"Im cold," I whimpered, and tears leaked out.

The plumber was not going to be number Nine, Ruth told herself, absolutely not. "Sorry, honey, but could you call? Ive got a pretty full day."

In the coauthoring trade, "Ruth Young" was the small-type name that followed "with," that is, if it appeared at all. After fifteen years, she had nearly thirty-five books to her credit. Most of her early work had come from corporate communications clients. Her expertise had woven its way into communication in general, then communication problems, behavioral patterns, emotional problems, mind-body connections, and spiritual awakening. She had been in the business long enough to see the terms evolve from "chakras" to "chi," "prana," "vital energy," "life force," "biomagnetic force," "bioenergy fields," and finally back to "chakras." In bookstores, most of her clients words of wisdom were placed in the light or popular sections—Self-Help, Wellness, Inspirational, New Age. She wished she were working on books that would be categorized as Philosophy, Science, Medicine.

"Ill take care of it," Ruth said quietly.

Driving toward LuLings building, Ruth entered the typical fog of summer. Then came block after block of bungalows built in the twenties, cottages that sprang up in the thirties, and characterless apartments from the sixties. The ocean view skyline was marred by electrical wires strewn from pole to house and house to pole. Many of the picture windows had sea-misty smears. The drainpipes and gutters were rusted, as were the bumpers of old cars. She turned up a street lined with more upscale homes, architectural attempts at Bauhaus sleekness, their small lawns decorated with shrubs cut in odd shapes, like the cotton-candy legs of show poodles.

LuLing smiled shyly. "First I thinking, Get money, then tell you. Now you ask, so now I show you." She went to the kitchen drawer where she kept years of expired coupons and pulled out an oversized envelope.

TWO

It was now nearly midnight, and in another few hours, Ruth would be able to talk. She stood in the Cubbyhole, a former pantry that served as her home office. She stepped onto a footstool and pushed open a tiny window. There it was, a sliver of a million-dollar view: the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge that bifurcated the waters, marking bay from ocean. The air was moist and antiseptically cold against her face. She scanned the sky, but it was too light and misty to see any "ghost bodies" burning up. Foghorns started to blare. And after another minute, Ruth saw the billows, like an ethereal down comforter covering the ocean and edging toward the bridge. Her mother used to tell her that the fog was really the steam from fighting dragons, one water, the other fire. "Water and fire, come together make steam," LuLing would say in the strangely British-accented English she had acquired in Hong Kong. "You know this. Just like teapot. You touch, burn you finger off."

He had laughed throughout, and she felt pleased. "Seriously," he said. "What?"

"How can be Dory?"

Dr. Huey looked up. "Is that when it is? I can never keep track."

"Thanks, Ma. Its wonderful. Well talk about it later, what to do with the money. But now we have to go. The doctor said we could still come at four, and we shouldnt be late."

"She can speak English too," Dory said.

"Still Monday." When you stop to think about it, shes right.

I laughed and clapped my hands, liking this made-up story best. The day before, she told me she had stared at an unlucky star falling out of the sky and then it dropped into her open mouth and burned her face. The day before that, she said she had eaten what she thought was a spicy Hunan dish only to find that it was the coals used tor cooking.

"He can stay ideal in his place, and Ill stay ideal in mine. Then we wont get into all that shit about whose pubic hair is clogging up the drain."

"The usual start of the week," Ruth said. "Chaos is the penance for leisure."

In the vegetable aisle, Ruth headed toward a bin of beautifully shaped turnips. They were each the size of apples, symmetrical and scrubbed, with striations of purple. Most people did not appreciate the aesthetics of turnips, Ruth thought as she chose five good ones, whereas she loved them, their crunchiness, the way they absorbed the flavor of whatever they were immersed in, gravy or pickling juice. She loved cooperative vegetables. And she loved turnips best when they were sliced into wedges and preserved in vinegar and chilies, sugar and salt.

The doctor looked at her mother. "Guoyu?"

"Look here, they have yoga," Wendy later said as they perused the schedule of classes at the club. "I hear yoga can change your life. Plus they have night classes." She nudged Ruth. "It might help you get over Paul."

"Readers will think we mean planets or the Big Bang theory."

"Do you think you might have left it on the BART train?"

Recently, though, Ruth had some concerns that her mother was becoming not forgetful, exactly, but careless. She would say "ribbon" when she meant "wrapping paper," "envelope" when she meant "stamp." Ruth had made a mental list of examples to tell the doctor. The accident last March, she should mention that as well. LuLing had bashed her car into the back of a truck. Luckily, she had only bumped her head on the steering wheel, and no one else was hurt. Her car was totaled.

"The murder must have been an awful thing for you to see," Dr. Huey said.

"I even showed her the canceled check. And she said, See, you still have the check! It was weird, like she wasnt making any sense."

In the hospital waiting room, Ruth saw that all the patients, except one pale balding man, were Asian. She read the blackboard listing of doctors names: Fong, Wong, Wang, Tang, Chin, Pon, Kwak, Koo. The receptionist looked Chinese; so did the nurses.

She called the doctor and got the nurse. "This is Ruth Young, LuLing Youngs daughter. We re coming to see Dr. Huey for a checkup at four, but I just wanted to mention a few things. . . ." She felt like a collaborator, a traitor and a spy.

"Take your time, Mrs. Young."

Wendy had often joked about her dwindling sex drive. But Ruth didnt think she meant it was absent. Would this happen to her as well? She and Art were not exactly the red-hot lovers theyd been in earlier years. They prepared less for romance and accepted more readily excuses of fatigue. She wiggled a toe: Get estrogen levels checked. That might be the reason she felt a sense of unease, fluctuating hormones. She had no other reason to feel anxious. Not that her life was perfect, but whatever problems she had, they were small. And she should keep them that way. She vowed to be more affectionate with Art.

"I dont know exactly when Ill be home. And you know those guys. They say theyre coming at one, they show up at five. Just because I work at home doesnt mean I dont have a real job. Ive got a really crazy day. For one thing, I have to . . ." And she started to list her tasks.

"Of course."

Throughout the years, LuLing lamented in Chinese, "Ai-ya, if only your father had lived, he would be even more successful than your uncle. And still we wouldnt spend so carelessly like them!" She also noted what should have been Ruths rightful property: Grandmother Youngs jade ring, money for a college fund. It shouldnt have mattered that Ruth was a girl or that Edwin had died. That was old Chinese thinking! LuLing said this so often Ruth could not help fantasizing what her life might have been like had her father lived. She could have bought patent-leather shoes, rhinestone-covered barrettes, and baby roses. Sometimes she stared at a photo of her father and felt angry he was dead. Then she felt guilty and scared. She tried to convince herself that she deeply loved this father she could not even remember. She picked the flowerlike weeds that grew in the cracks of sidewalks and put them in front of his framed picture.

When she lost her voice again, it was on their first anniversary of living together, and Art joked that her laryngitis must be psychosomatic. Ruth wondered whether it was. When she was a child, she lost her voice after breaking her arm. Why was that? On their second anniversary, she and Art were stargazing in the Grand Tetons. According to a park pamphlet, "During the peak of the Perseids, around August 12th, hundreds of shooting or falling stars streak the sky every hour. They are actually fragments of meteors penetrating the earths atmosphere, burning up in their descent." Against the velvet blackness, Ruth silently admired the light show with Art. She did not actually believe that her laryngitis was star-crossed, or that the meteor shower had anything to do with her inability to speak. Her mother, though, had often told Ruth throughout her childhood that shooting stars were really "melting ghost bodies" and it was bad luck to see them. If you did, that meant a ghost was trying to talkto you. To her mother, just about anything was a sign of ghosts: broken bowls, barking dogs, phone calls with only silence or heavy breathing at the other end.

Restraining order? Whos the nut here? "Im sorry this happened," Ruth said, and remembered a book she helped write on mirroring a childs feelings. "You must be frustrated when its clear youve done nothing wrong."

"Nude, with total strangers?"

Auntie Gal then said with great authority, "Shes a ghostwriter, one of the best there is. You know those books that say as told to on the cover? Thats what Ruth does—people tell her stories and she writes them down, word for word, exactly as told." Ruth had no time to correct her.

"So far I dont see any evidence of that. Her motor movements are good, reflexes are fine. Blood pressure is excellent. But well want to run a few more tests, also make sure shes not diabetic or anemic, for instance."

Dory grinned. "I told you she would."

"Then I have to phone you and figure out when youll be here for the plumber."

"They could, as could Alzheimers and other forms of dementia."

"Examples of mundane."

I was sleepy, still lying on the brick kang bed I shared with Precious Auntie. The flue to our little room was furthest from the stove in the common room, and the bricks beneath me had long turned cold. I felt my shoulder being shaken. When I opened my eyes. Precious Auntie began to write on a scrap of paper, then showed me what she had written. "I cant see," I complained. "Its too dark."

"Dont say dead." Dory griped. "I hate it when you say that."

"You saw this and didnt tell anyone?"

"Dont say kill!" Dory intoned. "Remember what they told us in assembly last year? Use that word, go to jail."

In the car on the way to the doctors office, Ruth noticed that her mother was strangely quiet. She kept looking at Ruth, who expected harsh words to start any moment: I told you that big slide was dangerous. Why didnt you listen to me? You could have cracked open your brain like a watermelon! Now I have to work overtime to pay for this. Ruth waited, but her mother only asked every now and then if she was hurting. Each time Ruth shook her head.

"It was a neighbors dog."

"Darling," Agapi said, "why does it always have to be a list of five and ten? I cant always limit myself to such regular numbers."

"Sure-sure. I not go anywhere."

The Yin and Yang of Being Single. The Yin and Yang of Being Married. The Yin and Yang of Being Divorced.

"Those could cause problems like this?"

To Ruth, the line looked like a sparerib picked clean of meat.

In the sixties, mused Ruth, people railed against race-differentiated services as ghettoization. Now they demanded them as culturally sensitive. Then again, San Francisco was about a third Asian, so Chinese-targeted medicine could also be a marketing strategy. The balding man was glancing about, as if seeking an escape route. Did he have a last name like Young that had been mistakenly identified as Chinese by a race-blind computer? Did he also get calls from Chinese-speaking telemarketers trying to sign him up for long-distance calling plans for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Ruth knew what it meant to feel like an outsider, because she had often been one as a child. Moving to a new home eight times made her aware of how she didnt fit in.

Ruth pulled up to the unloading zone at the rink. The girls scrambled out of the car and swung their satchels onto their backs. "See ya!" they shouted.

"Im not telling on nobody!"

"Mrs. Young, could you wait here while your daughter and I go outside to schedule another appointment? "

"My God. Whats going on there?" Wendy was back on the line.

Ruth tried to guess what an affirmative response might indicate. "My mothers always gotten into arguments, all her life. She has a terrible temper. And as long as Ive known her, shes been depressed. Her husband, my father, was killed forty-four years ago. Hit-and-run. She never got over it. Maybe the depression is becoming worse, but Im so used to it Id be the last one to notice. As for her confusion, I was wondering if it was a concussion from the car accident or if she might have had a mini-stroke." Ruth tried to remember the correct medical term. "You know, a TIA."

"And what if you met the ideal partner?"

"Its just that shes harassing me like a hundred times a day. Its making me nuts."

The next day, Ruth was playing in the schoolyard. Her mother was on the other side of the yard, monitoring other kids. Ruth climbed up the slide, eager to tumble down the silver curl into cool, dark sand. She had done this with Teresa a dozen times without her mothers seeing.

Ruth sighed. "Its been a little worse in the last six months, maybe longer than that. But today she seems worse than usual. Except for the last thing she said, she hasnt been that weird or forgetful. Its more like mix-ups, and most of it is due to her not speaking English that well, as you may have noticed. The story about O. J. Simpson—you know, that may be another language problem. Shes never been good at expressing herself—"

"Three days go. Monday."

"Girls, I wish you wouldnt ruin your appetites with junk food."

She had never been able to confide fully to anyone, not even Wendy, about what had happened with her and Paul Shinn. She had told Wendy of the many ways Paul irked her, that she was tempted to break up with him. When she announced to Wendy that they had split up, Wendy exclaimed, "Finally you did it. Good for you." With Art, the past seemed easier to talk about, because he had not been part of it. He was her yoga buddy, on the periphery of her life. He did not know what her earlier hopes and fears had been. With him, she could dissect the past with emotional detachment and frank intelligence.

Ruth was flailing for logic. "I dont remember you ever going to L.A."

"He never will," Gideon replied. "Youll cave in, you always do. Youll probably be calling HarperSanFrancisco by the end of the week, persuading them to change the schedule."

"Have you ever wanted to write your own book?"

"Yes, yes, excellent point, my dear. Cosmology, lets see . . . what we believe, subconsciously, implicitly, or both, how the universe works—you want to add something?"

