Box Girl (6 page)

       
PROS:
Good for posture. Strengthens lower back.

       
CONS:
Mortifying. Confusing to hotel guests. See also:
mortifying
.

The No-Show, aka The Called-in-Fat

Say it's Super Bowl Monday, say it's the Wednesday after Christmas, say it's a regular Tuesday. It doesn't matter. This get-out-of-jail-free-card can be cashed in whenever you need it. If your thighs are not feeling quite toned enough for the unforgiving overhead lights, fear not. We've all been there. Pretend you have an audition. A very late audition that doesn't start until eight o'clock. This is the yoga equivalent of not showing up to class.

       
PROS:
You can sit in whatever position you want in your real living room.

       
CONS:
You feel fat.

The Sly Pick

In the event you have any sort of itch to itch or wedgie to pick, you must do this very discreetly. I suggest fixing these things on the fly, while transitioning from one position to the next.

       
PROS:
Problem solved. Comfort.

       
CONS:
There's really no subtle way to pick your wedgie in a glass box under a spotlight. I am just trying to make you feel better.

She's Got a Good Booty for a White Girl

People in the lobby assume I can't hear them when I'm in the
box. Perhaps it's from watching too many crime-scene TV shows, but there is something about a glassed-in room that makes people assume it's soundproof.

It's not.

If I choose to listen, I can hear everything. I can hear the drunk couple at the end of the night—her hanging on his arm like a koala on a branch—asking how much for a room for the night. I can hear the group of guys debating between The Sky Bar, the Chateau Marmot, or the strip club, as well as the unanimous decision: “Strip club. Done.”

Most interestingly, I can hear any and all commentary about “that girl in the box.” Me.

Tourists, especially those with Southern accents, seem to ask the most questions. They'll lean forward on the front desk, their bags still slung over their shoulders, and demand to know, “Well how in the hell long is she in there for?”

Sometimes, concerned parents ask, “Is it hard to breathe in there?”

But, the most-asked question by far is, “Can they go to the bathroom?”

When anyone finds out I'm a Box Girl, this is always the first thing they want to know. It is such a ludicrous question, I can't resist giving a ludicrous answer: “No.”

“Are you serious?” they'll ask. “For how
long
?”

“Seven hours,” I'll say.

“What?” they'll demand. “How do you do that?”

“Some Box Girls go in their pants, but I prefer to avoid liquid for twenty-four hours prior to my shift. Just dry out like a raisin,” I'll say.

Of course we are allowed to go to the bathroom.

Like the questions, I also hear a lot of observations about, well, myself. One night, a young African American guy leaned over the counter and said to the male concierge, “She's got a good booty for a white girl.” I lay there on my stomach, my booty behind me, stadium-like lights shining down upon it, and stared at my book, frozen. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Though I'm no expert, I'm fairly certain this means I have a “large” booty for a white girl.

I much prefer the question I'll hear if I'm lying very, very still: “Is she real?”

This always makes me happy because I know mannequins don't have cellulite.

Underdog

          
BOX GIRL RULE #5:
Ultimately this is a modeling job and you must take care of your body. If you have severe bruises, bandages, or casts, you must wait until your body is healed and then ask to be put on the schedule
.

My legs looked like a Jackson Pollock painting: several
sharp slashes of red here (cuts from various thorny things), a drizzle of dots there (mosquito bites), a mysterious patch of puffy pinkness (poison ivy, probably). I emailed the box coordinator to get my shift covered. I didn't explain why, saying only, “I don't feel well.” I felt fine. But the problem was too hard to explain, especially to someone in Los Angeles, where there is no grass. My legs were torn up because my dad had asked me to mow the lawn a few days before, while I was home in Connecticut.

My dad, firmly planted in the one percent, cuts his own grass. He says it's good exercise, but let's be honest: It's because he doesn't want to pay anyone else to do it. He is an old-school man who's worked for every dollar he's ever had and
refuses to waste a penny of it. My dad mows his own grass, drives his cars until the doors fall off, and organizes his own garbage to take to the dump.

While he is happy to spend money on things he really cares about—family, food, golf, a good Scotch—he absolutely loathes wasted money. Hell hath no fury like my father when he found out a Blockbuster movie was turned in late and we were charged an extra dollar per day.

