BAD FAMILY

EACH WEDNESDAY, MISS CHANG DRIVES DOWNTOWN TO THE YMCA where, for two hours, couples practice the waltz, the swing, the Texas Two-Step. Often, she stands at the fringe of the dancers because she comes alone and must wait until she has worked up enough nerve to say to another woman, “You must excuse, yes?” Usually, the other women relinquish their partners to her graciously, but from time to time someone will hesitate, obviously annoyed, obviously wishing Miss Chang would choose some other couple to disturb. “That Chinese woman,” she hears someone say one night. “Why would a Chinese woman want to learn the Cotton-Eyed Joe?”

She wants to learn because she has never been graceful. When she was a girl, Mao sent people to the countryside to learn the meaning of work from the peasants. Miss Chang traveled to Inner Mongolia. She was fifteen, and for eight years she dug ditches and water wells. She wore men’s trousers, the legs rolled to her knees. She slogged through the muck, her steps heavy and thick. Even now, her feet on solid ground, she carries the hobbled motion in her legs. All day at the Mane Attraction Beauty Salon, she moves in halting steps as she shampoos, cuts, and perms. Only her hands, small and delicate, are agile and quick. She rarely drops a comb. Her fingers massage other women’s scalps. Sometimes she remembers how Mao’s Red Guard, because her parents were intellectuals who had gone to the university, cut her mother’s hair and shaved one half of her head so, when she went out on the street, everyone would know she came from a “bad” family. Now Miss Chang’s customers tilt their heads back into the cupped groove of the shampooing sink. They close their eyes. “Mmmmm,” they say, and Miss Chang closes her eyes too, and tries to feel the same luxurious motion they must feel when her fingers dance across their heads.

She has tried T’ai Chi, but she lacked discipline and balance; yoga, but she tired of tying and untying the knot of herself. She likes to watch Club Dance on The Nashville Network. She marvels over how women who have no natural claim to grace—who are too old, too heavy—can become so radiant, so lithe, in their cowboy boots and sequined shirts, bright scarves tied around their necks. The women spin and step, all of them smiling, never once looking down at their feet, as if this is a snap, this dancing, this beautiful liquid motion they have become.

“Some are water, some are stone,” her mother told her when Miss Chang came back from Mongolia, her body bulky and hard with muscle, a slim, delicate girl no more. “You, Li, you shouldn’t wait for a husband. You should go to the university instead.”

By this time, the American president, Nixon, had come to China—Mao had opened his arms to the West—and now there were even Americans teaching English at the university. Miss Chang fell in love with one of them, a slim, gentle man named Don. No one could understand how she could love an American, but she did, and when Don promised to uphold China’s socialist principles, the government gave him permission to marry her. Then they managed to leave China, a feat that thrilled both of them, particularly Don, who boasted to friends in America that he had smuggled a China doll out of the country.

And now she is Lily, a name she has chosen for herself. Lily Chang because she has taken back her father’s name. Lily because she wants to think of herself as a water flower, pretty and delicate. Here in Nebraska, she sees the plains stretch out for miles to the distant horizon, looks up at the vast sky, open and blue above her, and believes all things are possible, even at her age, even now.

Since their divorce, Don has been eager to do whatever Miss Chang asks, even agreeing to allow her to attend the dance class he teaches with his new wife, Polly. Miss Chang knows he can’t forgive himself for taking her from her family and her country only to divorce her. “You should come after me with a butcher knife,” he said to her once. “I wouldn’t blame you.” She told him, “Life’s too short to drag around a bitter heart. What’s done is done.”

She lets him take care of odd jobs around her townhouse. He changes her furnace filters, mows her lawn, tends to her landscaping. Polly never complains. The joke among the three of them is, all it takes is a divorce to make a marriage work. “Why can’t people be kind to each other?” Polly says.

