Dream Factory (5 page)

“What are you so happy about?” Amy asks as I step into the tent. She helps me with my zipper and hands me a cool washcloth for my neck.

“Don’t you know?” I ask, still smiling. “This is the happiest day of my life.”

 

“Want one?” Mark asks, extending a small box of lemon drops toward me. I take one off the top, rolling it in my fingers before placing it in my mouth. We have to wait offstage while the mice and my fairy godmother finish their musical number. “Think we’ll still be here for Cinderellabration?”

“Who knows. I wake up every morning expecting to go home.”

“Where is home?” Mark asks, putting the top back on the box of candies. He lifts it to study the gold image of the fairy castle on the side. It’s a simple question, but not one with a simple answer.

“Maine,” I say softly. “Sort of.”

“Sort of?” Mark asks, lifting his eyebrows.

“It’s complicated.” It comes out more harshly than I intend. Mark blinks a few times before looking back toward where the mice are choosing a girl from the audience to be my flower girl. Stacy told me they used to try to pick a boy to be the ring bearer, but they stopped when some dad freaked out on his wife for trying to
sissify
their son. Mark’s fingers begin picking at the castle sticker on the candy box, succeeding in pulling free one corner where it curls away from the plastic, destroying one of the towers. “How about you?” I ask. “Where’s home for you?”

“Here,” he says, leaning down to place the box in the top of his backpack. He sits up and turns toward me, and the look on my face makes him smile. “I don’t mean
here
,” he says, opening his hand toward the stones that make up the inside of the castle rooms. “I mean Orlando. About ten minutes from here.”

He takes off his crown and runs his fingers through his hair. He turns his head to look at me again, and something in his eyes makes me understand why the other princesses giggle so much when he talks to them. “You know how some families are filled with doctors or lawyers or carpenters?” I nod at him, watching as he turns the crown in his hands. “With my family it’s this place.”

“Wow,” I say softly. “That’s rough,” but as soon as I say it, I know it’s the wrong thing.

“Rough, how?” he asks. “What could be better than this?” and the way he says it is exactly opposite of the way I would say it. The way he says it, I know he means it. Really means it. “Ella, can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I say, but at that moment Stacy walks through the curtains holding my veil.

“You two ready?” she asks. Mark places his crown back on his head and begins walking toward the stage, where Aladdin and the other prince are waiting for him. Prince Charming’s choices for best man are much more limited.

“Ella,” Mark says before pushing through the curtains, “in case I forget to tell you later, you look beautiful.”

 

“Well, tell me,” Amy asks, bending to unlace her slippers.

“Tell you what?” I ask, pulling the wig from my head and shaking my head to free my hair. I stand in front of the fan, feeling cool for the first time all day. This is the only break that we get. Four hours between the end of the postwedding carriage ride around the park and the Electrical Parade.

“Ella, I haven’t known you for very long, but I can tell when something’s up.”

“It’s Mark.”

“Oh, it’s Mark now, is it?” Amy asks, pulling a T-shirt over her head.

“Very amusing,” I say. Amy remains quiet, waiting for me to continue. “He asked me out.” I wince a little as I say it, aware of the way Amy is always looking at him.

“That’s great,” she says, but something in her voice makes me look up. “What about Luke?”

“Luke.” I watch her face, but she won’t look straight at me. “I don’t think he’s Mark’s type. Besides,” I say, “he has a girlfriend.” Saying it aloud feels funny.

“He does . . .” Amy says. And I wait for the something more. She tilts her head at me, trying to figure something out, then smiles slightly and shakes her head. “So Mark asked you out.”

“Kind of.”

“Well, did you say yes?”

I pull off a grape from the basket on the table and pop it into my mouth, buying time. The grapes are a minor victory. Not able to go off campus for fear of being jumped by the picketers, we had to ask management to bring in produce for us. It wasn’t until Luke told them that they might not want us all to come down with scurvy that they started bringing in fresh food. There are only so many days that you can live on cheese fries and pizza. “Kind of.”

“Okay, Ella. Is it possible for you to be any more vague?”

“Maybe,” I say, smiling at her.

“What did you say?”

