George and I and Regan and Billy and Donnie and Susie flew up to Washington for the inauguration. We sat on the inaugural platform at the back of the Capitol, gazing out at the Washington Monument in the distance as the oaths of office were recited.

When the ceremony ended, we were ushered inside to a lunch amid the gleaming marble columns of Statuary Hall. Suddenly, I heard the U.S. Army Strings begin to play, their haunting violins unexpectedly surrounding us, and I gasped. Years later, at my own White House dinners, I would glance around to watch the enthralled expressions of our guests as a procession of strings magically appeared in the State Dining Room.

George and I now existed in that particularly strange netherworld of celebrity by a.s.sociation. In Midland, cars drove slowly past our house as locals pointed out "this is where Vice President Bush's son lives" to their out-of-town guests. We were vaguely "someone," the children of the famous, while I had the quiet ache of having no children of my own.

For some years now, the wedding invitations that had once crowded the mailbox had been replaced by shower invites and pink-or blue-beribboned baby announcements. I bought onesies and rattles, wrapped them in yellow paper, and delivered them to friends.

I had done it with a happy wistfulness, believing that someday my time, my baby, would come. George and I had hoped that I would be pregnant by the end of his congressional run. Then we hoped it would be by the time his own father announced his presidential run, then by the presidential primaries, the convention, the general election. But each milestone came and went. The calendar advanced, and there was no baby.

The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child, or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful, some not. Still, we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only "I am sorry for your loss." But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?

In the fall of 1980, as the white-hot presidential race was drawing to a close, George and I decided to apply to the Gladney Home in Fort Worth to adopt a baby. We had friends from Midland who had been Gladney babies and other friends who had already adopted their own children from there. Janet and Fred Heyne's daughter and son were Gladney babies. In later years, Susie and Donnie Evans, Jan and Joey O'Neill, and then George's brother Marvin and his wife, Margaret, would all adopt one or more of their children from Gladney.

What became the Gladney Home began in 1887, when a trainload of abandoned children from the northeastern United States arrived in Fort Worth on what was called the "orphan train." Over 150,000 children rode those trains from the East Coast to the Southwest until 1929. Now we were hoping that someone else's child might find a place to be loved in our home. We filled out the paperwork. Mother snapped a photo of us

along the fence line of our backyard, George in a brown corduroy jacket, me in a red sweater and pleated pants, our smiles strained but hopeful. Every time I come across that photo, it seems to say, "Please give this couple a baby."

At the same time as we were driving to Fort Worth for our Gladney interview and tour, I started to see Dr. Robert Franklin in Houston, Texas, for hormone treatments. In April of 1981, just as we were waiting for our home visit from Gladney, I discovered that I was pregnant.

I was anxious the entire time that I was pregnant. The memories of Mother's late miscarriages hung over me. And I was thirty-four years old, which in 1981 was considered old for a first-time mother. We had so longed for children and I was so superst.i.tious about this pregnancy that I even avoided the baby aisle of the grocery store.

The days and then the weeks pa.s.sed, but I remained afraid to hope.

Dr. Franklin was also worried that I might miscarry, just as Mother had. The recommended treatment was cervical sutures. George and I headed to Houston for the procedure, our fingers interlaced, our hands clasped together, communicating in that one gesture every hope that we held for all the months to come. While we were in Houston, Dr. Franklin scheduled us for a sonogram, which was a relatively new technology and not at all routine. Our radiologist was a doctor named Srini Malini, and we watched her as she studied the incomprehensible flecks of white scoring the dark gray screen. At last she turned to look at us and said, "There are two babies." George's eyes and mine overflowed.

But Dr. Malini kept staring at the screen.

Her next words were "They are not cojoined." Both of us gasped; we had never envisioned such a thing. My mind began to race with questions, and I asked her to look to see if there were any heart defects, anything a.s.sociated with Down syndrome. I had already decided against amniocentesis, because we didn't want to tempt the risk of miscarriage. And these were my babies. I would love them however they came. Dr.

Malini looked very closely, and then she said, "They're beautiful babies," the words I had longed to hear.

We asked if she could tell whether they were boys or girls. She turned back to the machine and said, "I can tell that the top one is a girl, but I can't see the one underneath as well. I'm pretty sure she's a girl, but I'm not positive."

The next day I had the sutures, and I sat in my hospital bed that night watching the highlights of Prince Charles and Lady Diana's storybook wedding, dreaming of a happy ending of my own. George had a dozen roses delivered to my room and signed the card, "With love, from the father of twins."

