The Home for Wayward Supermodels (3 page)

Raquel hesitated only a moment before nodding.

Desi turned to me. “You should do it,” she said. “Alex Pradels is one of the best. It’ll be fun. At the very least, you’ll get a great picture to put in the newspaper when you announce your engagement.”

That sounded good, though I still couldn’t imagine that this was something that in any way was going to become real—and if it did, that it was anything I’d ever want to do. Though I sure would love to be able to buy Tom that boat.

“What if I want to quit?” I blurted.

Desi glared at me. I knew she would have liked the opportunity to make my question prettier. But then I was afraid I’d get a prettier answer, which might not necessarily be as true.

Raquel laughed and squeezed my arm. “This isn’t slavery you’re signing up for,” she assured me. “It’s the most glamorous job in the world! All you have to worry about is staying as beautiful as you already are, and let me take care of the rest.”

But somehow, instead of calming my fears or getting me excited about the possibilities, she was only making me more nervous. It was like when it hits you that the big fish on your line probably has teeth.

T
here was a moment
when I could have run, when I wanted to run. I was sitting in front of the makeup mirror in Alex Pradels’s studio, staring at my reflection. Someone I didn’t know stared back at me. She had eyelashes like spider legs, and skin made of latex, and a mouth that looked like somebody had socked her and then rubbed raspberries all around for good measure. Her hair was ratted and teased and sprayed; it felt like cotton candy, the kind that’s been hardening inside a plastic bag for months.

This was the result of two hours of hard work by a British makeup artist who wore no makeup herself and refused to meet my eye, and a hairdresser named Glenn, who looked pretty much like a guy except he was wearing high heels, and I don’t mean cowboy boots.

Out in the studio, Alex and his young Asian assistant, who looked like she was in grade school, were setting up backdrops and carting around lights and fiddling with the music, alternating it between loud and louder. Every once in a while, Alex, who looked like the guy who played Julia Roberts’s best friend in that old movie
My Best Friend’s Wedding,
but who was not at all a nice person, would pop his head in and look me over as if I were a friend’s pet that he’d promised, against his will, to take in for grooming.

“How’s she coming along?” he’d ask the makeup artist or hairdresser, or the stylist who was wedging me into one ridiculous piece of clothing after another. The one part of this experience I’d been really excited about was getting to wear the kind of fabulous designer clothes I’d been drooling over in the pages of magazines, but these clothes were from the bizarre-o side of fashion: shirts with sleeves like wings and skirts with snakelike pieces of fabric hanging from them, coats made of rubber and pants with snakeskin laces down the sides.

“Fabulous,” they all said.

No one asked me, but if they had, I would have told them I thought I looked like something in a field you really did not want to step in. Ordinarily I did not consider myself the least bit beautiful, but compared to this mess, I was Miss Wisconsin before I even brushed my teeth.

Hating the way I looked wasn’t the only problem. It was my birthday. When Raquel and my mom tried to schedule this sitting, I said I’d do it any day but my birthday—and then this turned out to be the only day when all the other people could be there. Mom talked me into it, told me it would make a memorable way to spend my eighteenth birthday. Even Tom said I should do it, though he went silent when I told him that if it worked out I could buy him the boat. He wouldn’t admit it, but I guess that was an offense to his male ego. And now this was turning out to be even more dismal than I thought it was going to be.

Suddenly I realized I was alone in the dressing room. The red-painted door that opened to the stairs that led one flight down to the street was to my left, slightly ajar. I could even see a sliver of daylight through the glass door at the bottom of the stairs. I could stand up, walk down the stairs, push my way outside, find a phone booth, call Mom back in the studio to let her know I was gone.

I peeked into the studio, where Mom was camped by the buffet table, helping herself from the mountain of bagels that had gone otherwise untouched. Glenn and the makeup artist were sniggering in the corner. The stylist looked to be licking the edge of a piece of chocolate while staring vacantly toward strobe lights kind of like the ones they’d had at the Northland Pines prom, which kept popping off as Alex took test shots of the assistant.

