Wanda said dime-store cold cream is the answer to her beauty, plus ten hours of uninterrupted sleep . . . wearing eye patches and earplugs. The only exercise she gets is to be sexually active, and to that she has been devout since her 15th birthday. She said it's just as good as jogging, a bit more rewarding and not dependant upon the weather. By 7:30 a.m. she's ready to begin her housework. This is a one-hour routine that Wanda races against the clock to complete. If she finishes early, she puts one dollar bill in a sugar pot on the kitchen counter to be used toward long distance telephone calls to her high school girlfriend, Dawn, in Tallahassee. If she is not finished in 60 minutes, she stops no matter what . . . the kitchen timer tells her so. Her regiment is a combo of dusting with Pledge, running the Hoover and switching laundry to the voice of Neil Diamond on the hi-fi. The sorting and folding is done by the rest of the family, and her mother, Ilene, does the deep cleaning before holidays as a Christmas gift to Wanda. Her second husband, Jackson, does the grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons because that way he gets everything he wants. In fact, he has his own secondhand refrigerator in an outside shed where he keeps his beer and favorite foods. She said he is the easiest man to please on the face of this earth except for food . . . he's fussy like a newborn in that department.

By 8:30 a.m. she is ready to go to town in her white 1964 Impala. Searching for new beauty products and modern fashions like those in magazines is her job. Wanda never told me her age, but she did say that the day she stops fussing with herself is the day she'll be six feet under and Jackson could then have a garage sale and make hundreds of greenbacks on her jewelry alone. She usually only browses Monday through Wednesday and starts buying Thursday and Friday for the weekends . . . which still seem as important as prom. Never one to borrow, she has no credit cards and pays in cash to the very penny.

Friday night she and Jackson bowl at Sparky's and Saturday night they go dancing at the Last Chance Lounge. There isn't a weekend that goes by without at least five men hitting on her, she said . . . and that was a low count. Jackson doesn't mind . . . he knows it goes with the territory of being married to the wildest filly around. Face it, men are animals she said loudly . . .you feed them and they purr, if you don't they growl and show their teeth until they do.

Her best store for jewelry is Woolworth's. She said their selection is bigger than anywhere else and every month they have a two-for-the-price-of-one sale on matched sets. Wanda felt folks were plain ignorant to spend good money on fancy things in department stores when they could get look-alikes for a song. Yep, the exact same things you see on the cover girls. "Who could ever tell the difference anyway?" she'd ask without lowering her voice. Those were the times when the other Betty Crocker mothers at the park, sitting in front and in back of us, would raise their chins and noses toward the sky and roll their eyes like marbles.