"Okay," Ma said with her mouth full. Without thinking I leaned over and kissed her other cheek. I could feel her powder on my lips.

"Huh," said Aunty Lilah. "Too bad they didn't get a picture, all three of you together. That Marty, she hasn't changed a bit." This was Aunty Lilah's way of saying she didn't approve of my sister's dress.

As we headed for the door I asked Marty: "Does Ma know that you're moving back to the city?"

"Nope."

"Don't you think you'd better tell her soon?"

She rolled her eyes and didn't answer.

I ended up sharing a cab with Mimi and a couple of members of the wedding party. Poor Mimi. The photographer had caught her unsuccessful lungea"Grace had aimed perfectly into the arms of her maid of honor. As our driver slammed on his brakes for the fifth time, Mimi turned to me. "How can you stand to live in this city?"

"I don't drive."

Mimi lowered her voice. "My mother told me about your trouble. If there's ever anything I can do to helpa""

"There's nothing you can do," I said. She looked so wounded that I added, "I'm sorry, but I just don't feel like talking about it."

"I understand," she said, in her best social worker manner.

When we got there the warm-up band, a couple of twangy girls with acoustic guitars, was just finishing their set. Marty and the others had arrived before us and managed to secure a table in the corner. They waved us over. This was lucky because by the time Zachary Richard got onstage it was standing room only.

The music was zydeco with a strong rock influencea"great for dancing, and pretty soon Marty got up with the usher. I could tell he didn't know Cajun from a hole in the ground but was good-naturedly making it up as he went along. When he twirled my sister the skirt of her flimsy dress hiked right up to her garter belt snaps, giving every guy in the room a bird's-eye view.

Beside me, Mimi was getting drunk. "This music is SO GREAT," she shrieked into my ear. "Why aren't you dancing?"

"Why aren't you?" I asked, and she laughed, tilting her head toward the man sitting next to her. I couldn't tell what this meant.

When the song ended Marty's partner kissed her hand and she gave a little curtsy.

Mimi said to me: "I thought Grace was beautiful. That traina"it had little diamonds cut out in it. Did you see?"

"I didn't notice."

"It's amazing that Xiao Lu ended up with someone Asian at all. All through high school he was obsessed with the blond cheerleader type."

The band had begun playing a slow song, a lullaby, with what sounded like Cajun baby talk. Fais do do. It was very sexy. I wanted to close my eyes and just listen but there was Mimi yammering in my ear again: "Did you know Xiao Lu lost his virginity with me?"

"Really?" She was drunker than I'd thought. "And you with him?"

"Uh-huh. And I threw that fucking lingerie shower for her."

"You're a good person, Mimi."

"I am, aren't I." Her gaze was caught by something on the dance floor.

I turned and saw them too. Fais do do. Marty and the usher, his hands on her waist, hers locked playfully around the back of his neck. She was laughing, but when wasn't my sister laughing as if the whole world were some colossal joke? She reached up and pressed her cheek against the guy's and then said something into his ear.

I turned back to make a snide comment to Mimi and my forearm accidentally brushed my half-full beer. It went crashing to the floor. I found myself mesmerized by the jagged shards swimming in the rapidly spreading puddle. Why had I never thought of broken glassa"surely it would make a spectacular scar, unlike the neat little controlled surgeries my tiger stripes were. I could even aim for a vein this time.

I thought this and then I got up abruptly with no idea what I was going to do. I stepped carefully around the beer and broken glass and began negotiating my way through the crowd. As I passed the dance floor, I saw the usher cup my sister's chin and turn her face toward him. Marty looked disoriented for a second, from liquor or coke or whatever she was doing, and then, like the actress she was, recovered and smiled up at him. It was her most winsome smile, the one she used when she was in big trouble or when she wanted something very badly.

But the stage lights were cruel and brought out the lines around her mouth and across her forehead. She had Ma's complexion, but unlike Ma had not shunned the sun to protect it. In that moment I saw this: that despite her beauty, my sister was after all very ordinary.

I left the club, knowing that she could take care of herself. I wasn't worried about Mimi either. Maybe she'd have a great one-night stand with the guy next to her.

It was a week until the first official day of summer, but with the sulfur smell off the sidewalk, the scanty way people were dressed, you'd have thought it was already in full swing. I turned south, into the hoi polloi of the Village, the angled streets crammed with cafes and strolling couples, calm, as if I could keep walking forever. Eventually I found myself on Hudson Street, where the breeze freshened off the river, which I could glimpse each time I passed a cross street.

I had just enough left in my bank account to meet my July rent and living expenses. I knew I'd never see a cent of the money I'd given Marty. On Monday I'd call my boss, commit to some freelance I could do at home. It was time.

Three months ago I'd wanted to leave this world. In the hospital they told us that pain is something you experience and then put behind you. I disagree. I think you hold everything, pain and pleasure, in your heart, and that memory only deepens the next experience.

In painting, it's gesture that counts. Prime the canvas and use anything, a dirty brush will do, to lay out the first strokes, and then whether you realize it or not you've begun the rhythm. When it's dry, a finished piece, what onlookers should feel is the tension of your wrist cocked as you fed leaf blades into whiteness, dipping again and again into your palette, the precision and confidence of the three seconds it took to draw the curve of a limb with your brush angled like a pen nib. All the steps of that particular dance, as well as the particular whole.

The morning I'd tried to kill myself, I'd stood on the curb of the driveway looking down at the backyard, and what I'd felt, finally, was failure. Whatever would I have done with that pale New England sky, the spreading boughs of the pines etched so mercilessly upon it, how could I have expressed the simplicity of the black walnut so that it would have meant anything to anyone but me? I wasn't good enough. I wasn't nearly good enough. I wouldn't even know how to begin. It was my doom to be able to see, to feel like this, and not be able to translate.

Still, at that moment I'd known: this life is exquisite.

Epilogue.

I never told anyone, not even Valeric, what I was dreaming about when Ma woke me up that Saturday afternoon after she got back from New York five hours earlier than she'd planned. She'd known, my mother, as she sat through her alumnae lunch, because she excused herself before dessert and hailed a cab to Grand Central to make the 2:05. When she saw me she began to scream, and miraculously they said, I was jolted back to consciousness.

I didn't want to wake up. At first it had been like any kind of going to sleep, except more serious, I could even feel my heart slowing down, my breath becoming shallow. I was dreaming of Carey, more of a feeling than a dream, of lying in a narrow bed with him, the long bones of his body pressed against mine like those times he'd held me the last few days, before I moved out, after we'd quit having sex, but the warmth of him was something I still craved.

And then I dreamed of a pattern, repeated over and over: white bears carrying pink and yellow balloons on a light blue background. I hadn't seen it in twenty-six years, but I recognized it instantly: the walls of my crib in Monterey.

Finally I dreamed I was flying. Not by myself, but on the back of an enormous white crane, up into the eye of the sun.

That's when she called me back. OPEN YOUR EYES. OPEN YOUR EYES. THIS IS YOUR MOTHER. OPEN YOUR EYES.

Before he died, Uncle Richard sent me a present, a key chain with a single charma"a little silver greyhound. Like Nai-nai's hairpin, I keep it with me always, because, even with the way things turned out, I need all the luck I can get.