Body Grammar
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Synopsis
A coming-of-age queer love story set in the glamorous but grueling world of international modeling—a "terrific debut ... roiling with deep questions of identity and art, love, and the irrepressible need for meaning in life" (Jess Walter, bestselling author of The Cold Millions)
By the time Lou turns eighteen, modeling agents across Portland have scouted her for her striking androgynous look. Lou has no interest in fashion or being in the spotlight. She prefers to take photographs, especially of Ivy, her close friend and secret crush.
But when a hike ends in a tragic accident, Lou finds herself lost and ridden with guilt. Determined to find a purpose, Lou moves to New York and steps into the dizzying world of international fashion shows, haute couture, and editorial shoots. It’s a whirlwind of learning how to walk and how to command a body she’s never felt at ease in. But in the limelight, Lou begins to fear that she’s losing her identity—as an individual, as an artist, and as a person still in love with the girl she left behind.
A sharply observed and intimate story of grief and healing, doubt and self-acceptance set against the hyper-image-conscious industry of modeling and high fashion, Body Grammar shines with the anxieties of finding your place in the world and the heartbreaking beauty of pursuing love.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
Release date: June 14, 2022
Publisher: Vintage
Print pages: 272
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Body Grammar
Jules Ohman
1
The women started appearing out of nowhere the year Lou turned fourteen. Scouts. Modeling scouts. Lou had grown eight inches that year, went from the shrimpiest kid in her grade to a gawky five foot eleven: more spindly legs than human girl, caving her chest in to avoid being taller than almost every other person in gym class. The women, materializing as if out of some vortex in the sidewalks, handed her cards embossed with the names of modeling agencies—all of which were coined from superlatives (Lavish Modeling) or Portland iconography (Bridgetown Models, Rose City Agency)—and asked her to give them a call, to come in for a meeting, to talk a little bit more. Lou never did.
Even after she turned eighteen, they didn’t let up. They approached her at Target with her mom, the last week of high school, picking out twin long sheets for her freshman year at the University of Oregon. They approached the dark corner booth in the coffee shop where she’d holed up every day so far that summer, reading or drawing or just watching her friend Ivy, who was working, spray herself with steamed milk and get hit on by men in very tiny beanies. One woman approached at one of Ivy’s band’s shows downtown, dressed in a black blazer and black slacks and black sunglasses, pressing a card to her palm, and Lou, a little drunk, had thought for a full second that the woman was an FBI agent. After the first woman, in a mall food court when she was in middle school, Lou’s mom had told her if she wanted to try it, she had to wait until she was sixteen, what her mom clearly thought of as a reasonable working age, as if modeling would be anything like Lou’s summer landscaping job.
Lou knew lots of her classmates would love the chance to be a model: it seemed like a portal to being rich, to being known, being seen; or even, within the abyss of puberty, to just being told they were beautiful, though none of these women ever told Lou that. They all said she had an interesting face, which wasn’t the same thing. True, she was tall—she was mistaken for a much younger boy all the time, despite messy brown hair curling past her shoulders, which she didn’t necessarily mind. And true, she was the right size—she ate whatever she wanted and she stayed skinny and flat-chested, which she also didn’t mind. But it disturbed her to think these women purposely hung out at places where they knew teenaged girls would be. Malls. Concerts. Coffee shops. Scouting beanpole girls. Somehow, no one else thought it was creepy, even her parents, who were only amused, but Lou felt like she was being stalked by the fashion industry, an entity she didn’t love, didn’t feel catered to by, didn’t even understand was a thing until it asserted itself in her life, insisting she join it. She felt like she was being recruited to a cult that she could see through entirely, whose basic tenets she didn’t believe in and never would.
One woman approached while she was mowing a client’s front lawn on a Friday in early June, just a week after her high school graduation. Her boss was weeding in the back. It was a very nice and very steep neighborhood, a few miles from the house Lou had grown up in, on the edge of the hills around Skyline Boulevard. The grade made the landscaping particularly difficult; Lou was always afraid of rolling down the hill, sharp tools in hand, or the brakes on the truck going out while she was in it.
