"You're a natural..."

The building was called Harrington Plaza, though no one who worked there ever called it that. Everyone said simply “the store,” the way you might say “the office” or “home,” with that particular compression of familiarity that means a place has become part of you. It occupied most of a city block in the downtown loop, seventeen stories of pale limestone and glass, the lower nine given over entirely to retail floor space and the upper eight to the corporate offices of Harrington & Coyle Department Stores, Incorporated — seventy-three locations in fourteen states, main offices here, flagship store below.

Jamie von Lilienthaler III arrived on a Thursday morning in the second week of September, 1975.

He came through the employee entrance on the side street, as his paperwork instructed, a brown envelope clutched against his chest. The revolving door breathed cold air out at him as he pushed through — the deep, almost geological cool of a large building’s climate control, threaded through with the ghost of a thousand perfumes. He stopped just inside and let his eyes adjust. The corridor was narrow and institutional, fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, gray linoleum underfoot, a bulletin board tacked with union notices and a poster about the company picnic that had happened in July. A security desk sat at the far end, staffed by a heavyset man in a tan uniform who looked up over his reading glasses.

“Help you?”

“I’m starting today. Intern, through Whitmore College? James von Lilienthaler.” He spelled it. He always spelled it.

The guard checked a clipboard, made a mark, slid a laminated visitor badge across the desk. “Eighth floor. Ask for Mrs. Grunewald.”

The elevator was slow and smelled of machine oil. Jamie watched the floors tick by on the indicator — a brass arrow sweeping across an arc of numerals — and straightened his collar. He was wearing his best polo shirt, a pale blue one his mother had ironed, and a pair of clean dungarees with a careful crease pressed into each leg. He’d thought he looked presentable. He shifted the brown envelope from one arm to the other and tried not to think about how much he needed this to work out.

Whitmore required forty-five credits of approved professional internship before you could sit for your senior comprehensive exams. Forty-five credits. Jamie had fourteen, accumulated across two dispiriting summers at his uncle’s insurance brokerage, filing and answering phones. This placement — secured through the school’s career liaison office after considerable effort — was supposed to cover the rest in a single academic year.

The eighth floor opened onto carpet. That was the first difference. The lower floors had linoleum; up here the carpet was a dark burgundy that absorbed sound, and the walls were paneled in something that looked like walnut. A receptionist — a real one, polished, in her forties, with hair set in careful waves — looked up from her desk.

“James von Lilienthaler?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll let Mrs. Grunewald know you’re here. Please have a seat.”

— — —

Margaret Grunewald was the Director of Administrative Services for the Harrington & Coyle corporate office, which meant, among other things, that she managed the intern program. She was a compact woman of perhaps fifty-five, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a manner that was brisk without being unkind. She had, Jamie would later learn, been with Harrington & Coyle for twenty-six years, having started as a stock girl on the third floor and worked her way up without particular fanfare or complaint.

She looked at his polo shirt and his dungarees for approximately two seconds.

“I see,” she said, and folded her hands on her desk. “Mr. von Lilienthaler. First — welcome. We’re glad to have you. Second — there’s been a revision to your placement.”

“A revision.”

“Your paperwork from Whitmore indicates general office assistance. Typing, filing, running correspondence between floors. That position has been filled — one of our previous interns extended her contract. However, we have a different opening, and I think it’s actually a better opportunity for a young person who wants to understand how a large retail organization functions.” She paused. “It would place you in a public-facing role.”

Jamie nodded carefully.

“You would be staffing the reception desk at the main elevator bank on the ground floor. The elevators that serve our corporate floors. Visitors, vendors, executives — everyone who comes to see us from outside the building passes through that desk. You’d be the first face they see.” She let this settle. “It’s a significant position.”

“That sounds — yes. That sounds good.”

“It does require,” she said, and here her tone shifted into something matter-of-fact that he would come to understand was simply how she said difficult things, “appropriate presentation. The ground-floor reception position has a standard for dress. It always has.” She opened her desk drawer and withdrew a neat stack of small slips, each one a different color, each pre-stamped with a department code. “These are merchandise chits. They authorize you to select what you need from the appropriate departments, no charge, on the store’s account. Consider it part of your compensation package.”

He looked at the chits. There were eight or nine of them. He picked up the top one and read the department code.

