Primates of Park Avenue (12 page)

My friend Jeff Nunokawa is a professor of English literature. His specialty is the Victorian novel, and he often writes and lectures about the peculiar way Dickens, Eliot, and other Victorian novelists figure women not only as enthusiastic consumers of luxury commodities, but as luxury commodities themselves. I wondered what he would have to say about more contemporary luxury consumption by women, as exemplified by Birkingate, and about hostility and competition between women on the post-Baudelairean sidewalk. First, however, I had to explain the terms. Jeff is not one of the many friends with whom I have bonded over a love of fashion, and initially he thought I was talking about Birkenstocks. “I’m sure it really
is
a nice purse,” he began gamely, once I had explained that were talking about bags, not sandals, and explained what a Birkin bag was, and what Hermès was, and gave him a quick overview of the madness of the Birkinquest in Manhattan circa the 2010s. Then he added, diplomatically, “And I
do
get that people care about these things.” He paused for a moment and then, gathering the various threads together, he asked, in a tone at once authoritative and playful, “But why women?”

Liking “nice” things, coveting them, lining up for them, getting on a wait list for them, subjecting oneself to various humiliations in order to procure of them, wanting them even more because they are allegedly out of reach, “scarce”—we are generally quick to dismiss it as feminine folly and false consciousness, as being suckered in and “duped by fashion,” Nunokawa summarized neatly. But, he suggested, we are wrong. Sure, it’s crazy, and sure, when we live in New York, we sort of lose our sense of the craziness of such a quest, and it comes to seem normal. As in: women just want Birkin bags. And this ridiculous process of ingratiating oneself with a salesperson in order to get one, of obsessing and pulling strings, of hoping and waiting (“Let’s call them cake lines, shall we?” Nunokawa suggested gleefully) which seems like the dumbest and most pointless thing to do—well, Why? And why women? Here Nunokawa turned to the example of a fictional character from another era, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, deeming her “as real as it is possible to be in one sense—in her relationship to beautiful, expensive things.” As Lily’s quest to marry becomes increasingly urgent, propelling the narrative forward and playing with our own hopes, we realize that Lily does not just want things, Nunokawa reminded me—she wants them spectacularly and desperately because she, too, wants—she needs—to be a wanted thing.

So too with women in Manhattan and our Birkinquests, Nunokawa suggested. “It’s not just that women—women of a certain class or social set, contemporary Lily Barts—love the fashionable commodity,” he explained to me. “It’s that they
are
the commodity form.” These Birkin pursuers are not just deluded or dumb, he continued. They are up to something, something more than just elbowing one another out of the cake line for a bag. By chasing Birkins we’re not just making ourselves into chasers of Birkin bags. “These women are reminding men, society, and themselves that they inhabit a privileged, identificatory relationship to those bags.” Going after and procuring something precious and scarce, we are trying to rejuvenate our own scarcity, to reinvigorate the sense of everyone in our society of our own value. Our proximity to a sumptuous luxury item like a Birkin is selfish, frivolous—and efficacious, Nunokawa concluded.

Whatever it was, I was going to bump this cake line.

In the end, it went down like this: my husband went on a trip to Asia and Deirdre suggested he might more easily snatch up a Birkin there; she would make a few calls. But in Hong Kong, he got the song and dance about a three-year-wait list. And in Beijing, he was told the same thing (this is how I knew, before the world economists knew it, that China had surpassed Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world). And then on the last leg of his trip, he called me late at night, and I happened to pick up, and he said, “Do you like the gold ones?” He had browbeaten a salesperson at one of the Hermès shops in Tokyo into presenting him with not one but three Birkins to choose from. I chose the gold with palladium hardware, knowing Myra would be pleased.

