Tom had more than kept his promise. I was watching a movie star, in her very first role, in the movie where everyone in the audience asks, “Who is that?” or maybe in the movie that makes her a reigning international star, the sort of star where people all over the world copy her hairstyle and eye makeup and the way she laughs, when the handsome hero tells her he loves her. Rebecca Randle was confident and magnetic and irresistible, and she made all of this feel as easy as taking a breath or tucking a wayward curl of hair behind her ear, in a way that would make all of the women in the audience unconsciously reach toward their own faces and do the same thing. Rebecca was a revenge, a gob of well-aimed spit right in the eye of every rejection I’d ever known, from other people or from my own lowest and most indefensible judgments of myself, which are the only judgments anyone ever trusts.
I tried to decide if Tom had created an exact replica of my mother, but this wasn’t the case. If anything, Rebecca was, like me, my mother’s daughter — my mother, continued.
My hold on reality was in serious danger. Maybe I was like a character in one of those movies where a girl gets tossed down a flight of stairs, lands on her head and imagines the whole film, or she dreams it and in the movie’s last scene she either wakes up back in her own familiar bed, or she dies, because the entire story was a hallucination caused by a fatal gunshot. But I was pretty sure that I wasn’t asleep because my dreams were usually more hazy and featured edible Christmas trees made out of Mallomars and typhoons that swept through the Super Shop-A-Lot, sending Rocher and me surfing toward Arkansas.
So, if my life wasn’t a dream or a delusion or a drug reaction, I had to make a decision. I could track down Tom and insist that he undo his enchantment, or his curse. I could tell him that I’d changed my mind and that I hoped he’d understand, but that being so beautiful wasn’t a good fit. And then I could torch the red dress or knot it around a cinderblock and heave it to the bottom of the Hudson to be colonized by what would become the world’s most beautiful algae.
I could scrounge for bus fare and hightail it home to East Trawley to face Rocher’s understandable scorn and to live out my expected life, my real life, my pre–Tom Kelly life, as Becky, and no one else.
But running away, with two dresses to go, wasn’t just timid and cowardly. A fast exit would be an insult to my mom. Because, when she didn’t shred that phone number, my mother had held out this possibility. She’d handed me that plane ticket, or maybe a pair of iridescent couture wings, and now I was flying, or at least cleared for takeoff.
Locking eyes with the woman on the TV screen, I knew that I had to find out where Rebecca might take me. Maybe Rebecca was more than a shell; maybe she was an amazing means of transportation, a surreal, hypersonic, goddess-shaped rocket ship, blasting out of East Trawley. And because Rebecca could do anything, maybe I could finally learn what had happened to my mother, and what had destroyed her.
I decided to believe in some version of God, just possibly in Tom Kelly, and definitely in how much I’d loved my mom. I would believe in magic. I would say yes.
“By the way,” said Tom Kelly; he was leaning into the room with both hands braced against the door frame, like a warm-hearted Christmas Eve dad, checking that I was tucked in and that sweet dreams were on their way.
“I should mention something. You have one year to fall in love and get married. One year, or all of this, by which I mean Rebecca, all of it disappears forever.”
I chased Tom down the hall, yelling, “Hey! Wait up! Hold on!”
“Yes?” said Tom, barely pausing.
“What are you talking about? I’ve only been beautiful for about ten seconds and now I have to fall in love and get married? That’s ridiculous and it’s not much time and it’s not fair!”
“And you’ve just answered all of your own questions. Because there’s a clock attached to every beautiful woman. From the second she comes into her own, she begins to decline, because she begins to age. Aging is every beautiful woman’s kryptonite. And so, yes, it’s ridiculous and no, you don’t have much time and of course it’s not fair. Those three statements are the essence of beauty.”
“But … but …,” I protested as I slumped to the floor, with my back against the wall. Just a moment earlier I’d been giddy, riding the delirious crest of my new beauty and now here I was, back at square one.
