The Home for Wayward Supermodels (2 page)

One of Mom’s best customers, one of the rich summer people who were crazy for her pies, had lent her a cell phone just for this trip. Mom had promised that we would use it only in case of emergency, though the customer had insisted it didn’t matter. “Just don’t talk more than eight hundred minutes,” the customer had said, laughing.

Mom took the phone out of her purse and handed it to me as carefully as if it were a pistol. I dialed. Desi answered immediately.

“Where are you?” she snapped—or more accurately,
Wheh aw you?

I looked around, surprised. “I’m in the Dancing Chicken,” I said. “Where are you?”

“
I’m
in the Dancing Chicken,” said Desi, “and you’re not here.”

“Just a second,” I said.

I stopped the first person walking by, an Asian man wearing a dirty apron and carrying a pink tray loaded with clean glasses.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Is this the Dancing Chicken?”

He nodded. “Yes. But no more chicken.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Desi. “We are definitely in the Dancing Chicken.”

“Near the entrance?”

“Right next to the entrance, in front of the place with the parasols hanging out front.”

There was a moment of silence, and then she said, “What do you look like?”

“I’m tall,” I said. “Skinny. And like I told you, I have monkeys on my feet.”

Now I noticed that the dark young woman wearing the red flower, the one I’d tried to talk to when we first came in, was standing directly across from me. Holding a cell phone to her ear. And looking straight into my eyes.

“You didn’t tell me,” she said.

It was her. The words coming out of the phone were the same ones I could read on her lips.

“Didn’t tell you what?”

“You didn’t tell me that you were freaking gorgeous.”

I was so dumbstruck that I was still working my mouth, trying to come up with a response, when she flipped her phone closed and strode over to me, right up close, so she had to crane her head back to look up at me, and I had to peer down to where she stood with her chin jutting into my chest.

“But I’m not gorgeous,” I stammered. “The kids call me giraffe. I drink a milkshake every day and my bones still stick out. My teeth are crooked. Tom is the only guy who has ever even
wanted
to kiss me.”

Desi pursed her lips and looked at Mom. “She’s gorgeous,” Desi said.
Gawjus.
“Am I right?”

Mom nodded, surveying me. “I’ve been trying to tell her so for years.”

I rolled my eyes. “You have to say that. You’re my mom.”

“She comes by it naturally,” Mom explained to Desi, ignoring me. “I was a model myself, back in the eighties.”

“Wow,” said Desi. “So do you think Amanda could be a model too?”

“Mom was a model in
Milwaukee,
” I interrupted, before they could get too carried away with this ridiculous conversation. “Come on, we’re wasting valuable shopping time.”

A smile began to spread across Desi’s face. “So you’re dying to hit the downtown thrift stores?”

“Can’t wait!”

The main passion Desi and I had in common was clothes. She loved to design them, and I loved wearing them.

“You also want to see the fashion hot spots of SoHo and NoLita?” she asked.

“You know I do.”

“But first you’d like to stop for maybe some shrimp lo mein or tagliatelle bolognese?”

“Mmmmmm,” said Mom.

Which was my only clue that what Desi was talking about was food. And suddenly I was totally hungry. “Whatever you say.”

“So what are we waiting for?” said Desi. “Let’s go.”

Here are some stores that did
not
whet our shopping appetites:

1. A Chinese butcher shop that sold ducks’ feet and pigs’ snouts.
   
2. A Chinese fish shop with eels hanging in the window like slimy black ribbons.
   
3. Prada.
   Gawjus,
   as Desi would say, but about a bazillion dollars out of our price range.
   
4. A gallery showing photographs of nude people in Third World countries who were missing limbs or eyes or were even more voluptuous than Desi or bonier than me. I couldn’t stop staring at them in the gallery but couldn’t imagine wanting to face one over my cereal every morning, even if they hadn’t cost $8,000.
   
