The Tuxedo Job

My name is Sergio Petersen, I'm thirty-five years old, and I work as a dispatcher for a school bus company, which means I spend my days telling other people where to go while I sit in one spot getting wider. My last real date was two years ago. I'm telling you this so you understand why I was standing in the welcome center of the Prairie Line Railway Museum on a Saturday in July, sweating through my polo shirt, letting a woman I'd just met circle me with a measuring tape.

The museum sits on the edge of town, past the grain elevator, down a gravel road. They've got a restored locomotive out front and a vintage diner car you can rent for events. My cousin Herbert had booked the diner car for our grandparents' fiftieth anniversary dinner, and then he'd called me three weeks ago with his little condition.

"You show up in a tuxedo or I'm not coming," Herbert said. "Nonna has been asking about it. She wants the family looking sharp for once."

"I don't even own a suit, Herbert."

"Then rent one, Sergio. God. It's one dinner."

So I asked around, and the lady who cuts my hair gave me Tonya Bowen's number. Tonya does makeup and wardrobe for weddings and theater people, freelance, thirty-three years old, been at it since she was twenty-one. She met me at the museum because the anniversary dinner was happening there and she wanted to see the space. Then she talked the manager into letting us use the staff changing room for the fitting, since it was quieter than the lobby.

"Arms out," she said now, running the tape across my shoulders. "Okay. You've got good shoulders, Sergio. That's the good news."

"What's the bad news?"

"The bad news is nothing, stop it. You've just got a little softness at the middle, and a standard rental tux is cut for some twenty-four-year-old with a flat stomach. It's gonna bag here and pull there and you'll spend the whole dinner tugging at it." She pinched the tape at my waist and wrote a number in her notebook. "So I have a solution, but you're gonna think it's weird."

"Already weird. I'm being measured in a train museum."

"The solution is a corset."

I laughed. She didn't.

"Wait, seriously?"

"Seriously. A proper one, satin, laces up the back. It smooths the midsection, straightens the posture, and honestly it makes the jacket hang better than any tailor could. I've put men in them for stage productions before. They complain for ten minutes and then they look in the mirror and shut up." She snapped the tape once. "It goes under the tux. Nobody at that dinner sees it. You just look like a guy whose tux fits."

I stood there while a ceiling fan ticked overhead and the heat shimmered off the tracks outside the window. Somewhere down the line a diesel engine idled.

"I don't know," I said. "Won't it, I don't know, hurt?"

"It's snug. It's not a torture device. And you can take it off the second you get home." She looked at me with her head tilted, the way people do when they're deciding whether to push. "Sergio, do you want to walk into that diner car feeling like a guy in a rented bag, or feeling like the best dressed man in your family?"

"The second one," I admitted.

"Then let's try it. If you hate it, we pretend this never happened and I pin the tux the old way. Deal?"

"Deal," I said. "Cautiously."

"Cautious is my favorite starting point," she said, and went to her kit bag.

* * *

The staff changing room was about the size of a closet, a mirror on one wall, a folding screen that didn't cover much, a bench bolted to the floor. Tonya handed me the corset through the door crack and went out to the welcome center to give me privacy, which I appreciated, because getting into that thing alone took me fifteen minutes and involved language my grandmother would not approve of.

Here's how it works. The corset is already laced up the back, but loose. You wrap it around you, hook the front busks, which are these little clasps that fight you the entire time, and then you're supposed to have someone pull the laces. I tried doing it myself against the door frame like some kind of idiot. When I finally got it closed and cinched as far as I could manage, I turned to the mirror and hated what I saw for about four seconds.

I looked like a fat man stuffed into a mailbox. The top of it sat wrong, the bottom edge rode up, and the laces bulged at the back where I hadn't pulled them near tight enough. My face in the mirror was red and damp and not happy.

But then I noticed something. Underneath all the bad fitting, my waist was actually, genuinely smaller. There was a shape there. An hourglass suggestion, if I'm being generous with myself. And I felt this little kick in my chest that I did not expect and did not want to examine too closely.

