by Sarah Reith
“Menn-dah-see-know Cown-tee,” my mother trilled rapturously, then gave a lavish sigh. “Harvest should be good and damn well done by now. Did you get a decent crop? Your first time out and all.”
“Mother,” I warned. “I am not cultivating marijuana.”
“Did you hear that, boys?” she enthused.
Shortly after my father vanished, we concluded that our phones must be tapped, so we got into the habit of addressing comments to the agents who might be listening in on our conversations. My mother, reasoning that the decorum for such things was not covered in her etiquette manuals and therefore must be sanctioned, had never hesitated to share the details of what she called “X-capades” with her mortified underage daughter. After the invisible agents may or may not have joined us, she began to include them by adding, “Did you like that, boys? Both hands on the table, now, where I can see them . . .” We never did get any audience participation, but once established, this family tradition only increased her proclivity for treating every interaction like a performance.
“Okay. They hear you,” I said now. Certainly it was rude to refer to them in the third person; but I assumed that even the most exacting mistress of etiquette would grant me an extenuating circumstance. “And anyway, it’s not exactly a crime around here. It’s just a felony. Which doesn’t matter, because I’m not growing pot.” I paused, after this translation into the vernacular. “I’m modeling.”
“Mod-ell-ling.” She drew this out slowly. My mother tends to act like she is under the guidance of a director who is legally blind, might as well be deaf, and is committed to reviving vaudeville for a non-English speaking audience. At this moment, I was sure she was doing a saucy imitation of a Betty Page pinup pose. “Like Betty Page? Are you a pinup girl?” She sounded cautiously gleeful, like parents always do when they think their children might have stumbled onto a promising career track.
I don’t know why, but every time I get on the phone with my mother, I find myself trying to make her hate me. I do it on purpose, but really, I can’t help it. We are like a couple of alpha females in a nature channel documentary, prowling around each other in search of weak points and the most flattering camera angle. Just once, I’d like us to meet for coffee, get a pedicure, tease each other lovingly. Where did I even get this idea? I picture a montage, with background music. Maybe we’d be wearing scarves over our hair, like beautiful 1940s movie stars on a windy day. Instead, we show each other our weapons, rattle them menacingly, and then put them back with much fumbling as we retreat, pretending we never advanced in the first place. I took a deep breath.
“Mom,” I said. “Caitlin. Katy.”
She was silent. I imagine she didn’t know what to do with her hands, now that she wasn’t posing like a red-haired Betty Page.
“If we were living in Bangladesh. Or Thailand.” If there was nothing self-indulgent or amusing about anything we ever did, I explained silently. If we had nothing to renounce. “And you were in a brothel. And then I was born.” Please please please, I prayed. I guess that was praying. “Would you sell me, Caitlin? Would you turn me out?” Tell me what you really think, I thought at her. Just this once, you loud-mouthed whore, shut up and be sincere.
I thought she’d say, “Fuck yes,” with such unshakeable certainty it would be impossible to believe her. I’d planned, already, to peek behind the laughing mask and watch a tear run down her face. I knew what she’d say and how I’d respond.
“Isobel.” She sounded very tired. “Isobel. If I had a beautiful baby girl in a hellhole like that—” I could hear rustling as she shook her head. Her hair brushed the mouthpiece of the receiver. “I would wrap her in the cleanest blanket I could find. My beautiful girl. I would walk and walk until I was ready to die. I would do anything, Isobel. I would work, and I would die—” I heard more rustling; and then, like she’d found her place in the script and could stop ad-libbing, she chirped, “Oh, hell, Izzers. I could get a better price for you from some menopausal American lesbian couple. Wouldn’t that be fun? No leg hair in the bathtub, ever.” She cackled like a smoker, though she never was. “Just in case you think you could handle two of me. What kind of modeling did you say you were doing?”
Of course, I lacked the job qualifications to be a pinup girl.
