From A Ladder
In Cedar Rapids there are several cereal factories and the air carries maple syrup, and malt, and Crunch Berries. The air is sweet and everything else is gray. That winter, it was always sleeting or snowing or raining. As I prepared to get naked it didn’t feel like readying for a slice of another season. It felt like preparing for a different territory altogether, a different place. In the mornings I rubbed my body down with lotion and removed all jewelry. I pinned the hair up so that they could see the neck. In the evenings, I tried to run regularly so that they could examine muscle roping under the skin.
Once, while sitting naked on a fifteen-foot ladder, I remembered a painting, The Gross Clinic. A huge amphitheater stuffed with medical students gazing at a body. The students lean to the side while they watch. They take notes. Their sight lines converge in the central foreground, on an operation rich with spattered blood. There is a line of brightest white, a scalpel.
My neighbor Will’s students, mostly freshmen art majors, clustered around the base of the ladder, peering up to dissect. They were searching for and drawing rectangles in my flesh. I was older than them but still so young, I realize now. Today is a blocking and foreshortening day, Will said, striding around the classroom. They were turning my body into a series of boxes. Long boxes for my torso, short boxes for my head, cereal boxes for my calves.
I was grasping the sides of the ladder. I had been grasping for thirty minutes. Between my flesh and the ladder was a neon orange throw, a soft buffer with its own small agonies. Any long-sitter learns quickly how a fold, trapped beneath a body, begins to rankle muscle and mind.
This time, there had been a long moment unlike any other so far when I was naked and they were watching. It was when I was climbing the ladder, slowly, as if in a dream. The rungs narrowed. My feet were slippery. I envisioned the students’ view: an awkward, naked salamander, climbing from the pond. Dimples in a moving backside. Fear on display. The students were quiet and nervous. I stood finally on the penultimate step, a naked diver freezing up. Will softballed the orange blanket up to me and I strained to catch it, then arrange it behind me without fumbling too much. And then I turned around with an aching slowness, and showed them my naked front, grasped the ladder behind me with my hands, and gauged it right so that I could sit and not fall.
Their faces turned upwards like shining plates. They had long forgotten the smooth concrete floor. They drew my undersides. It was halfway through their semester. They were progressing.
A tree shook through the window, which only I could see from here, above the lighting track and the heating vents. I shook in the way a body does after twenty minutes of sitting rigidly still. A long pose can feel like the first stage of sleeping: your brain wonders if your body has died, and sends out muscle spasms to check. My hands had fallen asleep from gripping so hard. So had my left foot, placed on a higher step than the right. It was beyond any tingle. It was gone.
Any daydream of movement meant movement. I tried not to think of climbing back to the ground. It would mean moving the right leg first, then the left, and turning my body in a motion once fluid and unthinking, now incremental and highly intentional. I would do it wrong. The left foot would fail. My skull would burst open on the concrete like a Charentais melon.
In a few minutes an older woman in the class covered her face with her hand. Please, will you help her when she needs to come down, she whispered to Will.
I’m great, I said to Will, and I meant it, as long as I didn’t have to stand to descend.
Sweat ran down my sides. The air was freezing.
In The Gross Clinic, you can’t even see the body: just a pale flank, and on it, the red wound into which hands and instruments probe.
I can’t see.
Can you tell me how much this is?
It was snowing, and in Target, an older woman batted swimsuits away from her face. She emerged as if from the bushes. She held a white plastic purse with heavy fringe. 29.99, I murmured, and she walked away with the purse swinging from her hand, a prize rabbit.
This winter, I saw older women everywhere. They crawled out into my dreams and memories. The homeless woman I had once accidentally tripped over on a staircase, scattering her cup of change. Women who smiled at me on the sidewalk. The unmarried woman who my tiny shed-house was built for, who grew old inside, walking the same C-shape through the three rooms that I did, who died in the room where I slept alone. Sometimes I awoke at two with the sensation of being watched: and there, a centipede on the wall, its antennae angling towards my head. My blocks were changing. My neck was growing hunched, I felt, the spine crunching in on itself. Living alone, you start to imagine such things. Your house is the wrinkle in the blanket; you are always in it, on it, coming back to it, and it begins to rankle you in weird directions. You see yourself in everything. A certain smell of old lemons followed me for a week, and I sniffed rapaciously before realizing it came, somehow, from inside me, this scent I recognized on my mother and her mother.
