Celeste's Girl¶
✨ Scene 11¶
✨ The Ledger¶
Scene Eleven, or How a one-off becomes a rule, in Celeste's POV
It didn’t become normal all at once.
Nothing that matters ever does. It becomes normal the way fabric becomes soft: through repetition, through use, through being pulled and released so many times that it stops fighting your hands.
The second prototype was a jacket. Again, different cut, different sleeve head, but the same intention: make it survive the day without turning it into armour. Mara hung it on the mannequin and stood back, chin lifted.
“Right,” she said. “We’re not sending Annie out to be the crash test.”
Annie, already half-grinning as if she knew she’d been volunteered, immediately stepped away as though the floor had become lava.
“Bless,” she said, and looked at me. “Thank you.”
Mara ignored her gratitude the way she ignored weather.
“Charlie.”
Charlie looked up from the bench where he’d been hand-stitching a reinforcement tape onto a waistband. He put his needle down carefully, as if precision was a form of respect, and stood.
“Yes?”
Mara held up the jacket with two fingers.
“Same drill.”
There was a pause — barely a pause, the smallest catch at the back of his throat — like a muscle remembering the first time it had been asked to do something it didn’t like.
Charlie finally said, evenly, “Right. Where’s the log sheet.”
That was the moment I realised something had shifted. The discomfort hadn’t vanished. It had been translated. Into structure. Into process. Into something he could control. Mara’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, as if she approved of the question.
“You’re learning,” she said.
Charlie didn’t smile. He took the sheet from the clipboard and moved toward the fitting curtain. He didn’t look at me as he went. He didn’t seek reassurance. He simply did what he always did when the work demanded something unusual: he treated himself like a tool in the system, not a spectacle. Mara snapped the curtain closed with one decisive tug.
“Five minutes,” she called through it, and her tone wasn’t a demand. It was a deadline.
From behind the curtain came the rustle of fabric, the soft clink of a hook, the faint squeak of a shoe being shifted. Mara turned to the worktable and reached for her pencil. She made marks on the pattern piece as if she could already see what would fail. Annie leaned toward me, voice low.
“He doesn’t... mind?”
I kept my voice neutral. “He minds. He just doesn’t wallow.”
Annie blinked. Then she nodded as if that made perfect sense. Behind the curtain, Charlie’s voice came, quiet but steady.
“Arms up?”
Mara’s answer was immediate.
“Arms up. Twist. Bend. Lift.”
Charlie complied without complaint. You could tell, even without seeing him, that he was doing it precisely—same movements every time, the way you test a hinge, the way you test a clasp.
A minute later he spoke again, report mode, not emotion mode.
“Pull at the front scye,” he said. “Tape stops the fabric. Needs to end before the pivot. Otherwise it becomes a lever.”
Mara’s pencil stopped.
“Say it again,” she said.
Charlie repeated it, slightly clearer, like someone who had learned Mara’s ear needed clean sentences.
Mara nodded once, almost to herself.
“Told you,” Annie murmured, and this time she sounded impressed rather than curious.
Charlie stepped out a moment later, jacket on, cheeks faintly flushed — not with embarrassment, with exertion. He came straight to the table as if the garment were just another prototype. He pointed at the underarm.
“Here,” he said. “Two millimetres more ease at the sleeve head. And you need the reinforcement tape to stop here.” He made a precise mark with chalk. “Otherwise it transfers force sideways.”
Mara stared at the chalk line, then at his face.
“That’s an answer,” she said.
Charlie swallowed. “It’s just… what it does.”
Mara snorted quietly.
“That’s what I mean,” she replied. “Most people don’t know how to listen to fabric.”
I wrote it down, because that was my role: turn the fixes into a record, so the atelier could grow without forgetting how it got better.
The third time it happened, Mara didn’t even announce it. She simply held up a skirt — new cut, new waistband, a clever closure arrangement we’d borrowed from an extant garment plate—and looked around the room.
Annie, without shame, shook her head.
“Nope,” she said. “Has Charlie run it?”
Mara’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
Annie took a half-step back, hands raised in mock surrender.
“Then I’m not finding out where it splits,” she said. “I like my dignity.”
There was no laughter at Charlie. There was laughter at the idea of being the first casualty. It was different. It was women refusing to be the test surface. Mara’s gaze slid to Charlie.
“Charlie.”
Charlie didn’t even look surprised this time. He set his work down. He stood.
“Alright,” he said.
Then, quietly, without drama, he added, “Just… make sure the curtain rail is fixed. It catches.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to the curtain hardware as if it had personally offended her.
“Fine,” she said. “Someone fix it.”
That was Charlie’s agency: not asking to be spared, simply insisting on the conditions that made the work professional. It was another small shift. Not bravery in a classroom. Competence in a workplace. By the fourth incident, it had become a protocol without anyone formally naming it.
The staff began asking as if it was obvious.
“Has Charlie run it?” “Is this debugged yet?” “Can we get Charlie on it before we put it on shift?”
They were asking because they didn’t want to discover failure on the floor in front of tourists. They didn’t want to lose an afternoon to ripped seams and emergency pins. They didn’t want to carry the embarrassment of being the one whose garment broke. Charlie became the pre-test because Charlie was accurate.
Mara, predictably, hated anything that sounded like favouritism. One afternoon she finally snapped, not at Charlie, but at the room.
“Listen,” she said, voice cutting through the hum of irons and shears. “This isn’t about indulging him. This is about efficiency.”
