The Home for Wayward Supermodels Read online

  Croissant was the one French word I’d heard Mom say, because she made them for the Sunday morning crowd at the pie shop. She’d always mispronounced the word the same way everyone else in Eagle River did: croyzent. And croyzent was exactly what she said now. There was an awkward silence, as if someone had farted loudly, and then Alex corrected her, “It’s kwa-sant, madame.”

  “Oh God,” Mom tittered. “Saying it that way would make me feel like I was putting on airs.”

  “Croyzent,” I heard Glenn say. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “I don’t know why Raquel lets these girls drag their entire families in here,” sniffed the makeup artist.

  That was it. I stormed into the studio.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

  Mom looked up at me, her mouth open.

  “You can’t let these hoity-toity skeeveballs talk to you like that. Let’s get out of here.”

  “One hundred fucking dollars of product, down the drain,” huffed Glenn.

  “I’m still billing Awesome,” said the makeup artist. “Double.”

  Mom kept sitting there, so I walked over and tugged her up. “Let’s go, Mom,” I said, more gently now.

  “Just a second,” said Alex, walking over to me.

  I flinched, thinking he was going to grab my arm, or yell at me about how I couldn’t do this. But instead he brushed a piece of wet hair back from where it had been plastered to my face and touched—so lightly my whole body tingled—the edge of my now bare lip.

  “Magnifique,” he whispered, turning to Mom. “N’est-ce pas, Maman?”

  “I always tell her she’s beautiful just the way she is,” said Mom, smiling beatifically.

  Alex clapped his hands. “We will shoot the pictures like this, au naturel.”

  I froze. “But I told you,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

  He froze. He had the ability to freeze in a much more meaningful way than I did. “But you cannot leave,” he said finally. “This is the moment of your life. Come, everyone. We begin.”

  He moved toward his camera and his assistant scurried to turn on the lights. The rest of us stayed where we were.

  “She’ll look totally washed out,” Makeup Woman said.

  “Let me at least blow her dry,” said Glenn.

  “No one touches me,” I said, backing toward the door.

  “The rest of you can leave,” said Alex. “I’m sorry, but you too, Maman. We need nothing but the camera and the girl.” He laughed lightly. “And of course, the artist.”

  “No way,” I said, crossing my arms tightly over my chest.

  “Ah, the princess has further objections. What’s the problem now?”

  “I don’t want to be alone with you,” I told him.

  He opened his mouth but apparently decided not to say what he was going to say, instead raising his arm into the air and actually—catch this—snapping his fingers. “All right, Yuki stays,” he said. “Everyone else, clear the room. We begin.”

  Here’s what I would say: It wasn’t as horrible as I was afraid it was going to be, mostly because I just stood there, doing nothing, or sat there, doing nothing, or let myself flop over the stool, doing nothing, and “the artist” snapped away. For a while he tried to say those ridiculous things that you see in every TV movie about models—“You’re beautiful, baby!”—until I told him, “Won’t you please be quiet, please.”

  Then he cranked up the music and I stood or sat there and thought about what I was going to eat for dinner tonight, at the restaurant under the Brooklyn Bridge, the one with the amazing view of all New York, that Mom was taking me to. Now that it was my birthday, I technically could tell her about me and Tom. I also planned to ask Mom how she learned to speak French, and why she’d kept this ability hidden from me.

  Mulling all this over, I definitely was not smiling or looking at the camera. The so-called artist didn’t seem to care. These pictures were definitely going to suck. That realization, at least, brought a little smile to my lips.

  “It sucked, Mom.”

  We were sitting in the most beautiful place I had ever been in my entire life. The restaurant itself was all golden and glittery, with crystal chandeliers and candles on every table, reflected in the windows that looked out on the river and the lit-up buildings and on the lights of the buildings reflected in the river. It felt magical, being there, like I’d always imagined the prince’s palace felt to Cinderella. I wanted to feel like Cinderella myself, transformed by turning eighteen in this awesome place. We’d just finished eating and I’d decided that over dessert I was going to tell Mom about me and Tom. All through dinner I’d avoided talking about the photo shoot, but now I wanted to leave it behind in the land of before: before my real adult life started and I had the power to make sure only good things happened to me. After tonight I’d marry Tom and study art and literature at Nicolet College in Rhinelander and maybe open a vintage clothing store in Eagle River. But first there was one thing I had to know.

  “I hated it and I never want to talk about it again,” I told Mom. “But you have to tell me why you never let on that you spoke French.”

  Mom hesitated, then refilled her wineglass, even splashing a little into mine. Then she took a big gulp, which wasn’t like her. She was more an eater than a drinker.

  “I’m sure you knew I spoke French,” Mom said, not looking at me. “It’s not like it was any big secret.”

  Mom was a terrible liar. Even a little fib, like telling a customer the apple pie would be ready in five minutes when it was really going to be more like seven, she could hardly pull off. In fact, on the rare occasion when she attempted it, she’d start babbling and end up telling way more truth than anybody wanted to hear.

