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"Why do you think we're displeased with what you've done, Willow?"

"Why am I upset with what you've said to your mother. Willow?"

I could paper the walls of my memory with his questions.

My girlfriends worried about my father's psychological expertise from another point of view.

"How can you get away with anything?" they complained to me. "Your father would know immediately if you lie to him or cook up some phony excuse."

"I don't lie to him," I said, and they shook their heads at me with pity drooling from their eyes and lips, as well as some worry that I could get them into trouble, "However," I added. "I can fool my mother and often do."

That they not only understood but appreciated. It was as if getting past your parents was the initiation we all had to undergo to become full-fledged teenagers.

Somehow, lying to my adoptive mother on occasion didn't weigh too heavily on my conscience. Either the lies were too light or my conscience was too thick, whereas lying to Daddy would have been like stepping on a paper-thin sheet of ice.

Often. I thought my A.M. welcomed lies as long as the lies helped her to avoid some conflict or some disappointment. She was terrified of

unhappiness because someone sometime in her life had convinced her that sadness was what aged people the fastest and the most. Her belief was reinforced by the faces of some of Daddy's patients, especially the women. Depression, she was persuaded, aged them twenty to thirty years, especially around their eyes-- red, sunken and sad.

Anger was second on the list of youth killers, even though she succumbed to it more often than she would have liked. Scowling not only created wrinkles where there were none, but it deepened any that were naturally there. Thus, when offered the choice of following a deception or facing an ugly or unpleasant truth, my adoptive mother lunged for the lie the way some drowning person would stretch and jump for a life preserver.

She was truly a very beautiful woman, elegant and always in style. She often traveled to Paris. without Daddy, to shop for the newest fashions. Nearly as tall as Daddy, she had the figure of a runway model: to her way of thinking, being overweight was just as much an agent of age as anything. Women who gained and lost weight on a regular basis, she once told me, stretch their skin and create wrinkles, not only in their faces but also on their leas and even on and around their breasts.

"What's uglier than a woman in a V-neck gown with ripples of skin around her cleavage? Why, even a drop of perspiration flowing down from the base of her throat would get discouraged and evaporate," she told me once while she turned each and every way in front of her full-length mirror, scrutinizing her figure for any signs of imperfection.

All of my girlfriends were in awe of my adoptive mother, but that was because they didn't live with her. They saw her only from afar, looked at her the way they would look at some beautiful celebrity. From the things they said. I understood that their mothers were quite envious of mine. too.

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I worried that I could never have her sort of figure. I was five-foot-six. I had hair the color of a tarnished penny, whereas my A.M. had hair a shade lighter than fool's gold which actually glittered in the light. She kept it quite short, but she had a shelf of wigs in her closet so she could change styles at a whim.

One feature I had that neither she nor Daddy had were tiny freckles along the crests of my cheeks. I have a much lighter complexion than either of them as well. None of that was remarkable considering I was adopted, of course, but my adoptive mother was always jealous of my nose, claiming it was perfect and in proportion with my mouth and my eyes, speaking about it as if it were all a waste on me.

When I was a little girl. she warned me about my weight and predicted that I would always be chunky since I didn't have her genes. She pointed out my bloated cheeks and told me that was a good indication of what was to be.

"Your real mother must have been a chunky woman with a double chin," she declared. "Probably with oversized, sagging breasts and a waist you could tie an ocean liner to when it was in port She was probably short and squatty with ballooned cheeks and tiny eyes. Medicine, especially the medicine they give mentally ill people, can do that to a person, you know, and then their offspring inherit it."

She drew so many ugly visions of my real mother for me that I was sure I had been born to some sort of circus freak. I hated thinking about her and secretly harbored the hope that I had been created in a laboratory. Someday my father would reveal it, and it would shut my mother's mouth.

Amou said my adoptive mother was wrong about my baby fat, anyway, and was quick to cheer me up whenever my A.M. said things like that to me.

"Your mama is so worried about being infeliz, unhappy, and the wrinkles that would come, you'd think she would make sure you never be sad." she muttered.

Amou said many things under her breath. things I wasn't supposed to hear, much less understand. Sometimes she would use as many Portuguese words as she could, but I got so I understood those words, even the curse words, because I sat by observing and listening when she and her sister Marisa met for lunch at our house every other Sunday.

Actually, even as a child. I understood a great deal more than anyone thought, especially about myself.

But not quite as much as I needed to

understand. Not vet. That was coming.

It waited for me on a shelf in Daddy's office like a secret whispered in a dead man's ear.

.

When I arrived at the airport in Columbia. I was very surprised to see my cousin Margaret Selby Delray waiting for me at the arrival gate. It had been at least three years since we had seen and spoken to each other, the last time being at Uncle Darwood's funeral, The family had given out the story that he had died of heart failure. His alcoholism was an embarrassment that Aunt Agnes simply would not acknowledge. Like so many friends and relatives of my parents. the Delroys traveled on a bus without windows from one fantasy to another, shifting their eyes quickly away from anyone who would dare actually to look at them when they wove one of their illusions.

Margaret was only six months younger than I was, and comparisons were inevitable. I guess. She was two inches taller, but, contrary to my adoptive mother's predictions, I was the one who lost all her baby fat. The roundness evaporated from my face as if some magical sculptor molded my visage a little every night, bringing my high cheekbones out, thinning my lips, shaping my jaw and the lines of my neck and shoulders, firming and curving my breasts and narrowing my waist, until one day I looked at myself in my ivory oval vanity mirror and felt my heart go skipping with the real possibility that I was going to be attractive after all.