I always fold my clothes and put them away, because, if I don’t, then, in the half-light, the faces of monsters materialize. It always starts with two shadows for eyes. Then, the rest of a twisted expression comes into sight.

I tell myself it’s just my imagination. I’m a rationalist. Still, it’s hard to argue with a gut feeling so strong I don’t want to put my feet on the floor because there might be more than shoes under the bed. Me, a grown woman!

As a clothes designer, I can usually avoid these problems by staying at home. I used to have to go to fabric warehouses, and that was a trial, with all those prints and draperies.

Things have changed- I’m a “big name” now, and they send boxes of samples to me. Last year, we even took over the design of most of our own fabrics.

Twice a year, though, I still have to travel to big cities- old and famous ones, the ones that were around during the Black Plague. My ‘condition’ especially kicks in when I’m in one of those old hotels.

Thinking to do us a favor, the company’s travel agent puts us up in hotels that don’t just contain antiques, they are antiques. You don’t have to be a leading fashion designer to see they have a talent for awful carpeting and even more hideous wallpaper.

Every lobby is made of dozen different kinds of marble and the wainscoting is a festival of hand-carved ‘baroque’ ornamentation. If I am lucky, there will be a marvelous crystal chandelier. I look up and see mesmerizing rainbow glints from the facets. Sitting in some big wing-chair, I won’t have to look down. If I do, pretty soon I’ll be seeing, not floral motifs, but some Green Man or gargoyle leering up at me.

This time we are staying at a hotel in New York for the event now called Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. “Fashion Weeks” (they are held in several major cities, around the world) come twice a year. The most prestigious are in Europe, and to some designers, New York is “slumming it”. As for me, personally, I find America’s east coast exhilerating.

This event is to be a Spring show. I live an upside-down world where the spring line is shown in the fall and the fall line is shown in spring. It is our only chance to find one more way to convince the stores’ buyers that there is something special about my brand’s shirts, or skirts, better than all the other shirts and skirts out there.

If I have to set those shirts and skirts ablaze and send the models down the runway with smoke and flames on the them, I’ll do it. Actually, I did that last fall, and a few of the models swore they would never work for me again. I can’t blame them. Nobody was hurt, but they could have been, and burn scars don’t go over well in the modeling business.

I pay well, and models dedicated and brave enough to work with me enjoy an extra-special reputation. Just this once, I had the magazines asking us to arrange photo shoots for them, for free. With the clothes on fire, of course. That’s a great boon; my company usually pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for full-page ads in glossy color magazines.

After all this hype, though, most buyers are skittish and cautious. They’ll wait two or three years to see if what I created, actually sells, in the most expensive boutiques. My first sales will be to mavericks; it takes a maverick to get their attention.

That’s why designers have to have a lot of money. The company has to run for three years before what was displayed makes anything back. It’s not enough for my name to be on the fashion world’s lips for a year. I’ve got to do the same thing every year.

The very best part, for me, is working with the runway models. Except for being gorgeous, they’re all so different. Physical beauty can develop in someone poor or rich, slow or clever.

Much of the preparation can not be done in the hotel. We own a special trailer. Inside is a row of salon seats, sinks with running water, and mirrors. The vehicle is huge but there’s two attendants for each model (except Janine, who will need three), so it is very cramped.

Today’s efforts begin at 10 a.m. with waxing. Every shin, every armpit, and then every eyebrow, is painted with the hot gluey stuff. I let one of the makeup artist do my eyebrows, too. There’ll be a few cameras focusing on me, too, as the designer.

As the little strips are yanked away bearing unwanted hairs, we all bear our discomfort stoically. It doesn’t really hurt that bad; the beauticians are merciless, swift, and professional. Nonetheless, the momentary festival of ouchies is almost a bonding experience.

From down at the end of the row of seats, I hear a tiny muffled yelp escape from behind a hand. It seems someone is not used to having their legs waxed.

To be a model, you have to be willing to let people press cloth to your body and touch you on all except the most private places. There’s much trust; we can’t help but treat each other as family when we’re backstage or in the trailer.

Outside the shows, though, we go our separate ways. This camaraderie, I’ve learned, it’s usually not real. A week from now, none of us will miss any other. What personal stuff I know, I know because they wrote it on their applications, which I reviewed.

Our shows are some of the most elaborate in the world, and there are usually eight rehearsals. We do get to know each other a little, especially the “veterans” from previous shows who get hired again for six months later.

Some of my shows have male models, and they get prepped alongside the women. Beauticians can be either gender. Like the medical profession, there’s no room for body-shyness in front of the opposite sex. This show, however, happens to be all female models.

Some of the women don special harnesses, each one custom-made for that individual model out of fifty different components. Clothing designers are engineers before anything else. We have to know where points of stress will be, how to spread the stress like a spiderweb, what range of motion is needed for arms and shoulders.

I don’t just sketch on paper. I use three-dimensional computer programs to assist my visualization. I assure you, though, my first drawings looked exactly like yours did, and I started with crayons, pencils, and colored markers on paper.

