On the Target Costume Incident, Or: Why Does Anyone Own a Costume at All

One does try to keep abreast of current events, if only so one has something to say to Mummy over the telephone on Sundays, and this week the newspapers were absolutely *aflutter* about a costume. A Halloween costume. At Target. I confess I had to have it explained to me twice, because my first assumption — reasonable, I think — was that "Target" was some sort of new members' club, possibly in the Hamptons, possibly with a waitlist, and that the costume in question had caused a scene at a black-tie fitting. It was only on the second explanation that I understood Target is a *shop*. A shop that regular people go *into*. On purpose. To *buy things they intend to wear themselves*, rather than have selected for them and laid out on the bed by someone whose entire professional purpose is knowing one's collar size.

I sat with that for a while, you know? Because once you really absorb it — that there exists a whole category of person who walks into a large humming building with a shopping cart the way one might walk into a party, no invitation, no help, just wandering the aisles hunting for a *costume* — the actual controversy becomes almost beside the point. The scandal isn't the costume. The scandal is the *cart*.

But fine. The particulars, as I understand them from the coverage, are these: Target sold a costume, people found the costume offensive, there was what the papers call "backlash," and Target apologized and presumably removed the item, the way one removes a stain, briskly, with a little practiced regret. And I want to be extremely fair to everyone involved, because fairness costs nothing and Father always said generosity of spirit is the one luxury even he can't buy more of. So: fair enough. If a costume upset people, Target was right to apologize. One does hate a scene.

What I cannot get past — and I've turned it over and over, the way one turns over a hors d'oeuvre one suspects of being previously frozen — is the sheer *effort* embedded in the entire premise. These people had to go to a store. They had to select, from a rack, among strangers, a costume representing an idea of themselves they wished to present to the world for one evening. And then — this is the part that truly undoes me — they had to put it on themselves. With their own hands. No fitting. No one standing behind them with pins in their mouth murmuring about the drape of the shoulder. Just a person, alone, in what I can only assume is a modestly sized bedroom, wrestling with a costume they purchased for currency they had personally *earned*, for the privilege of pretending, for one night, to be someone else.

One does wonder why the pretending is necessary at all. I have never once needed a costume to be someone else, because I have never once needed to be anyone but exactly who I am, and I mean that with the warmest possible spirit — truly, you know? — but it does rather explain the whole Halloween industry once you look at it that way. It's not a holiday. It's a pressure valve. It's the one night a year the poors get to dress as though they, too, might be interesting, and then Target — bless them, they really are *trying* — hands them a costume that turns out to have offended someone else who was also, presumably, shopping alone, in the same aisle, with the same cart, hunting the same pressure valve. And then there's a whole *thing*, and an apology, and everyone goes back to being who they actually are, which is, I gather, the exhausting default state for most of the population three hundred and sixty-four days a year.

I raised this with Father over the weekend, the whole affair, and he listened with his usual patience — he really is a marvelous listener, when the topic doesn't involve his golf handicap — and he said, "Cynthia, some people don't have someone to simply *handle* it for them," and I said yes, precisely, that is exactly my point, thank you for understanding so quickly. Because that's the piece nobody in the coverage seems to want to say plainly. These people are managing their *own* costumes. Their own offense. Their own apologies, presumably, when they're the ones doing the offending. There's no one upstream absorbing any of it on their behalf. It must be *exhausting*, existing at that altitude, where a costume can actually reach you.

One simply doesn't have costume problems once someone else is sourcing the costume. I say this not to boast — Father always says boasting is common, and he's right, it really is — but as a genuine, structural observation: the entire controversy evaporates the moment a person is no longer the one standing in the aisle. Mrs. Fenwick-Aldous handles all of that for me, and I've never so much as seen a costume before it's already on a hanger in my room with a note about the theme of the evening, and in eleven years there has never once been what the papers would call "backlash," because Mrs. Fenwick-Aldous has never once made a mistake, and if she somehow did, it would not be *my* mistake, and no one would expect me to stand in a doorway and apologize for it on camera. That's rather the whole point of her. That's the whole point of anyone, really.

I don't say any of this with cruelty — I want to be terribly clear about that, because I know how it can read, and I would never want to seem as though I'm looking down on the actual humans doing the actual shopping. I'm not looking down at *them*. I'm looking down at the *shopping*. At the concept of it. The idea that "offense" and "apology" and "costume" are things one has to personally metabolize, in real time, with one's own two hands, is simply a level of the world I have never had to visit, the way one has heard of certain neighborhoods without ever needing the address. It sounds *difficult*. It sounds like the kind of difficulty people volunteer for and then, astonishingly, get upset about, which — and I say this with real, if bewildered, affection — is the single most poor-person thing a person can do. Choose the hard path, walk it yourself, cart and all, and then act surprised when it turns out to be hard.

One simply asks Father to have someone else go to Target. Or, better yet, one simply doesn't go to Target — one asks Father, and the costume, and indeed the entire concept of October, sorts itself out through channels one need never see. I don't know why more people don't try it. I really don't. It isn't complicated. It's just a door, standing open, in every room. You know?

Toodles, my darlings — do wear something fabulous, or better still, have it sent. — Cynthia