No one spoke. Everyone listened. Mara jabbed a finger at a bodice on the table.
“Repairs don’t need theatre,” she said. “Prototypes do. Anything new. Anything with a new closure or new stress profile — Rossignol runs it first. Then staff wear. That’s the order.”
She looked at Charlie as if daring him to misunderstand.
“Not because you’re special,” she added. “Because you’re honest. You don’t fake comfort. You don’t pretend something works when it doesn’t.”
Charlie’s ears went faintly pink. He looked down. Not shy. Just uncomfortable with being named.
“I don’t… want anyone wasting time,” he said quietly.
Mara’s mouth twitched, something like approval.
“Good,” she said. “Neither do I.”
Later, weeks into this new rhythm, I caught the moment it became truly normal. A new jacket had been pinned, a clever cut I’d been excited about. It looked perfect on the mannequin. The silhouette was right. The closures sat where they should. It was one of those garments that made you want to clap.
Annie reached for it, stopped, and glanced at Mara.
“Has Charlie run it?” she asked, casually, like she’d asked if it had been pressed.
Mara didn’t even look up from her pattern paper.
“No.”
Annie put her hands back in her pockets.
“Then I’ll wait.”
No fuss. No jokes. No eyebrow raises. Just... order.
Charlie, at the bench, lifted his head.
“I can do it now,” he said.
Mara’s response was immediate.
“Good,” she said. “Ten minutes. Break it on purpose.”
Charlie stood, took the log sheet off the clipboard without being told, and walked to the fitting curtain like a professional moving into position. As the curtain fell closed behind him, I felt a small, quiet satisfaction. School had made him visible in the worst way—public, exposed, used as a lesson.
Wardrobe had made him visible in the only way that mattered: as a person whose judgement the room trusted.
Not because we coddled him. Because we built a system where his precision had a place.
And once a precision like that has a place, it doesn’t stop.
It becomes the rule.
✨ Scene 12¶
✨ Has Charlie Run It?¶
Scene Twelve — “The Ledger” (Celeste POV, full prose draft)
Mara didn’t announce the new system. She simply put it on the table one morning as if it had always existed.
A ledger.
Thick. Hard cover. The kind you could drop and have it land with authority. It sat between the pincushion and the shears, beside the tin of chalk. On the first page, in Mara’s angular hand, were headings and lines, already ruled.
GARMENT: DATE ISSUED: WEAR-TESTER: NOTES (MOVEMENT / STRESS): FAILURE POINTS: FIX APPLIED: RE-TEST: SIGNED (MARA): SIGNED (CELESTE):
I ran my finger down the columns and felt, absurdly, the relief of it. The whole room would be calmer now. Fewer frantic, vague sentences. Fewer people saying it just tore as though fabric did things for fun. Mara watched my face without asking what I thought.
“What’s the rule?”
She tilted her head toward the far curtain rail—newly fixed, properly anchored now, no longer sagging like an apology.
“Rule is,” Mara said, “guesses aren’t data.”
And then she looked past me. Charlie came in quietly, as always, like he’d learned how to make his presence small without making himself invisible. A bundle of twill under one arm, a roll of paper under the other, hair still damp at the edges as if he’d left the house in a hurry. He saw the ledger and stopped.
Not because he disliked it. Because he understood what it meant. Mara slid it toward him with two fingers, like a forewoman pushing a job sheet across a bench.
“Write,” she said, eyes on him directly.
Annie, passing behind him, glanced at the headings and made a small sound of approval — like a woman watching chaos finally get pinned down. Charlie set his bundle down with careful hands. He didn’t touch the book immediately — he glanced at the headings first, eyes moving fast, absorbing structure like it was a language he was fluent in.
“You want me to log the failures?”
“I want you to log the truth,” Mara said. “And I want your name on the page when you’re satisfied it’s repeatable.”
His throat moved once. A swallow, not panic, but the faint tension he got when something was about to be formal. When he’d be held to the work—and allowed to own it. He picked up the pen.
“Start with the stays,” Mara said. “The working set. The one you ‘delivered last time.’”
I watched him write. His handwriting wasn’t pretty, but it was exact. Like stitching that might not be decorative, but it would hold through a season and then another.
GARMENT: Working stays, linen canvas, whalebone substitute (reed/synthetic baleen), size test 2 WEAR-TESTER: Charlie Rossignol MOVEMENT / STRESS: bending, reaching overhead, lifting tray, stair ascent / descent FAILURE POINTS: seam stress at left side-back, binding roll at top edge, grommet pull at waist tie point
Mara leaned over his shoulder, close enough to read without making it personal.
“How did it feel?”
Charlie paused with the pen just above the paper.
Not how did it feel, in the way people said it when they wanted a story. Mara meant the thing itself: pressure, pinch, drag, creep. He answered like he was reading off a diagram.
“Too much load goes to the left tie point,” he said. “That’s why the grommet starts to oval. If you redistribute tension — either move the tie or add a secondary anchor — then the binding won’t try to roll, because it won’t be fighting the torque.”
Mara’s mouth did a small, satisfied curve that wasn’t a smile so much as a verdict.
“And?”
“And the seam at side-back is... it’s underdesigned for repeated bend,” Charlie added. He tapped the page lightly. “Not wrong for... standing. But if you want a working garment, you need the seam to expect work.”
