“Oh. My. Gawd.”
Katharine blinked several times. She made Mary Bliss twirl around so that she could get the full effect. Then she made all the dryer women look too.
“Stunning,” was Katharine’s verdict.
“Perfect.” The pink-clad dryer women put down their magazines and gave Mary Bliss polite applause, using only the palms of their hands so as not to smudge their manicures.
“Not so bad,” Pearl said, lifting up a lock of Katharine’s sunflower-hued hair. “Better than brown. Huh?”
Mary Bliss herself was speechless. She did not recognize the woman in the mirror. Her hair was a warm-toned blonde, not yellow at all. It had been cut and softly feathered so that it hugged her head, and she had new wispy bangs that brushed the tops of her newly arched eyebrows. The last time she had bangs she was seven years old. Pearl had insisted on a new hot-pink lipstick color to go with the sunflower. The lipstick, which came in a shiny black phallic-looking tube, was called Hysteria.
Pearl made Mary Bliss hand over her old lipstick, the one she’d worn for the past seven years. “Look like baby food,” Pearl pronounced, flipping it into a trash can.
“Well?” Katharine was waiting for her toenails to dry. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Bliss said slowly. “I guess I’m shell-shocked. It’s not what I expected.”
“You were attractive before,” Katharine said. “In a schoolteacherish kind of way. Now you’re a bombshell. You know that, right? You’re a bona fide bombshell. You look like somebody’s second wife.”
“I feel like somebody’s second wife,” Mary Bliss admitted. She was staring down at the long acrylic nails Pearl had painstakingly applied to her own bitten-down fingernails. The new nails were slightly squared, and painted a pale seashell pink that made her hands look long and tanned and elegant.
“I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette or drinking a martini, or doing something…naughty,” Mary Bliss said, a note of wonder in her voice.
“Not a martini, sweetie, a cosmopolitan,” Katharine said kindly. “And that’s the whole idea. Starting tonight, you are going to cut loose. And I’m not just talking about a new lipstick color. Remember back at the beginning of the summer? You made me run through the sprinkler with you? And you said we were being baptized. A whole new you. Well, I’ll grant it, you’ve changed on the inside. You’ve boldly gone where you never dreamed of going before. But your exterior was holding you back. All we’ve done today is finish the transformation. It’s the all-new, improved Mary Bliss McGowan.”
“You think?” Mary Bliss asked, blushing.
“I know,” Katharine said firmly. She stood up and heel-walked over to the reception desk, where Hon was again screaming into the cell phone. She reached into the pocket of her smock and brought out a platinum American Express card.
She waved it under Hon’s nose until he looked up.
“Hon!” she yelled. “Get off the phone!”