5. Hideously Ugly Hooker Shoes. That’s not what it was really called, but should have been.
   
6. Smelly Clothes Last Worn By Dead People. See above.
   
7. Chanel. See Prada.
   
8. A tiny store presided over by an even tinier Japanese woman, where all the clothes were minuscule, far too short for me and way too narrow for Desi. They looked like chihuahua clothes. We laughed and laughed.
   

After the chihuahua-clothing store, Mom said she was really exhausted and that Desi and I should go on without her. We dropped her back at the hotel, figuring we had only an hour left until the stores closed.

“We’re going wild now,” Desi informed me, as soon as we were back on the street. “I’ll take you to all my really favorite places.”

Desi’s legs may have been nearly a foot shorter than mine, but she managed to move a lot faster than me, weaving her way through the people and the dogs and the garbage like some kind of urban athlete. I had to trot to keep up, and kept tripping over things and bumping into people, spending a lot of time saying “Excuse me,” which made people look at me as if I were totally loony. Which made
me
want to say “Excuse me” for saying “Excuse me.”

Here are some stores we went to where we
did
buy something—and what we bought:

1. A tiny shop on Canal Street, where I bought a Rolex (Desi called it a Fauxlex) plus a fake Marc Jacobs bag for twenty dollars, total.
   
2. Pearl River Trading: flip-flops to walk in (good night, monkey slippers!), a sari, and a straw bag big enough to be my new suitcase.
   
3. Canal Jean: four XXL T-shirts—orange, turquoise, yellow, and magenta—Desi promised to recut into dresses for me.
   
4. A shoe repair shop piled with dusty shoes no one had ever picked up, where we found a rack of sunglasses from the seventies with bright blue and taxi yellow lenses that were a dollar each.
   
5. A clothing-and-music trading store, where I traded my House O’ Pies T-shirt (don’t worry: the fishing vest covered everything) for ten CDs.
   
6. A funky pharmacy: false eyelashes. Plus a toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, and white lipstick.
   
7. An Italian coffee shop, where I ate my first cannoli. Which tasted so good I ate another one.
   
8. A shop called Frock that had the most amazing vintage clothes, everything from Comme des Garçons to Balenciaga and pre-Ford Gucci, where Desi went to get inspiration for her own designs.
   

I didn’t actually buy anything there, but that’s where it all started, or at least the New York part of it.

I’m talking about my modeling career, and it’s ironic that the thing that launched it was my overindulgence in the cannolis.

What happened was that I took two dresses into the changing room. One was this very simple but extra-clingy Halston I thought I might actually ask Mom to buy for me, and the other was this amazing zebra-print Patrick Kelly gown that looked like something someone would wear in an opera but that I couldn’t resist trying on for the fun of it, though I was afraid I was too bony to pull it off.

But because of the cannolis, my stomach was all pooched out so that the clingy Halston looked just plain embarrassing, but the Patrick Kelly fit perfectly. The skirt was so big I had to ease out of the dressing room sideways, and the dress itself was so spectacular that as I stood in front of the mirror, Desi straightening the bodice and flouncing out the ruffles, everyone in the store turned to look.

And kept looking.

I smiled into the mirror, and stood up straighter.

Suddenly a woman stepped forward, a woman who was maybe my mom’s age, but who was nearly as thin as me, wearing a baby-doll top and high-heeled pink sandals and a pair of those bleached and torn $300 jeans. Her hair was very black and very straight, as if she’d just come from a blowout. The closer she got, the older she looked.

“Have you ever thought of modeling?” she said, holding a card out to me.

I felt myself blush. “I couldn’t,” I said. “I mean, I’m from Eagle River, Wisconsin.”

Desi took the card and said, “She might be interested.”

The woman looked at Desi in a way that finally made me understand what it means to “look down your nose” at somebody. She raised her eyebrows, and turned back to me.

“I’m Raquel Gross of Awesome Models,” she said, “and you’re the kind of girl we might be interested in.”

