Nine Women, One Dress (8 page)

I never saw this coming, at least not anywhere in the pages of my carefully mapped-out life plan. According to that, the year after college graduation was to be filled with after-work meet-ups with old friends and new colleagues in smart outfits chosen from my modest but stylish closet. In that plan, said closet would be found either in my shared Junior 4 in a part-time-doorman building uptown or in my own studio walk-up downtown. In my daydreams it was never found, as it now stands, in my childhood bedroom, partially co-opted by my mother's off-season wardrobe.

I have always been a planner in a family of nonplanners. I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and began my education at PS 6, the local public elementary school with a reputation for being all that. It was fine, but by the third grade I had started downloading applications to Dalton, Trinity, and Columbia Prep and leaving them next to the coffee machine for my parents to peruse with their morning brew. When that didn't work, I tried sticking them right in their briefcases, and then in their gym bags.

My father, David, the product of Upper West Side Jewish political activists, dismissed them outright at first: “I went to public school and it worked out fine for me!” My mother, Sheila, the daughter of conservative black schoolteachers from Buffalo, was a little more understanding: “She seems to really want this, David. It can't hurt to just tour the schools.”

Actually it can, and that was exactly what I was counting on. Once we toured the first one, even my liberal dad couldn't deny that private school was the best place for me.

I wowed the admissions committee, asking calculated questions like “What community-service opportunities will be available to me at Dalton?” and “Would it be possible for me to start a knitting club to make baby booties for Chinese orphans?” Between that and my stellar grades on the entrance exams, I was able to make up for the fact that my parents had both graduated from state schools, leaving me legacy-less and therefore not a shoo-in for the Ivy League. Top-tier college acceptances sit like a pot of gold at the end of the New York City private school rainbow; all the touring parents (except for mine) pretend not to care, claiming to be more interested in inclusion and diversity, but really the bottom line is how many kids got into Ivies last year.

As soon as I was accepted to Dalton I changed my focus to the next goal in life—the Ivy League. I was in eighth grade, and starting the next year everything would count. I met my new classmates and sized them up one by one. Since it was a numbers game, my legacy-less acceptance to an Ivy League college depended heavily on who in my class had a legacy and where. I found casual ways to ask my classmates where their parents had gone to college and wrote down the results in a little notebook I kept under my bed so my parents wouldn't find it and send me to a shrink. In retrospect, it's unfortunate they never found it—I probably could have benefited from a little therapy. Though of course they noticed that my competitive nature was a bit obsessive. Even if they hadn't, it was pointed out to them at nearly every teacher conference.

By Christmas of ninth grade I had created a detailed spreadsheet of the competition, with Ivy League schools listed across the top and classmates who were legacies of them underneath. In the end the tally included a whopping seven legacies from my original first choice, University of Pennsylvania, and, even more discouraging, nine from the easiest to get into, Cornell. As I was not in the academic league of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia, this left me to choose between Dartmouth (2) and Brown (3). I studied the acceptance rates to those two schools from Dalton over the previous five years—all good—and then looked at the candidates themselves. The Dartmouth legacies were strong, both of them girls, one black like me, but the Brown legacies were all boys, and sniffling, boring white boys to boot. I ordered a Brown sweatshirt online and set my mind and my every move over the next three years on my future admission to Brown University. As you can see from my byline, I was accepted.

At Brown my drive to compete changed dramatically, in that I quickly realized I no longer could. Everyone had my stellar SAT scores, and if I had knitted enough baby booties to cover every orphaned foot in Beijing, population 11 million, then the girl across the hall had knitted enough to cover every orphaned foot in Shanghai, population 14 million. I spent my first semester trying to be the best, but somewhere in the late winter, as the snow began to melt, my focus shifted from realizing achievements to managing disappointment. I gave up on the idea of being at the top and ended up four years later graduating smack in the middle of my class, with no idea what was next. Unceremoniously dumped into the world, and without my usual clearly charted path, I took my double concentration in comparative literature and art history and headed home to NYC to take my place in the postgraduate abyss. And since I was not yet gainfully employed, I moved back in with Sheila and David.

