“Why would I? My real name is Eleanor.”
Luke chokes on his coffee. “Eleanor?”
“It gets worse,” I whisper.
“How much worse could it be?”
“Gertrude.”
“Man, that’s bad.” Luke shakes his head as if I just told him I have a terminal disease. I elbow him hard, but he barely feels it through the thick fur of his costume.
“Now you,” I say.
“Oh no,” he says, holding up one paw. “I don’t tell anyone my middle name.”
“Worse than Gertrude?”
Mr. Tubbs clears his throat, making me look back at the front of the room. “Mickey will be at breakfast today.” Mr. Tubbs taps a stack of papers on the table as he talks, lining up the edges. “Please take a copy of the schedule and try to be on time, people. Yesterday we had a fiasco at the Tea Party.”
“A tea party fiasco,” I whisper. Luke laughs too loudly, making Mr. Tubbs look over at us.
“So,” Amy asks later, as she helps me to pin my hair up under my wig. “Who is he?”
“Who?” I ask, working my fingers into my gloves. I’ve been going through an average of four pairs a day. Amusement parks aren’t really built for the white-glove treatment.
“The guy on the train.”
“You are not going to believe this,” I say, turning to check the back of my dress. Two days ago I went a whole hour with my skirt tucked into the top of my tights until one of the Merry Men told me. “He’s the new Prince Charming.”
“What happened to James?” Amy asks, twisting her hair up into a ponytail.
“Pulled hamstring.”
“Man, how many is that? Three?”
“Four.” I help Amy tug her wig down over the back of her head and adjust the headband to keep it from falling forward.
“I keep forgetting the Puker,” she says, laughing.
“Yeah, who eats sushi at an amusement park?”
“At least this one’s cute,” she says, fluffing out her sleeves. Last week they made her carry this silk bluebird on her shoulder until a little girl got hysterical because she thought Snow White was into taxidermy.
“I don’t care what he looks like. I am so done with princes.”
“At least you
get
one,” Amy says, taking my hand and leading me toward the doors. “I get a third of a prince. I have to share mine with Ariel and Belle.”
“I thought Belle was with the Beast.” I can hear the murmuring of the crowds as the first group of characters makes its way through the doors and toward the tables.
“Ella, he isn’t always the Beast. Sometimes he’s the charming prince.”
“What’s the difference between the charming prince and Prince Charming?”
“Your guy’s
name
is Prince Charming,” she says, giving my arm a squeeze. “Capital
P
capital
C
. He’s the real deal.” We pause to allow Donald and Daisy Duck to have their own entry. “You ready?” Amy asks, giving me her best if-I-smile-any-bigger-my-face-is-going-to-split-in-two smile. We walk through the doorway and into the brightly lit restaurant, where dozens of families await. They have saved and planned and traveled and gotten up early just to meet us. To take pictures of us that will end up in a scrapbook or a photo album or a shoe box so that someday someone will take it out and say,
Hey look, there I am with Cinderella. That was the last time we went on a vacation before our parents got divorced or Mom died of cancer or Bobby ran away.
I smile at the family sitting in the first booth that I come to. Two little girls sit in between their parents. They have matching T-shirts with swirls of pearlized ribbons and sprays of flowers, surrounding the words DISNEY PRINCESSES.
“Look who it is,” the mom says a little too shrilly. I have gotten used to this in the few weeks that I’ve been here. The too-big smiles. The too-loud laughs. The manic looks on everyone’s faces. The girls just stare at me with huge eyes, as if at any moment I might jump across the table and gobble them up. “It’s Cinderella,” the mom says, her voice hitting an octave nearly too high for human hearing. The little girls are frozen, pressed together at the back of the curving booth. I start to move on to the next table, where Goofy is entertaining a family by juggling a couple of apples and the pepper shaker, but the mom isn’t done with me yet. “Don’t you girls want a picture with Cinderella?” she asks, pulling the arm of the girl closest to her. I bend down, thinking that maybe if I make myself smaller, they won’t be so afraid. Slowly they slide out of the booth and make their way over to stand with me.
