After my first day of Ally, I needed to start over. I needed to forget the insecurity and awkwardness I felt standing on that staircase, pretending to be the fabulous Nelle Porter. Just hearing the words “outstanding addition” gave me a hole in my stomach that no amount of food seemed to fill.
Go on, eat it, you fat piece of shit. You’re pathetic. You can’t even handle one day of work without bingeing. You have no self-control. You don’t deserve this job.
Driving home from 7-Eleven with a bag full of food, I hated that my brother lived with me. Now I had to eat in the car a block from my house and throw up in the street so he wouldn’t know what I was doing. And I had to do it fast because he’d wonder where I was. I started by eating a large bag of Cheetos. The bright orange color would serve as a marker during the purge. It would be a map, almost, telling me how far I’d come and how much further I needed to go. When I saw orange vomit cascading from my mouth and flowing in chunks between the two rigid fingers jammed against my gag reflex, I’d know I’d passed 7-Eleven and then I’d make my way back to the restaurant and back through each course beginning with the corn chips, the enchiladas, and ending with the nachos. As I shoved the jelly doughnut into my mouth, I came up with my lie. Mom called and my cell service was beginning to drop out so I had to pull over to complete the call. That would do. I barely swallowed my last item, the Snickers bar, before I began regurgitating it. I shoved my fingers down my throat and threw up in the plastic bag five times before I was satisfied that I’d gotten most of the food out. I took off my T-shirt from underneath my sweater and wiped my face and hands on it. I found a trash can. I drove home.
As I walked in the front door, I saw my brother on the couch with the phone to his ear.
“Where the hell have you been? Mom’s on the phone.”
He handed the phone to me.
“Hi, darl! How did it go?” My mother was more excited than I’d ever heard her. I knew that she’d been thinking about me the whole day, just waiting to hear news of the cast, the set, and my new life as a star of a hit TV show.
I took a deep breath. I mentally selected the appropriate pitch to my voice.
“It was really great, Ma. I had the greatest day.”
It was a lie, but it should’ve been the truth. It would’ve been the truth if not for my debilitating insecurity, and I was certain that insecurity would fade with time once I had proven to myself that I deserved the job. In time, I was sure that I would be happy. After all, anyone else would’ve been. Most people would kill to have the opportunity that was given to me. How could I possibly complain to anyone that I didn’t like it, that loads of money and fame, the most desired things in society, made me feel uncomfortable? While I waited for my genuine enjoyment of it to set in, I would simply lie about how much fun I was having. Complaining to my mom would have just been immature and embarrassing. In fact, anything short of perpetual joy seemed pathetic.
I’d pretended to enjoy modeling also, so I’d had practice in pretending. It was my goal to be known as a model because I wanted to be the envy of my seventh-grade peers and be thought of as beautiful and worldly. But being called a model and actually having to model were two different things entirely and caused me to experience very different feelings. At the very beginning of my modeling career, I needed test shots by a well-known photographer whom my new agents had chosen for me, and filling a modeling portfolio cost money that we didn’t really have. I was told that I was lucky that I had caught the photographer’s eye and should jump at the chance to have my pictures taken by him. His fee was a whopping $1,400 for three different looks. Prints would cost extra. So I struck a deal with my mother. If she bankrolled my test shots and drove me to Melbourne, I’d pay her back all the start-up money with my earnings from my first few jobs. She agreed, and my modeling career began.
In preparation for the test shots, my mother had rolled my hair in rag curls the night before, and the lumpy twisted rags felt like steel rods between the pillow and my head and made it impossible to sleep. This method of curling the hair was really unpredictable because often one section refused to curl at all and so the “naturally curly, I can’t help it, I just woke up this way” look became the “I hate my straight, limp hair and so does my mother, who spent all night curling it in rags” look. On top of that, the rags had stray threads of cotton that would snag in my hair, and prying them out gave other sections an Afro-like frizz. I knew I had done the wrong thing by curling my hair the minute I walked in the door. The hairstylist grabbed my hairsprayed ringlets and proceeded to lecture me on how I should go to every job with clean, unstyled hair. As a twelve-year-old it never occurred to me I may have insulted him by doing my own hair. I was just avoiding what I thought would be an instant cancelation of the shoot if the photographer saw that I had just ordinary, limp, straight hair and, as a consequence, wasn’t worthy of his time. I felt like I’d bullshitted my way into making the modeling agency take me in the first place and that my hair was going to expose me for the fake I really was. Luckily, my hair and makeup were done before the photographer arrived, so my real identity, with my ugly hair and my red, blotchy skin, remained undiscovered.