Foundation & Intimate Apparel. 2-West.

He looked up.

Mrs. Grunewald met his eyes with the same composed expression she’d worn since he sat down. “The position,” she said, “has always been filled by a young woman. The uniform expectations reflect that. If you’d prefer to be reassigned to the filing position once it reopens in January, that option remains available. But you’d lose the semester.” She tilted her head slightly. “I understand that would be a problem.”

Jamie thought about the fourteen credits sitting in his transcript like the beginning of a sentence with no ending. He thought about his parents, who were paying for Whitmore at some cost, and his father’s careful silence whenever the subject of his academic progress came up at dinner.

“No,” he said. “I mean — yes. I’ll do it.”

“Good.” She smiled, and it was a genuine smile, warm at the edges. “Go down to 2-West first. Ask for Mrs. Pollack. She knows you’re coming — I called ahead. Give her the chit and she’ll take care of the rest. Work your way through the departments in order; each chit has the sequence printed on the back. The salon is last. Come back up to see me when you’re done, and I’ll walk you to your station.” She paused. “Do you have any questions?”

He had approximately forty questions. He said: “No, ma’am.”

— — —

The store opened at nine-thirty. It was ten past ten when Jamie came out of the elevator on the second floor, and the retail floors were already alive — the particular mid-morning hum of a department store in full operation, a sound made of a hundred small components: shoes on tile, the soft percussion of hangers on racks, the murmur of conversations, cash register drawers opening and closing with a mechanical ring, and underneath it all the store’s muzak system threading something instrumental and forgettable through the air.

He followed the signs for 2-West. The intimates department was softly lit, its displays draped in shades of ivory and blush and champagne. A saleswoman appeared from between two circular racks with the quiet efficiency of long practice. She was perhaps sixty, trim, with silver hair pinned precisely, and she wore her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead as though they were simply part of her.

“You must be the young man from upstairs,” she said, not unkindly. She looked him over once, head to toe, with the assessing eye of someone who has spent decades fitting people into things. “I’m Mrs. Pollack. Come with me.”

She took him to a fitting room in the back, larger than the ones along the wall. There was a padded stool and a three-way mirror, and Mrs. Pollack closed the curtain behind them with the air of someone getting down to business.

“Slip off your shirt, please.”

He did. The air in the fitting room was cool against his skin. He watched himself in the mirror — a young man of twenty, thin-shouldered, with the slightly startled look of someone who has just realized that a decision made in the abstract is now becoming concrete.

Mrs. Pollack produced a fabric tape measure from her apron pocket and moved around him with practiced efficiency, calling out numbers to herself in a low murmur, writing them on a small notepad. Then she disappeared through the curtain and came back with an armful of things.

The brassiere was white, cotton with a small amount of lace at the upper cups, with wide adjustable straps. “Soft cup,” Mrs. Pollack explained, matter-of-factly. “More forgiving for someone starting out. Hold your arms out, please.” She fitted it around him and fastened the hooks at the back with two deft motions, then adjusted the straps until she was satisfied. “Now.”

She took from the armful a pair of breast forms — flesh-toned, slightly weighted, shaped with an attention to anatomical accuracy that made Jamie’s breath catch. She nestled each one into the waiting cup with the care of someone arranging something valuable, adjusted the bra slightly to distribute the weight, and then stood back.

In the mirror, the change was immediate and profound. The forms filled the bra cups naturally, with the slight teardrop hang of actual weight. His chest, previously flat and unremarkable, now swept outward in a gentle curve.

“We’ll put a camisole over that,” Mrs. Pollack said, already moving. “And you’ll want something for the hip line.”

The hip and seat pads came in a special brief — a high-waisted garment fitted with firm foam shaping sewn into panels along the hips and across the seat. Mrs. Pollack directed him to step into it behind the curtain’s privacy, and when he came back out the transformation below the waist matched what had happened above: the straight plane of his hip line was now curved, the seat of the brief giving him a rounded, feminine silhouette that the mirror confirmed from every angle.

“There,” said Mrs. Pollack, with the quiet satisfaction of someone completing the first chapter of a longer task. She handed him a silky camisole in the same ivory as the bra, which he pulled over his head and which fell softly against his new shape. “Get dressed in your own things for now. You’ll change into the skirt and blouse after shoes. Keep the chits in order.” She gave him a small look, almost kind, and added: “You’ve got a good frame. Narrow shoulders, but we’ll dress around that. The blouse will handle it.”

