Turn 7 of 44

More undergarments soon are added to your body including garter belts for the stockings. The bra changes to a pair of lingerie. Soon your body is fully covered in the 1950s housewife undergarments. You look and feel proud of your new body. You then ask for the full look — dress, stockings, gloves, pearls, the works. She says yes as she leaves the room to go get everything else for you.

Vivian works like a woman setting a table for a holiday — everything in its order, nothing hurried. From the garment bag come more layers, each one presented with a little flourish.

"A proper garter belt, honey. None of that pantyhose nonsense — a gal's stockings must be *anchored*." The satin band circles your new waist and settles there like it was measured for you, and the straps hang waiting against your thighs, four little tugs of anticipation. The bra follows, then a slips-and-petticoat arrangement in whispering nylon, then a camisole soft as moth wings, and piece by piece your body disappears beneath the architecture of another decade.

"There," she says, stepping back, hands on her hips. "Foundations complete. A woman's underpinnings are her *character*, you know. Everything else is just window dressing." You turn to the tri-fold mirror and look, and pride comes up in you warm and simple as tea. Three angles of you, and all of them the same woman: cinched and curved and powder-pale, every inch of her covered in white satin and nylon, dainty hands resting on a waist you could circle with your own two small fingers.

You have never looked finished before. You have never looked like anything at all, and now you look like *her* — the woman you apparently were all along, waiting under twenty years of linen.

"Vivian," you say, and your voice comes out breathless with wanting it. "The full look. Dress, stockings, gloves, pearls — the works. Everything. Please." She beams like you've handed her a bouquet.

"Well, now *that's* what I like to hear! A gal who doesn't do things by halves." She pats your cheek once, cool and pleased.

"You sit right there and don't dare peek at yourself — it spoils the surprise. I'll fetch the whole kit and caboodle." And she goes, heels clicking down your hallway, petticoats swishing, leaving you alone at the vanity in white satin and garter straps, in a bedroom that smells faintly of lavender and is not quite the bedroom you fell asleep in last night. You sit very still and wait, proud and patient, a present under wrapping paper. From downstairs comes the sound of a door opening that you don't remember your house having.