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"College! Well, she always was a brain." "Oh, no ... but it's true she won a full scholarship." "Little bitty Daisy," Fiona said. "Just think." Ira had finished with the appliance, finally. He moved on to the coffee table. The Frisbee rested on a pile of comic books, and he picked it up and examined it all over again. Maggie stole a peek at him. He still had not said, "I told you so," but she thought she detected something noble and forbearing in the set of his spine.

"You know, I'm in school myself, in a way," Fiona said.

"Oh? What kind of school?" "I'm studying electrolysis." "Why, that's lovely, Fiona," Maggie said.

She wished she could shake off this fulsome tone of voice. It seemed to belong to someone else entirely-some elderly, matronly, honey-sweet woman endlessly marveling and exclaiming.

"The beauty parlor where I'm a shampoo girl is paying for my course," Fiona said. "They want their own licensed operator. They say I'm sure to make heaps of money.'' "That's just lovely!" Maggie said. "Then maybe you can move out and find a place of your own." And leave the pretender grandma behind, was what she was thinking. But Fiona gave her a blank look.

Leroy said, "Show them your practice kit, Ma." "Yes, show us," Maggie said.

"Oh, you don't want to see that," Fiona said.

"Yes, we do. Don't we, Ira?" Ira said, "Hmm? Oh, absolutely." He held the Frisbee up level, like a tea tray, ,and gave it a meditative spin.

"Well, then, wait a sec," Fiona said, and she got up and left the room. Her sandals made a dainty slapping sound on the wooden floor of the hallway.

"They're going to hang a sign in the beauty parlor window," Leroy told Maggie. "Professionally painted with Ma's name." "Isn't that something!" "It's a genuine science, Ma says. You've got to have trained experts to teach you how to do it." Leroy's expression was cocky and triumphant. Maggie resisted the urge to reach down and cup the complicated small bones of her knee.

Fiona returned, carrying a rectangular yellow kitchen sponge and a short metal rod the size of a ballpoint pen. "First we practice with a dummy instrument," she said. She dropped onto the couch beside Maggie. "We're supposed to work at .getting the angle exactly, perfectly right." She set the sponge on her lap and gripped the rod between her fingers. There was a needle at its tip, Maggie saw. For some reason she had always thought of electrolysis as, oh, not quite socially mentionable, but Fiona was so matter-of-fact and so skilled, targeting one of the sponge's pores and guiding the needle into it at a precisely monitored slant; Maggie couldn't help feeling impressed. This was a highly technical field, she realized- maybe something like dental hygiene. Fiona said, "We travel into the follicle, see, easy, easy ..." and then she said, "Oops!" and raised the heel of her hand an inch or two. "If this was a real person I'd have been leaning on her eyeball," she said. "Pardon me, lady," she told the sponge. "I didn't mean to smush you." Mottled black lettering was stamped across the sponge's surface: STA-BLER'S DARK BEER. MADE WITH MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER.

Ira stood over them now, with the Frisbee dangling from his fingers. He asked, "Does the school provide the sponge?" "Yes, it's included in the tuition," Fiona said.

"They must get it free," he reflected. "Courtesy of Stabler's. Interesting.'' "Stabler's? Anyhow, first we practice with the dummy and then with the real thing. Us students all work on each other: eyebrows and mustache and such. This girl that's my partner, Hilary, she wants me to do her bikini line." Ira pondered that for a moment and then backed off in a hurry.

"You know these high-cut swimsuits nowadays, they show everything you've got," Fiona told Maggie.

"Oh, it's becoming impossible!" Maggie cried. "I'm just making do with my old suit till the fashions change." Ira cleared his throat and said, "Leroy, what would you say to a game of Frisbee." Leroy looked up at him.

' 'I could show you how