He didn’t say woman work. He didn’t say I understand women’s bodies. He didn’t mansplain any of the embarrassing conclusions blokes force into the air when gender was nearby. He just described load paths.
Mara straightened.
“Celeste,” she said, without looking at me, “this is why we don’t trial on staff first.”
“Yeah, I know,” I rejoined. My voice came out lighter than I intended, because it was almost funny now — how obvious all this was, in hindsight. “We’d been doing it backwards.”
She finally looked at me then, eyes sharp.
“We weren’t doing anything. We were letting it happen.”
That was Mara. She could turn a whole week of chaos into a single sentence and make you feel embarrassed you’d ever accepted it. Charlie kept writing, pen scratching.
FIX APPLIED: move tie point 12mm; add secondary anchor tape; reinforce side-back with felled seam + narrow twill tape; adjust binding cut on bias
He stopped again. His fingers tightened slightly around the pen, and I recognised the moment: the place where competence collided with the other thing — the thing he didn’t speak about. He didn’t want to be dramatic. That was his discipline. But the discipline had seams, too. Mara waited. She didn’t rush him. She didn’t soften.
Finally, he said, very carefully,
“We’re still doing... the fitting under the curtain, yeah?”
Mara’s gaze didn’t flicker.
“Nothing has changed.”
“And the door stays locked,” he added, quickly, as if he regretted asking at all.
“Yes,” Mara said again. “And the log stays factual. No one discusses it like it’s entertainment.”
Charlie nodded once.
He wrote RE-TEST and then stopped, as if the word itself asked for a calendar.
I watched him, and I felt something in my chest shift into place. Not pity. Not romance. Something more utilitarian and more scalable: the sense of seeing an interface, and realising it could scale. If we could keep him safe from being turned into a spectacle, if we could keep him inside the logic of the work, then the whole atelier could expand without losing its centre.
Lauren arrived not long after. She didn’t knock timidly; she rapped once and came in. Practical. No theatrics. She carried a box of notions and a roll of interfacing like she was delivering supplies to a site office.
Her eyes landed on the ledger immediately.
“Ah,” she said. “You’ve made it official.”
Mara didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“We’ve made it measurable,” she corrected.
Lauren looked at Charlie, then at the curtain rail, then back to Mara, reading the room the way an adult reads a room—fast, with the parts that mattered.
“And he’s signing off?”
“He is.”
Lauren’s gaze sharpened with something that might have been approval, might have been alarm, might have been both. Charlie, still seated, still holding the pen, looked up at Lauren as if he expected a reprimand. Or a warning. Or the old script where adults spoke about him. Lauren surprised him. She put the box down, opened it, and slid a handful of reinforced grommets onto the table.
“Use those,” she said, as if it was obvious. “If you’re doing working garments, stop pretending decorative hardware can take load.”
Charlie stared at the grommets. Then — so small I almost missed it — his shoulders loosened. Not because his mother had rescued him. Because she’d spoken the language of the work.
Mara watched the exchange like she was watching two subcontractors finally agree on a specification.
“Good,” she said. “We’re past guessing.”
Lauren glanced at me. A quick look — adult to young adult. Not unkind. Just exact.
“And you,” she said, “keep it professional. Don’t you?”
I held her gaze.
“I do,” I said. “That’s the point.”
She nodded once. Like she’d ticked a box.
Charlie put his head down again and wrote.
SIGNED (CHARLIE)
Mara took the pen from him when he was done. She signed her name with a thick, decisive stroke.
Then she pushed the ledger toward me.
My turn.
I signed, and the ink looked oddly serious on the page, as if the act itself had weight.
And just like that, the atelier took one step away from being a clever little pocket of women doing miracles in private, and one step toward being a system that could withstand daylight and strangers.
✨ Scene 13¶
✨ Working Stays¶
Mara didn’t bring the stays out with ceremony.
She laid the materials on the cutting table the way a surgeon lays out instruments: in plain sight, deliberately spaced, nothing decorative about the order. Canvas was folded into a clean rectangle, and the linen tape was pressed flat. A small bundle of reed boning was tied with a string., next to a tin of grommets that looked comically minor for the amount of authority they were about to carry.
Charlie arrived a minute late and tried to apologise with his posture — shrinking his shoulders, he gave a quick glance at Mara, with a quietness that wanted to pay for the inconvenience in advance. Mara didn’t accept payment in the form of shrinking.
“Don’t do that.” She didn't look up.
Charlie froze. “Do... what?”
“Stage your arrival like you’re already wrong.” She lifted the canvas and shook it once. The sound was flat and honest. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters. Don't be late next time. Now, pay attention.”
He stepped closer, careful not to crowd. I watched his gaze take inventory without touching anything. He was good at that: reading surfaces, anticipating what mattered, trying to solve problems before anyone asked him to. Mara didn’t reward pre-emptive heroics. She nodded toward the ledger — still on the table, heavy with a quiet insistence.
“Open it.”
Charlie did, flipping to a clean page gently, ever so gently. His pen hovered, waiting for permission.
“Title.”
He wrote: STAYS — ATTEMPT 1. Underneath, he added the date. Mara approved it by continuing.
“These aren’t costume stays,” she said, tapping the canvas with two fingers. “They’re working stays. People keep confusing the two. Costume stays hold a silhouette for a photograph. Working stays hold a person for a day.”
