that’s their problem,” she’d say.
When she picked me up from the dance, I was in tears, humiliated and confused. She tucked my hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. Those people could go fuck themselves, she said. She made a special dinner and let me watch a dumb movie while I ate. Later, with my permission, she wrote a fierce letter of complaint.
“I’ll read them the riot act,” she declared.
10.
I tried to gauge where my parents thought I belonged in the world of beauties. It seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful; they enjoyed telling friends about the way people approached me to model and, later, about my modeling successes once I signed with an agency in middle school. They thought of modeling as an opportunity they should pursue as responsible parents. “She can make a lot of money. Does she have headshots?” a woman once asked in the checkout line of our local grocery store. When we returned to my mother’s car in the strip mall’s parking lot, I burst into tears. “I don’t want headshots, Mama!” I’d understood the word to mean needles in the head.
Eventually, my parents found me an agent and began driving me to shoots and castings in Los Angeles the way my classmates’ parents drove them to local soccer tournaments. My father put my first modeling “comp” card （an index-sized card with my dimensions and modeling images, typically left with clients at castings） on the wall by his desk in the classroom where he taught. When I was in high school, my mother framed a 9?-by-11-inch black-and-white image of me from a photoshoot and placed it on the kitchen counter facing the front door, so that anyone coming in was immediately greeted by my pouty lips, bare legs, and teased hair. I was embarrassed by the picture and its location. After I’d moved out of the house, I convinced my mother to remove it. By that point, it had been there for several years. “You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t represent you anymore. You’re more beautiful than that now.”
11.
Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.
12.
The first casting my mother took me to was for a denim company that made expensive jeans I’d never owned. She called in a sub to teach her class so that she could drive me to Los Angeles, and I left school early, hopping into her VW Bug in the middle school’s parking lot to make the commute.
She sped on the freeway, her sunglasses on. “I asked your agent about your chances on this audition. She thought I meant your chances of ‘making it’！ She said, ‘She definitely has a shot but it’s always tough to say.’” She glanced at the rearview mirror, her two hands on the steering wheel. “I meant your chances for this casting! Not for fame.” She shook her head. “I didn’t like that at all.” They were getting ahead of themselves, she explained.
Inside the casting office, we were met with a blast of cool air and floor-to-ceiling glass doors. White benches lined the room and screens hung on the wall indicating the rooms assigned to various auditions. I walked a few paces in front of my mother, wearing the inexpensive, stretchy version of the denim company’s classic jeans and chunky black boots, both newly purchased from Ross Dress 4 Less. In my heels I stood almost a foot taller than her.