“But — how am I supposed to meet someone? Where am I supposed to go? A bar? The Internet? Or do I just stand near an exit ramp and hold up a cardboard sign that says, MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN BEFORE THE TURNPIKE — MARRY ME?”
“Oh, please,” said Tom. “Have some faith. And get some sleep. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“Why? What am I going to do?”
I shivered, unconsciously holding my hands in front of my endangered new face. What did Tom have planned? Speed dating? A singles cruise? A slave auction?
“What’s the first and most important rule of successful marketing?”
I waited for it.
“If you want to sell the goods, you’ve got to put them in the window. So tomorrow you’re going to be photographed. For the cover of Vogue.”
Vogue had been my mom’s favorite magazine. Every month she’d sit and slowly turn the pages, as if she were searching for an especially meaningful biblical passage. She’d be absorbed for hours and sometimes she’d point out a photo of a particular model and say, “She knows what she’s doing” or “She’s almost it, but not quite, which is heartbreaking,” and once she’d scowled at a model and commented, “She’s a total slut, and she doesn’t bathe, ever. Trust me.”
The next morning as Drake drove us to the photo shoot I asked Tom, “But — Vogue? Isn’t that aiming a little high? Like the highest? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not for Rebecca.”
As we entered the industrial building where the photo session was going to take place, I saw that there was a gaggle of models lounging in the lobby area, slumped sideways over vinyl-upholstered chairs, their feet paddling in midair, or crouching in corners like injured sparrows, ignoring the NO SMOKING signs. They were all at least six feet tall and weighed less than their outfits, which were very tribal. When they were off duty the models all wore the sloppiest, most ill-fitting clothes, like a man’s oversized button-down dress shirt with a partially torn pocket, baggy khakis hacked into shorts with manicure scissors and heavy, battered work boots with the laces missing. My mom had once explained to me why models dressed like this: “It’s because they spend all day getting shoved and stapled into fancy clothes, but they also do it because they’re models. When a model wears something that looks like she found it in a Dumpster, everyone says, ‘See? She can look good in anything.’”
“I can’t go in there,” I told Tom, grabbing his arm. “Those girls will laugh at me, they’ll eat me alive. Those are …” I whispered the word, because I didn’t want to draw their fire. “… those girls are models.”
Tom shot me one of his looks, the one that meant “Becky, do you have the IQ of a folding chair,” and he put his hand in the small of my back and shoved me forward.
“Um, hey,” I said to the models, ducking my head. There was a pause as the models scrutinized me. This took a bit, because the models weren’t used to looking at other people.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” said one of the models, “it’s so not fair.”
“I hate you so much,” said another model.
“Oh my God,” said a third model, both numb and startled as if she’d just been beaned with a frying pan. “I’m having, like, it’s sort of, like, a breakthrough. It’s like, I finally understand something.”
“What, Smura?” another model asked her, and as I was processing the idea that someone could be named Smura, which sounded like a sexually transmitted disease, Smura walked over and stood right beside me. “See,” she said to everyone, “for the very first time, standing next to her, I’m the uggabug.”
This struck the models as a significant insight and t
hey joined hands.
“Now, when I’m walking down the street and I see an uggabug, I’m not just gonna avoid them,” said Smura. “I’m gonna tell them, ‘I know,’ and give them money.”
Tom ushered me through the modeling circle as some of the girls reached out to touch me, and he opened a heavy steel door into a large, shadowy room with bare concrete walls and rusting iron beams.
A batch of assistants was buzzing around someone in a fitted, untucked white shirt and tight black jeans, and when she turned around I saw that she was the woman I’d encountered the night before in the ladies’ room at the opera house.
“Tom,” said the woman, running her hand through her spiky, Norwegian-bleached hair and pinching a few strands upright as she inspected me. “I know what happened. I know exactly where you’ve been all these years.”
“Where?” asked Tom.
“Well, from what I’d heard, from extremely reliable sources, you had an inoperable brain tumor, which led to a spiritual rebirth and a trip to Calcutta where you fed lepers, and then once you’d achieved a state of perfect tranquility you were hit by a cab and got institutionalized as a hopeless vegetable.”
