Turn 16 of 44

You start to smile just like a 50s housewife and Vivian. Your teeth turn white and the smile is now permanently just like Vivian’s. Right after, Vivian grabs the hairstyle and sprays the whole bottle into your hair. She tells that the hair permanent. You know that her hair is shiny due to it as your bob starts to shine the same as hers. She then says the makeover is done and knows how you feel.

You smile at the mirror — and it isn't a smile you choose so much as one that arrives, settling into your face like the lipstick settled into your lips. The corners lift just so, the teeth show white and even and gleaming, and the whole expression is warm, pleasant, untroubled. Vivian's smile. You feel it fix itself in place the way the S-curl holds, and when you try, just idly, to let it soften, it doesn't. It's a good smile. It's *the* smile. Every gal on Mulberry Lane has one.

"Oh, sugar, look at that," Vivian says, delighted, her own smile the twin of yours in the glass. "Now you're finished from the neck up for true."

She snatches up the spray bottle before you can answer and mists your whole head — one pass, two, the scent of it sharp and sweet, like a beauty parlor in a town you've never been to. She works it through with her fingertips, coating every curve of the bob, and then the strangest, loveliest thing happens: the shine rises. It blooms along the swept front, down the smooth sides, until your hair gleams under the vanity light exactly the way hers does — that impossible lacquered luster you'd noticed on her the very first evening and never thought to question.

"That's permanent too, honey," she says, giving the bob one last fond pat. "Wash it, sleep on it, dance all night — it springs right back to this. Isn't science wonderful?" She means it wholly, and so do you, and you turn your head to watch the shine move.

"There," Vivian says softly, and her hands come to rest on your shoulders, and in the tri-fold mirror the two of you could be one woman photographed twice. "The makeover's done. And I know just how you feel, sugar. I remember *my* first night, looking in the glass like that. Like the whole world got squared away and put behind a picket fence." She squeezes.

"Now. Aren't you just dying to show Mulberry Lane what came home?"