Box Girl (12 page)

           
For the first image, “Lilibet Photo 1,” please touch up the lines around my eyes and even out the skin tone. Can you whiten the whites of my eyes? If so, please do so, they look a little blood shot.

           
For the second image, “Lilibet 2,” please fix the flyaway hair, and can you make the lips a touch (just a touch) pinker? Or redder—just a bit more color?? Not sure if you can do that.

           
Lastly, for the third image, can you remove the zit to the right of my mouth, and clean up the lines around my eyes? Also, if you can, could you make my teeth a bit whiter? And, again, if possible, give my lips a TINY bit more color??

           
Please email me back to let me know if this is possible and also to give me a quote on price and how long this will take.

THANKS
              

Lilibet.
        

After clicking on my Sent Mail tab to make sure the attachments went through, I reread the message. It was sort of horrifying. Could I have been any more nitpicky? Why didn't
I just tell them to give me a new nose and a new set of boobs while I was at it? Maybe highlight my hair and shave off a few extra pounds? Had I become like the image-obsessed girls I used to represent? Freaking out over a few fine lines and flyaway hairs?

What had gotten into me? Who asks someone to pretty much renovate her entire face with a digital paintbrush? I wanted to write him back, to explain I really wasn't like this, I promised.
I don't even wear makeup most days! I'm wearing sweatpants as I type this! I don't even own an eyelash curler!
(But that's just because they scare me.)

But the retoucher responded before I could write him back:

           
Hi Libet
⁵
thank you for inquire with us
⁶

           
the price for image #1-2 are $35.00 each and for image #3 is $55.00

Huh. As it turned out, Ronnie the Retoucher was totally unfazed. Of course he was; this is Hollywood. He was more than used to this kind of thing. Plus, the fact that English appeared not to be his first language made me feel less embarrassed. It was like getting a bikini wax from an Eastern European woman as opposed to an American; in some abstract way, the language barrier created some distance.

I was relieved. The truth was, I did care how these came out. I did not want to look like Charlize Theron in
Monster
. I wanted to look good. After spending two years surrounded by models, playing frumpy to their fetching, this was hard to embrace.

4
This was the actual email.

5
Yes, he misspelled my name, even though the correct spelling was right there in my email address.

6
Also the actual email.

Metamorphosis

Tonight, about an hour into my shift in the box, somewhere
in the space between reading and online window-shopping, I decide I want to find out who came up with this concept. I email a woman in The Standard's design department, and she writes back, promptly, “I'm sorry but we don't give out background information on design details or concepts at the hotels to anyone, including press. André and his design team came up with the concept for each of the hotels.”

I search “André” and “The Standard.” André Balazs. He owns several hotels and, according to Wikipedia, went to Cornell and Columbia. And, according to Google, he's dated Uma Thurman and Chelsea Handler, among others. But I'm not really interested in that. I'm interested only in this: He is a man. Of
course
he is a man. This manufactured reality could only be hatched from the head of a man. Men like to think that women lie around on their living room floors wearing itty-bitty white shorts and tiny white tank tops, always looking pretty, never making a mess.

If this André actually saw me at home he would see someone Swiffering her floor and picking at the pores on her face.

But that is a luxury of being a Box Girl. I get to transform. One moment I'm a writer in a bleach-stained shirt, the next moment I'm slithering across a mattress in short white shorts. Standing next to the box before my shift, molting my clothes—my sweater with the holes in the elbows, my jeans that smell like mildew—I get to slough off
that
me. I get to become
another
me:
blonde me, tall me, long-legged me
.

Out There

A girl reads a book on a couch in the corner of the lobby. She
bites the skin on the side of her nails while she does this and has checked her phone three times in the last minute.

A guy waits for his car, wearing tight, citrus-colored jeans, rolled at the ankles. His black hair is slick on the sides and is spiked into a shark's fin. With the boat shoes and striped tank top, his look is sort of Hollywood-meets-The-Hamptons.

Three British women walk beside a bellhop who is pushing their luggage—seven suitcases total. “I slept well, but I'm still quite tired,” one of them says.

A girl, about my age, walks toward the box with her parents. Her dad is wearing a baseball hat and a zip-up jacket. He looks like a Classic Dad-dad, like someone who orders a lot of stuff from L.L.Bean. Her mom is wearing an Hermès scarf under a blazer and expensive-looking flats. The daughter points at me, and I quickly look down. “This is the thing I was talking about,” she says.

I am constantly watching the people in the lobby, wondering where they are coming from, why they are here, how
long they'll stay. I make assumptions about them, pass judgments on them, silently criticize their wardrobe selections. All the while, I know they are doing the same to me. It's strange because, in a lot of ways, being in the box is like being a writer. It isolates me and, at the same time, puts me on display. When me and my writing, or me and my thighs, feel like coming out of our little cave, all of my vulnerabilities are out there for the public to pick apart.

I Am Not a Beagle

Tonight the box is filled with dozens of colored balls that
illuminate if you toss them. It's like the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese's, minus the pee smell. I've carved out an area for my myself and my computer.

The door opens. It's the concierge.
Oh no, not again. Do I have too much stuff in here? How could he even tell with all these balls?

“Hey, could you throw the balls around a little bit? Make them light up? That's the point of the installation.” I cock my head sideways and scrunch my eyebrows at him. He cannot be serious.

He appears to be serious.

“Oh, okay, sorry,” I say, and spike a royal blue ball against the mattress.

“Awesome,” he says, and shuts me back in.

But I don't want to sit here and toss a ball around for seven hours. If that's the aesthetic they're going for, they should have hired a beagle. I wiggle back down to my laptop, slithering
through a sea of balls on my stomach, plying them out from under me as I go. A minute later, I retract my right knee and forcefully release it, sending a flurry of balls flying, the box ablaze in all their glory.

Only The Lonely

If this is hard to believe, I assure you, it's even harder to
admit: One time I cried in the box. And here's the most embarrassing part: It was on Valentine's Day.

That night, the back wall was painted in bright asylum white and scored with three thick black lines that stretched the length of the box. On top of each line was a series of white tiles with one block letter drawn on each in an art-deco font. A dotted string of lights illuminated the letters from below, like a marquee at an old movie theater. The squares spelled the phrase: “Only The Lonely.” It was February, so I guess this was some cruel nod to the holiday that bisects it. Thus it was appropriate, I suppose, that this was the decor the night I cried in the box—tears streaming, mascara running, shoulders shaking, snot dripping—forced to face the back wall, hoping no one would notice. People in the lobby probably thought I was pretending, playing along with the props. But I was actually crying big, dumb, untidy tears. Not because I didn't have a boyfriend, but because I did, and he wasn't around for that stupid, stupid holiday.

Pretend I didn't tell you that.

I had feigned indifference, acted like I could care less about the stupid holiday.
What a dumb, commercialized load of crap
, I'm sure I'd said. Here's a tip: If your significant other ever says anything remotely similar to this, don't believe him or her. Maybe some people really do mean it, but I'd always err on the side of St. Valentine, just to be safe. Even my most black-hearted friends bleed mush when flowers arrive on their doorsteps. I know this because they will proudly post pictures of such gestures on Facebook or Instagram with the hash tag #lovehim or #bestboyfriendever.