“You got those from your father,” Caitlin used to remark of the feminine accomplishments upon my chest. “Of course, Haley—you remember Haley, don’t you? She had a classic Roman toe. Being on the Committee never hurt her.” My mother laughed lightly, like a broad-minded lady observing the enormous genitals on a representational work of art. “Let’s just say the Catholic schoolgirl uniform worked for her.” The Committee, of course, was the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and my mother’s mind was as broad as the open field she worked in. “She used to wear pasties that said ‘organic’ on them,” she went on, like I might benefit from the tip. “You know, like from the health food store. When she danced at the tamer places,” she added, so I wouldn’t think of Haley’s pasties as an unbecoming affectation of false modesty.
“Mother,” I broke in. “I am not a pinup girl.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” she chirped, quickly, like a bratty kid getting in the last word before the bell rings.
“I am an Art Model,” I enunciated loftily.
“Nude?” I couldn’t tell if she was elated or aghast.
Sex work is more than a job for my mother: it is the thesis statement of her life. She is like a researcher who starts to analyze the world from the point of view of her extremely specific discipline. She thinks hiring pretty girls to work as baristas is a form of pimpery; that the girls themselves are underpaid whores. “Really,” she’ll sniff, if the sweet young thing who makes her nonfat latte has a winsome way about her. “That girl is worth a lot more than just a wake-up wood. I certainly hope she’s getting paid.” And she’ll glare sternly at the girl (who may have overheard this market advisory) as if in matronly disapproval at the spineless apathy of today’s youth.
“Yes, Mother.” I sighed, trying to sound as if this were the most boring possible detail. “I pose nude. No big deal.”
The first time I stood up in front of a class, I felt my face flush hotter than I thought my body could sustain. I wished I’d never shaved my head, so I could take a classical maidenly pose with a curtain of hair cascading round my downcast eyes. If I’d kept my long, thick, already graying red-blonde tresses, I would be less naked. I could gaze into my split ends and not those pecking eyes.
It was not like being ogled. The students didn’t leer. Rather, they pecked, looking more at their drawings of me than they did at me. It reminded me of people who are constantly interrupting you to tell you what kind of person you are.
Peck, peck, peck, taking my measure in quick little pecks, except when they squinted to flatten me out and take a more precise measurement of how many naked head lengths I possessed, from the crown of my skull to my stained calloused heels. When artists measure a model, they close one eye and straighten the arm holding the measuring tool—usually a pencil—and they point it at the model. They want to make her two-dimensional, to bring her down to size. They want to see how many fractions of a pencil length her head is, if the distance from chin to breast is one full head, and how many heads from her nipples to her groin. Hardly anyone can close one eye without baring their teeth, so when they do this, they look like they are snarling as they take aim at the body on the stand.
It was a large classroom with a gray baseboard wall behind the podium, which was not a podium at all. A podium is where the learned and lovely stand. I displayed myself on a huge wooden slab of a table that the instructor and two of his students struggled to move to the center of the room. Someone had strung wire between the years’ worth of tacks and nails in this wall, so I posed before what looked like an abandoned Paul Klee drawing, made of wire. I thought I might pass out. I hoped I didn’t fall with my legs wide open, gaping at the classroom full of aspiring young artists.
&n
bsp; “It’s really not a big deal, Mother,” I said now, hoping I sounded like someone who had lived in continental Europe. “It’s not like these people are voyeurs. They’re celebrating the human form.”
My mother sounded like she might be choking. “Isobel Marie!” she gasped at last. “Don’t you know that all of Rubens’ models were whores?”
“Because whores in the seventeenth century paid so much to have their portraits done?” I retorted.
If only she hadn’t picked Rubens. In my mind’s eye, I could see the great man’s drawing of a lady with a peacock collar, looking skeptical, amused, and sideways at the master as he took her likeness. She had a small, sharp mouth and a small, sharp beak of a nose. She had great thyroidic eyes and a forehead broad and bright enough to give a phrenologist heart palpitations. As usual, I could not remember names or dates. I would have loved to say, in a bored, even tone, “Mother. Are you not aware of the drawing commissioned by the Lord and Lady What’s-Their-Name of the Whatever Court in the Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred Blanketty Blank?”