It was done. But that night I tossed and turned in bed. I fixated and I obsessed that Myra would feel that I had somehow insulted her or compromised her standing with Deirdre by not following up and buying it in New York. Over and over I conjured a vivid and terrifying vision: JJ infuriated with me for mishandling it and creating a situation in which she would be in the middle should her
mother
feel I had broken some unspoken but important rules about the etiquette of Birkin acquisition. Or something. The next day I woke up exhausted from my ruminations, which I replayed in my head all day long and which blotted out all my other thoughts. That evening my husband returned home from his trip with jet lag, dirty laundry, and an enormous orange box. “DON’T TOUCH THAT,” I barked at my son when he approached it with fascination. Under the ribbons, inside the box, under the tissue paper, on top of its pillow, inside the beige dust cover, was the bag. The placket was covered with off-white felt, lest the hardware scratch or be scratched. I peeled it away carefully, like a surgeon, to reveal the gleaming silver buckles and lock placket. And inside the fetish object there were more fetish objects—the puffy, accordion-like plastic that held the bag’s shape. The little lock and keys in their leather sheath. And the rain guard. Yes, the Birkin bag comes with its own raincoat. It was lighter than I imagined. It was beautiful and simple, with masterful contrast stitching. It was 35 centimeters, and it was a sonnet. My husband laughed when he saw me get a flashlight to inspect the Birkin’s interior and seams. Then I ran to the phone and ordered flowers, and a flowery thank-you note, for Myra. For all her help, and all her trouble.

You’d think I would have simply been happy to attain this Holy Grail of bags. But instead I eventually transferred my anxiety over whether I had offended Myra and JJ and Deirdre by
how
I had gotten the bag, to the bag itself. For days I fretted that my Birkin, though purchased from an Hermès store, might be a fake. I researched the placement of the artisan’s stamp, the stitching, and every aspect of its construction.
What
if it wasn’t real?
Oh, for the love of God, it’s real! JJ—who hadn’t been angry at all, and whose mother hadn’t been angry at all, just thrilled for me as someone’s mother who was obsessed with Birkins would be—shouted at me over the phone. “You just can’t accept that the search is over. You’re afraid you’ll feel empty now that you have what you wanted! And you feel like maybe
you’re
a fraud. Maybe you don’t deserve it. You do!”

If you are going to live on the Upper East Side, I was realizing, it helps to have friend who is a psychoanalyst.

I carried my Birkin everywhere, except in the rain. Then I had to leave it home, for fear of, well, of harming it. One day, with a little time to kill before picking my son up from school, I went into a clothing store across the street. It was a rare moment of shopping for myself rather than my offspring, of shopping rather than working or fretting about work, and it felt indulgent and luxurious. The young saleswoman welcomed me and, a few minutes later, offered to put the things I had chosen in a dressing room for me. “You can leave your bag on that bench. I’ll watch it for you” She smiled. “And I promise not to take it, even though I really want one.” We laughed and as she continued to eye the bag, I handed it to her and told her to try it out. She did, regarding herself from every possible angle in the store’s many mirrors. It was awkward, having something she wanted, and not a little uncomfortable, and to take the edge of discomfort off a bit, I responded, when she asked me if I loved my Birkin bag that yes I did, it was a workhorse, and it was nice, but it was, after all, just a bag. And that all the hoopla around it struck me as so much hype. She smiled and cocked her head to the side as we made eye contact in the mirror. “A few days ago someone came in with a two-tone
crocodile
Birkin,” she said sweetly, “and it was the chicest thing I have
ever
seen.” She paused for a moment, then continued: “After seeing that, it’s hard to get excited about one like yours.” She extended her arm, offering me my bag back.

A good
thing, too,
I thought to myself,
because you’d have to sell a LOT
of cashmere sweaters to pay for one, even one like
mine. If you could get anyone at Hermès to sell
you one. Which I doubt
. But I didn’t say any such thing. I only considered it as I paid for the clothes that I could afford and she couldn’t, and contemplated how, on the Upper East Side, there are many, many ways to run a woman off the sidewalk.

CHAPTER FOUR

Manhattan Geisha

Fieldnotes

Males of many species fight, display, vocalize, and otherwise compete for the opportunity to mate with available females. This is explained by Bateman’s principle, which states that the sex investing the most time and energy in producing, provisioning, and protecting offspring becomes a limiting resource over which the opposite sex will compete. In most animal populations, sex ratios are roughly equal. However, as a portion of females are perpetually removed from the pool of potential mates due to reproduction and intensive care of offspring (and pregnancy and lactation, in the case of mammals), females of many species most often become the “limiting sex.”

Census data show that among the higher order primates of the Upper East Side, however, there are dramatic imbalances in sex ratios. Due primarily to migration from outlying regions (transfers from natal troops), reproductive females outnumber males two to one. This unique ecological circumstance has changed relations between the sexes, and relations between females, in unique and notable ways.

