Next morning was overcast and cooler, the house perfectly silent as I checked my watch. I'd thrown my wedding ring into the East River, given the pear diamond back to Carey (it had been his grandmother's), but this token of my marriage I kept because it was from Ma, the most expensive present I'd ever gotten from her. Six-thirty. I was still on hospital time. I got out of bed and, still wearing the T-shirt I'd slept in, pulled on my corduroys. In the kitchen, my aunt and uncle's other cat, a little tiger, rubbed against my ankles and then shot through my legs when I slid open the glass doors to the patio.

I went out barefoot into the backyard and made my way through the tall grass, cold and heavy with dew, leaned against the back fence, and lit up a cigarette. That was a terrible habit I'd picked up in the hospital, smoking first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, but there was something divine about it too, the buzz so strong it was sick-making. I noticed the grapefruit lying scattered beneath the trees like bocce balls. They were rotting, riddled with insect holes. The grapefruit still in the trees didn't look much better. The ones Ma had brought to me at the hospital were obviously not from this yard. For a moment I entertained the urge to paint them, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket and began picking up the decaying fruit, making a heap in the corner by the fence.

If only it could always be early morning or night. It was the day that killed me.

I heard the shrill of the teakettle from the kitchen and when I went back inside Aunty Mabel was pouring hot water into mugs filled with leaves. On the stove something acrid-smelling simmered in a clay pot. In the cool morning light I could see how my aunt's face was a reflection of my mother's. But where high cheekbones made Ma regal, in my aunt they were exaggerated, giving her the melancholy air of a Modigliani. My aunt's eyes were long and narrow, like those in Chinese fairytale books. Like mine.

"Too cold out there without sweater."

"I'm fine, really."

I could hear my uncle coughing in the bathroom. He'd lost his basketball bet last night.

Aunty Mabel set two mugs on the table. "Who would think Pau-yu be the first to go," she said as we sat there sipping. "I always think it's your uncle."

"Daddy was older."

"Your Uncle Richard, six different doctors he has, for all his disease. Lucky we still have insurance and disability from his job." My aunt got up to turn off the burner under the earthenware pot.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Special Chinese medicine for his heart. We have a friend sends it from Queens."

I remembered the potion I'd taken the year I was eight, which I'd believed to be dried blood. I never did find out what it actually was.

After breakfast my aunt drove my uncle to the cardiologist and I sat out on the patio in the sun, which had finally come out, until I felt too much like a bum. I decided to gather the rest of the grapefruit, filling two giant trash bags. Insects had begun to hum in the jungly grass. Savannah was the word that came to mind as I stood there surveying the yard for any strays I'd missed.

The next task I set for myself was to clip the grass with hedge trimmers, wearing an old sun hat I found in the garage hanging beside the tools. When I was done I went in for lemonade and the last half of the Sally Jessy Raphael showa"bulimic boys, not as entertaining as you'd think, or maybe I was finally losing my taste for talk shows. By then it was around eleven-thirty and my aunt and uncle still hadn't returned, so I went out to the garage again and got out their old rusty rotary mower, which kept jamming on me. The ground was even more hummocky than it looked. I kept a hopeful lookout for armadillos, never having seen one before, but all I came across were lots of fat flying bugs and a tortoise, which I carefully picked up and put by the back fence, behind the grapefruit trees. The pastel lady from next door was hanging out her wash and waved to me.

Physical work doesn't keep you from thinking! In fact sometimes it stimulates it. My aunt and uncle were as good as could be, but I was still in my life, I still had to return to New York City. As I struggled with the clackety mower I calculated my savings: I could survive for about a month and a half on what I had and then I'd have to find a steady income One possibility was freelance from my old boss, if she still trusted me. My last assignments had been delivered late and barely acceptable. I'd told her I was going to Connecticut to live with my mother for a while, and then with all the mess, going into the hospital and all, I had completely lost touch.

It was hard to believe now, but at the agency I'd handled all the biggest projects. I was known to be great under pressure. Crank up the Vivaldi, order out pizza, and I could work through the night, meet the toughest deadline with panache. Where I worked, the darker the circles under your eyes the more promising your career. Sally Wang-Acheson, senior art director. So chic, that hyphenated name, and so chic was I my long hair done up in all sorts of intricately casual stylesa"I had finally begun to accept my looks for what they were not beautiful but something elsea"with all those flowing tropical-colored outfits, dangly bronze and silver earrings Carey had given me every birthday and Christmas. A woman with style. A woman on her way up.