Miss Chang has never been able to dislike her, because before the divorce, the three of them were friends. Saturday nights, they would go to the Pla Mor Ballroom to listen to music, and sometimes Don and Polly danced. Miss Chang was always too shy, and besides, she liked to watch Don dance. His steps, precise and fluent, seemed to carry him back to some ancient form of himself—the patient, humble teacher she had fallen in love with in China. He had given her, his student, words and grammar, a language with which to speak her heart, but in America, his land, he became boastful and pedantic. “You don’t know what it’s like here,” he told her. “It’s a different world. Everyone’s out for himself. You’ll have to get an edge to you if you want to get along. I’ll teach you.”

He lectured her on customs and conduct. If a car cut in front of her on the street, she was to honk her horn and drive as close to the other car’s bumper as she could. “Make the asshole sweat,” Don told her. “He’ll think twice before he cuts someone off again.” When someone called on the telephone wanting money for this cause or that, she was to hang up. “We’ll pick our charities,” he said. “We won’t have them forced upon us.” And she wasn’t to pay any attention to express line limits in the supermarket. “Groceries are groceries. It’s all highway robbery. Who’s counting?”

It was his constant watch and guard that eventually drove them apart. “You won’t listen to me,” he told her. “Why won’t you listen?”

She wouldn’t listen because she found the vulgar behavior he prescribed unsavory. She could never imagine Polly doing any of the things Don suggested. Polly was too kind, too polite. “Milk and honey,” Don said once. “A real lady.”

With Miss Chang, it was a different story. With Miss Chang, it was always, “You’ve got to toughen up. You can’t let people run over you.” Don harped and harped at her. But on Saturdays, when they went with Polly to the Pla Mor Ballroom, he was a gentleman. He held doors open for Polly and Miss Chang, pulled out their chairs, stood each time one of them left the table. He became the charming guardian who had first won her.

Even now, under Polly’s spell, he is eager and quick to serve. When Miss Chang thinks of the three of them and the common affection they have been able to manage despite the divorce, she feels a spark kindle inside her, and she knows it is her heart, and she knows it fires with longing and with rage.

Wednesday nights, at the YMCA, it embarrasses Miss Chang to have to bow to the American women, to ask for their husbands. She understands what an intrusion she is, and deep down, though she knows it is mean-spirited of her, she imagines Don could see all this coming when he agreed to let her attend the class without a partner.

One night, he takes her by the hand and says, “Come on. Show me what you’ve learned.”

Polly is strolling around the gymnasium, weaving in and out through the couples, stopping to watch this one or that. Miss Chang admires her small feet, her narrow waist, the way she steps across the waxed floor when she and Don demonstrate a dance.

But now Miss Chang is dancing with Don. Her left hand is on his shoulder; her right palm, meeting his left, is held out into the air at their side. They are doing the waltz, and she has no trouble following Don’s step-close-step. But she is on guard, waiting for the moment when he will push against her left hand, the slightest pressure, and begin to promenade her backward. “Walk your lady across the floor, gents,” he said the first night of class. “Don’t bore her with the easy stuff. She deserves a chance to put on a show.”

Don is chewing gum, and Miss Chang can smell his sweet candy breath. His gray hair is parted neatly on the side, and the soft knit weave of his polo shirt is pleasant to touch. She is dancing with him, and she knows people are watching. He has chosen her, Lily Chang, and she is in step with him, in time with the music, and soon he will press her backward, and she won’t miss a beat. Her feet will glide back as his own come forward, and she won’t stumble or hesitate. She’ll escape the thick weight of herself, and even if, as her mother suggested all those years ago, she be stone, she will be, for a short time, a small stone, flat and smooth, skipping lightly across the surface of a pond.

But Don never presses against her hand. He keeps her moving in the simple one-two-three box, and soon she starts to feel the insult of it all. He doesn’t think her capable of anything beyond tracing that box over and over, and once she knows that, she feels a great rage and shame rise up in her.

“Good,” he says. “Good.”

Miss Chang has already begun to despise him. So smug he is, with his neatly combed hair and his fresh breath and his soft, soft shirt. She intentionally botches a step, and another, and another, until their dancing is chaos, all helter-skelter, and he, for the first time, looks clumsy and inept.

