There are eight other girls in the lobby when the elevator opens – eight other blondes and a white marble floor. I ask if there is a sign-in sheet and one of them tells me there isn’t but the last girl who came in is sitting in the adjacent room. I walk over there.
Everyone is wearing black even though it’s not winter yet. Leather jackets, sheer tights, floral skirts – a Top Shop catalogue. Some of the girls stand out in their beauty, but ultimately we are all just different variations of one another. The Russian who looks like the twelve-year-old alien version of me is there wearing shoes that look expensive and a size zero skirt. Her hair is longer than it was last time and I wonder if she got extensions.
I sit down at a white table with white chairs and watch time fall away from me. The girl – the last girl before me – sits perched in the corner, her Daddy longlegs tucked near her chest while she talks softly into a phone with her left hand and pulls bobby pins of a ponytail with her right. She wears all black, too. On her feet are black rain boots that hit just above her ankle – the ones I wanted to buy but didn’t and still sort of think about.
I listen to her small voice with a British accent and the sound of hairpins falling into a paper bag. She talks furiously but she is quiet and poised in her ferociousness; the conversation sounds more like an old poem read in a field somewhere where there are sheep that live quietly in thick coats.
Even though she is only ten feet away from me, it is difficult to hear anything more than the mention of a man named Mark followed by the word “bookers.” These are fashion week problems: scheduling conflicts, waking up early, no one thinking about you and how hard it is to run around New York City all day. These are problems you complain about when you have them, but are secretly happy about because it means that you are busy, that you are in demand, that you are making money.
Her skin is as pale as an English morning, misty and watered down, with hair that is the reddish blonde color that only occurs after spending too much time indoors or under clouds. When she finishes with the pins she unfurls her hair from an intricately bound ponytail, evidence of having just come from a runway show. It crumples around her like stiff clumps of hay, bent and filled with hairspray, hitting below her bellybutton. She reminds me of Ophelia, dead at the bottom of an unfortunate river.
In the rubber boots that she owns and I want, she walks to a mirrored wall – the soles hitting the black wood floors quietly and without incident. She stares at her reflection, still talking into the phone, combing her hair out with her fingertips. After a few minutes, she gives up, looking at me on the way back with raised eyebrows and motioning to her giant frizzy mane. I shrug my shoulders as if to say, I feel you. I’ve been there.
After thirty-five minutes, girls begin to disappear into the room in front of us. A brunette woman hands each of them the same blue dress – some girls drowning in the size of it, their shoulders the only discernable body part until the hemline ends to reveal their legs.
I watch as the same brunette woman takes pictures of each girl. I watch as the girls are led from one room into the next. “Let me take you to Jared,” she says each time. I watch them come back, change into their own black clothing and then press the elevator button to leave. This is a casting. It’s always the same.
The dishwater redhead in front of me takes her turn. She’s the type that drowns in the dress, the blue swaying around her loose and unhindered. I listen to her chat with the casting director, who is as charmed by her accent as I was.
When she comes out, her blacks all in place and her hair tucked behind her ears, she begins to talk to me for no reason in particular, perhaps thinking she’s found someone to commiserate with. She tucks her portfolio into her bag while she relays to me her Busy Model fate: six a.m. call times, four runway show fittings, a hair and makeup test, three castings. I nod my head and try to look like I’m empathizing or sympathizing or whatever –izing would be appropriate right now, but it’s hard because I’ve never been that girl who everyone wanted at the same time. I woke up at 8 a.m. this morning and went to a lumberyard with my mom. I enjoyed the briskness of the morning uninterrupted. I drank multiple cups of coffee and got on the subway in no hurry at all. I smile and say something like “Totally” and wonder if she knows that this was the only thing I had to do today.
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