I went to the grocery store today at the worst time. Columbus, Ohio’s workforce had just been uncaged. In produce, I spotted a woman who obviously works in an office. No one who works at home wears heels or a skirt that high. Great legs. I hate her. She turned away from fondling the peppers and that’s when I saw it — the scar up her right knee that probably ruined her modeling career. Just like me.
Her scar reminded me of when I was 15 and my parents took our family on a trip to Atlantic City for a “Jesus Conference”. The date was October 14, 1978. How I remember that is because it was the day after Friday the 13th and the ocean was too cold for swimming but not too cold for going in to just below how far up we could roll our overalls.
Jesus was a no show at the conference. Again. And for most of it, so was I. On day one of the conference, I became instant friends with a girl who was wearing the same exact outfit I was wearing. She even wore her hair in two long, blonde braids. We snuck out of the conference to walk up and down the boardwalk and buy salt water taffy at a corner booth that was cranking the Beatles’ All You Need is Love.
To this day that has been my religious belief:
All you need is love, love,
Love is all you need.
I went through the motions of being Catholic but at 15, I traded in Catholicism for a Beatles tune, some salt water taffy and a scar on my knee. I think it was a pretty good trade.
I got the scar the day after Friday the 13th, which has made me suspicious of Saturday the 14th ever since. My new friend and I were on the fifth floor of our hotel in the vending machine room, playing soccer with an ice cube she dropped on our way back to her hotel room with a full ice bucket.
When the ice cube became too small to kick back to me, she took off through the large sliding glass door onto the balcony that lined the courtyard side of the rooms. I took off after her, only I ran through the part of the glass door that was closed. And like any accident, time did that thing it does. I fell in slow motion, watching pieces of glass above and below me fall in slow motion, too. I looked down and watched my knee fall gradually onto the point of a large, triangular piece of glass. It tore through my jeans and cut a wide gash in the skin over my patella. Gravity was in my favor. Had I landed a second sooner or later that pointy glass could have slashed tendon or muscle.
People came rushing from inside their rooms when they heard the glass smashing on the balcony and my fourth or fifth yell for help. It was New Jersey, so people were talking lawsuit first, first-aid second. One man said, “You should sue! Take this hotel to court. This just ruined your modeling career!”
Just as it had mid-accident, time went into slow motion again. All of us, and by us I mean four or five total strangers and me, paused to think about the likelihood of that argument holding up in court. It was a pregnant pause in which everyone assessed my gawky 15-year old adolescent looks and tried to imagine how the nose that I hadn’t quite grown into yet would look in the future, the way detective shows use age-progression to help locate children that have been missing for ten years. They assessed my legs, my height, weight and facial features.
Dangling in the air while blood is oozing out of my knee and hands and forehead was the validity of that statement “Is that true? Could this really affect her modeling career?” It was the first time I had ever imagined myself as a model. I didn’t even know if I was pretty. But modeling? Career? Me? On the front page of Seventeen? Advertising Breck shampoo and swinging my head side to side, while my hair, in the right studio light, looked like flowing honey?
Then just like that, time stopped its suspension. The silence was shattered, as we all came to an unspoken consensus that that “ruined modeling career” argument was just an impulsive quip. A woman kneeling next to me yelled, “Quick! Somebody call the paramedics! Honey, we’re going to need to tear open your pant leg so they can pull the glass out, okay?”
I thought it was ironic to be staring up at the ceiling of the inside of an ambulance, rolling through Atlantic City on a Saturday afternoon, especially because in the traffic jam on the way to the Jesus Conference earlier that day I remember saying, “I wouldn’t want to be in an ambulance in this town.” And yet here I was, in an ambulance with my mom and dad, wondering how long it would take to get to the nearest hospital considering how long it took for my dad to get to our hotel. Not that long.
We were in and out of the emergency room with stitches and crutches, and back in our hotel room, getting visitors from the Jesus Conference who wondered if we were going to sue. “They should have had stickers on the glass,” someone said. “They ruined her modeling career,” someone else said. There was that modeling career comment again. “You should sue!” they said.
My dad laughed off the suggestion. “No, we’re not going to sue,” he said when the visitors left the room. “Accidents happen.” He was probably remembering the time our family drove from Oklahoma to New York between military assignments. Within ten minutes of us being in a motel one night, one of us kids broke a window when we were trying to close it. The motel never charged us for the broken window “because it was an accident,” which was a blessing because we didn’t have one extra dollar for that road trip. All of the money the military gave my dad for transport between bases was spent on shipping our belongings to Turkey, and gas to get us to my grandmother’s house where we stayed for a week before flying to Istanbul.
But a teeny tiny part of me was hoping my dad would have been upset, like the man who showed up first on the scene. I was sort of hoping my dad would fall out of level-headed character and at least say, “Damn! This accident totally ruined your modeling career!” And then pace back and forth between the queen-sized beds, as if strategizing a plan to make it all better.
I wasn’t expecting any unlevel-headed behavior. I thought suing was an odd idea, too, but it would have been a strange kind of nice if my dad, for just one second, acted like that stranger. My parents were part Amish when it came to discussing beauty. It was irrelevant. Aren’t everyone’s parents supposed to think their children are the prettiest things on Earth and tell them how beautiful they are? If not, there wouldn’t be that expression – “A face only a mother could love.” Instead, my parents remained true to their values and talked about how ridiculous it is to sue a hotel for breaking their sliding glass door, especially seeing as we’re here for a Jesus Conference. “That wouldn’t be very Christian-like,” my mom explained to us kids.
I spent the rest of the weekend alone in our hotel room while everyone attended the remainder of the conference. I hung out on the queen-sized bed, watched TV with my stitched knee elevated on several pillows, and received countless calls from the hotel desk, “Is there anything we can get you? A glass of orange juice, perhaps? More pillows? A Seventeen magazine?”
I didn’t let on that we weren’t going to sue. It wasn’t very Christian-like. But I dug the room service, even though the orange juice was a little bitter.
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