Vivian, in her worn-out ankle boots but fancy new hat, stepped out of the frigid night air and into the brick building, pulling the door closed behind her with a “Brrrr!” before making her way to the cloakroom. She shrugged out of her coat and then carefully removed the beautiful new hat. Doris at Beulah Bechtel’s had said it was “Prussian-blue,” but Vivian didn’t know what that was. She thought it looked more like a dark navy. Beulah hired girls from the college and Doris probably went there to study Prussian or something. Either way, the blue complemented Vivian’s eyes, and she especially liked how the hat dipped low over her right eyebrow on the one side. Chic, she’d read in her fashion magazines, pronouncing it “chick” in her head. She carefully balanced the hat on top of her old winter coat on one of the hooks in the cloakroom, and then trod over the worn wooden floors into the switchboard room, pulled out her rolling chair, and rolled herself back up to the counter to put on her headset.

“Who takes a wife?” she asked Dorothy Hoffman, who was already seated, and probably had been for fifteen minutes.

“What?” Dorothy pushed the earpiece into her hair behind her ear, turning to face Vivian.

“Who takes a wife, in ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ who takes a wife? Is it the sheep?”

“The sheep?” Dorothy’s penciled eyebrows furrowed into a jagged M on her pale forehead.

“No?” Vivian asked, studying Dorothy’s eyebrows. She should’ve been using brown eyebrow pencil instead of black. Black made her look angry, and Dorothy was probably just a little annoyed, like she always was when Vivian was a little late and then talked about nursery rhymes.

“Why would the sheep take a wife?”

“I don’t know. For some reason that’s what stuck in my head. Something about the eee sound.” She turned back to the blank board in front of her and studied it, head tilted to the side. “The eeee takes a wife . . .”

“It’s the farmer who takes a wife,” Dorothy said, because even though she was annoyed she couldn’t let Vivian think the sheep took a wife.

“The farmer? Are you sure?” Vivian turned back to Dorothy, the doubt plain on her face. It was a nursery rhyme, for chrissakes. Why couldn’t the sheep take a wife?

“I don’t even think there is a sheep in the rhyme. You’re probably thinking of ‘the cheese.’”

“The cheese?”

“Yes, honey, the cheese.”

Vivian turned her attention back to the board, giving a vigorous shake to the dark barrel curls she’d carefully arranged to look like Bette Davis’s in All About Eve.

“Well, the goddamned cheese wouldn’t take a wife,” she muttered, then started to giggle at the image of two wedges of cheese in front of a pastor. One wearing a veil.

“It doesn’t.” Dorothy looked skyward for help, like she did sometimes. “The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone.” Dorothy sang the words as she held her hand over the mouthpiece.