On my knees in the half dark, I slip the drawer open, and it’s like a pirate chest opened in a movie, little glimmers brilliant on the faceted surfaces of the treasures, little musical chimes sounding as if these were audible jewels. No light in the room except the glow emanating from these things, which include: a fan made from stiff folded net fabric—did Sally call it chiffon? No, that was the filmy beige stuff on her prom dress; this is tulle, striped, one watery hue merging into another, a skyey spectrum like the prisms in the air in my ViewMaster slides of Niagara Falls, rainbows over a lucky boat named Maid of the Mist. Glittery ribbons, carnations made from Kleenex clipped with a bobby pin and fringed, just so, then unfolded into a burst of imitation blossom, one drop of cologne fragrant at the center. Scents, powders, delicious nail colors, an album into which she’s pressed Rainbow invitations: the night all the new girls dressed as pickaninnies, required to do their faces from this round tin of blackface. They put their hair in one hundred—count them—little pigtails. Better: the invitation to the Rainbow Cotillion, inside whose stiff engraved fold of paper floats a perfect bit of aurora, like a ripple of colored atmosphere. Aurora: undulation of three vowels moving like heat-shimmer up off the Memphis pavement. Cotillion: I fall into the warm haze of the word, which contains crepe-paper flowers pinned to wrists and sashes, arbors made from twisted bits of tissue paper, and somewhere there are bells, reverberant as though the cotillion were held underwater, and bell-shaped dresses—tulle and chiffon and the stiff gold-printed satin of the pillow, the lovely whiplike tentacles of the fringe—all circling forever, almost untouchable, in a sphere of their own. In the album are ticket stubs and place cards and flattened decorated nut cups, party favors, beside which the familiar daily world of our house and things, the plain navy and dull scarred brown of my school seem dun, workaday—unseasoned, a tired old broth redolent of nothing but necessity.

Something about this pleasure feels entirely private. How do I know this is something to hide? Partly it’s just that this room and its thrilling stuff are hers, but something runs deeper than that: my fetishism isn’t about Sally but about beauty itself, about wrappings and presentation and display, about artifice and its perfection.