“Smile,” the dad says, waving his hand in an effort to make them step closer to me. His voice is brittle and tired. I smile as he clicks off one, then two, then three shots, turning the camera slightly with each one. The mom is pushing at her cheeks, exaggerating her own smile into something that barely resembles anything remotely happy. I look down at the girls standing quietly beside me. The older one has her arm around her little sister, who is trying to smile despite the fact that her cheeks are wet with tears.
Normally, I would have had to go through several auditions to even get a shot at being one of the fur characters, but I got Cinderella just by showing up. Management was desperate. They had sold-out Princess breakfasts, waiting lists for the Chip and Dale campfires, not to mention the thousands of people who just come to the park and mill around, cameras at the ready to “make a memory that will last a lifetime.” The union gave management until Memorial Day to meet their demands. Better work conditions, free meals, cleaner costumes, a dental plan. I took the bus to Orlando when I heard the radio ad announcing immediate open auditions for all characters.
The real reason I got the part wasn’t because my hair was the right color (it’s brown, not blond,) or because I could sing (not even “Happy Birthday” or “Jingle Bells”) or because I had a great audition (I tripped on my gown on the way into the room), but because I was the right size. Of the nearly two dozen other girls who showed up for the audition, I was the only one who fit into the costume without any alterations. Thinking that they were casting us for a day or two tops, keeping wardrobe changes to a minimum was a priority.
I have to admit Cinderella is a pretty plum role. Most of my day is spent hosting various meals around the resort. There’s the character breakfast every morning after our real breakfast, then the Cinderella brunch at the castle, then the Princess Tea Party. In between times I have to stage the whole running-down-the-castle-steps-and-losing-my-glass-slipper thing. I get married every afternoon at three, and then I have a break until the Electrical Parade at nine. Luckily, there’s another Cinderella who does all the shows. Almost every face character has a duplicate in the performance area. Those people are the dancers and singers. Mostly all we do is smile and wave and sign autographs for people. The only thing that keeps tripping me up is the voice. Stacy, the princess handler, is in charge of making sure that we all stay in character when we’re working. She keeps telling us that we have to talk more properly. “Think vaguely British.” So in addition to trying not to break my neck running down stairs in heels and trying not to sweat more than a princess should, I walk around telling people that I
shan’t
be at Aurora’s buffet, that I
simply cawn’t
believe this heat, and that I would
rawther
have a glass of water than juice. That’s the other thing. Even though I go to about seven meals a day, I’m usually starving come dinnertime. Stacy made it very clear on the first day: Princesses don’t eat.
I have to change into my brunch gown before heading over to the castle. “Need help?” Amy asks, stepping into the changing room. I turn and let her pull at my zipper. After the skirt-in-stocking incident last week, I’ve taken to wearing shorts under my gowns. Around us, girls are suiting up for the day. Jessie from
Toy Story
leans toward the mirror, using a brown eyebrow pencil to give herself freckles.
“How sweet would that be?” I ask, nodding in her direction. “Jeans.”
“I may never wear a dress again,” Amy says, pulling at her bodice. “It could be worse though.”
I step out of my blue gown and hang it back up on the rack. “How’s that?” I take my pink dress, my hanging-around-the-castle dress, from the hanger and begin pulling it on. “I mean, besides the animals,” I say, watching as Winnie the Pooh adjusts her head in the mirror.
“What about Julie?” she says, nodding over my shoulder to where a girl with long red hair is adjusting her seashell bikini top. “Or even Devin?”
“I agree that sitting around in the stinking grotto all day with your legs jammed into a plastic fish tail while prepubescent boys try to cop a feel through your shells would suck, but how is Princess Jasmine any worse off than us? I mean, at least she gets to wear pants.”
“Yeah.
See-through
pants. That and a tiny halter top. Can you say five hundred crunches a day?”
“True. Not to mention that jerk who plays Aladdin. What’s his name?”
“You just don’t like him because he got you in trouble.”
“I still can’t believe he told on me for that.”
“Ella, you told a little girl that you hated the color pink.”
“Well, I do.”
“So not the point,” Amy says, but I can tell she’s having a hard time keeping her smile in check. “You do, of course, understand that the color pink is nearly synonymous with the Princesses, don’t you?”
