The Woman Warrior — At the Western Palace

At

the

Western

Palace

When she was about sixty-eight years old, Brave Orchid took a day o to wait at San Francisco International Airport for the plane that was bringing her sister to the United States. She had not seen Moon Orchid for thirty years. She had begun this waiting at home, getting up a half-hour before Moon Orchid’s plane took o in Hong Kong. Brave Orchid would add her will power to the forces that keep an airplane up. Her head hurt with the concentration. The plane had to be light, so no matter how tired she felt, she dared not rest her spirit on a wing but continuously and gently pushed up on the plane’s belly. She had already been waiting at the airport for nine hours. She was wakeful.

Next to Brave Orchid sat Moon Orchid’s only daughter, who was helping her aunt wait. Brave Orchid had made two of her own children come too because they could drive, but they had been lured away by the magazine racks and the gift shops and coee shops. Her American children could not sit for very long. They did not understand sitting; they had wandering feet. She hoped they would get back from the pay t.v.’s or the pay toilets or wherever they were spending their money before the plane arrived. If they did not come back soon, she would go look for them. If her son thought he could hide in the men’s room, he was wrong.

“Are you all right, Aunt?” asked her niece.

“No, this chair hurts me. Help me pull some chairs together so I can put my feet up.”

She unbundled a blanket and spread it out to make a bed for herself. On the oor she had two shopping bags full of canned peaches, real peaches, beans wrapped in taro leaves, cookies, Thermos bottles, enough food for everybody, though only her niece would eat with her. Her bad boy and bad girl were probably sneaking hamburgers, wasting their money. She would scold them.

Many soldiers and sailors sat about, oddly calm, like little boys in cowboy uniforms. (She thought “cowboy” was what you would call a Boy Scout.) They should have been crying hysterically on their way to Vietnam. “If I see one that looks Chinese,” she thought, “I’ll go over and give him some advice.” She sat up suddenly; she had forgotten about her own son, who was even now in Vietnam.

Carefully she split her attention, beaming half of it to the ocean, into the water to keep him aoat. He was on a ship. He was in Vietnamese waters. She was sure of it. He and the other children were lying to her. They had said he was in Japan, and then they said he was in the Philippines. But when she sent him her help, she could feel that he was on a ship in Da Nang. Also she had seen the children hide the envelopes that his letters came in.

“Do you think my son is in Vietnam?” she asked her niece, who was dutifully eating.

“No. Didn’t your children say he was in the Philippines?”

“Have you ever seen any of his letters with Philippine stamps on

them?”

“Oh, yes. Your children showed me one.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them to send the letters to some Filipino they know. He puts Manila postmarks on them to fool me.”

“Yes, I can imagine them doing that. But don’t worry. Your son can take care of himself. All your children can take care of themselves.”

“Not him. He’s not like other people. Not normal at all. He sticks erasers in his ears, and the erasers are still attached to the pencil stubs. The captain will say, ‘Abandon ship,’ or, ‘Watch out for bombs,’ and he won’t hear. He doesn’t listen to orders. I told him to ee to Canada, but he wouldn’t go.”

She closed her eyes. After a short while, plane and ship under control, she looked again at the children in uniforms. Some of the blond ones looked like baby chicks, their crew cuts like the downy yellow on baby chicks. You had to feel sorry for them even though they were Army and Navy Ghosts.

Suddenly her son and daughter came running. “Come, Mother.

The plane’s landed early. She’s here already.” They hurried, folding up their mother’s encampment. She was glad her children were not useless. They must have known what this trip to San Francisco was about then. “It’s a good thing I made you come early,” she said.

Brave Orchid pushed to the front of the crowd. She had to be in front. The passengers were separated from the people waiting for them by glass doors and walls. Immigration Ghosts were stamping papers. The travellers crowded along some conveyor belts to have their luggage searched. Brave Orchid did not see her sister anywhere. She stood watching for four hours. Her children left and came back. “Why don’t you sit down?” they asked.

“The chairs are too far away,” she said.

“Why don’t you sit on the oor then?”

No, she would stand, as her sister was probably standing in a line she could not see from here. Her American children had no feelings and no memory.

To while away time, she and her niece talked about the Chinese passengers. These new immigrants had it easy. On Ellis Island the people were thin after forty days at sea and had no fancy luggage.

“That one looks like her,” Brave Orchid would say.

“No, that’s not her.”

Ellis Island had been made out of wood and iron. Here everything was new plastic, a ghost trick to lure immigrants into feeling safe and spilling their secrets. Then the Alien Oce could send them right back. Otherwise, why did they lock her out, not letting her help her sister answer questions and spell her name? At Ellis Island when the ghost asked Brave Orchid what year her husband had cut o his pigtail, a Chinese who was crouching on the oor motioned her not to talk. “I don’t know,” she had said. If it weren’t for that Chinese man, she might not be here today, or her husband either.

She hoped some Chinese, a janitor or a clerk, would look out for Moon Orchid. Luggage conveyors fooled immigrants into thinking the Gold Mountain was going to be easy.

Brave Orchid felt her heart jump—Moon Orchid. “There she is,” she shouted. But her niece saw it was not her mother at all. And it shocked her to discover the woman her aunt was pointing out. This was a young woman, younger than herself, no older than Moon Orchid the day the sisters parted. “Moon Orchid will have changed a little, of course,” Brave Orchid was saying. “She will have learned to wear western clothes.” The woman wore a navy blue suit with a bunch of dark cherries at the shoulder.

“No, Aunt,” said the niece. “That’s not my mother.”

“Perhaps not. It’s been so many years. Yes, it is your mother. It must be. Let her come closer, and we can tell. Do you think she’s too far away for me to tell, or is it my eyes getting bad?”

“It’s too many years gone by,” said the niece.

Brave Orchid turned suddenly—another Moon Orchid, this one a neat little woman with a bun. She was laughing at something the person ahead of her in line said. Moon Orchid was just like that, laughing at nothing. “I would be able to tell the dierence if one of them would only come closer,” Brave Orchid said with tears, which she did not wipe. Two children met the woman with the cherries, and she shook their hands. The other woman was met by a young man. They looked at each other gladly, then walked away side by side.

Up close neither one of those women looked like Moon Orchid at all. “Don’t worry, Aunt,” said the niece. “I’ll know her.”

“I’ll know her too. I knew her before you did.”

The niece said nothing, although she had seen her mother only ve years ago. Her aunt liked having the last word.

Finally Brave Orchid’s children quit wandering and drooped on a railing. Who knew what they were thinking? At last the niece called out, “I see her! I see her! Mother! Mother!” Whenever the doors parted, she shouted, probably embarrassing the American cousins, but she didn’t care. She called out, “Mama! Mama!” until the crack in the sliding doors became too small to let in her voice. “Mama!”

What a strange word in an adult voice. Many people turned to see

what adult was calling, “Mama!” like a child. Brave Orchid saw an old, old woman jerk her head up, her little eyes blinking confusedly, a woman whose nerves leapt toward the sound anytime she heard “Mama!” Then she relaxed to her own business again. She was a tiny, tiny lady, very thin, with little uttering hands, and her hair was in a gray knot. She was dressed in a gray wool suit; she wore pearls around her neck and in her earlobes. Moon Orchid would travel with her jewels showing. Brave Orchid momentarily saw, like a larger, younger outline around this old woman, the sister she had been waiting for. The familiar dim halo faded, leaving the woman so old, so gray. So old. Brave Orchid pressed against the glass. That old lady? Yes, that old lady facing the ghost who stamped her papers without questioning her was her sister. Then, without noticing her family, Moon Orchid walked smiling over to the Suitcase Inspector Ghost, who took her boxes apart, pulling out pus of tissue. From where she was, Brave Orchid could not see what her sister had chosen to carry across the ocean. She wished her sister would look her way. Brave Orchid thought that if she were entering a new country, she would be at the windows. Instead Moon Orchid hovered over the unwrapping, surprised at each reappearance as if she were opening presents after a birthday party.

“Mama!” Moon Orchid’s daughter kept calling. Brave Orchid said to her children, “Why don’t you call your aunt too? Maybe she’ll hear us if all of you call out together.” But her children slunk away.

Maybe that shame-face they so often wore was American politeness.

“Mama!” Moon Orchid’s daughter called again, and this time her mother looked right at her. She left her bundles in a heap and came running. “Hey!” the Customs Ghost yelled at her. She went back to clear up her mess, talking inaudibly to her daughter all the while.

Her daughter pointed toward Brave Orchid. And at last Moon Orchid looked at her—two old women with faces like mirrors.

Their hands reached out as if to touch the other’s face, then returned to their own, the ngers checking the grooves in the forehead and along the sides of the mouth. Moon Orchid, who never understood the gravity of things, started smiling and laughing,

pointing at Brave Orchid. Finally Moon Orchid gathered up her stu, strings hanging and papers loose, and met her sister at the door, where they shook hands, oblivious to blocking the way.

“You’re an old woman,” said Brave Orchid.

“Aiaa. You’re an old woman.”

“But you are really old. Surely, you can’t say that about me. I’m not old the way you’re old.”

“But you really are old. You’re one year older than I am.”

“Your hair is white and your face all wrinkled.”

“You’re so skinny.”

“You’re so fat.”

“Fat women are more beautiful than skinny women.”

The children pulled them out of the doorway. One of Brave Orchid’s children brought the car from the parking lot, and the other heaved the luggage into the trunk. They put the two old ladies and the niece in the back seat. All the way home—across the Bay Bridge, over the Diablo hills, across the San Joaquin River to the valley, the valley moon so white at dusk—all the way home, the two sisters exclaimed every time they turned to look at each other, “Aiaa! How old!”