Males on the Upper East Side, it seems, have become what females are in other settings: choosy and coy observers of displays for their benefit. Meanwhile, extremes of ornamentation and elaborate “beautification practices”—not infrequently involving the physical mutilation and reassembling of their bodies and faces into a more “pleasing” arrangement by various “body and face shamans”—are central to the lives of reproductive and even post-reproductive females under consideration.

So are daily, highly competitive, precisely choreographed and grueling group endurance rites. These are believed to not only purify and enhance the appeal of the female body, but magically ward off the physical effects of time and even defer mortality. Females perform these rites in their native habitat, but take them to extremes in their summer migratory setting, approximately 100 miles to the east.

W
E HAD
another baby, a boy, not long after my older son started nursery school. And this time around I was more aware than ever that the standards for pregnant women and new mothers in Manhattan—particularly on the Upper East Side—are mind-boggling. Both uptown and downtown pregnancy were high-stakes, nine-month-long competitive marathons, to be sure. But there was no question that the women of the Upper East Side deserved a trophy for their all-out, extreme-sport-caliber exertions when it came to gestation. All around me, women in their third trimesters teetered on stiletto heels and went to dinner parties and restaurants-of-the-moment and charity events until midnight. They wore fantastically form-fitting designer maternity clothing and were assiduously, astonishingly groomed and maintained. Just as they continued to dress and socialize as if nothing had happened, they persisted in sprinting around the reservoir and working on their abs in fitness classes. Pregnancy on the Upper East Side, it seemed, was about having the best, buffest, sleekest pregnancy possible, which meant a pregnancy in which you acted as if you weren’t pregnant at all. The expectations regarding one’s appearance—to be glamorous and gorgeous—were unyielding, exacting, eternal.

Compared to my gravid peers, I was a shameful slacker. I just couldn’t keep up. I was gassy and itchy. I had acne. I was exhausted before I even got out of bed. In the self-care arena, I was off-roading, totally veering from the social script of uptown pregnancy. Whereas the first time around I took prenatal yoga and prenatal Pilates and prenatal everything, with this pregnancy I didn’t do a lick of exercise beyond venturing out to “run” errands (waddle was more like it) or walk to my office share, where I intended to write but promptly feel asleep. I didn’t think about food much at all, beyond strategizing how to keep down the Ensure my OB had insisted I drink, since I was actually losing weight from severe morning sickness. My eyes were constantly red—the blood vessels there burst from the violence of my many-times-daily vomiting. I looked like a stick who had swallowed a basketball, my husband observed. And this, I slowly realized, made me something of a lightning rod for the women around me, a projective test for their attitudes toward
their
bodies and diets. “You bitch,” said one. “
I
want terrible morning sickness next time!” “Oh my God, you look
fantastic
,” another enthused, entirely ignoring my gray, blemished skin and focusing on my scarecrow-like arms and legs.

My preschool-aged son, too, was something of a Rorschach for the women I spent my days with now. “Wow, he’s so trim and has
such
long legs,” they observed over and over as we hung together at the edge of the playground watching our kids. Something about their tone suggested that they viewed his physiology as an achievement on my part, or his. I had never before seen adult women focus on children’s bodies so intently, or extract so much meaning from them. I frankly missed my son’s chubby arms and cheeks, those markers of toddlerhood that had made him so adorable. But I could swear that some of these other mothers envied me for having a skinny kid.

I found a lot of their beliefs and cultural codes strange, but in other ways, I was a lot like the UES mothers I knew. Their preoccupations and standards, like the desire for a Birkin, were rubbing off on me. My more or less unconscious adjustment process was called habituation, the simplest form of learning, in which an animal, after a period of exposure to a stimulus, stops responding and starts accommodating it. Hypervigilant, skittish prairie dogs living near humans eventually don’t even bother to give alarm calls when we walk by; we start to seem like white noise to them. Deer get used to how utterly rank we smell (in Michigan I learned that sometimes before you see a deer, you can hear it give a tremendous snort, a harrumph of disgust at your vile stench, if you are upwind)—and come in close to eat from our gardens. And so, surrounded by people dressed in ways I would have found confoundingly foreign just months before, I now outfitted myself a little more conservatively, a little more expensively, a little more carefully. It felt like the last surrender, a giving up of my former self. But once I gave in to it, this process of habituation, it was not unpleasant. It made my life easier, in a way, to be like a prairie dog that has stopped noticing so much, or a deer that has decided that the alarming smell isn’t really so alarming after all. That previous part of me, a way of responding and being, the young downtown mom with a choppy haircut and big plans, was gone. Yes, I found myself wanting smooth blond blond blonder hair, and a Birkin, and a Barbour jacket, and whimsical emerald-green velvet Charlotte Olympia flats with kitten faces on them. And I surrendered. And so it was that, as soon as I went into labor on a brilliant fall day, I decided to venture forth and get a blowout.

