The Art of Stillness

Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
—Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary

The first time I modeled nude, I was 19 or 20, home from college for the summer and looking for work that paid more than minimum wage. Before leaving for New York, I had earned $6 an hour working at the Newmarket Movie Stop and Tanning in New Hampshire. It was a peculiar combination, slinging VHS tapes and DVDs between wiping down the tanning beds and setting their timers. The shop was in the basement of a gas station and convenience store, just a five-minute walk from my mom’s house. During slow shifts I did my calculus homework, textbooks splayed across the counter; often, my mother would come by with warm leftovers and we would talk over the to-go containers, condensation beaded on the lids.

I had held other odd jobs when I was growing up—hostessing and waitressing at a Japanese restaurant, organizing receipts for my mom’s friends who had their own businesses. But now that I was back home for the summer, I wanted more. More money, fewer hours, something at least marginally related to what I was studying: art. In high school, to build up my portfolio for college applications, I had attended a few figure-drawing classes at a community arts center in Exeter, a quaint mill town known for its elite private school. One model in particular was indelible in my mind: an older man with a hulk of a belly, a scrotum that hung to his knees, and a Gandalf-length beard, who brought props and pretended to be spearing fish in a stream for three hours. I thought of him when, after my first year of college, I called the arts center and left a message, asking if they needed models.

They called back a few days later and said they could pay me $20 an hour, which in 2009 sounded like good money to do close to nothing. The arts center sent over a simple form that included, along with blank lines for my name and address, one asking for my “body type.” I asked my mother what she thought. Though my stomach was relatively flat, we agreed that thin didn’t seem quite accurate. I had an overall softness, but plump seemed inaccurate and patronizing. My hips were padded, my breasts swollen by birth control pills, and my thighs strong from years of gymnastics, so we settled on athletic/curvy. Were they looking for something in particular? I wondered if there was wrong answer.

On my first day, I was careful not to wear underwear for an hour before arriving, so seams wouldn’t press lines into my skin. Behind a shoddy screen, I changed out of my clothes and into a terry cloth robe I’d borrowed from my mother. The students were mostly women who looked to be in their fifties. No one was there to lead the class; folks just signed in on a clipboard, dropped their money in an envelope, and circled their easels around a pedestal covered in shabby pillows. I waited in the oversized robe until everyone was ready, and then draped it over the back of a chair to begin. Thanks to my parents’ body positivity, I was never really plagued with self-consciousness. My mom was the one my friends turned to with questions about sex; who stuffed condoms in my suitcase when I headed to Italy the summer I was 16; who told me if I was ever at a party and felt unsafe to call and she would give me a ride home, no questions asked.

Over the phone, I’d learned that the class was structured around a standard set of timed poses. I began with incredibly slow movement, not stopping for five minutes: extending my left arm upward, sweeping it to