I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. The furnace wasn't working, Rena still hadn't fixed it. We just wore sweaters all the time. "Cold?" she said. "In California? You joke." They weren't feeling it, out there braying to the records, drinking Hunter's Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

I looked around the cramped, crowded room, like the stockroom of a Goodwill store. I imagined what my mother would say if she could see who I was now, her burning little artist. Just another used item in Rena's thrift shop. You like that lamp with the bubbled green base? Name a price. How about the oil painting of the fat-cheeked peasant woman with the orange kerchief? For you, ten dollars. A bouquet of beaded flowers? Talk to Rena, she'd let you have it for seven-fifty. We had a furry Oriental rug, and a solid oak table, only slightly tilted, along with five unmatched chairs, special today. We had an enormous tiki salad set, and a complete Encyclopedia Britannica from 1962. We had three matted white cats, cathair over everything, cat smell. All this, and an old-fashioned hi-fi in a fruitwood cabinet and a stack of records from the seventies higher than'Bowie's platform shoes.

And our clothes, Mother, how do you like our clothes? Polyester tops and lavender hiphuggers, yellow shirts with industrial zippers. Clothes floated around from closet to closet until we were bored, then we sold them and bought something else. You wouldn't recognize the girl I've become. My hair is growing out, I found a pair of Jackie O sunglasses and I wear them all the time.

My clothes are gone, the rich orphan clothes from Fred Segal and Barney's New York. Rena made me sell them. I'm sure you'd approve. We were unloading in the parking lot of Natalia's Nails one Saturday. I was arranging coffee mugs when I saw Rena pulling my clothes out of a black plastic garbage bag. My French blue tweed jacket, my Betsey Johnson halter dress, my Myrna Loy pajamas. Hanging them on hangers on the rolling rack.

I snatched them off the rack, stood there shaking. She had gone through my drawers, my closet. "These are mine."

Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. "Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?" She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. "Here." She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. "You name price, you keep money, ladno?" She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with an Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front. My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.

"Not that," I said. "Come on, have a heart."

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. "You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918." She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. "Is fact."

I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. Sour pliers squeezed my throat, juicing it like a lemon. She couldn't make me sell my clothes. That witch.

But I couldn't stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chest-nuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.

Why couldn't anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn't sort out.

"Someone gave it to me," I finally said to Rena. "So?" Rena looked up from her hangers. "You're lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out." I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts. "You want car?" Rena said. "Artist college? You think I don't know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is .. ." She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. "Money. You want remember, so just remember."

So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn't sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. As the sun got warm, the hard bargainers left and the couples came, lazily, arm in arm, old people out for a stroll, young people. The T-shirts, the pants, the jackets went. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was stilhunsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars.         «' •

"What she say," Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness.

"It's a Jessica McClintock," I said defensively. "Never been worn." My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.

I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody's daughter, somebody's real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn't a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn't a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I.

All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. After the fifth woman had tried it on, I started not caring so much. At about three, a group of girls came around, and one of them kept looking at the red dress, holding it up to herself. "Can I try this on?"

I took the plastic off, slid the dress down her arms, over the pale downy hair, pulled it along her body, zipped the back as she held up her dark ponytail. It looked just right on her. As it had never looked on me. I'd never seen the girl before. She didn't go to Marshall. She probably went to Immaculate Heart or the French School. A cared-for girl, someone's daughter. I held it for her as she went to the 7-Eleven to call her mother. Fifteen minutes later, an attractive older woman showed up in a butter-yellow Mercedes, black linen slacks, suede moccasins with horse bit buckles. I helped the girl into the dress again, and the woman gave me the hundred, a single crisp bill. They were going to a cousin's wedding in New York. The dress would be perfect. I could tell from the mother's expression that she knew exactly what it was worth.

We went on until five, then started breaking it down, loading up the van and Niki's pickup truck. All my things had sold. I sat on the fender of the van and counted my money. I'd made over four hundred dollars.