He asked me to cut the grass because he had recently undergone knee surgery and couldn't do it himself. His knee had been injured during a misunderstanding with a purebred Newfoundland in The Hamptons. He and my mom were spending a weekend with some friends who have a summerhouse in Southampton, and my dad was doing some late afternoon laps in the pool. Apparently his style of swimming—the two-armed flailing with a modified frog kick, which he calls “the backstroke”—alarmed the Newfoundland. (As it turns out, they are rescue dogs.) I can't blame the dog, really, because with all the gasping for breath, the excessive splashing, and the arms straining over head, my dad's backstroke does sort of look like he's drowning. Called to action, the two-hundred-pound dog dove into the pool to save my dad. In fending off the giant Darth-Vader-looking beast, my dad tore his meniscus. This, of course, was devastating to his golf game, and he would later joke that the damn dog should be put down. I think he was kidding.

In the fifth grade, my class created fish tanks out of two-liter soda bottles as a science project. This was every student's favorite part of the whole year because we got to take home the tanks—and our very own goldfish. I dreaded this day for many weeks before, sick to my stomach thinking about having to flush a little translucent body down the toilet after I no doubt
did something to kill it. When fish-tank day finally came, I lied and said my parents wouldn't let me have one. Which probably wasn't a lie.

My family's relationship with animals has been historically lukewarm. When approached by someone's dog, I attempt to speak with that syrupy talking-to-a-dog inflection. “There's a big boy!” I'll say, and pat, with four stiff fingers, the top of its head, never quite sure where it wants to be petted.

My mom doesn't even attempt to pet the dog. She instead does a sort of skip-skip-shuffle-step and holds her hands above her head, which everyone knows is the universal canine sign for “Please get up on two legs and jump on me.” At which point, she really panics and proceeds to yelp like a dog that would fit inside a purse.

Wild animals are no better. My mom practically aims for them on the road. I should rephrase: She does absolutely nothing to avoid them. She'll defend this by saying, “Well what in the hell'd you want me to do? Swerve and kill us both?”

I have been woken up many a morning to the sound of my mom spraying the deer in the backyard full of beebees. She'll be cloaked in her pink, quilted bathrobe and matching spongy slippers with a pellet gun firm against her shoulder, padding through the yard like Elmer Fudd. “I don't pay for all the teenagers in the neighborhood to come into my kitchen and eat all my food. Why should I be feeding all these deer?” she'll say, tracking a deer that's wandered into her garden for a snack.
POW
. She'll nail one right in the butt. It'll sprint away, its ass flailing wildly in the air. (The bullets aren't strong enough to kill the deer, she's assured me many times, in the same harangue about them spreading Lyme and being over-populated.) “They're a menace to society,” she'll say, then swish up the back steps to get her egg casserole out of the oven.

We're not terrible people, I promise. We like humans. We really like humans! Most of the time. And it's not that we dislike animals; we're just not quite sure what to do with them.

Somehow, we used to have a dog. A Welsh corgi named Choo-Choo, because at age two my brother thought she ran like a choo-choo train. We liked Choo-Choo; I swear we did. I even cried when she died. My dad picked me up from my fifth-grade afterschool French class and told me the news. I mustered up some tears because it seemed like the thing to do.

Here comes the bad part: For her fourteen years with our family, Choo-Choo primarily lived outside. While this was an acceptable arrangement when we lived in Georgia, I'm not so sure how humane it was once we moved to Connecticut. “She has a house of her own,” my mom would say, motioning toward the door-less, insulation-less wooden shack with three feet of snow on either side. My dad would add, sitting slipper-footed by the fire, “Would you want to live inside this hot house with a fur coat on? I don't think so.” I'd look outside as dusk enveloped the miniature wooden igloo, and then back inside at the roaring fireplace, the tartan-plaid blanket draped across the overstuffed sofa, and think to myself,
I'm not so sure
.

It's terrible, I know. Fortunately, it sounds like my mom has turned a corner. “Oh that was just horrible!” she said one day when I mentioned Choo-Choo's living in the cold. My dad, on the other hand, didn't budge. “She had a house!” he said, waving a page of his newspaper wildly. “With blankets!”