Everyone I knew seemed to be landing jobs, getting paid, and doing lots of fun and interesting things with their paychecks. I, on the other hand, was going on one unsuccessful job interview after another and was totally broke. My parents had laid down hard-and-fast ground rules when I moved back in, and those rules did not include money for fun or interesting things. “We will provide a roof over your head and food on the table, but we are done subsidizing your life,” they told me. Their parents hadn't given them a cent after college, and, as they loved to remind me, they'd also had student loans to pay off.

Just as the rejection was beginning to really take hold on my psyche, I stumbled onto an instant ego-booster while browsing through Bloomingdale's. Often, to cheer myself up after interviews, I'll get off the subway at 59th Street and exit into the basement of the store. Sometimes I'll try a new perfume; sometimes I'll get a free makeover, though not totally free, since I pay the price in guilt for not making a purchase. One day back in September when I was dressed in an interview suit with a particularly good makeup job, I bumped into an old Dalton classmate, Bitsy Bouvier. She too was dressed in a suit and looking pretty fabulous. She was always a step behind me at Dalton and went to a little Ivy—Hamilton, I believe. She squealed when she saw me as if we'd met crossing the Ponte Vecchio, as opposed to in the department store we'd both been frequenting since we could walk. “Sophie, I love your hair! You look so…cool!”

I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity. If she only knew my new hairstyle was a DIY special. The week before, my mother had caught me staring at myself in the mirror, forlorn. She's more of a softy than my dad, and sometimes I play on it. So when she asked me what was wrong, I saw an opportunity.

“It's my hair, Mom—I don't know what to do with it. You know I've been trying so hard to get a job and I can't even afford to get my hair straightened anymore.” I welled up—it's a talent of mine, I can do it on cue. She had to understand, she had the same hair. Although she wears hers like some kind of badge of honor. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom.
Oh, good, she's going to give me a little cash
, I thought. Cash would be nontraceable; my father would never know. She'd done the same thing two weeks earlier when I needed new interview shoes. But this time she sat me down in front of the mirror and pulled out a pair of barber's shears.

“No way, Mom!” I immediately protested.

“Embrace it,” she said. “You're not going to want to spend half your salary on your hair when you get a job, either!” She added, “Come on, I'll make you look cool.” We both laughed.
Cool
has never been a word you would use to describe me. Practical, driven, competitive, and, more recently, mediocre, lost, and unemployable—but never cool.

“What the hell,” I said, relenting. “I'll wear it ironically.” According to Bitsy Bouvier's compliment, it was working for me.

“How are you? What have you been up to?” she asked, doubtless expecting to hear a success story, since I'd been one of the stars of our high school class.

“Keeping it real,” I responded with a smile. What I should have said was keeping it real cheap.

“Where are you working?” And there it was, the question I had come to dread.

“You look fabulous—where are you working?” I countered.

“Goldman Sachs!”
Goldman Sachs?
She didn't even go to an Ivy League school! Maybe I should have gone to a little Ivy—less pressure and more room to flourish. I was beginning to question every decision I'd ever made.

“That's great,” I said, adding a bit viciously, “I'm surprised they let you out of the office at all, let alone to traipse through Bloomingdale's at five-thirty on a weekday!”

She laughed. “I'm treating myself to a new dress—I'm going to the ballet tonight with my boyfriend and his parents.”

A
job
and a
boyfriend
, with parents who attended the ballet? I nearly imploded from jealousy. But instead I lied. “That's funny. I'm here to buy a new bathing suit, because I'm going to the Ocean Club next weekend with
my
boyfriend and
his
parents!”

She looked sincerely happy for me. God, I'm awful. She whipped out her phone to take a selfie of us. I leaned in as she put her arm around my shoulder. Snap.

“I'll Instagram it! What should the caption be? Got it! #TwoDaltonWorkingGirls. So cute—I'll tag you. Where did you say you work again?”