“Really?” said Tom.
“But you still looked good,” said the woman.
“Thank you,” said Tom, relieved.
“But here’s what really happened,” the woman continued, still not taking her eyes off me. “You went away, because you were waiting for her. For this creature. For Rebecca.”
“So was it worth it?” Tom asked teasingly. “All those years?”
“Seeley Burckhardt,” the woman told me, not bothering to answer Tom’s question directly. I’d arrived in the red dress, and there was a squad of hair and makeup people at the ready. Seeley looked at them, looked at me, and said, “Why?” Then she said, “There,” and motioned for me to move onto a swoop of thick, seamless white paper, which fell from a roll anchored to a beam and stretched many yards along the floor. I stepped gingerly onto the paper because I didn’t want to scuff or rip it and then I stood there, facing Seeley, with my arms hanging lifelessly and my feet skewed at ungainly angles.
“The Chromo-Flex,” said Seeley, and as an assistant passed her a complicated, boxy German camera, I yelled, “Stop!”
“What?” asked Seeley. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s new,” Tom explained. “She’s never done this before.”
I was having a massive anxiety attack. I couldn’t have my picture taken. It was the thing I hated most in the world, whether my photo was being snapped for my driver’s license or for a laminated fake-wood plaque when I’d been chosen the Super Shop-A-Lot Employee of the Month. I’d looked beyond terrible in both of those pictures. Even Rocher had agreed that the combination of bad lighting, my blotchy skin and my unwashed hair had made me look like I’d been arrested after a meth lab explosion. There was nothing more humiliating than having my picture taken because when someone takes your picture, there’s no argument. That’s what you look like. That’s who you are.
Except now — I was someone else.
“I need to check on something,” I said. “I need a mirror.”
“Of course,” said Seeley. “Get me the half-pint,” she ordered an assistant, who wheeled over a truncated mirror, reflecting my body only from the neck down.
“Take a look,” said Seeley.
I saw red. Even last night, I’d been so caught up in Rebecca’s face that I’d barely considered the first dress, which, of course, fit superbly, but now I saw that its color kept shifting, from the most gloriously blaring, hussified crimson, to a richer, moodier claret, to everything from sunny tomato to severe Chinese lacquer to the thousand reds of a forest fire. I never wore red, because red was sexy and brave and out there, and I wasn’t. And could it be, had the dress mutated since its debut only last night? The dress had been floaty and effervescent but now it was sleeker, more form fitting, more on the prowl.
With my face, with Rebecca’s face, gone, out of the frame, I was free to acknowledge that for the first time in my life, I had a body. No, that wasn’t it. I had a bod. I had what Rocher would call a smokin’ bod. I had what every guy in East Trawley, and in all of the East Trawleys everywhere, would growl or pant or howl was a rockin’ bod. And I was turning myself on.
From the half mirror at Seeley’s studio, here’s what I found out: Rebecca was at least five inches taller than Becky, among other things. I gaped at my long, elegant neck, my sculpted but not overly muscled shoulders and at my staggeringly amazing breasts, which were doing what breasts ordinarily only do in the comic books hoarded by the most slobbering teenage boys. They were high and firm and while not Playboy humongous, not shy either. Even more shockingly, I realized that I was wearing very high heels and that they didn’t hurt and I wasn’t falling over.
“Rebecca?” said Seeley, and I blushed because I’d been doing everything but feeling myself up. As an assistant wheeled the half-pint into a corner I almost followed it, as if I were chasing a wartime lover through a packed train station.
“Wait,” said Tom. “One more thing.” Anselmo, the dapper owner of Heel-to-Toe Footwear, elbowed his way through the clustered assistants, carrying a Tom Kelly shoe box, just like the one I’d found in my mom’s trailer.
“To your exact specifications,” Anselmo told Tom. “Our entire staff worked through the night. We hope you will be pleased.”
