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to ride our bikes seems to grow red brick. There are no longer open fields, just streets lined with enormous Georgian
     houses. “They spring out of the ground,” my mother says darkly, and it’s true that if you go six months without driving a
     particular country road, the odds are that the next time you take that route you won’t recognize it. My mother exists in a
     permanent state of disorientation, something I believe is common in southerners of her generation. She often calls me crying
     on her cell phone, reporting that she was just trying to take a shortcut and all of a sudden nothing looks familiar. “I’m
     lost in my own hometown,” she will say, and I will assure her that she’s not, even though the truth is, I get lost sometimes
     too.
    This would surprise Belinda, who is convinced that all of her self-esteem issues spring from the fact that she was born in
     Alabama. She came up poor and Michael had been poor too when she met him at the university. Poor but brilliant, one of those
     lanky stooped-over idiot savant country boys—and who could have foreseen he’d write some sort of computer program when he
     was still a sophomore, that he’d sell it to the Bank of America before he even graduated? Not her, that’s for sure. Everybody
     said she really knew how to pick them, but she hated it when people talked like that. It made her sound so calculating, and
     the truth is, girls never know what boys are going to become. It’s just that once, early in the morning, when they were walking
     to class, Michael told her she was pretty. She’d met some guy at a kegger the night before, a guy who’d spent six blessed
     hours humping her and then left without saying goodbye. Belinda had been walking to class hungover with her pajama top on
     and Michael—sweet, shy Michael—had fallen into step with her and told her she was pretty.
    They got married, she got pregnant, or maybe it happened the other way around, and they lived for two years in that awful
     student housing, and then, bingo-bango, he signs with the bank for six figures. Six figures and five babies in five years
     and now her mother keeps a picture of Belinda’s house on her refrigerator, held with a magnet. “She doesn’t have a picture
     of my kids anywhere in her whole trailer,” Belinda has told me, several times, her voice rising in indignation. “But Mama
     sure is proud of my house.”
    So it’s hardly surprising she feels a bit like an imposter, but the truth of the matter is, she belongs here as much as anyone—just
     one more fact to go into that bulging file labeled Things Belinda Has Not Yet Realized. She’s always trying to catch up. She
     goes to those expensive old-lady stores and buys sweaters with pictures on them. Not just for holidays. She wears them all
     the time. Sailboats and dogwoods and animals. Most of the sweaters are stretched in the front from being worn throughout Belinda’s
     poorly spaced pregnancies and it makes the pictures a little surrealistic. Tonight she is wearing a dog whose legs look much
     too long. The sweaters, along with ankle-length jean skirts and bright-colored suede flats, are what Belinda imagines the
     sophisticated suburbanite should wear and she refuses to be deterred from this vision, even though God knows none of the rest
     of us dress like that. I’ve wondered why Nancy hasn’t tried to set her straight, about the sweaters and other things too.
     Belinda does everything Nancy tells her to do.
    But Nancy, I guess, is uneasy in her own way. She moved down three years ago from New Jersey and she still seems overwhelmed
     by the sheer size of her house. A lot of people moving in from the Northeast are like that—they had a $400,000 ranch house
     in some commuter town and then they come down here and it boggles their minds what $400,000 will buy. It’s the way of the
     world. The Realtor punches some buttons and tells you what you can afford, and it’s more than you think you can