Turn 19 of 44

You say that Vivian has it under control and that you are going to the new girl, Carol’s tomorrow with casserole. You and Fred then spend the night together before heading to sleep. You wake up 6:30 and put on the same sailor dress, heels as yesterday. Your hair, jewelry, makeup, still prefect. You head downstairs and start cooking breakfast for Fred. You sing housewife songs while you cook.

"Oh, Vivian's got it under control," you say, waving your red-tipped hand. "She's got a whole plan for Ruthie. Me, I'm taking the new girl Carol a casserole tomorrow. Tuna noodle." "A natural," Fred says again, and there's something satisfied in it, like a man reading a good report.

The evening folds itself away the way the good linens do. You and Fred go up to bed together, and the night is what a married night is — warm, orderly, his hand at the small of your back, the headboard keeping gentle time — and afterward he sleeps like a stone while you lie listening to the house tick and settle, the pearls on the vanity catching moonlight, your last thought a tidy little inventory: casserole by two, lipstick by five.

The alarm doesn't even get a chance. Your eyes open at six-thirty exactly, bright as a struck match, and Fred's side of the bed is already cooling because some part of the morning knows he'll want coffee the moment his feet hit the floor. You sit up and the bob springs back into place without so much as a hand passed over it, permanent as a promise, gleaming even in the gray early light. The face in the vanity mirror is already done — red lips, white teeth, the smile fixed and waiting — and you powder nothing, brush nothing, correct nothing. There is nothing to correct. You are a finished thing, and finished things get started early.

The sailor dress comes off its hanger like it's been waiting up for you — white cotton, navy collar, red scarf knotted just so, three petticoats, red heels down the stairs one careful click at a time. By seven the kitchen smells of bacon and coffee and something golden rising in the oven, and Fred shuffles in on his way to the bathroom and finds his paper already waiting at his place, his eggs already knowing his mood.

And you sing. You don't decide to; it just comes up out of you, sweet and pitched just so — *que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be* — and you hum the verses you somehow know all the words to while the bacon turns and the coffee perks and the toast browns itself to a picture. Fred glances in from the doorway, paper under his arm, and smiles at the sight of you: pearls at the throat, hips swaying to your own little radio, breakfast coming along like a magazine spread.

"There's my girl," he says, and you hit the high note of the chorus, red nails flashing over the skillet, and think — not for the first time, but for the first time *warmly* — that today you've got a casserole to build and a new neighbor to save."