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Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
I celebrate myself

Sorry. I just can’t do it.

Walt Whitman starts “Song of Myself,” the greatest poem in the world, with those three words. I wish I could follow his lead, start the same way, but I can’t. The words sound tinny in my own voice—arrogant, wrong. Maybe someday I’ll be able to say “I celebrate myself ” freely, even joyfully, like he does, but I’m not there yet.

Whitman’s book saved my life. Leaves of Grass saved my ass. If it wasn’t for that book, I might be in jail right now. If it wasn’t for that book, I wouldn’t be writing this one.

I have to admit, it’s a bit intimidating to write under Whitman’s long and illustrious shadow. I suppose I could try to picture him in his underwear. It worked for Marcia Brady when she gave her big speech (not that Whitman was in the audience at Westdale High). I have an advantage: I’ve already seen Whitman naked. A series of photos by Thomas Eakins from the early 1880s—“Old man, seven photographs.” Whitman’s name isn’t mentioned, but I can tell it’s him. Others have thought so, too. He was pretty cute for a sixty-something-year-old. I love how his belly pouches out just a little, the way my daughter Nori’s does over her diaper. I love the way he cocks one hip to the side—a little peevish, a little saucy. I love seeing him stripped bare.

I guess I have to strip myself bare here. I have to unload all that happened these last few months. If I write it down, there’s a chance I’ll begin to understand it.

One image keeps coming back to me. An image of Sodaba, my neighbor from Afghanistan, hunched inside the storage locker. The front of her burqa was flipped up off her face; it hung down the back of her head like a nun’s habit. She was turned slightly away from me; tendrils of hair were plastered against the side of her neck. The wide plane of her left cheek was slick with sweat. That was the first time, the only time, I saw any part of her face. I never learned the true shape of her lips or nose, the full scope of her eyes—just that wet expanse of skin before she realized I was there and pulled the veil back down. The skin of her cheek looked so smooth. It gives me chills to think about it now.

But that’s not where I want to start.

I want to go back to my normal life, before her life collided with mine. Back when I had more simple things to worry about—my kids’ lunches, my husband’s TV addiction, the auctions I attended each week.

The auctions. Of course. I could celebrate my self-storage auctions. That is something I think I could do.

This is how the auctions work. You get one minute with a flashlight. The auctioneer breaks open the padlock with a blowtorch or

bolt cutters, and you get one minute to stand in the doorway of the storage locker. One minute to peer inside and decide whether the wrinkled black trash bags, the taped cardboard boxes, the bicycle parts and beach chairs and afghans that reveal themselves in your mote-filled path of light, are worth your while.

You learn to trust your intuition. You learn to listen to that ping inside your gut that tells you to bid. You learn to look for the subtle clues—the shopping bags with a Beverly Hills address, the boxes marked fragile with a sharp black marker. You learn to avoid certain smells—mold and mildew are no good; you’ll probably end up with a bunch of old sweatshirts and socks that someone put in the wash but never bothered to dry properly, just left them to rot in plastic sacks. You develop a sixth sense for the smell of jewelry, the smell of electronics. TVs emit a hot, charged smell, even if they haven’t been turned on for years, while diamonds smell blue, like sweet cold water.

You try to remember that you’re bidding on someone else’s misfortune. Someone who couldn’t pay for their storage locker, who let it lapse into lien. You try to remember that you are benefiting from someone’s sadness, someone’s failure, that the money you’ll gain from this merchandise will come from someone else’s loss. You try to remember that there was a self who first put these items in storage, a self who one day planned to take them all back, a self who will miss these photo albums and brittle swim fins and frames filled with dried beans. But you push this all aside when the auctioneer says “Bidding will start at one dollar,” and your own self muscles its way to the front, and your own hand flies into the air.

I lifted my chin. Just the slightest tick. A few centimeters at the most. A small tilt of the head, a concurrent yet subtle lift of the brow. I wanted to see how small I could make my movement and still be noticed by the auctioneer. The auctioneer standing on a step stool in his Hawaiian print golf shirt and cargo shorts, the auctioneer with his Ray-Bans and poofy hair, saying “TendoIheartententengoingoncegoingtwice . . . ,” his mouth looking too solid to go so fast. Then he said “Sold to Flan Parker for ten dollars,” and I felt like I had been granted superpowers.

Early in my auction career, I waved both arms to bid. Soon I shifted to one flailing arm. Then one calm arm. Then a single hand. Then a finger. Then the chin. I thought maybe I would get to the point where the auctioneer would notice my pupils dilating, and that would be that.

I fanned myself with the auction list and gave my two-yearold daughter a sip of water. I wished I had been granted superpowers to keep us cool. The year 2002 was one of the hottest on record so far. Even the palm trees seemed to be drooping in the hundred-degree early-June weather. Everything at EZ Self Storage seemed to be drooping, not necessarily because of the intense Riverside heat. It was an older self-storage complex, and the owners hadn’t done much to spruce it up over the years. Like most self-storage establishments, it consisted of row upon row of low, rectangular buildings fronted with a series of garage doors. The walls were all unpainted cinder block, gray and crumbly-looking; the roll-up doors had probably been bright yellow at some point, but now were dinged and hammered into a dull, bruised shade. The asphalt on the ground was cracked and pitted, shot through with weeds. I wondered who would want to store their stuff in such a decrepit place.

I looked into the unit I had won. I couldn’t wait to find out what was inside one particular JCPenney’s bag. The plastic sack looked blocky, like it was full of transistor radios. Possibly bricks of gold.

Stuff ’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff ’d with the stuff that is fine.

“Good work,” said Mr. Chen-the-elder, a dapper junk-shop owner and fellow bidder. He patted me on the shoulder and ruffled Nori’s white-blond hair. The auctioneer folded up his step stool and put his clipboard under one arm, his red three-footlong bolt cutters under the other. The crowd of eight or so of us rambled after him to the next garage door, the last unit of the day, a ten-by-fifteen, most likely out of my league. I just went for the “Flan lots,” as my auction cronies had dubbed them. No big-ticket items, just modest assortments of boxes and bags, things I could easily carry to the car myself while pushing Nori’s stroller. I was usually able to get them for the opening bid. Most of the bidders weren’t interested in the small stuff—they wanted the furniture, the appliances, the big-money pieces; most of them were dealers with pawnshops or stalls in antiques stores. My yard sales were small potatoes. The lots full of antiques could start at over $100 and could go to several hundred, cash only, but they were still a steal. People generally earned back at least twice what they paid in auction once they sold the goods; sometimes they earned back ten times the amount. Sometimes more.

The lot on the block was full of instruments—a drum kit with amendz written on the front of the bass drum in electrical tape, a couple of guitars plastered with stickers, a stand-up bass, a saxophone, all set up like the band had just left to get their requisite groupie blow jobs. A few beer bottles and a couple of towels were scattered over the concrete floor. The storage unit had obviously been a rehearsal space. How could a band let all their instruments go into lien? Maybe everyone died in a Central American bus crash; maybe their wives had nagged them into giving up their rock ’n’ roll dreams.

Nori struggled to get out of her stroller. I had augmented the buckle with a complicated knotting of twine to thwart her escape attempts. Nori had become quite the little Houdini lately; it was getting harder to restrain her.

“Tigars, Mama!” She pointed to the guitars. I tried to hush her; the auction was about to start. I wasn’t very successful—she screamed at the injustice of being trapped in her small canvas seat. The auctioneer raised his speeding voice.

Mr. Chen-the-younger, a slightly shabbier version of his father, lifted a finger when the bidding reached $250. Yolanda Garcia gave her bouffant-fluffed head a quick tilt to the right when it got to $375. Soon after, Norman, the crusty old swap-meet man, shouted “Right here” over Nori’s cries of protest, lifting both of his veiny hands.

“Sold to Norman for $425,” the auctioneer bellowed. “Good going, everyone.” He shot Nori a slightly reproachful glance. “I’ll meet y’all in the office for payment.”

It was an easy transaction for me—ten bucks for at least a dozen bags and boxes. I couldn’t wait to bring them home and crack them open.

