Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (37 page)

A few weeks after school started, I lost my night job because Mr. Vince went out of business. In spite of months of advertising and thousands of calls to prospective clients, he hadn't sold enough vacations to keep me and the other telephone solicitors employed. Shoshana had quit the job months earlier, before she went to Israel for the summer. Several men and women came and left, but I worked with Mr. Vince until the end, and he was close to tears the day he let me go.

“Soon as I get on my feet again,” he promised, “I'll give you a call.” He paid me an extra week's wages as a bonus.

I went to the student employment office at the college, which had a program through which I could get credit for work related to my major. The counselor sent me to the Advertising Checking Bureau. My supervisor, Mrs. Davis, promised me a flexible schedule. “Your education is more important than a job,” she assured me.

Mrs. Davis was a petite, gray-haired lady who dressed in A-line skirts and frilly blouses with tightly secured cuffs and collars. Her desk was close to the entrance door, turned toward the room lined with glass-paneled offices for managers and higher-ranked supervisors. The three employees in her department faced Mrs. Davis along the only row of windows. Each desk and shelf over the radiators under the windows was covered with mounds of newspapers, magazines, folded posters, radio and television copy.

My job was to check that the ads for accounts assigned to me ran according to the arrangement between the manufacturer of the product and the retailer. The manufacturer paid for part of the advertisement. My job was to ensure that if Amana paid 30 percent of the cost, the Amana product took up at least 30 percent of the
column inches for the newspapers or magazines, or 30 percent of the radio and television copy. Each “checker” kept track of several accounts in a geographic area. I handled large and small appliances in the Upper Midwest. Every day I came into the office, there was a stack of clippings on my desk and a list of which accounts had which arrangements with which retailers. Often, instead of a clipping, there was an entire newspaper, which I skimmed until I found the advertisement for my client. I came to know the vagaries of weather in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the price of wheat in Kankakee, Illinois, the results of local elections in Onalaska, Wisconsin. For the third year in a row, Tracey Dobbins of Rock Rapids, Iowa, won top prize for her calf at the 4-H exposition. Mrs. Sada Ulton's pickled rhubarb was the best-selling food item at the county fair. Danny Finley scored the winning touchdown at the Emmetsburg High School Homecoming game. It was a world so far from Brooklyn that I was lost in it, awash in church suppers, agricultural fairs, births, deaths, local theatricals. From time to time, Mrs. Davis stopped by our desks to ask how things were going, or to wonder if the RCA logo was prominent in the ad for Sam's Appliance Mart. But like her three employees, she was a reader, and she often chuckled at the antics of Blondie and Dagwood, or snipped recipes from the pages of the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

Without the excuse of a night job, I came home every evening. I had supper, then closed myself in my room to do my homework, most of which involved preimage objects to which Mr. Grunwald had us apply identity transformations.

The more time I spent away from home, the more it felt as if I were a visitor in my family. Our house, with its noise and bustle, was like a pause between parts of my real life in Manhattan, in dance studios, in adventures with Shoshana, in college, in the social calendar of Mishawaka, Indiana. Weekends when I didn't have school or work, I caught up with my siblings' lives. Delsa had a boyfriend named George. Hector excelled at gymnastics in high school. Alicia sang in the school choir.

Mami, thirty-six years old and pregnant with her eleventh child, looked worn. Her step was slow, her skin had lost its luster, her hair, cut short to frame her face, was brittle and broken at the ends. After being unable to afford dental care for years, she went to the dentist during the summer, and he pulled out her teeth. Her face collapsed into her mouth, her youthful look vanished. The dentures didn't fit well, and she was in pain for months before the dentist agreed to fix them.

Tata moved out for a few weeks to live with Don Julio, came back, moved out on her own again. I went to see her at the boarding house where she lived in one room crammed with a bed, an easy chair with torn upholstery, a hot plate, some chipped dishes and glasses. By the window she had set up her altar of family relics and saints, who were supposed to bring her luck when she played
bolíta.
She won enough times to keep her faith in them. The bathroom was in the downstairs hallway, and she kept a chamber pot under her bed so that she wouldn't have to make the trip up and down the stairs more often than necessary. After a few weeks there, she returned to the basement once occupied by Lólin and Toñito. She grumbled and complained about the activity in the house. Now that we were older, she didn't find us as charming as when we were little. The only one she still doted on was Franky, who at four years old was still cute and didn't talk back when she scolded him.

I floated in and out of family activities, took note of major changes. Don Carlos lived with us. Norma dyed her hair red. Don Carlos moved out. Cousin Paco gave up wrestling. Don Carlos came back. Delsa achieved straight As in math. Hector helped Raymond get a job at a pizza shop. Crises rose, subsided, rose again, kept Sunday afternoons lively as aunts, uncles, cousins, and their families appeared unannounced to share in the good food and gossip that kept everyone entertained from week to week. I made excuses, disappeared into my room, or left the house as soon as I could get away, sometimes with one of my sisters or brothers but more often alone. I took in a double feature, lost in Hollywood's
version of life, with its elegant women, manly men, nonexistent children, predicaments resolved by guns or marriage, and sometimes both. Sometimes I went to visit Alma and Corazón, sat in their quiet apartment talking about books and listening to American rock and roll.

Corazón loved the Doors and the Bee Gees. “Listen to this,” she said, as she put on an LP. She sat back on the couch, I plopped next to her, and we closed our eyes and listened. She understood the lyrics of the songs, I didn't. “What does the chorus say?” she asked.