You learn it in art school, and you get a degree in textile arts. It was heavenly for me, to net, weave, knit, crochet, quilt, spin, tie-dye, and everything else, through college. I also have an engineering degree. There is a lot of strange science lurking inside the world of high fashion. And there is also “The Urge”.

My fellow designers are every shape and color, every gender (some of them appear to have invented a couple new ones along the way). The youngest is twenty (her grandfather was a celebrated clothing designer too), and the eldest is 99. We energize one another at the schools of design. Artists are most artistic when we’re around other artists.

The only thing you probably can’t be taught, and that is, how to want to fill gobs of paper with endless drawings, especially pictures of people wearing impossible things. We scribble on the margins of our homework, we doodle on our napkins. If we can’t, we’ll give ourselves what look like mad henna tattoos with ink pens. Most of us, to some extent or another, have an instinct to produce drawings.

Or maybe it’s a disease? For me at least, it sort of is. I can’t stand blank areas. It’s just wrong. To me, a sheet of empty paper feels like an open window. I have to do something to keep evil things from coming through.

My therapist (recommended to me by a fellow designer and doodler) assures me I’m not the only one to have ever felt this way. It’s a psychological condition that’s so old that it has Latin names: ‘Horror vacui’, and ‘Cenophobia’, the fear of open spaces. Behind those charming Where’s Waldo? illustrations is a known psychiatric aberration.

The elder tailor Mr. Mansard is my long-suffering associate. He puts up with my plethora of personal quirks with stereotype British seriousness. Today he has a mouthful of about twenty pins as he goes down the line doing the very last adjustments. I had said previously, “Mansard, I want the clothes to fit the way a snake’s skin fits the snake.” I take up a needle and whip-stitch a seam down a model’s body, on the spot.

When Mansard and I are done, you can’t force a marble into the space between the model and the garment she’s wearing. The version that the customers commission will actually allow breathing, but this is for the show, and I am going for an unreal perfection.

After the models don my latest creations, the stylists translate my colored marker head sketches into reality. For me, it feels like the girls are being transformed into my sketches.

Janine (whom I have hired despite being, at 25, over-the-hill by my competitor’s standards) is massaging her neck because it aches from having to keep her head in the same position for so long. Her hair has been stiffened into shiny flat bands an inch wide. The process is taking well over an hour.

She has consented to let three hair stylists cut fifty star-shaped openings into her actual long hair with surgical lasers. It fills the trailer with a horrible smell and we have to open the door on either end, but the end result looks stunning. Her hair is standing out in wavy strips a full meter behind her.

Little stars made out of hair have fallen on the ground. I’m staring at them, unable to stop myself from seeing a constellation of an animal in their random arrangement.

Just as they’re about to be swept up I say, “Wait! Gather those up. We’ll auction them for charity.” I wink at Janine. She nods and and smiles, and I seem to read in her eyes that she thinks I’m either a nutty old bat, or a batty old nut.

Carmen, another model, is enduring a different elaborate and uncomfortable procedure: her hair is being woven into what looks like a neck and shoulder covering with hood. It has a point protruding from the back, a medieval thing called a liripipe. She points at me in mock-accusation: “You’re a sadist.”

I recall she looked positively darling with fire licking at the edge of her evening gown, hazardously near her long graceful legs. I tell her, “This is your fourth show with me. I think you are a masochist.” We all share a laugh.

Janine is still smiling at me. She has a strange look on her face. Almost as much as a photographer, it is my job to notice every nuance of a face, and I’ve never seen that expression before on her. In my gut, I suddenly have an insight that Janine is actually unhappy, deeply unhappy.

I have a moment of confusion. Is her harness pinching terribly somewhere and she doesn’t want to make trouble? Should I ask her what is wrong? I catch sight of the prominently displayed clock, though- our appointment with the runway is getting nearer and nearer.

I owe part of my fortune to Janine’s little cleft chin and unusual but appealing green eyes that slant downwards on the outside corners. She trusts I will not forget that. She is a grown-up and if she had a problem, I assume she would say so.

I heard she sold her condominium in the big city this past month. We both know that this is her last show. By spring, I expect that she will be back in her home town, with her family, raising show horses.

I glance over and see how a new girl, Sashi, is faring. I wonder if I should go over and make smalltalk to help fend off boredom. Ah, no need; she’s asking questions about how to bleach hair and the stylist is eagerly “talking shop”.

The crew uses little machines the size of electric toothbrushes to turn Sashi’s hair into hundreds of tiny glossy dark braids. Thanks to wires hidden amongst the strands, they can bend and position the braids. Pretty soon Sashi’s head resembles a porcupine.

I cheer them. “Excellent! That’s just how I pictured it!”

Sashi doesn’t have such a distinctive face but the shape is perfect. I chose her over other models because she has a touch of muscle tone, and this show will require a bit more than just walking.

