Big Smile No Teeth

I’m with my family, so I’m posting another excerpt from my unpublished (hooray.) memoir.  Sue me.

Working in the fashion industry opened my eyes to lots of things.  The most disturbing was, despite being of normal size in the regular world, I was apparently an overstuffed cow in the fashion world.  This wasn’t the first time I’d been called fat.  Before I’d ever worked, before I’d met my first client, it had taken less than fifteen minutes for fashion experts to deduce this niggling fact about me.

            One of the first steps to becoming a model is to do a test-shoot to build your portfolio.  Paulette, acting as my surrogate fashion mom, knew I didn’t have the stomach to handle a real test, so she scheduled a mini-test, to see how I felt in front of the camera.  That’s how I ended up in a studio just moments from being officially christened as fat. 

            With his big curly hair and baggy jeans, Josh looked like the kind of guy record stores employed to look cool and ignore customers, but he was also a sought after up-and-coming fashion photographer.  He looked me up and down, his eyes half open.  Either he just woke up or was unimpressed.  It was probably a bit of both.

            “Go stand over there.”  He pointed at a mark in front of a white backdrop surrounded by bright lights.  “Gimme a sec.”

            My heart was thumping, my stomach rolled like I’d eaten the egg salad sandwich left tanning on the picnic table.  Some model I was, I didn’t want to have my photo taken, I just wanted to leave so that Josh could get back to being effortlessly cool all by himself. 

            “Here we go.”  He brought the camera up.  No directions, no pep talks, he was leaving it all up to me and I was clueless.

            “What do you want me to do?” I stood fixed to the floor trying to keep my hands from shaking.

            “Something.  Anything.”

            Standing still was something, anything.  I didn’t move.  Josh focused his lens on me.  I stared blankly into space. 

            Josh waited. 

            This was when I should’ve been posing, but I couldn’t.  I’d regressed into some kind of wide-eyed, on-camera, fool unable to understand the simplest of commands.  Finally, Josh clicked a picture. 

            “Move around and I’ll shoot off the roll.”

            I put my hands in my pockets and peeked at the camera.  He snapped a shot.  I looked away and he snapped another.  Josh wasn’t waiting anymore.  He moved around me clicking away like he was on a flat rate, which he was.  Thirty painful seconds later he stopped.  I hoped the pain was finished, but it was about to get worse.

            “Take your shirt off.”  Josh fiddled with the buttons on his camera.  “Elite may need some body shots.”

            Paulette didn’t say anything about this, but suddenly I felt a flicker of confidence.  I wasn’t fat.  I should’ve qualified that as not fat in reality.  Fashion was something different.  I whipped off my shirt and waited for Josh to say something.

            An approving grunt. 

            An indifferent cough. 

            Anything.

            It never came.  Josh looked at me through the lens and hesitated.

            “Can you suck in your stomach?”

            “Sure.” I said as if it was a regular request, like my Mom told me the same thing for family portraits.  Josh took a couple more photos.

            “Keep it sucked in.”

            As far as I knew, my stomach was as sucked in as it was going to get.  Josh finished the roll and I put my shirt back on as fast as I could, and ran out of the studio.  Josh probably thought I was going on a much needed jog. 

Days later Paulette and I were in Elite looking at my contact sheets from Josh’s mini-shoot.  My eyes were wide, arms dangling limp from their sockets.  My lips were tight and unnatural looking as if I didn’t know whether to smile or cry.  I looked terrible.  I stood rigid like an oak, insecurity carved into my face in every shot.  I scanned the sheet hoping things would get better, but the more I saw the more ridiculous I felt for thinking I could model.  When I got to the body shots, I was ready to apologize to Paulette and go home.  Josh was right.  I looked like a hippo caught in the headlights of a speeding tractor-trailer. 

            “You’re a little stiff.” Paulette examined the sheet and pushed her brown bangs out of her eyes. 

            “I had no idea what to do.”  I wanted to rip the contact sheet to shreds and hurl myself screaming out of the agency’s panoramic windows. 

            “Josh said it went so-so, but how did you feel about the shoot?” Paulette said softly like I may cry.

            “Alright.”  I lied.  I hated every second of having my photo taken.

            “Well, if you felt ok about it…”  Paulette smiled.  “I think you can do this.  I know you can.  It’s all up to you.”

            My view of models was that they were stupid and shallow, but now with the opportunity staring me in the face I realized part of me must have been stupid and shallow because I wanted to be a model.  I didn’t like admitting that, it was like admitting I was a self-absorbed jerk.  There were lots of reasons not to model.  Besides the obvious moral dilemmas of being an overpaid clothes hanger, I’d just found out I photographed like a lemur on a tree, and was cripplingly overweight.  I should have told Paulette thanks for her absurd belief in me, but no thanks.  I should have, but I didn’t.