“Who knows. I wake up every morning expecting to go home.”
“Where is home?” Mark asks, putting the top back on the box of candies. He lifts it to study the gold image of the fairy castle on the side. It’s a simple question, but not one with a simple answer.
“Maine,” I say softly. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?” Mark asks, lifting his eyebrows.
“It’s complicated.” It comes out more harshly than I intend. Mark blinks a few times before looking back toward where the mice are choosing a girl from the audience to be my flower girl. Stacy told me they used to try to pick a boy to be the ring bearer, but they stopped when some dad freaked out on his wife for trying to sissify their son. Mark’s fingers begin picking at the castle sticker on the candy box, succeeding in pulling free one corner where it curls away from the plastic, destroying one of the towers. “How about you?” I ask. “Where’s home for you?”
“Here,” he says, leaning down to place the box in the top of his backpack. He sits up and turns toward me, and the look on my face makes him smile. “I don’t mean here,” he says, opening his hand toward the stones that make up the inside of the castle rooms. “I mean Orlando. About ten minutes from here.”
He takes off his crown and runs his fingers through his hair. He turns his head to look at me again, and something in his eyes makes me understand why the other princesses giggle so much when he talks to them. “You know how some families are filled with doctors or lawyers or carpenters?” I nod at him, watching as he turns the crown in his hands. “With my family it’s this place.”
“Wow,” I say softly. “That’s rough,” but as soon as I say it, I know it’s the wrong thing.
“Rough, how?” he asks. “What could be better than this?” and the way he says it is exactly opposite of the way I would say it. The way he says it, I know he means it. Really means it. “Ella, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say, but at that moment Stacy walks through the curtains holding my veil.
“You two ready?” she asks. Mark places his crown back on his head and begins walking toward the stage, where Aladdin and the other prince are waiting for him. Prince Charming’s choices for best man are much more limited.
“Ella,” Mark says before pushing through the curtains, “in case I forget to tell you later, you look beautiful.”
“Well, tell me,” Amy asks, bending to unlace her slippers.
“Tell you what?” I ask, pulling the wig from my head and shaking my head to free my hair. I stand in front of the fan, feeling cool for the first time all day. This is the only break that we get. Four hours between the end of the postwedding carriage ride around the park and the Electrical Parade.
“Ella, I haven’t known you for very long, but I can tell when something’s up.”
“It’s Mark.”
“Oh, it’s Mark now, is it?” Amy asks, pulling a T-shirt over her head.
“Very amusing,” I say. Amy remains quiet, waiting for me to continue. “He asked me out.” I wince a little as I say it, aware of the way Amy is always looking at him.
“That’s great,” she says, but something in her voice makes me look up. “What about Luke?”
“Luke.” I watch her face, but she won’t look straight at me. “I don’t think he’s Mark’s type. Besides,” I say, “he has a girlfriend.” Saying it aloud feels funny.
“He does . . .” Amy says. And I wait for the something more. She tilts her head at me, trying to figure something out, then smiles slightly and shakes her head. “So Mark asked you out.”
“Kind of.”
“Well, did you say yes?”
I pull off a grape from the basket on the table and pop it into my mouth, buying time. The grapes are a minor victory. Not able to go off campus for fear of being jumped by the picketers, we had to ask management to bring in produce for us. It wasn’t until Luke told them that they might not want us all to come down with scurvy that they started bringing in fresh food. There are only so many days that you can live on cheese fries and pizza. “Kind of.”
“Okay, Ella. Is it possible for you to be any more vague?”
“Maybe,” I say, smiling at her.
“What did you say?”
“I asked him if you could come along.” I pull another grape from the bunch and drop it into my mouth.
“Like a chaperone?”
“I thought maybe we could double.” She frowns for a moment, looking at the picture on the television at the far end of the room. The images switch every few minutes, showing a live feed of different locations around the park.
“I guess I could ask Jeff,” Amy says, still staring at the screen. Teacups swirl across the screen. The camera angle distorts the faces of the people riding in them.
“Jeff? Is he the guy who plays Mowgli? He’s cute.”
“No, Jeff is Balloo.”
“Oh,” I say. The screen shifts to a shot of the entrance. I see Chip and Dale facing each other, arms gesturing wildly in what seems to be an argument. “Is he cute?”
“Okay, this is going to sound really strange,” Amy says. “I don’t know what he looks like. I’ve never seen him without his costume.” She smiles slowly at me. “But he has a great personality,” Amy says, hefting her backpack onto her shoulder. I follow her out and toward the nearest monorail platform.
“Get this,” I say, stepping under the shade of the canopy to wait for the train, “he’s a true believer.”
“Who is?”
“Mark. I mean it. He’s the real deal. He actually believes in all this junk,” I say.
“Ella, there isn’t anything wrong with believing in things,” Amy says, looking away from me and down the track.
“Sure. Real things. Like saving the rain forest or God or alien abductions, but this is like believing in—”
“What?” Amy asks, looking back at me and tilting her head.
“This is like believing in M&M’s, and then finding out when you bite through the shiny colored shell that there isn’t anything inside. That there isn’t any chocolate. That it’s just an illusion.”