“All right,” he says, squeezing her hand to make her stop. “That’s enough.”

“Yes,” she tells him. “It’s quite enough. Thank you.” She sees Polly across the gymnasium, watching them, her hands on her hips as if to say, “What in the world was that?”

D-I-E

Miss Chang cuts the letters from newspaper headlines and glues them to a sheet of paper. The cliché—this stunt she’s picked up from some detective show on television—irritates her, but still she uses her old Underwood typewriter to address the envelope: “Mr. and Mrs. Donald Brawner, 811 South Waltz Road.” The irony of the address only deepens her anger. She imagines Don and Polly falling in love with the fortunate coincidence—two dancers living on Waltz Road—and for a moment she wishes she had someone, anyone, to whom she could announce, “It’s me. It’s Lily Chang. I’m the one sending this note.”

Miss Chang’s townhouse is in a new subdivision called Sherwood Forest, but there are few trees there, only the ornamental Bradford pears planted along the driveways and some Japanese maples in front yards. Don cares for her carpet juniper and her evergreen shrubs and the chrysanthemums that bloom yellow and red each fall. In China, Miss Chang’s father had been the director of a botanical garden, but when Mao’s revolution came, the Red Guard destroyed the greenhouses, torched azaleas and dwarf cedars and rhododendrons because they were bourgeois. Here, behind her townhouse, there is only a large open space of lawn that stretches, without tree or hedge, from neighbor to neighbor. The lone exception is the house directly behind Miss Chang’s, the house of Miss Shabazz Shabazz, whose backyard is shaded by the only oak tree the developers must have spared and a white pine that carpets the ground with its fragrant needles. And there is a willow tree, its feathery branches sweeping down like the hair of the beautiful young girls who come to Miss Chang at the salon.

Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s daughter is also named Shabazz, but to avoid confusion she is known as Buzzy. Buzzy Shabazz is thirteen, and she has skin the color of caramel, a shade closer to Miss Chang’s own than to the deep ebony of Miss Shabazz Shabazz. The day Miss Chang went to their house to welcome them to the neighborhood, Miss Shabazz Shabazz explained how she had recently divorced her husband. “A white man,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you anything more.”

From the beginning, there was this implicit bond between them. “Women of color,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz seemed to be saying. “Women warriors. We’ll look out for each other.” It pleased Miss Chang to think of herself and Miss Shabazz Shabazz united, but at the same time, she had no desire to poison herself with distrust. Of course, she knew there were people in the world who thought her dirty and vile. Sometimes, when new customers came to the shop and Miss Chang told them she was ready, they made up flimsy excuses—they had forgotten to put money in their parking meters, they had left their ovens on at home—and they would hurry away, never to return, and Miss Chang would know. She tried to let her anger wash over her like a wave rolling to a crest and then falling away.

But the first time she met Miss Shabazz Shabazz, she felt the woman’s rage seep into her. Miss Chang saw it in the glint of the heavy gold rings Miss Shabazz Shabazz wore, rings shaped like spear points, and in her high, sharp cheekbones, and the hair cut close to her skull and nubbed with patches of gray. “I gave my daughter my last name,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz told Miss Chang. “My African name, just as my father did for me. ‘That way,’ he told me, ‘no man will ever be able to take it from you.’”

This year, Buzzy Shabazz and her friends play a game called Marco Polo. It is a game Miss Chang has heard her customers talk about, a swimming pool game carried over now from summer to autumn, from water to dry land. Each evening after school, a large number of children gather in the open lawn behind Miss Chang’s, most of them, like Buzzy Shabazz, almost at an age when such games will be lost to them. There is a desperate urgency to their play, as if they know they are leaving childhood forever and must celebrate its wild, rollicking joy as often as they can.