But my mother plowed ahead. “Oh, not the Ladies Whoozit and the bankers’ wives and all those mistresses trying to buy their way into the aristocracy. I mean those fat-assed bathing beauties and the Venuses and Ledas and that leering Andromeda. Let’s all celebrate cellulite, shall we? Will anyone ever render cellulite with that degree of love and care and—I mean, what a chubby-chaser. The original flab-fest fat fetishist. I’ll tell you what he had in his other hand, and it wasn’t a paintbrush. Honestly, Izzy, if you’d just pay the tiniest bit of attention to history . . .”
“So I could honor it by repeating it?” I managed to insert. That was a good one; but Caitlin didn’t even salute me, like she would have if we were going about this honorably. “You sound unhappy, Mom.”
“I’m not unhappy, I’m astonished. This is . . . well. Do you think for one second those high-minded artists aren’t hiding hard-ons behind their easels? Why do you think they wear smocks?”
“I don’t care if they are, Caitlin. It’s not my business.” I took a deep breath. “Since I’m not a whore.”
“Maybe not,” she said evenly. “But they only want what every john wants from one.”
“Someone who will pretend she gives a shit? For a price?” I could feel my lips drawing away from my teeth.
“Ask any painter’s wife or girlfriend or mistress if she didn’t pose for him first,” she commanded. This was her area of expertise. I could tell I was trespassing as clearly as if she’d squatted at the boundary and marked it. “They’re shopping, honey. That’s all they’re doing.”
“Do you know what you sound like?” I could hear my voice starting to shake. I had a logical argument. “You sound like a Republican.” The facts are on my side, I thought triumphantly; but she refused to hear me out.
“Of course I can’t prove what’s going on in other people’s heads,” she allowed, as generous as only a victor can be, “but trust me, sweetie, there are some things a person just knows.”
There are times when my mother’s mix of perfect diction and vulgarity makes her sound like someone’s stock idea of a naughty schoolteacher, all formal hair and high-necked dress, open to reveal her garters and her black lace peekaboo bra. Other times, she sounds like she’s been driven to measures she would never dream of, the coarseness in her mouth as foreign as a shotgun in the hands of a well-born lady protecting her virtue. And, like that determined virgin, tightening her grip, no one is more astonished at her unexpected competence than Caitlin known as Lilith. Now she was ferocious.
“Men,” she said, drawing the last word like a poisoned dagger, “don’t celebrate the human form without a few emissions. It’s about time you knew that.”
“Not everybody has sex on the brain all the time.” I knew I sounded like I was begging to be heard. I had expected this conversation to be very much like the one that preceded her absence from my wedding, the one where she cackled and called me a whore. Why did she cackle when I married, and then act like she’d have to cross my name out of the family Bible when I took a few classical poses at an accredited college? “You sound like some crazy religious fundamentalist. Why do you think women wear burqas? Because people are obsessed with the perils of sex.” Too late, I realized I had left a few steps out of my logical argument.
“That is exactly what I’m saying,” she said patiently. She sounded like a highly trained customer serviceperson—which is exactly what she was—deflecting the outrage of an unreasonable client. “I think I know a little bit more about this than you do.” Her voice came down about a quarter of an octave, as if she knew a lot more about my marital problems than I did.
“Are you saying we should hide our bodies unless we’re fucking?” I screamed into the silent phone line. “Because sex is all they’re good for? How is that materially different from fundamentalists who say that sex is just for procreation?” But Caitlin, I knew, was brewing her tea. She had an herbal infusion for every emotional occasion.
I put the phone down. I felt like I’d spent my life decoding hieroglyphs, only to discover the cuneiform was full of pompous dirty jokes about the Lord and Lady Wee-wee.
“That answers that,” I said out loud. I brewed a cup of strong black tea.
