The book of poems was in Daddy's black leather bag, along with warm-weather clothes I'd scrounged from my sister's bureau: gym shorts and a couple of giant T-shirts, all of which I was sure were originally Schuyler's. The pickings had been pretty slim. This was the story in our family: when Marty and I weren't looking, our mother would give our clothes away. There was always someone in need: a distant relative or a friend who had just arrived in America. Or someone who, although not exactly in need, was more deserving than my sister or me. My camel hair jacket went this route. Ma donated it to Aunty Winnie, Xiao Lu's mother. It was true that I'd left it hanging in the front hall closet, deciding it wasn't cool enough for sophomore year, when everyone was wearing distressed denim. But it had after all been mine.

"You never wear," Ma said. "She thinks it's chic."

Marty would fly into a rage. I remember her hollering down the stairs, demanding to know what my mother had done with her purple sweater, black jeans, gold scarf.

A few months after Daddy died, Carey and I came up to New Haven and found Ma in the midst of sorting clothes to give away. She was very organized about it, having lugged several moving boxes from the attic and labeled them: THROW OUT, GOODWILL, NEARLY NEW SALE, FLORIDA.

"What's *Florida'?" I asked.

"I send to Uncle Richard, maybe he can use." Uncle Richard was considerably shorter than my father but easily weighed twice as much. I looked in the box and saw that it was full of tiesa"brightly colored, bold patterns. Daddy had grown conservative in dress, but always favored loud ties.

In the GOODWILL box were piled dress shirts. Even though they'd been washed, I thought I could still detect his smell on them. A dry, slightly stale odor.

"Why don't you take?" Ma asked. "They fit you perfectly." She was right; I was broad enough through the shoulders. But I shook my head.

Ma picked up a tan V-necked sweater and held it up for us to inspect. "Definitely too small for Uncle Richard. Carey, you like this? Such nice cashmere, feel."

I said quickly: "It's not his color."

My mother frowned at it, then refolded it and put it aside. "Maybe I wear for around the house."

All the trousers were cut baggy. Ma laughed suddenly. "Look at this." She laid out two pairs on the bed side by side. We could see that one was much larger than the other.

"Your daddy got very fat right after we married. Everyone says it's my good cooking."

"I can believe that," Carey said, and I rolled my eyes at him. My mother was a terrible cook.

"It was your daddy who liked to cook," Ma said to me. "Every night, he made a feast, six courses at least. He used up every knife and pot and pan we had." She sat back on her heels with a dreamy look. "When I was pregnant with you, Sally, I have to tell him to stop, I was too tired to do the dishes."

"So did you cook?" I asked.

"No one cook. We go into Monterey for spaghetti with clam sauce." I could see my parents sitting in front of their enormous plates of pasta, looking daunted. "This American food," Ma would have sighed. Daddy would have pointed out that spaghetti was invented by the Chinese.

"I thought you were so sick you couldn't eat," I said.

"Who said that?" My mother folded each pair of trousers over her arm, pulling the legs out so that the creases lay perfectly. She handles clothes meticulously. So did Nai-nai. But there was a difference in attitude. To my grandmother, clothes held a kind of magica"they could change your destiny one way or the other. To my mother, they were servile, like farm animals in China. Treat them well and they'll perform their function.

Marty and I, American girls, were frivolous. My sister's clothes lay heaped on chairs and strewn on the floor, forgotten until she needed something in particular. I bought things for the color, and liked to see them hanging arrayed in my closeta"whites, blacks, warms, coolsa"almost more than I enjoyed wearing them.

"You want me to help you sort?" I asked my mother.

"No, easier if one person does."

Her answer made me feel guilty. She knew I hadn't loved my father enough to go through his clothes when he was dead.

As the plane taxied down the runway, I noticed that almost everyone was reading, or pretending to read. Not me. I sat straight up, waiting for that moment, exactly the space of a slow intake of breath, when we lifted off and began to climb steeply into the sky.

Those couple of days I'd spent at the house on Woodside Avenue, my mother and I had treated each other neutrally. We cooked meals, ate, cleaned up, watched the news, and it was as if I were just home for the weekend, had never tried to off myself, or been in the hospital. That last family therapy session might have never taken place.

The last thing Ma said, when she dropped me off at Connecticut Limousine, was that I'd probably have to take a taxi from the airport because Uncle Richard didn't have a license anymore, his eyesight had gotten so bad, and Aunty Mabel hated to drive.