“Wow,” I said. “I mean, is this a joke?”

I laughed and turned to Desi, expecting her to laugh right back. As long as I could remember, everyone had always made fun of the way I looked, to the point where they did it right in front of me. I was so tall, so skinny, so gawky and weird-looking, they figured, if I was any kind of cool I’d be able to laugh about it myself. And I had, I had even when it hurt.

But Desi wasn’t laughing. She wouldn’t even meet my eye. Instead she was alternately looking seriously at Raquel and peering down at the business card.

“Awesome Models,” she said. “I’ve read about you. Don’t you represent Fiona and Fernanda?”

Raquel nodded, not taking her eyes off me. “We represent all the hottest girls working today: Kaylee, Christiana, Ludovica, My Lan. And don’t tell anybody”—here Raquel leaned closer and spoke in a stage whisper—“but we just signed Tatiana.”

I laughed again. Who was I going to tell? Tom? All Tom was interested in was fish, football, and sex. Oh my gosh: Tom. I was supposed to call him when we arrived, and I’d completely forgotten. I guessed if he got worried and called the hotel, Mom would fill him in. I’d call him when I got back to the room, before I went to sleep, to tell him I loved him and missed him, at least when I had a second to think about him.

When I refocused, I saw that Desi was nodding vigorously, her mouth open. “Oh my God—Tatiana,” she was saying. “She’s amazing. But I’ve read that she’s really difficult. How did you manage to sign her?”

Finally Raquel turned to Desi, obviously impressed that she had the inside scoop. “We can offer girls the most comprehensive security, financial as well as emotional, along with complete benefits and the most creative work with the best photographers in the world. Everybody wants to sign with us.”

Desi nodded, examining the card again. “And so you’re offering all this amazing stuff to Amanda?”

“I’m offering Amanda the
opportunity
to be
considered
by Awesome Models,” Raquel said. “I’d like to send her for some test shots with one of our top photographers, see whether she really has what it takes to make it in the New York modeling world.”

“I don’t have what it takes,” I said. “Besides, I don’t want to move to New York. I’m going to marry Tom.”

“You’re engaged?” cried Desi, her eye darting to my ring finger.

“Not officially, but I will be, as soon as I get back home, right after I turn eighteen. We’re going to get married in September.”

“But you have such
fabulous
cheekbones,” Raquel said. “And those lips. That height. I even adore your little pouch of a stomach.”

“That’s the cannolis,” I mumbled.

“Maybe you should think about this,” said Desi. “I mean, September is three months away.”

“If we sign you, we’d pay you a twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus right away and guarantee you a hundred thousand dollars in income in your first year. That’s minimum; it could be much more. We’d set you up in an apartment, pay all your expenses. Physical trainer, clothing allowance, expense account…”

But my brain was still stuck on the signing bonus. Tom’s dream was to buy a fishing boat. If he had his own boat, he could guide whole parties fishing out on the lakes, not just individual clients. That could mean four or six or eight times as much income for him, for
us
. Just imagining the look on his face was priceless.

“So this twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “I’d get this up front, immediately?”

Raquel nodded. “But first you have to do the test shots. I’d send you to Alex Pradels, who’s a fabulous photographer. If those pictures worked out, and if you signed with us, then you’d get the twenty thousand dollars.”

“Twenty-five,” said Desi.

“What?” said Raquel.

“We want twenty-five as a signing bonus, and another twenty-five if Amanda’s income in the first six months exceeds fifty thousand dollars.”

“What are you, her agent?” Raquel asked.

“Yes,” Desi said, at the same moment I said, “No.”

I looked at Desi. What the heck? This was all pretend anyway. And I certainly had no idea what I was doing. “Okay, yes,” I said.

“We’re open to negotiating the terms,” said Raquel, “depending on the results of the shoot.”

“And I’m assuming,” said Desi, “that you cover all the expenses of the shoot, and that Amanda is entitled to prints even if we don’t come to an agreement.”