Brave Orchid forgot that she got sick in cars, that all vehicles but palanquins made her dizzy. “You’re so old,” she kept saying. “How did you get so old?”

Brave Orchid had tears in her eyes. But Moon Orchid said, “You look older than I. You are older than I,” and again she’d laugh.

“You’re wearing an old mask to tease me.” It surprised Brave Orchid that after thirty years she could still get annoyed at her sister’s silliness.

Brave Orchid’s husband was waiting under the tangerine tree.

Moon Orchid recognized him as the brother-in-law in photographs, not as the young man who left on a ship. Her sister had married the

ideal in masculine beauty, the thin scholar with the hollow cheeks and the long ngers. And here he was, an old man, opening the gate he had built with his own hands, his hair blowing silver in twilight.

“Hello,” he said like an Englishman in Hong Kong. “Hello,” she said like an English telephone operator. He went to help his children unload the car, gripping the suitcase handles in his bony ngers, his bony wrists locked.

Brave Orchid’s husband and children brought everything into the dining room, provisions for a lifetime move heaped all over the oor and furniture. Brave Orchid wanted to have a luck ceremony and then to put things away where they belonged, but Moon Orchid said, “I’ve got presents for everybody. Let me get them.” She opened her boxes again. Her suitcase lids gaped like mouths; Brave Orchid had better hurry with the luck.

“First I’ve got shoes for all of you from Lovely Orchid,” Moon Orchid said, handing them out to her nieces and nephews, who grimaced at one another. Lovely Orchid, the youngest aunt, owned either a shoe store or a shoe factory in Hong Kong. That was why every Christmas she sent a dozen pairs, glittering with yellow and pink plastic beads, sequins, and turquoise blue owers. “She must give us the leftovers,” Brave Orchid’s children were saying in English. As Brave Orchid ran back and forth turning on all the lights, every lamp and bulb, she glared sideways at her children.

They would be sorry when they had to walk barefoot through snow and rocks because they didn’t take what shoes they could, even if the wrong size. She would put the slippers next to the bathtub on the linoleum oors in winter and trick her lazy children into wearing them.

“May I have some scissors? Oh, where are my scissors?” said Moon Orchid. She slit the heel of a black embroidered slipper and pulled out the cotton—which was entangled with jewels. “You’ll have to let me pierce your ears,” she told her nieces, rubbing their earlobes. “Then you can wear these.” There were earrings with skewers like gold krisses. There was a jade heart and an opal. Brave

Orchid interrupted her dashing about to rub the stones against her skin.

Moon Orchid laughed softly in delight. “And look here. Look here,” she said. She was holding up a paper warrior-saint, and he was all intricacies and light. A Communist had cut a wisp of black paper into a hero with sleeves like butteries’ wings and with tassels and ags, which uttered when you breathed on him. “Did someone really cut this out by hand?” the children kept asking. “Really?” The eyebrows and mustache, the erce wrinkles between the eyes, the face, all were the merest black webs. His open hand had been cut out nger by nger. Through the spaces you could see light and the room and each other. “Oh, there’s more. There’s more,” said Moon Orchid happily. She picked up another paper cutout and blew on it.

It was the scholar who always carries a fan; her breath shook its blue feathers. His brush and quill and scrolls tied with ribbon jutted out of lace vases. “And more”—an orange warrior-poet with sword and scroll; a purple knight with doily armor, holes for scales; a wonderful archer on a red horse with a mane like re; a modern Communist worker with a proud gold hammer; a girl Communist soldier with pink pigtails and pink rie. “And this is Fa Mu Lan,” she said. “She was a woman warrior, and really existed.” Fa Mu Lan was green and beautiful, and her robes whirled out as she drew her sword.

“Paper dolls,” said Brave Orchid to her children. “I’d have thought you were too old to be playing with dolls.” How greedy to play with presents in front of the giver. How impolite (“untraditional” in Chinese) her children were. With a slam of her cleaver, she cracked rock candy into jagged pieces. “Take some,” she urged. “Take more.” She brought the yellow crystals on a red paper plate to her family, one by one. It was very important that the beginning be sweet. Her children acted as if this eating were a bother. “Oh, all right,” they said, and took the smallest slivers. Who would think that children could dislike candy? It was abnormal, not in the nature of children, not human. “Take a big piece,” she scolded.

She’d make them eat it like medicine if necessary. They were so

stupid, surely they weren’t adults yet. They’d put the bad mouth on their aunt’s rst American day; you had to sweeten their noisy barbarous mouths. She opened the front door and mumbled something. She opened the back door and mumbled something.

“What do you say when you open the door like that?” her children used to ask when they were younger.

“Nothing. Nothing,” she would answer.

“Is it spirits, Mother? Do you talk to spirits? Are you asking them in or asking them out?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. She never explained anything that was really important. They no longer asked.

When she came back from talking to the invisibilities, Brave Orchid saw that her sister was strewing the room. The paper people clung at against the lampshades, the chairs, the tablecloths. Moon Orchid left fans unfolded and dragons with accordion bodies dangling from doorknobs. She was unrolling white silk. “Men are good at stitching roosters,” she was pointing out bird embroidery. It was amazing how a person could grow old without learning to put things away.

“Let’s put these things away,” Brave Orchid said.

“Oh, Sister,” said Moon Orchid. “Look what I have for you,” and she held up a pale green silk dress lined in wool. “In winter you can look like summer and be warm like summer.” She unbuttoned the frogs to show the lining, thick and plaid like a blanket.

“Now where would I wear such a fancy dress?” said Brave Orchid.

“Give it to one of the children.”

“I have bracelets and earrings for them.”

“They’re too young for jewelry. They’ll lose it.”

“They seem very big for children.”

“The girls broke six jade bracelets playing baseball. And they can’t endure pain. They scream when I squeeze their hands into the jade.

Then that very day, they’ll break it. We’ll put the jewelry in the bank, and we’ll buy glass and black wood frames for the silk

scrolls.” She bundled up the sticks that opened into owers. “What were you doing carrying these scraps across the ocean?”

Brave Orchid took what was useful and solid into the back bedroom, where Moon Orchid would stay until they decided what she would do permanently. Moon Orchid picked up pieces of string, but bright colors and movements distracted her. “Oh, look at this,” she’d say. “Just look at this. You have carp.” She was turning the light o and on in the goldsh tank, which sat in the rolltop desk that Brave Orchid’s husband had taken from the gambling house when it shut down during World War II. Moon Orchid looked up at the grandparents’ photographs that hung on the wall above the desk. Then she turned around and looked at the opposite wall; there, equally large, were pictures of Brave Orchid and her husband.

They had put up their own pictures because later the children would not have the sense to do it.

“Oh, look,” said Moon Orchid. “Your pictures are up too. Why is that?”

“No reason. Nothing,” said Brave Orchid. “In America you can put up anybody’s picture you like.”

On the shelf of the rolltop desk, like a mantel under the grandparents’ photos, there were bowls of plastic tangerines and oranges, crepe-paper owers, plastic vases, porcelain vases lled with sand and incense sticks. A clock sat on a white runner crocheted with red phoenixes and red words about how lucky and bright life is. Moon Orchid lifted the rues to look inside the pigeon holes. There were also pen trays and little drawers, enough so that the children could each have one or two for their very own. The sh tank took up half the desk space, and there was still room for writing. The rolltop was gone; the children had broken it slat by slat when they hid inside the desk, pulling the top over themselves. The knee hole had boxes of toys that the married children’s children played with now. Brave Orchid’s husband had padlocked one large bottom cabinet and one drawer.

“Why do you keep it locked?” Moon Orchid asked. “What’s in

here?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“If you want to poke around,” said Brave Orchid, “why don’t you nd out what’s in the kitchen drawers so you can help me cook?”

They cooked enough food to cover the dining room and kitchen tables. “Eat!” Brave Orchid ordered. “Eat!” She would not allow anybody to talk while eating. In some families the children worked out a sign language, but here the children spoke English, which their parents didn’t seem to hear.

After they ate and cleaned up, Brave Orchid said, “Now! We have to get down to business.”

“What do you mean?” said her sister. She and her daughter held one another’s hands.

“Oh, no. I don’t want to listen to this,” said Brave Orchid’s husband, and left to read in bed.

The three women sat in the enormous kitchen with the butcher’s block and two refrigerators. Brave Orchid had an inside stove in the kitchen and a stove outside on the back porch. All day long the outside stove cooked peelings and gristle into chicken feed. It horried the children when they caught her throwing scraps of chicken into the chicken feed. Both stoves had been turned o for the night now, and the air was cooling.

“Wait until morning, Aunt,” said Moon Orchid’s daughter. “Let her get some sleep.”

“Yes, I do need rest after travelling all the way from China,” she said. “I’m here. You’ve done it and brought me here.” Moon Orchid meant that they should be satised with what they had already accomplished. Indeed, she stretched happily and appeared quite satised to be sitting in that kitchen at that moment. “I want to go to sleep early because of jet lag,” she said, but Brave Orchid, who had never been on an airplane, did not let her.

“What are we going to do about your husband?” Brave Orchid asked quickly. That ought to wake her up.

“I don’t know. Do we have to do something?”

“He does not know you’re here.”

Moon Orchid did not say anything. For thirty years she had been receiving money from him from America. But she had never told him that she wanted to come to the United States. She waited for him to suggest it, but he never did. Nor did she tell him that her sister had been working for years to transport her here. First Brave Orchid had found a Chinese-American husband for her daughter.

