[He always was. Had I been as pretty in high school as he was I would never have needed to develop a sense of humor.]
[Justin swears he didn’t say that. He did.]
I watched his blood drip into my lap. Then he said, “What happened?”
We did that a few more times as we listened to the ambulance drive in circles trying to find us.
[Fun fact: The streets of Marina Del Rey were patterned after the doodles of a middle-school girl in double-period algebra.]
The blinding lights inside the ambulance shooed away any fantasy that all Justin needed was a Kleenex and a cab and we’d be on our way. His initial diagnosis was a fractured nose and facial contusions. He went into the bowels of the ER to be sewn up, and I wandered into the waiting room where I sat alone watching Knight Rider without sound. I noticed what appeared to be clots on my skirt. My hands started to shake.
Needing something to do, I decided to call my mother. Searching for the pay phone in the corridor, I planned out everything I would say. I would calmly explain about the accident, I would assure her that I was unharmed, and explain that I’d get a ride home with Justin’s father. I located the phone and used one of the quarters she had given me for whenever I needed to make an emergency call.
“Hello?” she said.
Sob, sob, sob, sob. Sniffle. Deep inhale. Sob, sob, sob. Deep inhale. Attempt to explain this isn’t the world’s weirdest obscene phone call. More sobbing. More deep inhales. Sob some more. Sob some more. Sob some more.
Apparently, the only thing sustaining my composure since the collision had been the absence of my mother’s voice. I promised to call her as soon as his dad arrived but insisted on staying to support Justin.
[Because I was such a source of calm and reason at that moment.]
[By this time I was now a snot-sodden, tear-stained, blood-clot-bedazzled mess. It’s humbling to realize that even with a fractured nose, at that moment Justin was still prettier than I was.]
I hung up the phone and sobbed a few more minutes. Eventually, I headed back to the ER, but because I was still sobbing, I got completely lost. This meant that prior to finding my way back to the ER I visited nearly every area of the hospital, including the radiology wing and the morgue.
[I still wonder what the patients in the Cardiac ICU thought as they opened their morphine-dulled eyes and saw a sobbing, white-cheeked figure in a blood-spattered Edwardian dress drifting through their room.]
By the time I found the waiting room, Justin’s father was there. Looking down at my hands, I noticed I had been holding something. I didn’t remember picking them up nor did I feel them in my hands for the last hour, but there they were, sticky and bloody. I handed Justin’s dad the keys to what was left of his car.
Justin emerged, his blackened nose and eyes contrasting nicely with the waterfall of dried blood down the front of his shirt. He hugged his father, then he put his arm around my waist and hugged me. Shoulder to shoulder, our heads leaning toward one another, it was the prom picture we’d never take.
Weeks later, Justin and I took off for pancakes during a free period. Tossing my backpack in his backseat, I noticed a familiar-looking clump on the floor. Gingerly, I lifted up his blood-soaked shirt and the tuxedo jacket. I held out the shirt and waved it around like a flag taken from an especially grim battle. Justin said, “Oh, there they are.”
“You’re supposed to return this,” I explained.
“Yeah,” he snickered. “So I can get my deposit back?”
A flake of dried blood sprinkled down onto the upholstery. I crammed the clothes back under the rear seat and thought about my beautiful dress. It had been sent to a particular dry cleaner, one I can only imagine specialized in the laundry needs of butchers and ax murderers. One hundred and fifty dollars later, it was unmarked by the evening. If you looked at the dress, it was almost as if the evening had never happened.
Our evening had taken an abrupt turn into a tree and ended up someplace I had never anticipated. It wasn’t cute and it didn’t move the story of my life forward; it was just a random event. Had this been in a script, I would have said wearily to the writer, “Yeah, that got my attention, but what’s the point?” And the writer might say, “It’s like life.”
And I’d sigh, take a sip of tea, and say, “True. But sometimes life could use a rewrite.”
