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came home my lip had started to
    swell. She couldn’t help but notice, and all at once she began playing nurse. She took me upstairs and sat me on the edge of the tub and dabbed at the cut till it was clean.
    Tears were streaming down my face, but they had nothing to do with the torn lip. And she knew it. I mean, Christ—
    you’d think a normal mother would ask what happened.
    But she didn’t ask. Because she didn’t want to know; because she already knew.
    After she finished what she was doing, we sat there in 30 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N
    the bathroom, face-to-face, quiet, saying nothing for the longest time. Finally she broke the silence. “I never noticed how amazingly beautiful you are,” she said. “You are much more beautiful than any of those girls in the magazines you’re always looking at.”
    It was the nicest thing she had ever said to me. And I just fell apart.
    Those girls in the magazines. Okay, I admit it. I had my share of crazy childhood fantasies. I wanted to be discovered. I thought, you know, I’d be out at the mall and an elegant older woman would come up to me and say, “Hello, my name is Eileen Ford. I think you have what it takes to be a model. Here’s my card. Please call me as soon as you can, and I’ll send you a first-class ticket to New York.”
    Or I’d be working at the Orange Bowl, and Richard
    Avedon would come in with Lauren Hutton for a slice of pizza. I’d act real cool, like I didn’t know who they were, and mosey on over to take their order. And Lauren Hutton would look up at me, and her jaw would drop, and she’d say, “My God! Richard! Look at her! Look at those gorgeous lips! This is it! This girl is the Next Big Thing!”
    Yes, it’s true. When I was sixteen, Lauren Hutton was my hero. I loved the way she sailed across the pages of Vogue. I mean, to use an expression of the day, she was bomb-diggedy. This was a girl who had survived her childhood in Florida and made it in the big leagues. I loved her face. I loved the gap between her teeth. I loved that mischievous look in her eyes. I loved her because she gave me hope.
    And Richard Avedon, well—he was The Master. I think back on it, and of course I was only just beginning to appreciate his art. But there was something bright and clean about the images; the way he lit his girls; the way N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 31
    you felt they were literally staring back at you, smiling at you, telling you— me, in this case—that you were one of them.
    “Do you really think I’m as beautiful as they are?” I asked my mother. We were still in the bathroom, facing each other. She reached across and wiped away my tears.
    I felt so fucking ugly my whole life. I was too thin and I had no tits and I didn’t see them coming in any time soon.
    “More beautiful,” she said.
    And I believed her. I wanted to believe her. By the time I was fourteen, I had probably spent a thousand afternoons on the cold linoleum floor of the local Publix supermarket, poring over the fashion magazines as they arrived. Glamour, Mademoiselle, Vogue. I was a fixture there. Me, little Janice, lost in those pages, my long spindly legs blocking the aisle.
    The magazines seemed thicker in those days, more substantial, like little phone books, and I studied them as if I were preparing for finals. All those amazing women! Cheryl Tiegs. Rene Russo. Apollonia. Gunilla Lindblad. Lauren Hutton. Yes, especially Lauren Hutton. She was paper thin, and not classically beautiful—like Grace Kelly, say. And even when she was standing still, she looked as if she were flying. And I would think, I can fly, too. And I’m not Grace Kelly, either. And I’m as thin as she is. I figured that I, too, could stand on the snowy slopes behind the Suvretta-Haus resort in Saint Moritz, in my fluffy beaver cap, my gloved hands resting on my ski poles, looking radiant and beautiful and happy.
    I’d turn the page and see Catherine Deneuve in a St.
    Laurent tuxedo; turn