The makeover on Mulberry Lane

Turn 44 of 44

Air the beds and tidy the whole house top to bottom including the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room singing housewife songs that all housewives sing when cleaning, until it gleams. This takes up the whole morning and some of the afternoon until 2 when you sit down and have a little salad. You know that housewives like you don’t need to eat, your hunger is filled by providing for hubby.

Breakfast dishes done, you start on the beds, stripping them to air over the sills while the quilts flap out the windows like flags of surrender from a war nobody fought. And you sing while you work — some tune about a gal and her apron strings that you know every word of without ever having learned it, and the house picks up the rhythm of it. Floors mopped in long even strokes, bedroom furniture dusted until it gleams, the bathroom scoured porcelain-white and the mirror wiped down to where it shows your whole gleaming bob and pearls. Dishes squared, doilies squared, the living room straightened cushion by cushion until the whole downstairs looks like a page from a magazine. Fred's television corner gets its special attention, ashtray washed and set just so.

The morning goes to the upstairs and the early afternoon to the kitchen and the living room, and you don't grumble once — there's no room for grumbling in a day this well-shaped. Your feet barely ache in the heels, and when they do it feels correct somehow, like seams drawn straight. By the time the last window is latched and the last petticoat-smelling quilt is taken in off the sill, the house is gleaming and still and smells of lemon polish and hairspray.

At two o'clock exactly you sit down at the oilcloth table and have a little salad — a few leaves, a slice of tomato, dainty bites off a bread-and-butter plate. You don't really need more. A gal's hunger fills up with the providing, you know that the way you know the words to the songs: the clean floors, the full pail, the hubby kissed off at the door. That's the meal. The salad is just something to do with your hands.

You're still sitting there, red nails bright against the white china, when the thought arrives tidy as a schedule item: casserole by two, and it's two, and tomorrow there's a gal on Birchwood in trousers waiting to be welcomed proper — and after her, the Delgados, and after them, the whole street, if the raffle goes the way Vivian plans. Your smile holds wide and white over the little plate, and somewhere down the block a lawnmower starts up like the neighborhood clearing its throat.