We’ve put these custom-made contact lenses on her, to change her eyes into enormous lavender-edged aquamarine circle, like an anime character. She’d be able to pass for fourteen with those on.

I keep it to myself that I don’t think Sashi has such great modeling prospects ahead of her. The most famous faces have just the right balance of ‘typical’ and ‘unusual’.

That means models often begin as something of an “ugly duckling”. Runway models are scouted as young as thirteen, but often, nobody can guess at the swan they will someday become. Seventeen is more usual.

By age eighteen, the proportions change quite a bit, and some facial feature that used to be “ositively enormous” is now just “intriguingly different”. That hawk nose or an overbite with big front teeth that loomed so large in the morning mirror now just makes her “Aztec princess”, “Wholesome country girl” or maybe even some look like Janine’s that’s so unique they call it the “Janine” look.

There’s also a need for pictures of less “erfect” and less “unique” people. Between shows with runway modeling, there is also modeling clothing for catalogs and so on.

My right-hand woman, Dorothea, and I are now at opposite ends of the trailer, communicating via headset. She was a part-time model herself for some years. Her snub nose and full lips are exotic and primordial; her cheekbones swell like the breasts of doves. She appeared in ‘Big and Beautiful’ lingerie catalogs.

Obviously, she isn’t beautiful in the classic sense. She’s so nice, though, that you start to think that what she is, is what ‘beautiful’ should be. She has what the beauty pageants call ‘oise’. She has the self-confidence to show her honest compassion. That’s what being sent to little girl make-up and charm camp gave her.

She’s nicknamed “La Titaña” (pronounced tee-TAN-ya), and you might not guess from her appearance how great she is at negotiating, coordinating other people, and keeping things organized. She started as our wardrobe manager, just tracking clothes and props, occasionally dry-cleaning things.

It’s time for makeup, and that isn’t just faces. For this show I’ve decided we’ll use the liquid pantyhose. We open the trailer doors for ventilation, and spray it on. Now the girls’ legs are nicely shiny. We spray a second coat on, and throw handfuls of a very fine glitter dust to stick to this. Then a third coating of spray is applied.

As their legs dry, the models receive layers of makeup for a base. We have to do it standing up; no resting in the ultra-comfy styling chairs now.

I open a plastic scrap-booking case that contains stencils cut with tiny robot-controlled razor-sharp swivel-knife. I can tell Sashi thinks they are exciting; her eyebrows have gone up just a little. She asks me how I made them. I tell her the cutter uses ‘vector’ graphics, a way to save illustrations as dots and lines. Really, not any different than what vinyl sign-makers use. Now Sashi is nodding and smiling.

That just won’t do. “Relax your face, please,” I say. “And sit still.” Sashi sobers up right away. Every model gets stencils lightly plastered to her. We powder on the motifs in double time, quick pat-pats. In a few cases, another shape overlaps a previous one.

We’ve actually done this before— twice— with trusted interns as stand-ins. All the components of the process have been rehearsed. We’ve just never put it all together before. Unlike a play, we most likely never will again. It’s one-day-only, and this one day is make-or-break. Did I mention there is a lot of pressure sometimes?

I’ve made each facial design starting with digital photos of each model. Janine’s has colorful wedges like a spectrum, sweeping back from either side of her mouth. Hooded Carmen has a simple dark purple moon-crescent on her forehead, and a single little dot on each cheek. Sashi’s is more elaborate, with red-brown, ochre and black jagged areas on pale yellowish-green. Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.

The models are now looking like living sculptures or paintings.

With assistants holding up huge black umbrellas on all sides, to discourage sneak preview photos, we scurry into our appointed section of the backstage area. Covered by black cloth, and guarded by an armed guard, our prosthetics are waiting.

Dorothea’s big personality soon takes over as she calls out, with no need for a loudspeaker, what everyone is to do next. She tells me, “You go, girl!” It’s her catch-phrase. It means I must now abandon this area, and go out to the audience area.

I must make a good impression on the buyers, who are, for the moment, not “customers”, but “guests” at a somewhat exclusive event. I look at the reserved seats, and find mine without incident. Before I sit, I wave, and flashbulbs pop.

My “image” this show is “The Inventor”. I’m wearing a long light coat with straps and silver buckles on the sides, and black silky skirts. In this lighting, my spectacles have turned crystal-clear. (The high-tech changing glass lenses were set into the vintage 1900’s gold-plated steel frames at my bidding.)

Most of the time, my hair is in a simple ponytail. For shows, I let the stylist do something more exciting with it. This time they’ve pulled it severely back away from the forehead, with a few wisps deliberately left free, and the rest is in an elaborate bun at the back. A small slender screwdriver with a clear golden-yellow plastic handle is holding it in place, at an angle that looks as if I often casually yank it out, fix something, then jam it back in.

The fashion mavens take notice of the watch on a little strap clipped at my left hip, and small scissors in a wonderfully ornate case at my right. What looks at first to be a big amber pendant turns out to be machine oil in a fine glass bottle on a silvery chain. A small prop notebook with brass gears expertly riveted into the leather completes the outfit.

