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and the Gillette Crippled Children’s Hospital. Her pièce de résistance was a cape for a beauty queen in an iron lung, an Aran-stitched X and O cable.
    â€œNow when is she ever going to wear that?” Hazel muttered.
    It was as if adolescence—that new word that everyone all of a sudden knew—was a contagion Bea somehow had not caught. She agreed with her reasonable parents. She found high heels ridiculous. She ate casseroles and desserts with the abandon of a ten-year-old boy.
    And no, she wasn’t overweight, her mother conceded, but neither did she have the narrow profile, with long, thin limbs poking out of sleeves, that so many of the girls did then.
    It was a sign, a dance of mating, the way heels were and stockings and the square spot of purple on a female duck. A dab of makeup and the other little touches made a girl seem a normal girl, among the flock.
    Inside the music.
    Bea told her mother that people washed their hair more often than necessary because some businessperson had thought of a brilliant way to make more profit, off of women’s heads.
    â€œWell, we’re fortunate,” her mother said. “We can afford the shampoo. So go ahead and use all you like.”
    Her mother remembered that conversation a few years later, when Bea took the job with the advertising firm on Michigan Avenue, in Chicago.
    She hoped in Chicago Bea was washing her hair.
    Bea had never been truly oblivious. It would have surprised Hazel to learn that for two years of high school her daughter had considered herself to be in love with Alexander Pray, a delicate boy she could barely speak to. Her body changed when he passed by her in the school hallway. She sweated behind her knees; her mouth went dry. He was a high note. Other boys—the ones who helped her on the prom committee and followed along to meetings for the March of Dimes—hardly registered as notes at all; they were only rhythm, everyday comic noise. Burps, suction, a can opening.
    Alexander went along on the overnight trip to Michigan. Right before they left, as they were packing their duffels into the hold of the bus, Bea’s mother stood talking to him, alone. She lectured him, telling him that her daughter had no experience of overnight outings with young men and that she expected her back in one piece.
    Sometimes, Bea knew that Alexander was out of her league. Other times, she thought it was just possible he liked her.
    On that trip, they’d sat together. His arm had flung around her—or was it just resting on the top of the high bus seat? They’d slept with their heads together on the bumpy ride home.
    Did anything happen or not? Could it have? To this day, Bea wasn’t sure, although one night, in their forties, in a bar, Alex Pray told her about Hazel’s warning.
    No, Bea had kept him secret, an arrogant secret, the pure high note. Later, she was ashamed to talk about it because of how little there had been.
    It had happened in Chicago, too. The head of the firm; married. He probably never knew how much she felt.
    During the years her daughter was away, Bea’s mother had gone with several of her girlfriends out to the ecumenical church by the college. The services there were just different—less organ music and more about people’s real problems, the kinds of problems they didn’t talk about themselves yet but heard talked about on TV.
    There was a wonderful young priest, Father Matthew. Now that Bea was back, more stylish, if not much slimmer, her mother thought she’d have him over to dinner one night. Maybe he could help her daughter. He had grown up here. He must know people. His friends couldn’t all be priests.
    Not much was going on in the dating department.
    Bea’s mother now blamed herself. She’d done too good a job raising Bea. Half of rearing a girl was scaring her into not crossing the perilous line between popular girl and loose, sex being the line itself. The