Page 20 of Meant to Be

“They said you were a very hard worker—and so polite. Which goes a long way in this business.”

I nodded, wondering if there was abutcoming. Perhaps she was about to tell me that the photos hadn’t turned out and they needed to redo them. Or maybe the news was even worse. Maybe some higher-up had decided that none of this was going to work out after all.

I held my breath as Daisy splayed about a dozen photos of me on the glass coffee table between us. I looked down as I heard my mom gasp.

“Wow,” I said, my eyes darting from picture to picture. I hardly recognized myself. I looked like a movie star.

“Do you like them?” Daisy asked.

It felt like a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway.

“I mean…yes, sure,” I said, noticing there was no trace of the zit that had been on my chin the day of the shoot. My skin looked flawless, in fact, and my arms and legs looked more toned and tanned than they were in real life. “I can’t believe this isme. Did someone doctor these photos or something?”

Daisy laughed, then said that the images had been retouched. It was the first time I’d ever heard that word.

“How do they do that?” I asked her.

Daisy explained that it was a process in the darkroom where they pieced together separate images to create the perfect photo.

“Do they do this with everyone?” I asked. Maybe that’s what made supermodels supermodels: they were actually perfect without all the retouching.

Daisy smiled and said yes, everyone. Then she paused and her face got very serious as she said, “Listen, Cate. I want you to remember something as you move forward in your career.”

I nodded, listening as intently as I could.

“You’re going to be rejected and criticized and picked apart. Endlessly. You’ll be told you aren’t thin enough or pretty enough or good enough. And ultimately, at the end of it all, you’re going to be told you’re too old. No matter how successful you become, you will eventually be replaced by someone younger.”

The speech was the opposite of what I’d expected, but for some reason it made me like Daisy even more than I already did.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked, staring into my eyes.

“Yes. I do,” I said, wondering what about her statement could possibly confuse anyone.

Daisy pushed her glasses up on her nose and said, “And? Does that scare you?”

This question was more difficult to answer, and I pondered it a few seconds before shaking my head no. What scared me was the thought of Chip putting my mom in the hospital, maybe even killing her. Not the idea of someone telling me I was fat.

“Good,” Daisy said. “Because the sooner you realize that there is no such thing as perfection—and this entire business is an illusion—the better off you’ll be.”

—

Over the nextmonth, I returned to the city a half dozen times for casting calls, racking up rejections along with absences from school. Chip seemed to revel in my failure, reminding me that I wasn’t model material and gloating that he’d been right—that the whole thing was a scam. He also complained that I should be in school (as if he cared at all about my education) and that my mom should be home, cleaning and cooking and stroking his ego and doing God knows what else she did for him. It made me shudder to think about it.

Then, just as Chip was on the verge of making me quit before I’d even started, I got booked for my first job. Then my second and third and fourth. None of the jobs were with major fashion houses or big brands, and Daisy seemed to think they were small potatoes, but it felt like a lot of money to me. More important, I was gaining valuable experience and building a résumé. Daisy promised that if I kept working hard, it was only a matter of time before I got my big break.

“One minute you’re modeling a twenty-dollar skirt for Macy’s, and the next you’re wearing Versace on a catwalk in Milan,” she said.

So I kept working hard and saving what little money Chip didn’t take from me. You’d think the funds he siphoned off would have been enough to keep him off my back, but the more I made, the more he seemed to hate me. At first, I thought maybe he was jealous, but that really didn’t make sense. How could a middle-aged cop be jealous of a teenaged model? Then I thought it had to do with my mom—that he hated how happy and proud she got when she was looking at pictures of me in catalogs and magazines, because it meant less attention for him. In part, it was probably both of those things.

But I came to realize that it was mostly about power andcontrol. Everything with Chip boiled down to that. It wasn’t so much that he hated me, or even my success, but that he resented the confidence and independence that came along with that success. They clearly threatened him. I think he intuitively understood that if I got strong and made enough money, he wouldn’t have as much control over my mom. The bottom line was that Chip needed me to “know my place,” and if he sensed for one second that I didn’t or that, in his words, I was getting “too big for my britches,” he went berserk. So I kept a low profile around the house and often reminded my mom, who wasn’t as savvy about these dynamics, never to mention my career or casting calls within his earshot.

All the while, I counted down the days until my eighteenth birthday, knowing that I could move out of my house the second it was legally permissible—and that Chip couldn’t track me down and drag me back home as some sort of a power play. I felt myself regularly drifting into dream mode, imagining a small apartment in the city—one with two bedrooms so my mom could come with me. We could re-create a version of our old life in Hackensack, only slightly more glamorous, and minus the loser guys.

—

In September ofmy senior year, a rep from Calvin Klein contacted Daisy, inviting me to a small, exclusive casting call. The agent said they were looking for a “relative unknown—a fresh face with star power” and that they thought I fit the bill. I couldn’t believe it. In my mind,nobodywas bigger or more iconic than Calvin Klein, except maybe Ralph Lauren, though I preferred Calvin’s simple, seductive aesthetic to Ralph’s snobbish, preppy one. As excited and hopeful as I was, I was also a little worried. Not about getting rejected, but about gettingpicked. I knew that my landingCalvin Klein would upset the precarious power dynamic in our household. If Chip could no longer call me “bush league” and “second-rate,” it would push him over the edge.

The night before my audition, as I was in bed trying to fall asleep, he went on a rampage. Like clockwork. Through the door of my bedroom, I heard him ranting about me—and of all things, Pepper’s litter box. Chip despised Pepper (probably because Pepper didn’t give a shit about Chip) and was always threatening to give him away or, when he wasreallypissed, put him down.

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