When I first learned that I was pregnant, I had pictured two babies in my mind.

My next thought was that it's greedy to want two babies, and I berated myself for even thinking such a thing. Now there were going to be two babies, if all went well. One of my friends in Midland was a midwife, and she told me that anyone pregnant with twins should lie down in the morning and again in the afternoon, and I did that. I took Lamaze lessons from my close friend Penny Slade-Sawyer, who was the mother of three boys. I went to the neighboring city of Odessa to see my obstetrician, Dr. Charles Stephens, every three weeks, and my father insisted upon driving me there each time. Then in early November, when I was barely seven months along, Dr. Stephens found the early signs of preeclampsia. My blood pressure was dangerously high. He looked at me with a worried

face and said, "I'll never forgive myself if you don't get at least one baby." He wanted me to go to Houston or Dallas, where there were neonatal intensive care units, because he was sure the babies would be born prematurely and might need special care. I chose Baylor Hospital in Dallas because my uncle Mark was a doctor there and the neonatologist, Dr. Delores Carruth, was the mother of twins. George and I booked our flight.

In Dallas, I was admitted to the hospital and put on bed rest. I was determined to give the babies every possible day to develop and grow; I wanted them to have whatever chance I could give them. George was traveling between Dallas and Midland, tending to me, tending to his business, finishing his job as chairman of Midland's United Way charity campaign. But I was not lonely in my hospital room. Barbara Bush scheduled an event in Texas and came to see me, and so did my Dallas friends Pam Nelson and her husband, Bill, and Anne Johnson, the wife of Clay Johnson, one of George's longtime friends from Andover and Yale. Clay and Anne had seven-year-old twin boys of their own. Weldon and Robert visited me one day in my hospital room and soberly counseled, "We were premature and it wasn't that bad."

On November 24, George was back in Midland hosting the final United Way luncheon when my Baylor doctor, James Boyd, called him and said, "You are going to have your babies tomorrow." George asked him, "Are you sure?" And Dr. Boyd said, "Yes, unless you want your wife's kidneys to fail." My blood pressure was too high, and it was dangerous to continue the pregnancy. George rushed back to Dallas, and at dawn the next morning, I was wheeled into the operating theater for a cesarean section. George was standing next to me as they delivered the babies. Barbara came first at five pounds, four ounces, and Jenna second at four pounds, twelve ounces. They were five weeks early.

We had chosen to name the girls after our mothers, and we did it alphabetically and democratically. The baby who arrived first would be Barbara, the second would be Jenna.

Word was out that the vice president's daughter-in-law would be giving birth at Baylor, and all the television stations from Dallas were waiting at the hospital. One cameraman brazenly walked up to the maternity ward. As I was being wheeled from the operating room, he stepped from behind a wall with his camera. I was swollen with edema from the toxemia and my failing kidneys, and now my postcesarean face was flashed on the local news. It was humiliating. And what was even worse was that I smiled, trying to be accommodating, rather than simply telling him to go away and leave me alone. News photographers snapped pictures of George and the babies so that papers across the country could run the photo with the caption "The vice president's latest grandchildren."

Our girls were here and healthy, and we were thrilled. The country music group the Oak Ridge Boys sent tiny pink sequined jackets. And the jazz great Lionel Hampton sent three vases of red roses to my room, one for me, one for Barbara, and one for Jenna, with a note saying, "Welcome to the world. Lionel Hampton."

And we welcomed them. They were, quite simply, the answer to all our prayers.

I never saw Dr. Malini after that one visit in Houston, when she showed us the first images of our girls. Then on July 18, 2005, George and I hosted an official dinner at the White House for the Indian prime minister, Mahmohan Singh, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. The State Dining Room was transformed into an Indian garden, with overflowing vases of orange and red flowers, saffron-hued silk tablecloths, and miniature trumpeting elephants fashioned from hot pink and green mums and roses. For that dinner, one invitation was particularly precious to me. I invited Dr. Malini. When she came through the long receiving line wearing a stunning orange sari, George announced to the prime minister of India that she was the doctor who'd told us we were having twins, that she was the first doctor to see our babies. Dr. Malini laughed and said, "Yes, and I've honored patient confidentiality for all these years. I've never told anyone that I was the one who saw for the first time that you were going to have twins." I sat her at my table, and nothing made me happier than to see her beautiful smile all through dinner. It was such a small thing to give back to someone who had given us so much on that hot and anxious July afternoon.