I could go. They’d never notice—or at least not until I’d made a clean escape. Shouldn’t a person do exactly what she wanted on her birthday, especially on her eighteenth birthday?

It wouldn’t take a minute. I’d scrub my face with soap and water and then I’d stick my head under the faucet. I’d pull on one of my refashioned T-shirt dresses, slip on my flip-flops, and I’d be history.

And that’s just what happened, until the part where I pushed open the red door and started to step out into the hallway, the stairs just ahead, when something stopped me. It was my mom’s voice. She hadn’t spotted me; she wasn’t calling me or anything. No, she was doing something far more alarming. She was speaking French.

At first I thought maybe I was mistaken. As far as I knew, my mom spoke not a word of French or any other language besides English. Maybe it was Makeup Woman or Child Assistant who was chattering away in French with Alex. But no, I’d taken enough French in high school to detect a distinct Wisconsin accent in such telltale words as
beaucoup
and
croissant.

Croissant
was the one French word I’d heard Mom say, because she made them for the Sunday morning crowd at the pie shop. She’d always mispronounced the word the same way everyone else in Eagle River did:
croyzent
. And
croyzent
was exactly what she said now. There was an awkward silence, as if someone had farted loudly, and then Alex corrected her, “It’s
kwa-sant,
madame.”

“Oh God,” Mom tittered. “Saying it that way would make me feel like I was putting on airs.”

“Croyzent,” I heard Glenn say. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“I don’t know why Raquel lets these girls drag their entire families in here,” sniffed the makeup artist.

That was it. I stormed into the studio.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

Mom looked up at me, her mouth open.

“You can’t let these hoity-toity skeeveballs talk to you like that. Let’s get out of here.”

“One hundred fucking dollars of product, down the drain,” huffed Glenn.

“I’m still billing Awesome,” said the makeup artist. “Double.”

Mom kept sitting there, so I walked over and tugged her up. “Let’s go, Mom,” I said, more gently now.

“Just a second,” said Alex, walking over to me.

I flinched, thinking he was going to grab my arm, or yell at me about how I couldn’t do this. But instead he brushed a piece of wet hair back from where it had been plastered to my face and touched—so lightly my whole body tingled—the edge of my now bare lip.

“Magnifique,”
he whispered, turning to Mom.
“N’est-ce pas, Maman?”

“I always tell her she’s beautiful just the way she is,” said Mom, smiling beatifically.

Alex clapped his hands. “We will shoot the pictures like this, au naturel.”

I froze. “But I told you,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

He froze. He had the ability to freeze in a much more meaningful way than I did. “But you cannot leave,” he said finally. “This is the moment of your life. Come, everyone. We begin.”

He moved toward his camera and his assistant scurried to turn on the lights. The rest of us stayed where we were.

“She’ll look totally washed out,” Makeup Woman said.

“Let me at least blow her dry,” said Glenn.

“No one touches me,” I said, backing toward the door.

“The rest of you can leave,” said Alex. “I’m sorry, but you too, Maman. We need nothing but the camera and the girl.” He laughed lightly. “And of course, the artist.”

“No way,” I said, crossing my arms tightly over my chest.

“Ah, the princess has further objections. What’s the problem now?”

“I don’t want to be alone with you,” I told him.

He opened his mouth but apparently decided not to say what he was going to say, instead raising his arm into the air and actually—catch this—snapping his fingers. “All right, Yuki stays,” he said. “Everyone else, clear the room. We begin.”

Here’s what I would say: It wasn’t as horrible as I was afraid it was going to be, mostly because I just stood there, doing nothing, or sat there, doing nothing, or let myself flop over the stool, doing nothing, and “the artist” snapped away. For a while he tried to say those ridiculous things that you see in every TV movie about models—“You’re beautiful, baby!”—until I told him, “Won’t you please be quiet, please.”

Then he cranked up the music and I stood or sat there and thought about what I was going to eat for dinner tonight, at the restaurant under the Brooklyn Bridge, the one with the amazing view of all New York, that Mom was taking me to. Now that it was my birthday, I technically could tell her about me and Tom. I also planned to ask Mom how she learned to speak French, and why she’d kept this ability hidden from me.