Then the daughter had come and had been able to sign the papers to bring Moon Orchid over.

“We have to tell him you’ve arrived,” said Brave Orchid.

Moon Orchid’s eyes got big like a child’s. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Nonsense. I want you here, and your daughter wants you here.”

“But that’s all.”

“Your husband is going to have to see you. We’ll make him recognize you. Ha. Won’t it be fun to see his face? You’ll go to his house. And when his second wife answers the door, you say, ‘I want to speak to my husband,’ and you name his personal name. ‘Tell him I’ll be sitting in the family room.’ Walk past her as if she were a servant. She’ll scold him when he comes home from work, and it’ll serve him right. You yell at him too.”

“I’m scared,” said Moon Orchid. “I want to go back to Hong Kong.”

“You can’t. It’s too late. You’ve sold your apartment. See here. We know his address. He’s living in Los Angeles with his second wife, and they have three children. Claim your rights. Those are your children. He’s got two sons. You have two sons. You take them away from her. You become their mother.”

“Do you really think I can be a mother of sons? Don’t you think they’ll be loyal to her, since she gave birth to them?”

“The children will go to their true mother—you,” said Brave Orchid. “That’s the way it is with mothers and children.”

“Do you think he’ll get angry at me because I came without telling him?”

“He deserves your getting angry with him. For abandoning you and for abandoning your daughter.”

“He didn’t abandon me. He’s given me so much money. I’ve had all the food and clothes and servants I’ve ever wanted. And he’s supported our daughter too, even though she’s only a girl. He sent her to college. I can’t bother him. I mustn’t bother him.”

“How can you let him get away with this? Bother him. He deserves to be bothered. How dare he marry somebody else when he has you? How can you sit there so calmly? He would’ve let you stay in China forever. I had to send for your daughter, and I had to send for you. Urge her,” she turned to her niece. “Urge her to go look for him.”

“I think you should go look for my father,” she said. “I’d like to meet him. I’d like to see what my father looks like.”

“What does it matter what he’s like?” said her mother. “You’re a grown woman with a husband and children of your own. You don’t need a father—or a mother either. You’re only curious.”

“In this country,” said Brave Orchid, “many people make their daughters their heirs. If you don’t go see him, he’ll give everything to the second wife’s children.”

“But he gives us everything anyway. What more do I have to ask for? If I see him face to face, what is there to say?”

“I can think of hundreds of things,” said Brave Orchid. “Oh, how I’d love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make. You’re so wishy-washy.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have to ask him why he didn’t come home. Why he turned into a barbarian. Make him feel bad about leaving his mother and father. Scare him. Walk right into his house with your suitcases and

boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stu out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, ‘I am the rst wife, and she is our servant.’”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that. I can’t do that at all. That’s terrible.”

“Of course you can. I’ll teach you. ‘I am the rst wife, and she is our servant.’ And you teach the little boys to call you Mother.”

“I don’t think I’d be very good with little boys. Little American boys. Our brother is the only boy I’ve known. Aren’t they very rough and unfeeling?”

“Yes, but they’re yours. Another thing I’d do if I were you, I’d get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn’t need his money.”

“He has a great deal of money, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he can do some job the barbarians value greatly.”

“Could I nd a job like that? I’ve never had a job.”

“You could be a maid in a hotel,” Brave Orchid advised. “A lot of immigrants start that way nowadays. And the maids get to bring home all the leftover soap and the clothes people leave behind.”

“I would clean up after people, then?”

Brave Orchid looked at this delicate sister. She was such a little old lady. She had long ngers and thin, soft hands. And she had a high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong. Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long. But Brave Orchid would not relent; her dainty sister would just have to toughen up. “Immigrants also work in the canneries, where it’s so noisy it doesn’t matter if they speak Chinese or what. The easiest way to nd a job, though, is to work in Chinatown. You get twenty-ve cents an hour and all your meals if you’re working in a restaurant.”

If she were in her sister’s place, Brave Orchid would have been on the phone immediately, demanding one of those Chinatown jobs.

She would make the boss agree that she start work as soon as he opened his doors the next morning. Immigrants nowadays were

bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must’ve been the Communuists who taught them those habits.

Moon Orchid rubbed her forehead. The kitchen light shined warmly on the gold and jade rings that gave her hands a completeness. One of the rings was a wedding ring. Brave Orchid, who had been married for almost fty years, did not wear any rings.

They got in the way of all the work. She did not want the gold to wash away in the dishwater and the laundry water and the eld water. She looked at her younger sister whose very wrinkles were ne. “Forget about a job,” she said, which was very lenient of her.

“You won’t have to work. You just go to your husband’s house and demand your rights as First Wife. When you see him, you can say,

‘Do you remember me?’”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Then start telling him details about your life together in China.

Act like a fortuneteller. He’ll be so impressed.”

“Do you think he’ll be glad to see me?”

“He better be glad to see you.”

As midnight came, twenty-two hours after she left Hong Kong, Moon Orchid began to tell her sister that she really was going to face her husband. “He won’t like me,” she said.

“Maybe you should dye your hair black, so he won’t think you’re old. Or I have a wig you can borrow. On the other hand, he should see how you’ve suered. Yes, let him see how he’s made your hair turn white.”

These many hours, her daughter held Moon Orchid’s hand. The two of them had been separated for ve years. Brave Orchid had mailed the daughter’s young photograph to a rich and angry man with citizenship papers. He was a tyrant. Mother and daughter were sorry for one another. “Let’s not talk about this anymore,” said Moon Orchid. “We can plan tomorrow. I want to hear about my grandchildren. Tell me about them. I have three grandchildren, don’t I?” she asked her daughter.

Brave Orchid thought that her niece was like her mother, the lovely, useless type. She had spent so much time trying to toughen up these two. “The children are very smart, Mother,” her niece was saying. “The teachers say they are brilliant. They can speak Chinese and English. They’ll be able to talk to you.”

“My children can talk to you too,” said Brave Orchid. “Come. Talk to your aunt,” she ordered.

Her sons and daughters mumbled and disappeared—into the bathroom, the basement, the various hiding places they had dug throughout the house. One of them locked herself in the pantry- storeroom, where she had cleared o a shelf for a desk among the food. Brave Orchid’s children were antisocial and secretive. Ever since they were babies, they had burrowed little nests for themselves in closets and underneath stairs; they made tents under tables and behind doors. “My children are also very bright,” she said. “Let me show you before you go to sleep.” She took her sister to the living room where she had a glass case, a large upside-down sh tank, and inside were her children’s athletic trophies and scholarship trophies. There was even a beauty contest trophy. She had decorated them with runners about luck.

“Oh my, isn’t that wonderful?” said the aunt. “You must be so proud of them. Your children must be so smart.” The children who were in the living room groaned and left. Brave Orchid did not understand why they were ashamed of the things they could do. It was hard to believe that they could do the things the trophies said they did. Maybe they had stolen them from the real winners. Maybe they had bought cups and medallions and pretended they’d won them. She’d have to accuse them and see how they reacted. Perhaps they fooled the Ghost Teachers and Ghost Coaches, who couldn’t tell smart Chinese from dumb Chinese. Her children certainly didn’t seem like much.

She made some of the children sleep on the oor and put Moon Orchid and her daughter in their room. “Will my mother be living at your house or my house?” her niece asked Brave Orchid.

“She’s going to live with her own husband.” Brave Orchid was rm. She would not forget about this subject in the morning.

The next day, immediately after breakfast, Brave Orchid talked about driving to Los Angeles. They would not take the coast route along mountainsides that dropped into the sea—the way her children, who liked carnival rides, would want to go. She would make them take the inland route, at and direct.

“The rst thing you’ve got to ask your husband,” she said, “is why he never came back to China when he got rich.”

“All right,” said Moon Orchid. She was poking about the house, holding cans up to her ear, trailing after the children.

“He probably has a car,” Brave Orchid persisted. “He can drive you places. Should he tell you to go away, turn around at the door and say, ‘May I come and watch your television now and then?’ Oh, wouldn’t that be pathetic? But he won’t kick you out. No, he won’t.

You walk right into the bedroom, and you open the second wife’s closet. Take whatever clothes you like. That will give you an

American wardrobe.”

“Oh, I can’t do that.”

“You can! You can! Take First Sister-in-Law as your example.”

Their only brother had had a rst wife in the village, but he took a second wife in Singapore, where he had gone to make his gold. Big Wife suered during the Revolution. “The Communists will kill me,” she wrote to her husband, “and you’re having fun in Singapore.”

Little Wife felt so sorry for her, she reminded her husband that he owed it to Big Wife to get her out of China before it was too late.

Little Wife saved the passage fare and did the paper work. But when Big Wife came, she chased Little Wife out of the house. There was nothing for their husband to do but build a second house, one for each wife and the children of each wife. They did get together, however, for yearly family portraits. Their sons’ rst and second wives were also in the pictures, rst wives next to the husbands and second wives standing among the children. “Copy our sister-in-law,”

Brave Orchid instructed. “Make life unbearable for the second wife, and she’ll leave. He’ll have to build her a second house.”

“I wouldn’t mind if she stays,” said Moon Orchid. “She can comb my hair and keep house. She can wash the dishes and serve our meals. And she can take care of the little boys.” Moon Orchid laughed. Again it occurred to Brave Orchid that her sister wasn’t very bright, and she had not gotten any smarter in the last thirty years.

“You must make it plain to your husband right at the start what you expect of him. That is what a wife is for—to scold her husband into becoming a good man. Tell him there will be no third wife. Tell him you may go visiting anytime you please. And I, the big sister, may visit your house for as long as I please. Let him know exactly how much money you expect for allowance.”