“Sotheby's,” I answered, as quickly as if she had asked my shoe size.

She pecked away on her phone: #Dreamjobs #Sothebys #GoldmanSachs.

And that's how it began.

With each new like on Instagram I felt less like a loser and more like the twentysomething success with a great boyfriend and a job at Sotheby's that I'd told Bitsy I was. I checked Instagram all night, and by the time Bitsy Bouvier was watching the last plié at Lincoln Center, the photo had 179 likes. One hundred and seventy-nine people thought I looked fabulous—possibly even cool—and had a dream job at Sotheby's!

I was instantly addicted.

By the next morning people were on to liking the hot matchachino that Bitsy had for breakfast and I found myself feeling like a total loser again. I didn't even know what a matchachino was.

With nothing to do, I wandered back over to Bloomingdale's and ended up drifting through the bathing suit department. It was empty and a saleswoman approached. “Are you going somewhere warm?” she asked.

“Yes, to the Bahamas with my boyfriend and his family.” The lie came out again without my even thinking about it. If I couldn't have it all, I could at least
imagine
having it all, couldn't I?

She pulled out a beautiful Eres bikini. “Try this.”

I headed for the dressing room. She soon knocked on the door with a few more suits for me to try. I fell in love with an orange Norma Kamali with lavender flowers.

“It looks great on you!” she said as I timidly opened the changing room door. I looked at the tag—$185, just for the bottom.

“It's a little expensive for me,” I said. Even when fantasizing I was pragmatic. I'm so not cool.

“Well, you look great. Give me your phone—I'll take a picture for you to send to your boyfriend. Maybe he'll buy it for you.”

I want to be able to buy my own Norma Kamali suit
, I thought as I handed her my phone and posed for a photo. She looked at it and laughed.

“Check this out—with that picture of palm trees behind you, it looks like you're already in the Bahamas!” As she left she added, “Here's my card. Tell your BF that if he really loves you, he should call me for that suit!”

I sat down and looked at the picture. I looked great in the suit, and she was right, it did look like I was in the Bahamas. I couldn't help myself. I posted it on Instagram—#ItsBetterInTheBahamas. There were seven likes by the time I hooked my bra, double that by the time I zipped my jeans. And in the all-caps word of my first comment, I was once again AMAZING!!!!!!!

My friends began texting me—“You're in the Bahamas?” “Who are you with?” “You got vacation time from Sotheby's already?”

I invented a boyfriend, Charles, to go along with my dream job and my fabulous coolness. To avoid any risk of being found out and having to lie to people's faces, I turned down all invitations, excusing myself on the grounds of prior commitments related to said boyfriend, job, and fab coolness. The more excuses I made, the more pictures I posted to back them up. The busier I looked, the more popular and sought-after I became and the more likes I racked up. Every like fed my suffering ego. It was a dizzying cycle, and pretty soon I was on Instagram all the time, managing my pretend life.

Bloomingdale's seemed to be the perfect resource for all things Instagram-likable. A tight forty-five-degree-angled selfie shot in the housewares department holding my cool new immersion mixer: 198 likes; napping on six on my new Calvin Klein bedding, photo-enhanced with Beyoncé's favorite filter, Valencia: 243 likes; rushing to work with just a peek of my new Hermès bag in the corner, Lo-Fi filter: 372 likes and one covetous comment:
Is that the new Berline bag?
#SoJel comment.

It became a full-time job. Every Monday I would check the New York Social Diary calendar and map out my fictional appearances for the week. I would turn down an invitation to dinner with a “Sorry, opening-night gala at the Met!” Which I then had to follow with a photo of me in a Carolina Herrera gown from the fancy designer floor, with the always flattering Mayfair filter: a whopping 379 likes! I attended all the right charitable events in all the right designers—Gucci, Galliano, and Gabbana—and just last week I wore the most perfect little black Max Hammer, which Natalie, the saleswoman, told me was
the
dress of the season, to the New York Public Library benefit. No filter, 432 likes, one regram.