A Galley of His Own

I've been the sous chef on the Pride of the Caribbean for three years now, which sounds fancier than it is. Mostly I run the sauté station and yell at the walk-in door for not closing right. The ship is mid-sized, the kind that does five and seven night loops out of Miami, and after three years the Caribbean starts to look like one very large, very blue kitchen.

Michael is thirty-four, two years older than me, and he met me at a culinary event in Miami when I was thirty. We started dating a few weeks after that, and this trip was his idea. He booked a cruise on my ship for our second anniversary, which meant he was a passenger and I was crew, and the company has exactly one rule about that, which is that nobody cares as long as I do my hours.

So I did my hours. Then I saw the flyer.

It was taped to the crew board next to the schedule, between a notice about the gym and somebody's lost sunglasses. DAZZLE & DRAG, it said, in glitter letters that had been printed on regular office paper, which is the most ship thing I have ever seen. Annual competition. Main lounge. Sixth night of the voyage. Sign up sheet in the crew office.

I stood there reading it for maybe a full minute, holding a clipboard I didn't need. Here is the thing about me. I have never done drag. Not once, not even at a Halloween thing. But I have watched a hundred hours of it on my phone in the crew mess, and I have a decent voice for it, and somewhere in the back of my head a little voice said, you know Michael would lose his mind.

Michael had never seen that side of me because it didn't exist yet. That was the point. Two years together and I still wanted to surprise him. I signed my name on the sheet before I could think better of it, and then I stood there looking at my own handwriting like it belonged to somebody else.

The sign up sheet wanted a stage name. I wrote down Saffron. It was the first thing I thought of and I was standing next to the spice locker, so.

* * *

Getting the outfit was easier than I expected, because Meghan.

Meghan tends the sunset bar on deck eight and she has been on ships longer than I've been alive, or close to it. She is sixty-one and has seen everything twice. I caught her between crowds one afternoon, told her what I'd done, and waited for the laugh.

Instead she said, "Oh, honey. I have a dress in my cabin that would fit you. Sequins, gold, hem comes about here." She slapped her own knee to show me. "Heels too, but you're on your own for the walking part."

"Gold," I said.

"Gold. You're a chef, you'll look like a walking pat of butter and it'll be perfect."

She was right, it did look like butter, in the best way. She brought it down two days later in a garment bag and I stuffed it into the bottom of my crew locker under my spare whites, where it sat like a secret for three days. Every time I opened the locker for a knife or a towel I saw a corner of sequin and my stomach did a little flip. I'm thirty-two years old and I was hiding a dress in a locker the way a teenager hides a report card. I don't know a better way to describe it.

The heels were the actual problem. I wore clogs for twelve hours a day. My feet had thoughts about heels before I even put them on.

* * *

So I practiced. The galley goes dark at midnight except for one strip light over the pastry bench, and the night crew leaves me alone because I'm management, technically, and management practicing drag in an empty galley is not worth reporting when there's free ice cream in the freezer.

First night I just walked. Galley to the pass, pass to the walk-in, turn. Heels on steel decking is a specific kind of terrible. I fell once, caught myself on the prep table, and checked the doorway even though nobody was there. By the third walk I had something, not a strut, but a walk that didn't apologize for itself. I put a case of tomatoes at one end and pretended it was a runway mark.

Then the lip sync. I picked a slow one, something Michael had played in the car a hundred times, and I sang it into a whisk. That's a real sentence. I lip synced a slow ballad to a whisk in an empty galley at one in the morning and I meant it, every word, because in my head the whisk was him sitting front row.

I won't pretend I wasn't nervous. I was terrified and excited at the same time, that mix where you can't tell which one is winning. Some nights I'd do a full run and end it with a bow to the freezer, and I'd stand there breathing hard, heart pounding, grinning like an idiot at stainless steel. Three nights of this. The second cook caught me once, mid pose, and just nodded and got his yogurt out of the fridge and left. Ship people don't ask.

* * *

Night six. The competition.

I got to the little dressing room off the main lounge two hours early because I figured makeup takes me long when I don't know what I'm doing, and I was correct. I sat on a plastic chair in front of a mirror ringed with dead bulbs and a mirror ringed with live bulbs, because the room had two mirrors and only one of them worked, and I did my face with a kit I'd bought in port and watched four tutorials about.

Foundation, which went on too heavy and I fixed with a damp towel. Then eyes. I have steady hands, I decorate plates for a living, so the liner actually came out okay, a soft wing that made my own face look back at me like a stranger I liked. I did the mouth in a red that Meghan had picked, because she said gold dress means red mouth, don't argue with me.

The dress went on last. Sequins catch on everything, and I fought it over my head in the little room, breathing in, wiggling, and then it dropped and settled and I looked down at myself and I can't name the feeling exactly. Not pretty, exactly. More like the feeling of service done right, a plate going out perfect. I had padded the hips with rolled kitchen towels, which is the most chef solution to a drag problem ever devised