by Cathy Alter
I realized I was going a bit batty when, at a party one weekend, I overheard someone talking about Valencia, Spain. I had just read an article about Valencia’s “Hidden Gems,” but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember where. Was it in Bazaar? Or was Bazaar’s travel piece on Positano and not Valencia? Wait, maybe I read it in O magazine. Didn’t Gayle go there on her honeymoon? No, that’s not right. Before long, I was driving everyone at the party crazy with my train of thought. My madman’s itch to get to the bottom of the Valencia mystery was agonizing. Once home, I toppled stacks of magazines onto the carpet and tore through each one, page after violent page, until I found the article. It was in a three-year-old issue of GQ that I had swiped from Karl’s apartment.
Another side effect of having an amalgam of magazine articles in my head at all times was that I was paying way more attention to fashion than I ought to. This month, the whole peasant look had me really stressed out. Intellectually, I knew that if I wanted to successfully dress like Eliza Doolittle, I would have to layer, wildly. But when I saw the three-tiered paisley skirt modeled across a two-page spread in Self magazine, what to pair it with baffled me—a cable-knit sweater and a smocked blouse? Slouchy boots? Or a crazy-quilt concoction of a Donegal tweed vest, mandarin-collar smock, and high-heeled loafers? I saw myself walking down Twenty-third Street on my way to work in one of the getups featured in Allure’s “Peasantville”—a billowing paisley silk shirt and skirt, a velvet corset, eelskin lace-up boots, and what looked like a tasseled curtain pull as a necklace—and easily recognized there was no way in hell I was going to pull off that look. The skill required to peacefully introduce so many textures and textiles together—velvet, wool, silk, eel—was too advanced. Plus, it was about 90 million degrees in D.C., so the last thing I wanted to do was dress like an extra from Doctor Zhivago.
Which was why, weeks after my camping trip, I was still wearing what my friend Richard had lovingly nicknamed the Survivor sandals (when he wasn’t referring to them as “those unfortunate bull dyke sandals”). If Jesus had played for the NBA, he would have worn these beauties. All hopped up on brown leather and Velcro, still covered in a layer of fine dust from the motorcycle track, they made Birkenstocks look dainty. I had also been sneaking around in my nylon-and-polyester hiking pants, which were cropped and a confused shade of blue. Like the sandals, the pants employed Velcro, the official fastening device of all outdoor gear. Worn together, the look was so unflattering and unfashionable, I wouldn’t have been surprised to open up Glamour and find a photograph of me, front and center in “Dos & Don’ts,” with a black bar across my eyes.
Like someone who continues to wear their personalized Mickey Mouse ears long after they’ve left the Magic Kingdom, I was the walking embodiment of a bad souvenir. Or, even worse, I was this month’s centerfold from Field & Stream. I decided my mission was to get my wardrobe back to big-city standards.
Practically all the magazines had something major to say about dungarees this month. Glamour clocked in with a ten-page feature called “Your New Jeans,” with a special “Flattery Top 10!” section showcasing denim for every kind of body shape. Cosmo also had a similar concept with “Blues for Your Bod.” But, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “Never the twain shall meet.”
Cosmo also had a solution for “Flat Butt,” my particular problem. “Built-in butt lifting pads give a barely-there booty a little boost.” At $198, the FRx Clothing brand jeans (does this stand for “Fanny Rx”?) weren’t a joke, even though they sounded like the sequel to Saturday Night Live’s “Mom Jeans” parody.
I had never heard of the FRx brand before, and I wasn’t about to waltz into Neiman Marcus and ask where I might find their butt-pad jeans. So I walked to the Georgetown outpost of Miss Sixty to look for what InStyle called “the cream of the cropped.” The photo spread showed the pair of just-below-the-knee jeans worn four different ways:
Downtown Bound, paired with a pink and black empire top and gold flats;
Country Escape, tucked into tall boots with a sweater coat opened to reveal a wife beater;
Flash Dance, teamed with a baby-doll top and stilettos; and
Class Action, matched with a ladylike blouse, fitted jacket, and peep-toe pumps.