Ruth revised that to: "Perhaps Ruth might attend a finishing school in Taiwan where she can learn the manners and customs of a young lady. What is your opinion?"

"Youre a book doctor."

She turned on her computer and felt drained before she even started. What was she doing ten years ago? The same thing. What would she be doing ten years from now? The same thing. Even the subjects of the books she helped write were not that different, only the buzzwords had changed. She took a deep breath and phoned the new client, Ted. His book, Internet Spirituality, was about the ethics created by cosmic computer connections, a topic he felt sure was hot right now but would lose its cachet if the publisher didnt get it to market as soon as possible. He had said so in several urgent phone messages he had left over the weekend when Ruth was in Tahoe.

LuLing waved to dismiss this simple answer. "Maybe you see document. / see real thing." She demonstrated with motions. "He grab her like this, cut neck here—very deep, so much blood. Awful."

"Hm, thats an excellent question." He fell quiet, stroking his beard in thought.

"Truth is 1916," LuLing said.

The foghorns continued to wail. They sounded like tubas in a Shostakovich opera, comedically tragic. But was tragedy ever funny? Or was it only the audience who laughed knowingly as the victims walked into trapdoors and trick mirrors?

"Ah, Beijing," the doctor said. "I went there on a tour a couple of years ago. My wife and I saw the Forbidden City."

By the time they arrived home, the excitement had worn off, and Ruth felt a throbbing pain in her arm and head. She tried not to cry. LuLing put her in her vinyl La-Z-Boy and made her as comfortable as possible. "You want me to cook you rice porridge? Eat. That will help you get well. How about spicy turnips? You want some now, while I cook dinner? "

As she brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she could hear Dory screeching: "I want to watch that. Put it back! Its my TV too." Fia hooted: "That shows for babies, and thats what you are, wnnh-wnnh-wnnh."

"You need to talk to your mom," Francine was now saying in a whiny voice. "Shes been accusing me of not paying the rent. I always pay on time, the first of the month. I dont know what shes talking about, but she goes on and on, like a broken record."

"And then theres vapor pressure," Art continued, "and reaching that balance point between two states, one hundred degrees Celsius." Ruth nodded and gave him what she hoped was a look of intelligent concentration. She felt dull and badly educated. "One moment you have water," Art said, his hands forming undulating motions. "But under pressure from heat, it turns into steam." His fingers flittered upward.

"It appeals to all the senses," he explained. "It can be opaque but never solid. You can feel it, but it has no permanent shape. It might be hot or cold. Some vapors smell terrible, others quite wonderful. Some are dangerous, others are harmless. Some are brighter than others when burned, mercury versus sodium, for instance. Vapors can go up your nose with a sniff and permeate your lungs. And the sound of the word, how it forms on your lips, teeth, and tongue—vaporzzzzzz—it lilts up, then lingers and fades. Its perfectly matched to its meanings."

"Ill get it straightened out."

She was running late. She faxed the outline to Agapi, then raced around the house, gathering notes, her cell phone, her address book. Once in the car, she drove to the Presidio Gate and then through the eucalyptus forest to California Street. Her mother lived fifty blocks west, in a part of San Francisco known as the Sunset district, close to Lands End.

And then she noticed the mans ring, a thick band of hammered gold on his right hand, no ring on his left. Not all married men wore rings, of course, but a wedding band on the right hand was a dead giveaway, at least in San Francisco, that he was gay. Now that she thought about it, the signs were obvious: the neat beard, the trim torso, the graceful way he moved. She could relax. She watched the bearded man bend forward, grab the bottoms of his feet, and press his forehead to his knees. No straight man could do that. Ruth flopped over and dangled her hands to midcalf.

At the time, Ruth thought the analogies and advice were simplistic. You couldnt reduce real life into one-liners. People were more complex than that. She certainly was, wasnt she? Or was she too complicated? Complex, complicated, what was the difference? Art, on the other hand, was the soul of understanding. Her friends often said as much: "You are so lucky." She had been proud when she first heard that, believing she had chosen well in love. Lately she had considered whether they might have meant he was to be admired for putting up with her. But then Wendy reminded her, "You were the one who called Art a fucking saint." Ruth wouldnt have put it that way, but she knew the sentiment must have been true. She remembered that before she ever loved Art, she had admired him—his calm, the stability of his emotions. Did she still? Had he changed, or was it she? She drove toward the dry cleaners, mulling over these questions.

"Ah, this also not so easy say," LuLing began shyly. &q九_九_藏_书_网uot;Not really city, more like little place we call so many different name. Forty-six kilometer from bridge to Peking."

"No hurry."

Strangely, after that incident, LuLing never mentioned anything about the dog peeing on the lawn. Instead, whenever Ruth came home, LuLing made it a point to take out a spade, get on her hands and knees, and painfully dig out the yellow spots and reseed them, two square inches at a time. Ruth knew it was her mothers version of emotional torture, but still it made her stomach hurt as she pretended not to be affected. LuLing finally did hire someone to take care of the yellow spots, a cement contractor, who constructed a frame and a mold, then poured a patio of red and white concrete diamonds. The walkway was red as well. Over the years, the red diamonds faded. The white ones turned grimy. Some areas looked as though they had experienced the upheavals of Lilliputian volcanos. Spiny weeds and strawlike tufts grew in the cracks. I should call someone to spruce up the place, Ruth thought as she approached the house. She was sad that her mother no longer cared as much about appearances. She also felt guilty that she had not helped out more around the house. Perhaps she could call her own handyman to do cleanup and repairs.

"You took BART?" Since the car accident, LuLing had been taking public transportation when Ruth wasnt able to act as chauffeur.

"Ruth!" Art said in a warning tone. "The girls are going to be late."

"Im full," Dory answered. "We stopped at Burger King in the Presidio and ate a bunch of fries before we came home."

"Like court stenographers," the woman said. "I hear they have to be very fast and accurate. Did you go through special training?"

Ruth felt a twinge in her chest. It quickly grew into an ache. She wanted to embrace her mother, shield her, and at the same time wanted her mother to cradle her, to assure her that she was okay, that she had not had a stroke or worse. That was how her mother had always been, difficult, oppressive, and odd. And in exactly that way, LuLing had loved her. Ruth knew that, felt it. No one could have loved her more. Better perhaps, but not more.

"Do you know todays date?"

"Fia? Fia! Come back here. You promise me now, or Im going to take you home to change clothes."

"Vapors?" Ruth thought of chills and cold, mists and suicide ghosts. That was not a word she would have chosen.

During their phone meeting, Ruth reviewed the chapter that presented the Five Donts and Ten Dos of becoming a more engaged parent.

Ruth looked away.

"Shes getting more sex than I am," Wendy exclaimed. "I cant remember the last time I even wanted to do anything in bed with Joe except sleep."

Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. Im not a little girl anymore. Im not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Dont you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.

"Its true. Youre a dream when it comes to collaboration," Gideon went on. "You listen as the clients blather on, egos unchecked. They walk all over you, and you just take it. Youre easy."

"You win," she said, placing the crown of her head on a folded blanket. "Hoist away."

LuLing put on a paper gown, climbed onto the examining table, and dangled her feet. She looked childlike and breakable. Ruth sank into a nearby chair. When the doctor arrived, they both sat up straight. LuLing had always had great respect for doctors.

"So whats your favorite word?"

Ruth nodded vigorously. Water to steam, that she understood, sort of. Her mother used to talk about fire and water combining to make steam, and steam looked harmless but could peel your skin right off. "Like yin and yang?" she ventured.

"Well, thats sweet of you to say. Ill buy you coffee next time." She laughed and put her hand over his. "How about you? Tell me about your love life and all your past disasters. Whos your current partner?"

"I know who who!" LuLing grumbled. She counted, flipping her fingers down as she listed: "Dory, Fia, oldest one Fu-Fu, seventeen." Ruth used to joke that Fu-Fu, her feral cat, born with a nasty disposition, was the grandchild LuLing never had. "How Fu-Fu do?" LuLing asked.

"Im sure they have your records there. They wont need to see the card."

At that moment, luckily, the receptionist called out, "LuLing Young!" As Ruth helped her mother gather her purse and coat, she saw the balding man leap up and walk quickly toward an elderly Chinese woman. "Hey, Mom," Ruth heard him say. "Howd everything check out? Ready to go home?" The woman gruffly handed him a prescription note. He must be her son-in-law, Ruth surmised. Would Art ever take her mother to the doctors? She doubted it. How about in the case of an emergency, a heart attack, a stroke?

LuLing nodded bravely.

But then a familiar voice, loud and shrill, rang across the playground: "No! Luyi, stop! What are you doing? You want to break your body in half?"

LuLing glared at Ruth, and Ruth glanced at Art, but he was looking down at his plate. "Waipo speaks Chinese," Ruth said, "because thats the language shes used to." Ruth had told them to call LuLing "Waipo," the Chinese honorific for "Grandmother," and at least they did that, but then again, they thought it was just a nickname.

LuLing went blank.

She huffed, set the paper on the low cupboard, and motioned that I should get up. She lighted the teapot brazier, and tied a scarf over her nose and mouth when it started to smoke. She poured face-washing water into the teapots chamber, and when it was cooked, she started our day. She scrubbed my face and ears. She parted my hair and combed my bangs. She wet down any strands that stuck out like spider legs. Then she gathered the long part of my hair into two bundles and braided them. She banded the top with red ribbon, the bottom with green. I wagged my head so that my braids swung like the happy ears of palace dogs. And Precious Auntie sniffed the air as it she, too, were a dog wondering. Whats that good smell? That sniff was how she said my nickname, Doggie. That was how she talked.

"In any case, my dear, you should have a doctor give her a thorough, thorough checkup. And you put your arms around her and give that mother of yours a great big healing hug from me." It was a nice thought, but Ruth rarely exchanged embraces with LuLing. When she tried, her mothers shoulders turned rigid, as if she were being attacked.

As she wound her hair tight against her skull, I played with her box of treasures. I took out a pretty comb, ivory with a rooster carved at each end. Precious Auntie was born a Rooster. "You wear this," I demanded, holding it up. "Pretty." I was still young enough to believe that beauty came from things, and I wanted Mother to favor her more. But Precious Auntie shook her head. She pulled off her scarf and pointed to her face and bunched her brows. What use do I have for prettiness ? she was saying.

"I dont have a favorite yet," she finally answered. "I guess Ive been living off words for so long its hard to think about them beyond whats utilitarian."

By and large, the books she helped write were interesting, she often reminded herself, and if not, it was her job to make them interesting. And though she might pooh-pooh her own work just to be modest, it irked her when others did not take her seriously. Even Art did not seem to recognize how difficult her job was. But that was partly her fault. She preferred to make it look easy. She would rather that others discern for themselves what an incredible job she did in spinning gold out of dross. They never did, of course. They didnt know how hard it was to be diplomatic, to excavate lively prose from incoherent musings. She had to assure clients that her straightforward recasting of their words still made them sound articulate, intelligent, and important. She had to be sensitive to the fact the authors saw their books as symbolic forms of immortality, believing that their words on the printed page would last far longer than their physical bodies. And when the books were published, Ruth had to sit back quietly at parties while the clients took the credit for being brilliant. She often claimed she did not need to be acknowledged to feel satisfied, but that was not exactly true. She wanted some recognition, and not like the kind she had received two weeks before, at the party for her mothers seventy-seventh birthday.

Ruth had tried to decipher the pages. Her mother had once drilled Chinese calligraphy into her reluctant brain, and she still recognized some of the characters: "thing," "I," "truth." But unraveling the rest required her to match LuLings squiggly radicals to uniform ones in a Chinese-English dictionary. "These are the things I know are true," the first sentence read. That had taken Ruth an hour to translate. She set a goal to decipher a sentence a day. And in keeping with her plan, she translated another sentence the next evening: "My name is LuLing Liu Young." That was easy, a mere five minutes. Then came the names of LuLings husbands, one of whom was Ruths father. Husbands? Ruth was startled to read that there had been another. And what did her mother mean by "our secrets gone with them"? Ruth wanted to know right away, but she could not ask her mother. She knew from experience what happened whenever she asked her mother to render Chinese characters into English. First LuLing scolded her for not studying Chinese hard enough when she was little. And then, to untangle each character, her mother took side routes to her past, going into excruciating detail over the infinite meanings of Chinese words: "Secret not just mean cannot say. Can be hurt-you kinda secret, or curse-you kind, maybe do you damage forever, never can change after that. . . ." And then came rambling about who told the secret, without saying what the secret itself was, followed by more rambling about how the person had died horribly, why this had happened, how it could have been avoided, if only such-and-such had not occurred a thousand years before. If Ruth showed impatience in listening to any of this, LuLing became outraged, before sputtering an oath that none of this mattered because soon she too would die anyway, by accident, because of bad-luck wishes, or on purpose. And then the silent treatment began, a punishment that lasted for days or weeks, until Ruth broke down first and said she was sorry.