The game, as far as Miss Chang can tell, is a frenetic, almost maniacal combination of blind man’s bluff and tag. One person wears a blindfold and runs about trying to tag someone else. The rule is this: the person who is “it” calls out “Marco,” the others must answer “Polo.” By repeating the call again and again and again, the person who is “it” tries to zero in on someone else. As soon as another person is tagged, that person becomes it, and the game goes on. It goes on and on until the light fades and Miss Chang can barely see the children, can only hear their feet thundering across the ground as they run and the incessant chant of “Marco,” “Polo,” until darkness finally takes the game from them, and in the sudden calm the call rattles around in Miss Chang’s head.

One night, she closes her eyes and tries to imagine the children, blind to any limits of range or motion, racing across the grass. When they run, they come dangerously close to houses.

Sometimes they lose their balance and fall. They frighten away the birds that come to feed at Miss Chang’s patio. She misses the birds, but she loves to watch the children run, especially Buzzy Shabazz, who is sleek and fast. When Miss Chang watches her, she thinks of the marvelous bodies of athletes she sees on television. While Buzzy and the other children run, their shouts disturbing the usual neighborhood calm, Miss Shabazz Shabazz strolls about her yard, off limits to the children because of its trees. She is regal and leonine, as if this wild abandon is somehow beneath her concern, and Miss Chang starts to resent her and her oak tree and her willow and her pine.

One night at dance class, a door slams shut, and Polly screams. “Not to worry,” Miss Chang says. “It’s just the wind.”

B-A-N-G-! Y-O-U-’-R-E D-E-A-D

Polly comes in each Friday for a wash-and-set. She has fine hair, thinning on the top, and Miss Chang has to use a mild shampoo and conditioner and a pick to gently fluff the hair when she is done. Still, when she has finished, she can see Polly’s white, white scalp shining through the airy puff of hair. Miss Chang imagines birds plucking away the strands one by one until Polly is bald.

Goldfinches, cardinals, chickadees, doves: these are the birds that used to come to Miss Chang’s patio. But now, instead of their songs, she hears the raucous shouts of the children—“Marco Polo”—as if they are searching for him, calling to him over the barren plains of Mongolia where Miss Chang used to watch herds of running-free horses race to drink from the rock wells she had dug, all for the good of the Party, all for Daddy Mao.

Sometimes in Nebraska, the wind’s howl unhinges her. The peasants in Mongolia believed a weasel could become a spirit and come into a person and make that person do crazy things. It must be the same with the wind, Miss Chang thinks, a wind like the one that swept Genghis Khan across Asia, a wind that makes her think she can do whatever she wants, can send note after note to Polly and Don, and no one will ever know.

I-’-V-E G-O-T Y-O-U-R N-U-M-B-E-R

One night, after dance class, Miss Chang walks into the ladies’ room at the YMCA and finds Polly standing at the sink, sobbing. The delicate wings of her shoulder blades flutter.

“Please excuse,” Miss Chang says, and turns to leave.

Polly grabs her by the hand. “Stay with me,” she says. “Stay just a while. I don’t want to go home.”

“Something is wrong?” Miss Chang says. “Something at your house?”

“There are people in the world,” Polly says. “Horrid people. We’ve been getting threatening notes in the mail.”

Miss Chang feels, in the tight grip of Polly’s hand, her tremendous fear, and she wants to tell her there is no need to be afraid; the notes have been a hoax. But of course she can’t admit her guilt, and, too, Polly’s confidence flatters her. Out of all the people she might have told, she’s chosen her, Lily Chang.

“It’s probably nothing,” Miss Chang says. “Probably just some crank. Some cuckoo bird. Who would want to hurt you?”

“It’s Don,” says Polly. “He’s the one they’re after. He said this would happen, and now it has.”

Toward the end of summer, Polly says, Don received a call from a man named Eddie Ball, the same Eddie Ball who had been a key figure a few years before in the trial of a Lincoln woman who had hired a hit man to kill her husband. Eddie Ball, the prosecutors contended, had been the one to put the woman in touch with the killer. Eddie Ball, everyone said—though the trial had never proved it—had mob connections.

