Nine Women, One Dress(43)

From then on I fell in love on a near-daily basis. And lucky me, the feeling was mutual! I think New York City first started falling in love with me on account of my accent; the very accent that I had spent my first weeks swallowing with my morning coffee was just the thing that ended up making people fuss over me. Turns out that people weren’t as judgmental as I first thought. By and by, most folks that I came across found me entertaining. Delightful was actually the word they used most. “Your accent is delightful.” Sometimes it was refreshing, often charming, and once even enchanting.

And just like that, New York was crushing on Sally Ann Fennely. Not on account of my long legs and perfect smile and wavy blond hair, though I’m sure all that opened doors. But it was what I said and how I said it that got me invited in. It meant so much to me to know that it wasn’t just on account of my looks. As soon as I realized it, I began to lay it on heavier than a cow in a cotton field. Sounds pretty charming, right? A cow in a cotton field? Well, guess what, that’s not even a thing. I just made it up right on the spot. That cow in that cotton field was just the kind of thing that had people going on about how refreshing and real I was.

I first noticed the reaction at dinner in the women’s boardinghouse where I live. Yes, there are still women’s boardinghouses in New York City. When word first came in that I’d been accepted at the modeling agency, my mama, who had been pushing me all along, began to backpedal. Suddenly spooked at the reality of me living in the big city, she started Googling statistics on crime rates and the air-quality index—this from a woman who spent half her life with a cigarette dangling from her lips. But my grandma had a plan. She was a big Sylvia Plath fan and told us all about how when Sylvia Plath moved to New York she lived in a women’s boardinghouse, a safe place called the Barbizon. She even wrote about it in The Bell Jar. Somehow this risky analogy worked, as if suicidal Sylvia Plath had the makings of a role model.

The Barbizon was long closed, but there were about ten others to choose from; I ended up renting a room at a boardinghouse on the Upper West Side that supplied two meals a day and had a house mother and a twenty-four-hour doorman. Plus there was a strict no-boys policy. Mama was thrilled, and to be honest, I was happy about it too. I didn’t feel any more grown up or capable of living alone than I had the day before finding out I would be a runway model. The whole setup sounded more like a college sorority than life in the big city—though when I got here, no one seemed very sisterly to me. Well, at least not straightaway.

The first week at dinner I sat with the wrong girls—two other models, who barely introduced themselves and spent the entire meal discussing whether you can really wear black and navy together. (You can.) As the next week began I was late for dinner on account of my neighbor being busted for sneaking a boy up to her room. The matron was in the hallway pitching a conniption fit, and I was too frightened to try and slip by. When I finally made it down, I sat at the only seat available, between two smart-looking girls.

I must have looked a fright, ’cause they came right out and asked me what was the matter. Forgetting my efforts to subdue my southern accent, I blurted out, “That matron is madder than a wet hen!” They started to laugh. At first I thought they were making fun of me. My blushing cheeks must have given it away, ’cause the dark-haired girl, Margot, jumped right in and turned it around.

“What a great expression, ‘madder than a wet hen.’ I have to write that down!”

Turns out that she and the other girl, Halle, worked at New York magazine as interns. They didn’t get paid much, but they were invited to everything. One was from no farther away than Brooklyn, but her parents had wanted her to move out, and the other was from Boston.

I don’t know if they were honing their journalistic skills or if they were just nosy, but they sure did ask a lot of questions. “Where are you from?” “Why is a wet hen so mad?” “What are southern boys like?” “What do you do for kicks in Alabama?” I tried to sound interesting, but it was real hard. I didn’t imagine that tales of cotton farming and Friday night football would interest them. Luckily they loved my accent. It seemed that listening to me talk and hearing about a place they’d never been interested them plenty. That was the first time that I thought maybe I would stay in this big noisy city with a zillion people in it. Friends can really make any place seem livable, I think. The trick is to find a few of your own, and by the end of that dinner I felt like I had.

One night Margot got three seats to a Broadway musical through work and took Halle and me along. The first thing my grandma had said when we got word about me coming to New York was that I should go see a big musical on Broadway. She said it was something she had always wanted to do but she had never had the chance. I felt so grateful and excited to be going and a little bad that my grandma never had. I vowed to remember every last detail and relay them all to her on our Sunday call. My excitement was slightly squashed once we got to our seats. Turns out my friends’ editor’s son and a friend of his were in the seats next to us, and they were kind of cocky. Before the show even started they asked us to join them for dinner after at a famous old theater-district restaurant called Sardi’s. Thanks to Wikipedia and the crazy long line for the ladies’ room at intermission, I found out that Sardi’s is famous for having hundreds of stars’ caricatures on its walls. That sounded fine and all, but I really didn’t care for these two boys. The more they spoke, the stupider they seemed, like they didn’t even have the sense they were born with. Margot insisted we had to go on account of wanting to make a good impression on her boss, and Halle said we should go ’cause it would be fun. So we did. But it wasn’t.