"Why do you have all these?"

"You mentioned to the nurse that she had a car accident. Was there a head injury? "

"Im still in shock," Wendy went on. "Im about to . . . Hold on. I just got another call."

Auntie Gal and Uncle Edmund had brought along a friend from Portland, an older woman with thick glasses, who asked Ruth what she did for a living. "Im a book collaborator," she answered.

"What month?" LuLing asked Ruth. Ruth shrugged helplessly. "She dont know."

Ruth interrupted. "What she means is—" and she was about to say 1921, but the doctor put up his hand to stop her from speaking. He glanced at the medical chart again, then said to LuLing, "So that makes you . . . how old?"

LuLing nodded.

"I did. So anyway, you were saying . . . ?"

LuLing beamed, then added, "I win all for you."

"Monday." Date and day always sound the same to her.

Ruth looked up from her notes on her phone conference with the Internet Spirituality author and reminded herself of all the ways she was lucky. She worked at home, was paid decent money, and at least the publishers appreciated her, as did the publicists, who called her for talking points when booking radio interviews for the authors. She was always busy, unlike some freelance writers who fretted over the trickle of jobs in the pipeline.

You cant stop me, Ruth thought fiercely. She threw herself down the slide, head first, arms straight out—the position that only the bravest and wildest boys would take—fast, fast, fast into the sand. And then she crashed face first, with such force that she bit her lip, bumped her nose, bent her glasses, and broke her arm. She lay still. The world was burning, shot full of red lightning.

No more stories. Precious Auntie now told me, her hands talking fast. Its almost time for breakfast, ana we must pray while were still hungry. She retrieved the scrap of paper from the cupboard, folded it in half, and tucked it into the lining of her shoe. We put on our padded winter clothes and walked into the cold corridor. The air smelled of coal fires in other wings of the compound. I saw Old Cook pumping his arm to turn the crank over the well. I heard a tenant yelling at her lazy daughter-in-law. I passed the room that my sister, GaoLing, shared with Mother, the two of them still asleep. We hurried to the south-facing small room, to our ancestral hall. At the threshold, Precious Auntie gave me a warning look. Act humble. Take off your shoes. In my stockings, I stepped onto cold gray tiles. Instantly, my feet were stabbed with an iciness that ran up my legs, through my body, and dripped out my nose. I began to shake.

No one else understood Precious Aunties kind of talk, so I had to say aloud what she meant. Not everything, though, not our secret stories. She often told me about her father, the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain, about the cave where they found the dragon bones, how the bones were divine and could cure any pain, except a grieving heart. "Tell me again," I said that morning, wishing for a story about how she burned her face and became my nursemaid.

She pulled up to LuLings place, a two-unit Mediterranean-style with an apricot-colored curved front and a fake bay window balcony with wrought-iron grating. LuLing had once proudly tended her yard. She used to water and cut the hedge herself, neaten the border of white stones that flanked the short walkway. When Ruth lived at home, she had had to mow the seven-by-seven foot squares of lawn. LuLing always criticized any edges that touched the sidewalk. She also complained about the yellow urine spots, made by the dog from across the street. "Lootie, you tell that man dont let dog do that." Ruth reluctantly went across the street, knocked on the door, asked the neighbor if he had seen a black-and-white cat, then walked back and told her mother that the man said he would try. When she went away to college and came home to visit, her mother still asked her to complain to the man across the street almost as soon as she walked in the door. The missing-cat routine was getting old, and it was hard to think of new excuses for knocking on the mans door. Ruth usually procrastinated, and LuLing nagged about more and more yellow spots, as well as Ruths laziness, her forgetfulness, her lack of concern for family, on and on. Ruth tried to ignore her by reading or watching TV.

This was a surprise. "You adopted them?"

At the end of the examination, Dr. Huey smiled and announced, "Well, you are one very strong lady. Heart and lungs are great. Blood pressure excellent. Especially for someone your age. Lets see, what year were you born?" He scanned the chart, then looked up at LuLing. "Can you tell me?"

"Listen, Wendy, I know this is important, so can I call you back after I drop off the girls? "

"Ruthie, is your voice back? Can you talk?" It was Wendy, her best friend. They spoke nearly every day. She heard Wendy blow her nose. Was she actually crying?

On Sunday, when they returned home to San Francisco, cranky and sweaty, they discovered they had no hot water. The tank had leaked, and the heating element apparently had fried to death. They were forced to make do with kettle-warmed baths; Art didnt want to be gouged by emergency plumbing rates. Without a voice, Ruth couldnt argue, and she was glad. To argue would mean she was offering to foot the bill, something she had done so often over their years of living together that it had become expected of her. But because she did not offer, she felt petty, then irked that Ark said nothing further about the matter. At bedtime he nuzzled her neck and bumped gently into her backside. When she tensed, he said, "Suit yourself," and rolled over, and this left her feeling rebuffed. She wanted to explain what was wrong—but she realized she did not know. There was nothing specific beyond her bad mood. Soon Arts sonorous breathing rumbled out of sync with her frustration, and she lay wide-eyed in the dark.

THREE

Maybe number Nine was related to the plumber after all: tidal wave, broken water heater. The puzzle was solved. But what about the sheer curtains? What did that mean? The worry billowed up again.

As Dr. Huey turned for the door, he stopped. "And thank you for answering all the questions. Im sure you must have felt like you were on the witness stand."

"What was the date five months ago?"

Since Arts divorce, the girls had been dividing their time between their mom and stepdads home in Sausalito and Arts Edwardian flat on Vallejo Street. Every other week, the four of them—Art, Ruth, Sofia, and Dory—found themselves crammed into five miniature rooms, one of them barely big enough to squeeze in a bunkbed. There was only one bathroom, which Ruth hated for its antiquated inconvenience. The claw-footed iron tub was as soothing as a sarcophagus, and the pedestal sink with its separate spigots dispensed water that was either scalding hot or icy cold. As Ruth reached for the dental floss, she knocked over other items on the windowsill: potions for wrinkles, remedies for pimples, nose-hair clippers, and a plastic mug jammed with nine toothbrushes whose ownership and vintage were always in question. While she was picking up the mess, desperate pounding rattled the door.

Precious Auntie sat on a stool and drew me to her lap. Stop that, Doggie, she gently scolded, or the tears will freeze into icicles and poke out your eyes. She kneaded my feet fast, as if they were dumpling dough. Better? How about now, better?

"What happened?" Ruth whispered. Dont tell me, dont tell me, she mouthed in rhythm to her racing heart. Wendy was about to tell her she had cancer, Ruth was sure of it. Last nights uneasy feeling started to trickle through her veins.

In the crowded workout room, thirty disciples, most of them women, were staking out their turf, then adjusting mats as stragglers came in. When a man rolled out his mat next to Ruths, she avoided looking at him, in case he was the scumbag. She glanced around. Most of the women had pedicured nails, precision-applied nail polish. Ruths feet were broad, and her naked toes looked like the piggies from the childrens rhyme. Even the man next to her had better-looking feet, smooth skin, perfectly tapered toes. And then she caught herself—she shouldnt have nice thoughts about the feet of a potential pervert.

Remembering this, Ruth decided to splurge and buy a small orchid plant with ivory blooms. Orchids looked delicate but thrived on neglect. You didnt have to water them but once every ten days. And while they were somewhat pricey, they bloomed for six months or more, then went dormant before surprising you with new blooms all over again. They never died—you could count on them to reincarnate themselves forever. A lasting value.

"I can see why youre upset," Ruth consoled her.

"Duality of nature. Exactly."

When Ruth was growing up, her mother supplemented her income as a teachers aide with side businesses, one of which was bilingual calligraphy, Chinese and English. She produced price signs for supermarkets and jewelry stores in Oakland and San Francisco, good-luck couplets for restaurant openings, banners for funeral wreaths, and announcements for births and weddings. Over the years, people had told Ruth that her mothers calligraphy was at an artists level, first-rate classical. This was the piecework that earned her a reliable reputation, and Ruth had had a role in that success: she checked the spelling of the English words.

Ruth was thrilled. He was probably groping for a word that was arcane and multisyllabic, one of those crossword items that could be confirmed only in the Oxford English Dictionary.

One evening, about three weeks after she met him, their conversation became more personal. "Frankly, I like living alone," she heard herself saying. She had convinced herself this was true.

Dr. Huey laughed. "I guess everyone watched that trial on TV."

Every year, before their family reunion dinner in September, her mother started two new fermenting jars of spicy turnips, one of which she gave to Ruth. When Ruth was a little girl, she called them la-la, hot-hot. She would suck and munch on them until her tongue and lips felt inflamed and swollen. She still gorged on them from time to time.九-九-藏-书-网 Was it a craving for salt, or for pain? When the supply grew low, Ruth would toss in more chopped-up turnips and a pinch of salt, and let them pickle for a few days. Art thought the taste was okay in small doses. But the girls said they smelled like "something farted in the fridge." At times Ruth secretly ate the spicy turnips in the morning, her way of seizing the day. Even her mother considered that strange.

Dory was thirteen and chunky, larger than her fifteen-year-old sister. They wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. "Long hair look like suicide maiden," Lu-Ling had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.

"Not even Art, and especially not Miss Giddy."

LuLing was like the losing contestant on Jeopardy! Total for LuLing Young: minus five hundred points. And now for our final Jeopardy/ round . . .

"Im not taking sides. . . ."

"Dont now. She not married yet." He doesnt see that shes joking!

"You need to take her to the doctor. Do you understand? Go see a doctor."

This morning I remembered the trunk. I went to put away the birthday present that Luyi gave me. Gray pearls from Hawaii, beautiful beyond belief. When I opened the lid, out rose a cloud of moths, a stream of silverfish. Inside I found a web of knitted holes, one after the other. The embroidered flowers, the bright colors, now gone. Almost all that mattered in my life has disappeared, and the worst is losing Precious Aunties name.

LuLing shook her head. "Oh no, not just watch TV, I there when it happen. He kill wife and that friend, bring her glasses. Everything I see."

Wendy answered on the first ring. "Can you believe it?" she said, as though she had not stopped repeating this since their last conversation. "And I thought she was over the top when she had the facelift. Last night she told me that she and Patrick were getting it on twice a night. Shes telling me this—me, the daughter she once sent to confession for asking how babies were made."

Ruth flushed. What had she said! "It was the ring," she admitted, and pointed to his gold band. "Most of the gay couples I know wear rings on that hand."

"Yeah, who said that?"

Im not dead, Ruth tried to cry out, but it was like speaking in a dream. Nothing came from her lips the way she wanted. Or was she truly dead? Was that how it felt, this oozing from her nose, the pain in her head and arm, the way she moved, as slowly and heavily as an elephant in water? Soon she felt familiar hands brushing over her head and neck. Her mother was lifting her, murmuring tenderly, "Ai-ya, how could you be so foolish? Look at you."

This was the ninth year. Ruth, Art, and the girls had driven the two hundred miles to Lake Tahoe for the Days of No Talk, as they called them. Ruth had envisioned the four of them holding hands and walking down to the Truckee River to watch the nightly meteor showers in quiet awe. But the mosquitoes were working overtime, and Dory whimpered that she saw a bat, to which Fia teased, "Who cares about rabies when the forest is full of ax murderers?" After they fled back to the cabin, the girls said they were bored. "Theres no cable television?" they complained. So Art drove them to Tahoe City and rented videos, mainly horror flicks. He and the girls slept through most of them, and though Ruth hated the movies, she could not stop watching. She dreamed of deranged babysitters and oozing aliens.

"You became an expert on silence?" she joked.

He nodded knowingly. Dr. Huey was a pleasant-looking man, younger than Ruth. He started asking LuLing questions in Cantonese, and her mother pretended to understand, until Ruth explained, "She speaks Mandarin, not Cantonese."

Ruth followed the doctor into another room. "How long have you noticed this kind of confusion?" Dr. Huey asked right away.

Wendy came back on the line. "You still there? Sorry. Were casting victims for that earthquake movie, and a million people are calling all at once." Wendy ran her own agency that hunted extras as San Francisco local color—cops with handlebar mustaches, six-foot-six drag queens, socialites who were unknowing caricatures of themselves. "On top of everything, I feel like shit," Wendy said, and stopped to sneeze and blow her nose. So she wasnt crying, Ruth realized, before the phone clicked twice. "Damn," Wendy said. "Hang on. Let me get rid of this call."

After I stopped crying, Precious Auntie lighted more joss sticks. She went back to the threshold and picked up one of her shoes. I can still see it—the dusty blue cloth, the black piping, the tiny embroidery of an extra leaf where she had repaired the hole. I thought she was going to burn her shoe as a send-away gift to the dead. Instead, from the shoes lining, she took out the scrap of paper with the writing she had showed me earlier. She nodded toward me and said with her hands: My family name, the name of all the bonesetters. She put the paper name in front of my face again and said, Never forget this name, then placed it carefully on the altar. We bowed and rose, bowed and rose. Each time my head bobbed up, I looked at that name. And the name was—

"Shes not my mother!" Ruth shouted back. "I dont know who she is!" Her mothers eyes locked on hers. Although she was clear across the playground, she heard everything, saw everything. She had magic eyes on the back of her head.