“He wanted someone to write his story,” Polly says, “and someone at the university had suggested Don. Well, you can imagine Don’s reaction. ‘I won’t do that,’ he told Eddie Ball. ‘Not for a lowlife like you.’ You know how Don is. And Eddie Ball said to him, ‘You should be careful what you say to a man. You should be able to live with whatever happens now. I’ve got your number. I know where you live.’”

“Those notes,” Miss Chang says. “Have you told the police?”

Polly nods. “They drive by our house a couple of times each night. They’ve told us to be careful. That’s about it. Lily, I’m scared. I think it’s true about Eddie Ball. I think he knows people.”

Miss Chang knows practically no one besides Polly and Don. She has acquaintances, neighbors mostly like Miss Shabazz Shabazz, and there are the other hair stylists at the Mane Attraction, and her customers, but no one she would really call a friend. Other than Wednesdays, when she goes to the YMCA for her dance class, she spends her evenings alone. She watches Buzzy Shabazz and her friends race across her lawn; then she turns on her television to catch Club Dance. Before she started sending Don and Polly the notes, her quiet life pleased her with its plainness and its modesty. Still, when she saw the flit and bob of a goldfinch in flight, its bright yellow could stun her, and when she watched the women dancing on television, their steps could make her heart ache for love. And now she has become a thug, a shady character like this Eddie Ball. Suddenly, it saddens her to think of all the people in the world and the ways they can find to hurt one another when all along what they want—what everyone must surely want—is to feel that they are safe and cared for, a part of some circle larger than any shape they could manage on their own.

In the middle of summer, not long after she had welcomed Miss Shabazz Shabazz to the neighborhood, a policeman came to Miss Chang’s door. Someone, he explained, had stolen a birdbath from Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s yard. And someone had dug up a crepe myrtle and had thrown it onto Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s porch. Had Miss Chang heard anything, the policeman wanted to know. Had she noticed anything suspicious? No, nothing, Miss Chang told him. “Well,” the policeman said, “your neighbor is plenty hot about this. She’s afraid it’s because she’s black. I wouldn’t want to be in her way if she got started.”

After that, Miss Chang stayed away from Miss Shabazz Shabazz. She wanted no part of trouble. If someone had stolen the birdbath and dug up the crepe myrtle because they didn’t like the idea of blacks living in the neighborhood, how easy it would be for them to feel the same way about Miss Chang, especially if they saw her keeping company with Miss Shabazz Shabazz.

One evening, Don comes to put in Miss Chang’s storm windows. “So,” he says to her, “Polly told you about Eddie Ball.”

“Yes,” Miss Chang says, “she told me.”

They are upstairs in the spare bedroom, and Don has just opened a window. She can hear the squeals and shouts of Buzzy Shabazz and her friends.

“I’ve always had a big mouth, haven’t I, Lily?” “You tried to tell me too much.”

“I thought I had to take care of you. You seemed so frightened when we first came here.”

“I’m not frightened now,” she says. “You are.”

“You’re right,” he says. “And so is Polly. And we don’t know what to do.”

He bows his head, and Miss Chang, from habit, does the same. So many times, in China, they sat beside each other, arms touching, as he watched her write out verb conjugations. Now she notices that one of his shoes is untied. She remembers one day downtown, after she had come to America, a strange man asked her to tie his shoes. “I can’t believe you did that,” Don said when she told him the story. “His shoes were untied,” she said. “He wanted someone to help him.”

Don stoops to tie his own shoe; his fingers fumble with the laces. And suddenly something comes undone in Miss Chang, the knotted fist of her bitter heart, and she says to him, “You’ll come here. That’s what you’ll do. You and Polly. You’ll live with me until this is all over and it’s safe for you to go home.”

“Here?” Don lifts his head. Sunlight slants across his face. “Polly and I? We can’t.”

“You will,” Miss Chang says.

“The three of us? Here?”

Miss Chang nods. “We will.”