My favorite part of the whole auction experience was the moment right before I found out what I had won. The moment when I was sitting on the floor of our second-bedroom-turnedstorage-auction-storage-room in my overalls and red Converse sneakers, my short blond hair thick with other people’s dust. The moment when I was holding my X-Acto knife over a cardboard box, ready to take the plunge.

I found few things more satisfying than slitting tape with an X-Acto knife. That first pop of the seal, the way the tape snapped and curled beneath the blade, the fusty exhale in its wake. I loved it. I could have slit tape and pried open boxes all day. That moment right before you knew what was in the box—that was the best moment. That’s what I celebrated. Anything was possible.

I never did find out what was in all the JCPenney’s bags. After I paid up and started loading stuff into Booty, the trailer hitched behind Beulah, my old blue Datsun, a woman came up to me, frantic. She was wearing a faded sundress and house slippers. Her hair was a mess. She had probably just woken up.

“Hey, that’s my stuff,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I told her. I was drenched with sweat; it was probably 120 degrees inside that locker. “It’s mine. I just bought it.”

She started to cry. “I was going to settle the account,” she said. “I got here too late.”

“How much did you owe?” I asked.

“Three hundred dollars,” she told me. The way she said it made it sound like a million dollars. I knew how huge $300 could feel. “All my pictures and crap are in there.”

“Tell you what,” I said, thinking fast. “You give me a hundred dollars, and I’ll let you have your things.” I tried to sound charitable. I didn’t tell her I had bought everything for one tenth the

price.

“Thank you!” She threw her arms around me. I felt like such a schmuck. I could have let her have it for a lot less. I could have let her have it for free.

I helped her carry her stuff, the stuff that was briefly mine, to her seventies-era Oldsmobile. I caught a brief glimpse into the blocky bag that had piqued my interest. It was filled with what appeared to be shoe boxes. Little ones. A baby was asleep in the backseat, strapped into an old chrome-framed car seat, snot dried on his face. I felt even worse about taking the woman’s money, but I didn’t give it back. It was the easiest money I ever made.

“You’re a shrewd business woman, Flan,” Yolanda said to me after the woman drove off.

“Nah,” I said, “I’m just a jerk.”

She was loading boxes into her trailer. One box, marked art & ect, caught my eye.

“Hey, will you sell me that box for ninety bucks?” I asked her.

“This box?” She picked it up and looked at it as if she had missed something.

“I don’t want to go home without a box,” I told her. I also realized I didn’t want to go home with that woman’s money. My conscience was a tricky thing, taking a snooze, then sneaking up on me like a thief.

“You’re crazy,” she said, but she shook my hand, then Nori’s, to seal the deal.

I strapped the box into the passenger seat and we drove home, the battered ez self storage sign getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until I couldn’t see it at all.

 

When you see the term “Self Storage” all the time, you can’t help but start to think about it. You wonder things like where, exactly, is the self stored? Is it in the heart? The head? The pelvis? Is it something that billows through us like a ghost?

Walt Whitman thought the self was expansive, transcendent, divine; he thought the self was everything. I wanted to feel that way, I really did, but I wasn’t so sure. My self felt pretty small most of the time.

When I was seven and my mom was near death—pancreatic cancer—my father made me stay in her hospital room. It was horrible. She was in so much pain. I could almost smell the pain emanating from her—a sharp animal stench that cut through the antiseptic air, made the hairs on my arm jut like needles from my skin. My father wouldn’t let me leave. My mother’s body heaved and bucked under the waffled blanket as if she was going to levitate off the bed. She growled and shrieked and made all kinds of inhuman grunts and trills. I wailed and tried to bolt, but my dad held me tight. “This is your mother,” he said. “This could be your last chance to see her alive.”

“This. Is. Not. Me,” she forced out, her lips cracked, her eyes puffy and pink. I got even more scared then. If that wasn’t my mom writhing around, who was it? And where had my real mother gone? The last thing she ever said to me—her hand hard on my wrist, her rabbity eyes locked onto mine—was “Take. Care. Of. Your. Self.” I thought of the cultured pearls she kept in a soft cloth bag, the teapot she rubbed with silver polish every month, even though she never went anywhere fancy and none of us drank tea. I thought my self must be some expensive and high-maintenance object like that, something rarely, if ever, used. I wondered where I could find it, what sort of care it might require.

My father was no help in this regard. He had one idea for how he wanted me to be after my mother died: quiet. Make that two: quiet and obedient. Neither of which came naturally to me. He wanted me in a preppy schoolgirl uniform twenty-four hours a day. I rebelled. I tried on different skins. Sports-girl skin with striped tube socks and a ponytail and softball jersey. Sullen-girl skin with lots and lots of black. Hippie-girl skin with peasant blouses and worn Levis and bare feet. Hard-rock-girl skin with acid wash and big perms and boots with pointy heels. Nothing too original, I admit. I chameleoned my way through school, picking up the different hairstyles of friends, the different musical and alcoholic tastes of boyfriends, molding myself into their chosen image, a mirror they could look into and see themselves more clearly, not me.

I found Whitman when I was a senior in high school. I pulled Leaves of Grass off the shelf—an ancient edition covered with mustard-yellow cloth. I thought it might be a campy old tract about marijuana, although it would be surprising to find such a thing in our house. My parents didn’t have that kind of humor. Our bookshelves were sparse, a few technical manuals and Readers Digest–condensed novels shoved between tissue boxes and geodes and wooden boxes filled with shells from Lake Erie. My own nightstand, on the other hand, was always overflowing with library books. I loved the smell of them, the flutter of their pages against my fingers. Leaves of Grass felt different from any other book I had touched—there was a heft to it, a weight, even though it was a fairly slender volume. When I saw my mother’s maiden name looped onto the inside front cover in her once familiar handwriting, I felt like someone had kicked the air out of my lungs. I flipped through the book, breathing in the scent of my mother’s past, her life before my father, before me. The entire section of “Song of Myself,” pages and pages of long-winded verse, was underlined with dark, glossy pencil. My mother had really pushed the lead into the paper. It had even broken through in a few places. I ran my fingertip over the thin, yellowed pages, the narrow-ridged grooves that bulged like veins on the opposite sides. Maybe this was the self she had wanted me to take care of.

I have to admit I found Whitman a little embarrassing at first, a little rhapsodic for my pseudojaded taste (a recently acquired trait, via my boyfriend Rob), but I was intrigued. I liked that he said I believe in the flesh and its appetites. I liked how he corroborated my new stoner experience (also courtesy of Rob) . . . considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand as curious as any revelation. I liked the line With music strong I come. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, Whitman style. I liked how, whatever mood I was in, I could open the book and new rooms would open inside me.

I followed my mother’s advice. I’ve taken good care of the book, kept it safe in the folds of my underwear drawer. Whether I’ve taken good care of my own self is another question entirely.

My husband, Shae, was studying—or at least supposed to be studying—the Self. Selfhood. Virtual selfhood. Original selfhood. I was so jealous.

One day, I vowed, I would be back in school and I’d study the self, myself. I wanted to study “Song of Myself,” look into what Whitman was really doing with it. I already knew a lot of his omnivorous lines, as he called them, by heart. I wanted to understand them in a better, deeper way. I still do.

I tried to share Whitman with Shae, but he was incredibly analytical about everything, and not in an English-major kind of way, which I would have liked—more in a way that deflated any Whitman-related conversation (and it’s pretty hard to deflate Whitman). I’ve shared a few lines with the kids, too, but they’re more interested in poems that rhyme—Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein. As much as I loved to read, Leaves of Grass was pretty much the only nonchildren’s book I was able to squeeze into my life. I picked it up whenever I could, taking sips of poetry between auctions and meals and diaper changes and lullabies. The lines chanted through me even when I was far from the book. Whit-man was my therapist, my priest, my touchstone.

One of the new security guards waved me into the leafy oasis of Student Family Housing. I was always glad to drive back home. The large complex was kind of like a self-storage setup, itself—similar houses with different lives behind each door. It used to be army property, housing for married servicemen, before the University of California, Riverside campus was built in the 1950s.

