THE HAIL HAD moved on, south and west, the line of clouds now a distant stacked wall on the horizon where the land shifted from cane to grain. As the sun showed through, I passed a roadside litter sign saying DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS and a pasture filled with black and white Maine d’Anjous chewing their way through Monday afternoon. A car passed me on the narrow two-lane farm-to-market, slowing to check for tractors around the curb. The bumper sticker on her back fender read MY DAUGHTER AND MY MONEY BOTH GO TO A & M. And, on radio’s Best Country in the City station, someone started singing, “I’m just catching up with yesterday, by tomorrow I should be ready for today.”

Lord, how fine it all was. How long I’d waited for today.

But, to be honest, if dancing in Waco hadn’t been all but banned, we’d never have got our children as grown as we did. If we’d found ourselves moving around the dance floor once more any sooner, likely we’d have made an awful mess, had a wild affair breaking hearts right and left, our own included. How could we have ever got together with four babies? How could we have pulled apart those Baby Days’ homes?

From the minute he’d shown back up in my life, at Lila Beth’s that first Easter, I’d had dancing with him on my mind. I’d waltzed around the smooth floors of the parsonage all that next week—remembering the dances we’d had, back when everything had been all right, our parents all in place, us thinking of nothing but holding on and moving our feet.

And soon, like an answer to a prayer, Eben and I had got a thick vellum invitation to the Cotton Ball Pageant, with its small enclosure card, its tiny envelope for our reply, “Complimentary” written across the price, Lila Beth’s name listed as sponsor. A gesture she’d clearly set in motion before I’d turned out to be that suspect girl from Andy/Drew’s past; too late to change her mind, if she’d wanted to.

I was delirious with excitement. The younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, whose son and daughter I’d tutored into Stanford and Duke, had been to all the socials in the state. She and her husband (and the older Dr. and Mrs. Croft as well) were part of the circuit. They did Idlewild in Dallas, Fiesta in San Antonio, the Rose Festival in Tyler, a dozen others. But her favorite, the one she used to talk about the most, was the Cotton Ball in Waco. “I think the reason that one’s so special,” she’d said, “is that dancing is still so spicy up there. It’s like drinking during Prohibition must have been. You can actually feel the excitement like fireworks when everybody gets out on the floor and actually hug dances, as they call it. Isn’t that rich? It’s forbidden at Baylor, you know. So the old folks have formal promenades with the men and women in facing rows, and the younger set has functions, as they call them, meaning nighttime garden parties with a band, where everyone takes off their shoes and splashes their feet to four-four time in the swimming pool. It’s that literal way Wacoans all talk. Saying ‘lap baby,’ when they mean a nursing infant, and ‘knee baby’ when they mean one who’s weaned. No telling what they call sex. ‘Hip coupling’?”

I’d been a voyeur of such dances for years, reading about them in the Sunday paper back in the university even when I was doing nothing much but studying, deciding what to do with my life other than not become a teacher like the woman who’d married my dad. I’d see pictures of the guests—sometimes the older or the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft, whose ambitious children were still in my future—in their long (and then short and then long again) gowns, of satin, chiffon, crepe, peau de soie, georgette, names from novels, captured in the orangy colors of the Living Section. Sometimes the dances were called charity balls and held in the ballrooms of downtown hotels; sometimes they were galas that took place in almost-finished skyscrapers or automobile showrooms before the cars were delivered; sometimes benefits, black-tie events out-of-doors, in city parks, on riverboats, on docks by the lake hung with lights, orchestras playing to the stars.