Her invitation startles her. She knows if she were telling a story, this would be the place where her listeners would frown and shake their heads and call her a liar. “You didn’t,” someone might say. “Well, I can’t believe it.” She thinks of her customers, and how they tell her things they wouldn’t dare tell the people they love the most. She lets them talk until they know they’ve said too much and they’re embarrassed by what they’ve shown of themselves. “You never would have guessed that about me, would you?” someone might say. “Oh, I shouldn’t have told you any of that.” Some stories, she knows, are too true to be told, but she can’t escape this fact: she has asked Don and Polly, her ex-husband and his wife, to stay with her, and because they are frightened, they have said yes.

It is the first time since her divorce that Miss Chang has someone in the house each evening to take meals with her, to sit with her and chat, to make her feel safer in the night when she sleeps, pleased to know she isn’t alone. And they are such good company. Relaxed now that they are away from their own home, they are cheerful and eager to please Miss Chang. The first night, Don plays records on his phonograph and takes turns dancing with her and Polly. Later, they watch Club Dance and Don shows Miss Chang the steps to the Achy-Breaky. When it is time to say goodnight, Polly kisses her on the cheek.

“I can’t tell you how much this means to us,” Polly says. “I’m glad we can still be friends, considering the circumstances.”

“Ancient history,” Miss Chang says with a wave of her hand. “Sleep well.”

They sleep in the spare bedroom. They use the guest bathroom. Miss Chang lays out fresh towels and washcloths. Each morning, she rises early to prepare breakfast and sees a dove or two at the patio feeder. When she leaves the house for work, she starts to miss Don and Polly, not with the raw yearning she felt when she left her parents for Mongolia, but with a sweet, lovely anticipation that she will come home and there Don and Polly will be to welcome her.

“Lily,” Polly says to her one evening. “My sweet, sweet Lily.”

“Thank you,” Don says. “Thank you for having us here.”

Then one night Polly complains about Buzzy Shabazz and her friends and their game of Marco Polo. Polly and Miss Chang and Don are eating dinner, and through the patio doors they can see Buzzy Shabazz with a white handkerchief tied around her eyes. She is running wildly, her arms outstretched. She calls and her friends answer until the air is filled with their din, and it’s impossible to distinguish their words. Their sound is a shriek, a siren, the wind’s howl.

“That noise,” Polly says. “That dreadful noise. I don’t know how you live with it. I really don’t. Whose children are they?”

“Neighborhood children,” Miss Chang says. “The girl with the blindfold is Buzzy Shabazz. She lives with her mother in that house. There. The one with the beautiful yard.”

Don leans forward to get a better look at Miss Shabazz Shabazz’s yard. “Her white pine needs to be pruned,” he says. “You should tell her that.”

“Miss Shabazz Shabazz?” says Miss Chang. “You don’t know Miss Shabazz Shabazz.”

“I know those children are horrid,” says Polly.

“They’re trespassing,” says Don. “This is your property. Don’t they realize that? They have no right to be here.”

After dinner, Miss Chang pays a visit to Miss Shabazz Shabazz. “Your trees are lovely,” Miss Chang says. “But your pine. It needs pruning.”

Miss Shabazz Shabazz is gathering firewood from the stack behind her utility shed, and when Miss Chang mentions the pine tree, Miss Shabazz Shabazz drops the canvas tote sling she has filled with logs and they clatter about on the ground. “Not a word for months,” she says, “and now you come to stick your nose in my business? Speak up. Are you a mouse? Are you a little mouse who’s crawled out of my firewood?”

Miss Chang remembers how, when the schools in China finally reopened after the revolution began, she and the other students recited from Mao’s Red Book. “Chairman Mao says this” and “Chairman Mao says that,” over and over until the slogans stuck in their heads. The one that comes to her now is, “Chairman Mao says, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party.’” So she says to Miss Shabazz Shabazz, “It’s your daughter. Your Buzzy. I don’t want her and her friends playing their game in my yard.”

Miss Shabazz Shabazz laughs. Her lips are the color of cranberries. Her teeth are white, white, white. The power of her laugh startles Miss Chang.

“Don’t be silly,” Miss Shabazz Shabazz says. “Look at your yard.” She points behind Miss Chang to the open space. “There’s nothing there. Let children be children. What harm can they do?”