These were my late twenties, I laugh now, ten years later. They were still youngish years, of course, but speeding into something more permanent, I felt, dumbly, a smeary pastel of uninspiring features sprayed with fixative. That’s what I thought; I didn’t know better. All these memories I wrote down and have no recollection of now. I miss, my mother said a few years earlier, in the spring, according to my notes, buying me a dress, telling me that the curves I had now were lovely, I miss turning heads on the street. Men don’t even look at me anymore. Yuck, I thought, at the time, and yuck, I still think now, but I would never now do what I did ten years ago: sit naked in front of strangers and be reproduced.
At the beginning of a class they barely looked at me. They gathered their supplies and I stood against the wall waiting for Will’s signal. We didn’t speak. I just stood out of the way in my thin blue robe and pulled each arm with the other arm. Will put the music on. They assembled what they needed on their seated easels. The charcoal, the thin, large sheets of paper. When they were seated Will looked at me. Ready?
This was the understanding: that I was to sit or stand there naked, to be looked at, to be assessed, to be reproduced or even reimagined. That they would zoom in on parts of me without me knowing which parts were under examination. That they would tack me up on the wall and compare my twenty-eight breasts, my fourteen sternums. That while they were comparing these sketches I would slink off the platform and pull on my blue robe again, and leave the room for a sip of water from the fountain, and try to stretch like a piece of taffy over the surfaces in the adjoining room, ridding my body of the last pose, readying my body for the next.
The older woman came to class only occasionally. Once, I caught her staring at me during a break between poses. I was so startled by her gaze I actually waved as if I knew her.
We’re lucky, we have a really good model, I heard her tell one of the freshmen. I wanted to ask her why. Why am I a good model? What am I doing? I wanted to tell her be my mirror. But she had turned and was looking at another student’s drawing on the wall, of me, belly inflated like a cartoon frog’s, thin limbs, turned to the side. Perhaps she had studied art before. Perhaps she had drawn from particularly bad models—women who broke pose too early, or twitched, or spoke. Perhaps she saw something in me that was classical, or that she liked. Perhaps, stripped of my contemporary clothing, I resembled someone she once knew. But I knew: when she stared at me during the break, when she complimented me to another student, she just thought that here was someone she instinctively felt to be pliable, sweet, silent under the pencil.
The drawings showed me hunched and frail, wide and pouchy, barely-there, overtaking the entire page. Whipping lines or stolid boxes. No one drew my tattoo. The tattoos became multiple. The developing artists usually forgot the feet and fingers, or just didn’t bother. The thighs were smooth and pocked, vast and spindly. When the hair was there, it was a little circle on top of the head, or an ink smear. The neck was a bud vase, a Jolly Rancher, or the Washington Monument.
In the harder sessions, I had to hold a single pose for three hours, with occasional five-minute breaks. Maybe my brain was fresher than usual, unable to fade out. Or maybe my body was extra tense and full of aching reminders that it was there, a live and physical tether. The worst moments were the microscopically focused ones, like when I was convinced for the last five minutes before a break, standing with one leg propped on a chair, looking straight ahead, a winner’s easy stance, not out of place at a pool hall, that I was peeing myself. That something warm was dripping down my leg. That I couldn’t move to check because I would both give myself away and ruin the class. When Will called time I rushed to the grimy bathroom in the corner to check. Nothing.
Life models have written of needing something to mentally occupy their sessions. One spends the long hours constructing elaborate memory palaces—the goose in the tub, the banana on the bed, upstairs bedroom—to return to later, when she can move again, and write down the things she thought of during her pose. As I modeled I just stared at the white wall in front of my face. There were some moments I tricked myself into almost seeing a reflection in the paint. That is how reality begins to work, when you’re that still, and that forced-into-your-own-mind. It’s amazing and awful, like bobbing in the ocean, dissociating amidst the vastness while acutely, helplessly in your own body.