“Should I ask for more or less money now that I’m here?”

“More, of course. Food costs more here. Tell him that your daughter, who is the oldest, must inherit his property. You have to establish these things at the start. Don’t begin meek.”

Sometimes Moon Orchid seemed to listen too readily—as if her sister were only talking-story. “Have you seen him in all these years?” she asked Brave Orchid.

“No. The last time I saw him was in China—with you. What a terrible, ugly man he must be not to send for you. I’ll bet he’s hoping you’d be satised with his money. How evil he is. You’ve had to live like a widow for thirty years. You’re lucky he didn’t have his second wife write you telling you he’s dead.”

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t do that.”

“Of course not. He would be afraid of cursing himself.”

“But if he is so ugly and mean, maybe I shouldn’t bother with him.”

“I remember him,” said her daughter. “He wrote me a nice letter.”

“You can’t remember him,” said her mother. “You were an infant when he left. He never writes letters; he only sends money orders.”

Moon Orchid hoped that the summer would wear away while her sister talked, that Brave Orchid would then nd autumn too cold for travel. Brave Orchid did not enjoy travelling. She found it so nauseating that she was still recovering from the trip to San Francisco. Many of the children were home for the summer, and Moon Orchid tried to gure out which one was which. Brave Orchid had written about them in her letters, and Moon Orchid tried to match them up with the descriptions. There was indeed an oldest girl who was absent-minded and messy. She had an American name that sounded like “Ink” in Chinese. “Ink!” Moon Orchid called out; sure enough, a girl smeared with ink said, “Yes?” Then Brave Orchid worried over a daughter who had the mark of an unlucky woman; yes, there was certainly a girl with an upper lip as curled as Brigitte Bardot’s. Moon Orchid rubbed this niece’s hands and cold feet.

There was a boy Brave Orchid said was thick headed. She had written that when he crawled as a baby his head was so heavy he kept dropping it on the oor. Moon Orchid did indeed see a boy whose head was big, his curls enlarging it, his eyebrows thick and slanted like an opera warrior’s. Moon Orchid could not tell whether he was any less quick than the others. None of them were articulate or friendly. Brave Orchid had written about a boy whose oddity it was to stick pencil stubs in his ears. Moon Orchid sneaked up on the boys and lifted their hair to look for pencil stubs. “He hangs upside down from the furniture like a bat,” his mother wrote. “And he doesn’t obey.” Moon Orchid didn’t nd a boy who looked like a bat, and no stubs, so decided that that boy must be the one in Vietnam.

And the nephew with the round face and round eyes was the “inaccessible cli.” She immediately recognized the youngest girl, “the raging billows.” “Stop following me around!” she shouted at her aunt. “Quit hanging over my neck!”

“What are you doing?” Moon Orchid would ask. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing!” this girl would yell. “You’re breathing on me. Don’t breathe on me.”

It took Moon Orchid several weeks to gure out just how many children there were because some only visited and did not live at home. Some seemed to be married and had children of their own.

The babies that spoke no Chinese at all, she decided, were the grandchildren.

None of Brave Orchid’s children was happy like the two real Chinese babies who died. Maybe what was wrong was that they had no Oldest Son and no Oldest Daughter to guide them. “I don’t see how any of them could support themselves,” Brave Orchid said. “I don’t see how anybody could want to marry them.” Yet, Moon Orchid noticed, some of them seemed to have a husband or a wife who found them bearable.

“They’ll never learn how to work,” Brave Orchid complained.

“Maybe they’re still playing,” said Moon Orchid, although they didn’t act playful.

“Say good morning to your aunt,” Brave Orchid would order, although some of them were adults. “Say good morning to your aunt,” she commanded every morning.

“Good morning, Aunt,” they said, turning to face her, staring directly into her face. Even the girls stared at her—like cat-headed birds. Moon Orchid jumped and squirmed when they did that. They looked directly into her eyes as if they were looking for lies. Rude.

Accusing. They never lowered their gaze; they hardly blinked.

“Why didn’t you teach your girls to be demure?” she ventured.

“Demure!” Brave Orchid yelled. “They are demure. They’re so demure, they barely talk.”

It was true that the children made no conversation. Moon Orchid would try to draw them out. They must have many interesting savage things to say, raised as they’d been in the wilderness. They made rough movements, and their accents were not American exactly, but peasant like their mother’s, as if they had come from a village deep inside China. She never saw the girls wear the gowns she had given them. The young, raging one, growled in her sleep, “Leave me alone.” Sometimes when the girls were reading or

watching television, she crept up behind them with a comb and tried to smooth their hair, but they shook their heads, and they turned and xed her with those eyes. She wondered what they thought and what they saw when they looked at her like that. She liked coming upon them from the back to avoid being looked at.

They were like animals the way they stared.

She hovered over a child who was reading, and she pointed at certain words. “What’s that?” she tapped at a section that somebody had underlined or annotated. If the child was being patient, he said,

“That’s an important part.”

“Why is it important?”

“Because it tells the main idea here.”

“What’s the main idea?”

“I don’t know the Chinese words for it.”

“They’re so clever,” Moon Orchid would exclaim. “They’re so smart. Isn’t it wonderful they know things that can’t be said in Chinese?”

“Thank you,” the child said. When she complimented them, they agreed with her! Not once did she hear a child deny a compliment.

“You’re pretty,” she said.

“Thank you, Aunt,” they answered. How vain. She marveled at their vanity.

“You play the radio beautifully,” she teased, and sure enough, they gave one another puzzled looks. She tried all kinds of compliments, and they never said, “Oh, no, you’re too kind. I can’t play it at all. I’m stupid. I’m ugly.” They were capable children; they could do servants’ work. But they were not modest.

“What time is it?” she asked, testing what kinds of minds they had, raised away from civilization. She discovered they could tell time very well. And they knew the Chinese words for “thermometer” and “library.”

She saw them eat undercooked meat, and they smelled like cow’s milk. At rst she thought they were so clumsy, they spilled it on

their clothes. But soon she decided they themselves smelled of milk.

They were big and smelled of milk; they were young and had white hair.

When Brave Orchid screamed at them to dress better, Moon Orchid defended them, sweet wild animals that they were. “But they enjoy looking like furry animals. That’s it, isn’t it? You enjoy looking like wild animals, don’t you?”

“I don’t look like a wild animal!” the child would yell like its

mother.

“Like an Indian, then. Right?”

“No!”

Moon Orchid stroked their poor white hair. She tugged at their sleeves and poked their shoulders and stomachs. It was as if she were seeing how much it took to provoke a savage.

“Stop poking me!” they would roar, except for the girl with the cold hands and feet.

“Mm,” she mused. “Now the child is saying, ‘Stop poking me.’”

Brave Orchid put her sister to work cleaning and sewing and cooking. Moon Orchid was eager to work, roughing it in the wilderness. But Brave Orchid scolded her, “Can’t you go any faster than that?” It infuriated Brave Orchid that her sister held up each dish between thumb and forenger, squirted detergent on the back and front, and ran water without plugging up the drain. Moon Orchid only laughed when Brave Orchid scolded, “Oh, stop that with the dishes. Here. Take this dress and hem it.” But Moon Orchid immediately got the thread tangled and laughed about that.

In the mornings Brave Orchid and her husband arose at 6 a.m. He drank a cup of coee and walked downtown to open up the laundry.

Brave Orchid made breakfast for the children who would take the rst laundry shift; the ones going to summer school would take the afternoon and night shifts. She put her husband’s breakfast into the food container that she had bought in Chinatown, one dish in each tier of the stack. Some mornings Brave Orchid brought the food to

the laundry, and other days she sent it with one of the children, but the children let the soup slosh out when they rode over bumps on their bikes. They dangled the tiers from one handlebar and the rice kettle from the other. They were too lazy to walk. Now that her sister and niece were visiting, Brave Orchid went to the laundry later. “Be sure you heat everything up before serving it to your father,” she yelled after her son. “And make him coee after breakfast. And wash the dishes.” He would eat with his father and start work.

She walked her sister and niece to the laundry by way of Chinatown. Brave Orchid pointed out the red, green, and gold Chinese school. From the street they could hear children’s voices singing the lesson “I Am a Person of the Middle Nation.” In front of one of the benevolent associations, a literate man was chanting the Gold Mountain News, which was taped to the window. The listening crowd looked at the pictures and said, “Aiaa.”

“So this is the United States,” Moon Orchid said. “It certainly looks dierent from China. I’m glad to see the Americans talk like us.”

Brave Orchid was again startled at her sister’s denseness. “These aren’t the Americans. These are the overseas Chinese.”

By the time they got to the laundry, the boiler was screaming hot and the machines were ready. “Don’t touch or lean against any machine,” Brave Orchid warned her sister. “Your skin would fry and peel o.” In the midst of the presses stood the sleeve machine, looking like twin silver spaceships. Brave Orchid’s husband tted the shirt sleeves over it with a karate chop between the shoulder blades. “You mustn’t back into that,” said Brave Orchid.

“You should start o with an easy job,” she said. But all the jobs seemed hard for Moon Orchid, who was wearing stockings and dress shoes and a suit. The buttons on the presses seemed too complicated for her to push—and what if she caught her hands or her head inside a press? She was already playing with the water jets dancing on springs from the ceiling. She could fold towels, Brave Orchid

decided, and handkerchiefs, but there would be no clean dry clothes until afternoon. Already the temperature was going up.