Charlie’s pen moved, quick, neat enough to read. The longer he wrote, the calmer he looked. It was as if structure allowed him to be present without having to perform. Mara laid out the pattern pieces. Their clean shapes looked simple until you imagined them curved, tightened, forced to behave over bones and breath and movement.
“Your first attempt will fail,” Mara said calmly. She said it the way she might say it will rain on Thursday. Coldly factual.
Charlie blinked. “Is that... normal?”
Mara’s eyes flicked to him. “If someone tells you their first stays were perfect, they’re either lying or they don’t move in them.”
For a moment I saw that old instinct: the urge to vanish so nobody could watch him be imperfect. Mara caught it too.
“Charlie.” She said his name like a hand on a shoulder: firm pressure, not comfort. “The garment fails. You document it. We fix it. That’s the work.”
He nodded once. A small, stiff motion. But it was a yes. Mara slid the chalk toward him.
“Mark your seam allowances. And don’t be stingy. The first mock-up gets room to tell the truth.”
Charlie’s fingers closed around the chalk, and he began. The workshop was quiet, with busy sounds: scissors snipping, chalk whispering, the soft drag of canvas against the grain of the table. Outside, somewhere beyond the walls, the Faire was waking: faint voices, the clink of something metal being unloaded, a distant laugh. In here, it was trade. Mara moved around him, watching. Every now and then she corrected a hand position with two taps of her knuckles against the table. Once, she stopped him entirely.
“No. Your stitch length is too eager.”
Charlie looked up, confused.
“You’re trying to impress the seam,” Mara said. “The seam doesn’t care about feelings. It cares whether it holds.”
His ears coloured. He adjusted, shortened his stitch, slowed down. I filed the sentence away because it was Mara in a nutshell: brutally useful. When the pieces were cut and aligned, Mara gathered the mock-up, folded it once, and pushed it toward him.
“On it goes,” she said. “Over the t-shirt.”
Charlie’s eyes flicked — not to the curtain rail, not to some imagined private corner — but to the laces in his hands, as if they were a moral problem disguised as a practical one.
“It’s... back lacing,” he said carefully.
Mara’s expression didn’t change. “Of course it is.”
He swallowed. “I can’t—”
“I know,” Mara said, already reaching for the lace. Not impatient. Simply done with pretending the obvious was negotiable. “Stand here.”
She indicated the marked mat beside the table: the one used for checking balance and fall, where garments were judged the way tools are judged. Charlie stepped onto it, shoulders too high, trying not to occupy space.
“Drop your shoulders,” Mara said. “And breathe like a person.”
He obeyed, twitching, a fraction at a time. Mara held the mock-up open and guided it around his torso with the same practical decisiveness she used on a dressform. Her hands didn’t linger; they placed. She checked the centre-front line, smoothed the canvas once, then took up the laces behind him.
“Here’s the policy. You’ll use it like any other tool.” She nodded toward the ledger. At the top of the page, in her handwriting, sat the rule in plain language:
POLICY: Fittings for prototype testing are scheduled; documentation is factual; no commentary.
Mara returned to the lacing. “We’re doing a job,” she said. “We’re not doing a story.” Charlie’s throat moved. He nodded once, eyes fixed on the ledger as if it were a lifeline he could hold with his gaze. Mara began to lace: not yanking, not cinching, not exerting authority. She took up slack in small, even increments, the way you tension rigging: feel, adjust, feel again. The canvas settled. The garment found him.
“Tell me before it hurts,” she said. “Discomfort is the data we're after. If there's pain, it has failed.”
“Yes,” he managed.
“Don’t give me yes,” Mara said automatically. “Give me locations.”
Charlie let out a breath that sounded like relief disguised as compliance. Mara made one last pass, then stopped.
“Good. Enough for a first set of facts,” she said. She stepped back. “Now move.”
Charlie lifted his arms. The top edge shifted: it flattened cleanly in front, but was fighting him at the side-back. I watched the pull gather like clouds on the horizon.
“Again,” Mara said. “Higher.”
Charlie raised his arms fully. The left side-back seam took the load and complained at once — a diagonal crease forming from the waist toward the ridge of the shoulder line: not dramatic, just wrong. Mara’s gaze sharpened.
“Reach forward. Like you’re taking something from a shelf.”
Charlie did, and the left waist tie point became an anchor for everything the garment didn’t know how to carry. The canvas creased into a hard line. The lacing tugged. The top edge tried to roll. Mara didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to: she was watching physics in motion.
“Where.”
Not a question, it was: give me data. Charlie blinked — startled by the tone of the demand.
“Left waist tie,” he said, voice steadier. “It’s taking too much. It feels like everything’s hanging off it.”
“Good,” Mara said, as if accuracy itself was the safety mechanism. “Bend. Like you’re lifting a tray.”
Charlie bent carefully. The top edge rolled. This was the kind of failure a costume could hide for ten minutes on a pose session and then betray you on day one of actual wear. I saw Charlie’s expression flicker: disappointment, then relief. There was no pretending the garment was fine: it wasn't. Mara saw his face too.
“Write,” she said. “Before your feelings invent a different story.”
Charlie moved to the ledger, pen still in his hand. It trembled once, then steadied on the page. He wrote:
MOVEMENT / STRESS: overhead reach; forward reach; bend/lift simulation FAILURE POINTS: left waist tie load concentration; top edge roll; diagonal crease from left waist toward side-back; seam stress side-back left
Mara watched him write, then leaned in.
