Page 12

VOYAGE TO THE TOGSHOP , or a Brief History of the Doublet

That Sunday, a little less than a week before the opening of Into the Woods , the shop went into a tizzy and we were called in for an emergency. Cinderella—or, rather, the actor who played Cinderella in Into the Woods —was being a real pain in the neck. At the eleventh hour, she’d decided that she didn’t like the dress that she was going to wear, and she was demanding an entirely new costume.

“Evidently it didn’t make her feel princessy enough,” Phoebe said, rolling her eyes. “Bet she felt princessy pitching a fit. Anyway—are you comfortable running to the Togshop to pull some new dresses for her? It’s on the other side of town, and it’s where we store most of our costumes when they’re not in use. I wrote directions down for you; I’d go with you if I could, but I’ve got so much to do here. Don’t follow Google Maps or else you’ll wind up in a lake. One more thing—can you take Oliver with you?”

“Oliver? As in… Teller?”

“Yeah,” Phoebe said. “Oh, wait—I haven’t even told you the best part! The reason they had me at the last production meeting. Benna needs a special assistant for Oliver’s costume. She’s letting me submit some designs.”

“What? Really? That’s amazing!”

“Yeah—I mean, I know I just told you we’re not the West End,” Phoebe said. “And it’s going to be a lot of work. Like, the show opens in seven weeks.”

“You can do it,” I said.

“You think?”

“Of course,” I said. And I meant it, too. If anyone could pull that off, it was Phoebe. “This is so cool. To have a big name like Oliver in your design?”

“I mean, does anyone actually watch that show?” said Phoebe. “What did they call it? ‘The worst show on television’?”

My face burned red, and Phoebe knew instantly. It was worse than the time Touchstone—in fifth grade!—had pityingly informed me the tooth fairy wasn’t real.

“Oh! I’m sorry—I didn’t—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Sorry, that’s me putting my foot in my mouth.”

“I know Power Jam is ridiculous,” I said. “That’s part of its charm.”

“Maybe I’ll give it another shot,” said Phoebe. “I shouldn’t be so dismissive. I’ve barely given it a try. Maybe it would help me understand Oliver’s acting more if I watched an episode.”

“Skip the first one,” I said. “Maybe the second one, too, honestly. Start with three. You’ll figure it all out, and the third episode is really where they find their groove.”

“Okay,” said Phoebe. “Thanks. Research! Anyway—what was I saying? He’s going to go with you. I had this plan that Oliver and I would go over together and see what spoke to him. But now with the Cinderella, Benna’s asked me to do some alterations.…”

“No, no. It’s great,” I said. Besides the fact that every time I saw Oliver Teller, I seemed to find some new and interesting way to humiliate myself.

“Thanks so much,” said Phoebe.

“Of course,” I said.

Oliver was waiting for me in the foyer.

“We meet again, Celia Gilbert,” he said.

“Hello, Oliver Teller,” I said. In an effort to be Celia Gilbert, Star Costume Assistant, I’d worn my measuring tape again and fussed with it around my neck. We walked to my car chatting idly about the weather. Normal. Good. Yes. I was a Young Career Woman; he was a Young Actor; we were both in control and could be Professional together.

Of course, that illusion was totally shattered when he saw my car.

While I tended to run a pretty tight ship in every other area of my life, my car—for all that I loved it—was continually in a state of complete disarray. It was actually strategic, to contain all my mess to my very old car. While I hadn’t done anything overtly embarrassing like leave out the special collector’s edition of Power Jam magazine 9 that Ros had bought me for my birthday, there were still plenty of other minor things to fret over: a Porky Pig mask Touchstone had left in the car, along with several red noses; bits and pieces of old Halloween costumes that just lived in the back seat now; swimming goggles that Buckets had chewed on but that still kind of worked if you didn’t mind a slight leak in the left eye; the empty In-N-Out bags, the sticky coffee rings around the cupholder. Surely this wasn’t the situation my parents were referring to when they insisted I keep my car clean, but maybe I would have listened to them if they’d dangled the ultimate threat: One day, a handsome television star is going to be in your passenger seat, and you know he’s going to judge the state of your cupholders .

“I know you’re probably used to limos, or whatever,” I said.