“Can you iron?” Brave Orchid asked. Perhaps her sister could do the hand-nishing on the shirts when they came o the machines.

This was usually Brave Orchid’s husband’s job. He had such graceful ngers, so good for folding shirts to t the cardboard patterns that he had cut from campaign posters and ght and wrestling posters.

He nished the shirts with a blue band around each.

“Oh, I’d love to try that,” Moon Orchid said. Brave Orchid gave her sister her husband’s shirts to practice on. She showed her how family clothes were marked with the ideograph “middle,” which is a box with a line through its center. Moon Orchid tugged at the rst shirt for half an hour, and she folded it crooked, the buttonholes not lined up with the buttons at all. When a customer came in, her ironing table next to the little stand with the tickets, she did not say “hello” but giggled, leaving the iron on the shirt until it turned yellow and had to be whitened with peroxide. Then she said it was so hot she couldn’t breathe.

“Go take a walk,” Brave Orchid said, exasperated. Even the children could work. Both girls and boys could sew. “Free Mending and Buttons,” said the lettering on the window. The children could work all of the machines, even when they were little and had to stand on apple crates to reach them.

“Oh, I can’t go out into Gold Mountain myself,” Moon Orchid said.

“Walk back toward Chinatown,” suggested Brave Orchid.

“Oh, come with me, please,” Moon Orchid said.

“I have to work,” said her sister. Brave Orchid placed an apple crate on the sidewalk in front of the laundry. “You sit out here in the cool air until I have a little time.” She hooked the steel pole to the screw that unrolled the awning. “Just keep turning until the shadow covers the crate.” It took Moon Orchid another half-hour to do this. She rested after every turn and left the pole hanging.

At noon, when the temperature inside reached one hundred and eleven degrees, Brave Orchid went out to the sidewalk and said, “Let’s eat.” She had heated the leftovers from breakfast on the little stove at the back of the laundry. In back there was also a bedroom for the nights when they nished packaging too tired to walk home.

Then ve or six people would crowd into the bed together. Some slept on the ironing tables, and the small children slept on the shelves. The shades would be pulled over the display windows and the door. The laundry would become a cozy new home, almost safe from the night footsteps, the trac, the city outside. The boiler would rest, and no ghost would know there were Chinese asleep in their laundry. When the children were sick and had to stay home from school, they slept in that bedroom so that Brave Orchid could doctor them. The children said that the boiler, jumping up and down, bursting steam, ames shooting out the bottom, matched their dreams when they had a fever.

After lunch, Brave Orchid asked her husband if he and the children could handle the laundry by themselves. She wanted to take Moon Orchid out for some fun. He said that the load was unusually light today.

The sisters walked back to Chinatown. “We’re going to get some more to eat,” said Brave Orchid. Moon Orchid accompanied her to a gray building with a large storefront room, overhead fans turning coolly and cement oor cool underfoot. Women at round tables were eating black seaweed gelatin and talking. They poured Karo syrup on top of the black quivering mass. Brave Orchid seated Moon Orchid and dramatically introduced her, “This is my sister who has come to Gold Mountain to reclaim her husband.” Many of the women were fellow villagers; others might as well have been villagers, together so long in California.

“Marvelous. You could blackmail him,” the women advised.

“Have him arrested if he doesn’t take you back.”

“Disguise yourself as a mysterious lady and nd out how bad he is.”

“You’ve got to do some husband beating, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

They were joking about her. Moon Orchid smiled and tried to think of a joke too. The large proprietress in a butcher’s apron came out of the kitchen lugging tubs full of more black gelatin. Standing over the tables and smoking a cigarette, she watched her customers eat. It was so cool here, black and light-yellow and brown, and the gelatin was so cool. The door was open to the street, no passers-by but Chinese, though at the windows the Venetian blinds slitted the sunlight as if everyone were hiding. Between helpings the women sat back, waving fans made out of silk, paper, sandalwood, and pandanus fronds. They were like rich women in China with nothing to do.

“Game time,” said the proprietress, clearing the tables. The women had only been taking a break from their gambling. They spread ringed hands and mixed the ivory tiles click-clack for the next hemp-bird game. “It’s time to go,” said Brave Orchid, leading her sister outside. “When you come to America, it’s a chance to forget some of the bad Chinese habits. A person could get up one day from the gambling table and nd her life over.” The gambling women were already caught up in their game, calling out good-byes to the sisters.

They walked past the vegetable, sh, and meat markets—not as abundant as in Canton, the carp not as red, the turtles not as old— and entered the cigar and seed shop. Brave Orchid lled her sister’s thin hands with carrot candy, melon candy, and sheets of beef jerky.

Business was carried out at one end of the shop, which was long and had benches against two walls. Rows of men sat smoking. Some of them stopped gurgling on their silver or bamboo water pipes to greet the sisters. Moon Orchid remembered many of them from the village; the cigar store owner, who looked like a camel, welcomed her. When Brave Orchid’s children were young, they thought he was the Old Man of the North, Santa Claus.

As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid

Row. “On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days.” On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts.

Brave Orchid and her husband and children worked hardest in the afternoon when the heat was the worst, all the machines hissing and thumping. Brave Orchid did teach her sister to fold the towels. She placed her at the table where the fan blew most. But nally she sent one of the children to walk her home.

From then on Moon Orchid only visited the laundry late in the day when the towels came out of the dryers. Brave Orchid’s husband had to cut a pattern from cardboard so Moon Orchid could fold handkerchiefs uniformly. He gave her a shirt cardboard to measure the towels. She never could work any faster than she did on the rst day.

The summer days passed while they talked about going to nd Moon Orchid’s husband. She felt she accomplished a great deal by folding towels. She spent the evening observing the children. She liked to gure them out. She described them aloud. “Now they’re studying again. They read so much. Is it because they have enormous quantities to learn, and they’re trying not to be savages?

He is picking up his pencil and tapping it on the desk. Then he opens his book. His eyes begin to read. His eyes go back and forth.

They go from left to right, from left to right.” This makes her laugh.

“How wondrous—eyes reading back and forth. Now he’s writing his thoughts down. What’s that thought?” she asked, pointing.

She followed her nieces and nephews about. She bent over them.

“Now she is taking a machine o the shelf. She attaches two metal spiders to it. She plugs in the cord. She cracks an egg against the rim and pours the yolk and white out of the shell into the bowl. She presses a button, and the spiders spin the eggs. What are you making?”

“Aunt, please take your nger out of the batter.”

“She says, ‘Aunt, please take your nger out of the batter,’” Moon Orchid repeated as she turned to follow another niece walking through the kitchen. “Now what’s this one doing? Why, she’s sewing a dress. She’s going to try it on.” Moon Orchid would walk right into the children’s rooms while they were dressing. “Now she must be looking over her costumes to see which one to wear.” Moon Orchid pulled out a dress. “This is nice,” she suggested. “Look at all the colors.”

“No, Aunt. That’s the kind of dress for a party. I’m going to school now.”

“Oh, she’s going to school now. She’s choosing a plain blue dress.

She’s picking up her comb and brush and shoes, and she’s going to lock herself up in the bathroom. They dress in bathrooms here.” She pressed her ear against the door. “She’s brushing her teeth. Now she’s coming out of the bathroom. She’s wearing the blue dress and a white sweater. She’s combed her hair and washed her face. She looks in the refrigerator and is arranging things between slices of bread. She’s putting an orange and cookies in a bag. Today she’s taking her green book and her blue book. And tablets and pencils.

Do you take a dictionary?” Moon Orchid asked.

“No,” said the child, rolling her eyeballs up and exhaling loudly.

“We have dictionaries at school,” she added before going out the door.

“They have dictionaries at school,” said Moon Orchid, thinking this over. “She knows ‘dictionary.’” Moon Orchid stood at the window peeping. “Now she’s shutting the gate. She strides along like an Englishman.”

The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine o the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter—‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she’s saying.”

“She’s driving me nuts!” the children told each other in English.

At the laundry Moon Orchid hovered so close that there was barely room between her and the hot presses. “Now the index ngers of both hands press the buttons, and—ka-lump—the press comes down. But one nger on a button will release it—ssssss—the steam lets loose. Sssst—the water squirts.” She could describe it so well, you would think she could do it. She wasn’t as hard to take at the laundry as at home, though. She could not endure the heat, and after a while she had to go out on the sidewalk and sit on her apple crate. When they were younger the children used to sit out there too during their breaks. They played house and store and library, their orange and apple crates in a row. Passers-by and customers gave them money. But now they were older, they stayed inside or went for walks. They were ashamed of sitting on the sidewalk, people mistaking them for beggars. “Dance for me,” the ghosts would say before handing them a nickel. “Sing a Chinese song.” And before they got old enough to know better, they’d dance and they’d sing.

Moon Orchid sat out there by herself.

Whenever Brave Orchid thought of it, which was everyday, she said, “Are you ready to go see your husband and claim what is yours?”

“Not today, but soon,” Moon Orchid would reply.

But one day in the middle of summer, Moon Orchid’s daughter said, “I have to return to my family. I promised my husband and children I’d only be gone a few weeks. I should return this week.”

Moon Orchid’s daughter lived in Los Angeles.

“Good!” Brave Orchid exclaimed. “We’ll all go to Los Angeles. You return to your husband, and your mother returns to hers. We only have to make one trip.”

“You ought to leave the poor man alone,” said Brave Orchid’s husband. “Leave him out of women’s business.”

“When your father lived in China,” Brave Orchid told the children, “he refused to eat pastries because he didn’t want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their ngers.”