There were two hundred or so small plaster houses in the complex—duplex and single-family, some with peaked wooden roofs, some flat—all of them sturdy but showing their age. The thick walls muted the Riverside heat to some extent, and the curved streets were thankfully shady, draped over with oak and pepper trees. Some of the houses faced the road; others, like ours, were set back, arranged around courtyards. Our street, Avocado, curved by itself at the rear of the complex like the tail end of a nautilus. Guards had been posted to all the street entrances after the September 11 attacks the year before; I can’t say their presence made me feel any more safe—the guys let pretty much anyone in—but they didn’t make the place feel any less cozy, either. They had become part of the community. A few of them even brought their kids to our playground on their days off.

I loved the gnarled lemon tree outside the kitchen door, the pair of tall, pointy cypress—my son called them Dr. Seuss trees—out back. I loved our tiny house, overtaken with my auction stuff as it was. I loved the secondhand feel of the neighborhood. Everyone lived in old houses, pushed old strollers, drove old cars. Even the plants were raggedy and woody—bug-bitten rosebushes, papery puffs of bougainvillea, palms that dropped shriveled orange dates.

Whenever someone shiny showed up in the neighborhood— someone with polished nails or a new sedan or Baby Bjorn— they were treated, however unfairly, with suspicion. They didn’t tend to stay long. The shiny people could usually afford to rent a condo or a house with a pool. The people who stayed here for years ended up looking like the houses themselves—some peeling plaster, some splintering wood, a good solid foundation. We all wore jeans that were too tight, or too loose, or too light, or too small-pocketed or too high-waisted to be hip; our tank top straps too wide; our bodies too mushy, but I liked it that way. I liked clothing the neighborhood, furthering our untrendy world.

I deposited Nori next to Shae on the couch, gave my six-yearold-son, Noodle, a kiss, and carried the art & ect box into the auction room. The room stuffed to the gills with piles of linens, stacks of plates, bags of clothes. The room so full of random, loosely organized stuff it was almost impossible to walk through it. The little trails I had left between piles were disappearing as the piles slowly gave in to gravity and spilled over. My crazy room. The only place where I could breathe without my children’s breath rushing into my mouth.

I sat down on the floor, in the little rectangle of space I had carved out to do my unpacking and sorting. The school-grade linoleum that covered the floor of every room in the house was cool through my overalls. I sat for a while, eyes closed, relishing my time as a solitary body.

My anticipation was building. What could be inside the box? Stolen Rembrandts? Black velvet toreadors? Noodle ran into the room just when I was about to dig in. I should have locked the door. I didn’t like having the kids around when I was yielding sharp blades, unloading potential hazards. Once an emaciated but still alive rattlesnake was in one of my boxes, once a bunch of syringes, some full. I knew dead bodies were found in lockers every once in a while—cut up, wrapped in plastic, stuffed into freezers or hope chests or Samsonite.

“What is it, Noodle?” He was wearing one of Shae’s tie-dyed shirts, with, I could tell, nothing underneath. His long blond hair, the hair that often caused people to mistake him for a girl, was wild and uncombed. My little hippie.

“Nori’s outside!”

“Can’t your dad get her?”

“Shake’s sleeping.”

Everyone called Shae Shake but me. My name was Flan, short for Flannery, and I figured one dairy product name in the family was enough. We all ended up with food names, somehow. We didn’t plan it that way—we’ve never cared all that much about food. Noodle was really Newton—a family name with its own figgy connotations. Shae couldn’t bring himself to say no to his grandmother, who wanted us to give our son that name, and I couldn’t bring myself to call my baby “Newton.” He became Noodle almost immediately. We named Nori after my mother, Nora. We didn’t think about the sushi connection until she was a couple of weeks old. It made sense, though; it was probably inevitable. We weren’t a very balanced meal—two desserts, a helping of carbohydrates, and some seaweed—but then, what family is?

Noodle tugged at one of my overall buttons. “Mama, she’s going to go in the street!”

I dropped my X-Acto knife and chased him outside.

My best friend, Pia, was across the courtyard, holding Nori, clad only in a diaper, on her broad hip. Pia was a doctoral candidate in cellular biology. Her family was from the Philippines. She wore a floral T-shirt and khaki shorts I recognized from one of my auction boxes. I felt a small kick of pride. It was always a treat to see the urban planning scholar from Ghana wearing a Tweety T-shirt I had folded, to know the English major from India walking by probably had red underwear beneath her sari. Student Family Housing was a wonderfully international community. In our courtyard alone, there were also families from Wales, from Guatemala, from Afghanistan. Our blond family was an anomaly.

“Look who I found playing with my hose.” Pia handed me a dripping Nori. The front of her body was slippery and cold; her curls were plastered dark against her head. Her diaper felt like a squishy melon. She squirmed in my arms, wanting to get down.

“Thanks, Pia,” I sighed.

“Not a problem.” One of my other favorite things: Pia’s voice. And Pia’s long coarse black hair, her large no-nonsense body. “Listen, I’m making a big pot of ziti tonight. If you could throw together a salad, I think Isobel’s making bread.”

I was routinely assigned some sort of easy side dish during these shared meals. My neighbors quickly learned that even though we all had food names, I wasn’t much of a cook. Usually they asked me to bring a bowl of fruit or a pot of rice or some cherry tomatoes from the community garden. Our neighbors shared food from their home countries every once in a while, but more often than not, big pots of pasta reigned on the picnic tables.

The couple from Afghanistan, who lived two doors down from us, never participated. I wished they would—I was very curious about the dusky-spicy smells that wafted from their kitchen. I was even more curious about the woman, who wore a full burqa. I had never talked with her, had never even made eye contact—I didn’t know if it was even possible to make eye contact through the mesh window in her veil. The couple kept to themselves. A large American flag hung outside their front door, but I’m pretty sure it was more of a “leave us alone” gesture than a patriotic one. Their duplex had been egged twice since September 11. Once I saw the woman standing in the window while we were eating outside. She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. I waved, but she immediately pulled her blinds shut.

Nori wriggled out of my arms and bolted across the yard, her waterlogged diaper starting to sag. Noodle’s shoelaces flapped as he followed close behind.

“Stay where I can see you,” I said, just as they disappeared around the corner of the duplex. Pia touched my arm and went back to her gardening.

Our front door rasped open and Shae stepped onto our tiny front porch looking bleary and disoriented, running a hand through his long hair. When I first met Shae, his hair was lush, a wavy cascade of maple syrup, shot through with gold. Seven years later, it was still long and wavy, but it had thinned out a lot. His forehead was more prominent, too. His hair used to make him look like a rock star; over time, it made him look like an aging biker, a speed freak.

I had chopped off most of my hair the year before. I was getting tired of Nori yanking on it while she nursed. Now it looked kind of like surfer dude hair, clumps sticking out in all directions. Pia deemed it pixie hair. I kept trying to convince Shae to join me in short-hair-dom, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“What’s up?” he asked, his voice groggy.

“You were supposed to be watching the kids.”

“I was watching them.”

“Through your eyelids? Nori got outside, Shae.”

“I thought the door was locked....”

The kids reappeared, giggly and breathless. Nori’s diaper had fallen off. Noodle was holding a bird-of-paradise stalk like a jousting pole, poking his sister in the butt with the pointy orange flower.

“I’m biting you! I’m biting you!” he said. She squealed happily until she saw me. “He bite me,” she sobbed with gusto and ran into my arms. “He bite me!”

I mouthed “Bite me” to Shae over the top of Nori’s musty, damp head. I gave him a snarl that I hoped looked half-playful, half-vicious. He sighed and went back inside, leaving me alone, once again, with the kids.

