Manhattan is lousy with models. It has more of these lank, willowy creatures per capita than any other city in the world. There is no model census, of course, but they’re everywhere, lovely, graceful vermin who wear what you can’t.
If you’re going to buy coffee in Dean & Deluca in SoHo, or ride the elevators in the Conde Nast building, as I have for many tortuous years, well, all you can do is pull in your tummy, wish you were carrying your gym clothes in a designer sport tote instead of a ripped plastic supermarket bag and try to appear appear as if you’re not staring. I’m willing to accept this momentary discomfort as the price of getting to live in a city as exciting and diverse as mine.
Well. Now I’m thinking there ought to be a law. I took my girls to soccer at the community center on the Lower East Side, as I do many Saturday mornings, and in floats this person, each of her legs about a third longer than mine, her hair messy-yet-still-fabulous, with outsized pouty lips that nonetheless looked natural. I’m wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and ugly Ugg boots. She’s wearing sleek black leggings and a $700 Montcler ski jacket. I’m dripping lukewarm coffee out of an environmentally friendly travel mug onto my shirt. She appears to need nothing but the aura of her own beauty to sustain her.
I feel like a troll, and it’s not even really her fault! That’s the worst part: She’s just a mom trying to get through the day, as am I. It’s just that she seems to do it with so much more…fluidity.
I turn to my friend and say, “Wow, look at her! What is she doing here?” Until recently this community center served hungry and tired immigrants living 10-to-a-tenement, and surviving on herring and pickles. Now, apparently, it’s where models cluster.
My friend responds that she, too, is taking her kid to soccer (he then scoots in behind her) and that she’s seen her on the playground. “She’s, like, from Luxembourg or something,” she says.
“Well, she can’t look like that and be really nice, can she?” I ask. My friend gives me a resigned smile and says, “Actually, she is. She’s really nice.”
I grunt. “Her son–he must be awful, then?” My friend shakes her head.
We sit there for a few minutes as silence. “Well, her husband seems like he might be kind of an asshole,” my friend offers.
YES! Now I can view her as a beautiful princess abducted and locked in a tower on the Lower East Side by an evil warlock, which not only fits into my narrative but allows me the possibility of actually liking her, should we ever meet. She has tsuris. So do I! She has a young child. So do I! We both are probably exhausted (she from going to fabulous parties and me from doing laundry, but still!) When she was the model-turned-mom who looks like she carried her fetus in a Botiker handbag, I couldn’t relate.
Go ahead, blast me. I deserve it. She can’t help being model-esque any more than I can help the way I have started to grow and old Jewish lady beard. I know, no one’s life is perfect. But it would help if people like her didn’t make it look so easy.
December 7, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I laughed all the way through!!! F models!! If they are nice F them worse!! Give us regular folks something to live for. Loved your post.
December 7, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I feel you! I once attended a Music Together class in a church basement in East Hampton with a friend of mine. I had my third child with me and he was a few months old so I figured that justified my mumu (it is not longer justified, three years later, and yet…it sits in my closet eagerly awaiting a new summer).
A few minutes after the class started and we were embarking on a rousing rendition of Kookaburra, in walks this very tall, blonde, thin, lovely, unpleasant person (she had one of those stomachs that look as if she stores her organs in a crystal urn at home somewhere and only pulls them out once a day when she needs to digest her celery) carrying one of those chunky, cherubic blond babies that look rented.
She sits down next to me, yay. In between songs she initiated a conversation with “your baby is beautiful” ; this, as Stephanie and all moms know, is the only possible sentence that could make me not hate her…and she must have known too.
It turns out that she was irritatingly kind and generous of spirit and, I might add, not at all dumb.
I was actually warming up to her when she asked me if I would want another child in the future. I thought this was a sweet question coming from a woman who, obviously only had one baby and, did not yet know the body ravaging horrors of multiple childbirth .
I replied that this was my third (I stated this with that wise, slightly superior look that none of us are proud of but that we all know well) and that I was very happy to stop here. To which she replied, slightly and beautifully exasperated and without an ounce of malice or superiority, “I know, me too…but I really want to go for the fourth. My husband just feels like they are all so close in age and we should wait a couple of more years.”
I would stop here because I feel that I need not elaborate on the deluge of unhealthy thoughts running through my head at that moment ( ‘how bad can bulimia be, really…?’ to ‘ I am coming back next week with a vile of acid…’ to ‘I will go to culinary school, get a job as her cook and add thousands of calories of lard to all her meals’…), but then she added the coup de gras :”OH, are you here all summer? We should get all the kids together! What BEACH do you go to?”
I don’t remember what happened next, I might have passed out, or the class ended, Its really not important.
What is important is how badly I felt for being so insecure. Why couldn’t I just go to the beach with her and our children? What is wrong with me? she could have turned out to be a life long friend (who would hand me down last season’s Prada tote when she got her new one!).
Then I imagined her three, cherubic, well behaved blond children, running on the beach and speaking French, German, Italian and Chinese in perfect accents, wearing their slightly worn Calypso by Christianne Celle cover-ups, and my three beautiful, extremely LOUD Brazilian/Italian children screaming at me in English and Portuguese and shoving sand down each other’s throats, and me in my mumu…
December 12, 2008 at 3:58 pm
ha, i know who you’re talking about…
yes, unfortunately, she and her good-looking husband happen to be very nice…