The Spirit of ’76
PEOPLE CLOSE TO ME HAVE BEEN GIVEN ORDERS. WHEN I FINALLY die of good intentions, I don’t care what is sung at my funeral. My only feeling about flower arrangements is that I suspect I will hate carnations even beyond the grave. There is, however, one point on which I must stand firm: I must be buried in a striped shirt, jeans, and Converse low riders. It’s not that I think this is my best look; I’m just concerned that mourners might not recognize me in anything else.
I used to try to look stylish. From the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, I was never fully out of the fashion pool, even when it was abundantly clear I hadn’t waited twenty minutes since eating and was at risk of a style cramp. During this time, there was no look so high-concept I didn’t try to recreate it on a budget—which, in my case, was like creating a do-it-yourself poodle by gluing together clumps of dryer lint.
In high school, I owned bronze ballet flats. Realizing a sizable part of my dignity was only feigning death in the corner, I also bought a matching bronze headband, which I wore, a la Olivia Newton-John, about an inch above my eyebrows. No one ever confused me with an Australian singing sensation, but several people did point out my resemblance to the piccolo player in the Spirit of ’76 painting. A few concerned friends asked if I’d been in a car accident. “Yes,” I wanted to shout. “A fashionable car accident!” But we trendsetters let our head bandages speak for themselves.
I saved up several weeks’ allowance to buy a pair of forest-green, velveteen corduroy knickers. Having studied every issue of Seventeen, I knew that these knickers—when combined with an Aran sweater, white tights, and black patent-leather flats—would give me the appearance of an English country girl, all rose-cheeked and flush with love for my horse and that tousle-haired boy on the next estate who would marry me and make me the Duchess of Rutland. Sadly, there were a few ruts in my road to an inherited title. For one, I lived in Los Angeles, a place where titles are never inherited, but negotiated. The local temperature rarely drops below sixty-five degrees, so I didn’t own an Aran sweater. I decided a short-sleeved white angora sweater would provide much the same effect, and having blown my entire allowance on the green knickers, my bronze shoes would have to stand in for the black patent-leather flats. Also, there was the problem that I don’t flush winsomely. Really, I don’t flush at all. Where others develop pink cheeks after a brisk workout, I just become a more uniform shade of gray. The son of the Duke of Rutland, upon seeing me dismounting a horse, would assume I had been shot. The bronze head bandage probably wouldn’t help.
But I’m nothing if not willful, so I soldiered to school in my new outfit. With the bronze and the angora, the overall look was less English countryside and more Israeli discotheque. As the thermometer approached eighty-five, bits of angora came loose and stuck to my lip gloss and gray sweaty cheeks so that I soon resembled Santa Claus at an Israeli discotheque. The headband was removed for surreptitious blotting of the armpits and back. Colin, the best-looking boy in our class, walked up and stared at me for a full thirty seconds. Had I been capable, I would have blushed. He finally said, “You know what you look like?”
Hardly daring to say, “An English girl in the country who just got off her horse?” I instead said breathlessly, “What?”
He thought a second longer and said, “H.R. Pufnstuf.”
No, that was impossible. Pufnstuf had green legs and white boots. I had—I looked down—green legs and white tights. I didn’t have a bowl-cut hairdo of orange polystyrene, I had a…longish bob with bangs. Oh, Lord, I did look like H.R. Pufnstuf. I longed to snap back, “Pufnstuf wished he had bronze ballet slippers,”
but something told me I needed to reclaim my self-respect, not set fire to it.
Never again have I tried to wear knickers, plus-fours, culottes, or gauchos in public. This proves I have learned exactly one thing in my life. But every other ill-advised fashion choice? Oh baby, watch me go.
Watch my shoulder pads for about three years there in the mid-1980s. Please. Watch them. They were supposed to attach to my bra straps to shift visual focus upward but they had a bad habit of sliding down the back of my shirt, creating more of a dowager’s hump thing. This provided the same effect of distracting the eye from my hips as the more conventional shoulder-placement would have, but it also led to worried questions about my calcium intake.