I did the math. For $159, I was really getting four different jeans and spending only $39.75 for each.
I got about two feet into the store and immediately experienced what I call the Urban Outfitter Effect. There’s a period in your life where you delight in shopping at Urban Outfitters—all the ironic message-print T-shirts, kooky calico-print skirts, and zany shower curtains. And then you walk in one day and think, Am I the oldest person in here? That’s what it felt like to be standing in Miss Sixty, wondering if the men’s clothing was on the right side or the left.
I grabbed at the first salesperson I saw, a lanky guy with closely cropped cornrows and silver pants, and gave him an apologetic silly-me look. “Am I in the right section?” As if to illustrate my confusion, I pointed to the rack in front of me, which consisted of orange nylon genie pants and stretched-out tank tops with 1980s spin-art designs.
“What did you need help with?” I waited a beat before he added, “Ma’am.”
I showed Silver Pants the page I tore from InStyle with the cropped jeans. “Do you have these?”
He studied the picture for a while and seemed to actually be reading the whole article. “I’m going to have to look around,” he said, taking the page with him.
I followed Silver Pants around the store while he eyeballed the racks for any short-legged pants. Occasionally he’d stop on a pair, hold it up to himself, look at the InStyle picture, and then silently place it back on the rack.
“I know we had this style a few months ago,” he said, sounding like someone who forgot where they put their reading glasses. Except he was about twenty years away from needing them.
Thankfully, there were very few customers around to witness the clueless foreigner being led around by the supercool native. Everything about this experience was mortifying to me—from the Day-Glo homage to 1980s fashion that I had actually worn in the ’80s to the beeping and whirring electronica being pumped out at ear-bleeding decibels, to, when Silver Pants eventually found the jeans (on the sale rack for half price!) the dressing room curtain that provided about as much privacy as a hospital gown.
The jeans fit perfectly, which didn’t really surprise me, since my body is still pretty much prepubescent (no boobs, hips, or ass). Even if I wasn’t a schoolgirl, I could still fit into schoolgirl clothing, which is not necessarily a good thing. I didn’t want to end up looking like one of those desperate housewives who try too hard to be hip and young. (Like Lindsay Lohan’s mother, for example.)
“Do you have a question?” asked the cashier, even though I was standing in front of her with my jeans in one hand and my wallet in the other. Was she as confused by my presence in the store as I was?
“Yes,” I said. “I have a question. Can I buy these?”
Next to me, twin girls were jointly buying a shredded T-shirt. As the cashier rang them up, they faced each other and silently mirrored each other’s movements. The one in the micro mini would slowly circle her arm and the one in the skintight low riders would begin to slowly circle her arm. They reminded me of those creepy “Play with us” twins from The Shining. The woman ringing me up wasn’t giving them the time of day, but I couldn’t stop staring—at their identical Bettie Page hairdos, their undead pallor, their telepathic game of Simon Says.
After the sisters left, I wanted to bring the cashier into my intimate view of them and say something like, “What do you think was up with those girls?” But I was afraid that would make me sound like my mother. When I lived in NYC, I brought my parents to the East Village, and my mother went into fashion-police overdrive, making loud comments about all the pink hair and apron dresses on Eighth Street. I remember feeling sorry for her then, like she was fundamentally unable to appreciate the carefree fun and experimenta
l wit that the young so naturally possess, especially in downtown Manhattan.
And now, standing adrift in Miss Sixty, I at last understood my mother’s haughty disdain. I didn’t like young people anymore. Especially the gangs of college girls who walked around Georgetown dressed in their layered tank tops and micro kilts. I hated their long Victoria’s Secret hair and the way they pushed by me without ever saying, “Excuse me.” Feeling invisible was not, as I had recently read in Allure, the sole domain of over-forty actresses in Hollywood. We are all competing for something, and the fact that we will inevitably lose our ingenue status is heartbreaking in its simple truth.
I wasn’t ready to blame the inordinate amount of time I was spending with women’s magazines for creating this Victoria’s Secret insecurity—but the magazines were definitely pollinating my preexisting condition. The more I looked at pictures of clear-complexioned, strong-jawed women, the uglier and more out of place I felt in stores like Miss Sixty.
