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“You’re always listening to Teacher Ghosts, those Scientist Ghosts, Doctor Ghosts.”

“I have to make a living.”

“I never do call you Oldest Daughter. Have you noticed that? I always tell people, ‘This is my Biggest Daughter.’”

“Is it true then that Oldest Daughter and Oldest Son died in China? Didn’t you tell me when I was ten that she’d have been twenty; when I was twenty, she’d be thirty?” Is that why you’ve denied me my title?

“No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are.”

(Who was that story about—the one where the parents are throwing money at the children, but the children don’t pick it up because they’re crying too hard? They’re writhing on the floor covered with coins. Their parents are going out the door for America, hurling handfuls of change behind them.)

She leaned forward, eyes brimming with what she was about to say: “I work so hard,” she said. She was doing her stare—at what? My feet began rubbing together as if to tear each other’s skin off. She started talking again, “The tomato vines prickle my hands; I can feel their little stubble hairs right through my gloves. My feet squish-squish in the rotten tomatoes, squish-squish in the tomato mud the feet ahead of me have sucked. And do you know the best way to stop the itch from the tomato hairs? You break open a fresh tomato and wash yourself with it. You cool your face in tomato juice. Oh, but it’s the potatoes that will ruin my hands. I’ll get rheumatism washing potatoes, squatting over potatoes.”

She had taken off the Ace bandages around her legs for the night. The varicose veins stood out.

“Mama, why don’t you stop working? You don’t have to work anymore. Do you? Do you really have to work like that? Scabbing in the tomato fields?” Her black hair seems filleted with the band of white at its roots. She dyed her hair so that the farmers would hire her. She would walk to Skid Row and stand in line with the hobos, the winos, the junkies, and the Mexicans until the farm buses came and the farmers picked out the workers they wanted. “You have the house,” I said. “For food you have Social Security. And urban renewal must have given you something. It was good in a way when they tore down the laundry. Really, Mama, it was. Otherwise Papa would never have retired. You ought to retire too.”

“Do you think your father wanted to stop work? Look at his eyes; the brown is going out of his eyes. He has stopped talking. When I go to work, he eats leftovers. He doesn’t cook new food,” she said, confessing, me maddened at confessions. “Those Urban Renewal Ghosts gave us moving money. It took us seventeen years to get our customers. How could we start all over on moving money, as if we two old people had another seventeen years in us? Aa”—she flipped something aside with her hand—“White Ghosts can’t tell Chinese age.”

I closed my eyes and breathed evenly, but she could tell I wasn’t asleep.

“This is terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away,” she said. “Even the ghosts work, no time for acrobatics. I have not stopped working since the day the ship landed. I was on my feet the moment the babies were out. In China I never even had to hang up my own clothes. I shouldn’t have left, but your father couldn’t have supported you without me. I’m the one with the big muscles.”

“If you hadn’t left, there wouldn’t have been a me for you two to support. Mama, I’m really sleepy. Do you mind letting me sleep?” I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

“I didn’t need muscles in China. I was small in China.” She was. The silk dresses she gave me are tiny. You would not think the same person wore them. This mother can carry a hundred pounds of Texas rice up- and downstairs. She could work at the laundry from 6:30 a.m. until midnight, shifting a baby from an ironing table to a shelf between packages, to the display window, where the ghosts tapped on the glass. “I put you babies in the clean places