It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [2]
And with that, I made mistake #3:
I pulled the shirt off the rack and asked if I could try it on. To be honest, I was already in over my head. The boutique was very nice, and I had admired its windows for months but had never caught it on an open day. When my luck had changed, I took the two steps into the store and did a quick sweep with all five senses, noticing a) mannequins so tiny I swear a bony sternum was impressed into them; b) the piping in of music overhead I couldn’t possibly identify; and c) the presence of the lovely, exquisite creature positioned behind the front counter, who politely said hello with a French accent. I already knew by the international greeting Bonjour! that I was in the wrong space—I was the wrong size and wrong age and had the wrong wallet—but it was too late for me to turn around and swim back upriver to Elastic Land. Instead, I pressed on with the attitude that “I’m smaller than I look in real life,” and I scanned the first rack with interest. I found myself picking at a hangnail because of my quick discomfort, which is a nervous habit that I understand isn’t publicly acceptable, but if faced with a choice of thumb-sucking or fiddling with my crotch, I’ll eat my cuticles any day. It was there that not only did I discover that the clothes were just as beautiful as I had seen in the window but that my size, indeed, was on the tags and, most important, on the tag of the cute shirt.
“Of course I’ll show you to a dressing room,” Amelie said as she walked out from the behind the counter and gave me a warm, real smile. Not only did all of Julia Roberts’s teeth fit into her mouth, but they were whiter.
It was a cute dressing room—full-length mirror, a nice antique chair to put my purse on, and beautiful lighting. I like that, I thought as I looked into the mirror, noting that during my most recent visit to Anthropologie, the lights were so audacious I wanted to ask the dressing-room girl if she could turn the setting down from its current “Cruel” to the next level, “Barbaric.” Now, I know I spent over half of my life puffing on a cigarette filter, but the Kitten Ass around my lips in my reflection at Anthropologie was so pronounced it looked like I had been injected with plasticine as I was sucking on a crack pipe. If you’ve never smoked, used a straw, or are still able to wear red lipstick without it spreading out like tributaries from your lips, you might not know that Kitten Ass is the nice term for the vertical fault lines that surround your mouth, and if you’ve never had a kitten, I suppose Puppy Ass would do. I refuse to take this conversation any further if you’ve never been a dog person, either, since I do not know what a ferret’s ass looks like.
In the Anthropologie mirror, I saw wrinkles, dents, flaps, bumps, and something that caused me to say to myself, “I hope that’s a tumor and not a horn.” I was nothing short of horrified. As I sunk to the depths of despair and looked up the address of the closest cosmetic surgeon before I even left the dressing room, I tried in a panic to calm down.
“Every wrinkle you see is a wisdom line,” I told myself in a nice, steady voice. “Wear them proudly; each one is a challenge and an obstacle you have triumphed over.”
“You have an asshole on your face,” one of my meaner voices replied. “Doesn’t everyone want a juicy Wisdom Kiss from that mouth?”
“You’re just growing into your face,” the nice voice said. “There is grace in aging.”
“Especially if you ever wanted to use your face as a baseball glove,” the mean voice countered. “It gets softer and more doughlike.”
“You know, these lights are ridiculously bright and are shining on you from directly up above,” the nice voice tried again. “When does that ever happen in a real-life setting?”
“I dunno,” the mean voice said in a mocking tone. “Ever hear of the sun?”
As a result of that experience, I do think all Anthropologies should provide a courtesy volcano just outside their dressing rooms so every woman who is revealed as completely inadequate