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  In the marriage bureau, tiny pictures in pastel frames—a cheetah running, an eagle spreading its wings—decorated the walls of the waiting area. There was a sign in the room prohibiting photographs. Agnes sighed as she looked at her watch. Her daughters would be home from school in an hour and would be catching a ride to the banquet with Agnes’s friend. Her brother wasn’t coming. He had been depressed by their father’s news and told Agnes it was too difficult for him to leave the farm. Agnes got up from her seat and inspected a picture of a sailboat skimming moonlit waters. The caption read: You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. It made Agnes laugh out loud, and the receptionist glanced up at her from her desk.

  Her father arrived a moment later with his bride. He was beaming, handsomely dressed in a dark gray suit and platinum tie, two red carnations fastened to his lapel. He introduced Agnes and Qiulian with mock solemnity, exaggerating the tones of their names, lifting himself in the air and falling back on his heels. Qiulian smiled and told Agnes that her American name was Lily. Everything Lily wore was white. There was her opaque white dress suit with its faintly puffed sleeves. Her pearl earrings and two strands of pearls wound closely around her neck. A corsage of white roses enmeshed in a swirl of white ribbon pinned to her chest. She had decided on white just as if she were a first-time American bride, even though white was no color at all, what you wore to another person’s funeral. Perhaps it was a sign of Lily’s true feelings.

  Agnes grasped her father’s arm and pulled him aside. “How old is she, by the way?” It infuriated her that this woman was closer to her age than she had expected.

  “That’s top secret,”her father said, adjusting his carnations. “She’s very nice, isn’t she? Do I look all right? What do you think of my tie?” He glanced over at Lily, who stood serenely looking at her shoes. She held a small beaded purse between both hands, and it seemed from her empty expression that she was pretending not to hear their conversation. “Incredible!” he muttered. “I’m supposed to feel less as I grow old. But it’s the opposite — I feel more and more!” His eyes widened, and he knocked his fist against his chest. “Can you believe it? A seventy-eight-year-old heart like mine!” He walked back to Lily, smiling and patting her hand.

  Agnes felt her skin begin to itch. She wanted to lift her sweater, scratch herself luxuriously until she bled, but the receptionist told them it was time, and they were ushered into a narrow green-carpeted room where the justice of the peace stood waiting behind a podium. Behind him was a trellis on which a few straggling vines of artificial clematis drooped. It was a halfhearted attempt at illusion, and, for this reason, it gave Agnes some relief. It startled her to think that she had once cared about the color of roses matching her bridesmaids’ dresses. That day had been a fantasy, with its exquisite bunches of flowers, so perfect they did not seem real. At one point, she had looked up at the sky and laughed . . . she had felt so light and happy. She had worn a white ballroom dress and—of all things—a rhinestone tiara! If photographs still existed of her in that Cinderella outfit, they resided in other people’s albums, for she had torn her own into bits.

  Her father was listening to the justice with an impassive, dignified expression, his hands folded neatly in front of him. Agnes thought Lily’s smile belonged on the face of a porcelain doll. Her hair was cut in short, fashionable waves and seemed ridiculously lustrous for someone her age. Dyed, no doubt. Neither of them understood what the justice was saying, and Agnes had to prompt them when it was time to exchange rings. When the justice pronounced them husband and wife, her father looked around the room, smiling good-naturedly. He thanked the justice with a bow of his head and took Lily gently by the elbow.

  Her father visited less often after he was married. The few times he took the subway to Dunn Loring, he did not bring Lily with him. Agnes once asked him why, and he said Lily was quite popular at Evergreen House. “People are always inviting her out to restaurants,”he said. “Or she goes over to other ladies’ apartments, and they watch the latest Hong Kong melodramas. What sentimental drivel! But she enjoys it, she can’t get enough of it. . .”He told Agnes that one day Lily wanted to eat dan dan noodles and nothing but dan dan noodles. “There is a restaurant we know, but the owners were away on vacation. Qiulian suggested another restaurant, but when we got there, it wasn’t on the menu and she refused to go inside. She dragged me from one place to another, but none of them served dan dan noodles. I was so hungry by this time, I insisted we go into the next restaurant we saw. But she said she wouldn’t eat at all if she couldn’t have her dan dan noodles. So we ended up going home, and I had to eat leftovers.”Her father shook his head, though he was clearly delighted by Lily’s caprice.

