EIGHT.

    This isn't about anything. I distract myself: looking out the window and wondering if anyone's looking in at me. The apartment building across the street, Fireside Manor, is abandoned, and I frequently wonder what goes on in its empty rooms. Do birds nest in the window sills; do vandals graffiti the walls; do homeless teens sleep in the hallways, dreaming of warmth in a building that has no chimneys at all. I can't figure out where the name comes from. Perhaps there are facades set into the living room walls, devoid of function. At a library in the Inland Empire they have a holographic fireplace in the reading room. I want to set the books on fire.

    My own apartment is littered with them. I build towers of books, steeples that lean and threaten to tumble to the ground. I stuff them anywhere I can, but try to maintain a sense of order: recipe books in the kitchen cabinets, Anaïs Nin under the bed. I adore the scent of old paper, the faded onionskin sheets, the way the edges crumble if handled improperly. My series books sit neatly in the bookcase, the spines lined up like crayons in a box: the Merriweather Girls, Judy Bolton. I write secret notes using lemon water as ink and seek out clues in old lockets. The playing card from next door I inspect, searching the surface for any anomaly. There's nothing unusual about it except the circumstance of it's arrival into my hands. So disappointing. A card away from it's set is useless, solitaire.

    So am I alone. A stark white figure, sitting here in my dollhouse, a light box made of a child's tea set. I go out to take the bus downtown, #2 along Sunset Boulevard, past billboards and glittering Hollywood hills and this cold effervescent wind tossing leaves in complex waltzes across the sidewalks, daydreaming about playing cards and haunted houses and wedding dresses. I never feel as anonymous and drab as I do on the bus. We're indistinguishable from one another, carried along complacently as cars with tinted windows rumble with character and charisma at stoplights. The bus labors on, a moving billboard bearing an ad for a new film, a fresh face. I think of Therese and our sixteenth year, when she bought a beautiful wedding dress from the thrift store and held the package containing it tightly to her waist, carrying it home in a bundle. Full train, yards of lace, miniature buttons at the wrists and down her back, like Mary Mack. We were jealous of the Hispanic girls who got quinceñera dresses and lavish parties, and of girls in the South who went to Cotton Ball in princess gowns, full of gentility, and girls in well-to-do neighborhoods who had cotillions, learning to waltz on the arms of their fathers. No such things for us, no grand entrance into womanhood, and so we made it for ourselves. Therese's wedding dress, an honored thing, referred to only with certain indifference from other clothes, endowed with sanctity. A dress worn only once, and her mother would laugh as if there was something either charming or ridiculous about her daughter's fondness for the item, which hung on her wall, lavender scented and stained to a faded cream in a bathtub full of tea bags. She wore it only once, her long hair streaming out behind, lips immaculately painted, a courtesan's pout, though her attire announced that she does no harm.

    As a child I was confused when I read that Laura Ingalls Wilder wore black to her wedding, but in fact white was not a common color for bridal gowns until Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in white in 1840. All of my wedding dresses are white. I have my great-grandmother's simple sheer chiffon dress from the 1930s, with ruffled edges and a knee-length skirt. I have a 1940's dress complete with voluminous skirt scattered with silk flowers. The waist is so tiny that I have to lace my corset tightly before hooking the buttons up the back. I have a slim 1960s dress with buttons down the front and a long train. My neighbor gave me the dress, a remnant from her first marriage, and it is a bit tattered but I love it more for being so. More than anything I like the dresses because they're pretty, and because they're ceremonial; they invoke something childish in me that wants to play dress-up and take on different parts. I like to be in disguise. I like to be a bride.

    I haven't worn any of my wedding dresses for a while. I think I will call Therese and convince her to put hers on, once again, for the last time, and maybe we will go on a picnic to Seaside Park or el Capitan, trailing our skirts behind us. I'll make pink lemonade and strawberry pie and we'll marry ourselves, again. For the last time, for forever.

    I'll never marry anyone else. I'm too fickle and unsteady. Plus, it's harder to fall in love than I thought. Even liking someone can be so awful. What an utter waste of energy and attention. I don't even want to think about it. I'll be an old maid with a pedigreed dog, a collection of porcelain like you see in 'decorative arts' museums, and a really elegant and ladylike apartment since I won't have to share it with an uninteresting male.