Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham

to—I mean I’m sure you’ll play a great wife, but …”
    As she prattles on, I realize I’m experiencing a feeling I’ve never had before, something I can’t quite put my finger on. I was completely intimidated by Mavis and her hat and her walkie-talkie, but now everything has changed and she’s apologizing to me, trying to make me feel good. She’s treating me as if I’m important, as if she works for me. I’ve never even had an employee, and I don’t want Mavis to feel the way I felt ten minutes ago.
    “Well, here’s your trailer. Hair and Makeup are in the next one, see that big trailer with the pop-out? Someone from Wardrobe will be here in a second with your changes, and I will tell them I made you late, it’s a hundred percent my fault and I will tell the director—”
    “Mavis,” I say, stopping in front of the door to the trailer.
    “Yeah?” she says, her eyes squinting into the sun, almost hidden by the furry front of her hat.
    “This is my first real shoot. I don’t know anything. For instance, I have no idea what a second-second is.”
    Mavis smiles and seems to relax. “Second assistant to the second assistant director. I basically tell you where to go when, and am in charge of the general awesomeness of your day. Want some coffee?”
    “Um, sure. Where is it?”
    “I can get it for you.”
    “No, no, that’s okay, I’ll get it.” I don’t want to get on Mavis’s bad side again.
    “Okaaaay. It’s just that they need you in Hair and Makeup right away, and it’s sort of complicated to explain where crafty is. I can get it for you. Unless you need … do you like it a particular way or something, in a way that you think is too complicated for me to make?”
    I’m trying to be polite, because of course I wouldn’t dream of asking someone I’ve never met to fetch me coffee, but somehow it seems as though Mavis thinks I’m being rude by not allowing her to get it for me. I don’t know where I’m going wrong. This world seems to have different rules from the other world I’ve been living in all of my life. I wonder if I’ll ever learn them.
    “No. Nothing special. I guess, okay, um, just milk and sugar, if it’s no trouble.”
    “No trouble,” Mavis says, in the way people say “no worries” when they have lots, or “no biggie” when something is a colossal headache.
    F rom the minute I walk into the wardrobe fitting, in a trailer near mine, I’m confused. There are two giant rolling racks, one full of tan trousers, one stuffed with thirty or forty identical blue shirts.
    “Oh, are there … are there more people coming?” I ask a harried-looking woman nearby. She looks at me as though I’ve said something strange.
    “What? Oh, the racks? Noooooo. These are all for you.”
    “But, aren’t these all the same pants?” I say, laughing a little.
    “Well, no, there’s actually quite a variety,” she says gravely, indicating that, to her, pants and their similarity to one another are not a laughing matter. “I’m Alicia, by the way, the costume designer.”
    I wonder how Alicia feels to have the title “costume designer” when it refers, in this case, to the choosing of one blue shirt and a pair of khaki pants.
    “Sorry if it looks like a lot, but they aren’t sure if they want a twill or a gabardine, and don’t get me started on their limited comprehension of the stirrup pant. God forbid they allow for a little fashion . Anyway, we’ll have to try them all on. The client is very specific about what they want. I fought for jeans as an option, but the client didn’t want to make too urban a statement.”
    I don’t know who “the client” is, but already I’m worried about their opinion of me and their strong conviction regarding khakis versus jeans. So I obligingly try on endless pairs of pants, which all look the same to me, and pretend to agree with Alicia, who finds them all very different.
    Finally, Alicia finds a pair she likes, except