Julie’s eyes cracked open to splinters of sunlight stabbing through the branches of the tree outside her window. Birdsong wormed its way into her ears. Sunshine? Bird song?! What happened to the blizzard, hurricane, freezing rain, any catastrophic event (meteor shower, volcanic eruption, invasion of the body snatchers, anything including PG only) that was supposed to paralyze the city that day, force the cancelation of every social event that night? Clearly her ardent wishes had been callously ignored. The only dark cloud presaging bad weather that morning was the one inside her.

“Ohhhhhhh. . .” she groaned as she rolled over onto her side and clamped the pillow over her head, thereby hoping to suffocate herself by mistake, thus not, strictly speaking, committing suicide, which the Catholic church firmly frowned upon. The ridiculous thing was that it was such a stupid, silly thing to be in a stew about. Really. But it was beyond her 15-year-old mental prowess to put a stop to it.

“Julie, are you okay?” her mother called anxiously from just outside her door.

“I’m fine, Mom!” Julie called back, cracking the pillow just enough to make sure a healthy, hearty reply reached her mother’s concerned ears. Good. Her inner Meryl Streep had come to the fore. Her voice carried not a hint of the angst (that interior dark cloud feeling) that was weighing heavily on her that morning. Since she’d turned fifteen, “angst” (German for ‘increased anxiety, dread’) was proving to be a very handy word, one she’d learned from reading a John Grisham book, of all things. 

Today’s angst had to do with the first ever mother‒daughter dinner to be held at school that night. Some of the mothers had come up with the nifty (not!) idea as a way to raise money for scholarships to Ainsworth Country Day School, Ainsworth for short. Julie had no problem with that. With her mother a homemaker and her father an assistant D.A., the $10,000 a year for tuition was a lot for her parents. No, being a Bolshevik at heart, she believed no girl should be barred from getting the excellent education offered by Ainsworth for reasons of money alone.

Forgetting her plan to mistakenly suffocate herself, she threw back her pillow, rolled onto her back, and stared at the ceiling (the cool air with its healthy oxygen level felt good), and for, like, the zillionth time in the past two weeks, she thought about what had her in such a tizzy that morning. In a word, her mother. In three, her plain, unfashionable mother. So many of the daughters had very attractive, very (make that trés) fashionable mothers. Hers was neither.

For example, there was Alexis Cowper, who looked like Princess Grace the younger, and her mother, who looked like Princess Grace the older. Then there was Angelina Baker with her long sleek black hair and peaches-and-cream complexion, who could be heard almost every Monday morning telling the Alexis crowd about the blue ribbons she and her mother had won at dressage competitions that weekend, all the while tossing her glorious glossy head of hair about like a horse’s mane. Make that its tail, a place anatomically closer to the horse’s hind quarters. Yes, that was the better place for Angelina given her snotty disdain of anyone who wasn’t at least half Anglo-Saxon with preferably some relation who still lived in a castle in England. And then not the least of the mother‒daughter duos was Dawn Dawson and her mother.

Dawn was the star (make that supernova) performer at any event that involved a stage and an audience. She could sing. She could dance—ballet, tap, modern, the troika—you name it. She could do it. She could also act. “She’s born to the stage,” Julie’d overheard Mr. Flouncy (that couldn’t be his real name), the drama teacher, say once. And hadn’t she cut her lovely long auburn hair short when she’d played the lead character, Nellie Forbush, in South Pacific? Short hair was, I mean, much more practical than long hair, she pointed out to, like, everyone, when one was “washing that man right out of my hair.” She was a walking, talking talent show, and why shouldn’t she be? She was, after all, the daughter of Billie Barr, an ex–Broadway star who’d given up her stage career to marry a very wealthy plastic surgeon and bear future generations of Broadway stars, all with perfect noses.

Then there were the fashions these trés attractive women sported! Alexis’s mother was pure Gucci. Angelina’s was died-in-the-wool Savile Row, London. And Dawn’s was OTT haute couture. (Julie knew because there was almost always a photo of the trendy threesome in the Ainsworth Social Committee section of the Ainsworth Voice, in which they were always wearing a trés fashionable ensemble, pronounced ahn-sahm-bleh, the bleh breathed more than spoken.)