“Is that… a plastic cutlass?”

“We were pirates for Halloween,” I said, as though Halloween were last week and not eight months ago. The cutlasses I’d left in the back seat for impromptu sword fights with Ros and Touch, but the rest of the pirate costumes were hanging in my closet, along with the flamingo costumes and the ones from the year we’d gone as an avocado (Ros and I were the halves, and Touch was the pit). I couldn’t get rid of any of them; I was too proud.

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.

“Oh. Me and my friends.” I could’ve left it there, but something compelled me to keep talking. “They’re actually here with me this summer. Touchstone—his name’s Andrew—he’s part of the Young People’s Company. Ros works at the Hidden Fern, the plant store in town. Sorry—is this—this must be totally uninteresting to you.”

“What? No, the opposite. They’re here with you? I’m jealous.”

“You’re jealous of me ?”

“The summer with your two best friends? Totally. There’s no one in my life like that. Take a left up at that weird-looking tree.”

“You don’t have friends? What about the cast? What about you and Ronnie?”

“Ronnie and I broke up.”

“ Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.”

“We haven’t announced it yet. Don’t tell anyone, please.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Is it awkward on the show?”

“With her? Not so much. We’re good. It’s awkward because… everyone on the show is older than me. Ronnie’s only two years older than me, but sometimes I just feel like a baby. I’m really lucky, I know. I get to be doing this thing that so many people want to do. But it’s a lot of work, and it’s not always fun. Sometimes I’d rather be… going to In-N-Out,” he said, eyeing an empty bag.

“That’s easy to do. I can take you there.”

“Excellent,” he said. “You’re supposed to take a right up here.”

He turned around to investigate the back seat again, and this time came up with my tennis racket—the same one that I had eventually pulled out of the garbage can after quitting ninth-grade tennis.

“You play?” he asked, fussing with the strings.

“Just for fun,” I said. “I used to play on a team, but I quit a few years ago. My dad’s still mad about it. He says I could have been great.”

“Is he right?”

“Maybe. I loved it, but the problem was I got too in my head. Now I’m just on the swim team with my friend Ros. Or Ros used to be on it. Then they quit.”

“Would you ever go back to it?”

“Tennis? No, I don’t think so. I’m not that into it.”

“You’re driving around with a racket in your car, in case there’s an emergency game of tennis you need to play.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tennis left a mark on me, I guess. I still hear my coach’s voice in my head sometimes. But I don’t want to go back to playing competitively. Now it’s enough to just play for fun with my dad or with my friends.”

There was a beat, and then Oliver asked, “What are your friends like?”

I thought of how best to answer this. “You know how you were saying the other day, about how you wanted to play a different kind of character? That you have your role you play? I guess it’s like that. We’ve all got our roles we play.”

“So what are they?”

“What are what?”

“The roles.”

“Oh.” I stopped short, drawing a sudden blank. I’d never had to explain my friends to anyone; they’d always just been my friends. It was almost like I knew them too well to break them down into their component parts—it felt like having to describe breathing, or why it felt better to fall asleep on my stomach. “Touchstone is, like… a people person. He’s a schmoozer, almost. He loves theater, but I think he’d be a good therapist, too. He’s, like, good with people. He gives good advice. And Ros…”

Everything that came to mind felt way too grandiose. They were like my limb. They were my heartbeat. They were my voice, and I was theirs.

“Well, Ros… Ros and I are very different, I guess. They’re more outgoing. Wilder. Not like they’ve ever done anything too nuts, but, like, they were always the one who was buying hair dye at the drugstore and misreading the directions and winding up with a black scalp. Last year, they got in trouble for pouring acid on this kid’s hat.”

“Sounds… dangerous.”

“It’s not like he was wearing it. And this kid was a certifiable asshole—always misgendering Ros on purpose.” I paused. “Ros is also the one that people fall in love with.”

“Okay,” he said. “What about you?”

“No one falls in love with me.”

“No—your role .”

“Oh. I’m…”

The ball boy. The chore-wheel designer.

“… the planner.”

“An important role,” Oliver said. “You’re just going straight for a while.”

“It’s boring,” I said. The truth was I wasn’t as objectively interesting as my friends. I didn’t really offer anything the way they did. Touchstone and Ros were both sparkly ; they commanded attention, were so clearly the stars of their own shows. In my darkest moments, I worried I was a footnote: the part people skipped over.