Each evening, after work, Miss Chang stops by Don and Polly’s house to collect their mail. She brings it to them, and they sort through the envelopes. When they find nothing out of the ordinary, they give each other a hug and Miss Chang knows she is one day closer to losing them. “It looks like this is all going to blow over,” Don says. “Then we can go home, Lily, and get out of your hair.”

I K-N-O-W W-H-E-R-E Y-O-U L-I-V-E

When Don reads the note, he runs a hand over his head, mussing his hair. “That’s it,” he says to Polly. “I won’t be bullied.”

Polly reads the note and folds it very neatly along the creases Miss Chang’s own fingers have traced in the paper. “It’s your fault,” Polly says, and her voice is very low and even. “You had to open your mouth. You couldn’t keep quiet. I’ve always hated that about you.”

And suddenly, Don is shouting. “You put up with too much.” He is waving his arms about. “Damn it, Polly. You always have.”

“I just expect the best from people,” Polly says, still in that calm voice. “That’s all.”

“Well, I’m going to put an end to this,” Don says. “I’m going to stop it tonight.”

Miss Chang remembers the last night Don spent with her. He was cutting a coupon from the back of a cracker box, and he was having trouble keeping the scissors moving in a straight line through the cardboard. Finally, he slammed the scissors down on the counter, and he told her he thought he should leave. “For how long?” she asked him. “A few hours?” “For good,” he said. “Not come back?” “No, Li. I won’t come back.”

And now, again, he is moving toward the door.

“Lily, you talk to him.” Polly turns to her, and Miss Chang thinks of how Polly comes to her at the Mane Attraction and begs her to do something with her thin hair, trusts her to do what she can to hide her baldness. “You tell him, Lily. You tell him he can’t go.”

Miss Chang knows she should stop him. She knows she should say, “Wait. Let me tell you. You won’t believe this. It’s the craziest thing.” But all she can think of is Mao’s Red Guard and how they tore silk clothes from people on the street, how they destroyed Ming Dynasty vases, burned books, bulldozed the graveyards because burial was an old custom and took up valuable land. No more old ideas, no more old culture, no more old customs, no more old habits. She remembers the times when Don told her how to behave in America. “Toughen up,” he told her. “Get mean.” If she confesses to sending the notes, she imagines his smug grin and how he might say, “You see. I was right all along.” When what he can never know—what he never even suspected those days at the university, when she so meekly recited her verb conjugations—is the cold, cold heart she could never leave behind her in China.

So she says nothing. And then, Don is gone.

“Lily,” Polly says. “You’ve been so good to us. And now look at what we’ve brought into your house.”

After Don has left for Eddie Ball’s, Miss Chang steps out onto her patio, and there is Buzzy Shabazz only a few feet away. She hoists her green schoolbag up on her shoulder. She is wearing high-top leather basketball shoes, the laces undone.

“Buzzy. Buzzy Shabazz,” Miss Chang says. “I want to ask you something.”

“My mother told me not to listen to you,” says Buzzy Shabazz.

One night last summer before the episode with the birdbath and the crepe myrtle, Buzzy Shabazz came to Miss Chang’s house and asked Miss Chang to please tell her about the pretty yellow birds she saw flying onto Miss Chang’s patio. “Goldfinches,” said Miss Chang. How, Buzzy Shabazz wanted to know, could she and her mother get such beautiful birds to come into their yard. Miss Chang remembered how long it had taken her to entice the goldfinches, how she had hung the feeding tube filled with niger seed and had waited and waited for her little goldies to find it. And now that they had, she hated to risk losing even one of them to her new neighbors. Of course, she knew it was selfish of her, but in China there had been so few birds (once Mao had even ordered all the sparrows killed), she delighted now to the brilliant yellow birds with their black caps and wings and the playful way they grasped the rungs of the feeding tube with their claws and then flipped upside down to peck at niger seed through the slots below them. “I’m sorry,” she told Buzzy Shabazz. “This is something I cannot tell.”

