Turn 17 of 44

Offer to bring Carol a welcome casserole tomorrow for dinner and Ask what a housewife's day looks like tomorrow, the whole schedule. She tells you and that the welcome casserole is a great idea as you two head downstairs and you two say goodbye like housewives so that Vivian can go see her husband, Dick. She says goodbye Margaret, your name and you say goodbye to Vivian.

"You know what we ought to do?" you say, standing, petticoats settling. "Tomorrow I'll bring Carol a welcome casserole. Get her started right." "Oh, sugar, that's a *wonderful* idea," Vivian says, hand to her pearls. "Tuna noodle. Nobody refuses tuna noodle." And she lays out your day like a recipe: up at six-thirty to fix Fred's breakfast before he leaves, the beds aired, a tidy pass through the house, marketing at the butcher and the green grocer, the casserole assembled by two, a dab of lipstick freshened before five so you're pretty when he walks in. "Then supper, then a little something for the church raffle, then bed. That's a day, honey. That's a whole life, done right." It sounds like a song you've always known the words to. You descend the stairs together, heels clicking in counterpoint, and at the foot of the staircase you pass it — the door. The one you don't remember having. It sits under the stairwell now, white-paneled, neat as a hymnal, and your new mind slides past it the way a hand smooths a wrinkle out of a tablecloth. Vivian's smile flickers, just barely, as she walks by it. Then you're at the front door, and it's time. "Well, I'd best get home to Dick," Vivian says, gathering her coat over her orange dress. "Dick?" The name lands strange for half a second, like a fork in the wrong drawer. "Don't you mean Fred, honey?" "Do I?" Vivian says, and laughs her weather-presenter laugh, and pats your cheek with cool blue-tipped fingers. "A husband's a husband, sugar. Mine's waiting, anyway. Men do hate to wait." She steps off the porch into the early dark, turns at the walk, and gives you the smile, the whole smile, teeth and pearls and lampshine. "Goodnight, *Margaret*," she says. It takes you a beat to realize she means you, and then it doesn't take anything at all, because of course she does, or nearly does, close enough that it warms you going down. You lift one small hand and wave from the doorway, a proper hostess seeing a guest off, red nails flashing under the porch light. "Goodnight, Vivian!" you call, sweet as pie. "And thank you for *everything*." You stand there until her pumps click out of sight, then close the door on your transformed hallway, and the whole house smells like hairspray and lemon polish, and tomorrow has a schedule.