Then there was her mother, a plain Jane if there ever was one. Even her name was plain—Mona. But, no! She wasn’t so callous as to think such a thought without feeling like a total crumb. In fact, when such thoughts about her mother drifted unbidden into her head, she always felt a well-deserved self-inflicted stab to her chest. Now, this morning of the day of the mother-daughter dinner, with this war of selfish concerns versus self-loathing raging inside her, she felt suddenly overwhelmed, sweaty, nauseated, faint—her fight-or-flight response totally disabled.

She groaned, rolled over onto her side, and crammed the pillow over her head again. (Just how long did it take to suffocate one’s self?!) Her thoughts then crazily traced the same route they’d taken like a hundred maybe even a thousand times over the past couple weeks. First there was the fact that her mother was happily and unashamedly plain. Her light brown, corkscrew hair she always wore short in a blunt cut, held back with a very worn tortoise shell headband—so worn that it had a strange opaque, milky look to it. Beyond the tight grip of the headband, her hair bushed out in a mad corona of curls. As to her facial features, her eyes were small and brown. Her lips, not very visible when shut. Her nose small, but straight. Cheekbones, none. Chin? She definitely had one. It had become particularly evident when she turned 13, when she and her mother didn’t always see eye to eye re: what a young teenage girl could and could not do. Otherwise, it was an okay chin. No mole on it with black hairs sprouting out of it, for example.

Her mother’s figure? It was hard to tell. During the week her standard outfit was a denim jumper, under which she wore a variety of tops. In summer it doubled as a sundress. Only on Sundays and other special occasions did her mother dress up, always in the same simple peacock blue, crepe skimmer dress that buttoned down the front. Oh yes, on Sundays and special days she also doffed her navy blue espadrilles and wore low-heeled black pumps. As for makeup, she only wore lipstick, and only that on the same days she wore her black pumps. Jewelry? Besides her wedding band she only ever wore her watch and small pearl earrings, though on very special occasions she would don a strand of pearls. And, as already noted, even her mother’s name was plain.

It wasn’t that her mother didn’t like clothes. It was just that they puzzled her. . . It had something to do, Julie was sure, with the fact that she’d quit college when her mother was killed in a car crash and she came home to be a mother to her three younger siblings, two boys and one girl, the oldest only fourteen at the time. Then, her father, who was a fireman, died at a fire a year later, which made her the lone parent and provider. She’d gone to work as a secretary/legal assistant for the DA’s office. That was where she’d met Julie’s father, Robert Tyler, one of the assistant DAs. She’d worked for him, and according to him, had a natural legal brain. She could see through every argument, comb through mountains of court proceedings and find the right precedent to prosecute a case, and often convinced him, heatedly, when he was going at a prosecution the wrong way.

The story went that he’d finally fallen in love with her over a matter of buttons. Like many men, he didn’t take much note of women’s clothes. But, over the course of several months, he’d begun to realize that her mother seemed to always wear the same skirt and blouse to work. But what threw him off was that the buttons seemed to change from day-to-day, or maybe it was from week-to-week.

Anyway, one day, he asked her, in his usual blunt prosecutorial way, “Miss Burch, is your blouse always the same and the buttons change? Or is it the same kind of blouse with different buttons?”

Laughingly, she told him it was the former. She had only the one blouse, and when she got tired of one set of buttons, she sewed on different ones. She then proudly announced that she had four sets of buttons, including some rhinestone ones she wore on dressy occasions.

That last admission had been a challenge to her father to “ascertain whether she was perjuring herself with regard to the alleged rhinestone buttons.” So he asked her out to dinner at a nice restaurant. She’d taken him up on the challenge, and she’d proved herself right. She did have rhinestone buttons! She also proved to be a delightful conversationalist, have a sharp wit, and have very definite ideas about just about everything, and willing to talk about her ideas (duke it out even) until the cows came home, though in their case that night it was until the restaurant closed.

And, then he’d discovered that she was a wonderful cook and a wonderful mother to her orphaned brothers and sister, all of whom were growing up “to be model citizens,” his words. Until then, her mother hadn’t talked much about her circumstances at home, i.e., the heavy load of responsibility and care she was carrying there. The combination of her humor, intelligence, selflessness, and cooking skills tumbled him, head over heels, in love with her.