"Eighty," she said at last. "After that, eighty-seven."

"How old is your daughter?"

Why wasnt Art hearing this? Ruth wanted to gloat: See, others dont think Im difficult. Then she realized Gideon was saying she was a pushover. She wasnt really, she reasoned. She knew her limits, but she wasnt the type to get into a conflict over things that were ultimately not that important. She didnt understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger. According to her mothers cosmology, the world was against her and no one could change this, because this was a curse.

"We havent ruled out anything yet."

"What year is it now?"

"My mothers been depressed and angry all her life," Ruth told Agapi. She did not bring up the threats of suicide, which she had heard so often she tried not to react to them.

"Ruth, darling," Agapis taped voice continued, "can you look at the folder marked Fascinating Case Studies and pick out suitable ones for this chapter?"

"Im really sorry, Wendy. I have to take the girls to ice-skating school—"

"You shouldnt let them eat those things!" LuLing scolded, continuing in Mandarin. "Tell them you dont allow this anymore."

Back at the flat, Ruth put the groceries away, set the orchid on the dining room table, and went into the Cubbyhole. She liked to think that limited space inspired limitless imagination. The walls were painted red with flecks of metallic gold, Wendys idea. The overhead light was softened by a desk lamp with an amber mica shade. On the lacquer-black shelves were reference books instead of jars of jam. A pull-out cutting board held her laptop, a flour bin had been removed for knee space.

The nurse spoke to LuLing in Cantonese and she answered in Mandarin. They settled on accented English as their common ground. LuLing quietly submitted to the preliminaries. Step on the scale. Eighty-five pounds. Blood pressure. One hundred over seventy. Roll up your sleeve and make a fist. LuLing did not flinch. She had taught Ruth to do the same, to look straight at the needle and not cry out. In the examination room, Ruth turned away as her mother slipped out of her cotton camisole and stood in her waist-high flowered panties.

"Really?"

Fia dropped her mouth in mock shock, her reaction to most things. "Uh, she bought it for me, okay?"

"I only know because Im hosting this years family reunion dinner."

ONE

He looked puzzled. "Theyre mine. And my ex-wifes, of course."

"Some things you do for yourself," he answered. "Some things you do for others. Maybe theyre the same."

Ruth now watched as LuLing searched in the closet for her purse. She was still pointing out GaoLings transgressions. "Later grown-up time, want my things too. Want your daddy marry her. Yes, you dont know this. Edwin not Edmund, because he oldest, more success. Every day smile for him, show off her teeth, like monkey." LuLing turned around and demonstrated. "But he not interest in her, only me. She so mad. Later she marry Edmund, and when you daddy die, she say, Ooooh, so lucky I not marry Edwin! So stupid she saying that. To my face! Dont consider me, only concerning herself. I say nothing. I never complaining. Do I ever complaining?"

"I scared!"

Precious Auntie lighted several joss sticks. She blew on them until they began to smolder. Soon more smoke rose—a jumble of our breath, our offerings, and hazy clouds that I thought were ghosts who would try to yank me down to wander with them in the World of Yin. Precious Auntie once told me that a body grows cold when it is dead. And since I was chilled to the bone that morning, I was afraid.

Ruth stared at Fias navel. "Does your mother know youre wearing that?"

"Year?" LuLings eyes darted upward as if the answer were on the ceiling. "This not so easy say."

LuLing groused. "You say doctor visit one oclock."

Ruth listened to their laughter on the tape. She had never gone into therapy, as Wendy had. She worked with too many therapists, saw that they were human, full of foibles, in need of help themselves. And while Wendy thought it worthwhile to know that a professional was dedicated to her and her alone for two one-hour sessions a week, Ruth could not justify spending a hundred fifty dollars an hour to listen to herself talk. Wendy often said Ruth should see a shrink about her compulsion with number counting. To Ruth, however, the counting was practical, not compulsive; it had to do with remembering things, not warding off some superstitious nonsense.

"See? Youre already laughing."

The doctors appointment was ostensibly a routine visit. Her mother had overlooked having an annual checkup for the last few years, though it was included free in her HMO plan. LuLing was never sick. Ruth could not remember the last time she had had the flu or even a cold. At seventy-seven, her mother had none of the common geriatric problems, arthritis, high cholesterol, or osteoporosis. Her worst ailment—the one she frequently complained about to Ruth, in excruciating detail—was constipation.

Ex-wife? That made three gay men she knew who had once been married. "So how long were you married before you came out?"

"Then why you let neighbors dog come your backyard? Now see what happen! Ai-ya, die no reason!"

Ruth liked Teresa. She laughed a lot and always kept in her pockets things she had found: balls of foil, broken marbles, flower heads. Ruth had just started at another new school, and Teresa was the only girl who played with her. Neither of them was very popular.

"Whos Bao Bomu again?" Ruth asked.

After they hung up, Ruth began work on a chapter titled "No Child Is an Island." She replayed a tape of Agapi and herself talking:

"I used to be in corporate communications. Then I started freelance editing, and a few years ago I took on more full-scale book collaboration, mostly inspirational and self-improvement books, better health, better sex, better soul, that kind of thing."

"Bao Bomu taught me how to write," LuLing said one evening. "She taught me how to think. When you write, she said, you must gather the free-flowing of your heart." To demonstrate, LuLing wrote the character for "heart." "See? Each stroke has its own rhythm, its balance, its proper place. Bao Bomu said everything in life should be the same way."

The dining room table, which LuLing never used, was a raft of junk mail. Ruth pushed aside the Chinese-language newspapers and magazines. Her mother had always been sanitary, but never neat. She hated grease but didnt mind chaos. She kept junk mail and coupons, as if they were personal greeting cards.

"She did bump her head on the steering wheel." Ruth was suddenly hopeful that this was the missing piece to the puzzle.

"Okay, okay, go see doctor."

LuLing straightened herself to all four feet, eleven inches of indignity. "And now you see! Why GaoLing still want my money? She crazy, you know. She always think I got more, hiding somewhere. Thats why I think she take my purse."

"Fias the older one, shes going into tenth. Dorys thirteen. Shell be in seventh."

In an instant, she knew her mistake. "Of course not!" she scrambled to say. "I meant when you came out from New York."

But the way Ruth saw it, LuLing got into fights mainly because of her poor English. She didnt understand others, or they didnt understand her. Ruth used to feel she was the one who suffered because of that. The irony was, her mother was actually proud she had taught herself English, the choppy talk she had acquired in China and Hong Kong. And since immigrating to the United States fifty years before, she had not improved either her pronunciation or her vocabulary. Yet her sister, GaoLing, had come to the States around the same time, and her English was nearly perfect. She could talk about the difference between crinoline and organza, name the specific trees she liked: oak, maple, gingko, pine. To LuLing, cloth was classified as "cost too much," "too slippery," "scratchy skin," and "last long time." And there were only two kinds of trees: "shady" and "drop leaf all the time." Her mother couldnt even say Ruths name right. It used to mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and down the block. "Lootie! Lootie!" Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldnt pronounce?

It worked. "Okay, then," Francine said, and backed into her doorway like a cuckoo in a Swiss clock.

"Yes, and GaoLing late pick me up! I wait two hour. Finy she come. And then she accuse me, say, Why you come early, you suppose come here eleven. I tell her, No, I never say come eleven. Why I say coming eleven when I already know I coming nine oclock? She pretend I crazy, make me so mad."

He was also incredibly limber. He could wrap his ankles around his neck, balance like Baryshnikov. She, in comparison, looked like a woman getting a gynecological exam. A poor woman. She was wearing an old T-shirt and faded leggings with a hole in one knee. At least it was obvious she wasnt on the prowl, not like those who were wearing designer sports outfits and full makeup.

Within the first week, Wendy was off yoga and onto a home gizmo that looked like a rickshaw with oars. Ruth continued with yoga three times a week. She had found a form of exercise that relaxed her. She especially liked the practice of staying focused, of eliminating everything from her mind except breath. And she liked Art, the bearded man. He was friendly and funny. They started going to a coffee shop around the corner after class.

"Your purse."

"Like O.J."

Her mother—and Ruth tapped her ring finger to remind herself again of the doctors appointment. Four oclock. She had to squeeze a lot of work into the shortened day. She hurried, grabbing Fuji apples for Fia, Granny Smiths for Dory, Braeburns for Art.

"Fine," Dr. Huey declared, with no change of expression. "Now I want you to name the last five presidents in reverse order."

Ruths heart started to thump. "You saw a documentary," she said for Dr. Hueys benefit, "a reenactment of what might have happened, and it was like watching the real thing. Is that what youre saying?"

"Why you have dog?"

"Nude? What a scumbag! . . . Was he at least good-looking?"

"Scare me to pieces," LuLing had reported. "My skin almost fall off." She blamed a pigeon that had flown up in front of her windshield. Maybe, Ruth now considered, it was not a nutter of wings, but one in her brain, a stroke, and the bump on her head was more serious, a concussion, a skull fracture. Whatever was wrong, the police report and insurance company said it was LuLings fault, not the pigeons. LuLing was so outraged that she canceled her car insurance, then complained when the company refused to reinstate her policy.

So what was Nine? She always organized her day by the number of digits on her hands. Each day was either a five or a ten. She wasnt rigid about it: add-ons were accommodated on the toes of her feet, room for ten unexpected tasks. Nine, Nine . . . She could make calling Wendy number One and bump everything back. But she knew that call should be a toe, an extra, an Eleven. What was Nine? Nine was usually something important, a significant number, what her mother termed the number of fullness, a number that also stood for Do not forget, or risk losing all. Did Nine have something to do with her mother? There was always something to worry about with her mother. That was not anything she had to remember in particular. It was a state of mind.

Ruth had related the incident to Agapi Agnos, who said inattention and anger could be related to depression in the elderly.

She and Wendy were the same age. They had known each other since the sixth grade, but had gone through periods when they did not see each other for years. Their friendship had grown via accidental reunions and persistence on Wendys part. While Wendy was not the person Ruth would have chosen for her closest friend, Ruth was glad it had turned out to be so. She needed Wendys boisterousness as balance to her own caution, Wendys bluntness as antidote to her reserve. "Stop being such a worrywort," Wendy often ordered. Or "You dont always have to act so fucking polite," she might say. "Youre making me look like shit."

"Not bad. But can you imagine facing the naked butts of twenty people doing Downward-Facing Dog?" The two women walked out of the locker room. Ruth turned to Wendy. "Who the hell would do nude yoga?"

Dr. Huey laughed. "Resistance to Western medication is common among our elderly patients here. And as soon as they feel better, they stop taking it to save money." He handed her a form. "Give this to Lorraine at the computer station around the corner. Lets schedule your mother to see the folks in Psychiatry and Neurology, then have her come back to see me again in a month."

At the meat counter, she evaluated the options. Dory would not eat anything with eyes, and ever since seeing that pig movie Babe, Fia had been trying to be a vegetarian. Both girls made an exception for fish, because seafood was "not cute." When they announced that, Ruth said to them, "Just because something isnt cute, is its life worth less? If a girl wins a beauty contest, is she better than a girl who doesnt?" And Fia scrunched up her face and replied: "What are you talking about? Fish dont enter beauty contests."

"Well, if it is, youll have to tell her the antidepressants are ginseng or po chat pills."

I didnt think she was ugly, not in the way others in our family did. "Ai-ya, seeing her, even a demon would leap out of his skin," I once heard Mother remark. When I was small, I liked to trace my fingers around Precious Aunties mouth. It was a puzzle. Half was bumpy, half was smooth and melted closed. The inside of her right cheek was stiff as leather, the left was moist and soft. Where the gums had burned, the teeth had fallen out. And her tongue was like a parched root. She could not taste the pleasures of life: salty and bitter, sour and sharp, spicy, sweet, and fat.

"Dont forget responsible."

"Sure thing." Art gave her a kiss on the forehead. "Hey, thanks. I wouldnt have asked if I werent completely swamped." He kissed her again. "Love you."

"Did you hear me?" LuLing said.

"Watch," LuLing ordered her in Chinese. She ground an inkstick onto an inkstone and used a medicine dropper to add salt water in doses the size of tears. "Watch," she said, and selected a brush from the dozens hanging with their tips down. Ruths sleepy eyes tried to follow her mothers hand as she swabbed the brush with ink, then held it nearly perpendicular to the page, her wrist and elbow in www.99lib.netmidair. Finally she began, flicking her wrist slightly so that her hand waved and dipped like a moth over the gleam of white paper. Soon the spidery images formed: "Half Off!" "Amazing Discounts!" "Going Out of Business!"

