In my cupboard I have eighteen cans of jalapeno peppers that cost 11 cents each. There were twenty, but I have eaten two in the last year. I bought them because they were 11 cents each, you see. You never know when you might need jalapenos. I bought the twenty cans of mushrooms at the same time for the same price, but those I ate. Most of them, anyway.

When I was eleven, my thirty-six-year-old mother got herself an eighteen-year-old sailor boyfriend, and, rather than have the neighbors talk, she pretended he was my boyfriend. And just so the St. Joe’s nuns never found out, we moved two hours by bus away from the district.