Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest — where you want to erect a museum.

          Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

                   Mother.

I SEPARATED our dirty clothes at the Fletcher coin op, colors from lights, cold from hot. I liked doing laundry, the sorting, dropping the coins, the soothing smell of detergent and dryers, rumble of the machines, the snap of cotton and denim as the women folded their clothes, their fresh sheets. Children played games with their mothers' laundry baskets, wearing them like cages, sitting in them like boats. I wanted to sit in one too, pretend I was sailing.

My mother hated any chore, especially the ones that had to be performed in public. She waited until all our clothes were dirty, and sometimes washed our underwear in the sink, so we could put it off another few days. When we finally could not get away with it one day more, we'd quickly load our wash in the machines and then leave, go take in a movie, look at some books. Each time, we 'd come back to find it wet, thrown out on top of the washers or on the folding tables. I hated it that people handled our things. Everybody else could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn't we? "Because we're not everybody," my mother would say. "We're not even remotely like everybody."

Except even she had dirty laundry.

When the loads of laundry were dry, the sheets bleached back to sanity, I drove home in Niki's truck, she let me borrow it for special occasions, like when she was too drunk to drive, or I was washing her clothes. I parked in the driveway. There were two girls I'd never seen before sitting on Rena's front steps. White girls, fresh faces, no makeup. One wore a vintage-style dress with little flowers, her sandy hair in a bun with a chopstick stuck in it. The dark one had on jeans and a pink cotton turtleneck. Black clean shoulder-length hair. Her little nipples poked at the front of the pink cotton.

The vintage-dress girl stood up, squinting into the sun, her eyes the same gray as her dress, freckles. She smiled uncertainly when I got out of the truck. "Are you Astrid Magnussen?" she asked.

I hauled a garbage bag full of folded clothes out of the passenger seat, lifted another from the bed in the back. "Who wants to know?"

"I'm Hannah," she said. "This is Julie."

The other girl smiled too, but not as widely.

I never saw them before. They sure didn't go to Marshall, and they were too young to be social workers. "Yeah, and?"

Hannah, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, looked over at dark-haired Julie for encouragement. Suddenly, I became aware of what I must seem like to them. Hard, street. My eyeliner, my black polyester shirt, my heavy black boots, my cascade of silver earrings, hoops from pinkie-sized to softball. Niki and Yvonne had pierced my ears one day when they were bored. I let them do it. It pleased them to shape me. I'd learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or put on my back, I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom.

"We just came to meet you, to see, you know, if there was anything we could do," Hannah said.

"We know your mother," Julie said. She had a deeper voice, calmer. "We visit with her in Corona."

Her children. Her new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege, and now I was being replaced by something unmutilated, something intact?

"We're at Pitzer College, out in Pomona. We studied her in Women's Studies. We visit her every week. She knows so much about everything, she's really incredible. Every time we go she just blows us away."

What was my mother thinking, sending these college girls? Was she trying to grind me into talc, flour for some bitter bread? Was this the ultimate punishment for my refusal to forget? "What does she want from me?"

"Oh, no," Hannah said. "She didn't send us. We came on our own. But we told her we 'd send you a copy of the interview, you know?" She held up a magazine she had rolled in her hands, blushed deeply. In a way, I envied that blush. I couldn't blush like that anymore. I felt old, gnawed pliant and unrecognizable as a shoe given to a dog. "And then we thought, you know, now that we knew where you lived, we could —" She smiled helplessly.

"We thought we'd come and see if we could help you or something," Julie said.

I saw that I scared them. They thought my mother's daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. My mother didn't scare them, but I did.

"Is that it?" I asked, holding out my hand for the magazine.

Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. My mother's face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.

I sat down next to Julie on the splintered front steps. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. I opened the piece, flipped through it. My mother's gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography. "What do you talk about with her?" I asked.

"Poetry." Hannah shrugged. "What we're reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn't even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that's just incredible."

The transformation of the world.

"She talks about you," Julie said.

That was a surprise. "What's she say about me?"

"That you're in a, you know. Home. She feels terrible about what's happened," Hannah said. "For you most of all."

I looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeup-less faces, trusting, caring. And I felt the gap between us, all the things I wouldn't be because I was who I was. I was graduating in two months, but I wasn't going to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. I tried to see my mother through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did my mother suffer? I forced myself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? I really couldn't say.