What can I say about Shae? He was busy working, or at least claiming to work, on his dissertation, “Hands on the Joystick: Televisual Abstractionism and the Postnarrative Origins of Virtual Selfhood.” He was getting more and more distracted, more and more abstracted, all the time. His work was centered around the theories of Jean Baudrillard, who believed that simulations of reality were just as real as “real” reality. Shae’s whole dissertation hung on those bony French shoulders, but as far as I could tell, his research consisted primarily of watching soap operas, stacking library books in front of the couch, napping, playing video games, and occasionally smoking pot. Every time I came upon him furiously typing, it turned out he was playing Doom. “I have to experience virtual reality if I’m going to write about it,” he said. Baudrillard would be so proud. I wanted to trust that he knew what he was doing, but I was beginning to feel as if I had a virtual husband.

I met Shae when I was twenty-one; he was twenty-nine. I was working at a place called Grounded, a coffeehouse with a yoga studio in the basement. We served all organic coffee, but it was still full of caffeine, so the yogis in their tight, flared, black pants and colorful Hindu tank tops swung wildly between states of mania and blissed-out calm. The power yoga class was the most popular on the roster; I could almost feel the frantic steam of coffee-fueled asanas rising through the floorboards.

As a barista, I didn’t venture downstairs too often, but every once in a while, if I was acting cranky, my boss ordered me to take a restorative yoga class. All the workers had to wear yoga pants and purple Grounded T-shirts, so it was easy to slip into a session. The shirt featured a stick-figure woman doing the tree pose, hoisting a cup of coffee over her head with both hands. It was the logo of the place, and it drove me crazy. I always imagined the cup tipping, the coffee spilling, scalding the woman’s scalp. I suggested that an image of a person in classic, cross-legged meditation, holding the coffee cup in her lap, might be more appropriate, but my boss wouldn’t listen. I think the terms “centered” and “self-centered” had gotten jumbled up in her brain.

I didn’t really like yoga classes. Yoga is supposed to be noncompetitive, but I could tell people were sizing each other up, plus my body couldn’t figure out basic poses like triangle and down dog. The only good thing about restorative yoga classes was the extended sivasana time, corpse pose. It was like getting paid to take a nice little nap in the middle of a workday. Not that I was getting paid that well. My boss thought free yoga classes more than made up for the fact that she paid her workers seven bucks an hour. I considered quitting, but the hours fit with my school schedule, and it was easier to keep working than to find another job.

I was taking a couple of classes at Riverside Community College, saving money so I could move to Oregon. I had been accepted to Reed College, but hadn’t been offered any scholarships, so I was biding my time, rooming with a couple of coworkers in a tiny downtown apartment, socking away what I could, knocking some core requirements—math, science, all the boring stuff— off my list. I couldn’t wait to get up to the rain and green of the Pacific Northwest, away from the smoggy brown Riverside summers. I wanted to live in a place where I could wear colorful knit scarves, a place where my hiking boots would sink into rich thick mud. A place where I’d be able to focus on my true love: books. I was a voracious reader, but I wanted to become more discerning. Judy Blume and Rumi took up equal space on my shelves. I grabbed whatever called to me at the library and eagerly sought book recommendations from friends, but I didn’t know what I really should be reading, how I should be reading it. My high school teachers hadn’t been much help; they just had us work with humdrum textbooks and grammar sheets in class. I asked one English teacher about Leaves of Grass, but he blushed and said I was too young for Whitman. I couldn’t wait for professors with elbow patches and bifocals to point me in the right direction. Maybe I’d become a professor myself someday. Or a librarian. A book reviewer. Something that had to do with Whitman, with words. Then Shae walked into my life. A lot of guys at Grounded had long hair, but Shae was different. He didn’t have that beatific yoga look. He was a little pasty, a little paunchy, a little preoccupied-looking under that glorious mane of hair. It was a look that appealed to me. He wasn’t wearing a tweed jacket, but I could practically smell the university on him. He barely glanced my way when he ordered a large coffee.

“You consider yourself grounded?” He pointed to my T-shirt. I had been beaming look at me, look at me as I rung up his order.

I leaned across the polished wooden counter and said, “No, I can come out and play any time I want.” I gave him a smile that almost knocked him over.

I think I fell for Shae because he lived in his head. Most of the guys I met at Grounded were too touchy-feely and sensitive; most of the guys I met at Riverside Community College were all body, body, body. They only seemed to be in school because their parents wanted them to be, plus it was a way to meet girls and avoid entering the job market for a couple of years. They didn’t care about learning. I wanted someone to talk to, really talk to about ideas. Shae was great for that. And I figured I could tease him into his body, tease him into opening his heart. The body part was easy. I was pregnant with Noodle five months after we met. I was torn about the pregnancy—I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my going to Reed, not even Shae, who I imagined would follow me up there eventually—but he convinced me that when he was done with his dissertation, I could go to school anywhere I wanted. We would take turns, he said, kissing my belly. He was so sweet about it, so earnest, so thrilled about the baby. How could I say no?

Shae was crashed on the couch when the kids and I came back inside. Days of Our Lives was on, blasting from seven TV sets, the ones I hadn’t sold yet at yard sales, stacked against the wall in a blocky pyramid. Shae tried to convince me his soap opera fixation was related to his studies, but I was pretty sure it was something he had picked up from his grandmother Ada, who raised him after his parents died in a car crash when he was three. That was another thing that connected us, losing parents early on. Shae said he had always wanted to have babies young; I was glad to give him the family he hadn’t known as a boy. Not a family marred by tragedy. Not the soap opera family that Shae shared with Ada. The soap operas were always on when we visited her rest home in Alta Dena; she and Shae talked about the characters as if they were related by blood.

Shae’s favorite was One Life to Live. Sometimes I wanted to shake him and say “This is your one life to live and you’re blowing it.” I didn’t understand how he could fritter away precious study hours when I would kill to be in school. He didn’t watch The Young and the Restless, but that’s how I felt—young, restless. Restless, at least. Maybe not so young. I was almost twenty-eight. Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome. (It wasn’t as bad as Whitman made it sound. Not always, at least.) I could feel my studies drifting farther and farther away. I looked into some online humanities programs, but they were ultraexpensive, plus I didn’t know how I’d be able to find the time to focus on the work. The kids didn’t afford me much computer time; I could barely keep on top of my eBay transactions as it was. Once Shae was done with school and settled into a teaching position, he said, we’d be able to afford child care. And he’d watch the kids while I studied. The way things were going, though, I worried the kids would be in college themselves before I’d have my own chance.

A woman was in hysterics on the screens, her face greenish in three, gray in a couple, pink in one, orange in another.

“Shae, what’s that character’s birthday?” I asked him.

“October nineteenth,” he said.

“And what’s your daughter’s birthday?”

He was silent. The woman’s hysteria turned up a notch.

“May third?” he asked. He didn’t dare look at me.

“May second,” I said. “You suck, Shae.”

“I was close,” he said. He picked up a notebook and pen and wrote something down.

I sighed. “You let Nori get out.”

“Sorry, Flan.” He kept scribbling. “You know Nori’s escape velocity.”

“Escape velocity” was a term Shae borrowed from Baudrillard; it had to do, I think, with how we run from the real world to the virtual one of cell phones and computers and the like. I used to love when Shae told me about Baudrillard’s theories. I loved how his name was pronounced—Bau-dree-aard; I felt very sophisticated saying it out loud. Now Baudrillard felt like a dinner guest who had stayed in our house way too long.

“Nori’s a real girl, not a virtual one,” I told Shae before I went into the kitchen to see what sort of salad I could throw together. I knew it would be cathartic to tear a head of lettuce to shreds.

The evening air was just starting to cool when everyone converged in the courtyard, arms full of bowls, plates, and silverware.

I put my mauled and overdressed bowl of greens on the grayish picnic table. Pia set her pot of ziti beside it. It was no ordinary pot of ziti. It looked—forgive me, Pia—like a pot of vomit, but it smelled great.

“Peanut sauce?” I asked her. “With mango,” she winked at me. Every once in a while, Pia had the urge to experiment with food. Sometimes the experi

ments were sublime. Sometimes they were just plain weird. When she stuck to Filipino food, it was always fabulous. Even the blood stew.

I wondered what the Afghani couple was having for dinner. It smelled like lamb, onions. Something savory. Something syrupy and sweet with it, too—a sauce of sour cherries, maybe.