Yet Lou had been distracted all afternoon. Ivy was supposed to pick her up at any minute, and Lou was mostly watching for her dirty gold minivan, doing a crummy job on the oval of lawn by the rhododendrons. She and Ivy were going to be spending the next three nights together, which felt like a lush amount of time. They’d been friends since their freshman year but it was only this summer that Lou had let herself spend unrestricted time with her, as if before she was in some way saving up. She knew it was absurd to think time, or company, worked as if she could save any of it. But it didn’t really matter if there was sound metaphysical or even physical logic to it, because anytime lately Lou tried to keep Ivy at the same careful distance she kept nearly everyone, Ivy rejected that outright.
The woman waved her hands in Lou’s face to get her attention. She was walking a miniature husky. It looked like a robot toy Lou had as a kid that barked three times then flipped over backward. Lou pulled off her hearing protection and turned off the mower so she didn’t take off the husky’s snout.
“Can I help you?” Lou said.
The woman was dressed in a Lululemon-ish getup. Lou figured she wanted to know what the landscaping company was, even though it was emblazoned on the side of her boss’s truck.
“You have a great look,” the woman said, as if Lou was something she’d assembled herself. “Very striking.” She handed Lou the card right as Ivy pulled up to the curb in her minivan.
The dog sniffed Lou’s feet, then looked up at her with ice-blue eyes. The husky was so clean that when the mud from Lou’s boots showed up on its nose, Lou wanted to wipe it off, return it to mint condition.
“Thanks,” Lou said politely, and pocketed the card fast. She kept a stack of them in her room, because she thought it was funny and most of her friends thought it was funny. But she didn’t want Ivy to know.
“Who was that?” Ivy asked as Lou climbed in. The van smelled of sourdough and coffee, from the free loaves and bags of espresso Ivy brought home from work, and there was a Tetris of amps and equipment in the back. They were leaving in the morning for her band Fortunato’s final show, near the University of Oregon campus.
Ivy met her eyes, and for a second, Lou wanted to tell her, wanted them to be able to laugh about it like she would with any of her other friends, but she didn’t want Ivy looking at her like those women looked at her. She wanted Ivy looking at her for other things. Things those women couldn’t see and didn’t understand about her. That no one but Ivy did.
“I don’t know,” Lou said.
“Well, what did she want?”
“Nothing.”
Ivy didn’t push it because Ivy never pushed it, content to let everyone keep their secrets. Lou felt extra grateful for it right then, the sun bright in their eyes through the windshield, the woman and her immaculate dog already disappeared back down the sidewalk vortex: out of sight, out of mind.
The grass was still warm from the heat of the day by the time they settled at Aldenlight Park. They’d had milkshakes for dinner, then drove around in the summer air until Ivy requested they stop somewhere, try to get some photographs for her band’s new album cover. Lou pulled her Nikon from her camera bag and started adjusting the aperture and shutter speed, zooming in on Ivy’s impish grin. In the shadows, her face looked angular and hard, like it was cut from something solid. She had wavy dark hair just past her shoulders and dark eyes that were always lingering places, long after everyone but Lou had looked away. A straight pink scar ran down her upper lip and chin, imprinted like she’d fallen asleep on fabric. When she was a kid, she’d split her face in two on her bicycle, and Lou had never forgotten her description of it—the way she held on to most things Ivy said to her; Ivy, who seemed to think and speak in complete images. When she’d risen from the street to face her running mother, Ivy said, both halves of her teeth and jaw were raised like flags flying in opposite directions.
Ivy held her fingers out in front of the lens, and Lou took some shots of them. Her hands were long and strong, and it was easy to imagine them spreading out to reach difficult chords on the neck of a guitar. Her knuckles were thicker than Lou’s, whose hands were slender and small, scarred from yardwork and a nervous habit of picking down her cuticles until they bled.
Lou reached out and held Ivy’s hands still so she could focus the shot, then drew her hand back as she became aware that maybe that was a strange thing to do, leaving Ivy’s fingers in midair, reaching for nothing.
“Your calluses feel like plastic,” Lou said. “Like when you crush those plastic balls, in ball pits.”
“I’ve never been in a ball pit,” Ivy said.
Lou lowered her camera to stare. “How?”
“My mom never let me go in them; I don’t know. Why do you look so horrified?”
“I just don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“They’re kind of gross, right? Like, how do you think they clean them?”
“That’s not the point. It’s like saying you’ve never been on a trampoline.”
Ivy laughed. “I’m not a sociopath, I’ve been on a trampoline. In fact, I’ve been on a trampoline with you. At Catherine’s.”