— — —

The hosiery department was on the same floor. The salesgirl there was young — not much older than Jamie — with frosted hair and square-framed glasses with slightly oversized lenses, very 1975. She didn’t blink at his chit or his dungarees or the subtle change in his silhouette beneath his polo shirt. She measured his height and looked at the chit.

“Sheer-to-waist, I think. Better line with a skirt.” She pulled a flat package from the rack — L’eggs, in a plastic egg that she cracked open with practiced ease — and held them up to the light. “Barely-there. Good neutral for a first day.” She looked at his feet. “Size?”

He told her. She made a slight adjustment and handed over a second pair still in the egg as backup. “Always keep a spare,” she said, as though this were universal wisdom.

— — —

The shoe department was on the main floor. A young man with a salesman’s pad and a measuring device knelt before Jamie without visible reaction and measured his foot, then disappeared into the back. He returned with three boxes.

The shoes he settled on — or rather, the shoes that were settled on Jamie, with input from the salesman and a passing female colleague who was drawn in for a second opinion — were block-heeled pumps in a warm caramel tone, closed-toe, with a modest heel of perhaps two inches. Classic, the colleague said approvingly. The heel was enough to change his posture, to encourage a shift in weight onto the balls of his feet, to lengthen the line of the leg. He practiced three steps in the carpeted aisle of the shoe department while the salesman watched critically and then nodded.

“You’re a natural,” the colleague said and moved on.

Jamie did not know what to do with this, so he put the pumps in their box, tucked the box under his arm, and went back to the second floor.

— — —

Women’s Sportswear and Separates occupied the east side of the second floor, a rambling section of coordinated displays, the racks organized by color family in the way that was fashionable that year. The saleswoman there — heavyset, warm, with a laugh that seemed to live just below the surface of everything she said — looked at his chit and at him and said, “Come on, then,” and walked him directly to a rack of skirts without preamble.

“Tight skirt,” she read from the chit’s specification notes, and raised one eyebrow very slightly, not in judgment but in consideration. “Pencil skirt, they mean. Professional.” She sorted through the rack with the rapid fluency of someone who has memorized its contents. “What do we have going on under the polo shirt?”

He told her, briefly.

“Good. Hip line?”

He described the pads.

She nodded and pulled a skirt from the rack — a medium-gray wool blend, below the knee, cut narrow through the hips and tapering slightly at the hem. She held it against him, measuring the waist against his own, tugged the tag to check the size. “This one,” she said, with certainty. “Try it.”

In the fitting room, pulling on the pantyhose was a process — the careful drawing up of sheer nylon in the narrow stall, each inch requiring attention, the fabric cool and foreign and smooth — and then the skirt, which he had to step into and draw up carefully over the hip pads, the snug waistband closing with a zipper and hook at the side. When he emerged, the saleswoman circled him once.

The skirt fit closely over the padded hips, tapering to the knee. With the block-heeled pumps adding two inches, the overall effect was — complete. The posture the heels required, the weight of the hip padding, the whisper of the nylon against his legs as he took a careful step: all of it combined into something he did not immediately have words for.

“Blouse next,” the saleswoman said, and led him to a different rack.

The blouse was a soft polyester in a warm cream, with a loose flowing front panel and cuffed sleeves, the collar slightly wide and lying open at the throat — unmistakably feminine without being fussy, the kind of blouse that said office while also saying woman. It went on over the camisole, over the bra’s silhouette. The saleswoman buttoned the cuffs for him and stepped back.

She smiled then. Not the polite professional smile she’d been wearing throughout, but a real one, pleased at what she was seeing. “That is quite nice,” she said. “Really. The cut of the blouse does exactly what it should.” She turned him toward the full-length mirror at the end of the aisle.

Jamie looked.

He had looked in the fitting room mirrors throughout the morning — the three-way in 2-West, the narrow glass in the hosiery alcove, the angled panel in the shoe department — each time absorbing one more element of the transformation piecemeal, the way you read a sentence one word at a time without yet knowing what it means. This was different. This was the whole sentence.