“But I’m happy here with you and all your children,” Moon Orchid said. “I want to see how this girl’s sewing turns out. I want to see your son come back from Vietnam. I want to see if this one gets good grades. There’s so much to do.”

“We’re leaving on Friday,” said Brave Orchid. “I’m going to escort you, and you will arrive safely.”

On Friday Brave Orchid put on her dress-up clothes, which she wore only a few times during the year. Moon Orchid wore the same kind of clothes she wore every day and was dressed up. Brave Orchid told her oldest son he had to drive. He drove, and the two old ladies and the niece sat in the back seat.

They set out at gray dawn, driving between the grape trees, which hunched like dwarfs in the elds. Gnomes in serrated outts that blew in the morning wind came out of the earth, came up in rows and columns. Everybody was only half awake. “A long time ago,” began Brave Orchid, “the emperors had four wives, one at each point of the compass, and they lived in four palaces. The Empress of the West would connive for power, but the Empress of the East was good and kind and full of light. You are the Empress of the East, and the Empress of the West has imprisoned the Earth’s Emperor in the Western Palace. And you, the good Empress of the East, come out of the dawn to invade her land and free the Emperor. You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East.”

Brave Orchid gave her sister last-minute advice for ve hundred miles. All her possessions had been packed into the trunk.

“Shall we go into your house together,” asked Brave Orchid, “or do you want to go by yourself?”

“You’ve got to come with me. I don’t know what I would say.”

“I think it would be dramatic for you to go by yourself. He opens the door. And there you are—alive and standing on the porch with all your luggage. ‘Remember me?’ you say. Call him by his own name. He’ll faint with shock. Maybe he’ll say, ‘No. Go away.’ But you march right in. You push him aside and go in. Then you sit

down in the most important chair, and you take o your shoes

because you belong.”

“Don’t you think he’ll welcome me?”

“She certainly wasn’t very imaginative,” thought Brave Orchid.

“It’s against the law to have two wives in this country,” said Moon Orchid. “I read that in the newspaper.”

“But it’s probably against the law in Singapore too. Yet our brother has two, and his sons have two each. The law doesn’t matter.”

“I’m scared. Oh, let’s turn back. I don’t want to see him. Suppose he throws me out? Oh, he will. He’ll throw me out. And he’ll have a right to throw me out, coming here, disturbing him, not waiting for him to invite me. Don’t leave me by myself. You can talk louder than I can.”

“Yes, coming with you would be exciting. I can charge through the door and say, ‘Where is your wife?’ And he’ll answer, ‘Why, she’s right here.’ And I’ll say, ‘This isn’t your wife. Where is Moon Orchid? I’ve come to see her. I’m her rst sister, and I’ve come to see that she is being well taken care of.’ Then I accuse him of murderous things; I’d have him arrested—and you pop up to his rescue. Or I can take a look at his wife, and I say, ‘Moon Orchid, how young you’ve gotten.’ And he’ll say, ‘This isn’t Moon Orchid.’ And you come in and say, ‘No. I am.’ If nobody’s home, we’ll climb in a window. When they get back we’ll be at home; you the hostess, and I your guest. You’ll be serving me cookies and coee. And when he comes in I’ll say, ‘Well, I see your husband is home. Thank you so much for the visit.’ And you say, ‘Come again anytime.’ Don’t make violence. Be routine.”

Sometimes Moon Orchid got into the mood. “Maybe I could be folding towels when he comes in. He’ll think I’m so clever. I’ll get to them before his wife does.” But the further they came down the great central valley—green elds changing to elds of cotton on dry, brown stalks, rst a stray bush here and there, then thick—the more Moon Orchid wanted to turn back. “No. I can’t go through

with this.” She tapped her nephew on the shoulder. “Please turn back. Oh, you must turn the car around. I should be returning to China. I shouldn’t be here at all. Let’s go back. Do you understand me?”

“Don’t go back,” Brave Orchid ordered her son. “Keep going. She can’t back out now.”

“What do you want me to do? Make up your minds,” said the son, who was getting impatient.

“Keep going,” said Brave Orchid. “She’s come this far, and we can’t waste all this driving. Besides, we have to take your cousin back to her own house in Los Angeles. We have to drive to Los Angeles anyway.”

“Can I go inside and meet my grandchildren?”

“Yes,” said her daughter.

“We’ll see them after you straighten out things with your

husband,” said Brave Orchid.

“What if he hits me?”

“I’ll hit him. I’ll protect you. I’ll hit him back. The two of us will knock him down and make him listen.” Brave Orchid chuckled as if she were looking forward to a ght. But when she saw how terried Moon Orchid was, she said, “It won’t come to a ght. You mustn’t start imagining things. We’ll simply walk up to the door. If he answers, you’ll say, ‘I have decided to come live with you in the Beautiful Nation.’ If she answers the door, you’ll say, ‘You must be Little Wife. I am Big Wife.’ Why, you could even be generous. ‘I’d like to see our husband, please,’ you say. I brought my wig,” said Brave Orchid. “Why don’t you disguise yourself as a beautiful lady?

I brought lipstick and powder too. And at some dramatic point, you pull o the wig and say, ‘I am Moon Orchid.’”

“That is a terrible thing to do. I’d be so scared. I am so scared.”

“I want to be dropped o at my house rst,” said the niece. “I told my family I’d be home to make lunch.”

“All right,” said Brave Orchid, who had tried to talk her niece into confronting her father ve years ago, but all she had done was write him a letter telling him she was in Los Angeles. He could visit her, or she could visit him if he wanted to see her, she had suggested.

But he had not wanted to see her.

When the car stopped in front of her daughter’s house, Moon Orchid asked, “May I get out to meet my grandchildren?”

“I told you no,” said Brave Orchid. “If you do that you’ll stay here, and it’ll take us weeks to get up our courage again. Let’s save your grandchildren as a reward. You take care of this other business, and you can play with your grandchildren without worry.

Besides, you have some children to meet.”

“Grandchildren are more wonderful than children.”

After they left the niece’s suburb, the son drove them to the address his mother had given him, which turned out to be a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles.

“Don’t park in front,” said his mother. “Find a side street. We’ve got to take him by surprise. We mustn’t let him spot us ahead of time. We have to catch the rst look on his face.”

“Yes, I think I would like to see the look on his face.”

Brave Orchid’s son drove up and down the side streets until he found a parking space that could not be seen from the oce building.

“You have to compose yourself,” said Brave Orchid to her sister.

“You must be calm as you walk in. Oh, this is most dramatic—in broad daylight and in the middle of the city. We’ll sit here for a

while and look at his building.”

“Does he own that whole building?”

“I don’t know. Maybe so.”

“Oh, I can’t move. My knees are shaking so much I won’t be able to walk. He must have servants and workers in there, and they’ll stare at me. I can’t bear it.”

Brave Orchid felt a tiredness drag her down. She had to baby everyone. The trac was rushing, Los Angeles noon-hot, and she suddenly felt carsick. No trees. No birds. Only city. “It must be the long drive,” she thought. They had not eaten lunch, and the sitting had tired her out. Movement would strengthen her; she needed movement. “I want you to stay here with your aunt while I scout that building,” she instructed her son. “When I come back, we’ll work out a plan.” She walked around the block. Indeed, she felt that her feet stepping on the earth, even when the earth was covered with concrete, gained strength from it. She breathed health from the air, though it was full of gasoline fumes. The bottom oor of the building housed several stores. She looked at the clothes and jewelry on display, picking out some for Moon Orchid to have when she came into her rightful place.

Brave Orchid rushed along beside her reection in the glass. She used to be young and fast; she was still fast and felt young. It was mirrors, not aches and pains, that turned a person old, everywhere white hairs and wrinkles. Young people felt pain.

The building was a ne one; the lobby was chrome and glass, with ashtray stands and plastic couches arranged in semicircles. She waited for the elevator to ll before she got in, not wanting to operate a new machine by herself. Once on the sixth oor she searched alertly for the number in her address book.

How clean his building was. The rest rooms were locked, and there were square overhead lights. No windows, though. She did not like the quiet corridors with carpets but no windows. They felt like tunnels. He must be very wealthy. Good. It would serve a rich man right to be humbled. She found the door with his number on it; there was also American lettering on the glass. Apparently this was his business oce. She hadn’t thought of the possibility of catching him at his job. Good thing she had decided to scout. If they had arrived at his house, they would not have found him. Then they would have had to deal with her. And she would have phoned him, spoiled the surprise, and gotten him on her side. Brave Orchid knew

how the little wives maneuvered; her father had had two little wives.

She entered the oce, glad that it was a public place and she needn’t knock. A roomful of men and women looked up from their magazines. She could tell by their eagerness for change that this was a waiting room. Behind a sliding glass partition sat a young woman in a modern nurse’s uniform, not a white one, but a light blue pantsuit with white trim. She sat before an elegant telephone and an electric typewriter. The wallpaper in her cubicle was like aluminum foil, a metallic background for a tall black frame around white paint with dashes of red. The wall of the waiting room was covered with burlap, and there were plants in wooden tubs. It was an expensive waiting room. Brave Orchid approved. The patients looked well dressed, not sickly and poor.

“Hello. May I help you?” said the receptionist, parting the glass.

Brave Orchid hesitated, and the receptionist took this to mean that she could not speak English. “Just a moment,” she said, and went into an inner room. She brought back another woman, who wore a similar uniform except that it was pink trimmed in white. This woman’s hair was gathered up into a bunch of curls at the back of her head; some of the curls were fake. She wore round glasses and false eyelashes, which gave her an American look. “Have you an appointment?” she asked in poor Chinese; she spoke less like a Chinese than Brave Orchid’s children. “My husband, the doctor, usually does not take drop-in patients,” she said. “We’re booked up for about a month.” Brave Orchid stared at her pink-painted ngernails gesticulating, and thought she probably would not have given out so much information if she weren’t so clumsy with

language.

