“Getting old is strange,” she told me one morning, sitting on my blue couch by the window in my Los Angeles loft. “I was walking down the street the other day and saw two attractive young men approaching. I didn’t even think about it, but I stood up a little straighter to walk past them.” She let out a small laugh. “And they didn’t even look at me. And right then I realized that I’m invisible to them now. All they see is just a lady with gray hair!”
She looked lovely in the natural light as she spoke.
“I guess it’s just the way it goes.” She shrugged. There was a peacefulness to her. I imagined what it would be like to one day no longer be noticed by men.
“Perhaps it’s somehow freeing?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said finally.
22.
I am newly married to my husband when he remarks casually, “There are so many beautiful women in the world.”
I freeze when he says this. I know it is a perfectly acceptable and truthful thing to remark on, and yet I feel a familiar twist in my gut.
“What?” he asks. He can feel the switch; he can sense the instant tension in my body.
“I don’t know,” I reply. I press my face into his chest, ashamed of my reaction. “I don’t know why it hurts to hear you say that.”
I can tell he wants to console me, but he is confused. I want him to console me, too, but I am unsure why I need it. Why do I suddenly feel as if he doesn’t love me enough?
23.
In the small, windowless room that is my therapist’s office, I tell her about my reaction to my husband’s remark. I explain the gut pain. The assessing. The other women.
“Apples and oranges,” my therapist tells me. “What if you’re not the same as other women, what if you’re an entirely different fruit?” she asks gently.
I hate that I am having this conversation; a part of me is horribly embarrassed. I want to stand up and scream, Of course I know this! I hate women who compare themselves to other women! I am not that way!
But there is a version of myself who needs to hear what she is saying because there is also a part of me that wants to correct her. “But everyone has a favorite fruit,” I tell her. I feel a tear run down my cheek. “Everyone prefers one over the other. That is how the world works; everything is ranked. One is always better than the other.”
Blurred Lines
WHEN I DROPPED out of college to work full-time as a model, I liked to tell friends that the French word for model is mannequin.
“So,” I’d say, shrugging, “I’m a mannequin for a living.”
Around that same time, I caught a terrible stomach flu and lost ten pounds in one week. After I recovered, I kept the weight off, realizing that I was booking more shoots with my thinner body. I began wearing platform shoes at all times （even when I dressed in the dark to arrive at a shoot before sunrise） because I never wanted to give clients the opportunity to see that I was shorter than most models. I became skilled with time management, something I’d constantly struggled with in high school and in my only year of college, when I was perpetually the girl walking into class ten minutes late. I learned the traffic patterns of Los Angeles, making sure to always wake up with time to spare, and alerting my agent if I was even just a few minutes behind. I let clients photograph and style me however they wanted even when I hated the way they made me look. I made these adjustments to my behavior and attitude and body with one objective in mind: money.
I considered my life and work as a model as a temporary situation, one that protected me from the fate most of my older friends had suffered after the financial crash in 2008, when they had to move back into their parents’ homes, saddled with student debt, and return to the service industry jobs they’d held as teenagers.
Money meant freedom and control, and all I had to do to fund my independence was learn to become someone else a few times a week: strip down and get greased up in body oil to pose suggestively in red lace lingerie or brightly printed bikinis I’d never choose to wear, pouting at the command of some middle-aged male photographer.
Once I quit school—and got the flu—I reached a new level of financial success. Lingerie and swim shoots paid more than the normal day rate for a standard e-commerce job, and I had several clients who booked me regularly for what my body did for their products. I remember coming out of a dressing room in a lingerie set and one female client remarking that it was “hard to find girls that are so skinny and can also fill out a bra.” My cup size was a valuable and rare asset, one that translated directly to higher paying jobs. It also limited the type of work I could do, though; I was a “commercial swim” girl, meaning that I could shoot catalogs but I’d never work in high fashion.