MY WHOLESOME GIRLS sat in the dining room with me, eating an early supper of potato soup and warmed-up corn bread. They were poised on the edge of their chairs, waiting for their friends the Bledsoes to show, so they could all go out and hang around. I had someone else on my mind, too, and was wishing I could tell them my news.

I’d named them for dancers (Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham), wanting to embed in their very bones from the start the lightness and grace that I’d longed for myself. Then watched, bemused, as—generously overshooting the mark—they’d grown instead into towering, leaping athletes. I had also, missing my mother so terribly when they were small, felt it my bounden duty to pass on to them her fervent social consciousness, aware that in some way I had not been what she wanted, my passions too private, too personal, too local for her. So that they, her graceful granddaughters, had learned to soar into the air to score, to spring across the courts, all the while carrying the world’s worries with them. Runners bearing the torch. The result was that they were stuffed with the dreams of two lifetimes, packed with the bulging hopes of two generations. No wonder my fair daughters were larger than life: they’d been raised on the anabolic steroid of wish fulfillment.

As usual, I felt dwarfed and plain in their company. It reminded me how my mother used to say—when I complained about being so short and about how my mouse-brown hair was always blowing in my face—that she’d given me the best heredity she could manage and to be grateful for my straight hair, straight nose, and straight teeth. My girls were a more robust and vibrant breed than I. Not dark like their father, having my lighter coloring, they took after him in height, being already, at twelve and thirteen, five seven and five eight. Ruth, the older, my serious ecologist, wore her sandy hair in two thick clumps, one sticking out over each ear, and over ample breasts which her sports bra failed to bind wore a green T-shirt that urged SAVE THE WETLANDS. Martha, the younger, my animal lover and future vet, had a fat French braid down her back, two deep dimples she tried to ignore, and a chest message proclaiming FUR IS DEAD.

As usual, they were talking cows.

Today, N’Damas.

Martha, looking milk-fed herself, and to my motherly eye as if she should still be wearing pajamas with feet in them, was arguing with the stubbornness of younger siblings. “We’re mapping their genes. To increase milk production. They’re tsetse resistant, even though they don’t give much milk, the N’Damas are, their cows. But ours, that do give milk, they die like flies from those flies over there, the same as people. So we’re mapping their genes, see?”

Ruth tugged at her clumps of hair, holding them out like antennae. “That’s evil. That’s really evil, Mart. You know that, don’t you? That it’s evil? There are already two billion cows in the world, plus one and a half billion goats and sheep, plus one million pigs. What they ought to be doing, instead of using stuff like bovine growth hormones to engineer cows for bigger burgers and better cheese spread, is to get rid of them all. Do you have any idea how many people in the world could be fed on the grain that livestock eat?” She leaned across the table and waved a spoon at her sister.

Her kind face crinkling in frustration, Martha raised her braid and her voice. “You don’t even listen. You never pay any attention to what I’m saying. What we’re doing is mapping genes, and that’s good. I’m writing a paper on it. So those starving people in Africa can have milk. The reason they don’t have protein over there is not because the cows are eating the sorghum in the Sahara, Ruth”—she leaned forward, her earnest dimpled face intent—“since there isn’t any, but because the cattle they have, the N’Damas, don’t give enough milk.”

“What you need to be writing a paper on, Mart, is on plans for a livestock eradication project.”

Martha stood up, looking as if she might burst into tears. “You’re like those farmers in the dairy states objecting to everything. To gene mapping the same way they objected to the steel plow and barbed wire and the mechanical hay baler. I did a paper on that—”

“Do a whole Ph.D. on it. Or on your fly-proof N’Damas. Or on that wrinkled old Asian cow you love with the lousy meat.”

“The Wagyus, for your information, have the kind of meat that if you eat it, it actually lowers your cholesterol. For your information, that happens to be a very important scientific research idea. I may do a—”

Ruth sighed, stuck her spoon behind her ear, made a face.

How beautiful she was with her deep-set eyes and wide mouth, growing to look more like my mother every day. How proud she, Celia, would have been of these girls, with their passion for the whole world, their unflagging concern for every mouth unfed, every avenue of rescue unpursued. They must have got it straight from her, by a sort of osmosis in the womb, as if she’d implanted an incubator just for the likes of them in me, a nest destined to produce her heirs.

“The trouble with you, Mart”—my eldest tried to wrap up the argument; it was time for the Bledsoes to show—“the trouble with you is, you just parrot what you read. Don’t you know that all that gene mapping stuff is just McDonald’s financing bovine somatotropin McBurgers?”

“You thought it was a big deal, last year, when they were mapping corn genes—”

“Because it was. It is.”

“Well?”

It made me happy to listen to them, thinking that soon, so very soon, I would be able to offer these daughters of mine a farm where they could have their daily debate surrounded by the very four-stomached, ruminating milk cows they so adored/abhorred. Nice rich pastureland filled with live slow-moving, cud-chewing, shade-loving specimens to study.

