Box Girl

by Lilibet Snellings

  Is she for sale?

  Gobble, Gobble

  Sometimes the art installations in the box are seasonal. One January, the word “Resolve” hung from the front window, glowing in purple neon. The back wall was covered in New Year’s resolutions, which were scribbled in sidewalk chalk: Call your mom. Floss. Take a lover.

  Tonight, it seems the box artist has a real passion for Thanksgiving. Or maybe just a sick sense of humor. He’s covered the back wall with a blown-up photograph of an overweight man wearing a tie and a Rolex, the sleeves of his white oxford cloth shirt rolled up over his fat, furry forearms. The man has a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. He is clearly preparing to carve a turkey, except there is no turkey. There is just me. So I guess he is preparing to carve me. On the front pane of glass, it says, “Gobble, Gobble,” and all around me are papier-mâché carrots, gourds, pumpkins, and squash.

  Things Even I Am Unwilling to Do

  Box Girls—11

  I need a show of hands who is available and willing to work on NYE.

  The shift is from 7PM-2AM and pays $200.

  You will be provided with a gold bikini and will be painted all gold . . .12

  The theme of the night is “Gold ’09”

  You will be wearing a gold bathing suit and will be hanging out by the pool . . . swimming . . . hanging out . . .13 Bathing suits and robes will be provided, as will a special table for all three of you, drinks, along with a heating lamp. I’m pretty sure it will be OK to invite a friend to come along and hang out at the table, but I will double-check . . . The pool will be heated and no guests will be allowed in the pool. It’s just for the three of you to use and look pretty in.14 :)

  If you are interested, could you please forward me a recent photo of yourself along with your measurements . . . and don’t forget to include your height and weight!15

  11 An actual email from management.

  12 Oh, like how that secretary was murdered in Goldfinger.

  13 You already said “hanging out.”

  14 I’m thinking that wet and cold and painted all gold we wont look so much “pretty” as “freakish.” But thanks for the smiley face, it’s somewhat reassuring.

  15 No.

  Clare

  I couldn’t get the man’s words out of my head. “Is she for sale?” I decided to talk to Clare about this, because not only had Clare been a Box Girl, but she went on to work for The Standard in the design department.

  We met at a party hosted by Flaunt. It was at a new clothing boutique on Melrose Avenue and was sponsored by a vodka company, so the signature drink, complete with floating cranberries, was free. Clare and I stood in the corner by the bar and rested our free drinks on top of a garbage can.

  We looked around the room while we talked. There were lots of guys with beards and long hair—“Stillwaters,” I used to call them, because they look like they could be in that band from Almost Famous. I went through a stage in my single days when I loved Stillwater-types. Now my husband, Peter—tall, blonde, all-American boy—looks nothing like the Stillwaters. I sometimes find myself watching these men, wondering what they would look like without the hair, the mustache, the beard, the mask? Would they still look “cool?” Would they still be “cool?” How much of their identity is tangled up in all that hair?

  Clare and I decided to take a lap. We saw Luis, still the editor of Flaunt, holding court on the sidewalk outside of the shop. His arms were flailing and his philosophizing was rapid and unrelenting—how we’ve got to help each other out, how that’s what it’s all about, how in this business, in this economy, we’ve got to look out for each other, you know what I mean?

  We saw the old assistant to the publisher, who speaks with that flirty Hispanic inflection, that quick, quick, quick clip and then the slow, burning finish—the last word dragged out and flipped up at the end, as if everything is said with a touch of attitude.

  We saw a former intern at Flaunt, who was also a model, and wanted you to know it, but was also quick to amend that admission with, “And I went to Berkeley.”

  When Clare and I returned to our corner by the garbage can, I was finally able to ask her about the box.

  She immediately launched into hotel design–speak.

  “You go to a hotel and you can be whoever you want to be,” she said. “So people walk into The Standard, and the first thing they see is this girl, doing whatever she wants to do, being whoever she wants to be.”

