"We are Temples of the Holy Spirit," I say. And we all crack up again.

"That is enough," Genevieve says. "I am taking you girls home. Jack, please go find Mr. Bob and Mrs. Bob and let them know that we'll be over at their house later."

"Yes, ma'am," Jack says, and turns to go. But not before he gives me a wink and hands me a box of JuJuBes. Oh, I like that Jack.

Our curls are gone.

All 168 of them.

Genevieve brushed them out. Hard.

At Caro's house, the four of us are standing in the living room. Mr. Bob is in his easy chair, Mrs. Bob is sitting in her rocker.

"Bob," Genevieve says, "I want you to give these girls their punishment."

For the first time I get scared.

"Girls," Mr. Bob says, "I have thought about this long and hard. The four of you-well, the four of you behaved simply terribly in my public theater. You ruined the day for a lot of little girls, and their mothers too. I am not going to hear the end of it. They've already been ringing my phone off the hook."

Genevieve says, "Think of les petites pauvres. Yall ruined it for the poor children. Nothing to eat but onions and turnips in months, non? Some of them, peres haven't had a job in two, three years. Sharecropper enfants coming to town once a week for to see Flash Gordon. They don't want to see your derriere, filles. Comprendez-vous? You show those poor little girls the respect."

I look at Genevieve because she always makes me think things I want to forget about.

"Genevieve is right," Mr. Bob says. "There is a depression going on in this country, even if you four princesses don't see it."

"One of these days you girls have got to start behaving like ladies," Mrs. Bob says. "You're not babies anymore. You are young ladies. And there is a right way and a wrong way to act. What you did today was definitely wrong. You don't want to get reputations for being bad girls, do you?"

"But, Mrs. Bob," I say, before I can stop myself, "it's so much fun being a bad girl."

"Vivi," she says, "do you want me to call your mother and father and have them talk to you instead of me?"

No, I don't want her to call my mother, and definitely not my father, because he doesn't talk. He just takes off his belt and lets it do his talking for him.

"No, ma'am," I say.

"You all have got to start acting like ladies if you expect to get along in this town," Mrs. Bob says. "How can I get that through your head, Caro?"

"But, Mama," Caro says, "we can't help it if Teensy pooted."

"I know, I know," Mrs. Bob says, "you can't fight Mother Nature. But the four of you couldn't just leave it at that."

I drop my head, but I am secretly thinking about how very original the name Pooty Pootwell is.

"Thought I was going to have to call out for help," Mr. Bob says. "Never in my life have I had that much trouble trying to calm a theater down. Yall are not going to get away with this scot-free. For the next month-that is four straight Saturdays-you bad little girls are going to clean up The Bob after the Saturday matinee. Yall are going to sweep up every single piece of popcorn and pick up every candy wrapper that's left on the floor. Furthermore, you will not be allowed into The Bob except to clean. No movies during the whole time of your punishment. And I'm going to talk to Mr. Hyde over at the Paramount too, ask him to give his ticket people and his ushers strict instructions not to let the four of you into his theater either. Not until the month is up."

Back home in my bedroom, I sit down and think about what all has happened. And the more I think about it, the madder I get. It is all so unfair! I get so mad that my brain squeezes together and pushes out the most brilliant idea of my life to date! I will start my very own newspaper where I can print NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH! The name of my newspaper comes to me in a flash! It will be called "Vivi's Very Important News!" V.V.I.N. for short. Pronounced "Va-Vinn." I sharpen a pencil, get out my Big Chief tablet, and just start writing. I must reveal the news of this terrible injustice.

8.

In spite of the light drizzle that evening, Sidda was possessed with the idea of building a fire at the edge of the lake. She hadn't built an outdoor fire since she was a nine-year-old Girl Scout-the year Vivi and Necie had led Troop 55 and backed into the flagpole with Necie's County Squire station wagon.

She toyed with the twigs and newspapers, used up eight kitchen matches, and blew until she was hyperventilating. Then she gave up, sat back on her feet, and felt foolish. She only required a small fire. She wasn't cold, it's not that she needed heat. She had no plans to cook anything over the flames. She simply wanted to build a little fire outdoors and watch it burn. Her incompetence made her feel out of place in the great Northwest. She missed the screeching urban comfort of Manhattan.

If her mother were here, she'd have built a fabulous fire. Mama or Caro. Nights at Spring Creek, they'd build fires for hot dogs, s'mores, maybe toss in a firecracker or two. They'd sing, tell ghost stories, host talent shows, and compete in limbo contests, that broom lowering till it all but touched the pine needles. Later, their skin coated with 6-12, the kids would lean back against their mothers' bodies and watch the flames of the fire and the citronella candles burning, and the smoke curling up from the mosquito coils.