The photographer was a sluggish, heavy-set man whose droopy eyes accidentally registered me as he was glancing around the studio looking for something of interest—like a light or an assistant. After several hours of ordering and eating lunch, tweaking lights, and touching up my makeup, I began the actual modeling part of the photo shoot tired and wilted, and spent several more hours in that sweltering hot studio shooting the three different looks. For $1,400 I got a close-up wearing a jean jacket and a beret, a ridiculous jumping-up-and-down photo on a mini trampoline wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a more grown-up look in a skintight black dress with a black plastic trash bag on my head scrunched into an abstract shape. The latter, I was told, was high-fashion, avant-garde.
Although the photos turned out to be something that I showed anyone who cared to look at them, the experience of taking them was horrible. No matter which pose I struck for him, he had a correction, each more embarrassing to me than the last. “Don’t jut your hip out like that, stand normally. Chin down, relax your mouth, open your eyes.” He yelled his orders at me all day, demanding that I change what I was doing, chipping away at my joy and confidence with each command. By the end of the shoot, I had stopped attempting to inject my personality into the pictures. Instead I was like a scared puppy that sees its master and automatically rolls over because it knows that’s the one thing it can do to avoid a beating. I left the shoot feeling tired, anxious, and insecure, but because my mother had paid for it and taken another day off work to act as my chauffeur/chaperone, I felt I couldn’t tell her the truth of how the photo shoot made me feel. So I lied and told her that I was excited about my new career.
On the way back to Geelong from the big city, we stopped at McDonald’s. I held her hand as we stood in the “order here” line among other twelve-year-olds and their mothers. I stuffed myself with cheeseburgers, French fries, and a vanilla milk shake. And for the first time since the start of my career as a model, I was happy. Stopping at McDonald’s became a ritual for my mother and me after a go-see or a modeling job. It was a midway point between the big city and the smaller bay city where I lived, and it became the midway point between the person I was and the person I was pretending to be. I sat down to eat as a child, but talked about my exciting day at work like an adult. For that one moment, I let it all go and my mother watched me without judgment or concern. I’d passed the test, and food was my reward. I’d pretended to be an adult, and going back to who I really was, a child excited to be at McDonald’s, was my prize for being such a good pretender.
The only problem was that I couldn’t stop rewarding myself. Returning to regular school life, I started to gain a little weight. I don’t know why exactly, but I just couldn’t stop eating. After my first photo shoot, eating seemed to be a huge comfort to me, and so every day after school, my friend
Fiona and I would walk to the local supermarket to buy potato chips and candy. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, I knew I should be working out and trying to stay skinny for a potential modeling job that could happen at any moment, but eating just felt so good. My friend was a year older than me, and she told me that when I got to thirteen, my body would start changing, that I would hit puberty and get my period and get fat. Because she was older and knew more than I did, and because she had definitely gotten fatter since turning thirteen, I had no reason to doubt her, and so the inevitability of my weight gain made me think depriving myself of eating candy was futile. If it was going to happen anyway, I might as well make myself feel less anxious about it by soothing my nerves with a bag of potato chips. But I knew it was wrong. I knew my mother couldn’t see me doing it. She’d just lent me thousands of dollars to get my modeling portfolio with the proviso that I would model my way out of debt. No one would hire me in this condition. I weighed 120 pounds!