A few days after the girls were born, Mother and Daddy flew into Dallas to see the babies. Uncle Mark stopped by, and Daddy told him that he was having shoulder pain. Mark immediately went on alert. "I just had a patient who died of lung cancer," he told him, "and his first symptom was shoulder pain. When was your last X-ray?" Daddy hadn't had a chest X-ray in a while. Uncle Mark hustled him off to Radiology. When the films came back, the radiologist didn't see anything, but Uncle Mark did. It was a tiny spot, the kind of shadow that perhaps only a brother would have seen. He pointed to it and asked the radiologist, "What about this?" I had just given birth to twins, and my father was being diagnosed with lung cancer. He and Mother headed back to Midland to pack for a long hospital stay. Daddy's only hope of beating the disease was if surgeons removed part of his lung.

Joey O'Neill's dad offered to send his private plane to pick George and me and the girls up when we were finally released from the hospital, in mid-December. It saved us a six-hour drive or a commercial flight with two premature babies. When the plane left Midland for Dallas, my mother and daddy were onboard. Daddy was coming to Baylor for his surgery; I was leaving to return home to Midland. I don't remember what we said to each other; I was too overwhelmed. Life and death were balanced on the span of those two aluminum wings.

George and I arrived home, and we were on our own. While I had been at Baylor, my friends had hosted a baby shower for me and had set up the nursery. I hadn't even decorated a room or shopped for baby clothes because I was afraid to prepare for a future that might not come to pa.s.s. Now I had armfuls of diapers and tiny clothes and bottles, and I was completely overwhelmed. George and I had no experience with babies, and suddenly we had two, who seemed to cry all the time. I longed for my own mother, but she was with Daddy, first in the hospital and then for his long convalescence at home.

Friends came over to help set up our Christmas tree.

For months, I had secretly daydreamed of sitting under the Christmas tree with George and our two wonderful babies, like some storybook tableau. Instead, we were bleary-eyed and nervous, trying to soothe howling twins. Some nights, we put them in their cribs and literally ran to the other side of the house, hoping for an hour of quiet.

Eventually, driven by exhaustion and inexperience, we hired a baby nurse to help us get up with the girls in the middle of the night and to give us a chance to ever so briefly leave the house. After the girls were in their cribs, we would take long walks around Midland in the chilly wintry darkness, arm in arm.

Christmas came and went, and we adjusted. We got the girls on a strict routine.

We fed them both at the same time, even in the middle of the night. We put them down early, and they woke up early, and I had them nap in the mornings and afternoons. I believe very strongly in the importance of sleep for all children, but especially for premature babies, whose brains are still growing and developing. After the initial crying and the trauma of us trying to adjust to them and them simply trying to adjust to the world, both girls became happy babies. And George and I discovered a wonderful symmetry in having twins; there was always a baby for one of us to hold. Every morning before dawn, George would get up to make the coffee, as he had done from the start of our marriage; then he would go get the girls and carry them into our bed. We'd each hold a baby and drink our coffee while they drank their bottles, with the morning news droning quietly in the background. The start of the day was reserved for just the four of us. Those early mornings were some of the sweetest times of our lives.

In the afternoons, even in the frigid winters or broiling summers, I would push the girls in their stroller around the sidewalks of Midland. I adored those walks through the daytime quiet in the same neighborhood where my family's "Big House" had been, where each yard or square of sidewalk held a childhood memory of my own. At the end of our walks, we pa.s.sed a large, frosted globe light planted atop a post on a neighbor's front lawn. One afternoon Barbara lifted up her little hand, pointed, and said, "Moon." We had been reading Goodnight Moon Goodnight Moon at bedtime, and she thought this white orb was the moon at bedtime, and she thought this white orb was the moon rising on her street.

I still worried, though. The doctors had told me that many premature babies have eye problems, so when they were around six months old, I took both girls to an eye specialist, who waved a penlight around the room and had them follow it with their eyes.

He told me they were very alert girls, and I breathed a relieved sigh. They crawled early and walked by age one. But I still remember the couple of days when Barbara acted listless. I bundled her off to Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, who had been my pediatrician and who had treated the Bush children. Every child in Midland seemed to have been poked, prodded, and tongue-depressed by Dr. Wyvell. She had gray hair now, and she remained strikingly blunt. She did an exam, ordered some tests, and looked at me. "I know why you're worried," she said. "It's to be expected." With that, she p.r.o.nounced Barbara fine.