"How I go, dont know. But I there. This true! I follow that man, oh he sneaky. O.J. hide in bush. Later, I go his house too. Watch him take glove, stick in garden, go back inside change clothes—" LuLing caught herself, embarrassed. "Well, he change clothes, course I dont look, turn my eyes. Later he run to airport, almost late, jump on plane. I see whole thing."

"I am," she conceded. "I certainly am."

"This line is like a beam of light. Look, can you see it or not?"

"So you were going to marry."

Ruth felt her stomach had been punched. Her mother wasnt that bad off. He was talking about a horrible terminal illness. Thank God she had not told the doctor about the other things she had tabulated: the argument her mother had had with Francine over the rent; the ten-million-dollar check from the magazine sweepstakes; her forgetting that Fu-Fu had died. "So it could be depression," Ruth said.

"Todays Monday."

"Tst!" LuLing grumbled to Ruth. "Why doesnt their father scold them? He should tell them to listen to you. Why doesnt he have more concern for you? No wonder he never married you. No respect for you. Say something to him. Why dont you tell him to be nicer to you? . . ."

By using Chinese words, LuLing could put all kinds of wisdom in Ruths mind. She could warn her away from danger, disease, and death.

She wiggled her blackened fingertips like hungry flames. See what the fire did.

"I told you—"

That night, LuLing started teaching her the mechanics of writing Chinese. Ruth knew this was punishment for what she had said earlier.

"It sounded pretty clear to me that she thought she was there," Dr. Huey said gently.

"I didnt ask to go, he didnt ask me to come," she told Art simply. She avoided eye contact. "It was a civil way to break up. We both agreed it was time to move on, only separately. He was decent enough to try to put the blame on himself. Said he was immature, whereas I was more responsible." She gave Art a goofy grin, as if this were the most ironic thing anyone could have said about her. "The worst part was, he was so nice about it—like he was embarrassed to have to do this to me. And naturally, I spent the last year trying to analyze what it was about us, about me, that didnt work. I went over just about every argument that wed had. I had said he was careless, he said I made simple problems have difficult solutions. I said he never planned, he said I obsessed to the point of killing all spontaneity. I thought he was selfish, he said I worried over him to the point of suffocation, then pitied myself when he didnt fall all over himself saying thank you. And maybe we were both right and that was why we were wrong for each other."

"I hope so, because I was just about to call the police to get a restraining order!"

"Oh . . . Wow." Ruth was stunned. She pictured Mrs. Scott with a groom in a bow tie and gym shorts, the two of them reciting vows on a treadmill. Was Wendy upset? She wanted to say the right thing. What, though? About five years before, her own mother had had a boyfriend of sorts, but he had been eighty. Ruth had hoped T.C. would marry LuLing and keep her occupied. Instead T.C. had died of a heart attack.

He slid the ring over to Ruth so she could see the details. She picked it up. It was heavier than she had thought. She held it to her eye and looked through its center at Art. He was so gentle. He was not judgmental. She felt a squeezing in her heart that both hurt her and made her want to giggle and shout. How could she not love him?

"Stop thinking in terms of constraints," he told her. "If you write this book with me, you have to believe in its principles. Anything is possible, as long as its for the good of the world. Make the exception. Live exceptionally. And if you cant do that, maybe we should consider whether youre right for this project. Think about it, then lets talk tomorrow."

Dr. Huey waited, and finally said, "Now count down by seven."

"So you were in Los Angeles that day?" Dr. Huey asked.

As LuLing led her out, a teacher said, "Look how brave she is! Shes not even crying." Two popular girls gave Ruth big smiles of admiration. They waved. Teresa was also there, and Ruth gave her a quick, secret smile.

"No, no pay! Nobody pay!" LuLing cried. "Inside purse put my health card. I dont show card, doctor charge me extra. Everything suppose be free."

"What makes you say that?"

"So last night," Wendy began, "my mother called in a state of euphoria." As Wendy went on, Ruth dashed to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. When she was not in a hurry, she enjoyed listening to her friends ramblings. Wendy was a divining rod for strange disturbances in the earths atmosphere. She was witness to bizarre sights: three homeless albinos living in Golden Gate Park, a BMW suddenly swallowed up by an ancient septic tank in Woodside, a loose buffalo strolling down Taraval Street. She was the maven of parties that led people to make scenes, start affairs, and commit other self-renewing scandals. Ruth believed Wendy made her life more sparkly, but today was not a good time for sparkles.

"Seriously."

"Dont play with her, too many germs," LuLing told six-year-old Ruth one day, nodding toward the girl from across the street. The girls name was Teresa, and she had two front teeth missing, a scab on one knee, and a dress smeared with handprints. "I saw her pick up old candy off the sidewalk and eat it. And look at her nose, sickness pouring out all over the place."

"No problem."

Both girls were in the backseat. Ruth had suggested that one of them sit up front with her, so she wouldnt feel like a chauffeur. But Dory had replied, "Its easier to open just one door." Ruth had said nothing in response. She often suspected the girls were testing her, to see if they could get a rise out of her. When they were younger, they had loved her, Ruth was sure of it. She had felt that with a ticklish pleasure in her heart. They used to argue over who could hold her hand or sit next to her. They had cuddled against her when scared, as they had often pretended to be, squeaking like helpless kittens. Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls.

"We dont need any money," Ruth said. "And if we do, I can pay."

Ruth had not grown up with flowers in the house. She could not remember LuLing ever buying them. She had not thought this a deprivation until the day she went grocery shopping with Auntie Gal and her cousins. At the supermarket in Saratoga, ten-year-old Ruth had watched as they dumped into the cart whatever struck their fancy at the moment, all kinds of good things Ruth was never allowed to eat: chocolate milk, doughnuts, TV dinners, ice cream sandwiches, Hostess Twinkles. Later they stopped at a little stand where Auntie Gal bought cut flowers, pink baby roses, even though nobody had died or was having a birthday.

Why cant I see it now? Ive pushed a hundred family names through my mouth, and none comes back with the belch of memory. Was the name uncommon? Did I lose it because I kept it a secret too long? Maybe I lost it the same way I lost all my favorite things—the jacket GaoLing gave me when I left for the orphan school, the dress my second husband said made me look like a movie star, the first baby dress that Luyi outgrew. Each time I loved something with a special ache, I put it in my trunk of best things. I hid those things for so long I almost forgot I had them.

"Okay, okay, Ill take care of it. But if you get out of your meetings early, can you come home?"

Thus bolstered, Ruth confronted her mother: "If it bothers you so much, you take care of it."

Ruth could feel the blood draining out of her head. She tried another tack. "Well, let me call the doctor and see if we can still get in at four." She went to the back, where her mother did her calligraphy and painting, to the room that had been her own long before. On her mothers drawing table lay a large sheet of watercolor paper. Her mother had started a poem-painting, then stopped in mid-character. The brush lay on the paper, its tip dried and stiff. LuLing was not careless. She treated her brushes with fanatical routine, washing them in spring water, not tap, so that chlorine would not damage them. Perhaps she had been in the middle of painting and heard the teakettle crying and bolted. Maybe the phone rang after that, one thing after another. But then Ruth looked closer. Her mother had tried to write the same character over and over again, each time stopping at the same stroke. What character? And why had she stopped in mid-flight?

"Very good. I was wondering if you could do a little math for me. I want you to count down from a hundred, subtracting seven each time."

"Yes, yes, wonderful! What shows do you think we should do?"

Ruth took notes and started an outline. No doubt Agapi would call her that night to discuss what she had written. Ruth suspected she was the only writer in the business who believed a deadline was an actual date.

LuLing nodded, and Dr. Huey shrugged apologetically. "My Mandarin is pretty terrible. Hows your English?"

"What month?" Dr. Huey asked.

"Why you say that?" LuLing scolded. "Sound bad, like you traitor and spy."

"She took care of me when I was a girl. She loved me very much, just like a mother. Bao, well, this means precious, and together with bomu, this means Precious Auntie." Oh, that Bao Bomu, the crazy ghost. LuLing started to write a simple horizontal line. But the movements were not simple. She rested the tip of the brush on the paper, so it was like a dancer sur les pointes. The tip bent slightly downward, curtsied, and then, as if blown by capricious winds, swept to the right, paused, turned a half-step to the left and rose. Ruth blew out a sigh. Why even try? Her mother would just get upset that she could not do it right.

LuLing warmed up. "In those day, so many thing forbidden, cant see. Now everyone pay money see forbidden thing. You say this forbidden that forbidden, charge extra."

"Watch it," Ruth said. "Thats a hooker youre describing."

"News from the gods, " LuLing murmured. "I won ten million dollar! Open and see."

"I know of some excellent therapists whove worked with Chinese patients," Agapi said. "Quite good with cultural differences—magical thinking, old societal pressures, the flow of chi."

"Well, she does give me money for college expenses," Ruth admitted.

Her mother was speaking far too loudly. People were looking up from their knitting and reading, even the balding man. Ruth was pained. That cat had been her baby. She had held her the day she was born, a tiny wild ball of fur, found in Wendys garage on a rainy day. Ruth had also held her as the vet gave the lethal shot to end her misery. Thinking about this nearly put Ruth over the edge, and she did not want to burst into tears in a waiting room full of strangers.

Before Ruth could answer, Auntie Gal chirped: "Ruthie, you should tell my story! Very exciting, plus all true. But I dont know if you can keep up. Im a pretty fast talker!"

Ruth knew not to take sides with the tenant. But she worried that there might really be a problem like a fire one day, and she dreaded the headlines "Slum Landlady Jailed, Ignored Deadly Hazards." So Ruth surreptitiously handled some of the more resolvable problems. When she bought Francine a new smoke detector, LuLing found out and became apoplectic. "You think she right, I wrong?" As had happened throughout Ruths childhood, LuLings fury escalated until she could barely speak, except to sputter the old threat: "Maybe I die soon!"

"Face it, sweetheart, youre accommodating. Willing to bend over backward. And you have this knack for making even the dickheads believe theyre the best at what they do."

My name is LuLing Liu Young. The names of my husbands were Pan Kai Jing and Edwin Young, both of them dead and our secrets gone with them. My daughter is Ruth Luyi Young. She was born in a Water Dragon Year and I in a Fire Dragon Year. So we are the same but for opposite reasons.

Ruth wished she could go back to being mute. She wanted to shout for her mother to stop complaining about things she could not change. Yet she also wanted to defend her to the girls, especially now that something was wrong with her. LuLing acted eternally strong, but she was also fragile. Why couldnt Fia and Dory understand that and act a little kinder?

"That makes perfect sense, my dear! I knew there was a reason."

"Eighty . . . Eighty . . ." LuLing was stuck.

"Eighty-two this month!" she said.

Ruth joined in the search, sticking her hands under seat cushions.

Ruth started the car and pumped the brakes to make sure they worked. As she drove Fia and Dory to the skating rink, she was still mulling over what Nine might be. She ran through the alphabet, in case any of those letters might trigger a memory. Nothing. What had she dreamed the night before, when she finally fell asleep? A bedroom window, a dark shape in the bay. The curtains, she now recalled, had turned out to be sheer and she was naked. She had looked up and saw the neighbors in nearby apartments grinning. They had been watching her most private moments, her most private parts. Then a radio began to blare. Whonk! Whonk! Whonk! "This has been a test of the American Broadcasting Systems early-warning signal for disaster preparedness." And another voice came on, her mothers: "No, no, this is not test! This real!" And the dark shape in the bay rose and became a tidal wave.

"Too busy for mother," LuLing complained. "Never too busy go see movie, go away, go see friend."

Its your house, Ruth was tempted to say. But she forced herself to sound reasonable, unassailable, like Art. "Cant you call from your office in between meetings?"

"We thought about marriage," she said. "How can you not when you live together for four years? But you know what? Over time, passion wanes, differences dont. One day he told me hed put in for a transfer to New York and it had come through." Ruth recalled to herself how surprised she had been, and how she complained to Paul about his not telling her sooner. "Of course, I can work almost anywhere," she had told him, annoyed yet excited at the prospect of moving to Manhattan, "but its a jolt to uproot, not to mention leave my mother behind, and relocate in a city where I dont have any contacts. Whyd you tell me at the last minute?" She had meant that rhetorically. Then came Pauls awkward silence.

Sure enough, inside were a sweepstakes promotion coupon that resembled a check, and a sheet of peel-off miniature magazine covers. Half the covers were missing. LuLing must have ordered three dozen magazines. Ruth could picture the mail carrier dragging over a sackful of them every day, spilling them onto the driveway, her mothers hopes and logic jumbled into the same pile.

". . . .A parent, intentionally or not, imposes a cosmology on the little child—" Agapi paused. "You want to say something?" What cue had she given that let Agapi know she wanted to add a thought? Ruth seldom interrupted people.