Watch me in the late 1980s wearing a black catsuit, platform shoes, and dangly earrings. What I hoped made the statement “1950s Sarah Lawrence artsy-yet-exotic dance student,” was actually read as “Jimmy Dean ninja sausage roll.” The same outfit led to a memorable adventure where I managed to hook my earrings through my matching bracelet, purse strap, and hairbrush at the same time. This took five people and twenty minutes to untangle. It would have taken less time and fewer people had all my housemates not been completely stoned. Something about my situation struck them as unbearably funny and caused them to crave maple sausage during the entire rescue, further complicating matters.
Observe me during the grunge cycle in my Dr. Martens and loose-fitting calf-length jumper dress. Please note my resemblance not to the girlfriend of the lead singer of the band, but rather to the girlfriend of the lead singer of the band’s Okie grandmother—back when she fled the dust storms in the 1930s. I would look in the mirror and think, I appear to have huge feet, thick ankles, a baby on the way, and a husband whom I share with four sister-wives back on the compound. I wonder why I don’t date more often.
Contemplate the one time I thought, Why do I keep wearing black to formal events? I should try color. Please note how the color, which was a lovely bright tangerine in the store, became traffic-cone orange in evening light. People kept shading their eyes to look at me. I eventually draped myself in my date’s jacket, claiming to be cold, just to avoid scorching people’s retinas. This led to the second dumbest formalwear-based concept I’ve ever considered: “Color is problematic, but patterns are fun.” Unfortunately, the pattern in question exactly matched the wallpaper in the reception room. Look carefully at pictures from that event and you can see a spectral blur. That was my arm, which I kept waving so the caterers would stop leaning folded tables against me.
Scrutinize the pink tweed suit I bought after seeing it shown so well in Vogue. Sadly, it didn’t occur to me that the reason the models look so winning and adorable in this look, besides being a foot taller than I am and having the best tools Photoshop could throw at them, is that they are typically fifteen. Post-pubescent girls in matronly outfits can look sweetly incongruous. A woman well into her thirties in a pink tweed suit looks sixty. When I wore it, women tended to curtsy when I walked past. Men offered to find me a chair. Many people already enrolled in AARP called me “ma’am.”
Every two years I convince myself a well-chosen scarf will save me from my own dismal fashion sense. I buy one and play with it for an hour until I notice I’m obsessing over poofiness. If the scarf poofs in front, it says to the world, “Hi! I’m eating lobster!” If the poof is on the side, it says, “Bet you don’t see that coffee stain on my shoulder now, do you?” If the poof is in back, it cries out, “I’m so proud of my Girl Scout troop!” At which point I decide enough things are shouting at me in my life already, so I tuck the new scarf in the drawer along with the many other casualties of my periodic need to accessorize.
I once bought a sexy and expensive sweater-dress, not realizing that my dress had been born a wide knit belt and—much like the eels compelled by some inner GPS to travel thousands of miles to breed in the same sea in which they were born—it was time to return home. Nothing makes a holiday party more festive than death-gripping each side of your dress so it will stop trying to shrink its way up to the old country. All pictures of me from that event could be subtitled “Quinn fights with her dress and grimaces in terror at the thought of the sit-down portion of the evening. Merry Christmas!”
And yet, I still love fashion. I love fashion magazines when they tell me with a straight face that I would be well served by yellow eye shadow and should buy it right away and—wow! what are the odds?—there is an ad for Yves Saint Laurent yellow eye shadow on the very next page. I love stylists and photo editors who make choices that probably only make sense to people who have dined exclusively on antidepressants and small bits of beef for the past ten years. Here’s this season’s hot cover model in a hat made of roofing shingles and Play-Doh. Yes! Here’s a tableau of diamond-encrusted watches in what’s obviously the photographer’s colonoscopy. Marvelous! Here’s a montage of ten-thousand-dollar purses being worn by anorexic teen models dressed as homeless people, lying on beds of crab cakes. Brilliant! It’s all so flagrantly stupid and fascinated by itself that I cannot help but find it adorable.
Because I read this nonsense constantly I have inadvertently developed some knowledge of how things are done this year. Combine this with having a mother who impressed upon me that clothing actually looks better when it, you know, fits, and my own dogged need to be of service to humanity, and I become a nightmare in a clothing store. Pray you are not in the dressing room next to me, for you will get my opinion.