“My dad lost his wedding ring in a ball pit at my sixth-birthday party. And they had to empty the whole thing.”
“Did he find it?”
“Nope. And the bottom of it was disgusting. Like, human hair and a decade’s worth of fruit snacks.”
“What other kind of hair was an option?” Ivy said with a grin.
“Stuffed animal hair. I don’t know!”
“I think you mean fur. What was your favorite stuffed animal? And don’t lie and tell me you didn’t hoard them, because I’ve seen the Container Store zoo in your closet. Be honest with me, were you a dolphin girl?”
“How dare you.”
Ivy hooted. “You so were.”
“If you’re really asking,” Lou said, cleaning her lens with the bottom of her shirt, which only made it dirtier, “my favorite stuffed animal was an orca named Susanna.”
“I knew it.”
“It’s not the same!”
“You’re the sweetest person I’ve ever met,” Ivy said wistfully. “Susanna.”
“A killer whale, really.”
“Sweet, sweet, sweet.”
Lou blushed, heat spreading down her neck and chest. No one saw her that way. She was often called standoffish, or aloof, but not sweet. Never sweet. It reflected something back at her that she didn’t know how to hold in tandem with other parts of her, the parts of her that weren’t soft or easy or fragile, that weren’t belly-down to the world. Around Ivy, she felt like the kind of person who could admit that maybe she could be sweet and also not feel like being sweet made her susceptible, unguarded, open to anything bad coming for her.
Lou took a few pictures of Ivy. She felt hyperaware of not zooming in on her face, of keeping the shot wide-angle. She didn’t linger anywhere. “Are you nervous for the show tomorrow?”
“We’re not done with Susanna,” Ivy said. “Nowhere near done.”
“If this record goes platinum, can I have a cut of the profits so I can retire?”
“Retire from what? And I don’t think anyone’s retired off record sales in a long-ass time, dude. Why don’t you go to law school and sue all the streaming apps and then we’ll talk.”
“I would really be the world’s worst lawyer,” Lou said.
“You’d be all, ‘I don’t really think there’s actually an issue here, Your Honor, so why don’t we get some pizza together instead, and then everyone can go on a nice long walk in the fresh air, and we’ll all feel better.’ ”
“I’m sorry, would I be wrong?”
Ivy grabbed Lou’s camera and looked through the viewfinder at her.
“Don’t,” Lou said, blushing.
“What if I want you on the cover?”
“It’s not my band.”
“Well, some of the album’s about you.”
Lou hadn’t actually heard any of the new songs. She lunged for her camera, but Ivy held it back, laughing.
“Just a few,” Ivy said. She had a perpetual slouch to her shoulders, except onstage, when her posture improved with a guitar. The shutter clicked. Once. Twice. “In case you change your mind.”
“No.” It came out sharper than Lou meant it to. But she’d always hated having her picture taken, even before the sidewalk women started hounding her. It was definitely hypocritical, as someone who loved photographing other people, but she didn’t like how she looked in photos. Unaware. She didn’t like to be caught not looking.
“Whoa, I’m sorry, okay?” Ivy said, and handed back the camera. “Here.”
“This light’s terrible. Let’s go somewhere else.” The rise in her voice swelled to the very rim of needing to cry, and she didn’t know why.
Lou took the driver’s seat. She preferred to drive, always, and Ivy seemed to prefer her driving too, even though it was her van. They’d become friends after spending hours of ninth-grade biology trying to get their fat yellow stopwatches to land on exact numbers, killing time in the smallest of increments. But everything went fast when they were together. Even Lou’s driving, which was infamously hesitant. Only up in the hills where they lived did Lou feel certain of which curves to hug, which to give room. Her handling was untroubled, the only place on earth she might find comfort in hairpin turns. There was a danger to summer that she had never liked or adjusted to, the way everything felt too open, too fast, too reckless—maybe this was the result of a static gray childhood, that illusion of safety. She preferred the overcast days that Portland was famous for, the way the sky became a physical boundary, containing her.
They pulled up alongside a chain-link fence, a plane of grass behind it, and got out in front of the red radio towers, which were several stories high. Lou had never actually been here before. The towers had always felt like a landmark of home, not a destination in their own right. But here there was light.
“What do you mean, the album’s about me?” Lou said.
Ivy looked over at her, and the expression on her face suggested that Lou should know the answer to that question, that Lou was being fucking absurd in asking it to begin with.
