The Girl in the Tampon Commercial
by Jemimah Wei
The advertisement for my life would look like...
Two days after Jennie’s profile goes live, her phone rings. It’s the ex. Four of his friends have sent him the same screenshot of their selfie in front of the Catskills waterfall, taken last year when Jennie suspected he was going to propose. She’s blocked his face out with a poop emoji, but hers is on full display; her shy, close-lipped smile a bursting dam of hope, her cheeks tight and pink.
“Jesus,” he starts, without preamble, “I can’t believe you put that on your profile.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I asked if you minded, but you didn’t reply to my text.”
“Not the picture. The fact that you used to be in a tampon commercial. Is that really the foot you want to start on?”
Oh.
“It’s the most interesting thing about me,” she explains.
He hangs up, which is the way he ends most of their conversations. It’s been seven months since the ex walked out on her, but he still calls often, whenever he needs reminding that the break-up was a good idea.
Comment if you’ve been here...
Six months after he leaves, Jennie starts thinking about putting herself out there.
Because Jennie and the ex were together six years, the entire online dating phenomenon totally passed her by. Before they officially started going out, there’d only been OKCupid and Tinder, but OKCupid was for old people and Tinder had a reputation for being a hook-up app. Over the course of their relationship, different apps started sprouting, and now there are apps where you can filter by religion, sexuality, political views, kinks. Apps where girls have to make the first move, apps where you have to bump into someone in real life before they show up on the screen. So on and so forth. There are too many to choose from, so Jennie just downloads the one with all the ads on the subway.
The ex calls as she is setting up her profile. They’re trying to be friends. She tells him all about the questions the app asks of her, the conversational prompts it proposes, how it feels like her entire personality is being chopped up into little boxes that have labels broadcasting her views on politics, smoking, and childbirth.
“What if I’m still deciding?” she asks. “What then?”
“I’m only saying this because I still care about you,” he says. “But you should mention upfront that you’re a creature of comfort. And that you’re kind of unemotional. I mean, that sounds bad. Rephrase it however you want. But it’s important for people to know what you’re like, off the bat.”
Two truths and a lie...
Once upon a time, Jennie woke up, saw the ex sleeping peacefully beside her, and couldn’t figure out how she got there.
Jennie believes that if she can locate the point where it all went wrong, she can fix things.
Jennie isn’t sure which she is referring to: the relationship, or her life.
If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right…
In the third year of their relationship, the ex wakes in the middle of the night and catches Jennie watching the retired tampon commercial on her phone, under the sheets. When he asks why she’s watching it, again, she tells him it’s her secret source of power. He sighs and goes back to sleep.
Biggest risk I’ve ever taken…
It’s her first year in America. Jennie’s been trying to impress the boy all semester, and now that she’s finally run into him outside of class, she’s drunk off her face. She has about three seconds before he loses interest and melts back into the party, but she’s having trouble stringing more than two words together. Also, she’s at the point of the night where her eyeballs are veiny and her hair is sticking to her scalp. She feels like this is an unfair representation of who she really is, and tries to say so.
“You look fine,” he says.
No, really. She looks much better normally. She pulls her phone out to show him, but it’s a new phone, bought when she first arrived in America, and there’s nothing on it except –
“Is that you?”
She tries to flip her hair at him and nearly falls over. He starts laughing, and she glows happily.
“That is fucking priceless,” he says, taking the phone from her and playing the video again, “I can’t believe you were in a tampon commercial. That is actually the most interesting thing I’ve seen all night.”
My life peaked when...
Jennie is fifteen when the ad comes out. She is immediately the most popular girl in her cohort; when she walks down the corridor, whispers follow her — that’s her, that’s the tampon girl on Channel 5. Jennie does not actually know how to use a tampon but that does not matter. The ad is all that matters. The ad is excellent.
In the ad, a single dandelion seed floats in the air, following Jennie as she rides effortlessly through a field of lalang on a baby blue bicycle. She slides off the seat and throws her arms out in the air, her hair rippling silkily behind her, her eyes closed in bliss. Jennie likes the commercial because of how pretty she looks in it. Her hair is long and black and her skin is touched up to perfection. When Jennie watches the commercial, she truly believes that carefree quality of wonder is hers, too.
She has forgotten the way her scalp burned under the noonday sun, the thirty-something takes she had to do, riding back and forth over the same patch of lalang, all because she didn’t look happy enough in any of them. She’s forgotten the way the director screamed at her, SMILE, GIVE ME A FUCKING SMILE, then snapped at her mom in front of the entire crew, for running over to dab at the perspiration on Jennie’s forehead before the scene cut.
In that moment, her mom’s face falls in humiliation, and Jennie is filled with rage — shaking, irrational rage at the director, gross and balding and triple-chinned — for the way he looks at her mom, as if she is nothing but an insect, an insignificant fly. She will show him. She will show them all. One day, after this stupid fucking commercial is done, she will go on to star in television shows and movies; she will go to Hollywood; she will be the face of fucking L’oreal, and then she will come back and spit on this small town director who thinks he’s the shit. He’ll see, then. She just needs to finish this shoot, and be so fucking fantastic, that no one will doubt her talent. She’ll be scouted by a million agents once it goes live. She knows she’s meant for big things. She’s got her whole life ahead of her.
The director, sweaty and jaded, looks over. The novice, who was casted as a favor to a friend, stands cooling off in the make-up tent. If this is what commercial budgets get you these days, he thinks, then the industry has truly gone to shit. Her cheeks are pink and tight, he supposes it can pass as blush. They’re losing sunlight. He opens his mouth, and calls places. Take thirty-four. Now.
