"Yes, Mommy."

"Were your brothers here waking you up?" she asked with a scowl.

I didn't want to tell on them, but she didn't need me to testify.

"I swear they're like two muskrats getting under everyone's feet these days. I don't know what to do about them. One will swear the other's innocent and do it with the sweetest, most innocent eyes himself." She shook her head. She was complaining, but I knew how happy she was that they were so close. It had been so different between her and her twin. Whenever she talked about her sister Gisselle, she did so with a deep sigh of regret, still blaming herself for not being able to get Gisselle to become the sister she should have been.

"I should be getting up anyway, Mommy. There's so much to do, and I want to help."

"I know," Mommy said, her eyes small and dark. For both of us, but maybe more for Mommy, this was one of those happy-sad days. If she could have kept me a little girl forever, she would have, she said. "It all goes so fast," she had warned me. "Why rush it?"

Mommy always said she didn't want me to lose a day of my childhood. She claimed she had skipped her childhood completely. She blamed the hard life she had for making her grow up so fast.

"I want to be sure you don't struggle and suffer like me," she told me often. "If that means you'll be a little spoiled, so be it!"

But I knew she couldn't keep me a little girl forever, not if I had anything to say about it. Although I'd loved growing up here, now mostly I couldn't wait to leave and explore the world outside.

"I think I'm more excited today than you are," she said, her eyes beaming. She looked radiant, despite the early hour. Mommy was never one to wear a great deal of makeup or pamper herself the way the mothers of some of my girlfriends did. She hardly ever went to the beauty parlor and was not one to flit from one style to another, although she always looked chic and elegant. But maybe that was because Mommy was one of those special people who set the style. Other women were always interested in what she chose to wear, what colors, what fashions. She was a highly respected artist in New Orleans and her appearance at an art gallery or an exhibition would be noted, photographed, and printed on the society pages.

Mommy rarely cut her rich ruby hair, her name-sake. She kept it long and when she wore it down, she had it curled or twisted in a French knot. She told me that simplicity was the keynote to being attractive.

"Women bedecked in expensive jewels and caked with makeup might attract attention, but often they are not attractive, Pearl," she advised. "A pair of earrings, a necklace, should be used to highlight and not overwhelm, and the same is true for makeup. I know that girls your age think it's fashionable and exciting to dab on the eye liner lavishly, but the trick is to emphasize the positive, not smother it."

"I don't know what's positive about me, Mommy," I said, and she laughed.

Then she fixed those emerald-green eyes on me and shook her head. "If God had come to me when I was pregnant and said, 'Paint the face you want your child to have,' I couldn't have done better or thought of someone more beautiful than you, Pearl.

"And you have a wonderful figure, the sort of figure that will make most women green with envy. I don't want your good looks to go to your head. Be modest and grateful, but don't be the insecure little person I once was. That's when people take advantage," she cautioned me, and her eyes grew smaller and darker so I knew she was remembering one of the sadder or uglier events of her life.

Of course, my brothers and I knew that Mommy had been born and brought up in the bayou. Until she was sixteen, her father, after whom my brother Pierre was named, didn't know she existed. He thought her twin sister, Gisselle, was the only child born out of his love affair with Gabrielle Landry. He was married at the time, but his wife, Daphne, accepted Gisselle and pretended she was her own when my great-grandfather Dumas purchased her from the Landrys and brought her to New Orleans as soon as she was born. My mother's surprise appearance on their doorstep sixteen years later nearly exposed the grand deception, but the family concocted the story that she had been stolen immediately after she was born and had returned when the Cajun couple who stole her were struck with a fit of conscience.

From time to time, Mommy described how difficult life was living with a twin sister and a stepmother who resented her, but Mommy hated speaking ill of the dead. She had been brought up by her grandmère Catherine, who was a Cajun traiteur, a healer who combined religious, medical, and superstitious methods to treat the sick and injured. She believed in spirits. She told me that her grandmère Catherine and Nina Jackson, the Dumas family's old voodoo-practicing cook, would warn her that if she dragged up the dead with these stories, they could haunt us all.