  From the neck up—Nordic-blonde, blue eyes, Popsicle pink lips even without lipstick—Clare looks like she should be a greeter at a J.Crew in Greenwich, Connecticut. But from the shoulders down, she is covered in tattoos.

  “Okay,” I said. “But why do they have to be girls?”

  Then came art school–speak.

  “You have to remember the origin of art is the woman’s body. That was one of the first forms of art.”

  I let out a slow and unconvinced, “Okay,” stabbing a cranberry with my straw.

  “I’m of the school where something like this is celebrating the woman’s body, not degrading it. All the girls are dressed the same but they are all different shapes and sizes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. They’re not all model-looking girls. Not at all.”

  “Huh,” I said, nodding my head.

  I did not know that. I had always assumed, based on nothing more than email correspondence, that they were, in fact, model-type girls. I had received countless emails asking me to cover shifts for girls who had castings, or callbacks, or, for one obligation I will never forget, because a Box Girl was “recovering from breast augmentation.”

  I share this with Clare.

  “Some are. But not all. That’s not the point. It’s supposed to be a peek into human nature, not just a display case for guys to look at pretty girls.”

  I replied, “Well that’s what I had always thought, had always hoped, until I heard a man ask if I was for sale.”

  She already knows this story.

  “That was one time,” she said briskly. “So the girls are all in the same outfit, but each one of them is different, and they are all doing different things. Some read, some sleep, some play guitar. You write, for instance.”

  Driving home that night I thought about this. I thought about how, for the most part, I agreed with Clare. I tried to figure out why. Why was I okay with sitting in a box wearing so little clothing?

  Panopticon

  An older lady in a black button-down blouse and thick, tortoiseshell glasses is resting an elbow on the front desk, staring. No, glaring. I peek at her quickly and shrink back to my book. I now understand what it means to “steal glances” or look at something “out of the corner of your eye.” Since the most important Box Girl rule is “no eye contact,” I have to be sneaky about it—observing slyly, peripherally. I’m not supposed to make eye contact, but they say nothing about looking. With this woman, though, I don’t need to look. Judgmental eyes, after all, are meant to be felt, not seen.

  Some nights, if the lights in the box are particularly bright, I can’t see anything. The glass becomes reflective, and I’m in bondage to the gaze of others. It’s like being alone in a house at night with wall-to-wall windows and no blinds. On nights like this, the box becomes a sort of Panopticon—the circular-style prisons conceived in the late eighteenth century by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. With a surveillance station in the middle and cells facing toward the center, a guard could observe the inmates without them knowing whether or not they were being observed. Central to Bentham’s design was the idea that, not only were the guards able to view the prisoners at all times, but also, and most importantly, that the prisoners could not see the guards, thus ever-unsure whether they were under surveillance. Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” and “a mill for grinding rogues honest.”

  The French philosopher Michel Foucault was fascinated by Bentham’s design and argued that the Panoptic
on scenario forced prisoners to govern their own behavior, assuming they cared about the repercussions of bad behavior. Foucault believed prisoners would regulate their conduct based solely on the possibility that they were being watched.

  It’s easy to argue that social media is our modern-day Panopticon. It is impossible to know who is watching you, and we filter our online behaviors based on the off chance that someone might be looking. It forces us to see ourselves the way the watchers do. We are both the guards and the prisoners, judging others while allowing others to judge us.

  On these nights in the box, when the glass operates like a mirror, the only thing I can see is myself. I get to observe myself, judge myself, see myself as they do—as this woman does—from the outside, looking in.

  It’s hard not to wonder on those nights, seeing myself sitting there, stuck in a box, is this valid? Putting young women in glass boxes? Have I surrendered myself as an object for others to ogle? Am I someone who willingly objectifies herself?

  Marina Abramović, the performance artist, has always used her body as the subject, medium, and object of her art. For her piece entitled “The Artist Is Present,” Abramović sat in silence for more than seven hundred hours while strangers stared at her. For seven hours a day, from mid-March until the end of May, she sat motionless in an armless wooden chair, inside the atrium at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Anyone who wanted to (and was willing to wait in the sometimes overnight line) could sit opposite her, for as long as they liked, if they agreed to sit silently and motionless, too, and stare back into her eyes.