“Well, duh,” I say, spreading the skirt of my dress wide. That does it. We stand there grinning at each other for a moment before Stacy claps her hands and tells us that we need to get a move on. “See you this afternoon,” I say, picking up my parasol (pink to match my dress).
Amy waves at me with the back of her fingers as she hurries out the door toward the Haunted Forest. I follow more slowly. The castle’s less than a quarter mile from anywhere in the park. There, I know, little girls are eating star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking apple juice out of teacups while they wait for me to arrive. For sixty dollars each, they get brunch, a souvenir photo, a Cinderella doll, and their own golden crown.
It’s hot outside, and the park is starting to fill up. I walk past the shrubs trimmed to resemble Mickey and Donald and Goofy. Two little girls pick at a cloud of blue cotton candy. Their blue lips frame blue teeth as they smile at me. A boy with a green baseball cap sticks his tongue out at me, purple from his snow cone. A family cuts in front of me, and I have to stop short to avoid running into them. Mom is pushing a double stroller filled with two kids, a backpack, two animal-shaped sippy cups, an umbrella, and something blue and green and shiny. Dad keeps folding and refolding a map, trying to make it go back to its original shape. He is following his wife so closely that he keeps stepping on the back of her flip-flops and hitting her in the back of the head with the edges of the map.
It’s because the little boy is trailing behind them and doesn’t look at me that I notice him. In one hand he holds a giraffe by its neck, its head bent at an impossible angle from too many games of hide-and-seek, too many nights snuggling under the covers, and too many times crammed into carts at the grocery store. His other hand is clutching the ribbon attached to a Mickey Mouse balloon. It’s one of the double balloons, a blue mouse head inside a clear bubble. Mom stops the stroller and grabs the map from Dad.
I pause by the waterfall and watch as the boy pulls on the ribbon, making Mickey’s face dip toward him and then bounce back up into the air. Mom and Dad are moving again, but the little boy stays where he is, eyes glued on the balloon. He doesn’t move from his spot even when a woman nearly hits him with her shopping bag brimming with mouse ears and Tinker Bell wands. Whether it is the jostling crowd or the tug of his father’s hand, suddenly the balloon bounces up much higher than before, but this time there isn’t anything to stop its ascent.
“My balloon,” he says, much more softly than I would have imagined.
“I told you to hang onto it,” his father says, pulling him forward.
“I did,” I hear him say as he is pulled past me.
“Not tightly enough.”
The balloon dips twice in the air before it catches a fast moving air current and sails off over the lagoon. It grows smaller and smaller in the sky until I can’t see it at all anymore. The cobblestones are tricky to navigate, especially in high heels. Especially when you’re late. You have to watch where you place each foot to avoid falling, but instead of watching the road in front of me like I should, I keep finding myself staring up at the sky.
2
Luke
“Luke, we have some costuming issues,” Mr. Forrester says to me, tapping his wedding ring on his chair. “Your name has come up.”
I nod at him, twitching my foot so that the loose string on my Chucks makes its own
tap-tap
against the floor beneath his desk. On top of the desk, there’s a framed picture, like you’d expect, but instead of wife and kids, it’s just him, in a suit, smiling while he receives a gold statuette shaped like Mickey Mouse. Beside the photo is a desk calendar, “Daily Affirmations for Corporate Survival.” I’m not sure I understand what that means. Today’s affirmation is “A Knowing Smile Is Your Best Weapon.” Mr. For rester also has a Mickey Mouse-shaped pencil sharpener, ashtray, wastebasket, and Oriental rug. The ashtray has a cigar butt resting on Mickey’s ear. The phone on his desk, like those of all the management people here, is an actual plastic statue of Mickey Mouse holding the receiver in his white-gloved hand. I imagine Mr. Forrester shouting into that phone, maybe firing someone, while Mickey covers his ears and asks why everyone can’t just be friends. Then again, it might be
me
who’s about to get fired, so suddenly the whole idea is not so funny. I keep watching my hands, cracking my knuckles, still surprised some days to look down and see actual human fingers instead of fur-covered paws.
Mr. Forrester adjusts his tie clip and purses his lips. “Luke,” he says, “I want you to imagine I’m a six-year-old boy. A towheaded youngster who has come with Mom and Dad to the happiest place on earth. Are you with me?”