“I asked him if you could come along.” I pull another grape from the bunch and drop it into my mouth.

“Like a chaperone?”

“I thought maybe we could double.” She frowns for a moment, looking at the picture on the television at the far end of the room. The images switch every few minutes, showing a live feed of different locations around the park.

“I guess I could ask Jeff,” Amy says, still staring at the screen. Teacups swirl across the screen. The camera angle distorts the faces of the people riding in them.

“Jeff? Is he the guy who plays Mowgli? He’s cute.”

“No, Jeff is Balloo.”

“Oh,” I say. The screen shifts to a shot of the entrance. I see Chip and Dale facing each other, arms gesturing wildly in what seems to be an argument. “Is he cute?”

“Okay, this is going to sound really strange,” Amy says. “I don’t know what he looks like. I’ve never seen him without his costume.” She smiles slowly at me. “But he has a great personality,” Amy says, hefting her backpack onto her shoulder. I follow her out and toward the nearest monorail platform.

“Get this,” I say, stepping under the shade of the canopy to wait for the train, “he’s a true believer.”

“Who is?”

“Mark. I mean it. He’s the real deal. He actually believes in all this junk,” I say.

“Ella, there isn’t anything wrong with believing in things,” Amy says, looking away from me and down the track.

“Sure. Real things. Like saving the rain forest or God or alien abductions, but this is like believing in—”

“What?” Amy asks, looking back at me and tilting her head.

“This is like believing in M&M’s, and then finding out when you bite through the shiny colored shell that there isn’t anything inside. That there isn’t any chocolate. That it’s just an illusion.”

“That was possibly the worst analogy that I have ever heard,” she says, still looking at me intently. “Why does it bug you so much?” she asks finally. “I mean, why do you care what other people believe about this place?” I shake my head and turn down the track to see the monorail slowly making its way around the bend to circle the lagoon. “There’s nothing bad in believing, Ella.” Amy touches my arm, making me look at her. “Besides,” she says, a sparkle in her eyes, “Mark is, as you say, wicked cute.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“Have I?” Amy asks, smiling.

“About a hundred times.” The tram’s brakes squeak as it pulls to a stop in front of us. We wait as a family exits the car, kids licking furiously at ice-cream cones in a losing battle against the heat.

“Well, he is, and he’s totally into you,” she says, sliding into a seat near the doors. I sit down across from her, letting my pack drop into the seat beside me.

“I don’t know,” I say, leaning my head against the glass, which is cool against my cheek. “I think maybe it’s not so much me he’s into. I think it’s more Cinderella.”

“Well, they do live happily ever after.”

“So they say.” Across from me, Amy shifts slightly, putting her feet on the seat beside me. I close my eyes, feeling the slow bump of the tram as it slides over the rails. The thing about believing is that it’s dangerous. The world can turn upside down in an instant, and just when you think you’re on top of everything, you’re under it. Believing in something, someone, is hard. Sometimes when you let yourself fall too far, suddenly it’s gone.

4

Luke

The instruction manual says: “After moist toweletting, fluff character hair with the tips of your fingers.” I stand back from Dale’s body and look at him on his clothes hanger, his head mounted separately beside him. He doesn’t really seem that dirty, but one good whiff tells a different story—we sweat
a lot
inside the costumes.

I hold up the manual to Cass. “Finally,” I say.

“Finally what?”

“Grammar scientists have solved the problem of turning
towelette
into a verb,” I tell her.

“Well, after they perfected
beer me
, it was just a matter of time.” She begins blow-drying Chip’s topknot of hair, finishing in about ten seconds. The room starts to smell like lemons. I have to devote several extra towelettes to Dale’s nose, which gets grubby from all the kisses from children, flirty pats from women, mock punches from men. Most people can’t tell us apart by name, but Dale is the one with the red nose and the gap teeth, and is also the stupider of the two, which Cass reminds me of about eight times a day.