“Now,” she said. “Tell me what you think it means.”
Charlie opened his mouth, then shut it. He stared at his own notes as if the paper might supply the answer if he stared hard enough.
“I think the tie point is wrong,” he said finally. “Or not, um, supported enough. It’s acting like an anchor for everything.”
Mara nodded. “Load path. Right. And the roll?”
Charlie frowned, thinking like an engineer. “The top edge is fighting torque. The tension’s uneven, so the edge curls to accommodate the pull.”
“And the side-back seam?”
Charlie tapped the paper once. “It’s underbuilt. If it’s going to be working stays, that seam needs to expect repeated bend. Reinforcement, or a different finish. The fabric’s telling us where it wants more structure.”
Mara straightened. “Good.”
Charlie looked up, uncertain, waiting, as he always did, for judgement to arrive disguised as feedback. It didn’t. Mara stepped behind him again and began to unlace, quick and methodical, as if removing a tool from a test rig.
“Attempt one has served its purpose,” she said. “Now we do attempt two.”
Charlie’s shoulders sank with the weight of it, and then he lifted them again deliberately, as if choosing not to collapse.
Mara slid a narrow strip of twill tape toward him.
“This goes here.” She pointed to the area he’d described. “Secondary anchor. Spread the load. We move the tie point.”
“How much?”
Mara shrugged. “Twelve millimetres to start. It’s not magic. It’s iteration.”
Charlie wrote:
FIX APPLIED (PROPOSED): move tie point 12mm; add secondary anchor tape; reinforce side-back seam; adjust top edge binding cut
Mara watched him write the word “proposed” and nodded. Charlie’s gaze drifted back to the top of the page — to the policy line. Not to Mara. Not to me. To the rule. I watched something in his posture ease: not confidence, exactly. Trust. The kind that doesn’t come from being liked, but from knowing the room will behave predictably. Mara clapped her hands once.
“Right,” she said. “Attempt two starts now.”
Charlie didn’t argue. He didn’t apologise. He picked up the chalk without being told.
“Attempt two,” he said quietly to himself.
Mara’s eyes flicked up, and in them was a kind of satisfaction that didn’t need praise.
“Now,” she said, “you’re making stays. Real ones.”
And then, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world — as if the world had always been designed for women and we were merely returning it to its proper logic — Mara added, already sorting tape and canvas into a new pile:
“Later, we’ll give it a front closure. I’m not building dependence into a work garment.”
Charlie’s pen paused. Finally, he underlined front closure once, neatly, and got back to work.
✨ Scene 14¶
✨ The Block¶
Mara didn’t call it Attempt Two until Attempt Three had already begun.
The failed mock-up lay on the table again, flattened. Chalk marks were still faint on the canvas where the garment had confessed under movement: diagonal strain lines, a crease that had formed with embarrassing consistency, the small oval ghost of where a grommet had started to yield. Charlie hovered at the edge of the table, with clean hands and busy eyes. He looked like someone waiting to be given a solvable problem, the kind where there might be a correct answer. Mara didn’t give him that. She gave him a much harder problem.
“Attempt Two,” she said, and slid the ledger toward him. “Write the same headings. Then add...”
Charlie opened the book. “Add... what?”
“BODY TYPE.”
He blinked. “But it’s... me.”
Mara’s eyes lifted, sharp as pins.
“And do you imagine,” she said, “that the world is shaped like you?”
Charlie flushed. I felt the assumption snap in him — and with it, the little limits he’d been carrying without noticing.
“No,” he said quickly. “No. I — I know that.”
“Good,” Mara replied. “Then you understand we were never going to design stays as though your proportions are the default. As though anyone’s proportions were the default. With stays, there are no defaults.”
A prickle went through me. This was the moment the atelier either stayed a pocket of talent, or became something that could scale. Mara tapped the mock-up with one finger.
“This attempt did something useful,” she said. “It told us where the load went. We’ll fix that.” She pushed the strip of twill tape toward Charlie. “Secondary anchor here. Tie point moves. Reinforce the side-back seam.”
Charlie nodded. Mara held up a hand.
“But Attempt Two is not only about this garment. Attempt Two is about a method.”
Charlie’s pen paused above the paper. “A method.”
“A working block.”
He frowned slightly. He was trying to translate her words into geometry. Mara turned her attention to me.
“Celeste. Bring me the measurements sheet.”
I reached into the folder I kept for everything: notes, references, scraps of paper that might become useful later — and pulled out the page we’d started last week: columns of numbers and blank lines, a grid that looked innocuous until you realised it was the skeleton of a system. Mara took it, scanned it, and made a dissatisfied sound.
“This is a list,” she said. “Not a tool.”
I felt myself bristle. Then I reminded myself she wasn’t insulting me. She was protecting the work.
“What does a tool look like?”
Mara set the sheet down and drew a clean rectangle in the margin with her pencil.
“Waist,” she said, and drew a line across it. “Everything references waist. Not bust. Not hip. Waist is the hinge point.” She drew a vertical line down the rectangle. “Centre front. Centre back. If those aren’t stable, nothing else matters.”
Then she drew two arcs: one above the waist, one below.
“Rib spring,” she said, tapping the top arc. “Hip spring,” she tapped the bottom arc. “Those two numbers tell you what you’re really building. The rest is opinion.”
Charlie leaned in, eyes locked on the sketch — the way he looked at diagrams when he finally felt safe to show his mind working.
