Portrait of a Becoming

by Candace Walsh

Ludlow Street will always be stuck in 1994, the year I moved from Buffalo to live in an Alphabet City summer sublet. I may also always be stuck in 1994, in complicated thrall to the Perland sisters. 

When I made a reservation to stay at a glossy, high-rise hotel on Ludlow last year, I did so with the urge to collide my present-day self against my younger self. I wanted to slip into the old Ludlow’s grotty sepia, walk past paint-tagged storefront gates closed like brittle eyelids over vacant shops, jam a toehold into my chimerical youth. I also wanted to know what it would feel like to press up against Ludlow Street’s new skin: In short, I ate vegan ice cream scooped at one a.m., found the rooftops of Loisaida buildings to be free of charm, and walked along Houston, feeling both like a ghost and far more solid and grounded than I ever did as a callow twentysomething. 

I grew up in a Long Island suburb where people went to “the city” to Christmas shop and watch the ball drop. My father told me that the only people who lived there were very rich or very poor. But there was a kind of poor I was allowed to be, post-college, and it seemed very debonair to be poor that way—in a New York City apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen and a fire escape on which to smoke cigarettes and throw back cheap wine in the dark while staring at a sliver of star-dimming skyline. The woman I chastely loved was supposed to have come along on this move. But she chose to stick with her boyfriend, like any sensible straight girl would. Her absence felt like a hole in my mouth I wouldn’t let myself tongue.

My college friend Beth was already living in the city, sharing a tiny apartment on Ludlow with her childhood friend, Severine Perland. Severine had two real sisters, but Beth was like a sister to her too. Their parents had been friends. They grew up in each other’s bohemian houses, played at their parents’ art shows and readings. 

Severine’s name intimidated me before I even met her. I knew that it was important for her to like me. Her appreciation would mean that Beth and I could remain close, that I would not end up on the backward moving sidewalk of the irrelevant college friend.

Their tenement had narrow hallways, dusty mail slots, stepped-on leaves and promo postcards scattered on its entryway floor. Its walls were blurry with layers of paint. Severine and Beth were both fastidiously neat, which helped keep their apartment from feeling claustrophobic. 

Beth and Severine had already helped me find a place to live: their friend’s three-month sublet in a third-floor walkup on 5th Street between Avenue C and D. I got a better-than-nothing job as a foot messenger, hired by the uncle of another college friend, and was often met by toe-tapping recipients. Sometimes they said, “You don’t look like a messenger.” I knew they meant the sweaty, ropy-muscled bike jockeys who ran red lights and took stairs two at a time. I couldn’t afford to take the subway and walked all over town. In big shop windows all over Manhattan, I glimpsed my progressively slimmer self in profile: vintage sundress, wire-framed glasses, self-administered pixie cut. 

Although I was new to the city, I already knew that there’s thin, and then there’s New York thin. Beth and Severine were fine-boned, New York thin without visibly trying. I’d inherited a big-boned, peasant frame inhabited by the women on my father’s German side of the family; it wanted to be both strong and pillow-soft—traits that I would only appreciate when I became a mother years later. My mind was still notched into the belief that as a young woman, I should be slight, teen-movie easy to toss into a pool, appreciably smaller than wispy, lanky, downtown denizen dudes whose regard struck me as a prized imprimatur. 

Beth was elegant yet no-nonsense. Although I was in awe of her, I loved that I could make her laugh. I also needed her in Manhattan. Knowing people who knew people who knew people was deeply important before the internet. 

Severine was a photographer. She said so, and so she was. When I would say I was a poet, I felt less sure, especially after a guy at a party challenged me to recite one of my poems and mocked me for not having one memorized. 

Once, when I was waiting for Beth in their apartment, Severine handed me a peach silk camisole. “Put this on,” she said, in a voice sweetened with red wine and stained by tobacco, “Let me take pictures of you.”

I blushed. “Okay,” I said, turning around to slip off my T-shirt and bra.

“Modest,” she said.

