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

“She says, ‘Aunt, please take your finger 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 off 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 fingers of both hands press the buttons, and—ka-lump—the press comes down. But one finger 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 fingers.”

“But I’m happy