“Crucial, though,” said Oliver. “And I know we just met, but I don’t think you’re boring.”

I thought about this for another moment.

“You know who I am? I’m the seam,” I said. “I was friends with Ros, and I was friends with Touch, and I kind of stitched us all up. But most of the time, if I’m doing my job, you’re not really thinking about me. You just kind of forget I’m there.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Why, you spend a lot of time thinking about seams?”

“No, I find it hard to believe that anyone could forget you. Turn left here.”

I pictured the Togshop as a humble shack, not unlike the Lily Pad—a few extra clothing racks, a few bins full of mismatched shoes that sweet elfin cobblers would help us repair. But the Togshop was an operation . The racks swept toward the ceiling, three tiers high—you needed a ladder to reach the top. Oliver and I wandered through the aisles and tried to get our bearings, though the sheer number of costumes was overwhelming. Here were costumes specific to the 1500s. The 1910s. The 1950s. An entire wall of petticoats, of cowboy hats, of red kimonos. The volume and breadth were dizzying.

“Okay,” I said, slowly trying to orient myself. “I have a list from Benna, and…”

I looked back to make sure Oliver was following me. He was halfway down the aisle. He was also shirtless as in, without a shirt, not wearing a shirt, bare chested, nude from the waist up.

It was a chest I had seen numerous times before, though never in person—the producers of Power Jam seemed to find every possible excuse to shoot him shirtless, perhaps because they thought it contributed to his character’s villainy . After all, who eats breakfast shirtless but a villain? He was more often without a shirt than with, a strategy my mother referred to as “creepy” while I personally thought of it as “awesome.”

His chest, it bears mentioning, like his laugh, was even better in person than it was on TV. It didn’t have the high-contrast shadows or whatever shading they did to his abs to make them look fuller and more ’roided out. Maybe he’d stopped working out altogether since they’d wrapped filming. His stomach looked fuller and softer than it did on TV; his arms leaner. I had been unaware, before this very moment, that the back was something that one could be sexually attracted to. Like, wasn’t it just a back ? But Oliver Teller had the sort of back that I wanted to touch.

“Dude!” I cried, remembering myself. “What are you doing ?”

“Trying stuff on!” he said. He was holding some kind of elaborately embroidered velvet jacket in his hand, the name of which I’d momentarily forgotten, but later I would place it as the doublet . 10

“You can’t just try stuff on ,” I hissed.

“One, why are you whispering, and two, why not?”

“Because this isn’t a Marshalls ! There’s all sorts of damage you can do to the clothes.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“It’s not about being careful! It’s about… your, like… oils .” 11

“My oils?” Oliver said. “Celia, Benna Bloom has a literal cat that lives in the costume shop. I doubt I’m going to do any more damage to these clothes than Jacques would.”

Mercifully, he shrugged the jacket on. I waited for my composure to, you know, recompose. But somehow he looked… like… even… better?

Like. He looked good in that doublet.

Like, really, really stupid good.

Like. So good that it wasn’t just that the synapses in my brain seemed to misfire, but the whole brain itself went dark. It was as though some magic trick had been played on me, and the organ was gone completely, momentarily swapped with a rock. Ook. Ook. Man. Hot.

“How’s it look?” he asked.

Ook. Good. Eat.

“Unprofessional,” I managed.

“Come on,” he said. He pulled another doublet loose from the rack—this one was a deep, rich burgundy that reminded me of the best, sweetest cherries. “You know you want to.”

“I have to find these dresses,” I said, waving Benna’s list at him. “And you should be focusing on whatever makes you find your inner beast.”

“You’re a no-fun-haver,” he called after me.

Thankfully the next aisle over was chock-full of various religious costumes, so I managed to cool off amid the miters and the nun habits long enough to focus on my job. The list was supposed to address last-minute costuming for the Into the Woods cast: several different lace-up shoe options for the actor playing the Baker (he evidently had a sixth toe that needed a wider toe box); various grungy-looking linen shirts for the actor playing Jack (which were actually quite cool—I thought Ros would’ve liked one); and then, of course, three new dresses for the actor playing Cinderella.