Dr. Wyvell was the one who had diagnosed George's little sister Robin's leukemia when she was three and had told Barbara and George Bush that there was nothing they could do but make her comfortable. Leukemia was fatal, Dr. Wyvell explained, and she would slip away in a matter of weeks. Robin spent most of the next six months in Sloan-Kettering in New York, pumped full of transfusions on the slim hope of a cure before she died.

At home, I bought a baby food grinder and made all the girls' meals from scratch.

Later, when we went out to eat Mexican food on Friday nights, we would bring the girls, and they would sit in their high chairs eating beans and rice. After those years of living just the two of us, I was happy to have a home with baby toys strewn across the floor and crawling and toddling twins, exploring every nook and cranny of their world.

Daddy recovered from his surgery, and he and Mother began to drop by all the time to see the babies. Daddy's favorite time to arrive was right after lunch, just when I'd put the girls down for a nap. He would knock on the door, open it wide, and loudly call, "Laura, are the babies awake?" They invariably heard him, and once they could pull themselves up, they would be standing in their cribs beaming when their grandfather opened the door. He loved to hold them on his lap, their two little bald heads and his big one bent over together. We spent our Christmases with Mother and Daddy, and the girls clamored to go to Mother and Daddy's house on Halloween, to trick-or-treat there first.

Mother brought pink-frosted cupcakes on Valentine's Day, and we set up Easter egg hunts. Barbara scoured the gra.s.s and bushes and found the most eggs. She was a young collector, with mounds of colored eggs clutched in her hands and pressed tightly against her chest. Jenna was our homebody. When we were selling the town house on Golf Course to move to a larger ranch-style house on Harvard Avenue, she got on her tricycle and pinned one prospective buyer inside our little concrete backyard. As fast as her feet could push, Jenna rode in tight circles around the woman's legs until she could hardly take a step. Jenna was determined to defend her home against intruders at all costs.

Both girls were early talkers. I would repeat to them, "Say 'Daddy,'" and "Daddy"

was their first word, which thrilled George. I've long thought that it's a smart thing for mothers to do, to teach their children the word "Daddy" first.

George loved being a dad. He changed diapers when the girls were small. He got up at night to help feed them their bottles. He would come home and think of adventures.

One night, when a rare Midland snow had started to fall and the girls had just turned three, he announced after dinner that we were going for a snow walk. We bundled the girls in their jackets and trooped off in the darkness, and as the snow shimmered under the glinting streetlights, we held up our faces to feel the flakes land one by one. And he loved to play with his daughters. Some weekends, we would head to Donnie and Susie Evans's house on Lake Travis outside of Austin, and the dads would play El Tigre with the kids at night, under the stars and the moon. The kids would run around the cedar brush and the dads--George, Donnie, and Charlie Younger, another good friend from Midland--would chase them and growl or roar. Somehow, the kids always managed to hide from or outwit El Tigre. Once, George, Donnie, and Charlie were creeping underneath the branches of live oaks when they spooked an owl that took off screeching into the air. That bird gave the three Tigres more of a scare than they ever gave the kids.

Another of our good friends, Mike Weiss, later told me that George had taught him how to play with his own kids. "My dad never played with me," he told me once.

"George taught me how to be funny, how to have fun with them and have a good time."

Our lives in those years in Midland were centered on our family and our friends.

Often, Mother and Daddy would come for dinner. I would call Mother late in the afternoon to see what she was cooking, and we would put our meals together around our little table. I remember one summer evening, working in the flower beds in our yard after the girls had gone to sleep, while the sun still hung low in the sky. George was sitting on the steps with the newspaper, and I thought to myself, This is the life. And it was.

For the first four years that George's dad was vice president, we rarely went to Washington. In the late spring of 1984, the Bushes came to Midland for a reelection rally for Reagan-Bush. We met their motorcade at the airport and rode in with the girls in the fleet of sleek black limousines. As we wound our way along the loop road, past the new acres of warehouses and strip mall buildings toward downtown Midland, cars slowed down and pulled over. Dozens of Midland drivers thought we were a funeral procession heading to the cemetery.

But that physical distance also meant that we were the outliers on the Bush family

curve. We were not with them for Christmas, only for summer visits in Maine, with all the other cousins and meals for a small army of Bushes and wet beach towels strewn about the Kennebunkport house. George's parents had no time for drop-by visits to our home. Once, when the girls were two and a half, Bar Bush made a rare stop in Midland.

Jenna and Barbara ran out of the house with their arms held out to greet her, calling "Ganny," the name all Bushes give their grandmothers, and she looked up at me and said with grat.i.tude, "Thank you for teaching your girls to know me."