Ten years ago, I read about a product named Memomi (“The Memory Mirror: the Mirror that Remembers You”). Then, Memomi was exclusive to Neiman Marcus. You would stand before it in a luxe dressing room and it captured all sides of you at once, recording your side, your back, and your front, and then played you back to you, so that you could see, finally, your back in a dress, you could see the backs of your calves. Memomi gave you, in other words, others’ views of your body. Now, ten years later, Memomi has a new tagline: “try on without taking off.” It’s also called something different: “Eyesmatch.” It’s at Walmart, among other places. The idea is that the “mirror”—if we can call it that—captures your likeness, feeds it back to you, and also feeds your information to its clients, who can learn about your hair color, location, shopping preferences, skin type, and more. Presumably, they “see” you then more clearly, and shape your world, at least to some extent, with their targeted suggestions and reminders.
In an echo of Memomi, and mnemonic devices, the first daguerreotypes were called mirrors with memory. When people first viewed the prints they stood afraid and blank-faced, so these new mirrors, which caught and preserved flesh, wouldn’t catch them doing something private or embarrassing. What a thing, I thought that Cedar Rapids winter, to stare at a piece of paper, afraid of permanent exposure.
Many life models refuse to work for photographers. There is a lack of interpretation, they fear, and a permanent exposure that leaves them more naked than usual. They speak of things like goosebumps and birthmarks. They are fixed by the shutter with a brute click, not a long, curving assessment by pencil.
Ten years after this Cedar Rapids winter, there are so many days I want to live in a different world: one with fewer photographs everywhere, less self-assessment. I also feel very far from that old self. I would like, very often, to see her. But really, it is less about me seeing her than it is her seeing herself, as she truly was. I would like to draw her and show her the drawing. Some days it feels as if some weird explosion happened not far away, and everyone became shattered, fragmented, tired. It was less about aging than it was about a perceptible shift in the world, about constantly being sold things, about having to sell ourselves. I wrote down idea after idea for a new project that would illuminate the shift, the ways in which we were constantly being captured, our ways of thinking and being and earning were encroached upon, I felt, by powers we could not totally see, or remember to see.
Nothing I wrote really worked. Maybe it was the kind of thing you draw, not write.
The other day I said to a friend, but really to myself, in a voice memo I left her, that vanished after I sent it, though surely—surely!—those are kept somewhere, I said something like: I haven’t been with myself for a long time. I thought of that old self on the ladder, high on the ladder, shivering but mostly still. I wondered how to climb the ladder.
Will made huge batches of biscotti at a time, and he ate the cookies as he strode around his classroom. What’s that, he asked a student, pointing at some erroneous piece of me on the paper, chomping. That’s not there.
The breast, he said, holding a biscotti aloft as he stood behind a student, is all about gravity. You need to extend that.
I learned not to move even after he said it was time for a break. He meant this for the students. I continued sitting there, neck craning to the side as if waiting for someone to repeat what they’d said. He padded over with a piece of charcoal and marked the outline of my naked body onto the drop cloth beneath me. He marked where my armpit was, where the ends of my body sat. Okay, he said, and I went to stretch.
When I came back in I slid my blue robe off again and mounted the modeling platform carefully so that the drop cloth didn’t shift. I looked at the partial outline of my body, strange black slashes that gave the necessary information. I resumed the pose.
The first time, I couldn’t eat for the entire preceding day. Will could tell I was nervous. He told me the time I’d feel most naked was the moment of disrobing, not the actual pose. The slip between clothing and blazing flesh.
That first time, he nodded and I walked to the center of the room. I pulled on the little tie of the thin blue robe my now-dead grandmother gave me and it fell to the floor. She was alive then, and so, in a different way, was I. The aliveness of it all: naked, I felt full. Filled up, sated and creamy, as if with milk. I sat cold and full and shaking. No one said anything, they just began to draw, and that in itself—the mundanity of their looking—shocked me into stillness.
LUCY SCHILLER is a nonfiction writer and assistant professor at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Off Assignment, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Iowa Review, West Branch, DIAGRAM, the Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker (online), Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She is also a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review, and lives in Lubbock, Texas.