Tumbleweeds and Dim Sum
CAITLIN WAS AS easy to see through as a lace peignoir. She was just a cocksucking whore, and she knew it. She with her high-flown talk of temples and the Sacred Vulva had no secret message more confounding than the fact that people fuck. But I carried a parallel text in the stele of my own being, hacked in hard and deep, like an act of the most painstaking vandalism: Do not ever be a whore.
Not that I never wondered how it would feel to bring a man to his knees; to awe him with my power. Once, in early spring, I stood on the highway outside Soledad, watching white smoke and tumbleweeds and thinking, I could fix this if I had the nerve. The smoke was pouring out of a twenty-three-year-old Honda Civic I had bought with a year’s worth of waitressing tips, and the tumbleweeds were tumbling because that’s what spring is like in Soledad. A real season of renewal.
When the tow truck driver arrived, I tried to imagine how I would handle the situation if I possessed the proper secrets; if I dared to use the power that was mine. Did I have the brutal charm that Caitlin had? I did not. I sold him my car for three hundred dollars. Then I called my mother. I was crying so hard I was choking on snot. She dispatched a client, one she’d dismissed for the crime of falling in love. Marriage is a whore’s retirement, but dating a man from “the office” is a failure of imagination. He drove from Hollywood to Soledad alone, from Soledad to San Francisco with the tear-stained, travel-smeared daughter of his one true heartless love. He was hygienic, discreet, and what ladies in the ads in free weeklies describe as “generous.” Caitlin known as Lilith swore she didn’t mind.
There was a reason I was so ill-equipped to take my place among the goddesses and archetypes who chomp the heads off little men and pick their teeth with bones. It is a reason that prevents me from enjoying several savage pleasures; from wallowing and plunging and generally abandoning all sanitary codes to embrace the unshaven and the slimy, the wild-eyed, graceless, and urgent. The truth is that I am equipped with a finely tuned instrument of revulsion. If I begin to realize that a man is attracted to me, chances are my instrument will home in with the precision of a surgical camera on some minor detail no one else has ever noticed. I become preternaturally alert to the horribility of his hands, the skin beneath his eyes, some fleeting moment of his facial features that seems furtive, guilty, or cruel. I was so unfit to flirt, it took me over a year of waitressing to buy a car that lasted less than that.
When Frank the plumber winked at me across a plate of eggs, I imagined his big meaty hands on the soft parts of my body. I felt my face freeze in horror and wondered if I was capable of fainting. When Jerry the veteran began to gaze at me earnestly, I noticed how the skin beneath his eyes made his cheeks look like a pair of mel
ting candles. I thought about that skin moving close to my face and bolted for the kitchen with a stack of greasy plates. With the man I married, it was his chin. I didn’t notice how horrible his chin was until it was too late.
The John’s chin wasn’t weak, exactly. It was just extremely small. Plus, at some point, he started smearing Vaseline on his mouth, which made him look like he had just been devouring something greasy and obscene. The lower part of his face began to fill my field of vision. I could not look at any other part of him.
Once, shortly after I almost had to stop looking at him entirely, I happened to notice that his face looked perfectly normal. We were lying in bed, and I sat up to brush my hair. I had hair then. It was oppressively beautiful.
“Hey,” I said, surprised into affection. “I just realized that your chin is really not that small.”
“What are you talking about?” He was falling asleep. He always fell asleep. He didn’t care about clichés. And yes, I was having sex with a man I could not bear to look at. If I am not mistaken, that is exactly what my mother does for a living.
I decided an unadorned explanation was what the situation called for. The John and I cared about communication, authenticity, and respect. So, in my most reasonable, non-calculating tone, I began.
“I think, because of the difference in our heights, when I look up at you, I perceive your chin as being much smaller than it actually is. But looking at you just now, lying down, I realize that in fact you have a perfectly proportionate chin.” I breathed evenly, like I did when smoke began to trickle into the interior of my car. I have always believed that a calm rational attitude has the power to banish disaster. But it’s magical thinking, to believe that logic will prevail in a situation ruled by a heart gone numb or the installation of an after-market electrical system.