Victorian Secrets by Sarah A. Chrisman

Author:Sarah A. Chrisman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

A few weeks passed.

And then a few more weeks passed.

Gabriel started pestering me to call the store.

“Well,” I said reluctantly, “I don’t want to bug her . . . I’m sure she’s working hard.”

More time passed.

Summer started to draw to a close.

Eventually I heeded Gabriel’s advice and tried to contact the store to schedule my fitting. First I tried emailing. When that met with no response, I bought a phone card so that I could make a long-distance call to Canada. Several international calls later, I learned that the store owner had gone on vacation. No one knew anything about my order.

Pages fell from the calendar, and squirrels started checking their hoards.

Finally, when the deadline by which I had been promised the first of my ordered corsets had long since passed, I received a call. She asked me to come in for a fitting, and I made another trip to Vancouver. Another huge chunk of cash was laid down, and I returned home for further waiting.

When all was said and done, the first corset ran over a month past its promised deadline and was twice the price originally quoted. The second ran three months past due, three times the quoted price, and was still unfinished when I made a third trip to Vancouver. It was structurally done, but was bare white, completely without ornamentation. When placing the order, I had asked that it be flossed (stitching added to support the bones; I had asked for blue flossing to give a little bit of color to the plain white expanse), and this was supposedly included in the initial quote—now already three times higher than it had started. At this last fitting, the owner wanted to double the price yet again (six times her original quote!) to add the flossing. There was a scene in the fitting room that ran very much like something out of a poorly written penny dreadful:

After she’d had me strip down to nothing but my panties for the fitting, she started screaming at me that she was an artist and I should be grateful to pay whatever she asked for whatever she was willing to make for me. “My corsets are made with love!” she shouted, brandishing a handful of very sharp pins. “And I’m just not feeling any love from you!”

If you think love is supposed to come into business transactions, you’ve got a really warped view of business, lady.

This was ridiculous. Maybe some of her customers reacted favorably to this sort of treatment, but I certainly didn’t. To me, corsets are about Victoriana, not sadomasochism. My idea of proper wrist accessories are jeweled bracelets, not handcuffs.

She already had the lion’s share of my money, so I paid enough to get a receipt for the unfinished corset and removed it and myself with all possible haste. (I later did the flossing myself. It took me a few hours and five dollars’ worth of thread.) It boggled my mind that the store owner, so friendly and full

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.