“Come and maybe like my buyer?” I guessed, and she roared with laughter.

Alma wrote poetry. One of her poems was published in an anthology. She placed a sliver of paper as a bookmark on the page where her name in italics looked authoritative and precise. The poem was titled “They,” a sonnet about impotence and powerlessness. The last line, “They will not let me,” was such a surprise that I looked up at her to ask whom she meant, but her face was so proud and pleased with herself that I didn't dare.

On the bulletin board of the International School of Dance, someone posted a “Models Wanted” flyer, no experience necessary. I called the number and was told that the models were for a photography school. In exchange for posing, models received an eight-by-ten glossy from each student who took a picture. There was no nudity involved. Models brought a couple of changes of clothes and their own makeup. I told Shoshana, who immediately agreed we should do it.

The school was in a loft in the West Forties. There was a small dressing room with a lighted mirror and a closet for the models to hang their clothes. We were asked to put on “natural” makeup and wait to be called. There were two other girls, Sharon and Beverly, who planned to use their pictures in modeling portfolios.
They were taller, with better cheekbones, so they ignored me. Shoshana they eyed with envy. She was as tall as they were but more shapely, and her features, well proportioned and very pretty, were designed to be photographed.

We sat in a row of chairs outside the dressing room. Within a few minutes the instructor appeared, trailed by a group of young men.

“Ladies,” he began. “The way this works is, for the first hour or so everyone gets to pose, and everyone gets to take a picture. But if one of the students and one of the models develop a special affinity, then you may work together individually over there in the seamless.” He pointed to a huge roll of white paper dangling from the ceiling onto the floor, “Or on the set.” His hands fluttered in the direction of a dark gray backdrop with cloudlike blotches painted on it. “Is everyone ready?” We nodded, and he led us to another lit seamless area, where we posed in assorted groupings while the students clicked furiously, moved around for different angles, and tried to stay out of one another's way.

I felt silly striking “Mod” girl poses, but Sharon and Beverly were expert at it. When the instructor asked me and Shoshana to step out so that they could be photographed first together, then individually, I saw what a difference aptitude for modeling made. Sharon butterflied her elbows, placed her hands on her hips, and somehow made herself look two-dimensional. Beverly's specialty was motion. She jumped, and she managed to float in the air long enough for the photographers to take many more pictures than they could take of me standing still. It was impressive to see how effortlessly Sharon and Beverly went from pose to pose, each one different, each one striking. Shoshana and I looked at each other in dismay. No way could we do that.

We were surprised when, at the end of the first session, Sharon and Beverly were told to go, but three young men asked to photograph me and Shoshana together. We were posed in profile, first facing each other, then both looking in the same direction. The three young men worked as a team, set up lights for one another, took turns at a portrait camera set up on a tripod, while
the instructor stood in the background and offered suggestions for how to pose or light us. We were also photographed individually, in different clothes and with changes in our makeup and hair, which Shoshana and I did for each other. The session took the entire morning. At the end, we were exhausted, but the instructor asked us to come back on a different day for another group of students, and we agreed on the spot.

“Can you believe it?” Shoshana exulted. “They sent the professionals away and liked us better!” A career we'd never considered was now possible. “If we get good pictures,” Shoshana suggested, “we can put together a portfolio and go to the agencies.” We imagined that Eileen Ford herself would sign us and put us on the cover of
Vogue
.

“Competition for Twiggy!” I crowed.

“Although I think you're more
Seventeen
,” Shoshana mused.

“I've never seen a model with my complexion on that cover,” I sulked.

We did several more sessions at the photography school. The eight by tens the students gave us were high-contrast, black-and-white glossies, different from what we had imagined as we posed.

“Do you think we can really use these for a modeling portfolio?” I asked Shoshana one day as we went over our photographs. Deep shadows distorted our features, dramatic juxtapositions made us turn the pictures on their side to see if we could recognize ourselves.

“They're arty.” She was as unconvinced as I was. Nevertheless, we each bought a black portfolio and arranged our pictures with the “arty” ones in the back. It was Shoshana's idea that once we got our portfolios together, we should consult our advertising teachers. “After all, they have agencies and see thousands of models,” she reasoned.

Her professor was the dashing Mr. Delmar. Mine was Dr. Henning, long as a basketball player, with huge feet and hands, a massive head topped by curls of gray hair. He wore suits that hung in folds and drapes around his body like tweed togas.

When I asked him if he could look at my portfolio, he suggested
I come to his office, which was over a Tad's Steaks on Seventh Avenue. It was a small dark room at the end of an equally dim hallway that smelled of grilled meat. Mr. Henning sat behind a massive oak desk in front of a window. Smoky gray light fell on him from behind, highlighted the dust that floated in the air. He pointed to a leather chair across his desk, and I sank into its musty rasps and squeaks.

“These are very nice,” he said, poring over the pictures. He turned the portfolio over, as Shoshana and I did, to figure out the more artistic photographs. He looked up. “How tall are you?”

“Five feet, four inches.”

“Fashion models are taller,” he said. “At least five-eight. But you might be able to do catalogue work. What size bra do you wear?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I'm not being fresh,” he reassured me. “There's a market for models who do women's intimate apparel, bras and girdles, that sort of thing.” I was aghast, and it must have shown, because Dr. Henning raised his palms toward me, as if to protect himself from something I might throw. “This is for respectable catalogues like Sears and J. C. Penney's.” He unfurled himself from his chair to reach for a thick book behind him. “Let me show you.”