“So... it’s not just circumference,” he said slowly. “It’s distribution.”
Mara’s mouth tightened with approval. “Yes. Distribution. And distribution changes with the body.” She slid the pencil toward him. “Now you draw it.”
Charlie hesitated for a fraction of a second: an old habit, an old fear of doing it wrong in front of someone who might mock. His hand jerked slightly as he picked up the pencil and drew his own rectangle beside hers. He drew the waist line. Then he measured a distance above it with the pencil tip.
“Torso length,” he said quietly. “From waist to underbust. And waist to top edge.”
Mara watched his hand, not intervening. Charlie added small marks down the centre back.
“Back length. And where the shoulder blades... push.”
“This is a working garment. People breathe. People lift. They don’t stand like they're getting their portraits painted.”
He drew the arcs — rib and hip — and this time he did what Mara had done: he made the arcs different. Not symmetrical, not polite. Mara’s finger tapped the page near centre back.
“Now. That’s the block.”
Charlie looked up. “But... that’s still just one.”
Mara leaned on the table, the way she did when she was about to say something that would become policy.
“One block,” she said, “per category.”
Charlie’s brow furrowed. Mara lifted three fingers.
“We start with three. That’s all. Three bodies we can pad and test without dragging staff into it.”
She ticked them off, each one a label rather than a story.
“Nymph,” she said, indicating Charlie with a look that held no softness. “Slender, narrow ribs, little flesh to absorb pressure. That is the category you are closest to.”
I saw the tiny shift behind Charlie’s eyes. Mara made nymph technical, not personal.
“Well-nourished young woman,” Mara continued, “with generous spring and softness. The kind that makes lazy patterns tell untruths, and make cheap stays: cruel.” Then her gaze moved away, outward, as if she were thinking of someone beyond our room.
“And the returning-to-work mother,” she said, matter-of-fact, “whose torso has done real labour and carries it differently. Different distribution. Different tolerances. Different needs.”
Charlie’s pencil hovered. “So we… draft three blocks.”
“We draft one,” Mara corrected. “We draft a base that can be adjusted predictably. And we learn which adjustments belong to which category.”
She reached for the ledger and pointed at Charlie’s new heading.
“BODY TYPE,” she repeated. “Write it every time. Because if you don’t, you’ll start believing a good fit on you means you’ve solved anything.”
Charlie’s pencil moved.
ATTEMPT 2 — BODY TYPE: NYMPH (BASELINE)
Mara slid the mock-up back toward him. “Now do the practical fix,” she said. “Tie point moves twelve millimetres. Secondary anchor tape. Reinforce seam. Bias the binding correctly.”
Charlie nodded, grateful for a concrete task. He began unpicking the grommet area with careful fingers.
Mara watched for a moment, then turned to me.
“Celeste,” she said. “You like research.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Your job is to find extant examples of working stays and note what they compromise. Not the pretty ones. The honest ones.”
My spine straightened. That was a role. Not a favour.
“I can do that.”
Mara pointed to Charlie’s sketch. “And you,” she said to him, “are going to make that block into a template we can mark and reuse. Hole positions. Seam allowances. Boning channels. All of it. Clean. Repeatable.”
Charlie looked up, startled. “Me?”
Mara’s stare didn’t waver. “Yes, you. You have the mind for it. You want perfection? Earn it. We’ll make your perfection useful.”
Charlie swallowed. Then, quietly, “Okay.”
Mara tapped the ledger page once. “We will not pretend this is solved when it sits nicely standing still.”
Charlie’s eyes flicked to the movement list pinned near the fitting nook: reach, bend, lift, stairs. Mara followed his gaze.
“To have it fit standing is a lie,” she said. “It's when it fits moving it's the truth.”
Charlie nodded, and for the first time he looked less like a boy being tolerated in a women’s workspace and more like a technician being entrusted with a system. He picked up the Attempt Two mock-up and handed it to Mara. She matter-of-factly laced it.
hen Charlie lifted his arms. Reached forward. Bent.
The top edge behaved better this time — less roll, less spite. The diagonal strain line softened, as if the load had been persuaded into a more reasonable route. But something else happened, subtle enough that only someone looking for truth would see it. A tiny hinge formed along one boning channel at the side. It wasn't a tear: not yet. A kink, a promise of a tear. Charlie felt it at the same instant Mara saw it. His jaw tightened. Mara didn’t react with disappointment. She reacted with satisfaction.
“There,” she said, almost pleased. “Second-order failure. That’s real work doing what we asked it to.”
Charlie let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh… small, disbelieving.
“It fixed one thing,” he said, “and revealed another.”
“Exactly.”
Charlie went to the ledger and wrote without being told.
RESULT: improved load distribution at waist tie; reduced top edge roll under forward reach NEW FAILURE: hinge/kink at side boning channel under bend; pressure point emerging
He looked up. “Is that because I’m… too slim there?”
Mara’s gaze was cool, not unkind.
“It’s because you’re a baseline,” she said. “And baselines are useful precisely because they are not everyone.”
She leaned in, voice lowering into something like a vow.
“This,” she said, tapping the ledger, “is how we get the grail. Not by hoping. By mapping.”
Charlie stared at the page for a long second. Then he nodded, once, slow.
“Okay.”
This time it wasn’t compliance.
It was commitment.
References¶
Celeste’s three “working stays” reference targets
These are ideal because they’re museum-documented, visibly work-worn / pragmatic, and they each teach a different kind of compromise.
