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a sin beyond redemption.” The quote belonged to Dr. Norman Lazarus, a biochemistry research scientist whose discoveries included a drug to treat bone cancer. As our school psychologist and guidance counselor had explained to me, Dr. Lazarus had donated most of his profits to educational institutions. He established this special school for gifted students, which was his favorite project. I supposed the motto was intended to make us all feel guilty if we didn’t live up to our potential. If you were brilliant and lazy, you were like a person who had a talent to play the piano beautifully but wouldn’t take a lesson or touch a key. People who lacked any talent could really despise you for that and hate the fates that wasted their powers on giving you the talent.
    I wasn’t afraid that I would enter Spindrift and fail to meet anyone’s expectations for me. I was afraid that I would enter the special school and fail to meet my own expectations. The implication was very obvious. I could almost hear my own father saying it again: “If you can’t be happy here among your own kind, Mayfair, you’ll never be happy.”
    My own kind? Even my father thought I belonged to a different species now.
    I wasn’t too happy and didn’t expect that I would be the most pleasant new student. I was never good at hiding my displeasure, which goes back to my taking after my grandmother Lizzy. I should have taken lessons from Julie while I had the chance, I thought. Maybe that was really how you got along in this world.
    I gazed out of the car window and saw that the few clouds streaming across the sky looked like white ribbons floating over a sea of Wedgwood blue. Whenever my real mother saw a sky like this, she would say something descriptive like that. She would often speak in beautiful metaphors, which were sometimes quite spiritual, even though she wasn’t very religious. We would go to church only on holidays or for special occasions like weddings and funerals, but she believed in a holy spirit in us and around us.
    She’d say, “Look, Mayfair, God is tying ribbons in earth’s hair. Isn’t she beautiful?”
    â€œWhy do you say ‘she’? How do we know the earth is female, Mother?” I would ask.
    My father would laugh and say, “What a kid. Look at what she thinks of at this age.”
    But my mother would stay serious and kiss my cheek or my forehead before running her fingers through my wheat-colored hair. She wanted me to wear it long then, and she enjoyed brushing it for me. I would look at her in the mirror while she sat or stood behind me, and I would study her face and wonder, Do all mothers look at their daughters like this, with such pure love?
    I thought that as long as I had my long hair, I would have my mother’s deep love. It had grown to reach halfway down my back before she died. After that, I chopped it down to just at the nape of my neck and did such a bad job that I usually wore a hat, even when my father took me by the hand to a beauty salon for repairs.
    â€œWe know the earth is female because of all that’s born from her,” she told me. “And you know mothers are the ones who give birth.”
    That was logical, so I accepted it. I always appreciated that my mother would try to be logical when she answered my questions, even when I was only three. She never ascribed anything to fantasy. Just as there was no bogeyman, there were no good fairies. Mothers do seem to know their children better than fathers do. She knew early on that make-believe wouldn’t work with me.
    When my father wanted me to believe in Santa Claus, I simply told him that it was physically impossible for one man to deliver gifts to all the children in the world on one night, much less keep a record of who was naughty and who was nice.
    â€œNot even FedEx can do that,” I said, and he roared with laughter.
    â€œThis kid’s better than