This isn’t our job, cleaning costumes, but just yesterday the park Garment Care Union went out on sympathy strike. Soon enough the whole park will be on strike. It’s getting ugly, and yesterday Jesse was walking through Tomorrowland during his break, just eating a cheese pretzel, and somebody pelted him with a tomato, even though the nearest fence was probably fifty feet away. “You gotta admit,” Jesse said, “one of those strikers has a damn good arm.” The thing that freaked us all out was that he wasn’t even in his Friar Tuck costume, and still they knew he was one of us. “Scabs,” they call us when we get near enough to the gate for them to start yelling.

As far as the cleaning goes, face characters have it the easiest, and right now I am half-watching Ella run a steamer over her ball gown, which is hung up with clothespins. Prince Charming (Matt? Mark?) is next to her, combing out the fringe on his epaulets with this old plastic Afro pick he brought with him, the kind with a Black Power fist on the end of the handle. He told us it’s the same one his father used to comb out
his
epaulets back in the seventies. I’m betting they are the only father and son in the country sharing this particular tradition. When Cassie razzed him about it, he
quoted
page forty-seven of the manual: “All costume fringe (including epaulets and Davy Crockett’s jacket) can be managed using a wide-toothed comb.” He had us there. Most of the guys are watching Anna clean her Eeyore costume. She’s made herself famous in the space of a week by letting it be known at breakfast that she is usually naked inside her costume. Ella finishes with her three dresses and comes over to help me because I’ve just discovered a giant wad of gum stuck to Dale’s butt. This happens about three times a week, always to Dale, never to Chip. Chip is the serious one, the one who is smart about gathering acorns. No one assaults him with gum.

“Here, Mr. Helpless,” Ella says. She reaches into her plastic Donald cup and pulls out an ice cube. Then she sits beside me, and while I stretch the fabric tight across my knee she rubs the ice over and around the wad of gum.

“Would an Afro pick work better?” I say. She smirks.

“Hush,” she says, smiling a little. “The ice freezes the gum, then you can just break it off in pieces.” She concentrates on what she’s doing, her brown hair falling in strands that frame her face. I can feel the pressure of her fingers on my knee, moving in circles, the ice slowly melting in her hand. For half a second all I’m aware of is our breathing.

“Need some help, Luke?” Cass says. She’s still holding the blow-dryer, and looks at Ella holding the ice, like there is going to be a battle of the lesser supervillains.

“We’re good,” Ella says, still concentrating.

Cass looks at me. I shrug and make a face like there’s nothing I can do, like I’m trapped here under Ella’s fingers, but I feel my face warming, and right now some part of me is wishing that the wad of gum was a foot across, that she was holding a block of ice, and we would be like this for the next two days, just silent, and I could watch her face while she works.

Amy stands near us, retying the sash on her Snow White dress, then untying it and trying again. The manual says it’s supposed to “fall naturally,” and she keeps complaining that she doesn’t know what that means. Finally she gives up, and I hear her muttering curse words under her breath. Ella starts in on the gum with the blade of a butter knife. Cass keeps banging things around in drawers, then cutting her eyes at me when I look up.

“Hey,” Amy says, tying her sash again, “what do you guys know about that dude they call the Phantom?”

“Of the Opera?” I say. “I don’t think that’s Disney.”

“No, doofus,” she says. “A guy who
works
here. A fur character.”

I look around the room while Ella chips away at the gum. No one here looks like a phantom. Matt or Mark is breathing on his brass buttons, then cleaning them with a handkerchief. Robin Hood is making yet another joke about polishing his arrows. It’s funny about him—even though his name is Bryan, everyone just calls him by his character name. He just
seems
more like a Robin Hood than a Bryan—not too hard to imagine him stealing from the rich, and keeping it. Big Jesse smacks the dust from his Friar Tuck costume with a broom handle, then practices his English accent by reading the latest memo about how we are all part of the Disney
fahhmily
. Cassie lifts the pole that holds Chip’s head. We’re supposed to keep them on the poles when we aren’t wearing them. She always does, but mine usually ends up on the floor under the bed.

“You should take that outside,” I tell her, hoping to make her laugh. “Mount it at the edge of the city as a warning to other striking fur characters.”

“That’s not funny,” Matt/Mark says, still polishing. “Those idiots could shut this place down. They should just be happy they have jobs here.”