Other designers are, of course, making their own bids for attention.

Toku, a Japanese fellow from Wyoming in his 20’s, is accompanied by his shy and homely cousin. I overhear someone next to me whispering, “Is it true they’re going to get married there, just to challenge the law?”

Konnie Kloo, self-proclaimed queen of geeky-is-chic, wears a shirt whose soft surface is video screen accomplished with LEDs. It displays the colorful patterns known as the “Mandelbrot Set”. My honest enjoyment manifests as a glassy-eyed stare.

I’m saved from the mesmerizing patterns by Konnie’s wild arm waving. She is throwing a tantrum now because her garments are being dubbed ‘gimmicky’ by a tactless fashion reporter. Over my headset I hear Dorothea say, “Just pick up a chair, bust it over the guy’s head, Konnie!” Well, Fashion Week has drama but we’re not as far gone as professional wrestling. Yet.

(continued in Part 2)
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Toku’s showing comes before mine. Two years ago, all his models had to ride unicycles down the runway. His sales did not take off.

Toku’s things are very comfortable, cleverly reinforced to last a long time. Alas; double seams at the shoulders and crotches reinforced with gussets aren’t exciting. It really takes a clothing designer to appreciate what he’s showing us. The consumer won’t even notice until five years later, when that shirt with the Toku label is the only one left without a rip.

This year Toku’s models are wearing enormous comical paper mache heads while wearing sober work clothes. The audience watches, politely clapping a little, but clearly perplexed. He gets my sympathy.

By contrast, my Carmen’s casual entrance gets an appreciative murmur. She’s nearly flat-chested and she wears a hospital bandage dyed dark pink for a “top”. Small wings on at the backs of her shoulders move as if alive. Her strange woven hood hair makes people grin. She does a graceful circular kick, showing how the drawstring pants with V-shaped notch above the fly let her move freely.

Next, Sashi makes her runway modeling debut in just a long sweater that looks like it’s made of moss and bark. Cat ears are securely affixed to her hair. The earthtone zigzags on her face make sense now that she’s some kind of forest creature. A tail with a fluffy tip waves in her wake, thanks to robotics and a titanium frame inside. She jumps and kicks both feet out like a cheerleader.

Meanwhile, with practiced moves, they attach orchid-colored wings to another model (her name is Ishtara). Ishtara’s considerable hours practicing with a spare pair pays off as she comes out. Now she looks as if she was born with them. She stretches out with her fists, as if she just woke up, and the wings go out too.

The other models take their turns until, at last, it is Janine’s time. The lighting shifts and, unnoticed by the audience, a black carbon-fiber boom with counter-weighting is swung out high above the tongue-shaped stage.

Janine is wearing a very light large silk poncho, split in front, as a robe. On her feet are boots with small fluttering wings. Reaching the end of the runway, she casts the beach cover aside, revealing silk shorts with slits up the sides and a blouse that is a miniature version of the poncho.

Instead of turning, she keeps walking for the edge of the stage, and walks right off the end. She keeps walking, the winged shoes somehow keeping her in the air. She walks up invisible stairs, in a curve.

Janine’s harness is supporting by a main wire to the front of her pelvis and two other wires, one behind each shoulder blade. Made of actual spider silk, each of those three strands is as thin as fishing line. They are covered a special light-swallowing black pigment. Janine’s rig accounts for a third of the money invested into this show.

It takes a moment for the buyers to accept that Janine is apparently walking on air. Then, they burst into heavy applause. Yes, Janine’s years of gymnastics, dance and karate are all being put to wonderful use. I look away from Janine to see their faces. They’re amazed, and smiling. They can’t wait to tell others about what they’ve seen!

The bright lights shine so that the audience can’t see the “wires”. They just see Janine ascending on the air above their heads, towards an area of bright stage lights. As Janine is about to run out of auditorium, Dorothea’s voice says quickly, “Snuff it in five. Five. four. three. two. one.”

The lights are cut; Janine is quickly brought back to the ground behind curtains. She’s just earned an extra twelve thousand dollars on top of her usual substantial fee.

Now carrying bouquets of tiny nearly-weightless battery-animated butterflies on invisible memory-wire, the models take a curtain call together.

I don’t see Janine in the assembled group. “-where is she?” I say into the headset.

Dorothea replies, “David said she wasn’t feeling well. She said she was walking back to her room.” The hotel rooms are two blocks away. We have to vacate this area; we can’t spare anybody to bring her back.

Very annoyed, I spit out a couple of swear words. Hearing that, Dorothea steadies me with a good-humored, “whoa.”

Some of the models are carefully extracting themselves from the less comfortable things they are wearing, like ballet-slippers tipped with half-meter stilts.

I know that the least comfortable get-up is Carmen’s. When I look over, I see she is still wearing her wings, and demonstrating them for a fashion magazine reporter who has somehow made her way into the backstage area. Ordinarily, I might chase the reporter off, but today’s her lucky day.