But there my aunt was, waiting behind the rope, in a pink-and-white-flowered shirtdress and big sunglasses. Thinner in some places, fatter in others. She waved so wildly when she saw me that everyone looked to see who it was. I felt like a movie star.

"Wo lai na, wo lai na," she insisted, holding out her arms for the bag.

"No, I'm okay. It's really light."

She regarded me critically. "Too thin. Come, I'm right outside."

I barely had time to register the heat before we got to the car, an old maroon Tercel. My aunt switched on the radio to Muzak.

"Eleanor Rigby."

"I thought you didn't like to drive," I said.

"In Florida you have to drive." My aunt's voice had a lilt, a trace of southern. Her lips and fingernails were painted coral. I could tell right away I wasn't going to blend in here. Florida was surreal, I couldn't take seriously anyplace that had palm trees. And it was stunningly flat, the bay itself a vast plain, stretching out light blue and gleaming on both sides of us as we skimmed across toward St. Petersburg, which shimmered ahead of us through a fog of heat.

"You know, Sal-lee, my friend from the library has a pool, she says you can use. Or you can go to the beach. We have ninety-five degrees every day this week."

"I didn't bring a bathing suit."

"No problem, we buy at the mall."

"What's this about a library, Aunty Mabel?"

"I have part-time volunteer job at public library. Shelve books, catalog, things like that. Once in a while there's a kids' art exhibit, I help organize."

Despite myself, I began to relax. It was soothing to be driven like this, into a strange pale metropolis that whatever surprises it might hold, could never be as jangling as New York. When we got into the city proper, on the left, through the buildings, I could still catch glimpses of the bay. And even here, downtown, was that Florida light, with its peculiar empty quality, as if it were reflecting only ocean, like at the beginning of time.

Aunty Mabel said: "You know, your Uncle Richard isn't so good."

"What's the matter?"

"Since he retired. I think he lose his spirit. Maybe you can cheer him up."

"Me?"

"All the time he's in front of the TV. Maybe you can do some project together."

"Okay."

"He always want daughter, you know. Never son, like most men. He's so looking forward to your visit."

Ma had once told me that my aunt and uncle couldn't have children because when Aunty Mabel was young, she had been cursed by a beggar on the streets of Shanghai.

The street they lived on was all ranch houses, each with its own tiny backyard. Uncle Richard opened the door for us, wheezing. "Welcome, Niece." He was fatter than ever, thinning gray wisps combed back from his forehead, eyelids so heavy with wrinkles it made him look sleepy. "Typical Cantonese," Ma always said about him. "You know, that round face."

"You bring your pretty sister with you?"

"Not this time."

I followed my aunt down the narrow hallway. The guest room was practically unrecognizable from when Marty and I had visited as children. Then it had been all white-gauze curtains, flimsy spreads, like in a beach house. Now it was filled with heavy, bright embroidery: the spreads peach-colored satin with intricate scarlet rose borders, matching curtains with valances, a footstool plump like a pincushion. On one bed was a large pillow in the shape of a ladybug and on the other a toy cat, white and fluffy, like the ones on my bureau scarf, like Lili, who had gotten run over. Aunty Mabel had a lot of time on her hands.

After I'd unpackeda"even the satin hangers had little daisies embroidered on thema"I went back into the living room. The TV on a rolling cart was blasting a basketball game. On the sofa beside my uncle, Niu-niu, whom I'd only seen in a snapshot as a kitten, was sprawled out arthritically. There were flecks of white in her black coat. Uncle Richard stroked the cat absent-mindedly as he watched the game. When the action got exciting he'd heave her up by her shoulders and point her at the screen.

"See that breakaway? Good for three points. I knew it!"

"Who's playing?"

"Wildcats versus Hoosiers. I have one hundred smackers on this game. You don't tell your aunt."

I settled myself into a rocking chair with gingham frills over the arms. "Who are you betting on?"

"Wildcats, of course. You play basketball?"

"No."

"Too bad, you're tall and slim. Like your aunt, but she's also not sports-minded."

I remembered our Willowridge rec therapy games, where the therapist would keep switching the rules. "Okay, now both teams go for the same basket!" "Men against women!" "No dribbling for the next five minutes!" This last call usually got a laugh. Lillith, for some reason, would always pass to me, underhanded, arms flailing, as if the ball were way too heavy for her. It got so I would expect it.

It was too sad to think about.

Mel and I had tried calling her a couple of times at State, leaving messages she'd never returned. We did find out that she'd been transferred from Medical to a regular ward.

