“Oh, look, you guys,” I interrupted. “Isabel sent me her essay.”
They looked over as if they were surprised to find me sitting there.
“Isabel’s her student,” Lacie explained. “Rose is obsessed with her.”
“For good reason. This girl is insane,” I told Ian. “She calls herself a feminist but wears twelve-hundred-dollar fuck-me heels.”
Ian said, “Huh.” God, but it was hard to make him laugh.
The file finished loading. I scanned. “Oh, good Lord, you guys, listen to this. This is actually real.” I read:
BE YOU
Ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to be a runway model. The lights, and all those great clothes! To be a runway model, you have to know how you look to people. You have to understand what they see and use it to your advantage. It is almost like being an artist, though people don’t think of it that way.
In an essay by WEB Du Bois called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” he talks about the Veil. “The Veil” is about how you can have double consciousness. This is when you are aware of yourself, but also how you look to everyone else. This is exactly the quality you need to be a supermodel.
“Wait, what?” Lacie was laughing. “You’re making this up.”
“If only.” I kept going:
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings” was very moving to me. I felt that it spoke to my life experience. In my generation, people are always looking at each other. They are posting pictures on Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes when people are out having fun they’re just thinking about how it will look on Instagram. Obviously this is not what WEB Du Bois had in mind when he wrote about the Veil and Double Consciousness but I think it’s amazing how he anticipated modern lifestyles.
Feminism has taught me that it doesn’t matter who’s watching! And ironically the models who can look like they don’t care who is looking at them are the ones that the most people want to look at. Both feminism and WEB Du Bois’s essay have shaped my perspective as a young woman working in fashion today.
“Oh my God,” Lacie and Ian chorused.
“Yep.” I dropped the phone on the table with a dramatic clatter. “That’s Isabel West. She loves the term life experience.” Theatrically I wrinkled my face. This was what I had wanted all morning: their attention. “I mean, I thought I had gotten her to agree that double consciousness referred specifically to the black experience in America, but I guess it was just too hard to write about something other than herself.”
“Even black thought has to belong to her,” Ian said, and we all shook our heads. How thrilling to catch another white person—a seventeen-year-old girl—being racist. How superior we felt. “Who is this girl?” he wanted to know.
“She’s the richest. Of all my students, she’s the richest. Every time I go into her house, I have to take off my shoes, and the carpet is so soft my feet practically have an orgasm,” and that did it, thank God: he finally laughed.
Ian and I had met at an artist residency in a beach town during the crystalline early weeks of September, when a spell of drifty laziness, a sense that the ordinary laws of living had been suspended, had overtaken me. Winning the residency was a significant coup; it meant that I had talent, I thought, not simply potential. But after the hyperactivity of grad school and office life, the million bells of obligation, I simply did not know what to do with the gift of time except squander it. I struggled to stay rooted, like an astronaut on the moon.
The beach town was the last in a string of beach towns, and for many years it had been the lesser of its rivals, a sleepy fishing village mostly housing the help for the more fashionable environs. But in the past five or six years, the town council and the bureau of tourism had begun to aggressively market the town to young people. Nightclubs and bars opened. Motels jacked up their prices. A yoga studio appeared, then two, then a juice bar. But the pose of party town was not struck with complete conviction. The big hair and thick necks that invaded each weekend incensed the locals and at the same time pleased them, for now they had a common enemy and a unifying complaint. At the IGA, down by the docks, at the Shag Wong—the original locals bar—a giddy chorus of outrage echoed, the righteous jubilee of those who have finally been wronged.
Into this tempest we were dropped. After a lucrative Broadway smash, a famous playwright had bought an old stable and converted it to a residency house for artists, both visual and literary; the ramshackle building, bleached bone white and a milky calcium blue, had been welcoming artists during the summer months for nearly four decades, far longer than the royalties had lasted.
The towels were all thin, ragged, and rust-stained; the sheets all had the same dreadful gray, black, and white stripes, as if issued by a youth reformatory. The rooms smelled of mildew and Pine-Sol, and the salt and sand of a thousand beach days were bleached into the fine-grained floors. Everything creaked and popped. The second floor only extended half the footprint, so that the painting studios could rise unimpeded into the hot, dusty air that still carried a hint of manure and hay, the snort and stink of the twenty-five horses that once had been housed there. Great wooden rafters crossed beneath the ceiling, and at night birds and bats, drawn by the electric light, dove and swooped, casting flickering shadows on the rough stone floor thirty feet below. A haunted place, at once particular and anonymous, far removed from the faux-weathered shanties suddenly selling for $2 million, the Barn was layered by time, by the stallions who were now dead and the young artists who were now old, and yet despite its history, the place also seemed strangely out of time, an island on an island, a ruin possessing its own logic.
We had no place in this war between summer folk and locals, and the old groundsman who maintained the Barn left us alone. Not once, during my time there, did anyone ask if my work was going well, or even what I did in the hours I spent in my room with the door shut. They all assumed I was writing, but in truth, flummoxed by Portia’s notes, and unable to see my fictionalized Lacie anymore, I slumped all day at my desk, reading a book of theoretical physics.
This was during the bad time, when, trying to follow Portia’s suggestions, I had turned what had been alive into something boring. Portia thought so; after reading my new draft, I could hear her polite “feedback” avoiding the monstrous judgment she wouldn’t allow herself to say. I ran from it, unable to admit that something in my writing had soured. In a daze I turned pages, deducing from the strange diagrams and eager explanations that time was not linear but rather curved like a shining silver bowl. I imagined myself in the bottom of it, spinning.
An hour before sunset I would take one of the beach cruisers donated by the playwright and sail down the long winding road to the beach. I never wore a helmet. In Cambridge and Iowa I had; in fact all my life I had, but although there were blind curves and giant black SUVs and even larger pickup trucks barreling along these blind curves at forty miles an hour, I was convinced nothing bad would happen to me. Like the Barn I was untouched by my surroundings; I flew down straight-backed, my hair flying out behind me, my wire basket filled with towel and book, sure I was safe from tragedy.