And thena"catastrophe. A foot over on the other side, and it had affected me permanently, down to my brain cells. After degenerating to idiocy, I had to learn to be smart again, an adult in this world. How was it possible? Since I'd been sick I had taken to wearing the kind of asexual outfits I'd favored at boarding schoola"T-shirts, corduroys, sneakers. No makeup, no particular hairstyle. My reflection in the mirror was disturbing to me, the face thinner, childish, with a stripped expression I remembered from working with the mentally handicapped. Pure shock that you had to be out in the world at all.

I was almost done when I heard the car pull in. My aunt stood on the patio shading her eyes with her hands.

"Next year we spray the trees again."

"Aunty Mabel, there's some kind of other fruit out here. Little orange things on bushes."

"Calamondin. Too sour to eat. You can make marmalade from."

Unexpected treasures in your own backyard. I thought of the patch of lily of the valley behind the swing set on Coram Drive. Fortunately the bad boys missed it in their rampage. Once in a while Ma would pick a handful to keep in a glass in the kitchen. "This is what I have in my wedding corsage," she told Marty and me, although she didn't know the name in English. We didn't know that they were so rare that it was actually against the law in Connecticut to pick them.

"Sal-lee, you come in now," Aunty Mabel said. "After lunch we go shopping."

In Montgomery Ward I selected the most conservative bathing suit I could finda"a red one-piece with white polka dots and low-cut leg holes. I changed into and out of it as fast as possible, stopping long enough only to check that it was serviceable. Department store lighting was so cruel. "Let's see!" my aunt called from the other side of the curtain and I said, "It's fine, it's fine."

On the way to the cash register Aunty Mabel stopped at a rack full of tropical flowered sundresses, her coral nails fluttering over the hangers. "Sal-lee! Ni kan! This style become you very much."

To please her, I tried one on. It had a full skirta"not my tastea"with purple hibiscus on a green and white background that vaguely resembled leaves. But the bodice was cut in a sophisticated way, as snugly as an evening gown, with a graceful scoop neck and deep armholes. I wished the bones of my chest didn't show, but they always had, as long as I could remember. This time I gave in to my aunt and stepped outside to model.

"Huh," she said, drawing her eyebrows together in a delicate frown. I was barefoot and my ankles were raw from the sandspurs I'd picked up from working in the yard, but I could see that what she was looking at was the inside of my left arm where the tiger stripes overlapped delicately but distinctly from wrist to elbow.

"It's gorgeous," Aunty Mabel said, finally deciding she wasn't going to ask. "I buy for you."

For dinner my second night in Florida we had jiao zi. My aunt rolled out the dough and pressed circles into it with the rim of a teacup to make the wrappers. I spooned the pork and cabbage filling in and pinched the dumplings shut. Thanks to Nai-nai I'd perfected my technique at making them dainty, evenly scalloped at the edges. My sister's had too much filling and spilled out the sides. You could always tell which ones were whose when they came out of the pot.

"I'm not eating any of Marty's," I'd announce.

"Mine are better, they have more meat," my sister would shoot back.

"No fight," my father would say in his high-pitched starting-to-be-mad voice. But I noticed that Daddy ate more of mine than my sister's.

Aunty Mabel asked how Marty was.

"She has an apartment in New York now."

"How does she support herself?"

My sister lived off men, but I didn't think my aunt needed to know this.

"When she's in the city she works as a clown at South Street Seaport. Now she's up in Vermont with a college friend of hers."

"So she moves to the country?"

"No, no, this is just temporary. She still wants to be an actress in New York."

"Actress." Aunty Mabel sighed. "Your sister, she's always so active." She slid a pile of dough circles across the table to me. "And you! When you were little, you send us such beautiful cards. All kinds of animals, horses, dogs, cats. I still keep. You remember? And your ma-ma told us you won so many prizes in high school, for painting pictures."

"She told you?"

"Of course she told us. I think this is a very difficult school you attend, lots of talented girls."

"That's what it was like."

"So much talent, though, doesn't help find a husband."

"I did find a husband, Aunty Mabel."

"You found wai guo ren. Maybe it's better you find Chinese."

"You mean like Xiao Lu?"

My aunt considered. "Those New York Chinese too small and pale. Maybe Hawaiian, or some big, strong California one. You ever think about moving out to California? We still have relatives there, you know."