Walking home, I hit on my true challenge. August wasn’t about a pair of new jeans. It was about a set of old genes. In order to feel comfortable in Miss Sixty, I had to feel comfortable in Miss Thirty-nine.
It wasn’t just the Miss Sixty experience that had me feeling so focused on my age (a cold, hard fact that I still hadn’t revealed to Karl). There had been a confluence of events over the past few days that left me particularly vulnerable.
For one, there was the phone call that Karl received from his most recent ex-girlfriend, Jackie, a twenty-four-year-old model. I had seen a picture of her once, when Karl was opening some files on his desktop, searching for a photo of his old Triumph bike to show me. When he accidentally landed on the photo of Jackie, who was wearing a bright yellow bikini and leaning forward to show off her impossible cleavage, he closed the image with the trigger finger of a Wild West outlaw and said with a mix of pride and shame, “I had to try the cliché at least once.”
So I wasn’t very inclined to like this girl, even though Karl had told me she was crazy and superficial and too high-maintenance (don’t all guys describe their exes that way?). When she called, Karl was sitting next to me, talking about bugs.
“Did you know that cicadas don’t have a mouth or an anus?” he informed me, just before his cell phone rang.
Jackie was calling to ask if Karl had any extra tickets to see Thievery Corporation, a local band who was playing a sold-out show the following night. Why she thought he was suddenly a ticket scalper was beyond me, but that’s not what I focused on. No. I was stuck on the fact that even though I looked pretty cute in my new jeans, I was never going to look like a twenty-four-year-old bikini model.
“She still thinks we’re friends,” explained Karl, thinking the threatened look on my face was one of jealousy and not one of envy. “She doesn’t understand that it’s over.”
It may have been over for him, but for me, things were just beginning. Jackie’s phone call went hand in hand with an article I had just read in Glamour that confirmed, in 1,500 words, all the fears I had about where I lay along the continuum of bikini model and old bag.
In an article entitled “Men’s Upgrade Addiction,” Rory Evans asked, “Why is it that guys can’t seem to resist trading in everything—from their iPods to their girlfriends—for a new version?” A harshly lit photo of Brad and Jen, their lips pressed into tight smiles and staring vacantly in opposite directions, was placed side by side with a color-drenched one of Brad and Angelina. Angelina looked smug and completely full of herself. Brad, his hand casually tucked into his front pocket, looked like he just had the best lay of his life. Along the bottom margin of the page, in a CNN-like crawl, was this breaking news item: “Infidelity starts in the mind: 30% of committed partners have fantasized about cheating.”
Now, the smart thing to do would have been to quickly move along to the next article, “Make Over Your Hair without Cutting It.” (Besides jeans, hair was also big news this month.) But I had already pulled up to the car wreck. The need to rubberneck was too irresistible.
If I weren’t already the “older model,” Evans’s article would have been great fun to read. In it, she came up with hilarious nomenclature to describe the ways men cheat, from “‘expiration dating’ (cycling through girlfriends more quickly than it takes the milk in the refrigerator to sour)” to “‘nesting-doll wives’ (marrying younger, newer versions of essentially the same woman).” She recounted the tale of a high-profile Hollywood husband who cheated on his wife, one of “Los Angeles’ best-looking women,” by slumming it with “ultra-average looking women.”
Evans quoted notorious celebrity cads like Bill Maher: “It’s never about big or little or short or tall or blond or brunette. It’s only about old and new.” And she cited an interesting study of a male lab rat who “will copulate early and often with a cohabitating lady rat, and then his libido apparently tapers off…until a different lady rat is put in the cage and he gets busy with her all over again.”
It was impossible for me to glean anything good from all of this. Evans didn’t even offer any constructive advice, other than to satiate men’s constant need for novelty by constantly evolving ourselves. “We have to do our part and invest in change,” she concluded. I suddenly remembered that scene from Fried Green Tomatoes where Kathy Bates, attempting to jazz up her marriage, greeted her husband at the front door swaddled in Saran Wrap (a skill that I had thankfully mastered back in June).