-
London Museum (Museum of London) — Linen canvas stays with underarm guards, spiral lacing What Celeste can extract: abrasion management (the underarm guards), binding choices, and “honest” stiffness built for wear, not display. (London Museum)
-
London Museum — Brown cotton twill corset/stays with shoulder straps, centre-back holes What it teaches: a more utilitarian textile (twill), strap logic for working movement, and a shape that’s about control and support rather than decorative effect. (London Museum)
-
V&A Images — Late 18th-century stays in hard-wearing linen (“jean” linen) with silk What it teaches: the material truth of “pretty but durable” — robust cloth choices, and how refinement can ride on top of work-appropriate engineering without turning into lingerie. (Vandaimages)
Optional fourth (if you want Celeste to triangulate across continents):
- MFA Boston — Brown stays with undyed linen lining, leather edging, linen tape seam coverings (reads like “built to last, repaired to last”). (Museum of Fine Arts Collections)
If you’d like, I can write a short Scene 15 mini-montage where Celeste brings these three examples back as bulletproof notes (“what they compromise”), and Mara immediately translates them into rules for the block system. That would make the research feel like power entering the room, not like homework.
✨ Scene 15¶
✨ The Ladder¶
By the third day, Charlie stopped looking like a guest.
He moved through the atelier as if the place had given him rails to run on: cut, stitch, test, record and repeat. The rhythm took the tremor out of him, not because the work became easy, but because it became legible. He could be useful without having to invent a personality around it. Mara didn’t praise him. She rewarded him with continuity.
The three blocks lived on the wall now — traced paper over brown card, corners clipped, waistlines marked with blunt authority. Each had its own small forest of notes in Mara’s hand:
MOVE TIE POINT 12mm, ADD SECONDARY ANCHOR, WATCH TOP EDGE TORQUE, UNDERARM GUARD? The templates were beginning to look less like experiments and more like tools.
On the corkboard beside them, I’d pinned my research the way Mara liked things pinned: not like inspiration, like evidence.
WORKING STAYS: WHAT THEY COMPROMISE, I’d written at the top.
Under it, three museum-clean photos of garments that weren’t. Underarm guards that looked like someone had finally admitted armpits exist. Straps that told the truth about lifting. Edges reinforced the way you reinforce anything you intend to keep using. Mara had read the board once, silently. Then she’d taken a pencil and added her own captions, more brutal than mine:
ABRASION IS REAL. LIFT IS REAL. WEAR IS REAL.
Charlie had stared at those words for a long time, as if they were dogma. Now he was at the fitting mat again, standing where the floor tape made the designs measurable while Mara tightened the lacing with the quiet patience of someone tensioning a rig. He wore the mock-up over his T-shirt: Mara insisted on eliminating theatre.
“Arms up.”
He lifted. The top edge behaved: not perfectly, but honestly. It shifted and then settled, like a tool that had learned where it belonged.
“Reach forward.”
He reached. The diagonal crease appeared, but softer now, less of an accusation. The load had been guided into a better route. Charlie’s jaw loosened a fraction. He didn’t smile — he never smiled during tests — but he looked less like he was waiting to be caught out. Mara stopped and stepped back.
“Ledger.”
Charlie went to the table and wrote. I watched his hand. He wrote firmly, he was a technician. The door opened while he was still writing. Not a dramatic entrance. Not an interruption weighted with significance. Just the sound of someone arriving in daylight.
Lauren.
She didn’t come in with a mother’s alarm or a mother’s scanning. She came with a tote bag slung over her shoulder, keys in her hand, and the calm face of someone who had learned which problems were solved by volume and which were solved by structure. She took in the room in one glance — the templates, the ledger, the corkboard with my pinned references — and her eyes narrowed, not with suspicion, but with appraisal.
“Mara,” she said.
“Lauren,” Mara replied, as if she’d been expecting her at this minute. Lauren set the tote on the table and unzipped it. Out came a roll of twill tape, a packet of grommets, and a small envelope that looked like nothing until you remembered how much of Wardrobe’s authority lived in small parts.
“I brought the hardware,” Lauren said. Then, without softening her voice: “And I assume this is the part where you tell me what you need from me.”
Mara’s gaze held hers.
“It is.”
Charlie had gone very still. Not because Lauren frightened him: Lauren didn’t do intimidation. It was because she represented the outside world walking into Wardrobe without asking permission. Mara didn’t let that become drama.
“We’re building a block,” she said. “Returning-to-work. Real labour. Real distribution. Different tolerances.”
Lauren nodded once, as if Mara had simply named something she’d carried for years.
“You want a baseline.”
“Yes.”
Lauren glanced at Charlie, and the glance was both maternal and professional — I see you, and also: I will behave properly. She turned to Mara.
“Please tell me your conditions.”
Mara answered like a policy.
“Scheduled. Factual. No commentary. No unscheduled access. If you’re in the room, you’re in the work.”
Lauren’s face didn’t change, but something in her shoulders loosened — the relief of hearing competence speak in complete sentences.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m not here to watch. I’m here to build something that doesn’t punish women.”
That was the first time Charlie looked up properly. He looked at Lauren as if he’d never heard anyone say that out loud. Mara lifted her chin toward the ledger.
“Charlie,” she said. “New page. Same headings. Add body type.”
Charlie’s pen hovered. His throat moved. He looked at Mara like he was asking permission to direct a grown woman. Mara didn’t even glance at him.