I was standing in the dressing room at J.Crew recently and feeling the mild disappointment that is my typical emotion in a dressing room. After all these years I am still convinced there is a pair of pants somewhere that will make me appear five feet ten and of Swedish ancestry. There was a knock at the dressing room door.
“How are those pants working out?”
“Right size but the wrong color. Could you possibly get me this style in the khaki?”
There was a puzzled silence.
“They don’t come in khaki.”
“I saw them on the same table, in khaki.”
“I’m sorry, but they don’t come in khaki. We have walking shorts in khaki, would you like to see those?”
“Just clarifying here. The front table, right as you walk in, has three pairs of pants.”
“Yes.”
“One was gray, one was olive, and one was khaki. I am currently wearing the olive, and I would like the khaki, please.”
I could hear her brow unfurrowing through the door.
“Oh, those! Sure, I’ll get them. But those aren’t khaki, they’re birch,” she explained, her voice fading into the store. Silly me. I waited in the dressing room, refolding sweaters and listening to an exchange between two young women in the next dressing stall.
GIRL 1: That’s so cute on you!
GIRL 2: You don’t think it’s too tight across the stomach?
GIRL 1: No!
GIRL 1: Doesn’t it seem to be bagging in the chest a…lot?
GIRL 2: No! And the pants are adorable!
GIRL 1: I think they might be too tight. Look, they’re pulling across the hips and the butt, and I can’t actually button them.
GIRL 2: Are you kidding? You look great!
I was hooked. Apparently, these two people were looking into different mirrors. Under the pretense of finding out whether my not-khaki-but-birch pants were en route, I quickly put on my clothes and walked into the public dressing area.
The woman trying on clothes was modestly endowed; she had a bit of a tummy and a rear end that was large without being shapely. The camisole top drooped lifelessly over her chest but clung to her abdomen like a poultice. The fitted pants weren’t just pulling across her hips and butt, they were struggling at every seam. The bell-bottom legs widened at the knee and revealed more than a few inches of too solid ankle flesh. In short, this woman was not well served by this outfit, nor was this outfit well served by her.
Her friend cooed, “You know what would go great with that? A fitted jacket. An
d an ankle bracelet.”
This was such a preposterous statement that I took a careful look at the speaker. She was a marvel of female design, curvy and skinny, lush and toned. She was also wearing a camisole top and fitted pants, their perfect fit making a mockery of the outfit currently insulting her companion.
“Maybe…” the larger woman said slowly, plucking dubiously at the camisole straps, “if I got them shortened, it would fit better. And got the bra cups taken in. And had the bottom loosened a little bit.”
This is the point where the voice in my head, Lady Helpful, started yammering. “Say something,” she insisted, poking my brain with her index finger. “No, please,” I whined. “She won’t listen to me and they’ll both think I’m weird. Besides, who takes the fashion advice of someone wearing these shoes?” I looked down at my Converse low riders. Once cream, they were now a faded beige accented with a spattering of poster paint, half a My Little Pony sticker, and a few splotches from a cat’s bout with intestinal flu.
Lady Helpful glowered. I glowered back. “Look,” I argued with myself. “What’s the worst thing that happens if she buys the outfit? She looks vulgar and a little fatter than she actually is. Have you been out in the mall? This isn’t a problem anymore.”
I had reached a standoff with myself. But then, as usual, I caved. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat to get the girl’s attention.
“Uh,” I began. “You know, camisole tops like that are cut on the bias. It might take more work and money to tailor than it’s worth. And there’s another cut of pants that have a straighter leg.” Saying this allowed my mouth to move without letting out what I was really thinking: You are a big, beautiful woman who needs to stick your fingers in your ears and hum loudly when your skinny, delusional friend gives you advice about what to wear.
They both glanced at me, and I felt my face turn bright red. Mercifully, my khakis—I mean, my birches—arrived, which gave me a reason to slide back into my dressing room. As I closed the door there was a conspiratorial giggle from the next room.
Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life Page 16
