It started in the chill of the eighties, with a grand old museum piece Nordstrom's and a hot pink bikini. She was just a tiny thing, in corduroys and a turtleneck, holding the hand of a face she couldn't see and staring through a commercially sleek skylight at sunlight like gold. It didn't matter what season it was, unless it was Christmas, because in all the other months those department stores held summer.

The hot pink bikini was an elemental force. It was polyester, well suited for a go-go girl shaking voluminous hips against a backdrop of surf rock. There were two red and white daisys embroidered onto it, one on the left breast, one on the right hip. It didn't fit, of course, not a four year old. But the bikini stayed in the dress-up box, lying in wait, and the image of it was with her for life.

There were warning incidents, to be sure. Things were taken too far many times. Like the homes for fairies built out of greasy semi-trailer bones. Like the Kleenex boxes and their contents that became couches and dresses, respectively, for mohawked, finger-polish lipsticked Barbies. Like the brief episode of witchcraft that concealed the simple desire for candles and incense and other artifacts of the imaginary.

At fourteen, they all began again. She had her own bedroom, furnished with two stained pancakes acting as futons and a large box which comprised a dresser in that all her clothes (not so many as you'd think, not then) rested upon it. And so she left that room as often as she could, seeking the sensualist's secondary goal, when there are no items to be awed by, those ellusive Experiences. They were mostly coffee and cigarettes, and skipping school and looking tough. But sometimes there were boys and booze and drugs and roadtrips. At that age, she couldn't have conceived of a better Bohemia. All that time, she rebelled so softly, falling each time into safety, her mother's house and a bank account that was plenty for a little girl with no bills. She assumed it could be forever.

She saw the necessary choice in college. Some dark force inside her had packed her off and there she was and tried to turn right back around, but they'd closed the boarding gates. And really she could never have gotten on. To go home would be to give up. Not that giving up mattered. But she'd been waiting a long time to resume the pursuit of that pink bikini and all those other magic items, and they could be forever lost, depending on those moments.

Thus, after eighteen, there was no more rock'n'roll in her. When it went, so did her happiness, and she saw that it was too late. Every day she would wake up and she would be older than she would have believed possible the day before. The promises of brochures and sitcoms consoled her. Remember, she reminded herself. It's all for this.

She didn't see, though, that you can't buy rock'n'roll.

All through college she stoked herself on other people's promises and the transcendent qualities of the American Dream. She feigned modest to defend her choices, as though it would be enough to be guaranteed a meal and a bed. It had nothing to do with modesty, only leopard print couches and fringed velvet lamps and bamboo wet bars and hand-beaded vintage everything.

And now she's a little old lady, and she never went to the moon, but she went shopping more than once. She didn't find the promise, and she couldn't buy a time machine to take her back to the gutter. She pretended to be dull and good because that was her pretense, and she hid her hatred from all the other robots with all their robot toys. She learned to stop saying she was better because the objects she persued were better. And she found herself in a crushed velvet armchair in a near-perfect loft wearing a tafetta ballgown and Gucci shoes, sipping 12 year scotch from a simple but exquisite highball glass. And she closed her eyes and in her head she put on a sweatshirt and jeans and those old summer-smelling Airwalks she wore every day in high school. She dug out the studded bracelets she felt dirty putting on after work. She cut her hair in the mirror and gave herself a manicure with Wite Out. She put two changes of clothes and lots of socks and underwear into a backpack, locked the door, and closed the dollhouse.