“It’s allowed.”
Charlie swallowed. Then he looked at Lauren.
“Movement,” he said. “If you’re willing. Same list.”
“Of course.”
Charlie wrote:
ATTEMPT 2 — BODY TYPE: RETURNING-TO-WORK (BASELINE)
He didn’t decorate it. He didn’t apologise for it. He just wrote it as fact.
That was when Sarah arrived.
She came in with the particular energy of someone who never asks whether she’s welcome. Her accent carried the UK cleanly — sharp edges, no apology. She took one look at Lauren at the table, then at Charlie, then at Mara, and her mouth made a shape that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Oh,” she said. “We’re doing this today, are we?”
Mara didn’t look up. “We’re doing work every day.”
Sarah’s eyes flicked to the policy line at the top of the open ledger page.
“Still with the rules,” she said, casual as a pin. “All this managing.”
Charlie’s shoulders rose, and I saw the old reflex trying to return — the instinct to get smaller before anyone could make him. Mara’s voice cut across it.
“Don’t.”
Charlie froze. Sarah lifted a brow.
“I’m not being unkind. I’m being realistic. If he wants to work in a women’s world, he can face women’s challenges. Front-facing. No special cover.”
Lauren’s gaze landed on Sarah with a calm so controlled it was almost polite.
“And who made you spokesperson for ‘women’s challenges’?” Lauren asked.
Sarah snorted. “Oh, come off it. Women manage. Women cope. We don’t need—”
Mara set the reed boning down with a soft, decisive click.
“You’re confusing coping with virtue,” Mara said dryly.
Sarah opened her mouth. But Mara wasn’t done.
“And you’re confusing governance with weakness.”
Sarah’s expression sharpened. “Governance.”
Mara nodded toward the ledger and then — with a small tilt of her head — toward my corkboard.
“See that board?” she said. “That’s not comfort. That’s evidence.”
Sarah glanced, and her mouth tightened as she took in the blunt pragmatism of garments built for bodies that moved.
“Underarm guards,” Mara said. “Because abrasion exists. Straps because people lift. Reinforced edges because things wear out. Women solved problems by making rules and building tools. They didn’t ‘cope’ for sport.”
Sarah’s jaw worked. Her eyes flicked back to Charlie — properly this time, as a worker in the room, not a test case for her opinions. Her lips tightened.
“So what,” she said, voice flatter, “we wrap him in cotton wool forever?”
“No,” Mara said. “We train competence like we train anything else: by repetition and standards.”
Sarah’s chin lifted. “That’s what I’m saying. He can’t crumble the first time someone looks at him funny.”
Mara’s gaze held hers for a long beat, and then she nodded once — grudgingly, because it was fair.
“Fine,” Mara said. “But we don’t train resilience by ambush.”
The room went very still — not tense, just attentive. Mara turned to Charlie.
“Come here.”
He started: that instinctive fear of being summoned for judgement. And then he obeyed. He stepped to the table. Lauren stayed where she was: present in the way a seatbelt is present: you don’t notice it until you need it. Mara put her hand on the ledger.
“You understand this truth,” she said. “The garment fails. You write it. We fix it.”
Charlie nodded. Mara’s voice didn’t soften. It simply shifted into reality.
“Here’s the other truth. Our work will leave this room. People will notice. Some will be normal. Some won’t.”
Charlie’s fingers tightened around his pen. Lauren didn’t rush to comfort. She simply stayed quiet, and that quiet said: You have it in you to stand in this.
Mara went on. “You don’t choose what other people are. You choose what you do when they are that way.”
Charlie swallowed. “What… do I do?”
Mara looked at him as if the question was the beginning of adulthood.
“You keep working,” she said. “You keep your facts straight. You don’t perform. You don’t bargain. And you never disappear.”
Sarah let out a short breath. “That last one’s going to be hard one... for him.” Charlie blinked. Sarah shrugged, unapologetic. “I’m not being nasty. I’m being useful.”
Lauren’s mouth twitched — the smallest sign of amusement — and then she looked at Charlie.
“You don’t have to be fearless,” Lauren said. “Your headspace needs to stay in this room.”
Charlie stared at the ledger, at his own handwriting. It was evidence too: that he’d done something awkward, repeatedly, and survived the feeling of it.
“I can do that.”
“Good.”
She tapped the movement list pinned near the fitting mat.
“We do it in rungs,” she said. “A ladder.”
Charlie frowned. “A ladder.”
Mara’s eyes were steady. “First rung: you can be seen working. Second: you can be spoken to while working without losing your hands. Third: you can answer a stupid comment without trying to become a different person.”
Sarah exhaled. “Fourth rung: you tell them to get stuffed.”
Mara’s eyes flicked to her. Sarah bit her lip. “Politely, if you must.”
Mara didn’t smile, but something in her face loosened — the slightest concession that Sarah had landed in the right register at last. She reached for the mock-up again.
“All right,” she said. “Back to the proof.”
They didn’t make it an event. Mara laced. Lauren stood where she was told. Charlie watched the lines in the cloth as if they were a map he could learn to read in any weather.
And I watched the watching.
Lauren watched the garment, not the boy. Sarah watched the room, and I watched Sarah watching — the moment her disdain failed to find a foothold because there was no weakness being performed for her to kick.
Mara didn’t look up.
“First rung.”
And Charlie lifted his arms.