I quash my irritation and say, quietly, “How’s it going, Carmen?” and force myself to smile a bit.

She looks up at me guiltily. She’s always been the #2 around here, always in Janine’s shadow. She can’t cartwheel or walk on her hands like Janine can. Tonight will be a big break for her, but she’s not the ghoulish type who’d eagerly celebrate misfortune that furthers her own situation. I tell her, “Head for the trailer soon, okay?” She nods.

The models are excitedly talking to each other. For now Carmen is the “senior” (although she’s not technically the eldest). She says, “They’re waiting for us in the trailer. Let’s go!” There will be no need for the concealing umbrellas; the show is over, and it’s dark outside.

Dorothea seconds the motion with a hearty, “You heard her!” They leave to gratefully soak in the various industrial solvents it takes to remove the show cosmetics.

I want to congratulate my “first mate”, and celebrate a pretty successful show with her. She’s busy, frantically trying to use her phone. Probably trying to call Janine, I expect. Over the headset I hear Dorothea muttering to herself, “it’s not working…”

Of course. This is a French Renaissance building, with a heavy steel frame that often gets used to ground electricity— one enormous Faraday cage.

There’s a light hand-clapping at my side- so it’s somebody who knows I freak out if startled by tapping. I turn; Sashi is looking up at me earnestly, still in cat ears and makeup, but wearing her own T-shirt and sweatpants. She says, “My mother is waiting outside, I have to go now.” She holds up the belt with the robo-tail out to me.

I say, “Sure thing. I’m sorry the reception is too late for you.” Glancing down at the tail I say, “Keep it. Be good, now!”

Sashi says, “Thank you.” She shakes my hand between both of hers, then runs energetically for a back door. I realize a fraction of a second later that she’s pressed a scrap of purple paper into my hand.

I look at it. It has a torn edge and the hasty scrawl reads:

Janine went to kill herself. She’s been stealing the hairspray.

Thinking about Janine’s mood earlier today, my intuition tells me Sashi is very right. My hands feel like ice and I’m slightly dizzy. I’m not nauseous but there’s pure sense of distress without that physical discomfort.

I wave over Martin, our company security fellow. He has a communicator that works fine with the building’s wireless system. I tell Martin that Janine is probably in danger, and to call 911 for a suicide attempt.

The minutes it takes Dorothea to dredge up Janine’s room number at the nearby hotel stretch into what seems like hours. My tech guys are disassembling the precious spider-silk rig, packing it into black cases to be hauled out to a truck. Dorothea’s wardrobe assistants are also wrangling the precious props and garments.

Hotel security security and a police detective show up, and they tell us to stop what we’re doing and move out of the area.

Now I’m eaten up with worry. In two hours there will be a reception for models, designers, buyers, and a few others, but I’m thinking about Janine. What if we’re too late to keep her from killing herself?

My mind is once again casting about for things with a jumbled random nature in which to find demons. There’s Janine’s colorful silk poncho, left in a crumpled heap on a director’s chair. It starts to look to me like a small monstrous crouching frog-thing.

Clapping hands call me back to reality. Martin says, “They’re asking if we know where else she might be. She’s not in her room.” The hotel staff check for Janine’s car, and they find it untouched. Janine was brought with the rest of us to the Performing Arts Center in one of my big van. I say, “Unless she got a ride somehow, she’s probably still here somewhere.”

I give Dorothea the keys to my van, and she goes back with most of my team. Only Martin stays with me. I know that he and Janine dated a few times. I never knew why they broke up.

Quickly, a police officer named James questions Martin, and me, together. “I’d rather talk to you separately but this is a special situation,” he says. Inevitably, he asks why Janine would do such a thing.

I admit, “She was taking anti-depressants.” Martin nods; he knew that, too.

The lieutenant says, “Was she still taking them? Could she have run out?”

I shake my head. “She took them just fine. It’s really complicated. Medicines like that work but some of them have a warning ‘may lead to thoughts of suicide.’”

Martin tells the detective about Janine stealing bottles of hairspray. “She used to put a towel over her head, close her eyes, and spray it near her face. To get a high.” He rubs the corner of his eye.

He looks to me with regret. “I caught her breaking into one of the cabinets once, years ago. I’m sorry, I should have told you.” —but he kept her secret, because he loved her, and he still does.

“Would you say she’s impulsive?” Lieutenant James asks.

Right away I can answer, “No. She likes to plan things.”

The policeman says, “So, good chance she had tonight’s disappearance all planned out.” We nod. “Folks who want to kill themselves may spend a lot of time thinking about it. They might even rehearse it, over and over again.”

I’m thinking back, to Janine’s most recent performance, and then, farther back, to our rehearsals. Clad in her costume and wearing the winged shoes, Janine kept walking off the edge of the stage. She would fall a bit, then the spider silk harness would catch her.