The fitted skirt, the nylon-smooth legs, the curves of hip and chest, the feminine blouse, the heels — all of it assembled at once, and the person in the mirror receiving it all with a composure that surprised him. She stood with her weight distributed the way the heels demanded, one hip very slightly canted, her hands loose at her sides. The figure read entirely differently than the young man who had pushed through the revolving door three hours ago.

He thought: that’s not me.

And then, almost simultaneously: that’s exactly me.

The saleswoman had stepped away to give him the mirror in private — he hadn’t noticed her go, but she was gone — and for a moment the aisle was quiet around him, the rack of coordinated separates at his back, the muzak doing something in a minor key somewhere overhead.

He stood there a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he filed the sensation away without examining it. There was still the jewelry counter, and the salon.

— — —

The accessories counter was on the main floor, near cosmetics, staffed by a middle-aged woman with elaborate eye makeup and half a dozen bangle bracelets on her left wrist. She spread the contents of the chit’s allotment out on the glass counter — simple pearl stud earrings on a clip back, a thin gold chain necklace, a narrow bangle in brushed gold — and placed each piece on him with the decisive touch of someone who thinks in terms of the complete picture.

The earrings were cold against his earlobes for a moment, then simply present.

The necklace fell against his collarbone, cool and light.

“There,” said the woman, and studied him. “Classic. Good for a reception desk. Here.” She added a narrow-faced watch — ladies’ model, gold case, cream dial, thin leather strap. “Can’t be a receptionist without knowing what time it is.” She smiled at her own joke. He smiled back.

— — —

The Harrington & Coyle salon occupied a glass-fronted suite on the third floor, behind etched signage and through a door that released a cloud of hairspray and the faint chemical sweetness of permanent solution when opened. Inside, the chairs were in a row before a mirrored counter, each station separated by low dividers. The floor was black-and-white tile. The radio behind the desk was playing something with a lot of piano.

The stylist who came to greet him was named Donna. She was perhaps thirty-five, with a short geometric cut and a smock in a deep green, and she looked at the chit with a considering expression, and then at Jamie, and then at the chit again.

“Makeup and style,” she said. “And a unit.” She said “unit” the way someone who works with wigs every day says it — clinically, professionally. “You’ve done well so far.” She touched his chin lightly, tilting his face toward the light. “Good skin. Good bones.”

She led him to a chair and draped a cape around his shoulders. “Close your eyes when I tell you. And just relax — this part takes a while.”

It did take a while. It was also, Jamie found, unexpectedly meditative. Donna worked in near silence except for the radio and the occasional instruction — look up, look down, hold still, lips apart — and the chair was warm and comfortable, and the sensation of the various brushes and applicators moving over his face was rhythmic and strangely calming. Foundation, first, applied with a damp sponge, evening everything out. Then something for the undereye. Powder, which Donna applied with a large brush in a sweeping motion. Eye shadow — she chose a range of warm neutrals, ivory and taupe and a soft brown at the crease — and eyeliner in a deep brown applied with a fine brush, and mascara applied with his eyes opened wide as instructed.

Then the brows. This took the most time. Donna worked with a small brush and powder, building the arch, refining the shape, stepping back twice to study symmetry before pronouncing herself satisfied.

Lips last: a warm rose, carefully outlined and then filled, blotted once, refilled.

“All right,” Donna said. “Open.”

He opened his eyes and met his own gaze in the mirror, and for a moment did not entirely recognize the face looking back at him. Not because it was unrecognizable — it was his face, his features, unchanged in their fundamental geography — but because it was finished in a way his face had never been, shaped by the makeup into something precise and polished and undeniably lovely.

“Now the unit,” Donna said.

The wig was blonde — a warm, honey blonde with lighter streaks that caught the salon’s light — styled in the soft, slightly feathered cut that was everywhere in 1975, the layered wings sweeping back from the face, the ends turned under at the jaw. Donna positioned it with care, adjusted it twice, used a few pins to anchor it, then shook it out gently and combed through the layers with her fingers.

She stepped back. She looked at him for a long moment.

“Honey,” she said, “you look absolutely wonderful.”

He looked at the mirror. The blonde hair swept back from a made-up face that was genuinely pretty, the brows arched and defined, the eyes deepened and widened by the shadow and liner, the mouth a soft rose. Below: the feminine blouse, the pearl earrings, the gold chain at the throat.