  From her father, Agnes learned that Lily had studied Chinese history at the prestigious Zhejiang University. She liked to take baths over showers, used Pond’s cream on her face at night, and sipped chrysanthemum tea in bed. She rarely bought herself anything, and when she did, the things she chose were charming and fairly priced. Her father gave Lily a monthly allowance of five hundred dollars, which was half the income he received from Agnes and her brother as well as from the federal government. Lily, in turn, sent money to her son, a book vendor, and to her daughter, a truck driver in Guangzhou.

  More than a year passed, and Agnes never saw her.

  In December, she walked by Lily almost without recognizing her. She had stopped in Chinatown to buy duck for a New Year’s Eve party, and a small group of older women approached her on the street. She would not have paid them any attention if the woman in the gray raincoat had not paused to stare in the middle of readjusting a silk scarf around her head. It took Agnesa moment to realize it was Lily. By that time, the women had passed, heading south in the direction of Evergreen House.

  Agnes stood on the sidewalk, gazing absently at a faded brick building, its pink paint flaking off to reveal dark red patches. Even in the winter, the streets smelled of grease and the hot air blown out of ventilators. Behind a row of buildings, two looming cranes crisscrossed the sky. It was odd to think of someone like Lily living here. Agnes went inside the restaurant to get her duck, and by the time she stepped outside again, tiny flakes of snow were falling. She did not go back to her car but instead turned in the direction of her father’s apartment.

  Outside his door, she heard shrill voices and laughter, the noisy clacking of tiles being swirled along a table. The mahjong ladies, Agnes thought. Lily answered the door, her mild, empty eyes widening slightly. Her mass of glossy black hair was perfectly coiffed, and only her wrinkled neck betrayed her age.

  “I saw you on the street,”Agnes said. “Didn’t you see me?”

  “Yes,”Lily said, pausing. “But I wasn’t sure it was you until we had passed each other.”

  “The same with me.”Agnes pulled off her coat and tossed it onto the sofa. “So, who are your friends here?”

  “Oh yes, let me introduce you to my neighbors.”The mahjong ladies half stood out of their seats, smiling at Agnes, but it was obvious they wanted to return to their game.

  “Don’t let me disturb you,”Agnes told them. “Is my father here?”

  “He’s taking a nap,”Lily said, seating herself at the table.

  The living room was brightly lit compared with the dimness of the hallway. It seemed like its own island in space as the afternoon waned and the windows darkened. The mahjong ladies chattered, flinging their tiles to the middle of the table. They were older than Lily, in their seventies at least, their hands plowed with wrinkles, with bright green circles of jade hanging from their wrists. Their fingers, too, were weighed down by gaudy rings, the stones as shiny as candy, purple and turquoise and vermilion. “He ate oatmeal every day,”a woman with badly drawn eyebrows was saying.

  “I heard he took poison,”another said, picking up a tile. She had thick, sour lips and wore red horn-rimmed glasses. “Didn’t he lose everything?”

  “No, it was a heart attack. His
wife found him still sitting on the toilet! In the middle of reading a newspaper.”

  “He was too cheap to pay for his own funeral,”the third one said. She had a sagging, magisterial face, her thick white hair pulled back into a bun. “In his will, he donated his body to science.”

  The one with the false eyebrows knocked down all of her tiles. “Hula!” she declared.

  There were startled cries. “I wasn’t even close!”

  “Did anyone have three sticks?”

  Agnes smiled as she poured herself a cup of tea from the counter. These ladies were real witches, talking about people’s ends with such morbid assurance—how could Lily stand their company? Perhaps she liked the attention, for she seemed to be the silent center of the group, the one the ladies exclaimed over and petted. Lily glanced toward Agnes from time to time, smiling at her. She seemed impatient for Agnes to leave.

