Turn 22 of 44

Invite Casey to supper at your house tonight to meet the neighborhood proper. She says no as she opens the casserole and takes a piece. You don’t as you don’t need much food. She takes a bit and her eyes light up. She then says in a new voice that sounds like a 50s housewife’s that it’s jolly good. You start talking in a 50s slang with her as she starts to lighten up more.

"Well, sugar," you say, giving the bare dining room a once-over — boxes, laptop, not one doily — "you simply *must* come to supper tonight. Meet the neighborhood proper. Fred would be tickled pink." "No," Marge says, flat as the boxes. "No supper. I've got a deliverable." But she lifts the foil off the dish, maybe to prove something, maybe just because the smell of it got up through her nose like a hook through a fish, and she breaks off a corner piece with the edge of a fork from a moving carton.

"I don't need much either," she says, almost apologetic. "Running-heavy year." She takes a bite.

Her eyes light up. It's a whole event — the brow unknits, the shoulders come down off her ears, and she takes a second bite before the first is properly gone.

"Well," she says, and the word comes out wrong-footed, warm, pitched in a register that has never once been in that pantsuit — bright and honeyed and just so, a 1950s housewife's voice wearing her mouth like a borrowed hat. "That's *jolly good*." She stops dead. Looks at the fork. Looks at you.

"Jolly," she repeats, quieter, puzzled, like she's reading her own handwriting on a note she doesn't remember leaving.

"Isn't it just, honey!" you say, delighted, and pull out a chair and settle into it, petticoats swishing, because gals don't stand on ceremony in a friend's dining room.

"The whole street cooks this way. Vivian says it's all in the wrist. Oh, we're going to have the *swellest* time — book club, bake sales, the church raffle. You'll be fixed up in no time flat." "I have a *job*," Marge says, but the job sounds far away, like a radio in another room. She takes a third bite. Her bun has loosened a strand of hair that curls instead of hanging.

"The raffle's for the church, though, right?" she says, and it comes out in the honeyed voice again, and this time she doesn't look surprised. She looks interested.

"What church?" she asks, and reaches for the fork again.

"Don't you worry your pretty head about that," you say, giggling, and pat her hand with your red-tipped nails. "The gals will show you everything. That's what we're *for*."