  People often ask of Abramović’s work, is it art? And perched like a doll in a display case, I have to wonder the same: Is this? Am I, too, performing in here? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think I’m playing an important part in an ongoing installation. But am I just deluding myself? Because if that’s the case, then why the scanty outfits? Let’s be honest, here. Am I a piece of art or a piece of ass?

  However artistic an endeavor I may have assured myself this is, the strangers in the lobby don’t necessarily see it that way. They see a girl on exhibit, clad in very little clothing, and they must think this is just another typically LA gimmick. Am I no different than the strippers down the street at The Body Shop?

  I’ve asked a lot of people about this. While some feel the box is just a cheap, Hollywood attempt at grabbing attention, others, fortunately, see it as something more substantial. A friend told me one day, “What’s so intriguing about the girls in the box is that they are not dancing, or posing seductively. For the most part, they are reading.” This, she said, “Makes them that much more attractive.”

  During our first trip to LA, that summer after college, Rachel, Heather, and I went to The Standard. We had dinner in its twenty-four-hour diner with some guys we knew from college, and as we were leaving, we noticed the box. I said what I thought the people I was with wanted to hear, something like, “Oh my god, can you believe that? Weird. I mean, can you imagine?” But as the sliding-glass doors clicked open, I couldn’t help but look back one more time, thinking, That is so awesome.

  It’s as if being a Box Girl is some strange LA badge of honor. And in that weird way, I like being seen in the box. I like this recognition. Attention is seductive, intoxicating. That is a hard thing to admit. That’s not something you’re supposed to admit.

  But writers, after all, are performers. Though we are more bashful about it than actors who stand on stage and shout their talent to the world, the art and craft of writing is still a performance. Yet I spend the majority of my days sitting in front of a computer, by myself, staring out a window. It is an incredibly isolating way to make a living. (Or, almost make a living.) When I write in the box, in a sense, there is an audience. It is my stage.

  The box also feeds my impulse to watch, and to record. I can observe—stealthily—but I don’t have to engage. I am surrounded by the action and armed with a pen, but I’m not forced to join in. I get to report from inside this world. Like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe and Lillian Ross and Gay Talese and all the other reporters I have admired all my life, I get to be a true fly on the wall. But unlike all of them, no one is questioning my tape recorder. Because of this, I like to think that I am using the box as much as it is using me. I like to think it’s my little experiment. I get to know what it’s like to be a creature in captivity that is pointed at and talked about by passing tourists. I get to be the monkey at the zoo—the monkey at the zoo with a human-sized brain and a laptop. They might be watching me, but I am watching them, too.

  Women often ask if I feel vulnerable with all those people looking at me. The truth is, I feel powerful. Proud, even. This, I think, has everything to do with overcoming certain eating and body issues. So, in some ways, I have this sense of pride that I am finally at a point in my life where I can sit in a box in very little clothing and look good, knowing it’s not because I deprived myself or ran twelve miles, but because I am actually, finally, healthy. I can wear this scanty outfit with triumph.

  It has to be noted, though, that while The Standard has locations in Miami and New York, its Hollywood location is the only one with a box. Which is no surprise, really, given LA is a city that often seems entirely focused on external beauty, eternal youth, and so on. I’ll pull the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote from my dad’s photocopied page of Forbes: “Only remember—west of the Mississippi: it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.” I used to believe this when I first moved to LA. I loved this quote. I took pride in it. I’d think, I’m from the part of the country where people’s brains are more valued than their bodies. It took no time, however, to realize that there were as many artistic, intelligent, and interesting people on the “left coast” as on the right. And look at me now: a writer moonlighting as a Box Girl, relying on body, not brains. I’m sure tourists at the hotel assume I’m some bimbo, and you know what? I deserve that, for initially and irresponsibly writing off Los Angeles, its people, and its intellect. It’s a city of countless contradictions, and perhaps for that reason above all others, it’s a city that speaks to me so strongly.