Was this my destiny? Would Karl trade me in unless I answered the door wearing nothing but a Brazilian wax and a platinum blond wig? (My brother and I once found a ratty Marilyn wig in our attic, and when my black-haired mother saw us playing with it, she had said, “Oh, your father bought that for me and asked me to wear it out to dinner one night.” Which she did. Just once.)
But my mother was nine years younger than my father. She was also so entirely comfortable sitting up on my father’s pedestal, so entirely convinced that she looked just like Catherine Deneuve, so entirely content with where her life had landed her, that I couldn’t imagine her ever worrying about being retired for even a second out of her thirty-five-year-marriage. When my dad wanted something different, he bought a new pair of Ferragamos.
And even though she had zero concerns about her own relationship, that didn’t stop my mother from bothering with mine. After two months of dating Karl, I finally decided to tell my parents I was seeing someone new.
“Is he Jewish?” was my father’s first question.
“He’s half Jewish,” I replied, “and half Chinese.”
“Oh. He’s a Chew,” he quipped and passed the phone to my mother.
“How old is he?” was her first question.
“He’s twenty-nine.”
“Be prepared for disappointment” was all she said.
After having recurring nightmares where Karl, appearing as a club bouncer, carded me and then refused to let me past the red velvet rope, I made sure I had my driver’s license on me at all times. When I slept over at his place, I put my pocketbook on the floor next to my side of the bed, and when he was over at my place, I stored it in the bottom of my desk drawer. I was constantly preoccupied by my dirty secret and fretfully wondered how long I could keep it comfortably underground.
“No, no, I don’t like this for you at all,” pronounced Dr. Oskar when I admitted I still hadn’t revealed my grand age to Karl. “He will not mind,” he prophesized. “He wants to only celebrate you as the beautiful woman you are.” Dr. Oskar was big into celebrating me. He had heard enough about my mother to know that she hadn’t partied enough in my honor (when I told him that my mother had once sat me down, at twelve years old, and in defense of always wearing makeup, informed me I was no Christie Brinkley, he choked up and said, “I need a moment to get over my sadness for you”).
I promised Dr. Oskar I’d come clean to Karl before our next session, which was a week away. “That way, if he dumps me,” I reasoned, “I won’t have to wait that long to cry on your couch.”
&nbs
p; “Karl will not leave you over this,” he assured me. “But please listen to your dreams. They are very anxious for you.”
So, between the phone call from Karl’s boob-infested ex, the piece in Glamour about a man’s biological compulsion to trade up, my mother’s spectacularly unsupportive remark about steeling myself for disappointment, and the nightly outings of myself in dream form, I’d say there was a lot of anxiety in bed with me.
And yet for help, I had no choice but to turn to the same sources that were contributing to my suffering. After all, shouldn’t these magazines also dispense equal amounts of optimism to balance out the stinging despair of articles like “Men’s Upgrade Addiction”?
So I began to look for the good. Maybe Diane Lane could offer some encouragement. Here she was in Self, talking about how she was finally comfortable in her own skin. “Luckily,” she reflected, “40 is the new 30.” Which was great news, because that would make Karl and me the same age. Lane also joked that she gave herself a husband (the studly Josh Brolin) for her fortieth birthday and credited more sleep for her good looks.
In “Dating You at 20, 30, 40,” Jake, Glamour’s thirty-two-year-old male columnist, offered his “man’s opinion” on what he had learned after wining and dining three women from three generations. “All turned out to be flings,” wrote Jake, “but in that brief period of comparison shopping, I learned a lot about what’s great, and not so, about dating women of every age.”
Jake, who was pictorially represented by Jude Law in Alfie, and the spanning decades by Sienna Miller, Marisa Tomei, and Susan Sarandon, opined on everything from…
HER SEXIEST BODY PART
20s: Anything chubby. Chubbiness is unbelievably attractive in women in their twenties because it’s springy, curvy and healthy looking. Does it subconsciously signal their fertility? Is that the draw? Who knows—maybe it’s just cute.