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I wanted my voice to be everything I wasn't, but it was a traitor. By the end of each call — after finding the catalogue the customer had, the page number, discussing sizing, getting the credit card number, and desperately trying to sell five panties for twenty dollars (twenty-five cents commission for every panty sold!) — my Hooksexups would be frayed, and my voice so high it was closer to Minnie Mouse than Marilyn Monroe. "Goodbye!" I'd squeak.
I don't remember my first caller, but I do remember my first perv call, and the slow, blood-in-your-ears shock when you realize this person is masturbating. This was a time in our lives when we couldn't even talk about sex with our boyfriends — whom we were having sex with. I couldn't even tell Lisa I thought she was insane (blowjobs do not taste like any flavor ice cream and pickles). How incredibly, weirdly, intimate. What did they think I looked like? Did they imagine my voice coming out of the girl in the point d'esprit teddy's lips, the way I once thought the Virgin Mary statue's lips moved in chapel? Were their bedroom curtains drawn, or did they hunch down in the living room, with Jeopardy! muted in front of them?
You could hang up on perv callers (or worse yet, when someone wouldn't provide a credit card number up
At parties, boys crowded around while we pretended to answer the phone.
front), but sometimes I'd stay on the line. There was an old man who liked to rap about panties and pussy; I'd compliment him on his rhymes (what else did he have?) Just when I had gotten used to the pervs, the heavy breathers, the grade-school prank calls, something new would throw me. The time I couldn't understand what the male customer was asking, and a put him on hold to ask my manager: "Which thong do we recommend for 'tucking'?"
Or my first female perv call. Sure, it was odd that she just murmured, "Mmm, huh," as I enthusiastically described my favorite push-up bras and teddies. But it made it easier to read the special features I always forgot to mention ("And the best thing about the see-through lace bodysuit? It's crotchless!"). Then she asked me what I was wearing, and I could feel my heart pound in my ears anew.
What was I wearing? Not the same things as this beautiful family of women who cavorted in these glossy pages. I wanted that model's body, smile, hair. The painful joy of the summer catalogues! If only I could be that bronzed girl, lounging against a white-washed wall in a blue-sky utopia that could only be Greece, or Bali, or Baja — anywhere but Ohio. That freedom! Was this what college would feel like? But when I used my employee discount and ordered a nightie, it arrived oversized. The cotton was rough against my young breasts, which poked out embarrassingly against the material like science-class volcanoes. No bras I ordered inspired wonder.
Men and women proud to call Ira Glass a sex symbol melt when I say I used to work at Victoria's Secret Catalogue.
At parties, flocks of boys crowded around us while we to pretended to answer the VSC phone. I can't say I learned about love or sex from the catalogue, but I learned postures that looked a lot like them. I could bite my lip just so, lower my voice just right. I could close my eyes and imagine myself on a beach in Tahiti, as warm as Ohio nights. I could keep my eyes closed with boys, in basements, at parties, in warm corners with their dry, rough hands. But it wasn't right yet. It wasn't perfect.
"You need to get in touch with your sexuality," said Lisa. "You need to be an animal." We were in high school. We idolized Sharon Stone, though we weren't old enough to see Basic Instinct. We could say things like this and believe them. She handed me a Hershey's Kiss, even though snacks were forbidden on the work floor. "Making love is like eating chocolate," she intoned, sucking on the Kiss, her thighs pressed together, her eyes shut. She'd left the cavernous call center, flown up and away from her body and found some greater high, her own angelic vision.
To this day I can see her pursed lips. But now I wonder, could she really have been so transported by Hershey's? Watching the Fashion Show on TV, I'm in awe of the spectacle Victoria's Secret has created for itself. Even today, men and women who are intelligent, politically astute and proud to call Ira Glass a sex symbol melt when I say I used to work at the Victoria's Secret Catalogue. They beg me to "answer the phone." (Hell yes, I've gotten laid using my old phone voice.) And now I can work the underwires, easily recreate the catalogue poses: a finger against the lips, a tilt of the hips. It's so easy and fake and fun and horrible, that sometimes it's hard to let go. I wonder if the real models face this dilemma: when they actually fall in love and someone sees through them, what do they do when the poses grow old? A first step: open your eyes, take off the bra. n°
Nicole Ankowski has lived in Ohio, Oakland, and on the high plains of South Dakota, but is now proud to call Brooklyn home. She wrote for alternative weekly papers in the first two states, and tried to learn Lakota in the last. (The vowels can be tricky.) She just earned her MFA in Creative Writing and has been published in Beeswax literary journal. She is unable to resist good writing or bad TV.