Isobel set down a baking dish of corn bread studded with shrimp. Isobel was an economics fellow from Guatemala. She was short and squat, but she exuded the energy of an Amazon; I can’t say she was pretty, but there was something smoky and seductive about her. She had beautiful eyes.

“That smells like sex,” Nigel, a chemistry major from Wales with a foppy head of dark hair, leaned over Isobel’s pan of bread as he set a platter of mushrooms and a six-pack of Corona on the table. The two of them were always flirting.

“That looks like sex.” She pointed to the mushrooms. She was right—they were a messy, glistening tangle. I felt as if someone had plucked a guitar string that ran down the center of my body and ended, buzzing, between my legs.

“Is Jorge working tonight?” Nigel asked, trying to sound casual. His wife, an anthropology student, was off doing Ph.D. research in the Basque region of Spain. Jorge, Isobel’s husband, had a master’s in engineering, but the degree didn’t translate in America. The only job he could find was at a canning factory, swing shift.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Isobel hid a smile as she scooped a spoonful of mushrooms onto her plate.

Pia and I raised our eyebrows at each other.

“The party has begun.” Nigel smiled at Isobel as he began to distribute bottles.

“So, what’s everyone working on today?” I asked after we did the obligatory clinking. I wanted a vicarious shot of academe. Non-Baudrillard academe, that is.

“I plead the fifth,” said Isobel, to my disappointment. “This is the one time of day I don’t have to think about that.”

“Hear! Hear!” Pia took a big swig of beer.

“Come on, you guys,” I said.

Nigel began talking animatedly about something involving borons that I tried to follow, but I was immediately lost. At least his accent was nice to listen to.

“I cleaned up some labia today,” said Michael, Pia’s husband, when Nigel was done. Pia cuffed him on the arm.

“It’s my job,” he said. Michael was tech support for a porn site. It allowed him to work at home while Pia was at the lab. “The jpegs were all wonky.”

“Children are present, might I remind you,” said Pia.

“Labia is an anatomical term,” said Michael. “We don’t need to hide it from them.”

The kids weren’t paying any attention. They were fully engrossed in their bowls of ziti. I think Pia laced it with some sort of junior smack.

“Did you put coconut milk in this?” I asked her, spooning up another helping. It was incredible, the red peppers and mango bright and fresh in the creamy, nutty sauce.

“Yeah. And some sesame oil.”

Shae came outside.

“Shake!” the table called out collectively. He didn’t always join us during these meals; I often had to put together a plate for him and bring it to the couch or the computer, wherever he was currently sacked out.

“Hi guys,” he said and scooched in next to me on the picnic bench. He had just showered. He smelled sweet, steam still rising from his skin; I could feel my festering anger melt away. All I wanted to do was touch him. It had been way too long since we had seriously touched. I bit into a hunk of corn bread and understood why Nigel said it smelled like sex. The little shrimps packed a fleshy funk. I squeezed Shae’s knee under the table. He slid an arm behind my waist, leaned toward me, whispered “Sorry about before.” I hoped we would find some time alone together that night.

Nigel handed Shae a beer. I took a second one. Shae and I clinked bottles; the sharp clack sent a hopeful reverberation through my body. People talked about financial aid woes, what was going to be on TV that night, the war in Afghanistan, but I barely heard them. I watched the candles drip down onto the table, watched the kids slide around on the acorn-covered grass after they had finished eating, watched an owl take to the air as the sun started to set, and thought about what Shae and I would do to each other after we got the kids to bed. Baudrillard may have thought that we all wanted to escape reality, but I wanted to get right into the messy heart of it. I popped open another bottle of beer and tried to be patient.

Nori drifted off to sleep after just a couple of minutes of nursing—the three Spiderman bowls full of ziti had knocked her out. I went out to the living room to read Noodle his bedtime story, and found Shae sound asleep on the couch. I kissed him on the lips to try to rouse him; his lips just flattened under mine. Then they parted, and I was hopeful for a second until he snored into my mouth. His breath tasted like shrimp. I knew that was as sexy as things were going to get.

I hadn’t realized how tipsy I was until I stood up, dizzy, my anger reignited. Noodle was sitting on the floor with his book.

“You wanna come in the auction room?” I asked him. “I need to open a box.”

“Really?” Noodle had never been allowed in for the opening of boxes before.

“It will be our secret.” I touched a finger to his lips, then quickly removed it when I felt a little charge shiver down my body.

He dropped his book and followed me into the room. I ripped my X-Acto knife through the tape that sealed the art & ect box. I felt as if I was going to fall into the box and keep falling.

“What do you think it is?” I asked Noodle before I opened the flaps.

“I think the art is going to be shiny, but I don’t think we should open it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I think the ect is ectoplasm.” He hunched his small shoulders.

“Where in the world did you learn that word?”

“Ghostbusters. Ectoplasm is ghost goo. I saw it at Ravi’s house, Mama. I don’t think we should let it out.”

“I think we’ll be okay.” Even the word “goo” stirred me. I took a deep breath.

Noodle crouched behind my back; I could feel him scrunch his eyes tight against my overalls and brace himself for whatever I was about to unleash.

“Look, Noodle, no ghosts.” The only thing that wafted from the box was the scent of kindergarten. The smell knocked the horniness out of my system. Noodle cautiously ventured out from behind me to take a look. Art turned out to be a few pieces of construction paper swirled with cracked tempera paint; ect was some stone paperweights, an apron advertising a hot sauce company, Dalmation-spotted oven mitts, and a folder filled with operating instructions for electric tweezers, a foot bath, and a popcorn maker shaped like a UFO.

I lifted a stiff painting from the box. Flecks of blue and orange and green fell onto my overalls, the linoleum, Noodle’s feet. A large colorful face stared up at us, arms jutting where the ears should be, legs poking out where the neck should be.

“Dan, age 4, first painting, 8/22/90” was written at the bottom with ballpoint pen.

“Dan must be sixteen now,” I told Noodle. I put the painting on the floor to start a Return pile. I knew Dan’s mother would be happy to get that painting back.

At the start of every auction, the auctioneer exhorted us to return the “personals” to the office after we had gone through the lockers—photographs, letters, important documents. The office made an effort to reunite delinquent renters with items that held obvious financial or sentimental value. I sometimes tried to find the renters’ contact information so I could mail them their possessions myself. I knew a lot of people wouldn’t want to set foot in the office where they owed money, even if it meant they could get their birth certificates back.

“Dan is sad, Mama,” said Noodle. He leaned over the pile of art. His tie-dye shirt rose up; his little penis dangled free, pointed at the floor like a baby’s finger.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he keeped getting older.”

“And why did that make him sad?”

“Because he already did his first painting and now it’s all going to be old.”

I wrapped my arms around him. “You’re always going to be my baby. You know that, right?”

“I’m your old baby now,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. “You’re my wrinkly old white-haired baby.” I kissed his cheek, and to my surprise, he began to cry. Misery rose from his body and blasted into mine.

“I don’t want anything to happen to us, Mama.” He shook against me. Did he have a premonition something was going to happen? How could he have known?

“Me neither, sweetheart,” I said. I patted his head, my own head swimming. I hated to think about anything happening to my kids; I couldn’t let myself do it. I scanned the room to see what to include in my next yard sale.

Objects were safe. Objects didn’t promise to break my heart.

People were already milling around our front door when I started to drag blankets and boxes out at six-thirty in the morning. If I didn’t start at the crack of dawn, I lost a lot of business. Word had spread beyond our neighborhood; veteran Riverside yard-salers often made my house part of their weekend rounds. They didn’t have any trouble getting into the complex, but sometimes they plied the guards with doughnuts or coffee anyway. Every once in a while, a guard gave one of the shoppers a few dollars to look for a necklace for his girlfriend, a couple of cereal bowls for his new apartment.