The box contained a pair of red spike heels that were at least six inches higher than the stilettos I was already wearing. I dragged Tom aside because I didn’t want to hurt Anselmo’s feelings.
“Are you crazy?” I hissed. “I can’t wear those shoes! No one could wear them! They’re designed for the Jolly Green Hooker!”
“They’re perfect,” said Seeley, eavesdropping.
“Rebecca,” said Tom, and I reluctantly kicked off my previous shoes and contemplated the twin skyscrapers, which had the cherry red candy flake glimmer of a souped-up Corvette hardtop.
Grimacing, I slid first one foot and then the next into these blocks of fashionable cement, praying that I wouldn’t hit the floor face-first.
“You know Superman’s cape and Batman’s utility belt and Captain America’s shield?” said Tom. “Those are just accessories. Those guys wish they had these shoes.”
Tom was miraculously right. Instead of feeling crunched and crippled, I had just grown even taller and more powerful and, well, even more Rebecca. The shoes strode onto the swoop of white paper as if they meant business and as if they couldn’t wait.
Someone flipped a switch and the room was in darkness except for a bank of lighting instruments aimed directly at me. There was a muffled mechanical click as Seeley took a test shot. Then an assistant switched on something that was like music, only hotter and really filthy. It was a gut-busting bass line using the notes of my mom’s ringtone remixed as a throbbing beat, growing tougher and more demanding, like a boyfriend you’d be ashamed of but could never resist. When I heard that sound I experienced my most staggering revelation to date. Because thanks to Rebecca’s red dress and her hips and her heels, I wanted to dance.
As Becky, I could barely walk. At the few dances I’d ever been to I’d either sat on the sidelines or I’d hidden in a dark corner, shuffling my feet and never raising my rigid arms. I’d been way too self-conscious about my face and my body and my lack of rhythm and I never wanted to be like one of those girls who thinks she’s hot stuff and who gloms onto the center of the dance floor, chugging away in a wild-and-free spaz attack while everyone else imitates her and falls all over themselves laughing.
Rocher was a decent dancer but still careful. Shanice and her friends usually danced together, doing choreographed gestures copied from videos. As long as they all did the same few moves, and as long as Shanice did them the best, everyone was safe.
I remembered something else. One afternoon when I was thirteen, I’d come home early from school and I’d heard music blasting from inside our trailer. Throu
gh a window, I’d seen my mom, all by herself, dancing to a song on the radio, an earlier, disco song. Her eyes were shut and she was really moving. She’d already gained a lot of weight but it didn’t matter, because I’d seen that she loved to dance.
“Oh my God,” she’d said when I’d opened the front door.
“Mom?”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she’d said, shutting off the music. “I shouldn’t be doing that, there is nothing worse than an old person dancing.”
“But — you were really good.”
“No, maybe once upon a time. I just heard that one song and I remembered it, from a long time ago.”
I’d tried to get her to tell me about when she’d first heard the song but she changed the subject and she started asking me about school and I never saw her dance ever again. But I had the feeling that she was here with me right now, at the Vogue shoot.
I began to move my pelvis, just a few inches from side to side, finding the beat. My shoulders joined in because they couldn’t resist. My head started to sway and then my arms got on board and then I just balls-out erupted; I shimmied and shook and howled, because I was wearing a sizzling red dress and killer red shoes, and because for the first time in my life I felt absolutely liberated from any embarrassment or clumsiness or doubt. Some beautiful women can’t dance; their beauty paralyzes them. They’re like opera divas trying to sing pop hits or ballerinas trying to get down. But, as I was learning, Rebecca could do anything and now she was driving the entire room into a frenzy. She was having such a good time that pretty soon everyone, including the assistants and even the burly union guys who’d been hired to move the heaviest equipment, was joining in and Anselmo had tossed aside his gold-topped cane and was boogying on a tabletop. Rebecca wasn’t just perfect, she was a party and she was teaching me what it was like to love every inch of my body and everything it could do.
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