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Show in my father's house/ 58 gifts." One day when I was playing dress-up and had tired of my mother's depleted store of costume jewelry, I crept into Aunt Helga's room. I opened the top drawer and gaped. Lipsticks stood in rows like toy soldiers and earrings lay in a shimmering pool. Fine lace handkerchiefs piled up like summer clouds. These beautiful things made the world seem so fine a place to be -- I wanted them! My mother didn't have such things, and it wasn't fair. I stared at my face in the dresser mirror, at the ugly way my lower lip protruded when I was unhappy. Hadn't my father said I was his princess, that I should wear a crown? I decked my chest and forehead with necklaces and fumbled with the hand-tooled earrings from Mexico. I dabbed perfume from one of the pretty vials on the dresser-top and smeared bright lipstick over my mouth. Then, somehow, I dropped the tube on Aunt Helga's frost-white bed. I gasped, doubling over in terror. She would know! I shoved the jewelry back into the drawer and ran to hide under my mother's bed. My mother was furious. "It will never come out! Never! What on earth will I tell Helga?" I refused to cry or say I was sorry, feeling it served Aunt Helga right for having so much when we had so little. When Aunt Helga came home, she stood over me, a hand on one hip, her face like stone- "Why don't you get into your own drawers?" she spat, |