  Even from a geographical perspective, Los Angeles is a city mired in contradiction, the urban planning itself a dismembered mess of patchwork: Silverlake, Sherman Oaks, Westwood, Watts . . . Hollywood, Hawthorne, Brentwood, Bel Air . . . Koreatown, Compton, Marina del Rey. These neighborhoods have as much to do with one another as they do with Des Moines. Downtown Los Angeles is not even really downtown. Or maybe it is? It’s impossible to tell. With its labyrinthine webs of expressways, LA is a city that is impossible to figure out. For my first year here, I didn’t even know there was anything east of Fairfax Avenue. I had gone to the Farmer’s Market, and to The Grove, and I thought that was it. I didn’t know there was anything else over there. Unlike in Oakland, where Gertrude Stein says, “There’s no there, there,” in LA, there are countless theres, there. It just takes a while to find them.

  Because of the city’s fragmentary, far-flung floor plan, accessible almost exclusively by car, there is no collective sense of community, no overarching sense of “we.” Unlike in New York, or Boston, or Chicago, where there is civic pride in spades, in LA, there is no central rallying cry. It’s a city of transplants. When I meet someone who is actually from LA, my reaction is, “Really? You’re whole life?” I want to put my friend Madison in a museum. (But that’s also because her dad arrested O.J.) Everyone moves to LA with plans not to stay. But then we stay. Because somewhere along the way, this Garden of Forking Freeways burrows itself inside our hardened, from-elsewhere hearts, and slowly, we begin to love the place we claimed to hate.

  Los Angeles is such a misunderstood city. I certainly didn’t understand it at first—made assumptions about it, wrote it off. It’s a place that’s impossible not to ridicule until you really grit your teeth and muscle through the first two years. Truly, I think it takes that long to fully comprehend what’s so redeeming about the place, and to fully apprecia
te all its endearing inconsistencies. It is ugly, and it is also beautiful. It is fast; it is slow. It is sexy, and it is also smart.

  I grew up in a house full of contradictions. My mom pulls for University of North Carolina, my dad likes N.C. State. My mom is a bleeding heart liberal; my dad thinks Sarah Palin is a “babe.” My dad believes in getting to the airport two hours before flight time; my mom once missed a flight while getting a manicure in the terminal. My mom would go to a cocktail party every night of the week; my dad likes to joke that he wants to move to a lighthouse. Every election year, they almost get divorced. My dad will walk into the kitchen and say, “I’m not staying in this room if Al Sharpton is on the TV. I have absolutely no patience for Al Sharpton.” And my mom will laugh while turning up the volume. My parents also almost get divorced at the end of every college basketball season. During March Madness, my mom watches the games hunched over the kitchen counter—always in her lucky Carolina blue sweater—her eyes six inches away from the twelve-inch screen, screaming obscenities. While a perfect Southern lady eleven months of the year, come March, my mom starts talking like a character from Road House. A die-hard UNC fan, during tournament time, those “shit bags from Duke” are always up to no good. While my dad spends his Sundays watching every single golf tournament that is ever televised (“He would watch the Toilet Bowl Open, if it were on,” my mom likes to say), his passion for college basketball these days is pretty lackluster. I once called the house and asked what they were up to, and my mom said, “Well, I’m in the kitchen watching college basketball, and your father’s in the den watching The Sound of Music.”

  In all my years with the two of them, I have yet to uncover anything they have in common or any particularly compelling reason they ever got together. And still, they have been happily married for more than thirty years. That’s not to say they don’t have their fair share of arguments. But in some ways, I think the occasional knock-down, drag-out dispute is a sign of a good relationship. At least you’re talking to each other. They say silence kills more relationships than violence. I don’t remember who this “they” was, and while I’m pretty sure shooting someone with a shotgun or running them over with your car is a surefire way to end things, the sentiment still holds some merit. I don’t trust couples who say they don’t argue. It’s like girls who don’t drink beer; something’s up. Somehow, after decades of being married to my dad, my mom hasn’t poisoned the Metamucil, and I truly think it has something to do with their differences. They have amicably agreed to disagree.