Sorority rush was coming up next Thursday, and I needed white heels. In the Herald Square DSW, it’s every man for himself. Meanwhile, at the Soho Bloomingdale’s, all it takes is grasping a singular shoe in hand before a suited, flamboyant gentleman approaches to offer assistance. As you sit on plush velvet, he promptly returns a box labeled “7 ½”, a sticker you didn’t need to lift a finger to find. With meticulous care, he kneels down, delicately unpacking the box, removing the stuffing and tissue paper. And the shoes he pops out are not Kelly & Katies: they’re Loeffler Randall Camellias.
The Camellias and I have history. They’d been calling my name since last June. I was planning on buying them for my graduation, but my friend Julia had already bought the Camellias in pink, and my friend Ani was planning on wearing her blue ones, and if I bought them in white, it would be some sort of Powerpuff Girl mess. It was the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t them, it was me.
But now I was in Bloomingdale’s to make a return, and those pleated fabric–covered 3.5” cylinder heels were begging for a home. What kind of sick monster would I be to leave them orphaned?
The fabulously dressed store clerk came over. “How are we doing?” he asked.
“I’m getting them,” I replied.
“Great,” he responded as he placed them back into the box. “Are you getting married?” he asked me.
I laughed. “Oh hahah, no. They’re actually for my school’s sorority rush.”
He laughed back. “Ah, how fun!”
“Do you think they’re too bridal?” I asked.
The gentleman, probably worried he had made me uncertain of my purchase, immediately assured me, “Oh no, I just see a lot of brides love them. They’re so cute!”
I purchased them, of course, but I knew the shoes must’ve been bridal. Why else would he have asked if I’m a bride? But seriously. Why else? Why would he think I’m a bride? At least in this country, a bride is a woman, not a kid. A bride wears “Woman Shoes” (the kind with the pointy toe that I always made fun of my mom for wearing—“They look like Disney Villain Shoes!” I would tell her). A bride carries a purse instead of a backpack. She goes grocery shopping with a list and buys real food instead of fruit snacks and protein bars. She calls her friends “honey.” A bride is not too far away from becoming a mother, when she’ll take yoga classes and carry an even bigger purse to hold all her kid’s snacks and toys. So WHY would this impeccably groomed store associate consider me a bride? Couldn’t he tell that I’m a kid? I’m a kid. I’m a flower girl. I go to school where I carry my Herschel backpack that I’ve had since junior year. Just a few months ago I had senior prom and calculus and pep rallies, and the boys my age still ask for girls’ Snapchats instead of their numbers. I have an array of stuffed animals that I sleep with every night, like Silky, whose eyes have fallen out of their sockets, or Henry, a pink plush bunny whom I decided to assign a male name to at Show and Tell to give my fellow kindergarten students a lesson in gender norms. My water bottle has countless dents in it from dropping it on the concrete. I peel my nail polish off the second I get them done. I never remember to put rings on my fingers in the morning, and when I do, I take them off to wash my hands in public bathrooms and leave them there, and when I come back they’re gone. I’m a kid.
But still, something must have pointed the clerk to his conclusion. When I got back to my dorm with my unmade bed and my Lana Del Rey posters, I looked in the mirror, hoping to find something that he could’ve seen, but I should’ve known better because all I could see was me. It was just Ella. It wasn’t Bride Ella. It wasn’t even kid Ella. It was just the face I had looked at a thousand times over. I saw that my nose leans too far to the right and that my hair is a lot darker than my skin and my eyes—and I know this is why people tell me I look like Alexandra Daddario and Courtney Cox and even Zooey Deschanel one time. I know I have cool undertones so I look best in silver jewelry. But that’s all I could see. It wasn’t a bride.
It doesn’t happen all at once. I know I became a legal adult when I blew out my 18th birthday candles, but what is adulthood if not other people perceiving you as an adult? This started earlier. Adulthood—womanhood—came in flashes. It was my Bat Mitzvah, when my best friend declared, “Ella, I can’t believe you’re a woman in the name of Judaism!” Everyone laughed. It was a waiter pouring me a glass of wine at the kids’ table. It was a man in the 4th Avenue Staples asking if I had a boyfriend while I was shopping for 11th-grade supplies. It was wearing my favorite green dress for years, only to stop after my dad said not to wear it while walking in the city. It was my theatre director asking me to tone down choreography. It was filling out insurance forms with no annual income. It was a store clerk asking if I was getting married. These moments didn’t make sense until they stacked up, crashing down into the realization that maybe I was the one who didn’t make sense.
I remember reading an excerpt from The Second Sex in high school—that famous quote, where Simone de Beauvoir says, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I think that people perceive you as a woman before you perceive yourself as one. I think you’re just treated like one until finally, you take the hint and adjust accordingly. I guess if enough people see it, it must finally be true.
That night, as I was about to leave my college dorm to go out with my college friends to a college bar, I looked in the mirror again. I had spent the day at Bloomingdale’s because I had to make a return. I took the subway all by myself to Bloomingdale’s to make a return. As though I hadn’t picked out the outfit myself moments earlier, I winced when I saw myself holding my mom’s black purse. What made matters worse was looking down, where I saw myself in knee high boots with a pointed toe. My heart felt heavy. I was wearing Woman Shoes and hadn’t even noticed. I was a woman and hadn’t even noticed. But still, it was dress-up. How could they not see that? How could they look at me and not see a little kid who had raided her mom’s closet?
There’s a buried sense of pride in the fact that, to flamboyant sales associates and waiters and middle-aged Staples shoppers, I’m a real person, with a real job, who pays taxes and goes for early morning runs on the East River and buys rice pilaf and spinach at Fairway and has an Equinox Membership and knows what people mean when they say that a wine is too dry. Surely it implies there’s something this real and big inside of me too. I’m one of them. Coming of age, becoming a woman, doesn’t happen all at once, but to them, it’s already happened.
College is weird, because you actually begin to tiptoe, albeit in Loeffler Randall White Camellias, into the quasi-adult territory, where senior prom and calculus are undeniably relics of the past. Being eighteen is weirder; now, not only do others perceive you as an adult, but legally, you are one. Denying adulthood at this stage is pure delusion.
And yet, there exists a gap. There’s a gap between legality and morality. There’s a gap between your body and your brain. A gap between being a woman and feeling like one. Between being of age and coming of age.
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