Hurriedly, I tell Lieutenant James and Martin this. Martin nods, and says, “She’s probably going to jump.” He is already talking to Hotel security and others via radio.

If Janine had gone through the lobby, she would have been noticed. She had no time to get out of her make-up and the almost skin-tight clothes sewn onto her in places. There’s one way to get to the roof without being seen, and that’s the stairwell down a short hall from the auditorium.

The detective, James, says, “We have to slow her down by talking to her.” In my mind I’m adding, ‘if she’s up there and she hasn’t already done it.’ As if reading my mind, Detective James says, “We have to think positive, now.”

We run through the hallway, past wallpaper that I cannot help but feel is sometimes a gateway for the Unbidden. I avert my eyes from the armies of tiny goblins that must surely be watching us.

All my senses feel too acute. Every footfall echoes, and it smells horrible here. This is a place where people have snuck off to be alone and ill many times. The bleach used to remedy the more obvious messes only makes it more nauseating. The flights of stairs go on and on.

I’m sick to my stomach by the time we get to the top. Martin notices I’m looking pale and cautiously assists me. We come out of a gabled structure, onto a roof covered in tar and gravel.

Janine is sitting on corner, her legs over the sides. She is hunched over forwards, miserable beyond even the grief of losing one’s closest loved one. She refuses to turn around and look although I’m sure she can hear us there. I expect her to warn us to stay back or she’ll jump. Instead, she’s just quietly looking out at the city around her.

Down below, the streets have a Dreamsicle orange tinge. Every office still occupied by some busy New Yorker is a random pixel of light on the side of a skyscraper.

Seeing that she’s not teetering over the broad plaza with its design like an enormous dartboard, we stay back, hoping respect will have a good effect.

Janine breaks the silence to whine, “It’s not like you need me anymore. You’ve got Carmen.” She’s obviously talking to me, and not Martin or the good detective. Somehow, I know better than to believe this is about rivalry and jealousy. “Go ahead, use her up too, and throw her aside when you’re done, you ugly witch.”

She’s never ever talked to me like this before. It’s a little scary. Martin is wincing; he’s seen her ‘like this’ before. This is probably why they broke up: Janine is a Jekyll-and-Hyde.

When most people aren’t watching, she turns nasty, and cruel, and she says the most awful things. What kind of a role model for young ladies could she possibly be, with a personality problem like that?

She’s trying to pick a fight with me. Why? Because she has the medical condition called ‘clinical depression’. That kind of sorrow hurts, deeply, and being angry feels better than being sad. She gets relief from depression. Unfortunately, the price is that she’s driven all her friends away. No, I remind myself, she hasn’t. Depression has.

But she thinks it’s her.

If there’s some excitement, some adrenalin, that will also bring relief. I’m not feeling angry at all now, but, crazy as it is, maybe this is what she needs most right now. Calling on drama class from college, I snap, “After all I’ve done for you? You ungrateful spoiled brat. Your act’s not even worth half of what I pay.”

Janine turns her head; her face is a mess of random splotches of color. The area around her eyes are dark smeared circles like the sunken hollows on a skull. Her hair is a bizarre deflated tangle, in no way appealing.

She spits back, “My hair almost caught fire and I still have a scar from that last show.” She puts one leg up on the ledge and points to a spot on her calf, but I can’t see any marks there. She’s still wearing the shoes with the little wings and their batteries are winding down. They are still flapping quietly, slowly.

Normally, Janine is one of the least selfish people in the world, but right now, all that comes out of her mouth is talking about herself and her problems. ‘Me, me, me’. ‘I, me, mine’. It’s not hard for me to act mad, now, because it’s infuriating to hear.

Right now, nobody else exists in the world, but her. Everybody else looks like a puppet show to her. I’m not real to her; she can’t feel anything except the pain inside her.

Then Janine’s face scrunches up and she starts to cry. She puts her face into her knee. Through that, and her wailing, I can barely make out what she’s saying: “It HURT. But you didn’t care. You’re a ****ing slave driver. You make us wear stuff nobody will EVER buy and you’re never satisfied. If we broke our necks doing your insane stunts, you wouldn’t give a ****.”

I’m getting into the spirit of the occasion. I raise my voice, and heatedly respond, “Oh, you want me to be your mommy? Was it my job to kiss your booboos and make it all better? Yeah, I guess it was time you got a real job, where you’re not sitting on your lazy butt half the month! Janine, GROW UP!”

Martin turns red and wants to rise to Janine’s defense, but Lieutenant James touches his forearm, and I think I read his lips; he murmurs “Let ‘em go.”. Below, there are sirens, and blaring horns, from four fire trucks, but I don’t notice them.

Janine is crying her heart out freely, “I can’t get any other job… I can’t work all the time; it gets too bad… Before I worked for you, I had four jobs and I got fired every time… This was all I had…”

This is all nonsense, of course. Janine has enough in her bank account to retire for at least thirty years. There’s lots of modeling work she can still do. But, this isn’t about reality, this isn’t about reason. It’s about a medical condition, one that Janine can’t help. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not her fault.