Severine had spilly breasts that seemed almost out of place on her compact, hipless body. I had neither, and envied both with the hopelessness of knowing that nothing short of a skeleton transplant would give me her silhouette. She was both lush and lithe; her body’s paradox quickened my pulse.

“Sit on the futon,” she instructed, raking her fingers through her floppy, chocolate brown hair, the Winona Ryder Reality Bites cut that I’d tried and failed to give myself. She draped an expanse of embroidered silk from Chinatown around me, and fingered the wisps around my face.

Severine held up a camera, old-timey with a protruding lens and a Polaroid back. She pressed the shutter, pulled out a tan paper pouch, and peeled the top layer back to reveal the black-and-white picture of me. 

I felt compelled to fill what then seemed like an awkward silence as she reloaded her camera. 

“I just read an article,” I said, “about a study proving people with unusual first names are more comfortable breaking rules. Do you feel that way?”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” Severine said.

“I think it applies to me,” I said. My Long Island cousins moved back home after college to save money while they waited to get married and buy houses. Contrarily, I was stepping over sleeping and smacked-out people on my front stoop and getting my picture taken in lingerie on Ludlow Street. 

“Do you really think Candace is that unusual?” Severine asked.  

“Well, I could never find my name on barrettes, or those little license plates you could hang off the back of your bike.”

Severine smiled as if I could not have said something more suburban. Shame slicked my insides. As the eldest of six, the one observed to be worldly and mature in many of my circles, the sensation of coming off like a rube scalded me. 

But as Severine photographed me, arranged me, photographed and arranged me, the pleasure of being an artist’s attention softened my shame into velvety repletion.  In this rare moment, I didn’t have to prove myself. 

Beth walked in. “Hi,” she said flatly, taking in the scene.

“Beth, go put on something sexy and I’ll take pictures of you two,” she said.

“No,” Beth said sourly. “I’m not in the mood.” She was the kind of friend who beamed when she got more attention than me and acted petulant otherwise. Once, as we walked down Seventh Avenue, a man let loose a crooning paean to her long, slim legs, concluding with, “You got the fine body. Not your friend.” She beamed. His words landed in my chest like poison darts, and her ease with his pronouncement pressed them in deeper. I felt that I was in the wrong for caring what he said, not what she didn’t say. But like many less conventionally hot-bodied sidekick friends, I stuck around because Beth offered a kind of fun I thought I would not have otherwise. The part of me who frowned in the mirror concurred with this kind of cruel ranking.

Severine liked what she saw in the mirror, I was sure of it. If someone had ranked her as less than Beth on the street (which was deeply unlikely—she was New York thin), she would have laughed, given him an offhand verbal kneecapping, or both.

That day in their apartment on Ludlow, Severine smiled and shrugged at Beth’s rebuff, and handed me one of my photos. The heady feeling of being a muse receded. I picked up my shirt and bra and headed to the bathroom, feeling a walk-of-shame pang work its way up through my feet from the uneven floor.  

A few weeks later I sat on the grass of Tompkins Square Park with Beth and Severine’s older sister Britt. She was short, with a shag haircut that was defiantly close to being a mullet. We drank Coronas in paper bags. Nearby, a couple held each other, looking like wholesome college students, if not a little grungy, until the junk kicked in and they slumped, eyes rolling backward in their heads. It was the summer of heroin chic. Whenever I left my apartment, I had to walk around white kids on the nod on the sidewalks, bent over at the waist as if peering into invisible washing machines.

“So what’s your deal?” Britt asked me.

“My deal?”

“You straight, gay?”

“I’m bisexual,” I said. I was barely out at all—my parents would freak if they knew. There were no queer spaces in my hometown, but now that I lived in Manhattan, with lesbian bars like Meow Mix nearby, I thought I was in a space where my true identity would be welcomed. 

“Are you really bisexual?” Britt asked. “Or are you just a coward?”

I’ve since learned that meeting a rude comment with silence is usually a power move. It lets the offense hang in the air like a piece of rotten meat attracting flies. But my incredulity set me up for her next whap: “I don’t believe in bisexuality.”