Mulling all this over, I definitely was not smiling or looking at the camera. The so-called artist didn’t seem to care. These pictures were definitely going to suck. That realization, at least, brought a little smile to my lips.

“It sucked, Mom.”

We were sitting in the most beautiful place I had ever been in my entire life. The restaurant itself was all golden and glittery, with crystal chandeliers and candles on every table, reflected in the windows that looked out on the river and the lit-up buildings
and
on the lights of the buildings reflected in the river. It felt magical, being there, like I’d always imagined the prince’s palace felt to Cinderella. I wanted to feel like Cinderella myself, transformed by turning eighteen in this awesome place. We’d just finished eating and I’d decided that over dessert I was going to tell Mom about me and Tom. All through dinner I’d avoided talking about the photo shoot, but now I wanted to leave it behind in the land of before: before my real adult life started and I had the power to make sure only good things happened to me. After tonight I’d marry Tom and study art and literature at Nicolet College in Rhinelander and maybe open a vintage clothing store in Eagle River. But first there was one thing I had to know.

“I hated it and I never want to talk about it again,” I told Mom. “But you have to tell me why you never let on that you spoke French.”

Mom hesitated, then refilled her wineglass, even splashing a little into mine. Then she took a big gulp, which wasn’t like her. She was more an eater than a drinker.

“I’m sure you knew I spoke French,” Mom said, not looking at me. “It’s not like it was any big secret.”

Mom was a terrible liar. Even a little fib, like telling a customer the apple pie would be ready in five minutes when it was really going to be more like seven, she could hardly pull off. In fact, on the rare occasion when she attempted it, she’d start babbling and end up telling way more truth than anybody wanted to hear.

“I mean,” she said now, “I wasn’t
trying
to keep it a secret. It’s not like anybody
French
ever comes to Eagle River. And if they did, and they came into the pie shop, and they couldn’t speak a word of English and they couldn’t even
point,
for goodness’ sake, and so instead they said something like, ‘
Je voudrais une tarte aux pommes,’
which means they wanted an apple pie….”

“I know what it means, Mom,” I interrupted. “I took French all through high school, remember? I’d walk around the house memorizing these stupid dialogues, and you never once offered to practice with me, or showed any sign that you had any clue what I was mumbling about.”

The dessert arrived and Mom totally ignored it, instead refilling her wineglass before the waiter was able to rush over. This was a very alarming sign.

“I was afraid if you knew I could speak French you’d start asking questions,” Mom said, letting out such a huge breath of air that afterward she sat slumped on her chair like a deflated balloon.

The windows and the view were behind her—she’d insisted that as the birthday girl I look out on the city—and through the first part of the evening she’d seemed like an element of the splendor: my loving mom, so sweet and generous she’d brought me to this amazing place, the brightest star in the universe before me. But now she seemed not only oblivious to the beauty behind her but at war with it, dark and disturbed, denying all the light.

“What are you talking about, Mom?”

She sighed again and finally looked me in the eye. “I didn’t see any reason you’d ever have to know.”

“Know
what,
for land’s sake?”

“I learned to speak French from your father, Amanda. Oh sure, I took it in high school, but I didn’t really
get
it until I met your father and we started speaking it together. I mean, that’s
all
we spoke for those three months….”

I was even more stumped than I’d been before. My dad, Duke, was a lot like Tom: He didn’t do too much talking in any language. And I knew he’d never been much for school, preferring, as he put it, to “learn from the fish.”

“
Dad
speaks French?”

It was Mom’s turn to look confused for a moment, and then she actually laughed. “Oh, not Duke. No no no no, not Duke. I mean your real father. Your biological father.”

I stared at her. People had always said, from the time I was the littlest girl, how much I looked like my dad—like Duke. It was partly because Mom was so heavy and I was so skinny; no one in Eagle River could even imagine what she’d looked like when she was modeling, or see the resemblance between her and me. But I knew from looking at pictures of her when she was young and thin that I looked much more like her than like Dad, though it made him so happy when people said it.