Sherri put the stockings on and remembered the compression hose her mother had worn to keep the blood circulating in her legs. She stood and faced the mirror again, feeling especially naked with her legs black as night and her bare torso seemingly the only part of her that existed. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her breasts but she didn’t, because none of the other girls did. They were adults! Biata came over and asked her to slip her feet into the leg holes of her green uniform. Her strong old hands tugged and pulled the costume up over her hips as if she weren’t really there, yanking and pinching the fabric. She set Sherri’s breasts on the shelf inside the bustier part and squeezed as dispassionately as if she were testing peaches for ripeness at the grocery store. Ola came over, and the women measured and pulled, murmuring to each other in Polish, their fingers hard and cold, marking the satin with the safety pins they held between their pinched lips. Sherri thought there was something wrong. The uniform was so tight that she could hardly breathe, reminding her of something her mother used to tell her when Sherri complained as she roughly ran a brush through her mess of hair: “Beauty hurts.”

But once her costume—no, her uniform—was on, she gave herself permission to really look at her reflection, something she was never allowed to do at home because her mother believed mirrors made people vain. Muriel said that five seconds was long enough to see what you needed to see. The only mirror in their home was on the bathroom medicine cabinet, and it was old and pitted with age. Her father used to recite a line from Auden every time he caught his own reflection: “O look, look in the mirror, / O look in your distress; / Life remains a blessing / Although you cannot bless.”

That afternoon, in her uniform for the first time, Sherri lingered in front of this clean, smooth reflection and liked what she saw: Her shoulders and chest were milky white. Her arms, just arms before, seemed as long and delicate as tulip stems, and her legs seemed wispy and elegant, especially when she stepped into the pointy satin shoes she was told she’d need to take into town to get dyed to match her uniform.

Bunny Starr showed the girls how to put on their bow ties, and demonstrated how the bunny-head cuff links on the white wrist cuffs had to face each other. “Everyone is going to want to squeeze your tail. Don’t let them. And don’t ever let them take it. Or your ears. They’ll ask, and trust me, they’ll offer you money and favors, but you can never, ever let them out of your sight. These are only yours to borrow, and you’ll get charged if you lose them. They were custom made.”