Shae was still passed out on the couch. I had a bit of a hangover, so the cool air felt good on my face; I dreaded the heat that would come with the sun. I set the blankets—the fuzzy, fake-fur kind emblazoned with Raiders logos and sunset scenes and the like—on the acorn-studded grass, under the shade of the corky oak tree. One blanket was for women’s clothes; one was for kids’ clothes; one was for men’s clothes and tools (for some reason, there usually weren’t a whole lot of men’s clothes); one was for accessories—belts, purses, hats, jewelry; one blanket was for kitchenware; one was for tchotchkes—figurines and decorative tins and assorted doodads; one was for linens; one was for toys; one for books; one for miscellanies that didn’t fit in anywhere else. Pretty much every item was fifty cents, except the heavy-duty things like furniture and electronics or the collectibles I hadn’t managed to sell on eBay.

I had considered selling all of my auction lots online, but I would miss my yard sales too much. I loved hanging out with my neighbors. Plus it would be a pain to have to take pictures of every single item, to write a description, and upload it all onto eBay. It was hard enough to spend a few minutes at my computer without the kids pulling at me. And that’s not even to mention all the packaging and trips to the post office that would be involved. I saved that hassle for the stuff that could really bring in the bucks—nice jewelry, trendy kitsch. I enjoyed watching the prices go up on my eBay page as people bid—it wasn’t quite the same sweaty energy of a self-storage auction, but things could get quite heated if there were dueling bidders in the final seconds. I loved thinking of people all over the world hunched over their computers, holding their breath, waiting to see if they won the things I dangled before their eyes.

The nice thing about yard sales was I could see people’s eyes; I could see the flickers of anticipation and excitement there. The sheen of satisfaction when they found just what they wanted. The crackle of disappointment when they came up empty-handed.

I set my cigar box full of quarters on my little metal TV tray, unfolded my chair, and my third-world-style mall was open for business. I have stores plenty and to spare.

“How are you able to do this every week?” A woman asked as I added up her items in my notebook.

I put her 2T shorts and sippy cup and paper towel rack and Christmas plate and David Cassidy eight-track into a wrinkled plastic bag from Stater Brothers.“If I told you,”I said,“I’d have to kill you.”

She grabbed her son and left as soon as I handed her her change. She didn’t seem to realize that I was joking.

I first found out about the auctions from a family on Grape Street who had started having yard sales every weekend. Noodle was a baby; we got most of his baby clothes there, most of his toys, most of our mismatched plates and silverware.

“How can you have so many yard sales?” I finally asked the mom, a tall woman with a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and intense blue eyes. “Don’t you run out of stuff ?”

“It’s a secret.” She winked at me. An inordinate amount of gum flashed when she smiled.

The next weekend, I went to pick up some extra towels—Noodle was going through a major spit-up phase. I asked the woman again: “Where do you get all this stuff ?” None of the items laid out on the lawn had been there the week before.

“Magic,” the woman said with her horsy mouth, and pocketed my three dollars.

The following weekend, I went back to look for a bathmat (I found one, decorated with sea creatures, barely used). I opened my arms to encompass the kitchen canisters and rolling pins and macramé plant holders.

“What the fuck?” I asked.

A smile danced across the woman’s face. She looked around to make sure no one was watching, then whispered “Follow me,” jerking a shoulder to her house.

I lugged Noodle’s stroller up the front steps and trailed her inside. Her entire living room, aside from a couch and a narrow pathway, was filled with boxes. The air was stuffy; it smelled of mothballs and dust. My throat started to close up immediately; my eyes began to water.

“Are you moving?” I asked, through a sneeze.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” she said. “But not all these boxes are mine. I mean, they are now. But they weren’t always.”

She laughed in a way that made me wonder whether it had been a good idea to go inside some strange woman’s house with my baby. I hoped we wouldn’t end up sealed inside one of her crates.

“I don’t follow,” I said and sneezed again.

“Auctions,” she whispered.

I thought she said “Achoo” to mimic my sneeze.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She looked around again to make sure no one was watching and said, a little louder, “Self. Storage. Auctions.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You know those self-storage places you see off the freeway?” she asked. I nodded. “When people don’t pay, they auction off the stuff. For cheap. And then you sell it and make a huge profit.”

“So that’s where your yard-sale stuff comes from?”

She pointed to her nose and whispered “Bingo.”

Who is this kook? I wondered, but I was intrigued.

“I’m only telling you because I’m moving,” she said. “If I wasn’t moving, I wouldn’t say a word. I wouldn’t want the competition. There are too many of us in the mix already. But I’m out of here. I’m moving to Frisco. You can take my slot.”

“How did you find out about it?” “A family who used to live here was in the circuit,” she said. “When they moved, they passed it on to me.”

She plucked a newspaper from the arm of her sofa. The pages rattled and ruffled under her fingers. She opened them to a page full of small print.

“Look for these.” She pointed to the Public Notices. “The lien sales. Business and Professions Code 21700. They’ll tell you all you need to know.”

She was right. And, following her lead, I didn’t pass the auction information on to anyone else in the complex. I didn’t want competition over Flan lots. I didn’t want competition in the neighborhood. I had the yard-sale market cornered. I was the Godmother of Student Family Housing.

Pia knew, of course; she was part of the family. She came with me to my first auction to make sure the place wasn’t full of creeps who would take advantage of me. I found a box of flan mix in the first locker I won, buried in a bag of weird pantry items. Caramel custard glistened on a white dish beneath the brown and orange letters.

I held it up for Pia to see. I could feel the bag of powder shift inside the box.

“It was meant to be,” she said. Pia always tells it like it is.

I kept the flan box on the windowsill of my auction room at home until the ants found it. Then I cut off the front of the box and tacked it to the door. The edges were nibbled by silverfish, but I kept it up there anyway; it reminded me I was on the right track.

“You didn’t tell me you had a Filipino blouse in your stash.” Pia lifted a see-through shirt embroidered with tan flowers. The whole thing looked as if it had been soaked in a tub of tea.

“I didn’t know that’s what it was.” I probably couldn’t identify a third of the items that passed through my hands.

“Just for that, you’re going to give me this for free,” she said.

She slipped it on. It looked bulky and wrong with her teapot-patterned T-shirt underneath, but I knew it would be beautiful over a tank top, or the one fancy bra Pia owned.

“It’s yours,” I told her. She fingered the thready flowers. Already the shirt had grown on her, the reverse of a snake shedding its skin. I don’t think clothes can make the person, but I think they can help you see that person. When I saw Pia in that shirt, I could picture her at home with her family, surrounded by banana trees. If she had been naked, I wouldn’t have been able to see her life as clearly.

When my mother died, my father asked me to choose the dress she would be buried in. I remember standing in front of her closet, dazed, looking at all the clothes that her body would no longer slip into, all the clothes that would no longer hold her beating heart; they were just limp pieces of cloth now, empty, still smelling of perfume, hair spray, her own warm smell. I finally picked what I thought was the prettiest dress—red and Victorianlooking, covered with tiny gray flowers—and handed it to my father. He smushed it into a ball and brought it to the mortuary.

The funeral was open casket. My mom looked beautiful, but I could barely stand to look at her in that box. I could almost hear her saying This. Is. Not. Me. through her thin closed lips. I wished I believed in Heaven, but I didn’t. My real mom had disappeared.

Our neighbor Claire, one of my mom’s best friends, gasped when she stepped up to pay her respects. “Oh my God,” she said. Many people said that when they looked in the coffin. Then she added: “That’s my dress.”

“What are you talking about, Claire?” my father asked. He was dazed, himself.

“Nora borrowed that dress from me about a year ago,” she said.

My father glared at me. I knew I had made a horrible mistake.

“I said she could keep it as long as she wanted . . . ,” Claire trailed off. She started to laugh and cry at the same time, which scared me. Later, when my mom was buried, I heard Claire whisper “Bye, Laura Ashley.”

“My mom’s name is Nora,” I whispered back, and Claire started to laugh and cry again.

Pia came over later, wearing the blouse over a blue camisole. It looked gorgeous.

“Do you think the person who used to wear that shirt is still inside it?” I asked her.

“I’m inside it.” Pia swigged a glass of wine.

“No, I mean, do you think part of a person stays inside their clothes after they give them away?”