"Gideon? Gee, I dont know if I can promise about him."

"Im her daughter. I called your office earlier."

Over decaf cappuccinos one evening, she learned that Art had grown up in New York, and had a doctorate in linguistics from UC Berkeley. "So what languages do you speak?" she asked.

"Actually, Im more worried than upset," Wendy said. "Its just weird. Its like the older she gets, the younger she acts. And part of me says, Good for her, you go, girl. And the other part is like, Whoa. Is she crazy or what? Do I have to watch over her now, act like her mother and make sure she doesnt get herself in trouble? You know what I mean?"

"Mrs. Young!" the doctor greeted her jovially. "Im Dr. Huey." He glanced at Ruth.

Still wide awake, Ruth turned to her desk. Just then she felt a tug of worry, something she was not supposed to forget. Did it have to do with money, a client, or a promise she had made to the girls? She set to straightening her desk, aligning her research books, sorting faxes and drafts, color-coding them according to client and book. Tomorrow she had to return to routine and deadlines, and a clean desk gave her the sense of a fresh start, an uncluttered mind. Everything had its place. If an item was of questionable priority or value, she dumped it in the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. But now the drawer was full with unanswered letters, abandoned drafts, sheets of jotted-down ideas that might be usable in the future. She pulled out a clipped stack of paper from the bottom of the drawer, guessing she could toss out whatever had lain there the longest by neglect.

I know all this, yet there is one name I cannot remember. It is there in the oldest layer of my memory, and I cannot dig it out. A hundred times I have gone over that morning when Precious Auntie wrote it down. I was only six then, but very smart. I could count. I could read. I had a memory for everything, and here is my memory of that winter morning.

At dinner, LuLing sat next to Ruth. "Too salty," she remarked in Chinese, poking at her portion of fish. And then she added: "Tell those girls to finish their fish. Dont let them waste food."

When the grocer and then his wife died, in the 1960s, most of the inheritance—money, the house, the store, gold and jade, family photos— went to Edmund, with only a small cash gift given to LuLing in consideration of her brief marriage to Edwin. "Only give me this much" LuLing often described, pinching her fingers as if holding a flea. "Just because you not a boy."

So Ruth did not ask her mother. She decided instead to set aside several days when she could concentrate on the translation. She told her mother this, and LuLing warned, "Dont wait too long." After that, whenever her mother asked whether she had finished her story, Ruth an swered, "I was just about to, but something came up with a client." Other crises also intervened, having to do with Art, the girls, or the house, as did vacation.

"All right, so we assume everyone understands cosmology. We go on to say that parents pass along this cosmology to children through their behaviors, their reactions to daily events, often mundane— You look puzzled."

Seated in her brown vinyl easy chair, LuLing looked like a petulant child on a throne. Ruth gave her a once-over to see if she could detect anything wrong, a twitch in her eye, a slight paralysis, perhaps, on one side of her face. Nothing, the same old mom. LuLing was wearing a purple cardigan with gold-tone buttons, her favorite, black slacks, and size-four black pumps with low heels. Her hair was smoothed back and gathered like Fias and Dorys, only she had the ponytail wound into a netted bun, thickened with a hairpiece. Her hair was jet-black, except for the roots at the back, where she could not see that she had failed to apply enough dye. From a distance, she looked like a much younger woman, sixty instead of seventy-seven. Her skin was even-toned and smooth, no need for foundation or powder. You had to stand a foot away before you could see the fine etching of wrinkles on her cheeks. The deepest lines were at the corners of her mouth, which were often turned down, as they were now.

He smiled. "Do you always live in such a dangerous world?"

As the doctor examined Ruths arm, LuLing sucked air between her teeth in agony and moaned: "Ai-ya! Careful, careful, careful. She hurt real bad." When the cast was put on, LuLing said proudly, "Teacher, children, all very impress. Lootie no cry, no complain, nothing, just quiet."

When Ruth returned to the living room, she found her mother searching for her purse.

Ruth bit her lip and looked at the doctor.

"Well, starting with the fifties, you know, Howdy Doody, The Mickey Mouse Club, all the way to The Simpsons and South Park—"

"She may have fractured her arm," the nurse told LuLing. "And her nerves might be torn. Theres a great deal of swelling, but shes not complaining of too much pain."

The first time it happened was when she moved into Arts flat in San Francisco. For several days, Ruth could only hiss like an untended teakettle. She figured it was a virus, or perhaps allergies to a particular mold in99lib.net the building.

"Promise me first you wont tell anyone," Wendy sneezed again.

Art slumped his shoulders and sighed. "Why do you have to make everything so difficult? I just thought if it were possible, if you had time— Aw, forget it." He turned away.

"What do you do?"

"Nineteen ninety-eight!" She looked at the doctor as if he were an idiot not to know that. Ruth was relieved that her mother had answered one question right.

Art appeared at the doorway. "Sweetie? Dont forget to call the plumber about the hot-water tank."

"Eighty-two." He wrote this down. "So tell me, were you born in China? Yes? What city?"

"Around the Full Moon Festival."

"Yes," Ruth answered.

"Fu-Fus dead," she reminded her mother.

Toward the end of the class came the headstands. The novices moved to the wall, the competitive types rose immediately like sunflowers toward the noon sun. There was no more room at the wall, so Ruth simply sat on her mat. A moment later, she heard the bearded man speak: "Need some help? I can hold on to your ankles until you get balanced."

LuLing stared at her, silent for five full minutes. Then she burst like a geyser: "You wish I dead? You wish no mother tell you what to do? Okay, maybe I die soon!" And just like that, Ruth had been upended, flung about, was unable to keep her balance. LuLings threats to die were like earthquakes. Ruth knew that the potential was there, that beneath the surface, the temblors could occur at any time. And despite this knowledge, when they erupted she panicked and wanted to run away before the world fell down.

"Well, the headstand is one of the most important postures you can do. Being upside down can turn your life around. It can make you happy."

Ruth imagined Mrs. Scott taking off her Chanel suit, her trifocals, her diamond-encrusted designer crucifix, then embracing her beach boy.

As she gathered up Arts clothes at the dry cleaners, Ruth flexed her big toe and remembered she was supposed to call Wendy. Mrs. Scott and a boy toy, what a shock. She decided to wait until she was in the parking lot by the grocery store, rather than risk a head-on collision during a juicy cell-phone conversation.

"Does her personality seem to be changing? Is she depressed, more argumentative?"

"Thank you for sharing that. Now, if youll just wait here a few minutes, your daughter and I are going to step into another room and schedule your next appointment."

"No, dear, I mean what shows I might be on. Sixty Minutes, Today, Charlie Rose—oh, I would love to be on that show, that man is so sexy. . . ."

Ruth wanted to protest: Even I cant do that!

"Writing Chinese characters," her mother told her, "is entirely different from writing English words. You think differently. You feel differently." And it was true: LuLing was different when she was writing and painting. She was calm, organized, and decisive.

The two sisters came to America separately, and married a pair of brothers, sons of a grocer and his wife. LuLings husband, Edwin Young, was in medical school, and as the elder, he was "destined" as LuLing put it, to be smarter and more successful. Most of the familys attention and privileges had been showered on him. GaoLings husband, Edmund, the little brother, was in dental school. He was known as the lazy one, the careless boy who would always need a big brother to watch over him. But then big brother Edwin was killed in a hit-and-run car accident while leaving the UCSF library one night. Ruth had been two years old at the time. Her uncle Edmund went on to become the leader of the family, a well-respected dentist, and an even more savvy real estate investor in low-income rental units.

"Maybe she keep my purse, dont tell me. She always want my things. Jealous of me. Little-girl time, she want my chipao dress, want my melon fruit, want everybody attention."

"Lootie give me so much trouble," LuLing dictated, as if Ruth were invisible, "maybe I send her go Taiwan, school for bad children. What you think?"

Blood ran from Ruths nose and dripped onto the front of her white blouse, staining the broad lace-trimmed collar. She lay limply in her mothers lap, looking up at Teresa and the faces of the other children. She saw their fright, but also their awe. If she could have moved, she would have smiled. At last they were paying attention to her, the new girl at school. She then saw her mothers face, the tears streaming down her cheeks, falling on her own face like wet kisses. Her mother wasnt angry, she was worried, full of love. And in her amazement, Ruth forgot her pain.

This is not fair, Ruth wanted to shout. She has to convert the numbers into Chinese to do the calculations, then remember that, and put the answer back into English. Ruths mind raced ahead. She wished she could lay out the answers for her mother telephatically. Eighty-six! Seventy-nine!

Ruth thought of a book she had helped write a few years before, The Physics of Human Nature. The author had recast the principles of physics into basic homilies to remind people of self-defeating behavioral patterns. "The Law of Relative Gravity": Lighten up. A problem is only as heavy as you let it be. "The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The Centrifugal Force of Arguments": The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

Ruth shrugged. She felt like a fraud.

LuLing hesitated. "Forty, maybe forty-one." To her mother, she was always younger than she really was.

These are the things I know are true:

Ruth now pushed her cart toward the fish counter. She longed for prawns in the shell, always her first choice. Art wouldnt eat them, however. He claimed that the predominant taste of any crustacean or mollusk was that of its alimentary tract. She settled on Chilean sea bass. "That one," she told the man at the counter. Then she reconsidered: "Actually, give me the bigger one." She might as well ask her mother to dinner, since they were already going to the doctors together. LuLing was always complaining she didnt like to cook for just herself.

Later she lay on a cot in the nurses office. Her nosebleed was stanched with gauze, her punctured lip was cleansed. A cold washcloth covered her forehead, and her arm was elevated on a bag of ice.

Now LuLing jumped in: "Not just type, lots work!" And Ruth was grateful for this unexpected defense, until her mother added, "She correct spelling too!"

"Did you go to school there as well?" Dr. Huey asked.

"Fia, Dory, why arent you eating?" Ruth said.

"And I wish you two would stop talking like spies in Chinese," Fia said. "Its like really rude."

Ruth used her own key to let herself into her mothers apartment. She heard LuLing call to her: "Why so late?"

"Here it is!" Ruth cried. What a relief. She pulled out a green pocket-book from underneath a mound of magazines. As LuLing checked that her money and credit cards were still inside, Ruth noticed what had obscured the purse in the first place: new issues of Woodworking Today, Seventeen, Home Audio and Video, Runners World, Cosmopolitan, Dog Fancy, Ski, Country Living—magazines her mother would never read in a million years.

The most popular books were Defeat Depression with Dogs, Procrastinate to Your Advantage, and To Hell with Guilt. The last book had become a controversial bestseller. It had even been translated into German and Hebrew.

"Vapors," he said at last.

"What year was she born?"

"Youll have to wait," she called in a husky voice. The pounding continued. She looked at the bathroom schedule for August, which was posted on both sides of the door. There it said, clear as could be, whose turn it was at each quarter-hour. She had assigned herself to be last, and because everyone else ran late, she suffered the cumulative consequences. Below the schedule, the girls had added rules and amendments, and a list of violations and fines for infractions concerning the use of the sink, toilet, and shower, as well as a proclamation on what constituted the right to privacy versus a TRUE EMERGENCY (underlined three times).

Ruth had a sinking feeling. She did not want to hear this.

Fia stopped but didnt turn around. "All right," she grumbled. As she yanked up the jacket zipper, she said to Dory, loud enough for Ruth to hear: "Dads right. She loves to make everything sooo difficult."

PART ONE

"You should tell the doctor your good news."

Some nights LuLing found ways to help Ruth remember the characters. "Each radical comes from an old picture from a long time ago." She made a horizontal stroke and asked Ruth if she could see what the picture was. Ruth squinted and shook her head. LuLing made the identical stroke. Then again and again, asking each time if Ruth knew what it was. Finally, her mother let out a snort, the compressed form of her disappointment and disgust.

LuLing hesitated. "Ninety-two, ah, ninety-three. Ninety-three!"

One day Ruth worked up the courage to tell LuLing she should hire a lawyer to sue the man or a gardener to fix the lawn. Her college roommate had suggested she say this, telling Ruth she was crazy to let her mother push her around as if she were still six years old.

"Never satisfy!" LuLing told Ruth.

"Well, I dont think your dad would approve. I want you to keep your jacket on, even when youre skating. And Dory, you tell me if she doesnt."

Ruth disliked being put on hold. What was so dire that Wendy had to tell her first thing in the morning? Had Wendys husband had an affair? Joe? Not good old Joe. What, then?

"I want the truth, now," the doctor joked. "Not what you tell your friends."

She had no voice, just gasps and wheezes, the snorts of a ragged wind. She told me things with grimaces and groans, dancing eyebrows and darting eyes. She wrote about the world on my carry-around chalkboard. She also made pictures with her blackened hands. Hand-talk, face-talk, and chalk-talk were the languages I grew up with, soundless and strong.

She was flooded with self-consciousness and gratitude.