  “I mean,” she said now, “I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. It’s not like anybody French ever comes to Eagle River. And if they did, and they came into the pie shop, and they couldn’t speak a word of English and they couldn’t even point, for goodness’ sake, and so instead they said something like, ‘Je voudrais une tarte aux pommes,’ which means they wanted an apple pie….”

  “I know what it means, Mom,” I interrupted. “I took French all through high school, remember? I’d walk around the house memorizing these stupid dialogues, and you never once offered to practice with me, or showed any sign that you had any clue what I was mumbling about.”

  The dessert arrived and Mom totally ignored it, instead refilling her wineglass before the waiter was able to rush over. This was a very alarming sign.

  “I was afraid if you knew I could speak French you’d start asking questions,” Mom said, letting out such a huge breath of air that afterward she sat slumped on her chair like a deflated balloon.

  The windows and the view were behind her—she’d insisted that as the birthday girl I look out on the city—and through the first part of the evening she’d seemed like an element of the splendor: my loving mom, so sweet and generous she’d brought me to this amazing place, the brightest star in the universe before me. But now she seemed not only oblivious to the beauty behind her but at war with it, dark and disturbed, denying all the light.

  “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  She sighed again and finally looked me in the eye. “I didn’t see any reason you’d ever have to know.”

  “Know what, for land’s sake?”

  “I learned to speak French from your father, Amanda. Oh sure, I took it in high school, but I didn’t really get it until I met your father and we started speaking it together. I mean, that’s all we spoke for those three months….”

  I was even more stumped than I’d been before. My dad, Duke, was a lot like Tom: He didn’t do too much talking in any language. And I knew he’d never been much for school, preferring, as he put it, to “learn from the fish.”

  “Dad speaks French?”

  It was Mom’s turn to look confused for a moment, and then she actually laughed. “Oh, not Duke. No no no no, not Duke. I mean your re
al father. Your biological father.”

  I stared at her. People had always said, from the time I was the littlest girl, how much I looked like my dad—like Duke. It was partly because Mom was so heavy and I was so skinny; no one in Eagle River could even imagine what she’d looked like when she was modeling, or see the resemblance between her and me. But I knew from looking at pictures of her when she was young and thin that I looked much more like her than like Dad, though it made him so happy when people said it.

  Now I felt like not only did I not know what Mom was talking about, I didn’t know Mom. And my dad wasn’t my dad. I felt like I was going to throw up all over the starched tablecloth.

  “Am I adopted?” I said, practically choking on the words. “Are you my real mother?”

  “Of course I’m your real mother,” she said, her voice rising to that hysterical pitch I knew from the day the pie shop was robbed, or when Grandma died. “When I saw you all done up for that shoot today, it took me back to my own modeling days. I felt like I was looking in the mirror. And meeting Alex, being in that studio, speaking French again—it just all came flooding back.”

  “What came flooding back? You better tell me the truth now, Mom, and I mean the whole truth.”

  Here it is: She’d been to New York before. That’s why she started crying when we first saw the city. She’d come here when she was eighteen, my age, to model. Very quickly, she’d met a photographer, a Frenchman, and they’d fallen in love. Or at least she’d fallen in love. He went to France for a visit, and while he was gone she found out he was married. At about the same time she discovered she was pregnant. With me. She went back to Eagle River, where my father, I mean Duke, had been her high school boyfriend. She told him everything, and he wanted to marry her anyway. They agreed that he would claim me as his own. No one would ever have to know who my real father was.

  “So why are you telling me now?” I asked her. I was more furious than I’d ever been in my entire life, partly for her having lied to me for all these years, and partly for her now spilling the truth.

  “Seeing you there today at that shoot, so beautiful, such a natural, I thought: If you’re going to be in modeling, you’ve got to know the truth. You might meet your father, you might even work with him, and it’s wrong if you don’t know who he is. His name is Jean-Pierre Renaud; he’s quite well-known. I thought you’d stay in Eagle River your whole life….”

  “I just told you I am not going to be ‘in modeling,’” I said, slamming my hands down so hard on the table that the silverware and the crystal glasses leaped into the air, Mom’s wine toppling and draining like blood across the tablecloth.

  “I think that’s a mistake,” Mom said, fumbling to right her glass, her face so red it seemed like she was about to start sobbing—though at that moment I couldn’t have cared less. “Though I’d love it if you were with me in Eagle River….”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, staggering to my feet, jostling the table again so that the flames of the candles quaked in the reflection in the window. I couldn’t see the city anymore; all I could see was myself, enormous, looming over Mom.

  “All I know,” I told her, “is that I don’t want to be with you.”

  What I did want to do, and why I couldn’t do it:

  Sit down in a dark corner and cry. Reason I couldn’t do: Might get raped and murdered in all available dark corners.

  Get in a taxi or even on the subway and go to Desi’s house. But I didn’t have any money because I was wearing my sari, which naturally had no pockets and which didn’t go with any of my purses so I’d asked Mom to carry my wallet.

  Talk to Tom. But no cell phone, no money to use pay phone.

  Go back to hotel. Did not want to see Mom.