I dug my heels into the park grass. “How can you be so dismissive when you’re a lesbian?” I asked. “Isn’t that hypocritical?”

“Not at all,” Britt said. “Do you know how many of my ex-girlfriends left me for men? It’s bad for gay people. It’s bad for gay rights. It makes guys think that all lesbians are available!” 

The woman I was still in love with that summer hadn’t followed me to New York, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have been my girlfriend. Before her, there had been the grad student who kept ending up in my bed when her Jeep wouldn’t start. I still remember my dry-mouthed paralysis, shuddering breaths, the few inches between our bodies a canyon crying out for a rope bridge. Or was it just my side crying out? 

Nothing that came before had prepared me to make the first move. I was a coward in college, in that regard. Too afraid to kiss my crushes, apprehensive of going to gay bars. Instead, guys kissed me. Guys chose me. They convinced me with their surety, their tongues and stroking hands, the clutch of them. Their desire for me and what it proved felt almost as good as what I imagined, eyes closed: breasts against breasts, opening to an opening, the sounds of a woman coming, not my own. 

I’d been excited to learn that Britt was gay; I was hoping she’d introduce me to the scene. But instead, she was willing to battle to the death, it seemed, for binary purity. I sat in Tompkins Square Park that day and saw how little she cared about me—about my tears, the sob-hitches in my sentences as I struggled to explain how we were more alike than different.

Britt took off, had somewhere to be. Beth and I remained on the grass. 

“Britt is still really upset about getting dumped by her girlfriend,” Beth explained. “They lived together in Japan when Britt was there teaching English. They were supposed to move here together, but at the last minute, her girlfriend backed out, and started dating a guy.”

“So that’s an excuse for her to bug out on me?” I asked. “Maybe those women didn’t break up with her because they were bi. Maybe they broke up with her because she’s an asshole.”

Beth sighed like I was the difficult one. “I could tell you were getting upset, like you do, when you take things personally.” 

I encountered the last Perland sister, Olive, at a crowded, inexpensive Moroccan brunch joint. She was a fledgling yet gaining-traction fashion designer with a baby daughter.

Over mimosas, Olive, Severine, Beth, and I talked about writing and art, men and work. I was now, at least, employed as a technical writer, which gave me a decent paycheck but felt like what I would later learn to identify as soul death. When Beth found out I was making four thousand dollars more a year than her, she decided I should pick up the check at all of our meals out. I owed her. She connected me with a cheap apartment, showed me where to drink and dance, convinced me to try sushi, made me aware of arugula, invited me to openings, and introduced me, for better or worse, to the Perland sisters. 

We were talking about some guy who had blown me off. I don’t remember the preamble to Olive saying, “You’re not a babe.” She seemed to think she was giving me a compliment. You’re not a babe, and he’s an idiot who only likes babes? Or, I was too serious and intellectual to be a babe. But when I was twenty-one, I was not ready to rule out being a babe. 

Olive was a babe: petite and dimpled, blonde. Beth was also a babe. She was tall, with a sample size body, huge green eyes, a little valentine mouth. When a handsome man approached her at a party, she tossed her head and giggled, arched her back, leaned near, loved the game. Beth dated public intellectuals, and a photographer who made Catholics very angry. Beth got a handsome man to build a wall in her apartment because he fancied her, and a graphic designer donated hours of work to one of her projects while she did yoga stretches inches from his typesetting hands, his hollow-eyed wife lurking in doorways with their newborn. Beth knew how to leverage the commodity of her comeliness. 

When Olive said I wasn’t a babe, I went quiet. I pierced my over-easy egg with fork tines and dipped my toast into the yolk. It was better to keep my own counsel than to push back at a Perland. But her comment was a reflective surface like the shop windows that pulled me out of my messenger’s trodding trance, forcing me to remember I had a particular body that summoned judgements. Before, I thought being a babe was subjective—one person’s babe is another’s Plain Jane.  