“I have the u,” Brave Orchid said.

“Perhaps we can give you the name of another doctor,” said this woman, who was her sister-in-law. “This doctor is a brain surgeon and doesn’t work with u.” Actually she said, “This doctor cuts brains,” a child making up the words as she went along. She wore pink lipstick and had blue eyelids like the ghosts.

Brave Orchid, who had been a surgeon too, thought that her brother-in-law must be a clever man. She herself could not practice openly in the United States because the training here was so dierent and because she could never learn English. He was smart enough to learn ghost ways. She would have to be clever to outwit him. She needed to retreat and plan some more. “Oh, well, I’ll go to another doctor, then,” she said, and left.

She needed a new plan to get her sister and brother-in-law together. This nurse-wife was so young, and the oce was so rich with wood, paintings, and fancy telephones, that Brave Orchid knew it wasn’t because he couldn’t get the fare together that he hadn’t sent for his old wife. He had abandoned her for this modern, heartless girl. Brave Orchid wondered if the girl knew that her husband had a Chinese wife. Perhaps she should ask her.

But no, she mustn’t spoil the surprise by giving any hints. She had to get away before he came out into the corridor, perhaps to go to one of the locked rest rooms. As she walked back to her sister, she noted corners and passageways, broom closets, other oces— ambush spots. Her sister could crouch behind a drinking fountain and wait for him to get thirsty. Waylay him.

“I met his second wife,” she said, opening the car door.

“What’s she like?” asked Moon Orchid. “Is she pretty?”

“She’s very pretty and very young; just a girl. She’s his nurse. He’s a doctor like me. What a terrible, faithless man. You’ll have to scold him for years, but rst you need to sit up straight. Use my powder.

Be as pretty as you can. Otherwise you won’t be able to compete.

You do have one advantage, however. Notice he has her be his worker. She is like a servant, so you have room to be the wife. She works at the oce; you work at the house. That’s almost as good as having two houses. On the other hand, a man’s real partner is the hardest worker. You couldn’t learn nursing, could you? No, I guess not. It’s almost as dicult as doing laundry. What a petty man he turned out to be, giving up responsibility for a pretty face.” Brave Orchid reached for the door handle. “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“To go up there, of course. We’re at his oce, and I think we ought to be very direct. There aren’t any trees to hide you, no grass to soften your steps. So, you walk right into his oce. You make an announcement to the patients and the fancy nurses. You say, ‘I am the doctor’s wife. I’m going to see my husband.’ Then you step to the inner door and enter. Don’t knock on any doors. Don’t listen if the minor wife talks to you. You walk past her without changing pace. When you see him, you say, ‘Surprise!’ You say, ‘Who is that woman out there? She claims to be your wife.’ That will give him a chance to deny her on the spot.”

“Oh, I’m so scared. I can’t move. I can’t do that in front of all those people—like a stage show. I won’t be able to talk.” And sure enough, her voice was fading into a whisper. She was shivering and small in the corner of the seat.

“So. A new plan, then,” said Brave Orchid, looking at her son, who had his forehead on the steering wheel. “You, she said. “I want you to go up to his oce and tell your uncle that there has been an accident out in the street. A woman’s leg has been broken, and she’s crying in pain. He’ll have to come. You bring him to the car.”

“Mother.”

“Mm,” mused Brave Orchid. “Maybe we ought to put your aunt in the middle of the street, and she can lie down with her leg bent under her.” But Moon Orchid kept shaking her head in trembling no’s.

“Why don’t you push her down in the intersection and pour ketchup on her? I’ll run over her a little bit,” said her son.

“Stop being silly,” she said. “You Americans don’t take life seriously.”

“Mother, this is ridiculous. This whole thing is ridiculous.”

“Go. Do what I tell you,” she said.

“I think your schemes will be useless, Mother.”

“What do you know about Chinese business?” she said. “Do as I say.”

“Don’t let him bring the nurse,” said Moon Orchid.

“Don’t you want to see what she looks like?” asked Brave Orchid.

“Then you’ll know what he’s giving up for you.”

“No. No. She’s none of my business. She’s unimportant.”

“Speak in English,” Brave Orchid told her son. “Then he’ll feel he has to come with you.”

She pushed her son out of the car. “I don’t want to do this,” he said.

“You’ll ruin your aunt’s life if you don’t. You can’t understand business begun in China. Just do what I say. Go.”

Slamming the car door behind him, he left.

Moon Orchid was groaning now and holding her stomach.

“Straighten up,” said Brave Orchid. “He’ll be here any moment.” But this only made Moon Orchid groan louder, and tears seeped out between her closed eyelids.

“You want a husband, don’t you?” said Brave Orchid. “If you don’t claim him now, you’ll never have a husband. Stop crying,” she ordered. “Do you want him to see you with your eyes and nose swollen when that young so-called wife wears lipstick and nail polish like a movie star?”

Moon Orchid managed to sit upright, but she seemed sti and frozen.

“You’re just tired from the ride. Put some blood into your cheeks,”

Brave Orchid said, and pinched her sister’s withered face. She held her sister’s elbow and slapped the inside of her arm. If she had had time, she would have hit until the black and red dots broke out on the skin; that was the tiredness coming out. As she hit, she kept an eye on the rearview mirror. She saw her son come running, his uncle after him with a black bag in his hand. “Faster. Faster,” her son was saying. He opened the car door. “Here she is,” he said to his uncle. “I’ll see you later.” And he ran on down the street.

The two old ladies saw a man, authoritative in his dark western suit, start to ll the front of the car. He had black hair and no wrinkles. He looked and smelled like an American. Suddenly the two women remembered that in China families married young boys to older girls, who baby-sat their husbands their whole lives. Either that or, in this ghost country, a man could somehow keep his youth.

“Where’s the accident?” he said in Chinese. “What is this? You don’t have a broken leg.”

Neither woman spoke. Brave Orchid held her words back. She would not let herself interfere with this meeting after long absence.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” These women had such awful faces. “What is it, Grandmothers?”

“Grandmother?” Brave Orchid shouted. “This is your wife. I am your sister-in-law.”

Moon Orchid started to whimper. Her husband looked at her. And recognized her. “You,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

But all she did was open and shut her mouth without any words coming out.

“Why are you here?” he asked, eyes wide. Moon Orchid covered her face with one hand and motioned no with the other.

Brave Orchid could not keep silent. Obviously he was not glad to see his wife. “I sent for her,” she burst out. “I got her name on the Red Cross list, and I sent her the plane ticket. I wrote her every day and gave her the heart to come. I told her how welcome she would be, how her family would welcome her, how her husband would welcome her. I did what you, the husband, had time to do in these last thirty years.”

He looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies. “What do you want?” he asked. She shrank from his stare; it silenced her crying.

“You weren’t supposed to come here,” he said, the front seat a barrier against the two women over whom a spell of old age had

been cast. “It’s a mistake for you to be here. You can’t belong. You don’t have the hardness for this country. I have a new life.”

“What about me?” whispered Moon Orchid.

“Good,” thought Brave Orchid. “Well said. Said with no guile.”

“I have a new wife,” said the man.

“She’s only your second wife,” said Brave Orchid. “This is your real wife.”

“In this country a man may have just one wife.”

“So you’ll get rid of that creature in your oce?” asked Brave Orchid.

He looked at Moon Orchid. Again the rude American eyes. “You go live with your daughter. I’ll mail you the money I’ve always sent you. I could get arrested if the Americans knew about you. I’m living like an American.” He talked like a child born here.

“How could you ruin her old age?” said Brave Orchid.

“She has had food. She has had servants. Her daughter went to college. There wasn’t anything she thought of that she couldn’t buy.

I have been a good husband.”

“You made her live like a widow.”

“That’s not true. Obviously the villagers haven’t stoned her. She’s not wearing mourning. The family didn’t send her away to work.

Look at her. She’d never t into an American household. I have important American guests who come inside my house to eat.” He turned to Moon Orchid, “You can’t talk to them. You can barely talk to me.”

Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face.

She wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.

“Do you want her to go back to China then?” Brave Orchid was asking.

“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. She may stay, but I do not want her in my house. She has to live with you or with her daughter, and I don’t want either of you coming here anymore.”

Suddenly his nurse was tapping on the glass. So quickly that they might have missed it, he gestured to the old women, holding a nger to his mouth for just a moment: he had never told his American wife that he had a wife in China, and they mustn’t tell her either.

“What’s happening?” she asked. “Do you need help? The appointments are piling up.”

“No. No,” he said. “This woman fainted in the street. I’ll be up

soon.”

They spoke to each other in English.

The two old women did not call out to the young woman. Soon she left. “I’m leaving too now,” said the husband.

“Why didn’t you write to tell her once and for all you weren’t coming back and you weren’t sending for her?” Brave Orchid asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s as if I had turned into a dierent person. The new life around me was so complete; it pulled me away.

You became people in a book I had read a long time ago.”

“The least you can do,” said Brave Orchid, “is invite us to lunch.

Aren’t you inviting us to lunch? Don’t you owe us a lunch? At a good restaurant?” She would not let him o easily.

So he bought them lunch, and when Brave Orchid’s son came back to the car, he had to wait for them.

Moon Orchid was driven back to her daughter’s house, but though she lived in Los Angeles, she never saw her husband again. “Oh, well,” said Brave Orchid. “We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.”