Now Miss Chang says to the girl, “Every night you and your friends run through my yard.” Miss Chang points toward Buzzy Shabazz’s house. “How would you like it if I came into your yard? If I was an intruder come there uninvited?”

Buzzy Shabazz’s eyes open wide. “It was you,” she says. “You’re the one.”

“I’m not saying I’ve ever done it,” Miss Chang says. “I’d never even dream of it.”

“You stole our birdbath, and you dug up our bush.”

“No.”

“You, you, you.”

Buzzy Shabazz’s voice is rising, the way it does when she plays Marco Polo. It echoes across the empty expanse of Miss Chang’s yard, and all she wants is to make Buzzy Shabazz be quiet. She tries to clamp her hand over the girl’s mouth, but Buzzy Shabazz grabs her arm, and somehow Miss Chang’s hand ends up caught between Buzzy Shabazz’s shoulder and the strap of her schoolbag. Miss Chang is trying to let go, but she can’t. And Buzzy Shabazz is trying to yank herself away from Miss Chang. The two of them are dancing about the yard, and finally, the only way Miss Chang can free herself is to put her other hand against Buzzy Shabazz’s sternum and push. When she does, Buzzy Shabazz falls backward, striking her head, with a loud thud, on the ground.

Miss Chang tries to apologize. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she says. “This is all a mistake.”

But Buzzy Shabazz is on her feet and running to her yard, where Miss Shabazz Shabazz has come out to her white pine, pruning shears in hand.

Miss Chang goes into her own house, and there is Polly sitting on the loveseat, staring out the window. After the divorce, Polly came to Miss Chang, and she asked her if she would mind if she started dating Don. “If it bothers you, Lily, I won’t do it.”

“Do you love him?” Miss Chang wanted to know.

She remembers how Polly ducked her head like a starstruck girl. “Yes, Lily. I think I do.”

“Then why ask my permission?”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Lily. You’ve been so good to me. Dear Lily. I love you, too.”

Now Miss Chang is crying. She is thinking about Don on his way to Eddie Ball’s, and how Polly, staring out the window, must be so frightened for him. Miss Chang is imagining Buzzy Shabazz telling her mother that their neighbor, that crazy Chinese woman, has attacked her.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Miss Chang says.

Polly turns and rises so effortlessly from the loveseat. She comes to Miss Chang and takes her in her arms. “Do what, Lily? Poor dear. Tell me.”

There is a sharp knock at the patio door, the sound of metal on glass. Polly looks at Miss Chang, and Miss Chang sees the same terror she saw in her mother’s eyes the day the Red Guard knocked down their door and dragged her mother out into the street.

Miss Chang feels Polly’s shoulders tremble, and she remembers one day last summer when a goldfinch, convinced it saw clear passage through the glass, flew into the patio door and fell to the step. When Miss Chang picked it up, she could feel the wings trying to open—the slightest shudder—and she wished for something she could do, some miracle, to give the bird’s life back to it. She remembers the letters she cut from the newspapers, the dancing turns and dips of her scissors, her gentle, flowing rill. She sees the letters in her mind, scrambled, swirling into words she hadn’t thought to form: “LOVE,” “ME,” “NOW.” They startle her. All along, she imagines, this plea has been rising—this sweet yearning—and now here it is, flaring up with such an overwhelming majesty and force, she can’t help but confess it.

“It’s me,” she says, and her voice is barely a whisper. “I’m the one who’s been sending you and Don those notes.”

When the Red Guard took her mother, Miss Chang ran. She was just a girl, still light and fast. She ran and ran until she stopped in the botanical garden where the greenhouses were jagged with broken glass, where the azaleas and the dwarf cedars and the rhododendrons were charred and smoldering. She was so far from home. She was alone and ashamed. But she would never be able to forget the splendid motion of her swift and graceful flight. She recalls it now as Polly steps back and slips from her embrace, and all Miss Chang can do is turn, her feet clumsy and slow, to the patio door where Miss Shabazz Shabazz waits.