The Curator's Corset

The fifties are a strange decade for a woman who has spent her whole career handling other people's underwear. I'm Zelda Barrington, fifty-two years old, curator of textiles at the Metro City Historical Society, and I spent three days this month at the Grand Steampunk Exposition surrounded by twenty-five-year-olds in leather and brass who kept calling me "ma'am."

The convention center smelled like machine oil and perfume, which I have been told is the whole point of steampunk. I wouldn't know. My exhibit was Victorian undergarments, forty pieces of bone and silk and cotton, the centerpiece of the whole festival, and I was proud of it right up until a woman who couldn't have been thirty walked past my display case in a corset she was clearly wearing as outerwear and made me feel like a footnoted reference.

"You look great," my sister had said on the phone the week before. "You'll meet someone. Those things are crawling with lonely engineers."

"I'm going to work, Odessa. I'm curating."

"You're curating in a skirt that cost more than my couch. Work."

She had a point. I had bought the skirt for myself, for nobody, because I was fifty-two and dating had become a chore I kept cancelling. The last real date had been a man named Cyrus, sixty, who spent ninety minutes explaining his retirement portfolio. Before Cyrus there had been an artist named Wes, twelve years ago now, when I was forty. That one ended the way the good ones end, with two people realizing they wanted different cities. He still sends me a Christmas card with a lino print of a crow. I still put it on the fridge.

So there I was, day two of the exposition, standing next to a case of 1880s chemises and feeling like an exhibit myself. Look, everyone, the Mature Curator in her natural habitat. Do not feed.

"You've put the Paisley corset at eye level," a voice said behind me. "That's smart. It's the best piece in the room and most people walk right past it."

I turned around and it was Jed Wilton, my neighbor, the graphic designer from two doors down. Thirty-nine years old, dark hair going silver at the temples, wearing a waistcoat and goggles pushed up on his forehead like a pair of sunglasses. He had done the layout for our local history pamphlet five years ago, back when he was thirty-four and I was forty-seven, and we had spent three months arguing about fonts and I had enjoyed every argument more than I would admit.

"Jed. You came."

"I bought a three-day pass in February. I've been coming to this thing for a few years." He looked at the case. "That boning is genuine whalebone, isn't it?"

"It is. Donated in nineteen seventy-two by a family in Harwick. Don't ask me how it survived."

"It survived because somebody loved it." He said it without any irony, which is a quality I have always found unfair in a man under forty. "Sorry. That's a nerd thing to say in front of the expert."

"It's the correct thing to say in front of the expert. Everybody else says 'people were so small back then,' and I have to smile."

He smiled. "People were so small back then."

"I will push you into the chemise case."

We stood there a minute, both looking at the corset, and I noticed he was doing a thing with his hands. Rolling a coin across his knuckles, losing it, picking it up, starting again. Jed is not a fidgeter. Five years of pamphlet meetings and I had never once seen him fidget.

"You okay?" I asked. "You look like a man waiting for a jury."

"What? Oh. Fine. Fine, yeah. Big day tomorrow."

"It's Saturday tomorrow. The ball."

"Right. The ball." The coin went over his knuckles and dropped again. "I'm, uh. I'm wearing a costume I've never worn in public before."

"That's what the ball is for. Half the people in there will be wearing things they'd never show their neighbors."

"Yeah," he said, and laughed at something that wasn't the joke. "Neighbors. Exactly."

* * *

The convention has a cafe on the mezzanine, all exposed pipes and menus printed on gears, and I don't care what anyone says about themed dining, their coffee is real. We sat by the window with the whole convention floor spread out below us, a sea of brown and brass, and Jed ordered an espresso and I ordered tea, because I am who I am.

"Your exhibit is genuinely the best thing here," he said. "I mean that. I walked the whole floor this morning. Half of it is somebody gluing cogs to a hat. You made corsetry feel like history instead of costume."

"Most of these people don't know the difference, and that's fine. Costume is how people fall in love with history. Somebody glues a cog to a hat, ten years later they're reading about factory conditions."

"That's a very generous thing to say about hats."

"I'm paid to be generous about textiles." I stirred my tea. "What about you? Are you here to sell or to play?"

"To play. I do enough selling Monday through Friday." He turned his cup around twice on the saucer. "Zelda, can I ask you something kind of weird?"

"You've seen my whole exhibit. Weird is on-brand."

"Did you always know you wanted to do this? The clothes thing. The history of what people wear under everything."

"Since I was in my twenties and found a trunk of my great-aunt's things. Why?"

"Just wondering if it ever comes late. The wanting to wear something, I mean. Whether that's ever a late thing." He was looking at the floor below us, not at me, and the coin had stopped moving entirely.

"It's a late thing for some people. Why, are you thinking of taking it up? Because I have sources."

He laughed, a real one this time, and some of the wire went out of his shoulders. "Maybe. Maybe I've got a source or two myself." Then he went quiet and turned his cup again and said, "Tomorrow night. At the ball. Will you be there?"

"Until they throw me out. I have to give a little talk at nine, and after that I'm off the clock."

"Then after nine." He looked at me then, straight on, and I felt it in my stomach the way I hadn't felt anything in my stomach since Wes, which annoyed me considerably. "After nine, there's something I'd like you to see. Or someone. It's... I've been planning this for six months and I'm doing a terrible job of not blurting it."

"Six months?"

"Six months." He finished his espresso in one swallow. "Look, I should go, I've got a fitting at four and if I'm late the woman with the sewing machine threatens me with pins. But nine o'clock, after your talk. Find me."

"Jed, what exactly..."

"Nine o'clock," he said, already backing toward the stairs, pointing at me with two fingers like a promise. "Wear something you like. Not the work clothes. Something for you."

And I sat there with my cold tea, fifty-two years old, watching a thirty-nine-year-old man walk away from me faster than was polite, and I thought about my great-aunt's trunk, and about how the wanting does come late for some people, and about what on earth a man like Jed Wilton could possibly be wearing to a costume ball that he'd been nervous about for six months.

The next morning I ran my talk twice in the hotel mirror and got to the hall early, which is how I ended up in the vendor aisle behind my exhibit looking for a spare extension cord. That was the official reason. The unofficial reason is that I am nosy and I know it.

Two women at a trimmings table were talking over a box of brass buttons, and one of them said, "Well, he came back for the second fitting, didn't he. That tall one with the silver at the temples."

"The one who's been in here three times? God, he was so nervous I nearly did it for him. You should see what he ordered, though."

"A corset and a skirt? A man like that?"

"A silk corset, dear. Underbust. And a full skirt with the beading. He measured twice and paid in cash and then stood there blushing like I'd asked him to undress right there on the cutting table."