MY MOTHER WAS TIDY AND CRISP, WHICH IS WHY JANINE'S VACANT MOTHER AND MESSY HOUSE WERE JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR.

BY DEBRA FAY HOLTON | In Milpitas, Calif., in a middle-class neighborhood of tract homes with neat square patches of perfect green lawn, I met my first best friend, one of a long line of best friends who would suffer the fury of my mother's upturned nose. Janine Leonard lived in the cul-de-sac across the way with her mother and younger twin brothers, in one of the only custom-built homes on our block. She smelled like baby aspirin and her clothes always looked like they'd been sitting in the dryer for a few days. We would walk to Mrs. Bowers' first-grade class together holding hands, and when we let go to file into our assigned seats, my hand would smell like St. Joseph's, too.

I think now that part of why my mother didn't like Janine was because Mrs. Leonard sat around the living room in a baby blue housecoat most of the time. A smoker, my best friend's mother crushed out the brandless cigarettes she smoked in an overflowing ashtray that sat on the coffee table, just barely within her reach. She watched all the soap operas -- all of them -- and appeared to survive on Cheetos and Pringles potato chips. I don't think she ever opened the heavy blue living room drapes, and I had the idea that a thin sheen of dust lay over everything in that room, including Mrs. Leonard.

Though I'm sure my mother never set foot in Janine's house, she had a nose for things and could have accurately described the scene just from the scent I carried home with me. Smell was her strongest sense, one she utilized to detect crime, mendacity and bad breeding in everyone from the principal at my elementary school to door-to-door salesmen. Given the opportunity, she could make anything smell the way she wanted it to. So after each play session with Janine, Mom would put me in the bathtub and scrub my little hands and hair until everything was back to normal again.

My mom encouraged us to play at my house, in the backyard, presumably where Janine's peculiar aroma wouldn't reach her tender olfactories, but I much preferred the playground that was my best friend's house. Mrs. Leonard was my version of the dream mother, and I succeeded in convincing my parents to let me go over at least once a week. "She's not that bad," I told my parents. "She's a good mom."

What I really meant was that she let us do whatever we wanted. Well, it wasn't really a matter of letting us; she was too preoccupied with her 24-inch Zenith to pay any attention to what we were doing. We were aware that she had a vague sense of our presence; if we would have caught something on fire or broken a collarbone, we believed Mrs. Leonard would have been able to rush to our aid. But other than that, we counted on her vacancy, leaving us full run of the house, including the kitchen, the trampoline in the backyard and the pièce de résistance: her vast boudoir.

The only drawback was the twin brothers. It was an unsaid rule at Janine's that she was responsible for their well-being, and Mrs. Leonard didn't want to be disturbed by any fracas. Ted and Tom were a couple of 4-year-old parrots, imitating everything Janine and I said or did. They would follow us around the house mercilessly; if we wanted to jump on the trampoline, they had to jump too. If we made Hi-C or Jell-O in the kitchen, they demanded a chance to twirl the spoon around the mixing bowl, often slopping the sugary contents onto the floor, where we would leave it for someone -- we didn't expect it would be Mrs. Leonard -- to clean up later. They effectively held us hostage because, in addition to being accomplished echoes, they emitted reverberating shrieks if they didn't get their way.

So on certain Saturday afternoons, Janine and I would put our creative heads together and figure out ways to ditch them. They couldn't be ditched in the ordinary fashion, they were too crafty, so often most of our time together was spent constructing elaborate ruses that would keep Ted and Tom entertained. We'd build a mazelike fortress underneath the trampoline -- using bed pillows, sheets and cardboard boxes -- and they would spend at least a couple of hours working through the different routes. Once we dug a bunch of holes in the lawn and buried their favorite toys, then drew a treasure map and sent Ted and Tom on an expedition.

Finally, Janine and I would waltz into Mrs. Leonard's walk-in closet, turn on the light, shut the door and transport ourselves to another world. There was evidence in that magnificent room that at one time, my best friend's mother had an exciting social life requiring a variety of outfits for all occasions. Even as a 6-year-old, I recognized the incongruity that existed between the woman in the living room and the woman who owned the contents of that walk-in closet. But at 6 years old, I had other priorities.

N E X T_ P A G E: Making Mrs. Leonard mad