Jenna’s Model Life

At some point during my dad’s birthday dinner (at Pizza Orgasmica, which he’s been going to with his brother since they first moved to San Francisco together in the late ’70s), I took a step away from the table and felt a familiar pinching.

My bronze embroidered Jil Sander flats, size 40, eagerly purchased used this Spring on eBay for $40, never really fit. Nevertheless, in some triumph of fashionability and suppressed buyer’s remorse over practicality, I wore my flats to my graduation barbecue, to dinner with my grandparents, to class, to the radio station where I worked — anywhere I knew I’d be mostly sitting. I recall vividly wearing you, dear Jils, to the library one day in May. My feet were swollen by the Iowa heat, and even though you forced me to give up the game and walk barefoot from the Pentacrest on, I still had blisters for a week. That wrecked my confidence in you — except I still kept you around because I held some glimmer of hope for your suitability as footwear for cooler, tights-wearing climes.

I took you to Paris for autumn and I wore you once. That was really it.

So I caught you up in my end-of-year closet edit, and didn’t look back. You went in the bag with the sweater with the too-short arms, the skirt that doesn’t fit anymore, the shirt I last wore at Christmas 2004, the 1940s jacket I always meant to alter, the bootleg jeans and the slightly scuffed $7.99 eBay Gucci pumps (an alleged size 10) that hurt my feet so badly I wore them outside the house precisely once, and that was to get the mail. I put you all in four Trader Joe’s bags, and I hauled you to Haight St. The remaining 9/10 of my closet, including my more successful eBay operations, breathed a little easier, and my closet rail sprang back a little from its permanently burdened sag.

In line at one of the stores I was hitting, I sized up my fellow waiters: A middle-aged woman holding a sequined 1980s cocktail dress on a hanger. A girl in her twenties wearing a hoodie and carrying a knapsack. Two Latino guys with a giant tote bag. A girl my age, reading Housekeeping to pass the time.

The sequined dress lady and the hoodie woman started talking. “Well, he’s in the hospital,” whispered the woman in the hoodie. “A motorcycle accident.”

“Oh my God,” replied the sequined dress lady.

“He’s in a really good union, but he wasn’t hurt on the job. He has pins all in his leg.”

They turned away and I couldn’t hear the sequined dress lady’s reply.

“It’s just hard to go from him earning $6,000 a month to nothing, just like that, you know?” The hoodie woman snapped her fingers.

The buyer called me up just then. While she was silently going through my clothes, checking labels and examining my pants for evidence of period blood, I glanced over at the doorway as the sequined dress lady and the hoodie woman were leaving. Her outfit was so loose it took until she shouldered her knapsack and her hoodie shifted a little for me to notice she was pregnant.

If you want the Jil Sander flats, they’re on sale at Wasteland for $70.