"Your ba-ba so handsome." In the living room after dinner, my aunt and I were looking through old photograph albums. I remembered that she had once been interested in my father. We had come to a photograph of my parents just before they got married. They were leaning against the railing of a ship, hand in hand, hair blowing every which way, eyes only for each other. Daddy's face was angled a little away from the camera, smiling and shadowed. Even in that casual pose, you could see the intensity in the twist of his neck. Ma, dimpled in a big-shouldered dress, looked fragile beside him.

"Bau-yu and Pau-yu," my aunt said. "Similar and not similar."

We had the same picture in an album at home; I knew the story that went with it. After the ship photographer snapped their photo, they'd set out on a cruise around San Francisco Bay. Although it wasn't particularly rough, in ten minutes my father had completely ruined his fancy seersucker jacket. "I never saw anyone so sick in my life," Ma told us. "I had to take it to the cleaners three times." Back on land, Daddy told her how he'd suffered on his voyage from China. He'd lost eighteen pounds on the way.

I studied the face in the photo, noticed how the young man's side-parted hair fell in a way that reminded me of Marty's. Daredevilish.

Then came my parents' wedding. What touched me most was Aunty Mabel standing alone, her big, good-natured face framed by a bad perm, wearing a light-colored dress with petal sleeves and a straight skirt too tight around the hips. When she smiled her eyes disappeared into half-moons and you could see her crooked top teeth. Ma said that Aunty Mabel did better than anyone expected. She moved to New York and six months later started dating Uncle Richard, who was an accountant at Grumman, where she worked as a secretary.

No photos of their wedding, they'd gone modestly to City Hall. The next series showed my aunt and uncle standing in front of a two-family brick house in Flushinga"they'd lived there only three months before my uncle got a job with Martin Marietta in St. Pete. Uncle Richard was chunky and broad-faced and beaming, a heaviness around his chin foretelling the jowls to come. My aunt looked dazed in her heavy jewelry and unbecoming dresses.

"Ding-ah!" she called to my uncle, but he had fallen asleep on the couch across the room.

Me as a lumpy infant, a cowlick I still have springing from the left side of my head. Marty, smaller in every way, and more self-contained. The album chronicled the two of us growing up into our late teens. Between us, often, stood my mother. Seeing Ma and Marty together over and over made me note the difference in their beauty. My mother had a portrait prettiness, with her styled hair and regular features, while my sister's face was narrower, feline, a little dangerous. It wasn't just the generation gapa"my sister was born knowing something my mother never learned.

At first Ma's look changed dramatically from scene to scene, her hairstyle and clothing reflecting each passing fashion. You could practically pinpoint the year by looking at her. There we were at Disneyland, in front of Cinderella's castle, my mother in a modified beehive and Bermuda shorts, me in stripes, my sister in snowflakes. In front of the White House: Ma in a boldly patterned sleeveless shift and the Twiggy crop Daddy had hated so much, Marty and I on either side of her with our arms clutching the crosspiece of the fence, pretending we were being strung up.

Then suddenly my mother's fashion sense seemed to regress until finally it froze. The pixie haircut, the school-marm outfits, the tight mouth. She remained static, only growing older, while my sister and I blossomed.

Daddy, usually the photographer, was in few of the pictures. I watched him age, hair whitening first at the temples and then clouding through. His eyes got smaller, darker, and more brilliant. His body shrank to bones inside the endless similar sets of loose shirts and trousers that he wore year after year. The ties got more and more excessive. The rare smile become nonexistent. How bitter the lines framing his mouth, how resentful the hunch of his shoulders, how desperately his long hands groped the air by his sides.

For the first time I saw my parents' marriage as a love story gone terribly awry.

"Your ba-ba ever tell you he want to be pilot?" Aunty Mabel reached down into her wicker workbasket, fished out a card of bright orange embroidery floss, unwound it, and licked the end into a point, which she threaded through a darning needle.

"No, really?"

"He want to join the Chinese air force. You think he's so healthy, a tall man like that. But he failed the physical. All those childhood diseases make his constitution weak."

"I thought he wanted to be a physicist."

"That too. Afterward. Pilot was childhood dream." My aunt shook her head. "Your father was a genius, you should hear him talk! So clever, all those stories. His sisters would be so proud of him. Too bad he was stuck in the United States. All the time he hopes China opens up again so he can go back. He is almost thirty years old when he comes. You come to a new country too late, you are always stranger. Your mother and me, we go to school here, we make friends. Not so your ba-ba. He is incurable Chinese." "He did go back. To Taiwan."