  So I just started walking. It became apparent pretty quickly that I could either continue walking along the waterfront, veer off into darkest Brooklyn, or head onto the Brooklyn Bridge itself. At least the bridge was easy to find: All I had to do was look up, and keep walking toward the majestic span. In the cab on the way over here, I’d seen people walking and jogging—including families, women alone, even old people—along the bridge’s official walkway. I’d thought at the time that it looked like a really fun thing to do and tried to calculate whether I’d be able to squeeze it in before our plane left for Wisconsin tomorrow night. Now I had my answer.

  It was a warm night and there were even more people on the walkway now than there had been before. With all the people around, I was less afraid walking by myself there than I was on my own street in Eagle River at this time of night, which would be completely deserted. It was an amazing feeling being there, like walking on a rainbow over heaven.

  But no matter how transcendent the setting, I wasn’t able to lose myself to the experience of being there. There were too many voices banging around in my head. How could my mom have lied to me all those years? Did Dad—I mean Duke—really love me, or was he always thinking of me underneath as something tainted? And who was my real father, this Jean-Pierre whoever? Was it him that I looked like? Would I ever meet him? Did I want to?

  When I reached the Manhattan end of the bridge, I knew what I was going to do. I’d been to Desi’s apartment once, when she wanted to change her shoes. Now I headed there. Or I should say I tried to head there, but in the maze of downtown streets, all with names instead of numbers, it was next to impossible to figure out which way to go. My only guiding light was the Empire State Building—that was north. But the streets on the Manhattan side of the bridge, around the big court and government buildings, were dark and deserted, and the few people I saw, people in suits hurrying to the subway after a late night at the office, ignored my request for directions.

  I finally sank onto a park bench near City Hall and started crying, because I was lost in every way. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself out of this whole huge mess back into Tom’s arms. If only I’d never come to New York, had stayed in Wisconsin and married Tom. But that wouldn’t have made any difference, I reminded myself. Even if I’d never found out about my real French father, it still would have been true.

  I didn’t even notice that a homeless person had sat down beside me until she slid closer and held out a McDonald’s napkin, which I gratefully took.

  “Man trouble?” she asked.

  “No,” I sobbed. “My mother lied to me. And I’m not who I thought I was.”

  “I’m not who I thought I was either,” she said.

  “And I’m trying to get to my friend Desi’s apartment,” I told her, “but I can’t find my way.”

  This she could help me with, giving me amazingly detailed directions that included the kind of bark on a tree and the color of a sidewalk grate. I wished I could give her some money or some food, but that night I had even less than she did.

  Once I made it to the crowded streets of Chinatown and Little Italy, and then to the cool part of the Lower East Side, there were at least lots of people to point the way. By the time I reached Desi’s building, which stood between a vacant lot and a tenement where guys lounged on the front steps smoking something highly illegal, my feet were blistered and bleeding and it was so late my heart was pounding in fear as well as exhaustion. I was relieved when I rang the bell downstairs that she was home and buzzed me in immediately, before I had a chance to get killed. I moved as quickly as I could through the dark hallways of her building, definitely a less privileged side of New York than the rich restaurant where I’d so recently been gorging myself on a dinner that might have fed one of Desi’s neighbors for a week.

  The last time I’d been to Desi’s apartment had been in the middle of a weekday and nobody was around, but tonight it was packed with people, the stereo going, the TV blaring, guys in baseball caps and gold chains sprawled on the couch, kids running screaming across the rug, while in the kitchen Desi’s mom was frying eggplant. Desi herself stood serenely in the middle of all the chaos, pinning vintage fabric on a mannequin.

  “
Which ones are your brothers and sisters?” I asked Desi.

  “They all are,” she said, smiling slightly. “Except Chico, the guy in the Yankees cap. He’s my cousin.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  I’d never seen a family that looked more alike in more unusual a way. Desi’s mom was the same size and shape as Desi—tiny and round—but a completely different color, with pale red hair and even paler freckled skin. The room was filled with other people who all had the same basic shape, but with a range of skin tones, from one blonde little girl to a boy with skin the warm color of a chestnut, with Desi and the two guys on the couch somewhere in between.

  “So I thought you were out to dinner with your mom?” Desi said.

  That’s when I burst into tears again.

  She maneuvered me into her tiny bedroom, where I had to lift my legs up onto the bed to make room for Desi to shut the door.

  “Tell me,” she said, sitting down on the bed with me and taking my hands.

  So I told her. I told her everything my mom had told me, how I’d felt, what I’d thought on my walk across the bridge and through the streets of Lower Manhattan. When I finished, there was a long pause before Desi spoke.

  “Is that it?” she said finally.

  I nodded, sniffing back tears.

  “That’s all?” she asked again.

  Again I nodded.

  “But what’s the big deal?” she said.

  I blinked, squeezing out two more fat tears. I thought Desi and I were soulmates. I couldn’t believe I had to explain this to her.

  “I’ve never met my father,” I said. “I don’t even know what he looks like, what kind of person he is.”

  Desi shrugged. “So I’ve never met my father either. Did you get a look around out there? All five of us have different fathers and we haven’t met any of them. It doesn’t mean we’re any less happy. We’re probably more happy. The guys were probably bums, or my mom would have kept them around.”