Like a little girl, now Janine is yelling at me, her voice ragged. “There’s still ONE line of work I can do, I can be a professional ‘escort’. A street-walker. — Is THAT what you want?”

I say quickly, “No! Of course not!”

Janine brings her other leg onto the roof, and hugs her skinny knees to her chest. A denied toddler at a grocery store would have stopped by now, but Janine’s still crying as if there is no end in sight.

She says, “My mother said I had a demon in me. She would spank me when I got ‘this way’… It helped, I felt better after screaming for an hour. Then she would send me to bed without supper… That’s why I don’t care if I eat or not, I learned to not eat, when I was little. I hated her… When she died I felt happy. I was glad she was dead. I’m a horrible person, I’m bad; I don’t deserve to live!”

Poor girl! While my mind tries to invent monsters to fill the shadows it perceives, hers is now thrashing around, desperately trying to find some logical reason that she feels so bad. If she’s a bad person, if she deserves it, then, awful as that is, at least it makes a kind of twisted sense.

A new thought chills me: Living with this is going to take work. If she starts to believe she deserves it, she has no reason to try to fix it. I can’t let that idea take root any deeper than it already may have.

“Janine,” I say sharply, “You don’t deserve this. It’s a sickness.”

She shakes her head- but mostly because she still wants to argue. “It’s not. I took my meds.” She wails, “I took my **** pills and it didn’t help! It got worse!”

I nod, and reach out with both hands, offering a hug. “You have to read the papers that come with it. That can happen.” I don’t know if she believes me or not, but, to my relief, Janine closes with me and hugs.

I feel tears welling up in my own eyes. I am not, despite rumors to the contrary, made of stone.

Janine’s delicate body is shaking. She’s still pouring out tears, her face contorted in a way her fans couldn’t imagine. She is still crying, but now it’s embarassment, too. “God, I’m such an idiot!” she mutters.

I’d like to say that Janine suddenly feels all better, but the truth is, she only feels one hair better. The combined effect of her depression and the pills she took have faded only just a little. It subsides enough that she can whimper, “I don’t really want to die…”

At a run, Martin closes with us and his big arms hug us both. He’s shaking just a bit, and a few tears of his own join the mess.

Janine looks tearfully up at Martin and tells him, “I don’t want to leave all of you, I don’t want to go home… I liked being a model… but I can’t do anything, I’m so useless.” Martin shakes his head, and just holds her.

Detective James and a small crowd of others flood out onto the rooftop. A liason from the world’s largest performing arts center is offering us a private conference room in which to relax.

Security guards are pushing reporters back from the bottom of the stairwell. Despite our best efforts, one manages to get an absolutely lurid photograph of Janine with her face smeared up. They won’t get another glimpse of her until a few months from now, after a stay at a private clinic in Albany that’s also a little spa resort.

—————

We are rehearsing for the Fall “Fashion Week” show. I’ve chosen a sort of futuristic equestrian theme. Mr. Mansard, Dorothea, and Martin are still with the company, of course. I am working the bugs out of three free-standing mechanical horses: A filigree unicorn, a skeletal pegasus, and a stylized framework reindeer.

Carmen has blossomed as our leading model- there is something sassy to her personality that shines through. I’ve even designed some clothes to celebrate her free spirit.

Carmen’s tomboy hobby of skateboarding has matured into snowboarding. I told her I’m worried she will break all her limbs. She just flashed her bright teeth in a big smile and said, “You could just work designer casts and braces into the new line.”

Carmen often visits Janine; they have become the best of friends. They go horse-back riding together. Janine also volunteers at a camp where kids with disabilities can be with horses (and other therapy animals) and learn to ride.

That leaves only one loose end: the young model named Sashi. Her quick thinking helped save Janine’s life. Dorothea and I want to thank her. So does Janine.

The cell phone number she gave us is bunk. The contact information she gave Dorothea is also nonsense. Joanne of JPA, (the Joanne Peterson Agency for models) says she never heard of the girl. She’s returned Sashi’s paycheck.

The police detective, Lieutenant James, did help me to file a missing persons report. His opinion, though, is that Sashi is probably just fine, and that she gave false information because she was doing this behind her parents’ back.

So, wherever you are, Sashi, thank you. Your fee is in a trust fund. If you haven’t turned up to collect it after three years, it will go to Girl Scouts of America. Oh, and “Fashion Week” is by invitation-only, but if you ever want tickets, drop me a note.