  “Well,”Agnes said, after she had finished her tea, “he won’t mind too much if I wake him.”She walked across the room and opened the bedroom door, even though she sensed this was precisely what Lily did not want her to do.

  Her father sat at his desk reading a newspaper, his bifocals slipping down his nose. A single lamp illuminated his down-turned head, and it seemed from his silence that he had been exiled here. His manner changed the moment he saw her. His face broke into an exuberant smile as he stood up from his chair.

  “So what are you doing here? Come to pay me a visit?”

  Agnes closed the door behind her. “I’ve brought you a duck,”she said. “And to wish you a happy new year.”

  “A duck? Did you go to the Golden Palace?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s the best place to go. They have better ducks than anywhere else. Number one ducks!” he said. “So plump! And with crispy skin.”

  Agnes looked at her father. “And how are you these days?”

  “I’m fine!” he declared. “I’m good! Just look at me.”He straightened his argyle sweater over his shirt and tie, then preened in front of the mirror, turning his head to one side and then the other.

  “You don’t play mahjong with the ladies,”she said, looking around the room. The furniture was mismatched—things that she had given him which she no longer had any use for. A chair from an old dining room table set. A desk with buttercup yellow legs. A massive dresser with gothic iron handles. It bothered Agnes to see her daughter’s stickers still on one of the drawers.

  “You know me. I’m not good at these sorts of games. I’m a scholar, I read things ... like this newspaper,”he said, waving it in the air. “Besides, they want to talk freely without me hanging about.”

  “What’s that doing in here?” Agnes asked. “Is that where she makes you sleep?” In the corner, between the bed and the closet, was a makeshift cot covered with a comforter folded in half like a sleeping bag.

  “The bed is too soft on my poor back,”her father said. He pressed his hand against his spine and winced. “This way is more comfortable.”

  Agnes sat down on the thin cot, which bounced lightly. “So this is how she treats you,”she said. “She won’t even let you into her bed.”

  “Her sleep isn’t good.”Her father cleared his throat, setting the newspaper down on his desk. “She often wakes up in the middle of the night.”He didn’t look at her as he fiddled with the pages, then folded the paper back together. Agnes felt an involuntary stirring in her chest. She had avoided him all this time, not wanting to know about his marriage because she had not wanted to know of his happiness. But she should have known Lily was the kind of person who took care only of herself.

  “How else is she behaving?” she asked. “Is she mistreating you in any way?”

  “No, no,”her father said hurriedly, shaking his head.

  “Is she a wife to you?” There was a pause as he looked at her. “You know what I mean,”she said.

  “She suffers a pain,”he offered hesitantly. “In her ovaries.”

  Agnes laughed. She got up and strode across the room, flinging the door open.

  “Don’t say anything,”her father said, following after her. “Don’t let her know what I’ve told you.”

  In the living room, the mahjong ladies were laughing and knocking over their walls, and Agnes had to raise her voice above theirs. “I’d like to talk to you,”she said to Lily.

  For a moment, Lily pretended not to hear, continuing her conversation with the white-haired lady beside her. Then she glanced over at Agnes, her face a mask of porcelain elegance except for one delicately lifted eyebrow. “What is it?”

  “Why aren’t you sleeping with my father?”

  The ladies’ voices fell to a murmur, their hands slowing down as they massaged the tiles along the tablecloth. They looked at Lily, who said nothing, though her smile seemed to be sewn on her lips.

  Her father clutched Agnes’s arm, but she refused to be silent. “You married him, didn’t you? He pays for your clothes and your hairdo and this roof over your head. He deserves something in return!”

  Her father laughed out loud and immediately put his hand over his mouth.

  Lily stood up, but the mahjong ladies remained in their seats as if drunk, their eyes glazed with the thrill of the unexpected. “Perhaps we can resume our games later,”Lily said. The one with the horn-rimmed glasses stood up slowly from the table, prompting the other two to rise. They looked as if they had been shaken out of a dream.

  “Oh, my heavens!” the one with the eyebrows exclaimed as Agnes shut the door on them.

