The Brewer's Request

The first time I ever wore a dress I was twenty-two, and it wasn't even my idea, not exactly. My older sister had left a laundry bag of stuff at my place before driving off to her new job two states away, and somewhere near the bottom was this sundress, yellow with little white flowers, the kind of thing that weighs nothing at all. I'd been drinking a couple of beers after my shift at the warehouse, back before I got into brewing, and I remember holding it up on its hanger and thinking, well, nobody would ever know.

I tried it on standing in front of the bathroom mirror with the fan running so I couldn't hear my own heartbeat. It fit loose around the waist and tight across the chest, wrong in every way a dress can be wrong on a body like mine, and still something in my chest went quiet. Not happy exactly. Quiet. Like a room where the fridge finally stops humming. I wore it for maybe twenty minutes, sat on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees, then took it off, folded it back into the bag, and didn't touch it again for six years.

That's the part people don't get when I tell them. It wasn't shame exactly, or not only shame. It was that I had a job and roommates and a dating life, such as it was, a couple of casual things in my mid twenties that fizzled out the way those things do, and the last real relationship ended when I was twenty-six and left me mostly just tired. Adding a whole secret wardrobe to all that felt like carrying a second backpack. So I didn't. I put the want in a drawer and closed the drawer.

Except drawers don't actually lock, do they. Over the last four months I've bought, online, in a slow guilty drip: two skirts, three blouses, a pair of low heels that turned out to be too big, a pair of tights that turned out to be too small, and a wig that arrived in a box that the delivery guy absolutely did not give me a look about, I decided, even though he did. All of it lives in a duffel bag under my bed. I have worn each item alone in my apartment, for minutes at a time, always with the plan of doing it properly someday, and always putting everything back before the feeling turned into something I'd have to name.

The problem with doing it alone is that there's nobody there. That's it, that is the problem, and I know how thin that sounds. But a dress in an empty apartment is just fabric. There's no one to see the skirt move when you walk, no one to tell you the blouse is tucked in crooked, no one to look at you like you're a person who made an effort. After enough solo attempts it started feeling less like a secret and more like a ghost habit.

The person I eventually worked up to asking lives one door down.

Georgina is thirty-four and does costume work freelance, which I knew because for two years I've been hearing her sewing machine through the wall at odd hours, and because once she asked me to help carry a dress form up the stairs and we got talking. She's done fittings for drag performers and theater people since she was twenty-four, she told me that night on the stairs, like it was no bigger a deal than telling me where she got coffee. She treats clothes the way I treat a mash schedule. Practical. If something's off, there's a reason, and the reason can be fixed.

* * *

It took me three tries to actually knock. The first time I got as far as raising my hand and then went back inside and reorganized my fridge, which needed nothing. The second time her door was open a crack and I heard the sewing machine and lost my nerve entirely. The third time was a Thursday evening, traffic humming below like always, and I knocked before my brain could file an objection.

She opened the door with reading glasses pushed up on her head, a pincushion on her wrist, and said, "Oh hey, Jack. What's up?"

"Hi. Hey. So, I, um!" I had a whole speech planned. I want you to know it evaporated completely. "I need help with something kind of personal. And you're the only person I could think of who wouldn't make it weird."

She just stepped back and held the door. "Come in, then."

Her apartment is what you'd expect, racks of clothes along one wall, bolts of fabric stacked like firewood, a full-length mirror leaning against the wall instead of hanging on it, thread on every horizontal surface including, I noticed, the cat. I sat on the edge of a stool between a bin of buttons and an iron, perched like I might need to leave fast.

She pulled her glasses down onto her nose and looked at me over them. "Okay. Personal how? You're not dying, you're not married, you're not in a cult."

"No. None of those!"

"Then say the thing. It's never as bad said out loud."

So I said it. I told her I'd been buying women's clothes for months and wearing them alone and that I'd started at twenty-two with my sister's sundress and stopped, and that I wanted to actually do it, properly, see myself in a mirror, maybe someday go further than my own living room. My voice cracked twice and I kept talking anyway, which felt like a personal best.

To her credit, she didn't do the gasp or the reassurance or any of it. She nodded, the way I nod when someone tells me their stout came out too bitter. A problem with a solution.

"Okay," she said. "What do you want to try first?"

"I don't. I don't know. That's kind of why I'm here."

"Then we start simple." She was already up and walking the rack, flipping hangers past with two fingers, the way you'd flip through records. "You said skirt and top in your message. Well, you didn't say, but the way you hovered outside my door Tuesday said it for you."

"I didn't message you."

"You stood outside my door for four minutes Tuesday. I heard you breathing." She pulled two hangers free. "Skirt and blouse it is. Stand up, let me look at you."

I stood. She held a fitted blouse against my chest, a soft black one with a little stretch to it, and squinted. "You've got broader shoulders than the cut assumes, so we'll go up a size and take the seam in a touch, or you'll get that pull across the back. Fabric's got spandex in it, which is your friend. Cotton with no give will fight you every time you reach for anything."

The skirt she held against my hips was a pencil skirt, dark grey, some kind of twill. "Structured, so it holds its shape instead of announcing everything. Stop with the face, a pencil skirt is just a skirt, it doesn't bite. You'll want to take smaller steps than you think, that's all. Everybody does. I'll pin the waist for you, it's never one number, real bodies aren't one number."

She laid both pieces over the back of a chair and looked at me. "Full mirror, good light, and you, changed. That's today's whole mission. Nothing else has to happen today."

I looked at the mirror leaning against her wall and my stomach did the thing it does at the top of a coaster. Somewhere under my bed, forty pounds of duffel bag waited for me to come get it.

* * *

The duffel bag was exactly where I'd left it, under a box of winter stuff I never put away. I unzipped it and there everything was, the two skirts, the three