The makeover on Mulberry Lane

Turn 37 of 44

You wash Ruth’s hair and the gray and dyed pink color washes out which reveals beautiful black hair. You then set her pin curls while the two of you gossip about the street. You tell her 45 minutes until the hair is ready and you can Do her makeup to match yours and ever other housewife exactly. She agrees and you do the makeup and add the permanent red lipstick

"First the hair, honey," you say, sitting her back at the vanity sink. "Can't curl what won't hold, and this mop of yours has been holding *grudges*." Ruth giggles and tips her head back like she's done it a thousand times, and you run the water warm and work it through the gray curls. The color lifts almost at once — the gray, and there under it a washed-out pink she never mentioned, dye gone tired years ago — and out of it all rises black. Deep, glossy, blue-black, curling up rich and springy around your fingers the moment it's free.

"Well, *land sakes*," Ruth says, eyeing the dark ringlets framing her pale powder face in the tri-fold. "I haven't seen *that* since high school. Isn't that just the cat's pajamas."

"Black as a license plate and twice as shiny," you agree, sectioning her out in neat little rows, winding each ringlet round your finger and pinning it flat. Pin curl after pin curl, the both of you bent close, and the gossip runs easy as the comb — Carol's bouffant and how quick she took to it, the Delgados coming next month and not a one of them able to boil water, that wife over on Birchwood with the sister who wears trousers clear down to the market.

"Trousers!" Ruth cries, delighted and scandalized both at once, which is a trick you didn't know a gal could do.

"Well, somebody ought to *fix* her."

"Ain't that the truth," you say, patting down the last pin. "Now honey, forty-five minutes, not a minute under — a set this deep needs to bake. But a gal doesn't sit idle." You flip open the little case from the vanity drawer, compacts and lipsticks ranked inside like soldiers.

"We'll do your face while she sets. Makeup to match mine exactly — and Carol's, and Vivian's. Every gal on this street wears the same face. It's just how we're made."

"Do me up, honey," Ruth says, closing her eyes and folding her small white hands in her lap. "Make me just like all of you."

So you do, beat for beat, the way Vivian did yours and you did Carol's — powder, the arch of brow, the dark red lipstick pressed and blotted and pressed again, permanent as a headstone and twice as glossy. When she opens her eyes, three Ruths look out of the mirror wearing your face, black ringlets pinned up like a crown waiting to fall.

"Oh, *Margaret*," she breathes. "I look just like one of you gals."