I always hoped I would have more babies. But I was thirty-five when the girls were born. The years unwound and it didn't happen. George never once said that he wanted more children. He never once said that he would have liked a son. He has always been thrilled with the two girls we got. We both are. But my heart was deep enough for more. There remained that twinge of what might have been.

Some 300 million years ago, the oceans overran much of the earth's land. The place I know as West Texas was nothing more than a vast floor at the bottom of the tepid Permian Sea. Slowly, over the millennia, the waters began to recede. Reefs and sh.e.l.l banks collapsed into dry ground. Twelve thousand feet of sand, limestone, and silica were left behind by the sea's ebb, collecting in what is known as the Permian Basin. Then the water swept in one last time. Clay and limestone, prehistoric boulders and debris were strewn across the valley, producing a long, continuous plain, with the remnants of this ancient sea floor buried underneath. And among the fossilized fish and sh.e.l.ls and curious spiny creatures that once plumbed its depths, pools of oil and pockets of natural gas formed. The roughly 100,000 square miles of Permian Basin land in West Texas and New Mexico are thought to hold significant portions of the United States' oil and natural gas reserves. Midland, Texas, sits in the basin's geographic center. When oil was found, Midland was where the oilmen came.

The inhabitants of the Texas plains had long known about petroleum. They were not as resourceful as the ancient Egyptians, who covered their mummified bodies in pitch, or the Babylonians (who built their kingdom in what is now Iraq), who employed it to pave their streets. But occasionally native Indian tribes wandered past oil springs and tar pits; their healers and medicine men sometimes spread the black oozings over achy joints and sores on the skin in hope of a cure. The Indians taught the early settlers to do the same, and on the range, ground oil was used for lubricating wagon wheels.

Although the first Texas oil well was dug in 1866, only in 1901 did men succeed in finding an oil gusher. Midland's first oil boom occurred during the 1920s. It sputtered back to life partway through the Great Depression. The 1950s were its golden age, the 1960s its crash. But by the mid-1970s, Midland had begun to rebound. The Arab oil embargo and long gas lines sent oil companies flocking back to Midland. Cranes dotted the skyline, sleek gla.s.s buildings rose along the downtown streets, and by 1983 only three other cities in the entire state of Texas had built more office s.p.a.ce than Midland. Money followed. From 1974 to 1981, Midland's bank deposits rose from $385 million to nearly $2 billion. The most successful oilmen bought private planes and Mercedeses or outsize Cadillacs. They teed off at the country club in the middle of a weekday afternoon and gambled outrageous sums on every hole. Their wives glittered with diamonds. There were ranches bought in other states, second homes, and jet rides for an afternoon of shopping in Dallas at Neiman Marcus. People planned spectacular parties and flew in the bands and the caterers. Rolls-Royce opened a Midland showroom. So many newcomers flocked to the city to get into the oil business that Midland literally ran out of room; it was impossible to find a vacant house.

George and I lived a life far removed from this extravagant wealth. Our biggest indulgence was a membership in the Midland Country Club, although George did earn enough that I had the luxury of being able to stay home with the girls.

Still, living in Midland in 1982 was like having drawn up a chair to a card game where the bettors at the table held a flush in every hand.

George started in the oil business as a landman. He had moved to Midland in 1975 after he graduated from Harvard Business School. He spent hours combing courthouse records to determine who owned the mineral rights on a particular tract of land, which could be leased for oil well drilling. After he lost his 1978 congressional race, he started a small, independent oil exploration business, Arbusto Energy ( arbusto arbusto is is "bush" in Spanish). Independent oilmen find and drill new wells. When prices are high, the risks are good ones. In the early 1970s, a West Texas oil driller had a one in fifty shot of hitting a small oil field, a one in one thousand chance of striking a big one. But at the start of 1983, oil prices in Texas plunged.

