Turn 43 · The makeover on Mulberry Lane

Wake at 6:30 sharp and clip the stockings back on, then the petticoats before putting the sailor dress and heels back on. You pearls, makeup, hair still the same and frozen in place. You make Fred's breakfast in the sailor dress covered by the apron. Fred comes down and eats while you make his lunch. He kisses you and takes the lunch for a long day of work. You smile the whole time.

You wake at 6:30 sharp without an alarm, the way a gal does when her day is her own to keep, and the house is pink-gray with early light. The stockings come off the dresser first, clipped to the garter belt with two practiced snaps, then the petticoats, one two three, and the sailor dress settles over it all with its navy collar and red scarf like a uniform reporting for duty. Red heels on the linoleum. Pearls at your throat where they never left. You catch yourself in the hall mirror on the way down — bob gleaming, lipstick dark and permanent, smile fixed wide and white — and you don't touch a thing, because nothing needs touching. It all held through the night, frozen in place like the morning after a magazine photo shoot. The apron goes on over the dress, white flowers over white cotton, and the kitchen wakes under your hands — bacon singing, eggs knowing their mood, coffee drawing dark and patient in the pot. Your body does the work before your mind arrives, which is a lovely way to live if you let it, and you do. You sing a little housewife song while the toast browns, knowing all the words. Fred comes down at seven on the dot, square-shouldered and calm, smelling of sleep and shaving soap, and finds his paper at his place and his eggs already knowing him. "Morning, Margaret," he says, and the name lands on you warm as the coffee pot. While he eats you pack his lunch pail at the counter — sandwich, apple, the little waxed things a workingman's lunch holds — and he reads the front page and hums, and the whole kitchen runs like a metronome. "Pork chops again tonight?" he asks. "Whatever hubby wants," you say, and he smiles into his cup. At half past he stands, ties his tie, and kisses the top of your bob — "Good girl," he says, quiet and pleased — and takes the lunch pail and goes out into the early cool, and you stand in the doorway in your apron and sailor dress and heels, smiling the whole time, watching him go, with the beds to air and the house to tidy, a bathroom and kitchen to clean