First I called Lily, who had just had a baby herself, a beautiful little girl named Flora, who stopped fussing whenever she lay on my husband’s chest. Lily and I considered whether my latest round of contractions was some kind of false alarm false labor, as so often happens before the big day and had been happening to me for about a week. Lily guessed it wasn’t. But, as a mother of four, she was her usual calm self about timing. “It’s not the
third
baby or anything. We know you always have those into your pant leg, or in the taxi. But this is the second one. Maybe go for a walk and see what happens.”

I walked right to the salon where they washed and dried my hair. I figured I could squeeze in a manicure and pedicure. After these, I considered tending to things below the belt, but my contractions were now a minute apart, so I called my husband instead.

“
What?!
We have to go!” he cried. As we cruised down the East Side to the hospital, the driver of the oversized, overpriced SUV my husband had arranged to take us there intoned, “Please miss, you are not having baby in this car! Wait!” Minutes later, with my feet up in the stirrups, I apologized to my OB for the unkempt state of things down there. He observed, while my son’s head crowned, that many of his patients had Brazilian bikini waxes right before delivering, something he just couldn’t understand. He mentioned that the requests for elective C-sections “so things don’t get stretched out down there” had skyrocketed. And that many of his patients had plastic surgeons on call so they could get a tummy tuck immediately after delivering the baby. That’s nuts, I thought as I gave a final push. But even as they put my newborn on my chest—He was so blonde, and so big! He was so beautiful!—I wished my thighs had been hairless as I delivered him. And in spite of almost giving birth in an Escalade, I am not above admitting, when I look at the pictures of me holding my son immediately post-birth, that I am glad I got the blowout.

Nearly without exception, affluent new mothers in the West subject themselves to the physical and emotional rigors of “getting their pre-baby body back.” The phrase, so vernacular and upbeat, is also disingenuous and cruel, suggesting that such a fantasy is even technically possible. Primas and multiparas (those who have had one or more kids) are not nulliparas (those who haven’t), after all. You don’t get your pre-baby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn’t had a baby.
Because you had a baby
. The corollary to the compulsion to conduct yourself as if pregnancy doesn’t slow you down one bit is the wish, afterward, to pretend that it—the whole messy matter of your abdomen and vagina and breasts and ribs having been strained to extremes you don’t even want to consider— never happened. No saggy breasts or tummy rolls for us. As if this weren’t unrealistic enough, we are expected and expect to be able to “get back to normal” within an absurdly accelerated time frame.

After the birth of my kids, I thought with longing of a Chinese custom that keeps a woman in bed for an entire month after she gives birth, and out of the fields or the workforce for another several months thereafter. She is attended by female relatives, and forbidden to exert herself in any way, so that she can focus entirely on nursing and recovery. Here, in contrast, hospitals can eject us twenty-four to forty-eight
hours
after we give birth (my mother’s generation got a week). To parents in the nonindustrialized, non-Western world, this custom seems utterly barbaric.

True to our social script, I was quickly home with a new baby. Unlike some of my conspecifics, who opted for formula because, they told me, they didn’t want droopy breasts and mashed nipples, I committed to breast-feeding, as I had with my first son, and quickly got into a routine with our newborn. I was lucky that nursing was easy for me, as well as for my sons. I knew it conferred long-lasting benefits to the baby, but like most Manhattan moms, I was keen on breast-feeding because I had heard it helped you “get back your pre-pregnancy body” more quickly. It burned something like 600 or 700 calories a day, my girlfriends told me. In the end, my morning sickness had relented a bit and I had managed to pack on the recommended number of pounds. So now I stuck with nursing not only for my sons’ sakes, but for my waistline. And then, when the baby was around five months old, I decided it was time to get back to working out.