LuLing was the one who had taught her to count fingers as a memory device. With this method, LuLing never forgot a thing, especially lies, be trayals, and all the bad deeds Ruth had done since she was born. Ruth could still picture her mother counting in the Chinese style, pointing first to her baby finger and bending each finger down toward her palm, a motion that Ruth took to mean that all other possibilities and escape routes were closed. Ruth kept her own fingers open and splayed, American style. What was Nine? She put on a pair of sturdy sandals.

"Im not a true polyglot," he said. "Most linguists I know arent. My actual language specialty at Berkeley was American Sign Language, ASL. I now work at the Center on Deafness at UCSF."

"Me," Wendy said. "And dont look at me like that, Miss Shock-and-Dismay. At least it wouldnt be boring."

With Chinese words, her mother did make sense, Ruth now reasoned to herself. Or did she?

"Came out?" He made a screwy face. "Wait a minute. Do you think Im gay?"

"What about you?" he said. "Whats your favorite word?"

"Youre thinking of Dory," Ruth answered. Dory had been held back a year because of attention deficit disorder. She now received special tutoring.

When she woke in the morning, Art was up, doing his yoga stretches in the next room. "Hello," she said to herself. "Is anyone there?" Her voice was back, though squeaky from disuse.

Ruth secretly gloated when she scored better than Wendy in sit-ups. Wendy cheered aloud at besting Ruth in push-ups. Ruths body-fat ratio was a healthy twenty-four percent. Wendys was thirty-seven. "Its the enduring genetics of my Chinese peasant stock," Ruth kindly offered. But then Ruth scored in the "very poor" range for flexibility. "Wow," Wendy remarked. "According to this chart, thats about one point above rigor mortis."

"How can be Monday? I go three days go, not today!"

The following August, rather than just wait for muteness to strike, Ruth explained to her clients and friends that she was taking a planned weeklong retreat into verbal silence. "Its a yearly ritual," she said, "to sharpen my consciousness about words and their necessity." One of her book clients, a New Age psychotherapist, saw voluntary silence as a "wonderful process." and decided he would engage in the same so they could include their findings in a chapter on either dysfunctional family dynamics or stillness as therapy.

"I said the appointment was at four."

"Start at a hundred."

"Ruthies dead!" a boy yelled. Girls began screaming.

He slipped off the ring and rotated it in the light. "My best friend made it for my wedding," Art said solemnly. "Ernesto, a rare spirit. He was a poet and a goldsmith by avocation, made his living as a limo driver. See these indentations? He told me they were to remind me that there are a lot of bumps in life and that I should remember what lies between them. Love, friendship, hope. I stopped wearing it when Miriam and I split up. Then Ernesto died, brain cancer. I decided to wear the ring to remind me of him, what he said. He was a good friend—but not a lover."

"Its just easier for people to remember in series of fives and tens," Ruth answered. "I read a study somewhere about that." Hadnt she? "It probably has to do with counting on our fingers."

More ridiculous questions followed.

For the past eight years, always starting on August twelfth, Ruth Young lost her voice.

The dramas her mother and Auntie had gone through over the years resembled those off-Broadway plays in which two characters perform all the roles: best friends and worst enemies, archrivals and gleeful conspirators. They were only a year apart, seventy-seven and seventy-six, and that closeness seemed to have made them competitive with each other.

"Whats wrong with being responsible? I wish more people were. And you know what else? Youre willing to be vulnerable. I think thats endearing."

Ruth was about to burst. Her mother must sound garbled to Dr. Huey. She had had concerns about her, but she didnt want her concerns to be fully justified. Her worries were supposed to preclude any real problem. They always had.

She didnt answer, and after he left, she grabbed her coat and keys, then saw the girls standing at the end of the hallway, staring critically at her. She wiggled her big toe. Twelve, hot water.

From then on, Ruths malady was elevated to an annual sanctioned event. She stopped talking two days before her voice faded of its own accord. She politely declined Arts offer that they both try speaking in sign language. She made her voiceless state a decision, a matter of will, and not a disease or a mystery. In fact, she came to enjoy her respite from talk; for a whole week she did not need to console clients, remind Art about social schedules, warn his daughters to be careful, or feel guilty for not calling her mother.

"Why you always take her side?"

"Mealtime, for instance. Perhaps dinner always happens at six and Mom is an elaborate planner, dinner is a ritual, but nothing happens, no talk, unless its argument. Or meals are eaten catch-as-catch-can. With just these contrasts, the child might grow up thinking either that day and night are predictable, though not always pleasant, or that the world is chaotic, frantic, or freely evolving. Some children do beautifully, no matter what the early influences. Whereas others grow up into great big adults who require a lifetime of very, very expensive psychotherapy."

"Yes. Absolutely. Theres still a lot of freedom to do what I want."

Fia turned and walked away.

LuLings eyebrows bunched in thought. "Clinton," she said after a pause. "Last five year still Clinton." Her mother had not even understood the question! Of course she hadnt. She had always depended on Ruth to tell her what people meant, to give her what they said from another angle. "Reverse order" means "go backward," she would have told LuLing. If Dr. Huey could ask that same question in fluent Mandarin, it would be no problem for LuLing to give the right answer. "This president, that president," her mother would have said without hesitation, "no difference, all liar. No tax before election, more tax after. No crime before, more crime after. And always dont cut welfare. I come this country, I dont get welfare. What so fair? No fair. Only make people lazy to work!"

"I have meetings, and three appeals coming up." Art worked as a linguistics consultant, this year on cases involving deaf prisoners who had been arrested and tried without access to interpreters.

"Yeah, but every parent does that. Theyre supposed to. But that doesnt give them the right to make you their slave."

Wendy interrupted. "Mommy married her personal trainer! Thats what she called to tell me. Hes thirty-eight, shes sixty-four. Can you believe it?"

She hesitated. Of course she had. She wanted to write a novel in the style of Jane Austen, a book of manners about the upper class, a book that had nothing to do with her own life. Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

Ruth had to remind her to take her newly found purse, then her coat, finally her keys. She felt ten years old again, translating for her mother how the world worked, explaining the rules, the restrictions, the time limits on money-back guarantees. Back then she had been resentful. Now she was terrified.

"Good. No problem."

"Oh . . . Well, a few months ago, she went over the fence. A dog chased her. She couldnt climb back up fast enough."

"And you enjoy that? Its satisfying?"

The past year, her mother had stopped asking, and Ruth wondered, Did she give up? Couldnt be. She must have forgotten. By then the pages had settled to the bottom of the desk drawer.

Now that they had resurfaced, Ruth felt pangs of guilt. Perhaps she should hire someone fluent in Chinese. Art might know of someone—a linguistics student, a retired professor old enough to be versed in the traditional characters and not just the simplified ones. As soon as she had time, she would ask. She placed the pages at the top of the heap, then closed the drawer, feeling less guilty already.

The wall facing me was lined with overlapping scrolls of couplets, gifts to our family from scholars who had used our ink over the last two hundred years. I had learned to read one, a poem-painting: "Fish shadows dart downstream," meaning our ink was dark, beautiful, and smooth-flowing. On the long altar table were two statues, the God of Longevity with his white-waterfall beard, and the Goddess of Mercy, her face smooth, free of worry. Her black eyes looked into mine. Only she listened to the woes and wishes of women, Precious Auntie said. Perched around the statues were spirit tablets of the Liu ancestors, their wooden faces carved with their names. Not all my ancestors were there, Precious Auntie told me, just the ones my family considered most important. The in-between ones and those belonging to women were stuck in trunks or forgotten.

The Cult of Personal Freedom. The Cult of Compassion. The Cult of Envy.

"She good, never complain."

"You are such a cynic! All right, you write the definition, but just include something about how each of us fits into our families, society, the communities we come into contact with. Talk about those various roles, as well as how we believe we got them—whether its destiny, fate, luck, chance, self-determination, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, and Ruth, darling, make it sound sexy and easy to grasp."

"Always. Lifes more exciting that way."

"Ai-ya!" LuLings face twisted with agony. "How this can be! What happen?"

She put on her idiot face. "Gosh oh golly, there are so many! Lets see. Vacation. Jackpot. Then theres free. Sale. Bargain. You know, the usual."

"Aw, shucks."

And Art said, "So what else is new?"

LuLing went on: "Each character is a thought, a feeling, meanings, history, all mixed into one." She drew more lines—dots and dashes, downstrokes and upstrokes, bends and hooks. "Do you see this99lib.net?" she said over and over, tink-tink-tink. "This line, and this and this—the shape of a heavenly temple." And when Ruth shrugged in response, LuLing added, "In the old style of temples," as if this word old would bump the Chinese gears of her daughters mind into action. Ping-ping! Oh, I see.

The fog was sweeping over the ramparts of the bridge, devouring the headlamps of cars. Nine out of ten drivers were drunk at this hour—Ruth had read that somewhere. Or maybe she had written that for a client. She stepped down, but left the window open.

That evening, as Ruth steamed the sea bass, she told Art in an offhanded way, "I took my mom to see the doctor. She may have depression."

It pleased her to discuss such matters with him. With Wendy she tended to talk about peeves more than passions. They commiserated on rampant misogyny, bad manners, and depressed mothers, whereas Art and she talked to discover new things about themselves and each other. He wanted to know what inspired her, what the difference was between her hopes and her goals, her beliefs and her motivations.

Ruth remembered how she felt when she was their age. She too had resented LuLings speaking Chinese in front of others, knowing they couldnt understand her covert remarks. "Look how fat that lady is," LuLing might say. Or, "Luyi, go ask that man to give us a better price." If Ruth obeyed, she was mortified. And if she didnt, as she now recalled, even more dire consequences followed.

In an odd way, she now thought, her mother was the one who had taught her to become a book doctor. Ruth had to make life better by revising it.

"No! One oclock! You say be ready. So I get ready, you dont come!"

Her watch sounded at eleven. She tapped her finger, Eight, call Gideon. When she reached him, she began with the demands of the Internet Spirituality author. "Ted wants me to push everything else aside and make his project top priority under rush deadlines. I was very firm about saying I couldnt do that, and he hinted pretty strongly that he might replace me with another writer. Frankly, Id be relieved if he fired me," Ruth said. She was preparing herself for rejection.

"Hundred!" LuLing said confidently, then nothing more.

"You know that new girl Darien likes?" she heard Fia say to her sister. "She has the best hair. I could just kill her."

"Okay. And I was thinking, how about including a section on the cosmology imparted by television as artificial caregiver? Just a suggestion, since it would probably also work as an angle for television shows and radio interviews."

"So busy, so success," her mother had said recently when Ruth told her she didnt have any free time to see her. "Not free," LuLing added, "because every minute must charge money. What I should pay you, five dollar, ten dollar, then you come see me?" The truth was, Ruth did not have much free time, not in her opinion. Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy. Her free time was usually usurped by what seemed at the time urgent and later unnecessary. Wendy said the same thing: "Free time doesnt exist anymore. It has to be scheduled with a dollar amount attached to it. Youre under this constant pressure to get your moneys worth out of rest, relaxation, and restaurants that are hard to get into." After hearing that, Ruth didnt agonize as much over time constraints. It wasnt her fault she didnt have enough time to do what was necessary. The problem was universal. But try explaining that to her mother.

"Fia start six grade?" LuLing was now asking.

Hadnt she told her mother Fu-Fu had died? She must have. Or Art had. Everyone knew that Ruth had been depressed for weeks after it happened.

In the locker room that first night, they overheard two women talking. "The guy next to me asked if Id like to go with him to that midnight class, Togaless Yoga. You know, he says, the nude one."

Ruth hung up. She thought about it. The good of the world, she muttered to herself, was her agents job. She would warn Gideon that the client was pushy and might try to change the publication date. She would stand firm this time. To do what the client wanted while meeting her other commitments would require her to work round the clock. Fifteen years earlier she could have done that—in the days when she also smoked cigarettes and equated busyness with feeling wanted. Not now. Untense the muscles, she reminded herself. She took another deep breath and exhaled as she stared at the shelves of books she had helped edit and write.

The Biology of Sexual Attraction. The Physics of Human Nature. The Geography of the Soul.

"No, you never!"

LuLing turned crabby again. "You fault we late."

Ruth liked that he said that. Book doctor. She had never called herself that, nor had anyone else. Most people called her a ghostwriter—she hated the term. Her mother thought it meant that she could actually write to ghosts. "Yes," she told Art. "I suppose you could say that, book doctor. But I tend to think of myself as more of a translator, helping people transfer whats in their brain onto the blank page. Some books need more help than others."

At three-ten, Ruth finished paying the plumber. Art had never come home, nor had he called. A whole new water heater was needed, not just a replacement part. And because of the leak, the plumber had had to shut off the electricity to the entire flat until he had suctioned out the standing water and removed the old tank. Ruth had been unable to work.

"What day did you go?"

"I have nothing to do with arranging publishing dates," Ruth now tried to explain.

