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to.”
    Candy grinned. “You sound just like Momma.”
    â€œDon’t ever say that.”
    â€œYou do, you do, you do,” she said, making a face. “Nyeah nyeah. Okay, then: thumbs down on the Gap. Keep walking.”
    The next store was full of lingerie. Gorgeous cantaloupe-breasted models in black underwire bras gave us their best sultry looks from seven-foot-tall posters. “Victoria’s Secret Supporters,” I said, reading the display. “What are those?”
    â€œGirdles,” Candy said briefly. “Come here.”
    I joined her at the next shop entrance. “Bebe?”
    â€œThey’re out of San Francisco. And I guarantee you can spend some money here.”
    She was right. I left the store forty minutes later and six hundred dollars poorer, but in possession of the most beautiful jacket in the world. It had the New China look, small square shoulders and tailored at the waist and it was made of this incredible stuff called silk shantung that shimmered and changed color when you looked at it because all the warp threads were brilliant gold-green, while the weft ones were sapphire blue. That’s what the sales clerk said, anyway, and she said that silk shantung was in all the magazines, and that this season you could wear it over a casual blouse for lunch or at work, and then throw it over a dress for the classiest evening wear. It was beautiful stuff, soft to the touch, and also textured with little knots and tufts of this sea-foam thread. I loved it. I also got a pair of slacks to go with it, and then we sailed off to a shoe store to buy a pair of pumps in peau de soie—I made the clerk spell it for me—which is French for “silk shoes” and I loved everything I bought very, very much, as I had not ever allowed myself to love clothes before.
    Momma was dead. I didn’t have to be the plain one anymore.
    â€œI feel this incredible energy these days,” I told Candy as she led me to the Starbucks coffee joint at the end of the floor. “This freedom. As if I had spent my whole life holding back my natural strength, and finally it’s come bursting out like . . . like a kinked hose when you straighten it.”
    She laughed at me. “Splash!”
    â€œExactly! I used to drag myself out of bed after eight and a half hours of sleep. Now I’m staying up until one every night.” I had moved back into my parents’ house for the last six months of mother’s illness and was sleeping once more in the bedroom Candy and I had shared as girls. I had pulled up the blinds on every window because I couldn’t bear to miss a minute of daylight, and by six-thirty every morning I was sitting on the balcony watching the garden resolve out of the darkness, developing like a Polaroid from a mass of humped shadows into trees and monkey grass and palm fronds and ferns, and every now and then the cobalt flash of a bluejay.
    I slept less and I ate less. After years of turning down cheesecake in public and sneaking to the Empire Café for a furtive eclair, I didn’t even want dessert. “Half the time I was eating, it was like a bribe, this way of killing time, of dulling my spirit.”
    â€œAre you sure you’re not in love?” Candy said.
    I hugged my jacket in its crinkly paper shopping bag. “Not yet, but here’s hoping.”
    At Starbucks I let Candy examine the tags and turn the shoes over, plotting makeup, while I sipped my cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, the recommended special. I felt giddy and lighthearted, watching the ice skaters three stories below, bumping and circling. Putting an ice-skating rink in the middle of a mall in sweltering Houston was a stroke of genius, I thought, a perfect way of saying that at the Galleria, you really could get anything.
    Most of the skaters were hapless: eight-year-old boys trying it on a dare, or thrill-seeking visitors from Panama in rented skates. An elderly