“That was possibly the worst analogy that I have ever heard,” she says, still looking at me intently. “Why does it bug you so much?” she asks finally. “I mean, why do you care what other people believe about this place?” I shake my head and turn down the track to see the monorail slowly making its way around the bend to circle the lagoon. “There’s nothing bad in believing, Ella.” Amy touches my arm, making me look at her. “Besides,” she says, a sparkle in her eyes, “Mark is, as you say, wicked cute.”
“So you’ve told me.”
“Have I?” Amy asks, smiling.
“About a hundred times.” The tram’s brakes squeak as it pulls to a stop in front of us. We wait as a family exits the car, kids licking furiously at ice-cream cones in a losing battle against the heat.
“Well, he is, and he’s totally into you,” she says, sliding into a seat near the doors. I sit down across from her, letting my pack drop into the seat beside me.
“I don’t know,” I say, leaning my head against the glass, which is cool against my cheek. “I think maybe it’s not so much me he’s into. I think it’s more Cinderella.”
“Well, they do live happily ever after.”
“So they say.” Across from me, Amy shifts slightly, putting her feet on the seat beside me. I close my eyes, feeling the slow bump of the tram as it slides over the rails. The thing about believing is that it’s dangerous. The world can turn upside down in an instant, and just when you think you’re on top of everything, you’re under it. Believing in something, someone, is hard. Sometimes when you let yourself fall too far, suddenly it’s gone.
4
Luke
The instruction manual says: “After moist toweletting, fluff character hair with the tips of your fingers.” I stand back from Dale’s body and look at him on his clothes hanger, his head mounted separately beside him. He doesn’t really seem that di
rty, but one good whiff tells a different story—we sweat a lot inside the costumes.
I hold up the manual to Cass. “Finally,” I say.
“Finally what?”
“Grammar scientists have solved the problem of turning towelette into a verb,” I tell her.
“Well, after they perfected beer me, it was just a matter of time.” She begins blow-drying Chip’s topknot of hair, finishing in about ten seconds. The room starts to smell like lemons. I have to devote several extra towelettes to Dale’s nose, which gets grubby from all the kisses from children, flirty pats from women, mock punches from men. Most people can’t tell us apart by name, but Dale is the one with the red nose and the gap teeth, and is also the stupider of the two, which Cass reminds me of about eight times a day.
This isn’t our job, cleaning costumes, but just yesterday the park Garment Care Union went out on sympathy strike. Soon enough the whole park will be on strike. It’s getting ugly, and yesterday Jesse was walking through Tomorrowland during his break, just eating a cheese pretzel, and somebody pelted him with a tomato, even though the nearest fence was probably fifty feet away. “You gotta admit,” Jesse said, “one of those strikers has a damn good arm.” The thing that freaked us all out was that he wasn’t even in his Friar Tuck costume, and still they knew he was one of us. “Scabs,” they call us when we get near enough to the gate for them to start yelling.
As far as the cleaning goes, face characters have it the easiest, and right now I am half-watching Ella run a steamer over her ball gown, which is hung up with clothespins. Prince Charming (Matt? Mark?) is next to her, combing out the fringe on his epaulets with this old plastic Afro pick he brought with him, the kind with a Black Power fist on the end of the handle. He told us it’s the same one his father used to comb out his epaulets back in the seventies. I’m betting they are the only father and son in the country sharing this particular tradition. When Cassie razzed him about it, he quoted page forty-seven of the manual: “All costume fringe (including epaulets and Davy Crockett’s jacket) can be managed using a wide-toothed comb.” He had us there. Most of the guys are watching Anna clean her Eeyore costume. She’s made herself famous in the space of a week by letting it be known at breakfast that she is usually naked inside her costume. Ella finishes with her three dresses and comes over to help me because I’ve just discovered a giant wad of gum stuck to Dale’s butt. This happens about three times a week, always to Dale, never to Chip. Chip is the serious one, the one who is smart about gathering acorns. No one assaults him with gum.
“Here, Mr. Helpless,” Ella says. She reaches into her plastic Donald cup and pulls out an ice cube. Then she sits beside me, and while I stretch the fabric tight across my knee she rubs the ice over and around the wad of gum.
“Would an Afro pick work better?” I say. She smirks.
“Hush,” she says, smiling a little. “The ice freezes the gum, then you can just break it off in pieces.” She concentrates on what she’s doing, her brown hair falling in strands that frame her face. I can feel the pressure of her fingers on my knee, moving in circles, the ice slowly melting in her hand. For half a second all I’m aware of is our breathing.
“Need some help, Luke?” Cass says. She’s still holding the blow-dryer, and looks at Ella holding the ice, like there is going to be a battle of the lesser supervillains.
“We’re good,” Ella says, still concentrating.
Cass looks at me. I shrug and make a face like there’s nothing I can do, like I’m trapped here under Ella’s fingers, but I feel my face warming, and right now some part of me is wishing that the wad of gum was a foot across, that she was holding a block of ice, and we would be like this for the next two days, just silent, and I could watch her face while she works.