1.
In the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, a bloated bulgy body loomed. Justine looked at herself in despair. She mumbled, "My head is shaped like a marshmallow..."
On her way to bed as well, Justine's mother overheard. For the hundredth time, Julie told her daughter, "Honey, you're beautiful." She knew that Justine would cry herself to sleep tonight. This scene, or a close variant, usually repeated itself about once a month, like clockwork.
"Mom... I really need surgery." Justine was not a whiner, and she tried to pitch her voice as mildly as she could, but the edge of despair kept creeping in.
Julie said, predictably, "Why? Because you want to look like a model? They have eating disorders; they're not normal. When they look in the mirror, they see themselves as fat, when they're not."
"Mom...? I'm _not_ normal. I weigh fifty-two pounds more than the next heaviest girl in class. I'm fifty-three and a half pounds more than the third biggest."
Julie rubbed her temples, as if Justine was provoking a severe migraine. "Justine, you know you're not old enough."
Oh joy, Julie thought to herself, 'The Esteem Issues' again. Justine had them every month. Julie trusted that, given a few days, Justine would forget about surgery. Justine was able to hide her distress better after a day or two, so Julie assumed she forgot about it. It was just "teen hormones", not a 'real' issue.
This time, for once, Justine was not going to back down. "I'm seventeen and a half. I've never had a date because boys haven't looked at me since I was twelve."
When Justine's body had started developing early, her female classmates had talked enviously about how she was getting real boobs.
They spent the next year secretly stuffing tissues into their training bras (except for Justine, who didn't have to). She could remember them trying out Bollywood and MTV dance moves at slumber parties together. She could remember when she thought her body looked really good. For all of a year.

2.
They had tried going to therapy three years ago. The therapist had reassured Julie that Justine was a fairly typical and mentally healthy girl.
Julie was relieved to learn that crying yourself to sleep did not necessarily mean Justine needed pills or more therapy. The psychiatrist had told Mom that Justine's problems were physical, but that she would like to continue working with Julie. The sessions were very expensive, and Julie had declined the invitation.
"Let's go to the gym together." Julie had announced two years ago. "A little mother-daughter time; we can get in shape."

3.
Justine was enthusiastic but she was out of breath five minutes into the "Cardio-kick" class. It was quite a bit more rigorous than the casual gym class at Justine's school. A painful stitch formed in her side. That was followed by nausea. Justine tried hard to keep a smile on her face but it wasn't possible.
Meanwhile, even though she had a desk job and never exercised, Julie seemed to have no problem keeping up with the instructor.
About fifteen minutes later, Justine whispered, "Mom- I have to go to the bathroom!"
Frustration set in, and Julie snapped, "That's the sorriest excuse for getting out of a little exercise I have ever heard." Julie excused them from class; the instructor nodded in a friendly fashion. From over behind a screen, though, the pair could still be heard tensely arguing.
Then, Justine broke into sobbing as she realized she had no bowel control. The contents of her insides were liquid and running out, hot and burning, into her sweat pants. Tears were running down her face.
Not sure if Justine was doing this crazy thing on purpose, Julie at least got them out of there quickly. She made Justine sit on some old newspapers and the ride home seemed to take hours although it was only eight minutes from home.

4.
After The Incident, Julie and Justine had just gone out for morning walks together. They talked quite a bit. Early on, Justine asked, "What was my father like? ...was he fat like me?"
"He was a wonderful man."
"But, was he fat?" Justine persisted.
"He was 'heavy'," Julie admitted. To tell the truth, she actually did not remember him so well. She had had several boyfriends, one after another. Ethan had been a pleasant friendship but they had drifted apart, and not unhappily.
When Justine was three, Ethan had died, leaving the family quite a bit of money in a bank account, in a trust fund.

TO BE CONTINUED...

With all those veggies going under the knife, I'm dissatisfied with my current cutting board. It's a plastic resin. It cleans nicely and it's light and durable, but the design leaves much to be desired.

When I prepare something juicy like a pineapple, the juice runs off the edge and onto the counter. I have one with a juice-catching groove and it doesn't hold enough liquid.

When I chop several ingredients that need to be used at different stages, they need way too much room to keep them apart. I want some little troughs to keep them in line.

Most of all, I'd like it to have some character, something friendly, familiar and cheerful, encouraging me to be industrious. How about a big happy bird face?

Here's the design:
[link]

(Here's the matching Mr. Raven String Holder: )
[link]

As autumn approaches, I start taking advantage of the full sun by dehydrating a few key ingredients. In particular, green pepper and celery.

Peppers 'n' celery:
[link]

While it's true that, with modern trucking, we *can* have sweet peppers fresh year-round, the price over the past years has had a tendency to soar during the winter months.

I only use tiny bits of sweet pepper; the flavor is very bitter to me. Still, there's a lot of foods that wouldn't taste right without it. Better for me to chop it up and dry it, than to use just a chunk and have to throw the rest away.

Celery, on the other hand, is gold. It puts a savory heartiness into many dishes, from humble chicken soup to a queenly roast eggplant with browned onions and breadcrumbs. I can go through a lot, and dried celery is insanely expensive.

I never did this when I lived in Michigan. Celery is a cold-loving plant that would keep on growing in a bucket of sawdust in the basement, and we always had some fresh. It would turn an anemic chartreuse yellow but a day or two in the windowsill perked it right up. A tiny sprinkle of powder of beeswax in the water speeded this up.

So. Where's my knife...