The Wildcats were down by ten when Aunty Mabel came in with a tray holding a pitcher and three glasses. "Turn down TV," she said to Uncle Richard. He obeyed, winking at me, and then began clearing a place on the coffee table by shoving aside a pile of magazines and newspapers, including, I noticed, an old Racing Form.

"So you were in the hospital." Uncle Richard took a big sucking sip of his lemonade. "They call it a mental breakdown, huh?"

"Something like that."

"Your mother tells us you try and kill yourself."

"Ding-ah!" my aunt said.

"You are Chinese, not Japanese. Japanese like hari-kari, honor, all that. Chinese have other way out of troubles. Chinese know it's all luck. So they try to change luck."

"Sally's luck is changed," Aunty Mabel said. "She comes to visit us."

"That means our luck is changed. You come to cheer old man up." Uncle Richard poked at Niu-niu, who didn't budge. "See this cat? I'm like this cat now. Decrepit."

"Come on," I said.

"Good for nothing. They should mercy kill me."

"See how he talks?" my aunt said to me.

"Every time I go to doctor, he gives me more medicine to take. Now it's my heart. Like a rusty valve, Mr. Ding, he says. You get older, things start fall apart."

"You smoke too much," Aunty Mabel said.

Indeed, I'd noticed that on the ceiling over where my uncle was sitting was a distinct brown stain, spreading out from the middle like an aura.

When I offered to help with dinner my aunt shook her head and pointed through the glass doors at the back patio. The red-and-white-webbed lounge chairs that had been there when I was a child had been replaced by ones cushioned in lengths of squishy lime green tubing. "Xiuxi."

The grass in the backyard was overgrown and weedy. From where I lay I could see that the grapefruit trees hadn't been kept up, but here and there among the glossy dark leaves a patch of yellow showed through. A palmetto plant made a sagging fountain in the middle of the yard. There was even a full-fledged palm tree, a short one whose trunk was the shape and pattern of a pineapple. Honeysuckle draped from the eaves of the garage, entwined with a vine that shot out trumpet flowers the color of blood oranges. The flowers were so beautiful I knew they must be poisonous. And the air was brimming. It wasn't just honeysuckle I smelled, there was something even more heady, a fragrant rush that was almost decadent.

The South pulled no punches when it came to decadence.

I fell asleep and dreamed I was five years old again and very sick. Pneumonia with complications. It was our first winter on Coram Drive. There were ghosts in the room, hiding in the pattern of the apple blossom wallpaper, in my clothes. I was staring at my favorite T-shirt folded on top of the bureau. It was red and blue stripes, with very thin black stripes between. Ma came in and I pointed to the shirt. "What?" she said. I pointed again. She picked it up and shook it and a ghost flew out and into the open door of the closet.

I opened my eyes and was back in Florida. In the yard to my right a sprinkler was going. What had awakened me was the sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. A middle-aged women in a pink top and mint green denim shorts carried grocery bags into the house. She gave a friendly nod as she passed. "We have such nice neighbors, this quiet old Oriental couple," I imagined her telling people. "And now their sweet young niece has come down from Connecticut to keep them company."

A heavy, slow breeze stirred against my pale chill northern skin, teasing the blood to the surface. I enjoyed the caress, not moving until my aunt called me for dinner.

She told me the smell was confederate jasmine. "Behind the garage, you see. All yellow."

"Watch out for armadillo," Uncle Richard added.

"Armadillo?"

"What do you think makes all those tunnels in the lawn? Big Mama Armadillo. Your aunt is out by the garage the other day and she sees one of the babies. Usually they don't come out in daytime. She jumps and says, *Ai-yah!' Armadillo jumps even higher than she does!"

As easygoing as my aunt and uncle were, conversation with them was exhausting. After dinner I excused myself as soon as was tactfully possible, and retreated back to the guest room. I took out Mel's book and propped myself up in the twin bed farthest from the door, near the window, where I'd slept so many years ago. On the sill was a parade of little glass animals, starting with the rat. The signs of the Chinese zodiac. I picked up my year, the dog. It looked like some kind of spaniel. Strong and reliable. Last in line was pig, Marty's year. Lazy but lucky.

I set the dog back in its place and let the book fall open to the page that had been read the most. It was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

I knew it by heart. It was one of the poems Fran had recited to me over and over on the banks of the Sudbury River. I saw that Mel had marked the last two lines: It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

17.