A barrel of West Texas crude lost five dollars in a single week in January. As opposed to twenty-six or twenty-eight dollars a barrel, it was now just over nineteen. The Midland banks were the first to fail. George walked into First National Bank on the morning of its demise. Mr. Cowden, the descendent of one of Midland's first ranching families, was standing in the gray marble lobby pleading with his depositors not to withdraw their funds. His weathered face taut with emotion, he promised them, "Your money is safe here. Please don't take your money. Your money is safe." But the line of customers stretched across the lobby and down the block as people waited to cash out their holdings. By the time the final slip had been pa.s.sed to a teller, the bank's last cent was all but gone. In a concluding touch of irony, First National, the largest independent bank in the state, had been chartered back in 1890, during the cattle days, after the devastating drought of 1886 and 1887. Cowboys who rode the range to round up what animals remained called it the "Great Die-off." Ranches were abandoned from the Rio Grande to the farthest reaches of the Great Plains. After that disaster, three Midlanders, including John Scharbauer, whose family later built the fancy downtown hotel, chartered a bank designed to see cattlemen through the "bad times." Slightly less than a hundred years later, Midland's First National would not survive this one.

George was anxious about the future of his own small company and his seven employees. He merged with another, larger company, Spectrum 7, in 1984. Oil prices briefly stabilized, then dropped again. We watched as drilling rigs went idle one by one.

The top owners lost their vacation homes, their jets, even the desks and the few spankingnew computers that had been in their now-empty buildings. Moving trucks pulled up to downtown towers, and the contents of entire offices were carted out by burly men. The remnants of prosperity were bundled off to warehouses and sold for cents on the dollar at periodic public auctions. But it wasn't just the wealthy oilmen. Oil drilling is built on a scaffold of engineers, geologists, scientists, pipeline men, and roughnecks, pumpers, and roustabouts out in the field. They were among the first to be let go. Families picked up and fled, houses sat for months, even years, unsold. I'd see the signs planted on lawns, or swinging forlornly from posts as I drove around. Friends, acquaintances, and stalwarts

around Midland edged toward ruin. The "big oil" I knew were the people who worked at decent jobs, who bought homes, sent their children to school, prayed in church, and pushed their shopping carts down the supermarket aisle next to mine.

With that peculiar West Texas pluck, car b.u.mpers sported stickers that read: "Please, Lord, let there be another boom. I promise I won't p.i.s.s it away next time."

George took a 25 percent pay cut, shaved whatever costs he could, and tried to hang on.

We had already been going to church since before the girls were born; it was where I felt, at last, the gentle embrace of faith again. Now some of our friends, like Don Evans and Don Jones, started a Wednesday-night Bible study for men. George was one of the first to begin attending.

One summer during college, I had a date with a boy in Midland. We'd gone downtown to see the Summer Mummers, the local theater group, perform, and he was driving me home. During the show, he had constantly refilled his frosted gla.s.s from a pitcher of beer. I had paid no attention until we were in the car. His face was flushed, and his eyes shone like gla.s.s. He drove me back home without stopping at a single red light or slowing for a stop sign. We screeched through the streets of Midland, and I gripped my seat until my knuckles were white, and I could feel rivulets of sweat sliding down my skin. Whenever the engine slackened, I wondered if I could simply open the door and jump out, leaving him and the car to sail on alone. We made it to my front door, but I was shaking. Yet after I was back at SMU, I still got in cars with people who had been drinking, because that was just what everyone did.

Midland was a drinking town. After Prohibition was repealed, Midland County remained largely dry; residents repeatedly voted against allowing alcohol sales. But that only changed how people drank. Range-weary cowboys drank; cattlemen, railroad men, oilmen coming in from the fields, all of them drank. But so did the operators, the engineers and scientists and geologists who came after that. For years, liquor and mixed drinks couldn't be served in restaurants, but private clubs could pour a drink straight from the bottle, so people joined clubs, especially country clubs, where their individual "bottles" could be kept in their lockers. Vodka, bourbon, scotch, gin, anything with a kick, came out, gla.s.s after gla.s.s. Those who didn't join clubs, like my father, simply drove to package stores at the county line and carried out their bottles in brown paper bags. At Johnny's Bar-B-Q, Daddy could pour his own drinks from Johnny's private stash in the kitchen.

All through my growing up, adults hosted dinner parties laced with c.o.c.ktails and finished with nightcaps. More than once, men and women would weave their way from the hostess's front steps to their cars and drive home. My mother rarely drank, and certainly not to excess. She might nurse a Tom Collins through an evening. But my father drank every night. On the weekends, he and his buddies would watch football, betting on the games and mixing martinis or pouring generous fingers of bourbon. During the week, the downtown men usually ordered c.o.c.ktails with their lunches behind the thick walls of the Petroleum Club.

Women drank too. I remember one girl I knew in high school who we all thought was wild and who had a bad reputation. Twenty years later, back in Midland, I was working on the high school reunion committee. She came and told us that throughout high school, her mother had been falling-down drunk in her house. But in Midland, no one talked about those things. Any escape had to be her own.

