Turn 20 of 44

Serve Fred his breakfast at the table and send him off to work with his lunch pail and a kiss. You then start cleaning the house. You don’t or complain about any of this as you keep your smile and know ing that when Fred comes home to a clean house, it’s good. You then stop after a while to make the tuna noodle casserole. You put a white flower apron. You notice how you cook like a 50s housewife.

You plate Fred's breakfast like a picture in an advertisement — eggs sunny-side up, bacon in a neat lattice, toast cut corner to corner, coffee with just the right cloud of cream. He eats at the head of the table with his paper propped against the sugar bowl, and you stand by with the pot, refilling his cup before he can ask, the way you've apparently always done.

"Eggs are perfect, Margaret," he says, not looking up. "Vivian eat breakfast?"

"She had to run, honey, her Dick's a stickler for schedules." You kiss him at the door at ten past eight, pressing a brown paper lunch pail into his hand — packed last night, somehow, between the brush-out and the goodnight — and watch him all the way down the walk, one hand raised, the smile holding like paint. The car doors thunk. The engine turns over. Gone.

Then the house gets its morning right. Beds stripped and aired over the sills, the good quilts flapping in the breeze like flags. Dishes washed, dried, stacked to match. Floors run with the mop in long even strokes, the furniture dusted until it complains, the doilies squared to the table edges. You don't grumble once. There's no room for grumbling in a day this well-shaped, and when your reflection slides past in the front window — bob, pearls, sailor collar, smile — you give her a nod, like two gals passing on the sidewalk. Fred will come home to clean, and that's the whole point of a wife. That's the arithmetic. It comes out even.

At noon you tie on the apron — white cotton, printed all over with little flowers, strings crossed once at the back — and there it is again, that knowing in your hands. You crush the crackers with a fork tines-down. You fold the tuna through the noodles with a spatula stroke that turns the whole bowl over in one motion, no clatter, no drip. You know the soup goes in condensed, undiluted, and that the topping is crushed chips, not crumbs, and that the oven wants twenty-five minutes at three-fifty and not one degree more. You never learned this. You never once cooked like this in your life. And yet there you are, hip cocked against the counter, humming, watching the oven door like it's television.

"Well, I'll be," you tell the casserole, which is bubbling already, golden at the edges. "Aren't you just the picture."

The dish goes into its carrier, the dish towel goes over it, and the clock says two o'clock exactly. Blue corner house, here you come.