"Piney pitch is the secret to starting a fire," Vivi used to say. "Unless you have kerosene, of course."

Sidda hadn't thought she even remembered that instruction.

"Get hard pitchwood from the center of a loblolly pine stump if you can find it, Sidda, and you can't go wrong."

Well, Mama, there aren't any loblolly pines around this place.

She stood up and looked around her. All around her were Sitka spruce, Western red cedar, and hemlock, but she didn't know which was which. She'd never thought much about trees before. Except for the old live oak tree at Pecan Grove, with its hundred-and-twenty-foot-branch spread. That tree could make any member of her family weep when they talked about it. When Sidda was a girl, she believed if she ever got married it would be under that tree.

Pitch, Sidda thought. I'm looking for pitch. Perfect pitch.

There was no perfect pitch, but Sidda did find a rotting stump. Not five feet from where she had been squatting. She looked into the center of it, and there was the resiny part, the last part to rot. Reaching into the trunk, she broke off several pieces and returned to her erstwhile fire site.

"Separate your sticks, Siddalee," she heard her mother (or Caro) say. "Start with a tiny teepee, with the littlest twigs over some shavings. Good. Now use some slightly larger sticks for your next layer. Just keep building it like that, easy does it, while your fire builds."

Sidda did exactly as her mother had taught her. But the fire would not catch. Everything was simply too wet. It was dark, only the tiny lights on the other side of the lake were visible. Still a thick cloud cover, no stars visible. And this was supposed to be the time of meteors. May had told her the Olympic Peninsula was known for shooting stars in late summer. Just Sidda's luck to show up the one summer when clouds refused to budge. All this quiet dampness was somewhat spiritual. And somewhat depressing.

Returning to the cabin, Sidda slipped into a pair of dry, warm sweatpants, and lit a fire in the fireplace. She put on a Rickie Lee Jones CD of songs from the forties, poured herself a glass of brandy, sat down, and tried to make herself read a Jungian book on marriage. Three pages in, she closed the book.

Lying down in front of the fire, she stroked Hueylene. She could smell the alder logs as their burning warmed the room. Through the glass doors she could see nothing but gray and rain. This is cozy, all right, Sidda thought, but if it's like this in August, I hate to think what December looks like.

She pulled Hueylene's travel bed in front of the fireplace. She stared into the flames for a moment, then reached for the book of "Divine Secrets." It fell open to a florist card that read, "Happy Anniversary, Ya-Yas! Love from the Ya-Ya Husbands." Wild. But that's the way it was: every year the Ya-Yas threw themselves a party to celebrate another anniversary of their friendship. And the husbands actually brought gifts! Sidda remembered more about Ya-Ya anniversaries than she did about Vivi and Shep's.

A flier from the grand opening of the Southgate Shopping Center in Thornton was tucked in next to a handwritten recipe for a cheese souffle. The recipe had been crossed out, and a note to the side read: "Forget it! Fix a drink and go out for hamburgers!"

Next she ran across a photo of a younger Caro holding an infant in her arms. Caro was making the A-OK sign with her fingers, and wore a jaunty little beret. The infant was tucked in the crook of her arms, and they seemed to be standing in front of a statue. Which one of us wild children was that? Sidda wondered.

As she turned to the next page, what looked like pieces of walnut shell fell out of the book. Sidda imagined her mother years ago snacking on the nuts while pasting things into the scrapbook. Sidda thought about throwing the remnants away, but changed her mind. Gathering the shards up off the floor, she tucked them back into the book where they had been for God knows how long.

Sidda thought about nuts, how they are food and seed at once. How they hold fertility magic in one tight, tiny space. Her mind ran to rich symbolic imaginings, but still she could not guess the enchantment those particular walnut shells contained.

As the smells of sweet woodruff and alder burning and lake water wafted about her, so did the essences of her mother's stories. Not in the way Sidda wanted, but in the way of hidden things that mysteriously reveal worlds unsuspected and longed for.

Vivi, 1937

Mother won't let Caro and me play in the new hammock until we rub the face off the Blessed Virgin statue Father brought back from the island of Cuba.

"This turpentine stinks," Caro says. "I don't see why we have to do this."

"Rub hard," I say. "Then Mama will let us try out the hammock."

The statue is sitting on our front porch, right where it got delivered in a wooden box, alongside Father's luggage. Father is just back from Cuba, where he went to the Tennessee walking-horse show with his rich friends. He stayed in a big hacienda with servants. Cuba is paradise, Father says, with white beaches and orange flowers growing everywhere and wild parrots and all the people happy. His rich friends run the whole island, and Father said he will take me with him next time. He said Mother dresses too much like hired help to take her. If Mother would take the kerchief off her head and the dust rags out of her pockets, I just know she'd be beautiful.