Mommy didn't try to get me to believe in these things; she just wanted me to respect people who did and not take any chances. Daddy sometimes reprimanded her and told her, "Pearl is a woman of science. She wants to be a doctor, doesn't she? Don't fill her with those tales."

But when it came to keeping my twin brothers in line, Daddy wasn't above trying to scare them with Mommy's stories. "If you don't stop running up and down those stairs, you'll wake up the ghost of your evil aunt, and she'll haunt you when you sleep," he warned. Mommy would turn a twinkling eye of reprimand at him, and he would go sputtering off, complaining about a man's home no longer being his castle.

"I wish you and Daddy hadn't decided on such a big party for me, Mommy," I said as I rose to get washed and dressed for the work ahead. Daddy had hired one of the famous New Orleans jazz bands to play on the patio. He had a pastry chef from one of the finer restaurants to make desserts, and he had employed waiters and waitresses. He had even contracted with a film company to record the affair. He was doing so much for my graduation, I couldn't imagine what he would do for my wedding.

But then, I couldn't imagine getting married, either. I couldn't envision having my own home and raising my own children. The responsibilities were so enormous. But what I really couldn't imagine was falling so deeply in love with someone that I would want to spend the rest of my life with him, see him every morning at the breakfast table and in the evening at the dinner table, go everywhere with only him, and be so beautiful and so desirable all the time that he would want to be only with me. I had had boyfriends, of course. Right now I was going steady with Claude Avery, but I couldn't envision spending my life with him, even though he was one of the handsomest boys at school, tall with dark hair and silver blue eyes. Many times Claude had told me he loved me and waited for me to say the same about him, but all I could muster was "I like you very much, too, Claude."

Surely love had to be something different, something more special, I thought. There were many mysteries in the world, many problems to be solved, but none seemed as impossible as the answer to the question What is love? My girlfriends hated it when I challenged their dramatic declarations of affection for one boy or another, and they were always accusing me of being too inquisitive and looking at things with microscopic eyes.

"Why do you have to ask so many questions?" they complained, especially my best friend Catherine Didion. Catherine and I were different in so many ways, it was hard to understand why we were so close, but perhaps it was those very differences that attracted us. In a way it was our curiosity about each other that kept us so interested in each other. Neither of us fully understood why the other was the way she was.

"It's not such a big party," Mommy said. "Besides, we're proud of you, and we want the whole world to know it."

"Can I see my portrait this morning, Mommy?" I asked. Mommy had painted a picture of me in my graduation gown. She was planning to unveil it tonight at our party, but I had yet to see the finished work.

"No. You have to wait. It's bad luck to show a portrait before it's completed. I have a little touching up to do today," she said, and I didn't protest. Mommy believed in good and bad gris-gris, and never wanted to tamper with fate. She still wore the good-luck dime that Nina Jackson had given her years ago. It was on a string around her right ankle.

"Now I'd better go speak to those brothers of yours to be sure they don't make a nuisance of themselves around this house today."

"Will you help me decide what to wear and do my hair later, Mommy?"

"Of course, dear," she said just as my phone rang. "Don't spend your morning gossiping with Catherine," Mommy warned before leaving to go to the twins.

"I won't," I promised, but when I said hello, it wasn't Catherine, I greeted, but Claude.

"Did I wake you?"

"No," I said.

"Well, it's here: our day," Claude announced. He too was a senior and he too was graduating, but I knew he wasn't referring only to that. Claude and I had been going steady for nearly a year. We had kissed and petted and once been almost naked beside each other at Ormand Lelock's house when his parents left him alone for two days. We had nearly gone all the way twice, but I had always resisted. I told Claude that for me it had to be something very special, and he had come up with the idea that it would be something we would do on graduation night. I hadn't agreed, but I hadn't disagreed, either, and I knew Claude thought that meant it would happen.

The first time it had almost happened, I stopped him by explaining why it was a prime time for me to get pregnant. He was frustrated and annoyed and fumed as I explained a woman's cycle.