Because of the woman I loved who didn’t come to New York, I knew there was more to being attractive than being a babe. She was not a quote unquote babe. She was an artist who stayed up all night with pastels, turning poster-sized paper into worlds. She hid her shape in loose T-shirts over bang-around jeans. Her features were classically pleasing, but she never wasted time painting them. She made collages and chocolate chip cookies without a recipe. They were sometimes lumpy and sometimes flat but always delicious. 

 But as I paid for brunch I couldn’t help but feel I lacked something necessary when Olive put her finger on my un-babeness. When I huffed about Olive’s comment later to Beth, nothing she said soothed my pique. 

The Perland sisters were what I was not, yet: They were sure. They were right. They just knew. I began to find myself arguing with imaginary Perlands as I walked the streets of Manhattan. According to the Perland sisters, my name wasn’t all that unique, I was a coward, and I was not a babe. 

Over twenty years later, am I truly still in complicated thrall to the Perland sisters? Only in the memory of their way of moving through the world and how they challenged me at a liminal time in my life. I could be anyone because I was so close to being no one. The Perlands demanded that I show them who I was—in a city that chews up and spits out those who aren’t sure—in part by telling me who they thought I was not. They made me more deliberate. The more sure I am, the less any new friends influence me, which is both a comfort and a loss.

In the months and years that followed, other college friends moved to New York, friends who were as eager for my scanty tutelage as I used to be for Beth’s. The flights of stairs I climbed to my apartment, the distance I walked from Avenue C to the F train, the cigarettes I used to smoke and my steady order-in meal of Vietnamese vegetables and rice conspired to make me as thin as I ever would be. My awkward haircut grew out. I stumbled into a career in fashion and lifestyle journalism, opening the floodgates to free clothes, facials, and invitations to parties that stacked against the hours of each night like layer cakes. Gabriel Byrne and Willem Dafoe each winked at me, at a Details party and in a Chase ATM vestibule, respectively, though those male gaze imprimaturs granted no lasting comfort. My new sense of self and my New York life allowed me to leave Beth and the Perland sisters’ friendships behind without explanation. I was having more fun without Beth than as her sidekick. 

I got my first paid article assignment because of stolen, leveraged babeness. The editor of a laddish pop culture mag struck up a conversation with Beth on the subway while she looked at help wanted ads. He invited her to write for his magazine. When she called me to ask what a clip was and if she could fake it, she admitted that he probably asked her in part because she’d been wearing a minidress, with her hair in Heidi braids. I had clips. Real ones. I said no, she could not fake them, and stealthily called the editor myself. 

If I had never known Beth, I would have had a different life. She came to my first book’s New York reading at KGB Bar—stood in the doorway, only—and during the intermission, I rushed over to her and apologized for disappearing. She seemed mortified that I brought it up, and soon disappeared herself. 

I would not find my writing voice in New York. I would not find the love of my life there either. Fifteen years later in Santa Fe I met and fell in love with Laura, a photography art historian. She liked to teach her students about the work of an artist who was known for photographing girls and young women on the edge of becoming: Severine Perland. In the high desert’s silence and space, I succumbed to the tide-pull my body contained. 

Amid moves, moods, and metamorphoses, I held on to Severine’s photograph of me, and showed it to Laura, who smiled and admired that young me, the short hair never again reprised, captured by an artist whose work held a place in her syllabi. Laura looked at me differently, far from the realm of the gaze I felt so crushed beneath when Severine took this photo in that tiny Ludlow Street apartment. I smiled to myself when she said, “Oh my God, what a babe.” 

I’d gone to Pearl Paint a few days after Severine took the picture, but I could not afford to have it properly framed. It was still on the piece of red matting board, affixed by four glossy white photo corners that I had licked and painstakingly stuck to the surface. Almost immediately, the photo began to change. Severine hadn’t done, or hadn’t bothered to do, whatever she needed to do to preserve it. The photo acquired metallic highlights that spread across the paper, gilding my hair, gathering in the shadows around my shoulders. It continues to change to this day.  

Published November 10th, 2019