Two decades out, almost nothing had changed. We were wealthier than our parents, we were less frugal because none of us had been scarred by a depression, but we were living much the same lives--dinners out on Friday, dinner parties in on Sat.u.r.day-and alcohol was part of each one.

On Fridays, we usually ate Mexican food, and the women drank margaritas and the men drank beer. On Sat.u.r.days, it was dinner at someone's home, usually a barbecue where everyone would bring something--appetizers, salads, desserts. And alcohol. There was wine, there was vodka, and there were mixed drinks, and we drank them. My father,

who was retired, now liked to have a martini with lunch and a bourbon or two with dinner. George drank the three Bs, a bourbon before dinner, a beer with dinner, and then B & B, a sweet after-dinner drink. It was lethal, and it was completely accepted because that, or some version of it, was the drinking life of most men. At parties as the night deepened, the men grew louder, the cut of their jokes sharpened, and they laughed at everything. In many homes, the morning began with coffee and aspirin. George would go for a run. He is an incredibly disciplined athlete, and he ran every day, even at lunchtime in the summer, when the sun seemed to stand still atop Midland. He ran and he sweated out the dregs of the alcohol. But come nightfall, he'd pour another drink.

He didn't have three drinks every night; many times all he had was a beer. But when he'd poured enough, he could be a bore. Maybe it's funny when other people's husbands have had too much to drink at a party, but I didn't think it was funny when mine did. And I told him so. But I never said the line "It's either Jim Beam or me." That joke came much later. I was not going to leave George, and I wasn't going to let him leave me with twins. Our marriage was enduring, we loved each other, and we were two people who did not have divorce in our DNA. But I was disappointed. And I let him know that I thought he could be a better man.

In 1986, we planned a July trip to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs to celebrate our fortieth birthdays, George's, mine, and Don and Susie Evans's. Jan and Joey O'Neill came, and so did our good friend Penny Slade-Sawyer. Neil Bush, George's younger brother who lived in Colorado, came too. The men played golf, and the women sunned by the pool. And on the last night, everyone, especially the men, ordered too much to drink at the bar. I heard the same toast repeated twenty times. I've joked that George quit the next day because he got the bar bill, but it was a combination of things. It was the fact of turning forty; it was the fact of his father being the vice president and the expectation that Mr. Bush would run for president. None of the Bush children ever wanted to do anything to embarra.s.s their dad. But it was also having talked with Billy Graham the summer he turned thirty-nine, when we were visiting his parents in Maine, and it was joining that Wednesday-night Bible study in Midland, which fixed George's mind on a higher purpose. It was living through an oil bust when people we knew had lost everything and recognizing that failures are best met head-on, clear-eyed. And some of it was growing into being a father and a husband. There had been many drunken and half-drunken weekends, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this one, except that it was one weekend too many. It was to be the last one.

When George decided that he was done with alcohol, he never complained, he just stopped drinking. And he was surprised by how quickly he felt better, by how great it is to wake up in the morning when you haven't had a drink the night before. He ran

better, he read better. We had always taken books to bed and read at night, but George never read for very long. Now reading became a pleasure for him again.

We kept going to the same parties, but George would have a nonalcoholic beer.

And gradually, many of our friends stopped or slowed their drinking, one after being stopped for drunken driving, another after a stay at the Betty Ford clinic. Others just put away their bottles and six-packs and moved on. One friend told me, after she had joined AA and progressed through the twelve steps to the one for making amends, that she had driven Barbara and Jenna to their art lessons after she had been drinking. I had seen her, waved to them as she got behind the wheel, and had never known. A few of the heaviest drinkers who didn't quit, women and men, are in their sixties now, and my heart breaks at how much they are struggling.

Years after George quit, as Mother and I sat talking one quiet afternoon, she turned and said that, unlike me, she had never thought to ask Daddy to stop drinking.

Although George H. W. Bush was in his second term as vice president, George and I had not been invited to a single state dinner. We read newspaper accounts of the Reagans' black-tie evenings, where the women wore long, shimmering gowns and strappy high heels and everyone toasted equally elegant foreign guests. Once, George's dad did ask, "Have y'all been invited to a state dinner?" And George and I both said no.

