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“That wasn’t LSD, Mama. It was just a cold pill. I have a cold.”

“You’re always catching colds when you come home. You must be eating too much yin. Let me get you another quilt.”

“No, no more quilts. You shouldn’t take pills that aren’t prescribed for you. ‘Don’t eat pills you find on the curb,’ you always told us.”

“You children never tell me what you’re really up to. How else am I going to find out what you’re really up to?” As if her head hurt, she closed her eyes behind the gold wire rims. “Aiaa,” she sighed, “how can I bear to have you leave me again?”

How can I bear to leave her again? She would close up this room, open temporarily for me, and wander about cleaning and cleaning the shrunken house, so tidy since our leaving. Each chair has its place now. And the sinks in the bedrooms work, their alcoves no longer stuffed with laundry right up to the ceiling. My mother has put the clothes and shoes into boxes, stored against hard times. The sinks had been built of gray marble for the old Chinese men who boarded here before we came. I used to picture modest little old men washing in the mornings and dressing before they shuffled out of these bedrooms. I would have to leave and go again into the world out there which has no marble ledges for my clothes, no quilts made from our own ducks and turkeys, no ghosts of neat little old men.

The lamp gave off the sort of light that comes from a television, which made the high ceiling disappear and then suddenly drop back into place. I could feel that clamping down and see how my mother had pulled the blinds down so low that the bare rollers were showing. No passer-by would detect a daughter in this house. My mother would sometimes be a large animal, barely real in the dark; then she would become a mother again. I could see the wrinkles around her big eyes, and I could see her cheeks sunken without her top teeth.

“I’ll be back again soon,” I said. “You know that I come back. I think of you when I’m not here.”

“Yes, I know you. I know you now. I’ve always known you. You’re the one with the charming words. You have never come back. ‘I’ll be back on Turkeyday,’ you said. Huh.”

I shut my teeth together, vocal cords cut, they hurt so. I would not speak words to give her pain. All her children gnash their teeth.

“The last time I saw you, you were still young,” she said. “Now you’re old.”

“It’s only been a year since I visited you.”

“That’s the year you turned old. Look at you, hair gone gray, and you haven’t even fattened up yet. I know how the Chinese talk about us. ‘They’re so poor,’ they say, ‘they can’t afford to fatten up any of their daughters.’ ‘Years in America,’ they say, ‘and they don’t eat.’ Oh, the shame of it—a whole family of skinny children. And your father—he’s so skinny, he’s disappearing.”

“Don’t worry about him, Mama. Doctors are saying that skinny people live longer. Papa’s going to live a long time.”

“So! I knew I didn’t have too many years left. Do you know how I got all this fat? Eating your leftovers. Aiaa, I’m getting so old. Soon you will have no more mother.”

“Mama, you’ve been saying that all my life.”

“This time it’s true. I’m almost eighty.”

“I thought you were only seventy-six.”

“My papers are wrong. I’m eighty.”

“But I thought your papers are wrong, and you’re seventy-two, seventy-three in Chinese years.”

“My papers are wrong, and I’m eighty, eighty-one in Chinese years. Seventy. Eighty. What do numbers matter? I’m dropping dead any day now. The aunt down the street was resting on her porch steps, dinner all cooked, waiting for her husband and son to come home and eat it. She closed her eyes for a moment and died. Isn’t that a wonderful way to go?”

“But our family lives to be ninety-nine.”

“That’s your father’s family. My mother and father died very young. My youngest sister was an orphan at ten. Our parents were not even fifty.”

“Then you should feel grateful you’ve lived so many extra years.”

“I was so sure you were going to be an orphan too. In fact, I’m amazed you’ve lived to have white hair. Why don’t you dye it?”

“Hair color