The first dress was pretty standard princess fare: cream colored and poofy sleeved, heavily bejeweled, a skirt so huge I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get the trunk of my car closed.

The second dress was even bigger and shinier.

But the third dress—

I’ll start by saying that I don’t normally go for dresses. People claim they’re comfortable and easy—one and done!—but whenever I put one on I just feel overdressed, like I’m trying too hard. Ros and I called my wardrobe sheep-farmer chic —slip-on boots, thick woolen sweaters, lots of overalls, long in the winter and short in the summer, and the occasional jumper thrown over a T-shirt (as Touchstone once said to me, “Do you own anything that doesn’t have some sort of bib?”). On the rare occasion when I had to get dressed up, I owned a few floor-length floral-print dresses with a row of buttons down the front that weren’t horribly offensive to my sensibility. I still wore my boots with them, and sometimes I even managed to think that I looked cute.

This dress in my arms was like nothing I’d ever owned, and yet.

It caused something inside me to shift.

I could tell right away that it would be too big for the actor who played Cinderella. It was cut completely different than the other princess dresses: This was a stretchy gown straight up and down like a column, with a high neckline and long sleeves. It was heavily beaded but somehow managed to be light, almost liquid in my arms. The most stunning thing about it was its color: a fiery-orange-red beaded base sprinkled through with yellow and gold and hot-pink beads. The best approximation of a sunset in a dress that I had ever seen.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it. It was more than a dress. It felt like a sartorial embodiment of a plot twist, like the sort of dress that could make things happen.

“Whoa,” Oliver said. He’d reappeared wearing a floor-length white fur coat, a pink 1950s poodle skirt, and a loose-fitting, blousy pirate shirt. Somehow he managed to pull off this wild mishmash—just another unfair advantage of the extremely attractive. “You have to try that on.”

“I’m not going to,” I said, furious that he’d read my mind.

“ I want to try it on.”

“I’ve measured your shoulders. You’d rip the seams out.”

He tugged the dress off the hanger, and I cried out a little bit, as though I’d been physically harmed.

“You good?” he said.

“Fine,” I said, and I was fine, really—just a little embarrassed over having developed an emotional connection to something so silly as a dress so quickly. “Just—be gentle with it, okay?”

Oliver helped me load all the costumes into the back of my car, plus the white fur coat he’d been wearing (“Phoebe might dig it, though I doubt the director will go for it,” he said). The dress, the dress that I had already started thinking of as my dress, we draped gently across the back seat, moving the leftover Halloween costumes out of the way.

“All right—let’s get back to campus,” I said. I threw the car into reverse and glanced in my rearview. “God, those skirts are so fucking big I can’t even SEE out the back—”

Oliver was giving me a strange look.

“What?” I said.

“It’s just—hold on—may I?—you have something—”

He moved his hand toward my face. The pace was glacial, as though I were a dog that might bite, but then once it became clear that I wasn’t going to move away, his touch was gentle and firm: two fingers below my right eye, on the curve of my cheekbone, the crest where tears gathered speed, if they made it that far. He turned his hand over to show me: An errant sequin from the dress—my dress—now clung to Oliver’s fingertip.

“Make a wish,” he said.

And even though I was not the sort of person who believed in wishes—even if I were , it seemed to me that wishes always came with a cost—I blew onto his fingertip and watched the sequin disappear somewhere into the mess of my car.

Footnotes

9 The magazine was filled with gems: glossy photo shoots of the cast, deep dives into the filming of certain episodes, even tips and tricks on how to become a better roller skater (Find your stance! Engage your core!). There was a featurette on important props, like the scissors Blade Mendoza used to cut Kenna’s laces, and the spare hot-pink wheels the costumers kept on hand for when the wheels needed replacing. There was also one photo of Oliver Teller that I often found myself turning to—him, tank topped and pouty lipped, pushing his hair back with one hand, another in the pocket of his jeans. Let’s just say the magazine pretty much fell open to that photo, and upon remembering this, I was doubly relieved the magazine had left my car.

10 This garment was popularized in Spain and worn in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. I actually knew this word, even though I’d temporarily blanked on it, blinded by/focused as I was on Oliver Teller’s bare chest.

11 Yes. Oils. I said this.