“It all comes out in the wash, sweetheart,” she said. “Every bit of DNA.” I wasn’t talking about DNA, but Pia’s mind was much more literal than my own. It was probably an easier way to live. “Do you think our neighbor would be a different person if she didn’t wear her burqa?” I asked. “Obviously,” said Pia. “She wouldn’t wear it if it wasn’t who she was as a person.”

“Do you think she wants to wear it or she has to wear it?” I asked. I was endlessly curious about the woman. I wonder if that’s why our lives collided later; maybe my curiosity acted like a magnet, pulling her into my orbit. Maybe nothing would have happened if I hadn’t been so intrigued.

“I don’t know.” Pia poured more wine into my glass. It glowed like a cup full of light. “Do you like to wear those overalls, or do you have to wear them?”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said, but I looked down at my red Converse high-tops and wondered if I had set my own trap.

Sometimes I felt a bit trapped in Riverside. Don’t get me wrong—I liked Riverside. It was like a bigger version of Student Family Housing. Worn in, a little ragged, but not without its charms. I just had the sense that my real life was waiting for me somewhere else.

Riverside sits in a valley halfway between L.A. and Palm Springs, and doesn’t have the glitter of either place. It technically should be desert, but thanks to irrigation, even the brown, rocky areas are scattered with green, including every type of palm tree imaginable—the short squat ones that look like pineapples, the ones that look like they’re wearing shaggy hula skirts, the ones that are so tall and skinny they arch over like lowercase “r’s” in the wind.

Riverside was derided on all the cool radio stations, called the armpit of southern California. News stories never hesitated to name it the meth lab capital of the world. But those reporters didn’t know the Riverside I knew. The Riverside of restored Craftsman bungalows and crumbling Spanish haciendas, of fifties ranch-style homes and brand-new salmon-colored housing tracts. The Riverside of tacquerias and mini-malls and street fairs and roads lined with magnolia and eucalyptus trees. The Riverside of gorgeous clear winters when you can see all the way to the snowy tips of the San Bernardino Mountains. The Riverside where the navel orange was born; the Riverside with the best smog-enriched sunsets you could ever hope to take in—electric swaths of apricot and lavender.

I first came to Riverside right after my high school graduation, three years before I met Shae. My boyfriend back then was a musician; he wanted to head to L.A. to seek his fortune as a head banger. He wasn’t very good; I wasn’t holding my breath for any record contracts. But I couldn’t wait to leave Cleveland, to leave my father, to head for unimaginably exotic California.

We drove cross-country in his primer-splotched Dodge pickup truck, all our stuff crammed under a tarp in the back. Leaves of Grass was back there, wrapped in an old half slip, tucked in the inside zippered pocket of a duffel bag. With each passing state, the landscape felt bigger and grander and the cab of the truck felt smaller and stuffier. When we stopped at a Taco Bell in Riverside for lunch on the final leg of the trip, I couldn’t bring myself to get back in the truck. I couldn’t bring myself to spend any more time with my boyfriend’s clove cigarettes and the way he clicked his tongue piercing against his teeth. I slipped my duffels out from under the tarp, left a note ending “C Ya” on the passenger seat, and headed down University Avenue. I walked toward the big yellow “C” carved into the side of the Box Springs Mountains behind the UC campus, moving from one C to another, toward whatever life had in store for me.

Those mountains were directly behind our neighborhood in Student Family Housing. If I looked out the bedroom window, I could see their stony flanks glowing in the moonlight. Our bedroom was literally a bed room. All four of us slept there. My old futon was splayed on the floor, along with the crib mattress that Nori sometimes slept on (no box spring, no frame), and a twin mattress (ditto) that Noodle sometimes slept on, each bed covered with a rotating assortment of clashing, often decades old, cartoon-themed sheets from my auction boxes. We often ended up in bizarre configurations—the average morning found me partly on the crib mattress, partly on the futon, partly on the floor, Shae curled on the twin, Noodle stretched out at the foot of the futon, Nori’s little body splayed across the rest of the bed like a giant pink starfish.

The kids loved running around the room in their socks, jumping on the springy mattresses, launching themselves onto the firmer landing pad of the futon. They had more fun on those beds than Shae and I did. The futon hadn’t seen much action since they were born. The couch was another story. And the living room floor. And the bathtub. You have to be creative when you have little time and little bed space to work with. But since Shae started getting more and more distracted by his dissertation, none of the surfaces in the house were getting much play.

I loved watching the Box Spring Mountains change. Sometimes they looked purple at dusk; sometimes, if it was cloudy, they looked gray, the large rocks embedded there radiant and sandy, like they were glowing from the inside. In the winter, after the rains, the hills were green, the rocks white; in the summer, when you could see them through the smog, everything was brown. There were a few trails leading up to the C, leading up to the radio towers that blink their red lights at the very top of the range. We hiked up twice—once when I was pregnant, and once with a kid strapped to each of our backs. It was a disaster both times—my allergies went bonkers, plus when I was pregnant, the height and exertion made me queasy, and when the kids were with us, Noodle was scared of the lizards doing push-ups on the rocks and Nori’s diaper leaked all over my back. I much preferred to look at the Box Spring Mountains through the window of our box spring–less bedroom, the C flashing like a beacon, reminding me—sometimes as a blessing, sometimes as a curse—“See, see, see where you are?”

�I normally didn’t go to auctions outside of Riverside. Every once in a while I went to Moreno Valley or Corona or Colton, towns close enough so I could get home in time to pick Noodle up from school. But it was summer and I could bring him with me and Nori, expand our purview. So I decided to go to Fontana.

We found Your Self Storage on a dusty road lined with eucalyptus trees, sandwiched between a goat farm and an auto parts yard. The freshly painted roll-up doors and roofs of the storage units looked mockingly bright against the dingy landscape. Someone else must have felt the same way—the first “S” on the raised-letter sign had been hit by a rock. Most of the letter was shattered—it made the sign appear to say your elf storage.

“I guess I’ll have to store you here,” I told the kids. “My little elf-children.” Nori shrieked with laughter, but Noodle looked stricken, as if I might really leave him behind.

I didn’t recognize any of the cars, mostly huge SUV-pickup monsters, parked along the sides of the road. This was a whole other auction community. The Garcias and the Misters Chen and Norman and the rest of the gang were not going to be here, that was pretty clear.

I parked my car near the chain-link fence and watched goats stick their wet noses through the diamonds of wire.

Nori was so excited I could barely clip her into her stroller. She immediately began to work at the twine, crying out to the goats as if they could save her. Noodle was thrilled, too, but he tore himself away from the animals and dutifully slipped our bottles of water into his backpack. I learned early on that water was a crucial part of auction preparedness, especially on hot smoggy days.

When I signed in at the registration desk inside the office, the receptionist, an older woman wearing a Rancho Cucamonga Quakes baseball cap, glared at me.

“What?” I asked.

“This isn’t a place for kids,” she said.

“Yes it is,” piped up Noodle. “We saw goats outside! Baby goats are kids. And we saw them! Outside!”

I could still smell their gamy breath in my hair. “Ghost,” echoed Nori, still fumbling with the buckle. A line of drool hung down from her mouth to her lap. “And this is Elf Storage,” Noodle said. “And elves are kids, too.” He looked at me for corroboration.

The woman was not amused.

“Do we have to leave?” I asked her. “We came all the way from Riverside.” “Just don’t let them out of your sight,” she said. “We can’t have kids running around the complex.”

“I can handle that,” I said just as Nori broke free from her stroller and knocked over a plant stand. Noodle righted it, and picked up the crumbs of dirt that had fallen to the floor as Nori ran around the small reception area.

“Auction starts in five minutes,” the woman said. “Keep those kids in line.”

The Fontana auction crowd wasn’t very friendly. No one made eye contact with me. No one made comments, good or bad, about the kids. They kept their eyes glued on the auctioneer, on the storage lockers.

The first few lots were out of my league—huge entertainment centers and sectional sofas and motorcycles. Towering bureaus and old refrigerators. A unit stuffed with so many boxes, poor Booty would never be able to haul them all away. The prices were outrageous—$700,$1,200. I never would have guessed Fontana, which I had always heard was a grungy rural burn-out mecca, to be a big-money town; maybe these people, mostly men, in their pressed jeans and short-sleeved dress shirts and cell phones clipped to their belt buckles, had driven in from L.A.