After four long weeks, I received a call from the Modeling World. My agency was hosting a runway show in Melbourne with a local designer so they both could show off their wares to the fashion industry. They asked me to walk in the show, which would take place in a nightclub, and the event was only five days away. I felt no excitement, just panic. I dreaded the fashion show and I hated myself for getting so fat. I was nervous about being on a catwalk in front of the fashion industry anyway, much less modeling clothes that might show them all the reasons not to hire me—my big hips, my bulky calves, my fat stomach. To be perfectly honest, after my experience with the test shots, I would’ve been happy if I’d never gotten hired to model. I had the glamorous pictures to prove that I was pretty, and a story to tell of what it was like to be a model while never having to admit how terribly insecure modeling made me feel. Proving that I could do it if I wanted to but not actually having to keep proving it over and over again would’ve been perfect. The only thing between me and this plan was my ego with its inflexible stance on failure. The embarrassment of failure was too much for me to bear. I’d already told everyone that I was a model, I’d convinced an agency that I had what it took to be a success, and, of course, I couldn’t disappoint my mother. The only thing standing in the way of devastating embarrassment and success and admiration was a Cadbury Caramello Bar. There was no other option but to starve myself for the five days and hope that I could at least lose the five additional pounds I’d gained in the last two weeks.
Not eating is pretty easy when you have a gun to your head. I just needed those five pounds off for the fashion show, and then after that I’d eat salads and I’d never again eat junk food. After this stupid, extreme diet, I was going to work out every day and never have to starve myself again to get ready for a job. It was all about being ready, being prepared. As I had discovered, 90 percent of my nerves and feelings of insecurity came from being underprepared—whether I hadn’t studied enough for a test or trained enough for ballet exam—most of my feelings of terror would go away when I felt I knew the answer to every conceivable question. Modeling would be no different. If the question was, “Will you look good in this tiny bathing suit at any angle?” then my answer would be, “Yes.” It was that simple.
My mother, a dieter from way back, approved of this quick-fix plan not only to get me ready for the show but also to shut me up. Unfortunately, when I was nervous, I’d cry a lot. I’d wail and howl and stomp around the house moaning about how stupid I was and how I was doomed for a life of failure and mediocrity. My plan to starve myself, although not the healthiest plan, was a one-time Band-Aid that was better than the wailing, and so she reluctantly taught me a couple of her dieting tricks. Mostly they consisted of caffeinated beverages without milk, Ryvita crackers with beets and steamed vegetables. Oil, butter, dressings—everything that made food taste good—were out. Dry was in. And so I embarked on my first diet, wanting desperately to succeed as a good dieter and to get this situation behind me.
Over the next five days, I consumed a total of 2,000 calories and had lost the five pounds. Thanks to my self-discipline and determination, I was a success. I felt like I could accomplish anything. I was proud of myself, and my mother was proud of me, too. We drove up to Melbourne for the fashion show with confidence and maybe even a little excitement. I was ready. I was twelve years old and about to start my career.
I arrived to pandemonium. Due to our hitting some traffic in the hour-long journey from Geelong and the fact that we were left alone to find our way to the backstage area, I was slightly late for the show.
“The girl that just walked in hasn’t been through makeup and hair,” yelled a man with a clipboard. I was yanked by the forearm from my mother and guided over to an empty stool. From that point on, I was a product on an assembly line. My head was doused with cold water and blown dry, the round brushes tearing at the knots in my hair while I was simultaneously poked in the face with a coarse brush that at certain angles felt like hundreds of fine dressmaking pins. Bright, ugly, unflattering colors were slapped on my face with the brushstrokes a house painter would use to apply primer. I sat in silence looking at my reflection as it became uglier, unable to even introduce myself because of the guilt I felt that my lateness had caused this panic. Nobody had asked me for my name anyway. There were models to the left and right of me in varying stages of completion, none of whom even glanced my way until the makeup artist exclaimed in a shrill voice, “What am I supposed to do with these eyebrows?” And that made the model next to me turn to look at them.
“Whoa. They’re some crazy eyebrows!” the male model said to me in a big, stupid way that made me angry rather than ashamed.