  “Now,”Agnes said, turning toward Lily and waiting for her to speak.

  “I have an illness ...”Lily began. “A gynecological disorder that prevents me ...”Her gaze wandered to Agnes’s father, who hovered near the bedroom door. “Well, in truth, he’s an old man,”she said, her expression hardening. “His breath stinks like an open sewer. I can’t stand to smell his breath!” She snatched her scarf from the closet and wrapped it quickly around her head.

  “If you don’t sleep with him,”Agnes said, “I’ll send a letterto the immigration office. I’ll tell them that you only married him to get a green card!”

  Lily’s hands trembled as she put on her coat. “Do as you like,”she said, walking out the door.

  Her father looked deeply pained.

  “She won’t refuse you now,”Agnes told him.

  “What has happened?” her father said, his voice shaking. “Who are you? You’ve become someone ... someone completely without shame!”

  “I should open up a brothel,”Agnes declared. “That is exactly what I should do.”

  In February, her father called to tell her he wasn’t sure whether or not his nose was broken. There had been a snowstorm two days before, whole cars sheathed in ice, the roads filled with irregular lumps, oddly smooth and plastic, where the snow had melted and then frozen again. In this weather, her father and Lily had gone out walking to buy groceries at Da Hua Market. Lily had walked ahead, and when she was almost half a block away, she turned around and asked Agnes’s father to walk faster. He tried to keep up with her, but corns had formed along his toes and the soles of his feet. When he quickened his pace, he slipped on a deceptively bland patch of ice and hit his nose on the pavement.

  When Agnes saw her father—a dark welt on the bridge of his nose, a purple stain beginning to form under his eyes — she couldn’t help but feel a flood of anger and pity. You could have lived your last years in peace, she wanted to say to him. Instead she glanced at the closed bedroom door. “Is that where she’s hiding?”

  He looked at her morosely. “She left earlier because she knew you were coming.”

  In the hospital, Agnes noticed that her father walked gingerly down the hall, stepping on the balls of his feet without touching his toes or heels to the ground. An X-ray revealed that his nose was not broken after all. Agnes told the resident he was having problems walking.

  “That’s not an emergency,”the resident replied. Nevertheless, she left the room
to call in a podiatrist.

  Her father grew excited when he saw the podiatrist. He began speaking to him in Chinese.

  “I’m sorry,”the podiatrist said, shaking his head. “I’m Korean. Let’s take these off, shall we?” He lightly pulled off her father’s socks. There were red cone-shaped bumps along his toes and hard yellow mounds on the soles and heels of his feet. But what shocked Agnes most was the big toe on his left foot. The nail of this one toe looked a thousand years old to her, thick, encrusted, and wavy, black in the center and as impenetrable as a carapace.

  “Older people’s toenails are often like this,”the podiatrist said, seeing Agnes’s surprise.

  Her father seemed oblivious to their comments. He was squeezing his eyes shut as the podiatrist worked on his foot, slicing the calluses off bit by bit with a small blade. Her father winced and jerked his feet up occasionally. “Oh, it hurts,”he exclaimed to Agnes. “It’s unbearable!”

  “I know this isn’t pleasant,”the podiatrist said, looking at her father. He took a pumice stone out of his pocket and rubbed it gently against her father’s foot.

  When the podiatrist had finished paring away at his corns, her father covered his feet back up, slowly pulling on his socks and tying the laces of his shoes. He smiled at the podiatrist, yet because of his bruised nose, his face seemed pathetic and slightly grotesque. “It’s better beyond words,”he said.

  In the parking lot, her father showed off by walking at a sprightly pace in front of her. “It’s so much better now!” he kept exclaiming.

  The doctor had told Agnes that the corns would eventually come back, but she didn’t tell her father. She was thinking how well he had hidden the signs of old age from her. That big toe underneath his sock. Since the time she was a child, she and her father had lived their lives independent of each other. She had never demanded anything of him, and he had been too busy with his work at school, so that by the time she was six she had been as free as an adult. They left each other alone mostly because of her mother, whose sickness filled up the entire house and whose moods were inextricably bound with their own.