For although my OB had wisely counseled that childbirth and recovery were “nine months up and ninth months down,” like most of my peers I did not feel I
had
nine months. I was in a hurry, impatient to be the old, taut me, apprehensive and preoccupied beyond reason that it would never happen. Mothers all across the country feel a version of this fear; women’s magazines like
Fit Pregnancy
and
New Mommy Workout
and stringent post-pregnancy exercise DVDs and online classes attest to our collective terror. But here on the Upper East Side, the anxieties and pressures are greater. Whereas women in Nebraska and Michigan might hop on the treadmill in the basement when they can, and skip Dunkin’ Donuts, and take their time with the last ten pounds, perhaps resigning themselves to all or a portion of it remaining, my tribe of mommies was another matter. Just as we had to excel at being beautifully pregnant, so we had to be the most gorgeous mothers of infants, babies, toddlers, and young children that it was possible to be.

As this was the Upper East Side, the first order of business, once I had decided to exercise, was to shop. Lululemon was the brand of choice. It had eclipsed Athleta and was an intrinsic and ubiquitous part of the Upper East Side mommy uniform by the time I was ready to rumble. Skintight yet thicker than regular spandex, shockingly comfortable, with whimsical details (fun prints abounded) and smart concessions to women’s actual lives, needs, and desires (pockets in places that didn’t create bulk, for one), lululemon was an inescapable part of life in my neighborhood. It telegraphed, “I have time to exercise, and here’s the payoff.” Part of lululemon’s appeal, I realized the first time I tried on their pants and a fitted jacket, was that these items weren’t merely unforgivingly tight and form-fitting. And they weren’t merely clothing—they also functioned as a kind of girdle or exoskeleton, smoothing out bumps, holding everything up and in while they appeared to bare all. For the first year or two after lululemon hit the streets, women wore their lulu pants with longer lulu tops or jackets to cover the derriere and loin areas. Or tied a long-sleeved lulu shirt around their waists. And then came a moment when women collectively declared, “I have a crotch. And a bottom. Deal with it.” Habituation was swift. What had at first looked outrageously exhibitionistic—exposing the ventral and dorsal sides of a female
Homo sapiens
between her waist and pubis—quickly became no big deal. What choice did men have but to become desensitized by the barrage of lululemon-clad nether regions, the nearly constant, inescapable exposure?

And so I came to own lots and lots of lululemon. I bought fitted lulu jackets and fitted lulu pants. I bought fitted cap-sleeve tops with plunging necklines and vibrant-hued, fitted tanks. I bought snug lululemon bras specially designed to fit under the tops and tanks. There were even special lululemon thongs and underwear designed of microfibers to be “invisible”—with edges that faded into nothing, so you wouldn’t have VPL. There was a fitter at lululemon, who put you up on a box in front of a three-way mirror like a regular tailor does, and talked to you seriously about which shoes you would be wearing and how long the pants should be and how large the hem should be, as if they were real trousers and you were a businessman at Brooks Brothers. Well, it
was
a business, I would soon learn, this “working” out, and a serious one at that.

Thoroughly outfitted, I looked into fitness options, and quickly learned that there had been a sea change not only in exercise togs but in exercise
practices
since the births of my two children. As I cluelessly did Pilates and yoga and sprinted in the park when I could, all around me, members of the tribe I studied had been splintering into subtribes, pledging their allegiance to one of a few tremendously popular cults: a ballet barre class called Physique 57, and a spin class called Soul Cycle.
How ridiculous
, I thought when my friend Amy sent me a Youtube video of women at Soul Cycle sitting on their stationary bikes, their lower halves whipping round and round at lightning speed while their upper halves did various yoga poses. I imagined how perplexed archeologists of the future would be by such an artifact (“They move, yet they make no progress”).
Give me a break
, I sighed internally when another friend described her Physique 57 ballet barre class as we sat at a café, earnestly intoning that it had changed her body in a mere six 57-minute sessions. She sounded like an infomercial. Then she lifted her shirt to show me her abs, and I nearly spat out my green tea. She was
cut
. After less than six hours. I was suddenly game.