Soon, not only did he become a regular guest at the Burch family table (he was batching it in those days), but he also “asked” if he might become a regular member of the family (i.e., by her marrying him). The family had a meeting, with her father present to defend himself, decided he’d pass muster as a pro tem dad, and he and her mother married. Julie was born soon after they married, and then that was it. Despite trying (Why did her mother always have to say that?), she never got pregnant again. Julie was all they got for children. But then, if you thought about it, her mother had pretty much discharged her parenting obligations by bringing up her three siblings, the last of whom went off to college when she, Julie, was only a toddler. (The two brothers were priests, one at the Vatican, the other somewhere in the Sudan—a very dangerous posting, but then the brother who was at the Vatican claimed that the Curia, the behind-the-scenes crew who ran the show in Rome, could be as dangerous as any enemy Sudani tribesman. Her Aunt Louise, her mother’s younger sister, lived with her family in San Diego. She was a half-time homemaker married to a marine biologist and worked half-time as a laboratory assistant at the Scripps Institute.) So Julie had only vague recollections of being anything other than an only child. But she wasn’t spoiled! Not with the father and mother she had! No way.

Anyway, the years when most girls are preoccupied with fashions and looks, her mother spent being a mother and provider. That part of her brain never got activated.

Julie veered sharply away from her mother. She loved clothes, jewelry, perfume, makeup—the works! Unfortunately, right now, she had to wear a uniform to school, thereby thwarting her fashionista leanings. Because of the rampant teen sex, and other non-academically conducive conditions, at the local public, Julie always mentally made that “pubic,” high school, her parents were sending her to Ainsworth.

IN HER DEFENSE, until the day when she’d sat reading the flyer the teacher had passed out announcing the mother–daughter dinner, she’d never really given her mother’s looks all that much thought. Really. As far as her own looks went, true, she was always inwardly pleased when people would remark on her close resemblance to her Aunt Babs, her father’s sister, with her head of soft, dark-brown curls, her rosebud lips, her large gray eyes, and her adorable figure. But that thought and concerns about her mother’s looks had never been thought in conjunction with each other!

BUT, when her large gray eyes snagged on the words “mother–daughter dinner” at the top of the announcement that had been passed out at the end of school two weeks ago, it was like a window shade snapped up in her brain that jarred loose a surprising landslide of panic about her mother and the impression she might make on the other girls at school, and their mothers. 

Yes, yes, yes. It was stupid to give a darn about things like social status and money and looks. But tell that to her stupid, addled adolescent brain that had a “mind,” ha, ha, of its own. Also of concern, and this was something to her credit, she didn’t want her mother to be an outcast in the crowd of high-style, affluent women she expected would be at the dinner.

 When she’d handed her mother the announcement about the dinner, she expected (hoped!) that her mother would be lukewarm about going. She’d avoided, so far, all the mothers’ teas, luncheons, and other get-togethers, but those hadn’t been big fundraisers. Julie was surprised, also dismayed, by her mother’s enthusiasm for the dinner. She thought it a “wonderful” idea, sounding just like Grace Kelly in High Society when she said the word. What a perfect way to raise money for the school’s scholarship fund! How “wonderful” it would be for the mothers and daughters to be gathered all in one place!

“I think I’ll make my praline cookies—if I can find the recipe,” she ended by saying, before sailing down the hallway to the kitchen, the announcement held aloft like a small sail, leaving Julie standing and feeling very alone in the dark hallway trying to figure out what had just happened and why she was suddenly feeling so alone in the world.

Her mother’s praline cookies were at least one ray of sunshine. (It was also fortunate that their name fell into the r-to-z group of mothers–daughters who were supposed to bring a dessert.) Her mother’s praline cookies were the hit of every Tyler family gathering. Even her dour Uncle John, your basic taciturn priest, the one at the Vatican, had once called them manna from heaven. Yes, there was some consolation in the fact that her mother wouldn’t bring shame on her in the dessert department.

“Julie, get up!” her mother shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Why are you being such a slugabed this morning? You’re going to make all the girls in the carpool late!”

“I’m getting up, Mom!” Julie shouted.

Satisfied by the bony thumps of Julie’s heels on the floor above her head, her mother went back to the kitchen. Not for the first time did Julie think that her mother hadn’t needed a college degree. She’d gotten an advanced, or maybe it was honorary, degree in mothering by the time she was born.