Everything Must Go

by Jenny Fran Davis

  When I told Elijah on Thursday that Mum and Daddy have been having awful fights, he just listened for a long time, silently. Then he rose from his seat wordlessly, but with the most delicious little smirk, and bought me a single pink macaron at the counter with a crumpled dollar from his leather wallet. He set the plate down in front of me.

  “For the girl who has everything,” he said. His smirk reached a breaking point, and his face erupted in a smile.

  I wanted to DIE. But also live, you know?

  Journal entry, October 18

  Oh my God. I just got home from an Elijah meeting, and I am FREAKING out.

  Let me start from the beginning.

  After we’d settled at a table, he thumped a packet of readings on the table but rested his big hand on it, keeping me from reaching for it.

  “Have you ever been photographed?” he asked.

  “I mean, yeah,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?”

  He just shook his head. He wasn’t smiling this time, and I shifted around in my seat.

  God, he’s so intense. I would do anything for him.

  “I mean by a professional,” he said. “In an artistic way.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d know if you had.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Can I shoot you?”

  His eye contact was sending electric signals to my chest, making my heart beat funny. I had to look away, so I did, down at my calf-length light denim skirt.

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked when I’d gathered the strength to look up at him again.

  I was flirting with danger at this point, and I knew it. I was nervous, but I was also wearing a vintage Prada blouse (for which I’d paid twenty-eight dollars at a consignment shop, naturally), so I felt a bit unstoppable.

  “I’m asking if I can take a series of photographs of you in various outfits for a project I’m doing,” he said.

  I paused. The moment stretched out before us like a strand of a spiderweb.

  “Yes,” I said. And then: “Why?”

  He laughed. “You have such a look about you,” he said. “The clothes themselves, but also the way you wear them. You’re, like, reclaiming them somehow. I think it’ll translate well on film.”

  My neck burned. Is there anything quite as delicious as a physical compliment? I don’t think there is, and definitely nothing better from Elijah.

  “I still haven’t seen any of your work,” I said.

  He rummaged in his back pocket for his phone and extracted it, tapping with concentration. Finally he held it out for me. I stared at the screen. A pale girl with long, shining white hair floated on her back, arms akimbo, in a high-waisted white bikini. White-blond hair glimmered on her legs, under her arms, at the edges of the crotch of her bikini bottoms. Two mossy, dirt-speckled lily pads floated beside her. There was something hauntingly beautiful about the photo. My chest tightened.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “She’s a photographer, “I shot her first,” he said. “This was last year. Before she got into taking her own photos.”

  I looked into the girl’s big green eyes, which pooled with tears. The name came to me at once.

  “I totally know who she is,” I said. “She’s Ursula Abbot, right?”

  Ursula Abbot was one of my favorite feminist Instagram artists. She basically argued, with beautiful shots of her looking sad in mirrors, in hospital beds (Urusla had a life-threatening illness and documented her doctors’ visits), and in Victorian backyards, that being visibly sad—emotional, moody, diseased, upset—was political and liberating in a world that shames girls for their sorrows about sexism and sickness, about the demands society places on women. That being an unhappy girl could reshape the very idea of sickness itself, exposing it as a capitalist project and crafting it into a weapon against the patriarchy.

  After agreeing to meet Elijah at the entrance to Central Park, I ran home, a scream scratching at my throat, and took another bath to hold my body. In the bath I prayed, “Dear Jesus, please, please, make him fall in love with me.”

  After drying off, I pulled out my laptop and typed “Elijah Huck” into Google. And Elijah Huck, it turned out, was kind of a Big Fucking Deal. I mean, he was hardly a national celebrity, or whatever, but he’d made headlines in the independent online magazine from Oyster (“Elijah Huck Documents Upper-Class Underworld”), the teen feminist magazine Nymphette (“Urban Hipst-onary: A Conversation with Up-and-Coming Photographer Elijah Huck”), and even a New York Times live piece called “Too Cool for Instagram (But on It Anyway).”

  Nymphette, by the way, will become much more important later on in the story.

  I didn’t tell my friends. They would have called him a creep or something (but he wasn’t that much older than we were! Only nineteen to our sixteen! And his age was part of what made him so attractive). Like one of my idols, Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, I’d made it my policy not to date high-school boys. (Not that I really even knew any high-school boys, on account of going to Bowen, but that was beside the point.)

  He told me to wear whatever I wanted to the shoot, so the night before, I tried on every item of clothing in my closet for Lael, my sister, who sat on my bed, eating chocolate soy milk ice cream from the carton. She wasn’t impressed—by Elijah or by my outfits.

  “So he’s into your clothes,” she said. “Is he gay?”

  I shook my head. He’d mentioned a high-school girlfriend, a Polish immigrant named Ivana who’d been a math whiz and, as it had turned out later, a lesbian, a fact he’d shared while trying to illustrate a point about the Wars of the Roses.

  “Not gay,” I said. “And besides, it wouldn’t matter. I’m not interested in him romantically. Also, way to dabble in tropes, Lael.”

  Lael just laughed.

  I finally settled on a short apricot shift dress and a matching coat (both made in 1958; I’d bought the set on Etsy from an old woman in Idaho) that didn’t make Lael want to gouge her eyes out with her ice cream spoon, which she’d almost done earlier when I put on a busy green Marimekko dress. (About that number, she’d declared, “Pregnant art teacher.”)

  In hindsight, the coat was a little bit too heavy for the weather. I arrived at the entrance to the Park ten minutes late (my 1950s guidebook called “So You Want Him to Pin You”—not that I wanted Elijah to pin me yet, of course—cautioned against punctuality, and though as a proud feminist I obviously read it ironically, it wasn’t like I was about to read good advice and ignore it), sweating more than I cared for him to see.

  I saw him before he saw me. He was adjusting the lens of his camera, squinting in the sun a little bit and pursing his lips. I took a deep, shaky breath. I waited until he saw me and waved me over, slowly nodding approval at my outfit.

  He photographed me on the street first. It was more awkward than I’d expected to be photographed: I felt like I had to hold my breath the whole time, and I had to make sure none of my limbs were at funny angles. Besides, it was a weekend morning, and the streets were flooded with tourists. People around us stared. A few tourists photo-bombed us, especially as we headed toward Fifth Avenue, as though we were a famous art monster couple or something.

  The shoot lasted for a few hours, into the early afternoon, and it seemed natural to get lunch in a Le Pain Quotidien that had just opened on Fifty-Ninth Street.

  It was there, over a vegan fall tart that we shared, that he told me his idea: instead of taking an entire series of photos and uploading them to the portfolio on his website, he’d create a blog in order to share the images every week. The goal was to drum up a robust fan following on social media, a career move his mentor had been urging him to make. I agreed, with two caveats: one, that he couldn’t tell anybody that the photos were of me (he agreed to always cover my face somehow, with a big hat or my hair or a sign of some sort), and two, that he had to expand on the Pennsylvania Dutch thing, which I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about ever since he’d told me. />
  “You really want to know?” he asked, setting his fork down on his plate.

  I nodded.

  “Remember when I told you about the Quare Academy?”

  I nodded again.

  “That’s where I went for my last two years of high school.”

  “Is it in Amish Country, or something?”

  He laughed. “No, no,” he said. “It’s in upstate New York. In the Hudson Valley. It’s an alternative farm school where you learn peace studies and global issues and environmentalism instead of normal English and history and science.”

  “So how did you know the phrase?”

  “Quare offered an elective in Pennsylvania Dutch. Accompanied by a narrative history seminar, part of which took place in Amish Country.”

  I swallowed a laugh. “That’s the long story you couldn’t get into before?”

  He nodded, crossing his arms. “Are you going to back out of the blog now that you’re not satisfied with my answer to your question?”

  I pretended to think about it.

  It took us a few tries, and a few soy lattes, but we finally settled on the concept. He laughed as he typed out the first post, hyperbolic and wry. Of course he wasn’t taking this seriously. He was too cool for that in his flannel and cuffed jeans. He pressed publish. We each took a bite of éclair.

  The first Miss Tulip blog post, October 21

  misstulipblog.com

  HOME SEARCH ARCHIVES PRESS CONTACT

  INTRODUCING MISS TULIP: A IS FOR AUTUMN AND APRICOTS

  Photos c/o Elijah Huck

  Click to navigate through photo album

  Meet Miss Tulip, a teenager who has made it her mission to dress every day like it’s 1958. Before you roll your eyes and shake your fist at the whims of this generation, or worry about troubling nostalgia for pre-Civil-Rights-Era America, hear—or, more accurately, watch—her out. You might just be surprised.

  I met up with Miss Tulip at the entrance to Central Park on West Fifty-Ninth Street. She showed up in this matching apricot dress and coat from the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, as well as a pillbox hat that she’d informed me had been dyed to match by her tailor on Third Avenue.

  The thing about Miss T is that at first glance, she could be the type to reinforce a classic femininity that conjures baking casseroles and darning socks. She’s got an in with every vintage retailer in New York. She has an honorary PhD in accessorizing. But don’t be fooled by her demure exterior: Miss Tulip is a rebel. Recontextualizing outfits from an era plagued by even more bigotry than our own throws the gazer into a new incarnation of the constructed feminine, one informed by, yet working to liberate itself from, its past.

  But the clothes are only half of it. After the shoot, we discussed intersectional feminism and modern-day settler colonialism over coffee, two keen interests of Miss T’s: at the surface, she’s pure 1958, but inside beats the heart of a Jezebel editor.

  THE LOOK: 1950s WOOL SHEATH-STYLE APRICOT DRESS | |

  MATCHING COLLARED COAT | | BLACK STOCKINGS | |

  BLACK FLAT SHOES | | CAT-EYE SUNGLASSES | |

  APRICOT PILLBOX HAT (DYED TO MATCH)

  SETTING: CENTRAL PARK | | WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET

  Journal entry from November 19, a month later

  Daily Elijah interactions:

  8 a.m.: The Spence Room, at breakfast, eating half a bagel and sipping coffee.

  My heart starts to hammer, and I make a point to pass the table he’s at—with a few other teachers, usually, but sometimes alone, sometimes writing in a little notebook—and if he doesn’t look up and smile at me the first time, I walk by again and again until he does. If he beckons me over to the table he’s at, I make a point to gesture at myself, all fake-surprised, like, Me??? and he laughs and I walk toward him. On the walk, I can’t feel the ground under my feet, probably because my toes have gone numb.

  1:30 p.m.: Dr. Levin’s class, which he sometimes leads.

  I literally can’t sit still when he comes to observe in Dr. Levin’s class. I’m so aware of everything. I’ve never felt so alive. But it’s the kind of alive where I feel like I’m about to die—that’s how alive I feel. I can’t sleep. My heart is beating too fast. Everyone’s voice sounds tinny, like when music plays on a computer.

  3 p.m.: Dismissal, when I stroll past Dr. Levin’s room to watch Elijah collecting his stuff and preparing to leave.

  Which isn’t really even that creepy, if you think about it. I mean, I could be a Peeping Tom, or something.

  4:30 p.m.: every Thursday: our meeting on the Upper West Side.

  On Thursday, at our meeting, he told me about this super-emotionally damaging relationship he was in during high school (post-Ivana) after I gave him a Mum-and-Daddy update, and we just sat smiling at each other behind our lattes despite the pain that we’d just shared. He’s just so in touch with his emotions and gets so sad despite the cool front he puts up!!! I have it SO BAD.

  He’s taking a year off from Columbia next year to teach an elective on the history of violence at Quare, the peace-environmentalism-and-arts boarding school he graduated from. So that means he won’t be around next year. The thought of not seeing him at least twice a week makes me want to die. I hope by that time I’ll have convinced him not to leave, but that’s kind of creepy, so I’ll keep that to myself for now.

  I want him every hour of the day.

  God, if anyone found this journal, I would absolutely DIE. Is there anything more humiliating than being in love?

  Profile in LOTUS magazine, mid-December

  TO A T(W)EE:

  NEW ARTIST AND MUSE TAKE CENTER STAGE

  There’s a new sheriff in town, and her name is Miss Tulip. She’s taken off like wildfire, especially with the teen set—specifically, with teens who’ve eschewed Forever 21 in exchange for thrift stores. Elijah Huck, who’s made a name for himself in indie photography, receives over one hundred emails per day about the series, most of them gushing with praise and thanks for giving them a fashion resource they can relate to.

  In the past few weeks, the Miss Tulip blog has spurred dozens of copycats, including Hex in the City (a Wiccan teen, Lula Mikelson, wanders New York in vintage gothic attire performing rituals), PEARLS (four young women clad only in pearls pose with Park Avenue doormen from Seventeenth Street to the Bronx), and The Wizard of Bras (a young designer of feminist lingerie dresses statues of men in all five boroughs in her custom bras and underwear).

  Huck’s posts, which regularly attract thousands of visitors, are unique in their ability to evoke both modernity and antiquity, as well as provide a tentative explanation—a subtle one—about why today’s young people look to the past for answers about their identities and their futures.

  Journal entry from December 22

  I haven’t even told India and Cora about him, because they’d definitely tell me to snap out of it. Every time something gets written up about Elijah and Miss Tulip, I feel such a sense of pride, but it’s PRIVATE pride—like an intimate thing between Elijah and me.

  Elijah fantasies:

  • We’re in the Met. He pulls me off to the side, into some deserted corner, and starts kissing me.

  • I’m standing in front of an ornate bookcase, studying it, hand on my chin. He comes up from behind and drapes himself over me. I spin around; we kiss.

  • We’re on the subway. He reaches for my hand; I let him hold it. I look down at my lap and smile. There is electricity at the line where our legs touch.

  Let me pause here and say that I know this seems like the most trivial, most bourgeoisie shit ever. I mean, a hipster fashion blog in which I dress in clothes from 1958? Please don’t lose heart, readers. This was my old life, remember. It’s as painful for me to relive this time as it is for you to hear about it, if not more so.

  Anyway, I was his muse, but he wasn’t in love with me. Or was he? Therein lay the problem. He wanted to follow me around the city, photographing me in vintage clothes. He called me inte
resting. He listened to my problems and opened up about his. He told me that I could really rock a Jackie Kennedy head scarf and that I knew a thing or two about tastefully pairing prints. AND YET. He didn’t invite me over to his 107th Street apartment to kiss me. He didn’t even touch me, not even once to adjust me during a photo shoot. We took the subway together on weekends from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Queens, even rode the Staten Island Ferry together, but he didn’t so much as put his arm around me. There was always a thin barrier between us, which I chalked up to his position of power. And although sometimes this barrier was made of metal, sometimes it was made of a gauze that seemed thin enough to tear.

  Let me pause again for one more minute. At age sixteen, just as now, I was a fucking woman. It wasn’t that I needed his approval to exist. Even in this time of frissons and jittery stomachs, I knew my power without Elijah. I didn’t need him to kiss me. I just really wanted him to, and that wild desire made my body feel like it was on fire. I was in love, and it was the kind of love that made me forget myself.

  So he didn’t kiss me, but he talked to me. He told me countless hilarious stories about Quare, academically rigorous and socially conscious, and encouraged me to apply, albeit in a buoyant, slightly jocular way. Until eleventh grade, he’d attended Westwood, Bowen’s prestigious brother school. (Quare was for students in the eleventh and twelfth grades only.) He’d grown frustrated, just as I was growing frustrated, with the stuffy, pretentious private school scene. (Even though I would never say that out loud.)