"When a Chinese returns to China, he goes to lao jia." In the early 1970s, when it was beginning to be possible to do so, my parents had written to their respective families. Ma had received several letters back: her oldest sister had died (one of those aunts whose blurry heads Marry and I had scrutinized in Nai-nai's ancient sepia family portraits), such and such a cousin was professor of German at the foreign language institute in Shanghai. Since it was impossible for those in China to obtain visas to the United States, would Nai-nai and Ma and Aunty Mabel please come back to visit them as soon as possible. Nai-nai had wanted to, had made plans, but the cancer had gotten to her bones by then. Her daughters had never gone.

My father had received only one letter back, on onionskin paper, the characters drawn with blue fountain pen ink in an uncertain hand. It was from a stranger, a primary school teacher in the town where he'd grown up. So sorry to have to be the one to convey such news to his illustrious American colleague, etc., etc., but Wang Pau-yu's younger sister had passed away several years ago from the sugar sickness. Diabetes, Daddy explained. She'd been a laborer, a farmhand, unmarried. No one knew what had become of the older sister. She'd held a local government post, and then joined the Communist Party and moved to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. She'd changed her name and was impossible to trace.

I asked my aunt: "Do you think Ma should have married someone else? Someone more her class?" I remembered Uncle Richard and hoped Aunty Mabel wouldn't take offense.

She didn't. "More than difference in class. Difference in character. Your father had a very bad childhood. So insecure, always afraid. Your mothera"well, you know, she's the baby. A little spoiled, like your sister. She doesn't understand this kind of fear."

I was flipping the pages of the album fast now, until a large group photograph made me stop. There was our whole family, La Guardia Airport, Christmas, my sophomore year of boarding school. My parents still the perfect couple for the camera: Daddy, his hair almost completely white now, my mother close beside him with her dutiful, distant smile. Uncle Richard in a Russian fur hat, which he must have kept mainly in mothballs, for who would need such a thing in Florida, his arm raised in a bon voyage salutea"his other arm around my aunt, who looked caught off-guard. Me in an army jacket and ragged-hem jeans, my sister with heavy mascara and a bad layered haircut. Between the two of us my Nai-nai, wearing the long beige cashmere coat my mother and aunt had given her for Christmas. I could see in the photograph how it hung off her shoulder blades, she had gotten so thin. By that time she was wearing turtlenecks rather than high-collared blouses to hide her mole because she couldn't manage buttons. A couple of years before, she had broken her hip, and still sported an ivory-handled cane.

"Your Nai-nai look distinguished, eh?" she said to me. "Not just like any old lady." When I walked her to the boarding gate she leaned against me, clutching my arm, and I could feel the brittle bones of her fingers through her soft leather gloves. It was the last time I ever saw her, touched her.

My mother was fussing, asking if Nai-nai was sure she had her ticket. My grandmother ignored her. "You much taller," she said to me. "It's good to be tall. Tall girl stands out."

And I remembered how I had felt comforted, although I had heard it a hundred times before.

The phone rang and my uncle started, in the middle of a snore. "Hello?" Aunty Mabel said. Then she handed the receiver to me. "For you."

"Ma?" I asked, but my aunt shook her head.

"Sally? It's Mel."

"Oh my God, how are you?" His voice was like elixir, cool, filling, impossible to describe how glad it made me feel. "Where are you calling from?"

"My parents' house."

"Are you on pass?"

"I'm out, Sal. They sprung me."

"That's great! What are you up to?"

"Well, for starters, I thought I'd come down and see you."

"I thought you said you were broke."

"There are ways, darling, there are ways. I think I can borrow some wheels."

"It's a little crowded herea""

"Oh, don't worry about that, Sal, I wouldn't impose on your family. I have a place to stay."

"When?"

"Not sure yet. I'll call you in a couple of days. Is it hot down there?"

"Ninety-five in the shade."

"Beautiful. We'll go sailing. I have to go, hon. Just sit tight, I promise I'll call you. Bye."

Aunty Mabel was bowed over her embroidery, but my uncle, now fully awake, leaned forward on the couch, rubbing his pudgy palms together. "Boyfriend, eh?"

"No. Just friend."

"Just friend. Ni kan," he said to my aunt, "see how she blushes."

18.

Aunty Mabel was in the kitchen, answering questions: Is she eating enough, is she sleeping, is she being a help to you. My aunt's Shanghainese was so quick the sibilant syllables seemed to trip over each other.

I was summoned to the phone. Before she handed it to me, my aunt whispered: "Your sister's in an accident."

When I asked, Ma said: "No, no, nothing serious. Marty's rental car, it went into a ditch. Insurance covers everything. She has a broken arm, that's all."