Donna unclipped the cape and stood back to see the whole picture. She nodded to herself, pleased. “You are going to be just fine,” she said, the same thing Mrs. Grunewald had said, and somehow he believed it from both of them.

He thanked her. He meant it.

— — —

Mrs. Grunewald did not make a fuss when he came back to the eighth floor. She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone confirming that a job has been done correctly, and then she smiled and said, “Good. Come with me, please.”

They took the elevator down together. Mrs. Grunewald was not a woman who filled silence with unnecessary talking, and Jamie was grateful for that. He was absorbing the new experience of riding in an elevator as someone different than he had been this morning: the slight adjustment in weight distribution from the heels, the skirt’s gentle resistance when he shifted his feet, the nylon-smooth feel of his legs in the closed-toe pumps, the subtle swing of the gold chain when he moved. Sensory information, all of it, coming in steadily.

The ground floor of Harrington & Coyle was the grandest floor, intentionally so: high ceilings, marble-look floors, the main cosmetics and fragrance counters near the entrances, handbags to the left, the men’s accessories tucked discreetly to the right. The main elevator bank that served the corporate floors was at the rear of the store, past the central display tables and the jewelry cases — eight elevators in two rows, their brass doors polished to a shine, with a carpeted waiting area and, at its center, a reception desk.

The desk was of dark wood, curved at the front, with a telephone console on the left side, a call log and appointment book on the right, a small vase with two carnations on the corner. The chair behind it was upholstered in burgundy to match the carpet.

Behind the desk, on the carpeted wall, hung the Harrington & Coyle crest — the stylized H&C in gold on a field of deep blue — and below it, on the desk’s front face, a small name placard in a brass holder.

Mrs. Grunewald produced the placard from her jacket pocket and slid it into the holder as Jamie watched. The name on it, set in clean block letters:

JAMEE

“We have the calls routed to you automatically,” Mrs. Grunewald said, setting a typed sheet beside the telephone console. “This is the extension list and the protocol for greeting visitors. You’ll direct vendors to the service elevator around the corner; corporate guests use these main cars. Executives you know by sight by the end of your first week; until then, verify with the log.” She paused. “Any questions?”

“No,” he said. Then: “Thank you, Mrs. Grunewald.”

She gave him a look that was brief and warm. “You’ll do fine,” she said and was gone.

He waited until she’d gone, then settled into the chair. The burgundy upholstery was firm and comfortable. The telephone console was an avocado-green of the era, the buttons arranged in a neat grid. The call log was open to today’s date — Thursday, September 11th, 1975 — and her pen was there, and the appointment book, and everything that she would need.

She straightened the placard slightly. Jamee. No last name that had to be spelled. No numeral hinting at an irrelevant history. Just a cute first name for people to refer to her by. “Jamee is doing a fine job,” someone might say. Or, “Jamee sent me right up to the correct floor.”

The first elevator opened and disgorged a man in a charcoal suit who was moving fast and did not look over. The second elevator closed with a soft chime. Somewhere in the store, a cash register rang. The muzak shifted into something with strings.

Jamee folded her hands on the desk in the posture that felt, oddly, entirely natural. She sat up straight, and the blonde hair lay softly against her jaw, and the pearl earrings were cool and light against her earlobes, and the skirt fit close and the heels of the pumps rested against the chair’s base, and the gold watch showed that it was twenty minutes past twelve.

The morning had started with a brown envelope and a polo shirt and fourteen internship credits and a name nobody could spell. All of that was still true. And also something else was true, something that had been true for considerably longer than this morning — true in the way that certain things are true before you have language for them, before there is any occasion to say them, before the world provides, unexpectedly and in the middle of a Thursday, a place where they can be true out loud.

Sometimes, Jamee thought, wishes really do come true.

She sat with that for a moment — the weight of it, the simplicity of it, the fact that it was Thursday and the muzak was playing strings and the man in the charcoal suit was twelve feet away and still approaching, and none of it was a dream, and the name on the placard was hers.

She smiled, and it was her own smile, and she said, in a voice that was entirely her own: “Good afternoon. Welcome to Harrington & Coyle. How can I help you?”

―――