As soon as the invitation came, I’d spread my treasure trove of gowns on the bed—my secret dowry, which I’d kept stored in the back of the large linen closet in the hall of the parsonage. (It had always seemed strange to me how the families who’d first lived in the seventy-year-old house had had enough linens—monogrammed towels, hemmed sheets, appliquéd runners—to fill two deep closets, yet so few clothes that the parents shared a single shallow one.) The legacy of dresses had, of course, come to me from the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft. So pleased had she been at my results with her children that she’d insisted on some extra gift above my fee, some special present just for me. A week at a health spa? An airline ticket? I hadn’t even had the manners to hesitate. I knew she never wore the same formal twice; I’d seen that from the papers. They had to be somewhere, I’d reasoned. Packed off to the Next to New Shop, or at that very moment languishing in the back of one of her walk-in closets.

My request seemed to please her. “Get your mind off that high school beau of yours,” she’d said. “Get you out there with better options.” Then, locating the gowns, packing them lovingly in tissue paper and garment bags, she’d hesitated. “They look so dated, dear. Honestly. Clothes you think are the latest thing look worse than old hairstyles. You wonder what on earth you could have been thinking of.”

Spread out on my bed in Waco, they looked as if some magic trunk from the past had produced them. What wonders, the yards of fine fabrics, with tiny hooks or invisible zippers, tucks and linings and finishing seams a work of art. Some with lace across the strapless bodices, some with petticoats under layered taffeta, some with brilliants in a band around the chiffon neckline. My favorite: a floating white gown with a halter neck, narrow waist, and skirt a full circle at the ankles. It had been worn to a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers Gala. And the photos in the paper had lines of lyrics under the beaming guests: Shall we still be together with our arms around each other, shall we dance? On the clear understanding that this sort of thing can happen, shall we dance?

Eben had scratched around in the deep loam of his conscience trying to decide if we should accept. It wasn’t, after all, he reasoned, as if he was a Baptist preacher, although there was the general community at large to consider. And the invitation had been proffered by Mrs. Williams, the mainstay, in fact one of the elders, of his church. That must indicate that it was acceptable for us to go; especially since the tickets were complimentary.

Seeing the wealth of gowns I’d spread out on the bed, he was angry. He’d only hesitated, he explained, fearing I might not have a dress to wear; that our budget would not stretch for something new. I’d said I didn’t realize he’d never seen them, not able to admit how much I’d liked keeping them secret, how much I’d liked having something of my own he didn’t share.

As it turned out, the formals were inappropriate, the ball was actually only a pageant, and we didn’t get to dance.

I’d asked Mary Virginia to stop by, to help me choose one to wear. She had been kind, somewhat embarrassed, explaining that the Cotton Ball Pageant was an umbrella term for what was really a dozen events. Suppers for the princesses and their escorts, parties for the queen and the entire court, a sponsor’s evening for the parents and out-of-town friends (this did have dancing, and perhaps my doctor’s wife had come to that?), a garden brunch on Sunday for all the people who put the week together. That, actually, we were invited only to the nighttime pageant, to which people dressed up, but in cocktail clothes, no black tie, so they could sell more seats.

“You could describe the scenes yourself, Cile, even though you just moved here. It’s all the same old stories, each with about a zillion people participating, all of whose kinfolks pay to come. The tepees on the west bank of the Brazos; hauling the first load of cotton across the suspension bridge; the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, south of Kansas City; the invention of Dr. Pepper. Same old stuff.” She’d laughed, sitting on my bed, holding up first one dress and then another as she pretended to act out the scenes.

“But so much money for that—” I was crushed.

“Oh, well, those tickets aren’t general admission. We get a buffet first, and special seats, and the big reception afterward, you know, the perks. That’s for being part of the crowd who gets to arrive from somewhere else and adjourn somewhere else while all the mob are trying to find their cars and their kids.”

Possibly I looked close to tears.

“I can lend you something,” she said, “if this is all you’ve got. Don’t go buy anything.”

But I shook my head. I was going to wear one of those anyway, in case this was the nearest I ever got to a ball in this life. The white Ginger Rogers chiffon with the halter neck would do just fine. I didn’t care if I looked out of place; I had my own agenda. I could write the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft that I had been to the Cotton Ball Pageant in her Buick Showroom Gala gown.