Amy stands near us, retying the sash on her Snow White dress, then untying it and trying again. The manual says it’s supposed to “fall naturally,” and she keeps complaining that she doesn’t know what that means. Finally she gives up, and I hear her muttering curse words under her breath. Ella starts in on the gum with the blade of a butter knife. Cass keeps banging things around in drawers, then cutting her eyes at me when I look up.
“Hey,” Amy says, tying her sash again, “what do you guys know about that dude they call the Phantom?”
“Of the Opera?” I say. “I don’t think that’s Disney.”
“No, doofus,” she says. “A guy who works here. A fur character.”
I look around the room while Ella chips away at the gum. No one here looks like a phantom. Matt or Mark is breathing on his brass buttons, then cleaning them with a handkerchief. Robin Hood is making yet another joke about polishing his arrows. It’s funny about him—even though his name is Bryan, everyone just calls him by his character name. He just seems more like a Robin Hood than a Bryan—not too hard to imagine him stealing from the rich, and keeping it. Big Jesse smacks the dust from his Friar Tuck costume with a broom handle, then practices his English accent by reading the latest memo about how we are all part of the Disney fahhmily. Cassie lifts the pole that holds Chip’s head. We’re supposed to keep them on the poles when we aren’t wearing them. She always does, but mine usually ends up on the floor under the bed.
“You should take that outside,” I tell her, hoping to make her laugh. “Mount it at the edge of the city as a warning to other striking fur characters.”
“That’s not funny,” Matt/Mark says, still polishing. “Those idiots could shut this place down. They should just be happy they have jobs here.”
“Yeah,” Ella says, “forget dental insurance. Be happy.”
“Wasn’t that a song?” Amy says, and everyone laughs. She looks genuinely surprised. Since her arrival she has worked really hard to make friends, and I get the idea that wherever she comes from, she probably isn’t all that outgoing. That’s the best part of this job. You show up here, then spend half your time being someone you’re not. Pretty much like high school, only we get paid for it.
“They will never shut it down,” Cass says. “They can’t. This place has a life of its own. The people are secondary.”
“She’s right,” Ella says. “It’s like McDonald’s. Someone quits a place like this, it’s like you or me breaking a shoe-lace.” She chips away the last of the gum.
“That’s not what I meant,” Cassie says.
“So, have you?” Amy says.
“Have we what?” Prince Charming asks her.
She rolls her eyes. “Pay attention. Have any of you heard about the phantom guy?”
Just when we start to ask what she’s talking about, the loudspeaker crackles on, and Call-me-Bill Tubbs summons us upstairs for another motivational speech. In the background the PA system plays “We Are Family.” Mr. Tubbs tells us to have a Disney day.
You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That’s it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit—instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What do you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It’s just part of the code that they mean “for a living” because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don’t care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it’s better luck. Never that. People are always in something. I’m in advertising. I’m in real estate. I’m in sales and marketing. When Dad gets that question, I always hope he will say, I’m in holes, or I’m in dirt, but he nev
er does. He says that he is in speculative resource development, and most of the time people don’t even bother to ask what the hell he means.
It comes up again, that question, during the picnic. After Mr. Tubbs’s motivational speech he “surprises” all of us with a picnic lunch, not realizing that the last place we really want to be is outside in the heat again, eating in the town square at the end of Main Street, U.S.A. We sit in the bright grass and on the low stone walls holding our paper plates of wraps and coleslaw and brownies. Cass has been quiet since we were in the laundry room, but she sits so close to me on the brick wall that her thigh is angled up against mine.
“Hi,” I say, touching the small of her back.
“Hi.” She smirks at me. “I think we’d better make sure this seat is taken.” She reaches over and pats my lap with her tanned hand, looking at me.
“What do you mean?” I glance past her long enough to see Ella loading up her plate with food at the tables, laughing at something Prince Charming is telling her.
“We’re both smarter than that, Luke,” she says. “Do you really want to have the whole conversation?”
I shake my head. “We’re just friends, O jealous one,” I say. “I think she’s funny.”
She nods, shrugs. “Okay, how about I find a ‘friend’ and rub an ice cube up and down his thigh while you watch. Would you like that?” She looks at me over the rim of her cup as she takes a sip of lemonade.
When I picture it, someone else touching Cassie, my stomach knots up. I shake my head again. “No, I guess I wouldn’t like that,” I tell her. I think back, trying to see myself from the outside, trying to see myself as some shrugging, aw-shucks guy while Ella sits there chipping away at the frozen gum, see myself rolling my eyes at my girlfriend to let her know I don’t want to be there any more than she wants me to. I make that picture for myself, but how true is it? I think about what’s stored in my head—Ella’s hair swaying in shiny strands, Ella’s hands with their freckles and veins, Ella’s vanilla smell. Even now I want to ask Ella, How true is your memory of an hour? Because I know her answer would interest me. How do you get past the person you think you are if he’s always standing in your way? I look at Cass, really look at her, then lean across and give her a kiss, taste the lemon and sugar on her mouth. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, but barely hear myself because Ella is laughing behind me.
Dream Factory Page 4