But Lou didn’t know. It wasn’t clear. Or if it was, only the border of it. The insides were messy and unformed and too fragile to live in the world. She didn’t want the thing to puncture and spill all over everything.
“So what you’re saying is you wrote ‘Ballad of a Dolphin Girl,’ ” Lou said, trying to turn it back into a joke. “Don’t you need my permission to steal my life story?”
Ivy gave her the briefest smile. “ ‘Ballad of Susanna,’ killer whale.”
Lou adjusted her camera settings while Ivy walked over to the tall fence. At first she just gripped it, looking up. Barbed wire twisted at the top. Then she started to climb. Lou faced her while walking backward, holding up her Nikon. She knew from somewhere that this was the highest point in Portland. Her bare legs and arms were cold as the breeze picked up. She felt nervous, suddenly, without knowing why.
When Ivy climbed down and turned back, wild-eyed, running straight for Lou, there was an ember glow to her cheeks as she closed the distance between them.
Lou took her picture, and it came out blurry and perfect and strange. Like a girl turned radio wave.
2
The next morning, they picked up Catherine Ellis, who got into the back seat of the van with a backpack clinking with bottles and left her seat belt unbuckled. It was only when Lou reminded her that Catherine dug it out of the center-seat fold and secured herself, teasing Lou that she couldn’t parent her the whole trip because she had plans to party, and Lou wasn’t entitled to interrupt the weekend. Saying it as if the summer wasn’t one long free weekend. They were all spending the weekend with Fortunato’s drummer, Tuck, and Catherine’s sister, Morgan, who were both about to finish their sophomore year of college. Morgan and Tuck were friends from high school and lived together off campus. Even though they had been best friends since ninth grade, Catherine rarely had Lou over, always wanting to hang out anywhere but at home, and so Lou knew very little about her sister.
Catherine was wry and talented, and seemed to get off on giving Lou shit. They had been cocaptains of their track team in high school. Catherine had been their coach’s favorite, mostly due to her perfect running posture, her lean, the cadence she never broke, and she was a state champion, committed to running for Oregon in the fall. When the girls’ long-distance team won meets, it was because of Catherine. She idolized Steve Prefontaine, had a shrine to him in her bedroom, and was always quoting him in their premeet huddles. But she smoked a lot of weed and drank too much the night before meets. Their coach was always saying, You’re wasting yourself, Ellis. Lou wasn’t a naturally talented long-distance runner at all, but she and Catherine had been selected as captains because she worked hard and Catherine was a champion. Lou had none of that competitiveness, was once cited on an elementary school report card for needing to be a little less careful and a little more aggressive, which her parents had joked about for the rest of her childhood. (Could you be a little more aggressive with that fork in those brussels sprouts, kiddo? You might be a little less careful with your merging, dearheart, so we don’t miss the exit.) Catherine had an edge to her that she never directed at Lou, even when she teased—but she was actively aiming it toward Ivy on the ride south.
“Are you and Tuck hooking up?” Catherine asked Ivy, seconds after she got in the car.
Lou actually deeply wanted to know the answer to this question, but Ivy had never offered it and Lou had never asked so directly. As far as Lou knew, Ivy didn’t hook up with anyone. She was in a serious relationship with her guitars, with the kind of sound she wanted. That spring, she’d made a few offhand comments about different musicians she admired, of a variety of genders, and Lou had analyzed them for weeks afterward, trying to determine a common thread, but it was never their physical appearances. It was always their tonality, or the degree of sadness Lou felt listening to their songs.
When Ivy didn’t say anything right away, Catherine added, “He’s such a nerd.”
Before Tuck graduated, he and Ivy always sat together at lunch and Lou had watched them from the table where she sat with her friends on the track team, trying to determine if their body language was romantic or just familiar. Tuck was a jazz drummer. They’d formed Fortunato before he left for college, and this was going to be their last show before Ivy moved to New York for school. She and Tuck spent almost every single weekend together practicing, and Lou didn’t know if something had changed now that Ivy was leaving. She seemed to talk about him in a different way, like there was always something she wasn’t saying.
“Tuck’s a genius,” Ivy said seriously. “And why do you care?”
Catherine laughed. “My sister was fucking him in high school, but she was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I caught him eating her out in our treehouse.”
“Please stop,” Lou said. ...
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