"Everything okay in there?" Tonya called from out front.

"No," I said. "I think I did it wrong."

"Can I come look? I'm not gonna laugh, I promise. Well, not much."

"Come in, whatever."

She came in, took one look at me, and pressed her lips together. "Okay, so you hooked the bottom clasp first and that's why it's all crooked. Turn around. Arms up."

She undid the front, repositioned it against me, and refastened it, her fingers quick and businesslike, not touching anything she didn't need to touch. Then she took the lace loops at the back and pulled, and I made a noise like a busted accordion.

"Oh God," I said.

"Breathe shallow and keep your hands on your hips. There." She tied off the laces. "Now look!"

I looked. The mailbox was gone. What was left was a man with a straight back, a flat stomach, and a waist that went in where a waist should go in. The satin was black and slick and it caught the light in a way that made me feel strange, a warm prickly feeling starting at my sternum and going places it had no business going at two in the afternoon in a train museum.

"Huh," I said.

"Yeah. Huh," Tonya said, and she was smiling at my reflection. "You hate it, right? You look miserable."

"I don't hate it," I said quietly.

"I know. I could tell from your voice through the door. Men always get that voice." She dug in her kit bag again. "Now, one more piece. Stockings and garters."

"Hold on. Stockings?"

"Stockings and garters. They hold the corset's bottom edge flat so it doesn't ride up under the trousers, and they make everything on the top of your thigh lie smooth. The tux pants cover all of it, every inch, I swear on my business license." She held up a pair of black stockings, sheer, with a seam detail. "These are actually yours if you want them. I bought them for this. Waist measurement said you'd need the corset and I like to be prepared."

"You bought these before you even asked me?"

"I bought three sizes. This is the one that fits. Garters clip right here." She pointed at the garter tabs hanging from the bottom of the corset, little rubber nubs waiting. "You want to sit on the bench for this part unless you're good at balancing."

My breathing had gone quicker, and I couldn't fully blame the corset for that, though I was going to try. I sat on the bench and took the stockings from her and rolled the first one up my calf, and it felt like nothing I'd ever put on, cool and thin and tighter than a sock but in a different way, a way that made the hair on my arms stand up.

"So nobody sees any of this," I said, mostly to hear it said out loud.

"Nobody. It's under armor, Sergio. Armor that fits." She watched me clip the first garter, then corrected my angle. "Clip it front first, then back, then the sides. Like that. You're a natural."

The second stocking went easier. I stood and looked in the mirror again, black satin and sheer black nylon from chest to toe, and I did not hate it at all, and that fact sat in my stomach next to the laces and hummed.

Tonya checked her watch. "Tux should be here Tuesday. We'll do the fitting with all of it on. Today we just need your jacket measurements, so you can keep the corset on for that or not, your call."

"Keep it on," I said, too fast.

She wrote something in her notebook without looking up, but I saw the corner of her mouth.

Tonya measured my shoulders and arms with the corset on, and her tape measure kept brushing the satin, and every brush felt louder than it should have. She wrote numbers in her notebook and didn't look up at me once, which I appreciated, because my face was doing something I didn't want witnessed.

"Okay," she said, snapping the tape shut. "Jacket's going to fit like a dream over this. Now put the loaner on. Museum keeps a display tux in the back office, Mr. Kemp said I could borrow it for silhouette purposes. It's a size too big but you'll get the idea."

The loaner tux hung on a rolling rack by the door, black and glossy under the plastic. I wrestled into the trousers first, which went over the stockings with a whisper of fabric on fabric that nearly did me in, then the shirt, then the jacket. The shoulders were too wide and the sleeves hung past my knuckles, but the waist, cinched down by satin and bone, actually took the jacket in where it was supposed to. I buttoned the single button and turned to the full length mirror propped against the wall.

I stood there a second. The man in the mirror was tall and straight and had a shape. He looked like somebody who got invited to things.

"Well?" I said.

Tonya had come up behind me, and she looked at my