"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.

"It starts when an egg is released," I began.

"I go out with you," he moaned, "and find I'm in science class getting a lecture on human reproduction. You think too much; you're always thinking!"

Was he right? I wondered. When his fingers touched me in secret places, I trembled, but I couldn't help analyzing and thinking of why my heart was pounding. I thought about adrenaline and why my skin had become warm. Textbook illustrations flashed before my eyes, and Claude complained that I was too distant and uninvolved.

The next time we were alone he was prepared and proudly showed me his protection. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but I told him I wasn't ready.

"Ready!" he exclaimed. "How do you know when you're ready? And don't give me some complicated scientific answer."

What was my answer? We had been having a lot of fun together, and all of our friends assumed we were in love. The other students at school considered us a perfect couple. But I knew we weren't perfect. There had to be something else, something more that happens between a man and a woman, I thought.

I watched Mommy and Daddy when they were together at parties or at dinners, and I saw the way they were in tune with each other, reading each other's faces, knowing each other's feelings, even when a roomful of people separated them. There was an electricity in their eyes, a need and a love for each other that made me feel they were secure in their affection. Maybe I was asking for too much from life, but I wanted a love like theirs, and I knew I didn't have it with Claude.

I didn't know how to tell Claude that he wasn't the one, and I almost talked myself into doing it with him just to satisfy him and satisfy my scientific curiosity about sex. But I had resisted right up to this night, the night Claude planned for us to make love.

"It's all set," he said. "Lester Anderson's parents are leaving for Natchez right after graduation. We've got his house for our private party."

"I can't leave my own party, Claude."

"Not right away, no; but later, when we're all going out, I'm sure your parents will understand. They were young once, too," he said. He had a way of turning his eyes and looking at a girl from head to foot that made her self-conscious. Most of the girls giggled and felt flattered when Claude did this. During the last few weeks, I'd suspected that Claude was seeing someone else on the side, maybe Diane Ratner, whose gaze followed us so closely down the hallway that I felt the hair on the back of my neck tingle.

"My mother never had a party like this when she was my age," I said softly.

"She'll still understand, I'm sure. You want to go, don't you?" he asked quickly. When I didn't reply immediately, he punched out another "Don't you?" his voice full of desperation.

"Yes," I said.

"Then it's set. I'll see you later. I've got a lot to do before the graduation ceremony, but I'll pick you up."

"Okay," I said.

"I love you," he added and hung up before I could respond. I sat there for a moment, my heart pounding. Would I finally surrender myself tonight? Should I? Maybe I was just finding excuses because I was simply afraid.

Mommy and I had had our intimate conversations, but she never really answered my questions. Instead, she told me no one could.

"Only you can answer those questions for yourself, Pearl. Only you will know when and with whom it's right for you. Make it something special and it will be. Women who treat sex casually usually get treated casually. Do you understand?"

I did and I didn't. I knew the fundamentals, the science, but I didn't know the magic, for that's what love had to be for me, I thought, something magical.

When I went downstairs I found the house at sixes and sevens. People were scurrying to and fro, following Mommy's directions to change this and rearrange that. Flowers were being placed in vases everywhere. The maids were hunting down the smallest specks of dust. Every window was being washed, all the furniture polished. The hum of vacuum cleaners filled the air. Mommy was having our ballroom decorated. A six-foot-long glittering Congratulations sign was being hung from the ceiling, as were multicolored balloons, rainbow streamers, and tinsel. The jazz band had arrived to check out the acoustics and set up their stands and instruments.

"Good morning, Pearl," Daddy called as soon as he came in from the patio. "How's my little intern?" He kissed my forehead and embraced me quickly. Nothing I had done or said had pleased Daddy more than my decision to become a doctor. It was something he had once hoped for himself.

"I went as far as pre-med," he had told me.

"Why didn't you continue, Daddy?" I had asked. For a few moments it looked as if he wouldn't answer. His lips tightened; his eyes grew small, his face dark.

"Events carried me in a different direction," he replied cryptically. "It wasn't meant to be. But," he added quickly, "perhaps that was because it was meant for you."

What events? I wondered. How can something you desire so much not be meant to be? Daddy was so successful in business, it was difficult to imagine anything he couldn't do when he set his mind on it. When I pursued him for the answers, however, Daddy tightened up and became uncomfortable.

"It was just the way things were," he said and left it at that. Because I saw it was too painful for him to discuss, I didn't nag, but that didn't mean the questions were gone. They hung over all of us, dangled invisibly in the house and attached themselves to the pictures in our family albums, pictures that traced the strange and mysterious turns my parents' lives had taken before and just after I was born. It was as if we had secrets buried in some dusty old trunk in the attic and someday—maybe soon—I would open the trunk and, like Pandora, release the discoveries I would quickly regret.