And it rushed over me to tell them about Drew. Girls, I’m running off with this dear gentleman farmer that I’ve known since before you two were born or even thought of, and we’re going to live out there on the land, happy as Herefords at the State Fair. And you can come anytime and have Cow’s Party in the bluebonnets. You, Martha, can stuff long stalks of bluestem into the gentle rubbery-lipped mouths of heavy-lidded Holstein, lay your dimples against their thick necks, and you, Ruth, can breed hybrid maize in rows behind the barn, where the soil has been turned and furrowed for a hundred and fifty years.

And if I’d already talked to Eben, I might have told them then and there. I had a need to reassure myself that although I’d be leaving them on weekdays until they could drive, I’d still have them in my life. More, that I’d have something new and fine to offer them; someplace that they, in their easy independence, might grow to love and consider home.

I must have looked at them with the words near my lips, the wishing on my face, because both girls turned to me.

“What do you think, Momma?” Martha asked, trying to read my expression. Wanting to keep peace.

“I wanted to say—”

Ruth held her clumps of hair straight out to receive my message. “Attention,” she said, with her tolerant elder-child smile, “a bulletin from the short people.”

I caught my breath; my news would have to wait. It wasn’t fair to their father to tell them first. “While you’re having this cow fight,” I said, lightly, my throat choking slightly, “don’t forget you’re eating soup that has half a cup of milk and a pat of butter per bowl. Not to mention a secret spoon of Parmesan cheese.”

“Momma!” Ruth made a strangling sound, staring at her bowl of white liquid in horror, as if she might have recently contracted bovine spongiform encephalitis. “I thought this was potato soup?”

“It is. But if it didn’t have anything else in it, it would be mashed potatoes.” I laughed.

Ruth’s debate over whether to push her bowl away and get up from the table or finish her meal was solved by the sound of the Bledsoes’ car, honking out front.

I walked them to the curb, waving at the departing mother behind the wheel of the big new Olds.

The Bledsoe girls, in racing shorts and running shoes, with their amazingly long legs and high behinds, were taller even than my girls. The older, named Rosa by her mother but called Sugar at school, was five ten at least, and the younger, named Phillis but known as Baby, looked to be five nine. It was hard to tell for sure, because their shoes seemed to have lifts and they wore their hair, cropped close in back, in high wiry tiaras in front, adding at least three inches to their height.

The two pairs of siblings had met during their sixth-grade year when all the schoolchildren in the city were bused to separate and equally inconvenient schools. The older girls now played basketball together; the younger two, volleyball.

The Bledsoes’ nicknames, Sugar and Baby, had been dreamed up by school paper sportswriters who needed a good tag. In the case of mine, their last name provided a wealth of leads concerning what one or the other had done to the opposing team in citywide games: devasTAITed, irriTAITed, decapiTAITed. (Or, when the writers were reaching, obliterTAITed, annihiTAITed, elimiTAITed.) I could see that in a couple of years when my daughters were playing on the same teams in high school, the headlines would herald their rat-a-TAIT-TAIT offense and their TAIT-à-TAIT defense.

In a couple of years, also, these four would all be taking Japanese, a new course that had come into the curriculum without a murmur, giving a new twist to the term bilingual education, which once had meant English as a second language for Spanish-speaking students, and now meant Japanese as a second language for English-speaking students. The earth turns; Waco had become part of the global village. The school district wanted our youth to be ready to deal with the Pacific Rim, which, in this case, meant the corridor of scientists settling along the interstate. Baylor University, that Baptist bastion which still offered a vigorous course of studies in the separation of church and state, had led the way and now taught—in addition to Japanese—Chinese, Thai and Indonesian to its fresh-faced, drug-free students.

In response to this same brave new world, the district was also putting into effect an accelerated prep school imbedded right in our existing high school. And although the Bledsoes did not live in Lake Shore but in Oak Hurst (on Oak Wood off Wood Oaks off Forest Oaks off Oak Forest), they went to school with my girls because Barbara, their mother, taught gym at the middle school. They were eligible for the program anyway, because selection was to be city wide. Modeled on the best preparatory schools in the East, it was going to give every student a shot; there was to be no test screening or teacher selecting. Those who can take it can take it was the slogan.

The school system was trying to promote it as the Academy, harking back to the time when Waco, because of all its early educational institutions, had been known as the Athens of Texas. But the kids had already coined another name for the would-be Academicians: nesters. An old term around here for those small homesteaders whose farms were tucked within the spread of larger landholders. Besides, Athens to most of the kids was just the name of an east Texas town. They were concentrating now on the glory that was Kyoto and the grandeur that was Jakarta.

But right here in the mild breezy tail end of Wind Day, the foursome was debating whether to go run or stop by the school and shoot baskets.

While they talked, bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet, Baby was slowly drumming on Sugar’s back with her fists, doing a little jivey dance, as if making music.

Sugar whirled and glowered at her sister. “I wish you would stop acting like a dark continent, dickhead—” The tall athlete looked down at me and made a polite apology. “Pardon, Mrs. Tait, that’s peer group parlance for ‘seventh-grader.’ ”

I laughed with them. How transparent they all were in their feuds. Each needing constant attention, approval, from her one true peer, her sister. Maybe, I thought, that was who we always cared the most about, the ones we grew up with.

Maybe that was the cement between Drew and me: we went all the way back to the good old dumb old days.