He immediately promised that we would receive an invitation. Months pa.s.sed. George finally said, "Dad, I thought we were going to be invited to a state dinner." He replied, "Oh no, I said a steak steak dinner." We all laughed and a.s.sumed that our invitation would dinner." We all laughed and a.s.sumed that our invitation would never come as the Reagan administration ticked toward a close. Then, a lovely embossed envelope with the perfect pen-and-ink calligraphy arrived, inviting us to a state dinner at the White House. It was one of the last dinners that the Reagans held. And it was on the same day the movers were coming to our house to load our boxes and start on the journey up to Washington, D.C. George H. W. Bush, the man our children called Gampy, was going to run for president, and his campaign manager, Lee At.w.a.ter, had asked George to move to Washington to work on his father's race. We were leaving Midland.

I had been working with the movers for over a month to arrange everything.

Traveling to Washington for the dinner would require two plane flights and considerable expense. It seemed impossible to change our dates and rearrange everything. I called the White House's social secretary to decline, and she made a surprised sound into the other end of the phone.

Indeed, during the first Reagan-Bush term, when George and I were invited to a Sunday-afternoon concert performed by Itzhak Perlman, we had decided to make a special trip to Washington. George packed his nicest suit; I had a fancy dress. We were both nervous about going to the White House. Inside, women gingerly picked their way along the slick marble stairs and halls. My eyes wandered, taking in the velvet and brocade and the heavy wooden tables and carved chairs, the high ceilings and glittering chandeliers, and the crush of far more elegantly dressed people in each room. We sat on gold banquet chairs that had been precisely arranged in rows across the East Room, with a special roped-off section for the most important dignitaries, and waited patiently in the receiving line to shake President and Mrs. Reagan's hands. When the military aides announced us, both George and I were speechless. We smiled and stayed mute, having no idea what to say. Now, after years of receiving lines, I'm grateful for the people who don't say anything except "I'm so happy to be here," and just keep moving. It can take hours for the president and the first lady to shake all those hands.

Before the movers came, we had a big yard sale. I sold off furniture, books, baby clothes and toys, almost anything that wasn't nailed down. Susie and Donnie Evans helped us tag everything, including the baby beds and baby things that we had kept in storage for so long, and set it out on our front lawn. We were shedding our life of almost ten years. Some things we got rid of I wish I'd kept, like an old Ronald Reagan movie poster that we had framed. I don't know what possessed me to sell it, just the frenzy of divesting ourselves.

I've always traveled light; I look back on over thirty years of marriage, and aside from shelves of sc.r.a.pbooks and books, we've acc.u.mulated startlingly few things. As we've moved, we've donated or given away many of our furniture pieces and rugs, even posters and paintings. I prefer to keep memories rather than things. Some of it is my dislike of clutter and its complications. Some of it comes from being a librarian, when I had to manage a collection. I had to catalog each piece, check bindings and repair tears; I culled the volumes, removing copies that had grown too tattered or worn. Every object had to pa.s.s through my fingertips. It has made me wary of the responsibility of too many things.

We set off for Washington with a small moving van and our Pontiac sedan and Chevy station wagon, leaving behind our friends and our home. I had never lived outside of Texas for more than a few weeks. I was forty-one years old. For more than twenty-five of those years, Midland had been my home; for more than twenty years, it had been George's. It was not just the pan-flat arid land that we were leaving behind with each mile of road but a way of being and of speaking. People in West Texas believe that they think differently, and to a large degree they do. There is a plainness to the way West Texas looks that translates into how people act and what they value. Those who live there are direct and blunt to the point of hurt sometimes. There is no time for artifice; it looks and sounds ridiculous amid the barren landscape. From the era of the first settlers, people or animals could freeze or starve or roast if debates went on too long or too many niceties were observed.

The West Texas plains were seared on each of us like an invisible brand. I am struck sometimes by the words spoken by Ten Bears, the Great Comanche war chief, as he pleaded with Abraham Lincoln's men not to force his people onto a reservation: "I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath." And how similar his words sound to the rougher-edged lament of the cattlemen-the same men who had driven the Comanches from their land. As he grew old, the Midland rancher W. C. Cochran wrote, "For anyone who loved G.o.d's own creation, it was a paradise on earth. . . . The hills and valleys abounded with deer, turkey, bear, and antelope. Bee trees were numerous and buffalo common. . . . Every old-timer cowman remembers these times. The wire fences took all the joy and thrill out of the cow business for the old boys, who remembered when they used to sit around camp and talk about who had the best horses and play a little ten cent ante when it was not their night to ride fifteen or twenty miles. Those good old days pa.s.sed away with the coming of the wire fence."

Out on that range, people adapted to the land; the land contoured them, not the other way around.