The remark both humiliated and rankled her. Why had Art said that, and especially in front of the girls? He knew how much that would hurt her. A former boyfriend had once told her she made life more complicated than it was, and after they broke up, she was so horrified that his accusations might be true that she made it a point to be reasonable, to present facts, not complaints. Art knew that and had even assured her the boyfriend was a jerk. Yet he still sometimes teased that she was like a dog that circles and bites its own tail, not recognizing she was only making herself miserable.

"We should define cosmology here," she heard herself say, "perhaps in a sidebar. We dont want people to think we re talking about cosmetics or astrology."

She had met Art nearly ten years before, at an evening yoga class she had attended with Wendy. The class was her first attempt in years to exercise. Ruth was naturally thin and didnt have an incentive at first to join a health club. "A thousand bucks a year," she had marveled, "to jump on a machine that makes you run like a hamster in a wheel?" Her preferred form of exercise, she told Wendy, was stress. "Clench muscles, hold for twelve hours, release for a count of five, then clench again." Wendy, on the other hand, had put on thirty-five pounds since her days as a high school gymnast and was eager to get back into shape. "Lets at least take the free fitness test," she said. "No obligation to join."

LuLing nodded. "Also my nursemaid teach me many things. Painting, reading, writing—"

It must not be cancer, Ruth thought. Maybe she was mugged, or thieves had broken into the house, and now the police were calling to take a report. Whatever it was, it must have been serious, otherwise Wendy would not be crying. What should she say to her? Ruth crooked the phone in her neck and dragged her fingers through her close-cropped hair. She noticed that some of the mirrors silver had flaked off. Or were those white roots in her hair? She would soon turn forty-six. When had the baby fat in her face started to recede? To think she used to resent having the face and skin of a perpetual teenager. Now she had creases pulling down the corners of her mouth. They made her look displeased, like her mother. Ruth brightened her mouth with lipstick. Of course, she wasnt like her mother in other respects, thank God. Her mother was permanently unhappy with everything and everybody. LuLing had immersed her in a climate of unsolvable despair throughout Ruths childhood. That was why Ruth hated it whenever she and Art argued. She tried hard not to get angry. But sometimes she reached a breaking point and erupted, only to wonder later how she had lost control.

"Is she paying you to be a punching bag?" her roommate had said, building the case.

"I suppose most people want to write their own book," she answered. "But I think Im better at translating what others want to say."

"Ill be there in a sec!" she called out. "And girls, if you didnt eat breakfast, I want you to drink milk, a full glass, so you wont fall over dead from hypoglycemic shock."

Ruth forced a laugh, staring into her coffee cup. She was the one who had complained. "We were opposites about cleanliness," she answered. "Thank God we didnt marry." As she said this, she sensed the words were at last true and not a cover-up for pain.

"Same as me. Dragon year." She looked at Ruth for confirmation. Her mother was a Rooster.

I was a fire-eater, she said with her hands and eyes. Hundreds of people came to see me in the market square. Into the burning pot of my mouth I dropped raw pork, added chilis and bean paste, stirred this up, then offered the morsels to people to taste. If they said, "Delicious!" I opened my mouth as a purse to catch their copper coins. One day, however, I ate the fire, and the fire came back, and it ate me. After that, I decided not to be a cook-pot anymore, so I became your nursemaid instead.

Later LuLing had Ruth try her hand at the same character, the whole time stuffing Chinese logic into her resistant brain. "Hold your wrist this way, firm but still loose, like a young willow branch—ai-ya, not collapsed like a beggar lying on the road. . . . Draw the stroke with grace, like a bird landing on a branch, not an executioner chopping off a devils head. The way you drew it—well, look, the whole thing is falling down. Do it like this . . . light first, then temple. See? Together, it means news from the gods. See how this knowledge always comes from above? See how Chinese words make sense?"

"Believe me, Agapi, my mother is not like other Chinese people." Ruth used to wish her mother were more like Auntie Gal. She didnt talk about ghosts or bad luck or ways she might die.

LuLing kept searching. Abruptly she straightened herself and said, "I know. Leave my purse at GaoLing house. Must be she forget tell me."

She pulled out her notes for chapter seven of Agapi Agnoss latest book, Righting the Wronged Child, and punched Agapis number. Ruth was one of the few people who knew that Agapis real name was Doris DeMatteo, that she had chosen her pseudonym because agapi meant "love" and agnos referred to ignorance, which she redefined as a form of innocence. That was how she signed her books, "Love Innocence, Agapi Agnos." Ruth enjoyed working with her. Though Agapi was a psychiatrist, she didnt come across as intimidating. She knew that much of her appeal was her Zsa Zsa Gabor shtick, her accent, the flirtatious yet intelligent personality she exuded when she answered questions in TV and radio interviews.

Her bangs fell to her eyebrows like mine. The rest of her hair was bound into a knot and stabbed together with a silver prong. She had a sweet-peach forehead, wide-set eyes, full cheeks tapering to a small plump nose. That was the top of her face. Then there was the bottom.

He was laughing convulsively. "This whole time you thought I wasgay?"

"I dont have one right now. Half the time I live alone, the other half Im picking up toys and making jelly sandwiches for my two daughters."

"You surprise?" LuLing wore a look of absolute joy.

"Im not an expert on anything. But I love language in all forms— sounds and words, facial expressions, hand gestures, body posture and its rhythms, what people mean but dont necessarily say with words. Ive always loved words, the power of them."

"Youre lucky."

"Difference?" she asked.

"Ive been that way with my mother all my life," Ruth said. Suddenly she remembered what had been eluding her. Her mother was supposed to see the doctor at four this afternoon. Over the past year, Ruth had been vaguely worried about her mothers health. Nothing was terribly wrong; it was just that LuLing seemed slightly off, hazy. For a while, Ruth had reasoned that her mother was tired, that her hearing might be going, or that her English was getting worse. As a precaution, Ruth had also gnawed over the worst possibilities—brain tumor, Alzheimers, stroke—believing this would ensure that it was not these things. History had always proven that she worried for nothing. But a few weeks before, when her mother mentioned she had an appointment for a checkup, Ruth said she would drive her.

"Left what?"

Once she had hung up. Ruth reminded herself of the tasks she needed to do today. Ten things, and she tapped first her thumb. One, take the girls to skating school. Two, pick up Arts suits at the dry cleaners. Three, buy groceries for dinner. Four, pick up the girls from the rink and drop them off at their friends house on Jackson Street. Five and Six, phone calls to that arrogant client, Ted, then Agapi Agnos, whom she actually liked. Seven, finish the outline for a chapter of Agapi Agnoss book. Eight, call her agent, Gideon, whom Wendy disliked. And Nine—what the hell was Nine? She knew what Ten was, the last task of the day. She had to call Miriam, Arts ex-wife, to ask if she would let them have the girls the weekend of the Full Moon Festival dinner, the annual reunion of the Youngs, which she was hosting this year.

"No, with my CPA, my dentist, my boss. Who do you think?"

They were pages written in Chinese, her mothers writing. LuLing had given them to her five or six years before. "Just some old things about my family," she had said, with the kind of awkward nonchalance that meant the pages were important. "My story, begin little-girl time. I write for myself, but maybe you read, then you see how I grow up, come to this country." Ruth had heard bits of her mothers life over the years, but she was touched by her shyness in asking Ruth to read what she had obviously labored over. The pages contained precise vertical rows, without cross-outs, leaving Ruth to surmise that her mother had copied over her earlier attempts.

"How many grandchildren do you have?"

"You are. Youre terrific. Youre honest and funny. Smart, interested."

Fia turned around slowly and rolled her eyes upward.

The class started with what sounded like a cult incantation, followed by poses that seemed to be saluting a heathen god. "Urdhva Muka Svanasana! Adho Muka Svanasana!" Everyone except Ruth and Wendy knew the routines. Ruth followed along as if she were playing Simon Says. Every now and then the yoga teacher, a ropy-muscled woman, walked by and casually bent, tilted, or lifted a part of Ruths body. I probably look like a torture victim, Ruth thought, or one of those freaks my mother saw in China, boneless beggar boys who twisted themselves up for the amusement of others. By this time she was perspiring heavily and had observed enough about the man next to her to be able to describe him to the police, if necessary. "The nude yoga rapist was five-eleven, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. He had dark hair, large brown eyes and thick eyebrows, a neatly cropped beard and mustache. His fingernails were clean, perfectly trimmed."

Art touched her hand. "Well, I think he lost a terrific woman."

After she and Wendy finished their conversation, Ruth stepped out of the car and walked toward the grocery store, still thinking. Nine, Moms doctor. And she started to count on her ringers the questions she should ask the doctor. Thank God she could speak once again.

"Its grapefruit," eight-year-old Ruth once said, exasperated, "not grapefoot. Its a fruit not a foot."

But this was the worst part: Being the only child of a widow, Ruth had always been forced to serve as LuLings mouthpiece. By the time she was ten, Ruth was the English-speaking "Mrs. LuLing Young" on the telephone, the one who made appointments for the doctor, who wrote letters to the bank. Once she even had to compose a humiliating letter to the minister.

Ruth stood at the top of the slide, frozen with shame. Her mother was the busybody watcher of kindergartners, whereas Ruth was in the first grade! Some of the other first-graders were laughing down below. "Is that your mother?" they shouted. "Whats that gobbledy-gook-gook shes saying?"

"Thanks, but Ill pass. Im afraid Id get a cerebral hemorrhage."

At the checkout counter, Ruth saw a woman in front of her scoop up bunches of ivory- and peach-colored tulips, at least fifty dollars worth. Ruth was amazed at how some people casually bought flowers as household staples, as if they were as necessary as toilet paper. And tulips, of all choices! They wilted and dropped their petals after a few days. Was the woman having an important dinner party on a weeknight? When Ruth bought flowers, she had to assess their value in several ways to justify what she bought. Daisies were cheerful and cheap, but they had an unpleasant smell. Babys breath was even cheaper, but as Gideon pointed out, it was the lowest of floral low taste, what old queens used, along with lace doilies they inherited from their grandmothers. Tuberoses smelled wonderful and gave an architectural touch, but they were expensive at this store, nearly four dollars a stalk. At the flower mart, they were only a dollar. She liked hydrangeas in a pot. They were making a comeback, and while they cost a lot, they lasted a month or two, if you remembered to water them. The trick was to cut them before they died, then let them dry in a pottery pitcher, so you could keep them as a permanent floral arrangement, that is, until someone like Art threw them out, citing that they were already dead.

The pounding came again. "Ru-uuth! I said its the phone!" Dory opened the door a crack and shoved in a cordless handset. Who was calling at seven-twenty in the morning? Her mother, no doubt. LuLing seemed to have a crisis whenever Ruth had not called in several days.

With the death money, along with her years of savings, LuLing bought a two-unit building on Cabrillo and Forty-seventh, where she and Ruth lived in the top flat. GaoLing and Edmund moved to Saratoga, a town of vast-lawned ranch-style homes and kidney-shaped pools. Occasionally they would offer LuLing furniture they were going to replace with something better. "Why I should take?" she would fume. "So they can pity for me? Feel so good for themself, give me things they dont want? "

Through such conversations, she realized for instance that she was lucky to be a freelance editor, a book doctor. The discoveries were refreshing.

Art chuckled. "God! Did you actually live with someone who complained about that?

Suddenly Ruth noticed what Fia was wearing—low-slung jeans and a cropped shirt that bared a good six inches of belly. She must have had her jacket zipped up when they had left home. Ruth lowered the car window and called out: "Fia, sweetie, come here a second. . . . Am I wrong, or did your shirt shrink drastically in the last ten minutes?"

As Ruth neared the steps to the upper unit, the downstairs tenant stepped out of her doorway, signaling that she wanted to speak to her. Francine was an anorexically thin woman in her thirties, who seemed to be wearing a size-eight skin over a size-two body. She often griped to Ruth about repairs needed for the building: The electricity kept shorting out. The smoke detectors were old and should be replaced. The back steps were uneven and could cause an accident—and a lawsuit.

Seriously? She plucked at what surfaced in her mind, but they sounded trite: peace, love, happiness. And what would those words say about her? That she lacked those qualities? That she had no imagination? She considered saying onomatopoeia, a word that had enabled her to win a spelling bee in the fifth grade. But onomatopoeia was a jumble of syllables, not at all like the simple sounds it was supposed to represent. Crash, boom, bang.

Art ducked his head through the doorway and tapped his watch. Seven twenty-five, he mouthed. Ruth was about to tell him it was Wendy with an emergency, but he was already striding down the narrow hallway. "Dory! Fia! Lets hustle! Ruth is taking you to the ice rink in five minutes. Get a move on." The girls squealed, and Ruth felt like a horse at the starting gate.

"It is," Ruth agreed. "Vaporzzzz," she echoed, savoring the buzz on her tongue.