Brave Orchid and her son drove back north, Brave Orchid sitting in the back seat the whole way.

Several months went by with no letter from Moon Orchid. When she had lived in China and in Hong Kong, she had written every

other week. At last Brave Orchid telephoned long distance to nd out what was happening. “I can’t talk now,” Moon Orchid whispered. “They’re listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you.” Moon Orchid hung up on Brave Orchid before the minutes she had paid for expired.

That week a letter came from the niece saying that Moon Orchid had become afraid. Moon Orchid said that she had overheard Mexican ghosts plotting on her life. She had been creeping along the baseboards and peeping out windows. Then she had asked her daughter to help her nd an apartment at the other end of Los Angeles, where she was now hiding. Her daughter visited her every day, but Moon Orchid kept telling her, “Don’t come see me because the Mexican ghosts will follow you to my new hiding place. They’re watching your house.”

Brave Orchid phoned her niece and told her to send her mother north immediately, where there were no Mexicans, she said. “This fear is an illness,” she told her niece. “I will cure her.” (“Long ago,” she explained to her children, “when the emperors had four wives, the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace. Her feet would sink little prints into the snow.”) Brave Orchid sat on a bench at the Greyhound station to wait for her sister. Her children had not come with her because the bus station was only a ve-block walk from the house. Her brown paper shopping bag against her, she dozed under the uorescent lights until her sister’s bus pulled into the terminal. Moon Orchid stood blinking on the stairs, hanging tightly to the railing for old people.

Brave Orchid felt the tears break inside her chest for the old feet that stepped one at a time onto the cold Greyhound cement. Her sister’s skin hung loose, like a hollowed frog’s, as if she had shrunken inside it. Her clothes bagged, not tting sharply anymore.

“I’m in disguise,” she said. Brave Orchid put her arms around her sister to give her body warmth. She held her hand along the walk home, just as they had held hands when they were girls.

The house was more crowded than ever, though some of the children had gone away to school; the jade trees were inside for the

winter. Along walls and on top of tables, jade trees, whose trunks were as thick as ankles, stood stoutly, green now and without the pink skin the sun gave them in the spring.

“I am so afraid,” said Moon Orchid.

“There is no one after you,” said Brave Orchid. “No Mexicans.”

“I saw some in the Greyhound station,” said Moon Orchid.

“No. No, those were Filipinos.” She held her sister’s earlobes and began the healing chant for being unafraid. “There are no Mexicans after you,” she said.

“I know. I got away from them by escaping on the bus.”

“Yes, you escaped on the bus with the mark of the dog on it.”

In the evening, when Moon Orchid seemed quieter, her sister probed into the cause of this trouble.

“What made you think anyone was after you?”

“I heard them talking about me. I snuck up on them and heard them.”

“But you don’t understand Mexican words.”

“They were speaking English.”

“You don’t understand English words.”

“This time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside.”

Brave Orchid tweaked her sister’s ears for hours, chanting her new address to her, telling her how much she loved her and how much her daughter and nephews and nieces loved her, and her brother-in-law loved her. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I won’t let you travel again. You’re home. Stay home. Don’t be afraid.” Tears fell from Brave Orchid’s eyes. She had whisked her sister across the ocean by jet and then made her scurry up and down the Pacic coast, back and forth across Los Angeles. Moon Orchid had misplaced herself, her spirit (her “attention,” Brave Orchid called it) scattered all over the world. Brave Orchid held her sister’s head as she pulled on her earlobe. She would make it up to her. For

moments an attentiveness would return to Moon Orchid’s face.

Brave Orchid rubbed the slender hands, blew on the ngers, tried to stoke up the ickerings. She stayed home from the laundry day after day. She threw out the Thorazine and vitamin? that a doctor in Los Angeles had prescribed. She made Moon Orchid sit in the kitchen sun while she picked over the herbs in cupboards and basement and the fresh plants that grew in the winter garden. Brave Orchid chose the gentlest plants and made medicines and foods like those they had eaten in their village.

At night she moved from her own bedroom and slept beside Moon Orchid. “Don’t be afraid to sleep,” she said. “Rest. I’ll be here beside you. I’ll help your spirit nd the place to come back to. I’ll call it for you; you go to sleep.” Brave Orchid stayed awake watching until dawn.

Moon Orchid still described aloud her nieces’ and nephews’ doings, but now in a monotone, and she no longer interrupted herself to ask questions. She would not go outside, even into the yard. “Why, she’s mad,” Brave Orchid’s husband said when she was asleep.

Brave Orchid held her hand when she appeared vague. “Don’t go away, Little Sister. Don’t go any further. Come back to us.” If Moon Orchid fell asleep on the sofa, Brave Orchid sat up through the night, sometimes dozing in a chair. When Moon Orchid fell asleep in the middle of the bed, Brave Orchid made a place for herself at the foot. She would anchor her sister to this earth.

But each day Moon Orchid slipped further away. She said that the Mexicans had traced her to this house. That was the day she shut the drapes and blinds and locked the doors. She sidled along the walls to peep outside. Brave Orchid told her husband that he must humor his sister-in-law. It was right to shut the windows; it kept her spirit from leaking away. Then Moon Orchid went about the house turning o the lights like during air raids. The house became gloomy; no air, no light. This was very tricky, the darkness a wide way for going as well as coming back. Sometimes Brave Orchid

would switch on the lights, calling her sister’s name all the while.

Brave Orchid’s husband installed an air conditioner.

The children locked themselves up in their bedrooms, in the storeroom and basement, where they turned on the lights. Their aunt would come knocking on the doors and say, “Are you all right

in there?”

“Yes, Aunt, we’re all right.”

“Beware,” she’d warn. “Beware. Turn o your lights so you won’t be found. Turn o the lights before they come for us.”

The children hung blankets over the cracks in the door-jambs; they stued clothes along the bottoms of doors. “Chinese people are very weird,” they told one another.

Next Moon Orchid removed all the photographs, except for those of the grandmother and grandfather, from the shelves, dressers, and walls. She gathered up the family albums. “Hide these,” she whispered to Brave Orchid. “Hide these. When they nd me, I don’t want them to trace the rest of the family. They use photographs to trace you.” Brave Orchid wrapped the pictures and the albums in annel. “I’ll carry these far away where no one will nd us,” she said. When Moon Orchid wasn’t looking, she put them at the bottom of a storage box in the basement. She piled old clothes and old shoes on top. “If they come for me,” Moon Orchid said, “everyone will be

safe.”

“We’re all safe,” said Brave Orchid.

The next odd thing Moon Orchid did was to cry whenever anyone left the house. She held on to them, pulled at their clothes, begged them not to go. The children and Brave Orchid’s husband had to sneak out. “Don’t let them go,” pleaded Moon Orchid. “They will never come back.”

“They will come back. Wait and see. I promise you. Watch for them. Don’t watch for Mexicans. This one will be home at 3:30. This one at 5:00. Remember who left now. You’ll see.”

“We’ll never see that one again,” Moon Orchid wept.

At 3:30 Brave Orchid would remind her, “See? It’s 3:30; sure enough, here he comes.” (“You children come home right after school. Don’t you dare stop for a moment. No candy store. No comic book store. Do you hear?”) But Moon Orchid did not remember. “Who is this?” she’d ask.

“Are you going to stay with us? Don’t go out tonight. Don’t leave in the morning.”

She whispered to Brave Orchid that the reason the family must not go out was that “they” would take us in airplanes and y us to Washington, D.C., where they’d turn us into ashes. Then they’d drop the ashes in the wind, leaving no evidence.

Brave Orchid saw that all variety had gone from her sister. She was indeed mad. “The dierence between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”

Every morning Moon Orchid stood by the front door whispering, whispering. “Don’t go. The planes. Ashes. Washington, D.C. Ashes.”

Then, when a child managed to leave, she said, “That’s the last time we’ll see him again. They’ll get him. They’ll turn him into ashes.”

And so Brave Orchid gave up. She was housing a mad sister who cursed the mornings for her children, the one in Vietnam too. Their aunt was saying terrible things when they needed blessing. Perhaps Moon Orchid had already left this mad old body, and it was a ghost bad-mouthing her children. Brave Orchid nally called her niece, who put Moon Orchid in a California state mental asylum. Then Brave Orchid opened up the windows and let the air and light come into the house again. She moved back into the bedroom with her husband. The children took the blankets and sheets down from the doorjambs and came back into the living room.

Brave Orchid visited her sister twice. Moon Orchid was thinner each time, shrunken to bone. But, surprisingly, she was happy and had made up a new story. She pranced like a child. “Oh, Sister, I am so happy here. No one ever leaves. Isn’t that wonderful? We are all

women here. Come. I want you to meet my daughters.” She introduced Brave Orchid to each inmate in the ward—her daughters. She was especially proud of the pregnant ones. “My dear pregnant daughters.” She touched the women on the head, straightened collars, tucked blankets. “How are you today, dear daughter?” “And, you know,” she said to Brave Orchid, “we understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them.” Sure enough, the women smiled back at her and reached out to touch her as she went by. She had a new story, and yet she slipped entirely away, not waking up one morning.

Brave Orchid told her children they must help her keep their father from marrying another woman because she didn’t think she could take it any better than her sister had. If he brought another woman into the house, they were to gang up on her and play tricks on her, hit her, and trip her when she was carrying hot oil until she ran away. “I am almost seventy years old,” said the father, “and haven’t taken a second wife, and don’t plan to now.” Brave Orchid’s daughters decided ercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them. All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics.