North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both

by Cea Sunrise Person

  This was good, I thought; in this new world of mine, I could make myself into anyone I wanted to be. I knew what we fledgling models were known as: the summer girls. Only a small percentage of us would actually make a lasting career of modeling. At the end of the season we would all go back to school, most of us reabsorbed into our former lives with only a small collection of glossy ten-by-twelve photos as souvenirs of a short-lived dream. I couldn’t help thinking that we were a lot like the summer visitors of my childhood. But I was sure that I would beat the odds. And when I left New York late that August, I told myself I was no longer Cea Sunrise Person, the weirdo from the wilderness with the crazy family. I was Cea the Model now, and I would never be that outcast little girl again.

  I STOOD IN THE humid bathroom of the tiny Mauritius airport, sweat collecting on my brow as I pulled article after article of clothing from my carry-on bag. It was still too heavy, the woman at the check-in counter had told me. I held each garment up in front of me, deciding which I could live without. After I’d emptied half my bag, I threw my discards into a corner and walked briskly to my gate, trying not to think about the huge risk I was about to take—or the desperation that was driving it.

  It was the summer of 1985, and I had just finished attending the finals of Elite’s “Look of the Year” competition. It was my second attempt, after being disqualified the first time around for my age. This time, at fifteen, I had won the Canadian and then the North American semifinals, but yesterday that road had ended. Here, on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius for the world finals, I had placed in the top twenty—just shy of winning a cash prize. I was devastated, not because I’d expected to win but because without the money I didn’t know what to do next. As I had learned during my previous summer in New York, launching a modeling career took money. Elite wanted me to go to Paris for the rest of the summer, but I had less than twenty dollars in my wallet and no way to pay for a flight, much less anything else. I had lain awake nearly all the previous night, thinking about my mother. If I went home it would all be over. I would lose one precious year in an industry that prized youth, and what would I be trading it for? A job at the Dairy Queen, pointless walks to the mall with my only girlfriend, evenings spent at home alone while Mom swooned under the spell of her married lover. I finally fell asleep on a pillow wet with tears, more frightened of such a fate than anything a broke summer in Paris might hold for me.

  The next morning, I had awoken with a plan. As luck would have it, the competition coordinators had flown me from Calgary to Mauritius on a route via Paris, which meant that technically speaking, I had a plane ticket back to Paris. All I had to do was get off the plane there and pray for bookings.

  Twelve hours after ditching my clothes in the Mauritius bathroom, I emerged from Charles de Gaulle Airport into a dusky Paris evening with my pulse jumping. I had made it this far, but there was a major flaw in my plan: I had forgotten that the plane landed at night, and the agency wouldn’t reopen until nine o’clock the next morning. I was exhausted with jet lag, in a strange city that spoke a foreign language, and I had no money for a cab or a place to sleep that night.

  “Okay,” I said to myself over and over again as I stood on the curb, trying to formulate my next move. “Okay. It’s okay. Just stay calm, you’ll figure it out.” I had never talked to myself before and was on the verge of panic. My hands were trembling and I was about to cry. Compact cars with yellow headlights zoomed past me and people walked by, glancing at me curiously. I knew I appeared older than I was, but I probably still looked like a scared and lost teenager.

  “Avez-vous besoin d’aide? Do you need some help?” one man asked, looking at me with concern.

  I shook my head. “No, I, uh . . . just waiting for someone. Thanks.”

  “Okay,” he said in his French accent, shrugging. “But if they do not show up, I have my car right here. You are going to Paris? I live near the Opera. It is no problem to give you a lift.”

  I tried to smile back at him, touched by his kindness. Very likely he was harmless, but I couldn’t afford to take the risk. “N-no thanks, but thanks very much. Really, my friend will be here soon.”

  “Very well. As you wish.” He lifted his hands and walked away.

  “Okay,” I muttered to myself again, back to near-panic. “Need to calm down. Calm down and figure this out.” Out of nowhere, Papa Dick’s face appeared in my head. I inhaled and squared my shoulders. This was it, I thought, my chance to prove to myself that I didn’t need a family. After everything I had been through, a night alone in a vast, unknown foreign city wasn’t about to bring me down.

  Public transportation, I thought; there had to be some. Wasn’t everyone always talking about how amazing the Parisian Metro system was? I headed back into the terminal and found an information desk. A woman pointed to an escalator. I walked down the moving steps, gaining confidence. I had a map in my hand and the address of the agency memorized. I could do this. I exchanged my pitiful handful of currency, bought a ticket, boarded a car and, as the train pulled away, sat down to work out the next part of my plan.

  The way I saw it, there were two possible places I could sleep that night: the central station, where I could sit on a bench and try to stay awake for most of the night while pretending to wait for a train, or a city park, where I risked dozing among bums and/or being raped and murdered by morning. Too late, I realized I would have been better off staying at the airport, snoozing in a chair and hoping I didn’t get kicked out. We were hurtling through the countryside now, and I almost wished I could get off and sleep in the trees somewhere, just like the good old days with Mom. My eyes flooded with tears, but I wiped them away impatiently. My wilderness days were over. I was in the city now, and it was time I developed some urban survival skills.

  I checked my map again, matching it with the one in the passenger car to be certain I got off at the right stop. We were approaching the center of the city. It was completely dark outside, the cobbled roads narrowing as they became busier. There were still plenty of people roaming the streets at this hour, amid ornate architecture, quaint cafes and magazine kiosks. It looked just like the background in my snow globe, I realized with a small thrill as the train pulled into my stop. I exited into the night and walked until I found Rue Legendre.

  The agency was in a small building with gray trim that seemed to house both offices and residences. Most of the windows were dark, but a few burned brightly. I tried the door, and unsurprisingly it was locked. I stood back on the sidewalk, thinking enviously about the people cozily ensconced in their homes for the night. Although I still didn’t have a solid plan of what I was going to do, I was managing to hold myself together. But the darkness was starting to press into me, making me feel jumpy. A car sped by and tooted its horn. I looked up, and a man leaned out the passenger window and shouted something at me in French. I picked up my bag and moved closer to the entrance of the building. Just then, the door opened and a middle-aged woman came out with a small dog on a leash.

  “Voulez-vous venir à l’intérieur?” she asked, holding the door open for me.

  I stared back at her. I had no idea what she’d just said to me, but I could see the foyer just beyond her, beckoning like a mirage. “Uh . . . merci,” I said, practically lunging over the threshold. I made my way up the staircase, found the door to the agency and leaned against it, grateful just to be inside. A wave of exhaustion washed over my body. The floor was carpeted, and I had taken the thin blue blanket from the airplane. To my left, I could see that the hallway turned a corner to an area that I hoped would be more private. I stumbled into the sheltered space, then sank down on the floor and slept.

  When morning came, it was two female voices laughing and speaking in French that woke me. I turned over, my shoulder and hip aching from being pressed into the hard floor all night, and suddenly remembered where I was. I jumped up and peeked around the corner. One of the women was unlocking the door to the agency while her friend yammered on, apparen
tly telling her a hilarious story. When they disappeared into the agency, I sprang into action. My bladder was bursting painfully, but there was something else even more pressing: I had to be sure I looked okay. I ran my hands over my hair, squeezed Visine into my eyes, popped a breath mint into my mouth and put on some lip gloss. Then I pulled my best outfit from my bag, a tight T-shirt with black leggings and ankle boots, and quickly changed my clothing. By then I had to pee so badly that I was starting to dance around, so I grabbed my bag, tried to look relaxed and walked into the agency.

  The women looked up at me inquiringly, and then broke into a smile. “Cea,” one of them said, rising to greet me, “you are even more beautiful than your photographs. Come in, come in.”

  “Thank you. It’s so good to be here.” I beamed. She moved toward me and kissed me once on each cheek, and I prayed I didn’t smell bad. I stepped back a little and glanced around. “Um, you don’t by any chance have a bathroom, do you? I’d just like to freshen up a little. Flew the red-eye in last night, you know how it is.”

  “Of course. Just beyond the booking table.”

  I smiled once more, and then walked as casually as I could toward the beckoning utopia of the wooden door. I did it, I thought to myself gleefully. Despite the hideous discomfort in my bladder, it was one of the best moments of my life. I was fifteen years old, I had chosen and created my own life, and now there would be no stopping me.

  INDEED, MY PLAN WORKED. My agency set me up in an apartment with several other models in the grotty district of Pigalle, sent me around to go-sees, and within a week I was getting bookings. Within three weeks, I had made enough money to buy a ticket home and alleviate some of the stress of worrying about how I was going to eat.

  One day, I was walking by a bus shelter when I caught sight of a picture of myself in an ad for a bank. I was lounging on a yacht in Corsica, presumably on a holiday paid for with all the money I’d saved by trusting this company with my finances. I stopped and stared, suddenly overcome by thoughts of Papa Dick. If ever there was a moment to horrify him, this was it. I had become everything he despised, a willing pawn in the urban consumer industry. As I sighed and moved forward, I realized I had no idea if the thought made me happy or sad. But then, I had little reason to care. Though I’d written several postcards to my grandfather since I started modeling, I never heard anything back from him.

  It wasn’t until the end of summer that I finally set foot on the plaza of the Eiffel Tower. I’d observed it from afar as I traveled the city and seen it in the backdrop of many photos taken of me, but it was as if I feared that actually visiting the real-life landmark of my childhood snow globe could only bring disappointment. I exited the Metro station and approached the tower slowly. Of course, there was no denying its beauty. And as I gazed up at the famous crisscrossing architecture, I realized what the source of my reticence had been. I wanted Mom to share this moment with me, if not in person then at least in voice.

  Smiling to myself, I made my way through the crowd of tourists until I found a phone booth. I picked up the receiver, inserted my telephone card and dialed her number, listening to the line buzz across five thousand miles.

  “Hello?” Mom said sleepily, and my throat clicked closed. I had spoken to her only once since I’d arrived in Paris, just to tell her where I was, and I’d felt like she’d barely heard me. Mom. What’s wrong? I had asked her, even though I didn’t want to know. Nothing. It’s just . . .we had a fight. And it was so weird, because we had sex afterward and I couldn’t have an orgasm—

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” Mom’s voice pulled me back to the present.

  In that moment, I realized that although I might return home for school and continue to share a roof with my mother, she would never be a parent to me. What’s more, she didn’t even deserve the label. I was fifteen years old, I was in Paris by myself, and she hardly cared. Since I had been here, a photographer had offered me cocaine and told me I would fail as a model if I didn’t partake and offer him sex, and I had dealt with it. A gypsy boy had snatched my bag off my shoulder, leaving me penniless and without a passport, and I had dealt with it. A man on the Metro had masturbated into my hair, and I had dealt with it. Alone. I shook my head silently, tears flooding my eyes, and hung up the phone on the woman I had all but given up on.

  But I was fine, absolutely fine, without her.

  Part Five

  Consequence

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Looking back, I can see that it all started to fall apart with my first marriage. Until then, I had marveled to myself almost smugly at how unaffected I was by my crazy past and family. Even as my career took off in my late teens and early twenties, I fell into none of the typical pitfalls that many survivors of challenging childhoods did; I never did drugs, I had a healthy relationship with food, I didn’t engage in casual sex and I only drank as much as my friends did. But for me, it was my craving for normal—that dangling carrot that seemed always just beyond my reach—that would be my undoing.

  When my first boyfriend laid me on his bed and reached for a condom from his drawer, I never imagined I would one day marry him. I was sixteen, one year older than the girl I had been the summer before in Paris, and he took my virginity in his childhood bedroom while his mother was cooking a roast upstairs. For me, the moment was not driven by lust, but rather a desire to just get it over with. I was already an adult in so may ways—I had a career, I traveled on my own, I helped my mother pay the bills—that I saw this as the final step to bring me into womanhood.

  Kevin was my little piece of sanity within the crazy, polarized world I inhabited. At home, things were terrible. Although I could have chosen to drop out of school and pursue my career full-time—after all, who was going to stop me?—the fact that Mom hadn’t finished high school drove me to hang in and graduate. There wasn’t a single thing I wanted to have in common with my mother. We were like black and white with no gray overlap between us, moving like strangers through each other’s lives. While she continued her life as pot-smoking mistress to her married lover, I told her nothing about my mostly friendless existence at school, the hangovers I had after weekend parties, or the fact that I had stopped working on my one passion outside of modeling, writing, because my creative voice sounded to me more and more like a desperate whine. She knew little of my modeling life in New York, L.A. and Paris during the summers between school, the highs of landing national TV commercials and the lows of losing out on work to girls with straighter teeth or bigger breasts, the schmoozy parties that I detested but was forced to attend, the time a wealthy Los Angeles businessman bought me a new car (which I refused, dreading the strings attached) after meeting me once for coffee. I was lonely, and Kevin helped fill that gap, even though I refused to admit to myself how empty I still felt in his presence. I loved him mostly because he loved me, and because he had a family as predictable as the pecan pie they ate each Sunday after dinner. He and I stayed together for two years and then broke up when I graduated from high school, knowing we would be torn apart by the distance of our careers. My heart did not break. I moved to Paris and threw myself headlong into my work, and the truth was that I barely gave him a second thought.

  But then a funny thing happened. Although I had initially seen modeling as my money train to a normal life, as time went on I found it harder and harder to maintain that vision. My constant need to adapt to new environments was taking its toll. I regularly worked in countries where I didn’t know a soul, much less the language, and yet I would be out navigating the public transportation system on my first day there. I lived in grungy apartments with strangers one week and thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suites the next; ate cabbage for three days to fit into a swimsuit and then binged on chocolate bars for just as long after the job was done; made enough money to buy a car in ten days of work and then didn’t get a booking for a month afterward, certain that my career was over.

  By 1995 I was at the peak of my modeling career. This is from a shoot in
Milan, Italy.

  And though I loved my job, I hated the ugliness that went with it. I watched girls eat and then stick their fingers down their throat, fall off tables in nightclubs from too many drugs, and cry into their pillows because they were sixteen years old, stuck in a foreign country and didn’t have enough money to go home. One time, at a pension in Milan, the elevator door slid open to reveal a model lying on her side with blood dripping down her arms; she had tried to kill herself after losing out on a big job to another girl.

  And then there were the life stories. Family dysfunction seemed to run rampant in the fashion industry, and being constantly thrown together as temporary colleagues or roommates caused us to blurt out our pasts to each other in record time. Telling my own story a few times over too much wine, I forged quick and deep friendships with several girls, clinging to them as my real family fell further away. Though I sent postcards and gifts to Mom at her birthday and Christmas, I got almost nothing back. I didn’t even know where my grandparents were anymore, and my father rarely called and never visited me. Somewhere along the line, my dream of normal had slowly morphed into a craving for mediocrity. I daydreamed about returning home and renting an apartment, getting a waitressing job, marrying whoever might have me.

  And it was then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that I learned through an old friend that Kevin was living not a hundred miles from my current home of Hamburg. He had moved to Germany to pursue his career as a professional hockey player, she said, and had never stopped talking about me. I called him up, and we went out for dinner to catch up. As we talked, the feeling of nostalgic comfort that swept over me was irresistible. Kevin was my little scrap of home in a world as strange as the childhood one I had left behind.

  When I was twenty-two, Kevin and I got married. Our wedding day was a snapshot of my new, perfect life that I wanted everyone to believe was real, complete with a white dress and trip down the aisle with my father, even though he felt like a stranger at my side. I invited my mother on the condition she wouldn’t come stoned or bring her boyfriend, both of which promises she broke. I quelled my fury with too much wine. At the end of the evening, I observed my father grinning awkwardly while Mom waved a hand in front of his body, wondering aloud at the color of his aura, and I realized it was the first time in my life I could remember seeing my parents together in the same room. As I lay by my husband that night, I tried to tell myself it was exhaustion and too much booze that was killing my desire for him. I let him do his business on top of me, and then I lay awake for a long time afterward, knowing that I had made a huge mistake but also understanding that I was much too damaged to correct my wrongs. My past was catching up with me.