The auctioneer stood beside the next unit. It was one of the biggest in the place, twenty by fifteen. I almost didn’t watch as he opened the lock with his bolt cutters, as he started to roll up the shiny purple door, but something pinged inside my belly. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd, Nori on my shoulders, Noodle hanging on to a belt loop in the back of my overalls, the stroller clunking and hopping as he pulled it behind him with one hand.

The purple door whooshed up to the ceiling. Everyone leaned forward to see what was inside. The combined heat of the day and the closeness of the bodies made me feel dizzy. I held on to Nori’s legs with one hand to steady us both. I was about to beam my flashlight into the dim cave when I realized there was no need. The sun had sent a shaft of light at just the right moment, just the right angle, to illuminate the contents of the locker. There was a single box in the middle of the floor. A single, solitary box—no markings, no labels—inside all that space. It glowed in the spotlight of sun. My heart started to race. I wanted it. It was irrational how much I wanted it. I wanted it more than any auction lot I had ever seen. I took a deep breath and could smell the sweet blue of diamonds, the nacreous tang of pearls, the grassy sugar of emeralds, the carbonated clarity of desire.

The crowd began to murmur.

“They wouldn’t rent a big unit if the stuff weren’t valuable,” I heard someone whisper.

“Maybe it’s a severed head,” said someone else.

The bidding started. Three people, including me, wanted the box. The price kept going up, and I kept raising my hand. I couldn’t stop myself. I had never bid beyond $50 before; now I was agreeing to $150,$200. One of the bidders dropped out at $225.

If this had been Riverside, the regulars would have called this a Flan lot right away. They would have let me snag it for the opening bid. But my main competitor, a man with gold cuff links and aviator sunglasses, didn’t know a Flan lot from a bowl of caramel custard. He kept raising his hand, and I kept raising mine. My kids, for once, were perfectly still and silent; it was as if my own breath-holding had plunged them into some sort of animated suspension. My adversary dropped out at $330 and the box was mine.

Three hundred and thirty dollars was a lot of money. A month’s worth of groceries, not to mention way more than I made at my average yard sale. It was not something to throw around lightly. I had never lost money on an auction before. I hoped the box was full of treasure I’d be able to parlay into more cash.

When it was time to pay and haul the lots off, several buyers milled around my unit. “Are you gonna open it here?” the guy with the aviator sunglasses asked.

I had planned to—with one box, it would be easy as pie to go through it on site—but I changed my mind. My box-opening time was my yoga, my time to relax. It was sacred. “Sorry,” I told him.

I strapped Nori back into her stroller, wended the twine around an extra turn. I squatted to pick up the box, using my knees, as I had learned, not my back. The box was disappointingly light. It flew up to my shoulders with no effort. I was worried it would keep on rising, like a helium balloon, and disappear.

“Three hundred and thirty dollars for an empty box,” the man laughed and shook his head. “Hell, I’m glad you won it, not me.” He walked away, cocky and bowlegged. I wanted to tackle him to the ground, but I restrained myself.

“Is it empty, Mama?” Noodle asked, worried. He took the box from my hands and, like a pint-size strongman, lifted it easily up over his head.

The box jostled quietly on the passenger seat the whole ride home; nothing rattled inside of it, no clunk of metal, no ring of crystal, no soft rustling of newspaper or bubble wrap or Styrofoam. I wondered how I was going to tell Shae I had just spent $330 on an empty box. I wondered how we were going to get through the month. I had a couple of eBay auctions ending soon. Maybe the bidding would spike up at the last minute and save me.

Shae was sacked out on the couch when we got home, his hand buried in a bag of cheese puffs. His eyes were tellingly red. The stack of library books had grown taller on the floor, but none of the spines had been cracked. None of the pages were coated with orange powder from his fingers. The only thing tinged with orange was the remote control. A soap opera woman in a blue bridesmaid dress was having some sort of conniption fit. Shae said “Hey” when he heard us come in, but he didn’t take his eyes off the seven screens. I had tried to encourage him to just turn on the one with the best reception, but he insisted on all seven. He said if he only had one screen on, the other six stared at him blankly and made him nervous.

“Daddy, we saw ghosts.” Nori jumped on his lap. “And one of them eated a flower!”

“Cool, baby girl,” said Shae. He tilted the bag of cheese puffs so she could grab some. Noodle sat down next to them. His face immediately slackened into TV-watching mode.

“I’ll be in the auction room,” I said as I walked past with the box. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Shae what I had paid for it. “Don’t let Nori get outside.”

“I won’t,” said Noodle.

I closed the door of the second bedroom behind me; I fell into corpse pose and let the coolness of the linoleum seep into my body.

The box sat next to me, full of emptiness.

How could I have spent so much on a single box?

Was this my karma for taking one hundred dollars from the woman whose lot I won for ten?

I sat back up and grabbed my X-Acto knife. My usual box-opening fizz was gone, replaced by a dull throb of dread. I closed my eyes and dragged the knife across the filament tape. With each pop of the slender fibers, I felt I was slitting the tendons of my own wrist.

I half-expected spirits to swirl out of the box, à la Pandora. Angry ghosts, maybe the ectoplasm Noodle was so scared of. Instead, a vaguely floral smell drifted up, a surprisingly clean smell. I slipped my fingers into the gap between the cardboard flaps, and slowly, cautiously, spread them open.

The inside of the box was painted with swirls of color— purple and silver and orange and green. I thought I could see things in the serpentine of swoops—a sun, a half-melted face, a pear, an owl, a spoon—but I wasn’t sure if the artist put them there or if I was just finding stories in the clouds. It was such a vibrant riot. If I unfolded the box and framed the cardboard, maybe it would be worth something. A woman in San Bernardino had recently bought a painting for five bucks at a thrift store; it ended up being a Jackson Pollock, worth millions. I shined my flashlight inside to see if anyone had signed the box.

The beam lit upon a scrap of blue paper, half-tucked into one of the bottom folds of the box. I tugged it out, losing a corner of it in the process. The paper was hand-made, a thick slab, like a hunk of blue oatmeal flecked with dried flowers and copper thread. A single word was written on it, in gold ink, in thick swoopy letters: yes.

The word caught me off guard. It felt like a karate chop to the throat.

I flipped the paper over. It said, also in gold ink, but with thinner lettering: “If found, please return to me at the blue house on Mount Baldy. Many thanks, Julia.”

I was supposed to return the box? Maybe this Julia would reimburse me for some of the auction money. I headed over to my auction-room computer to do a Google search on “Julia,” “Mount Baldy,” “blue house,” “art,” when the doorknob began to rattle.

“Mama?” It was Noodle, now knocking frantically. I had locked the door this time. “Nori got outside!”

The word “Yes” clunked through me as I ran past my passed-out husband, as I grabbed Nori before she ambled into the street, as I carried her back inside, as I attempted to reason with her, as I glared at Shae until he woke up and retreated to his computer in the kitchen.

I probably wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone, but I didn’t have a lot of Yes in my life. I had a lot of Yeah. A lot of good stuff—my kids; Pia; my neighborhood; my neighborhood meals; my opening of boxes; my occasional, though increasingly infrequent, fumblings with my husband. But not a lot that made me light up. A low flame, maybe. A dull glow. The word “yeah” sounded like a yawn, a sigh. Not a sizzle. “Yes” was garlic thrown in hot oil. “Yes” was waves hissing onto the shore, Pop Rocks crackling in the mouth. Maybe a “Yes” was waiting for me somewhere. Maybe this Julia had an answer, a key. I went on the computer and learned, to my relief, that the bidding on one of my eBay auctions—an original Star Wars Play-Doh set—had inched up over $200. I couldn’t find anything online about the artist, though. I’d just have to drive up to Mount Baldy, I decided, and see if I could find her myself.
 

Excerpted from SELF STORAGE © Copyright 2011 by Gayle Brandeis. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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