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drive-in movies. Our favorite prank is to move the car when one of us goes to the refreshment stand, so the abandoned one has to hunt through the rows of parked cars with their panting occupants to find us. Smoking Pall Malls, we cruise the new road to Bristol, the first divided highway in our area, with the same excitement as when we rode the new escalator at J. Fred’s.
    Dates with boyfriends take place entirely within cars — at the drive-in restaurants and movies and in secluded spots with fogged-up windows and radios softly purring.
    A girl soon leaves town chubby, only to return skinny a few weeks later. As their bellies swell, a couple more girls drop out of school to elope with traumatized, baby-faced boyfriends.
    One night I find myself attired in a white strapless Scarlett O’Hara gown with a hoop skirt, waltzing at the country club with a tuxedoed and cummerbunded Harold. I’m taking as much pleasure in my Merry Widow corset and satin spike heels as I used to in my shoulder pads and cleats. I, too, am now proud of the Tidewater land grants my fine colonial ancestors received from King James I. My grandmother sits at a table with my parents, smiling like the Cheshire cat in her sequined gown.
    Meanwhile, my sister Jane has been born with an olive complexion. Swaddled in a flannel blanket, she resembles a papoose. My mother, descended from New England Puritans, once proclaimed the idea of extramarital sex as unappetizing as using someone else’s toothbrush, so there’s no possibility of genetic intervention by some Native American milkman. Years later, when a plausible explanation emerges, some acknowledge having noticed Jane’s exotic coloring. But at the time, as in all polite southern towns, no one says a word.
    My brother John was my rebel without a cause while we were growing up. He threw snowballs with rocks in them at passing cars. He tapped into the phone line and made free calls all over the world until the president of the phone company informed my father that John would go to prison unless he stopped. He built a shortwave radio to play chess matches with people behind the Iron Curtain.
    I used to hide in John’s closet to watch him hypnotize his friends, stretching them board-stiff between two chairs, their heads on one and their feet on the other. He’d tell them that when they awoke, they’d walk into the shower fully dressed and turn on the faucets. Afterward they’d stand there in the shower in their soaked clothing, totally bewildered.
    When John dropped out of high school to join the navy, my father hunted him down and shipped him north to Deerfield and then to MIT, where he grew the first beard Kingsporters had ever seen on a young man from a respectable family. He edited the campus humor magazine and orchestrated such pranks as planting a large cardboard missile from a military recruitment display nose-first in the floodlit MIT dome and then painting a crack down the dome as though the missile had crash-landed there.
    Since John is my hero, I take his advice when he tells me to come north to college. In any case, I’m intrigued by my mother’s homeland. I’m also intrigued by my father’s madcap adventures at Harvard Medical School. So I hop a train up there, and John drives me to interviews at several colleges.
    I like the woods and the lake on the Wellesley College campus because they remind me of home — apart from all the anxious young applicants in their Bergdorf Goodman suits, who are strolling the paths with their equally anxious parents prior to their interviews. I’ve bought a suit made from a material that resembles mustard-colored burlap. The red paisley blouse matches the lining of the jacket. It had seemed chic at J. Fred’s on Broad Street. But up against all that gear from Neiman Marcus, I realize that I resemble June Cleaver en route to the dentist.
    I sidle toward a turreted stone structure that looks as though