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Choose the red polish so your nails match your, Vivian’s and all the housewives lips. Vivian chooses to do some blue nails. You two gossip while the nails are being done. Soon, both of your nails are done and dry. You two giggle due to looking prefect as Vivian pulls out the pearl necklace, pearl earrings and diamond ring. You put them on and your jewelry now looks like a normal 50s housewife.

"Red," you say at once, holding up your small hands. "Red like the lips. Like every proper gal's lips." "Red for you, then," Vivian says, uncapping the bottle, "and I'm feeling blue myself — literally!" She waggles a second bottle you hadn't noticed, a deep lacquered blue, and paints her own orange nails over with it while you watch, scandalized and delighted.

"Blue nails, Vivian! Won't people talk?" "Let 'em. A gal's nails are her own business," she says, and there's something in the way she says it, quick and flat, that you file away without knowing why. Then she does yours, ten small red mirrors, stroke by careful stroke, and the two of you gossip through the drying — the Hendersons' lawn, the Priors' Reno nonsense, whether the woman at 14 Birchwood even *owns* an apron. You wave your hands in the little breeze of her fanning, and the red gleams, and it matches your mouth exactly, and that is simply correct, the way arithmetic is correct.

"Dry!" she announces, tapping each nail, and you both lean into the tri-fold mirror and look at the pair of you — two housewives, polished and painted — and burst out giggling, helpless, holding each other's arms, because you look *perfect* and it's the funniest, finest thing in the world.

"Now the jewelry," she says, recovering, and from the little case she draws a pearl necklace, pearl earrings, and a diamond ring that throws cold sparks across the ceiling. You put them on one by one — the pearls settling cool against your collarbone, the earrings threading through piercings you don't remember making, the diamond sliding onto your left hand and sitting there like it was cast for that exact finger.

You look in the mirror and there she is, complete: a 1950s housewife, head to heel, pearls and diamond and red nails and red lips. Ordinary. Normal. Right.

"Fred gave me mine," Vivian says softly, touching her own necklace, watching you in the glass. "Every gal gets hers, one way or another."