“They’re exactly like my father’s eyebrows and he’s dead.” That shut him up. I started thinking about my dad and wondered how he would feel about me modeling. Although I felt really bad about using him to justify having big, bushy eyebrows, it wouldn’t be the last time I did it to stop people from talking about them. Until I realized you could pluck them. Other than that one interaction with the model, I didn’t actually talk to any of the other Team models until after the show when we were directed by the bookers to mingle with the crowd. As I was awkwardly standing alone at a high-top table trying to look sophisticated by sipping sparkling water, I overheard one of the girls say, “Apparently there’s a girl here who’s only twelve,” and I blurted out in excitement, “That’s me! I’m twelve!” as only a twelve-year-old could. After that, word spread and other models talked to me in the condescending way adults talk to children. I was hardly a child and they were only a few years older than me, so I didn’t appreciate it. But the most upsetting thing about meeting them was that I realized how beautiful all of them were. Stripped of their crazy fashion show makeup I could see their big eyes, set far apart and cradled by their perfect cheekbones that the rest of their face hung from in perfect proportion. Their hair, thrown up messily yet beautifully in a hair tie, and their loose, easy clothes spoke of their attitude toward their beauty—it was effortless and unconscious. It didn’t require their critical eye reflected in a mirror to craft it; it just was there. They were so much more beautiful than me that I was in awe of them. I felt so ashamed of the dress and heels I’d bought for the occasion, and so stupid to have reapplied makeup after removing the show makeup. But the thing that gave me the pit in my stomach was the fact that I knew I needed it. Underneath the caked-on foundation was red blotchy skin, and if I didn’t wear eyeliner, my eyes looked too small for the roundness of my face. I was different from all those girls, and I had to be careful not to let anyone see it.
The show itself was pretty uneventful. I had to model only one unrevealing outfit—culottes and a T-shirt with built-in shoulder pads. I was sent down the runway with a male model who strutted around like he was line dancing, holding me by the wrist and twirling me around like I was a prize he’d won at the state fair. I felt stupid that I’d made such a big deal about the show. After I’d stood around practically in silence for over an hour, overhearing c
onversations that intimidated me because I couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about, I was finally allowed to go home. I felt relieved that the night was over. I got into my mother’s car, took my heels off, and curled my cold feet underneath me. I sat facing her as she drove, talking to her all the way like she was my best friend. I ate a whole bag of mint candies that my mother had put in the car for me as a reward for getting through my first fashion show and for successfully losing all that weight. I ate them greedily and steadily until there were none left. As we pulled into our driveway an hour later at midnight, exhausted and full of sugar, it crossed my mind that eating all those candies might have caused me to gain a pound. As I walked barefoot to the back door, my belly distended in my skintight dress, I devised a plan to stop the sugar from turning into fat. Tomorrow was sports practice at school, and I made a promise to run ten extra laps around the hockey field to make up for it. And that wasn’t the only promise I made that night that I didn’t keep. I promised myself I wouldn’t binge again.
7
“HEY, PORTIA. How were your days off?” I walked into the wardrobe fitting room passing Jane Krakowski as she was leaving.
“Great, thanks.” I was aware as I spoke that I hadn’t talked in awhile. It felt unnatural and my voice sounded raspy and constricted with phlegm, the telltale sounds of a chain-smoker. I cleared my throat, embarrassed.
“See you in there.” She said it in a way that sounded like we were both in trouble, like we were about to walk into a detention room at school. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Jane. Her facial expressions were infectious, like she was keeping a naughty secret that could crack her up at any moment. Apart from Jane, I hadn’t really gotten a sense of the cast yet. They all seemed pretty quiet and professional, more like corporate businesspeople than the actors I had known in the past. The cast of my first movie, Sirens, interacted with each other in a much more playful manner than I’d observed with the cast of Ally. During Sirens, we’d eat lunch together and listen to Hugh Grant’s hilarious stories or Sam Neil’s dry explanation of what it was like to be a supporting actor to a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. But maybe I would eat lunch with them today and hear their stories. Maybe I’d even tell them some of Hugh’s stories. They were much funnier than mine.
Unbearable Lightness Page 5
