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lap. Why do I dwell on my mother and the Ya-Yas?
    Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.
    Sidda came upon crushed corsages, faded and powdery. Next to one was written “Cotillion w/ Jack. Wore yellow gown.” Stuffed in the crack of the same page was a fadedhandwritten receipt from some place called The Lucky Pawn. Sidda wondered what it could have been for. She had a hard time imagining her mother at a pawn shop.
    She found tickets to movies that cost only fifteen cents to get into. She found Coke bottle tops; she found an old IOU that read: “IOU 3 back rubs,” but no clue whose back was on the receiving end. One page opened naturally to three blue-and-white raised school letters for cheerleading and tennis from Thornton High School for the years 1941, 1943, and 1944. For some reason, the 1942 was missing. Sidda wondered about that year—what had happened?
    There were countless snapshots from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, many of them fading with time. It took Sidda a few moments before she realized she had yet to come across one picture of her father. But she was surprised and pleased when she stumbled across a little poem she’d written as a girl. It was folded into an envelope that read to the ya-yas from a bohemian girl.
    Then there was a cardboard foldout frame from The Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans, which contained a photo of Vivi, Teensy, and Genevieve, Teensy’s mother. Genevieve was gorgeous in a young Jennifer Jones sort of way.
    There were printed and engraved invitations to dances and luncheons and balls and afternoon teas.
    She particularly liked the “At Homes,” like the one that read simply:
     
    Mr. and Mrs. Newton Whitman
    At Home
    Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of June,
    nineteen hundred and forty-three
    from eight until eleven o’clock.
     
    On that invitation Vivi had scrawled “Wore the apricot tulle.”
    There was a photograph of an achingly handsome young man in a World War II Army Air Corps uniform. There were many photos of men in uniform, of course, but this one caught Sidda’s eye and forced her to linger. She wondered if it was Teensy’s brother.
    There were dance cards filled with gentlemen’s names. Sidda had heard of many of them and had known some of them when she was growing up in Thornton. There were a few fading mimeograph sheets from a class called “How to Be Smart and Charming.” There were holy cards, a red veteran’s poppy, and a clipping from the classified section of The Thornton Monitor , thanking Saint Jude “For Favors Granted.”
    As Sidda looked at these various objects, her imagination kicked into full gear, and she could feel the life that her mother’s keepsakes held. For a moment, she felt overwhelmed with gratitude toward Vivi for sending the scrapbook. She felt almost ashamed at being presented with such an embarrassment of riches. Sidda wanted to cry because she could not bear the thought of how vulnerable the scrapbook had been as it voyaged across the country in planes and trucks.
    Mama parted with these Divine Secrets because I asked her to , Sidda thought. The reason I feel like crying, Sidda realized, is not just because this scrapbook is vulnerable, but because Mama, whether she knows it or not, has made herself so vulnerable to me.
    Sidda returned to the snapshot of the Ya-Yas pregnant and posing creek side. She scrutinized the image. Each one of the women was laughing, and the longer Sidda stared at the photo, the closer she came to hearing their four distinctly different laughs. She studied each woman’s pose, herswimsuit, her hands, her hair, her hat. She closed her eyes. If God hides in details, Sidda thought, then maybe so do we. She took a deep breath in through her nose, held it for a moment, then let it out very slowly through her mouth. Her eyes remained closed, but Sidda was far from being asleep.

5
    T aking out the journal she’d packed, and intending to make some preproduction notes on The Women ,