Father bought the Cuban Blessed Virgin for Mother. The statue was gorgeous, with brown skin! She had earrings and a necklace, and the brightest colors of any Mother Mary I had ever seen. Big red lips and a violet color on her eyelids like she was ready for a fiesta. Mother just hated her.

The first thing Mother did after Father left for the office this morning was to unscrew the gold hoop earrings and take all those pretty red and yellow necklaces off the Virgin's neck and drop them in a pile over by the hen-and-chicken planter. The whole time she was doing it, she shook her head like that statue had gone and done something bad.

"The Blessed Virgin is not a Negro," Mother said. "It is just like foreigners to try to turn the Mother of God into a gaudy tart. That statue needs to be cleaned up! Imagine what Father Coughlin would say if he could see this statue."

Mother listens to Father Coughlin on the radio. If Father Coughlin says something, then it's like Moses brought it down from the mountain.

"You listen to that radio priest more than you do your own husband," Father tells her.

She says, "If Demon Rum wasn't stalking your soul, then I might listen to you more."

Mother says that Father spends too much time with his horse friends, and he has turned his back on God. Mother will not go to any horse shows with him, so I get to take her place. I love all the ladies in their jodhpurs and boots, and the picnics with vodka gimlets for the grown-ups and pink lemonade for me, and everyone all dressed up. Father's Tennessee walking horses, Passing Fancy and Rabelais's Dream, take prizes right and left. Every time those horse people get together, it's a party.

"Take your fingers and rub every bit of that color off the Virgin's cheeks," Mother says.

I pour a little more turpentine on my rag and rub in circles to get the rouge off the Virgin's cheeks.

After Mama goes inside, we can finally talk about our secret plans. Today is the day leading up to the night of our Divine Ritual Ceremony, which Caro and Teensy and Necie and I have been planning and planning.

"Do you think Necie will chicken out?" I ask Caro.

"She thinks we'll get kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby," Caro says. "She is scared to go out in the woods at night."

"I go out in the woods by myself at night all the time."

"You do not!"

"Oh, yes I do. I go out there all the time. I'm brave as Amelia Earhart. Sometimes I sleep out there by myself."

"Vivi, you lie lie lie," Caro tells me.

I just smile.

Mother comes out to inspect our work on the Virgin. "Now," Mother says, "now she looks more like Mary Most Pure. Well done, girls, the Blessed Virgin is proud of you."

"We've turned her into a white lady," Caro says, examining the statue.

Mother smiles. "The Blessed Virgin is not a colored person. She is the Mother of God. She is above even white people."

"Then how come we had to rub all her brown skin off?" Caro asks. Caro doesn't believe everything grown-ups tell her. Caro makes up her own thoughts.

"Little girls shouldn't ask so many questions, Carolina," my mother tells my friend.

"Bonjour!" Teensy calls out, walking up our path, wearing a little sunsuit Genevieve's cousin on the bayou made her, all out of dishcloths. Necie is with her, and they're holding hands, coming to play.

"Hey! Pals!" Caro calls out.

"Hello, girls," Mother says when they reach the porch. She reaches out to pat Teensy's pretty black curls, but Teensy pulls away. She doesn't like my mother ever since Mother spanked Teensy's bottom for taking all her clothes off at my sixth birthday party and dancing around buck naked singing to me.

"Ooh, who is she?" Teensy asks, pointing to the statue.

"That is the Blessed Virgin that these good little daughters of Mary have reclaimed. She was a tacky colored Cuban with rouge like a harpy, but we took care of that, didn't we, girls?"

"Yes, ma'am," Caro and I say.

"She used to be a gorgeous brown lady," I say.

"Well, she sure looks like a spook now," Teensy says. "How come yall rub off her mouth?"

"What do you think, Denise?" Mother asks Necie.

"Did yall use an eraser?" Necie asks.

My mother laughs. "No, dear. We started with Clorox and switched to turpentine."

"Can we go play in the hammock now, please, ma'am?" I ask.

"Yes, you may," Mother answers, "but first come and genuflect in front of Our Holy Mother."

And so we all genuflect in front of the statue that looks like she saw something scary and lost all her color. Then Teensy spots the jewelry Mother took off the Virgin. She snatches it up so fast that Mother doesn't see her do it. That Teensy has quick hands, and she loves jewels.

So now it is me and Caro and Teensy and Necie out on the side porch. Harrison, who works for us, just hung the big hammock Father brought me. It's hanging from the blue ceiling of the porch, just outside the windows of Father's study.

"None of yall have a hammock like this. This one is Cuban." I climb into the hammock and lay back facing the street.

Caro says, "Okay, you ready for me?"

"I most certainly am," I tell her, and she scrambles into the hammock.

"Okay, Necie, now you."

Necie starts to climb in. She holds her dress so we can't see her panties.