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handful. He's been saying he misses Mr. Schafer and that he doesn't want to live with Dawn and their mom anymore. And he's been getting into trouble in school. So that's what had been going on in Dawn's life at the time she took the job baby-sitting for Myriah and Gabbie Perkins.
    When Dawn rang the Perkinses' bell it was
    answered by the gallumphing feet of Chew-bacca, their big black Labrador retriever.
    "Chewy! Chewy!" she could hear Mrs. Per-kins saying. Then she heard a little scuffle. "Dawn?" Mrs. Perkins called.
    "Yeah, it's me," Dawn replied.
    "Let yourself in, okay? I'm going to put Chewy in the backyard."
    "Okay!" Dawn opened the front door and stood listening. Apart from the sounds of Mrs. Perkins taking Chewbacca outside, she couldn't hear a thing. Where were Myriah and Gabbie? Usually they race to answer the door if one of us baby-sitters is coming over.
    When Mrs. Perkins returned, she put a finger to her lips and whispered, "I want to show you something. Follow me."
    Dawn followed Mrs. Perkins upstairs and into the girls' bathroom. Mrs. Perkins gestured for her to peek inside.
    Dawn did. Seated on the (closed) toilet, she saw Gabbie, who's almost three, holding a mirror and carefully applying a streak of green eye shadow in a long line from one eye, across her nose, to her other eye. She looked like a cave woman.
    Myriah, who's six, was standing on a step-stool, leaning over the sink to the mirror on
    the medicine cabinet, and smearing on purplish lipstick.
    Strewn around them — on the floor, on the back of the toilet, and all around the sink — were cotton balls, Q-tips, hair curlers, and dribs and drabs of leftover makeup, such as the ends of lipsticks, almost empty pots of blusher, and drying tubes of mascara. And seated carefully in a line on the floor were the girls' dolls and teddy bears.
    Myriah glanced up and saw her mother and Dawn in the mirror. "Hi!" she called excitedly.
    "Hi, Dawn Schafer!" added Gabbie, who calls almost everyone by both first and last name.
    "We're having a beauty parlor!" exclaimed Myriah. She put down her lipstick and jumped off the stool. "These are our customers," she said, pointing to the dolls and bears.
    "Our customers," echoed Gabbie.
    "And now we're fixing ourselves up," Said Myriah. "I'm doing my makeup first."
    "Girls, I'm going to leave now," Mrs. Perkins interrupted. She turned to Dawn. "I've got another checkup." (Mrs. Perkins is expecting a baby.) "The obstetrician's number is on the refrigerator. I have some errands to run afterward, so I probably won't be home until five o'clock. You know where everything is, right?"
    Dawn nodded.
    "Any questions?" asked Mrs. Perkins.
    "Well," said Dawn, looking around the messy bathroom, "is it really okay for the girls to play with all this stuff?"
    "Oh, yes. Don't worry about it. I give them the ends of all my makeup. Don't worry about cleaning up, either. We'll do that tonight or tomorrow. They've got a good game going."
    Dawn grinned. Mrs. Perkins is great. What a nice mommy. We know this one mommy — Jenny Prezzioso's — who gets hysterical at the very thought of a mess or a little dirt.
    After Mrs. Perkins left, Myriah introduced Dawn to some of the "customers" in the beauty parlor. First she held up a bear whose plastic snout was covered with lipstick and who was wearing a shower cap.
    "This is Mrs. Xerox," she said. "She's having her hair permed."
    "I put her lipstick on," spoke up Gabbie. She had finished her own makeup job and looked at Dawn solemnly from garish eyes. Lipstick, red and pink, stretched from ear to ear. She held up the hand mirror again. "Don't I look pretty? I'm a lovely lady."
    "And this," Myriah went on, holding up a baby doll, "is Mrs. Refrigerator. She just needed an eye job. . . . Oh! I better do my eyes!"
    Myriah jumped up on the stool again and began collecting tubes of mascara and eyeliner.
    The phone rang.
    "Can I get it?" cried Gabbie. She leaped off the toilet, spilling a lapful of hair