When Mei-Wan, Margarite’s new next-door neighbor, moved in, Margarite told her the story of the man whose black hair turned red after he lost his true love.

 

“His hair was as black as yours,” said Margarite.

 

Mei-Wan said nothing. She was a quiet girl. When she came to visit, she sat in the pink chair across from the sofa. Somehow the chair was right for a Chinese person, Margarite thought. Black hair on shining pink, that olive skin, those limpid almost lashless eyes. Mei-Wan could be a queen sitting there, if it weren’t for her clothes. Margarite intended to have a word with the girl one day about her clothes. Matching things wrong, bad shoes, old stretched-out dresses that had been cheap and poorly made even in their new days.

 

Margarite continued the story. “The blackest hair you ever saw.” Mei-Wan nodded faintly. “Then the girl he was in love with had to move away with her family. She was a real pretty girl, real wholesome. Big green eyes and dark brown hair, not as dark as his but pretty dark. At any rate, she moved away with her family, to New Jersey.”

 

Mei-Wan shuffled in the chair. Margarite thought she smelled the drifting scent of the girl’s perfume: orchid. A bit sweet, but pleasant nonetheless. “Am I talking too fast?” she asked.

 

A blush tinged Mei-Wan’s cheeks. She would do anything to avoid talking; her English was very weak.

 

“So it wasn’t a week after this girl moved to New Jersey that I saw her young man at the IGA. There was a big red streak in his bangs. I told him he shouldn’t be going around with dye in his hair, and he said that he didn’t put dye in it, it was just growing in that way.” Margarite paused; should she offer Mei-Wan something? “You want a Coke?”

 

“Thank you please,” said Mei-Wan.

 

Margarite rose to go fix the Coke. She thought it peculiar that the girl would come to visit her like this. She’d come last week, too. Margarite had opened the door only halfway because rain was sloshing all over the porch. Mei-Wan was standing there looking shy and nervous. Her umbrella was pink with pictures of long-necked birds on it. Margarite had her leave it on the porch. It turned out the girl didn’t even want anything, just came for a visit.

 

Margarite came back into the living room and handed Mei-Wan the Coke. She resettled herself back onto the sofa. For a second, she saw the apartment as the girl might be seeing it at that very moment: dark and dusty, faded furniture, that old mirror with white spots. And the smell? Lemon and wood, Margarite hoped. No grease or sour towels like the apartments downtown or the ones next door.

 

“At any rate, a couple of weeks later I saw this young man again. This time it was at the lake, it was July by then and he was out with his family at Scott Lake. And would you believe it but his hair was completely red by this time?”

 

Mei-Wan raised her eyebrows somberly.

 

“And he said he didn’t dye it either. Said it just turned that way all on its own. But a neighbor of mine, I don’t think you know her, she said that what happened was that he got rust in his water somehow. Rust will turn your hair orange. You’d better get water softener. So I would have believed this neighbor of mine if it weren’t for the fact that a year later this girl he was in love with comes back into town. And would you believe that her hair was red, too?”

 

Mei-Wan nodded.

 

“So the two of them were going around, both of them with bright red hair. They said it was missing each other so much was what caused their hair to turn red. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?” Margarite laughed and Mei-Wan smiled her polite, timid smile.

 

“They’re married to each other now. But they aren’t the same as they were before their hair turned red. There’s something different about them now. They’re sadder, quieter. But who knows what to blame for that? My friend Sheila still is convinced that it was rust in the water, but who knows? Maybe missing somebody that much can cause your hair to turn colors.”

 

Mei-Wan rose up in her seat. “If my husband leave me, then maybe my hair would change. Maybe much of me would change.” Her voice was high and soft.

 

Mei-Wan was young, maybe around twenty-one. Her husband was a little older, maybe thirty. Both of them had just moved from China because the husband was teaching science in the high school as part of a teacher-exchange program. Mei-Wan’s husband was called Houng Lee. Margarite secretly disliked Mei-Wan’s husband; she thought he bossed the girl around too much. When they’d driven home from the church potluck, Mei-Wan was sitting in the backseat and he was in the front. Margarite hadn’t the nerve to ask the girl why this had happened, because on other occasions she had seen the two of them in the car, they’d both been in the front seat. At the potluck, Mei-Wan and her husband had brought noodles and vegetables in a big silver wok. Everyone was very polite about the fact that no one else had brought such an unusual item. Margarite herself had brought potato salad, and her friend Sheila had brought tuna casserole made with skim milk to cut down on the fat.

 

Houng Lee was one of the shortest men that Margarite had ever met. But still, he was taller than Mei-Wan. They looked like a doll couple when they walked together. Margarite hadn’t been all that happy when they first moved into the apartment next door. She’d heard things about Chinese people: weren’t they communist? Margarite herself wasn’t active in politics, but she was a sure-fire republican at heart, and a communist-hater as well. But now that this girl was coming to visit her, how she could help but be polite?

 

Margarite rose and went to the window. The trees had flared up in their autumn cloaks. “Aren’t the trees beautiful?” She picked up a basket of laundry she had been working on when the girl had come by. She felt rude tending to a household chore while she had a visitor, but Mei-Wan had been here over an hour and Margarite couldn’t entertain her all day. She sat down on the sofa and began to sort her socks into a pile on the footstool. “Do you two have a washer and dryer over there?” she asked.

 

Mei-Wan nodded.

 

“What time does Mr. Lee get home?”

 

Mei-Wan looked down to the floor. “He comes after teaching classes is over.”

“About three, then? School lets out at three.”

 

“Yes,” she replied. “About three.”

 

Margarite checked the clock on her buffet. “It’s almost three now,” she said. “He’ll be coming home soon.”

 

The girl nodded. “Soon,” she said, and stood up to go. She was wearing white sandals with sheer pantyhose — it was the wrong type of dress for the season, and didn’t she know that a girl should never wear hose with sandals? Maybe they didn’t have that rule in China. Margarite fixed her gaze onto the girl’s abdomen, checking for any signs of pregnancy. She’d heard that the Chinese were allowed one child per couple.

 

“Well, watch out on those front steps,” Margarite said, rising up, remembering the ache in her hips as she walked the girl to the front foyer. “Lord,” she said, opening the screen door and waving the girl toward her umbrella. “I won’t even be leaving the house until this rain is done. No sense risking a fall.” She rubbed her hip bones. “I had surgery two years ago,” she said, even though it was clear from Mei-Wan’s blank expression that “surgery” was an unknown word. “Five hours under general anesthesia. Another two weeks in the hospital, and all of it for nothing. First they were going to do implants. Artificial hips, like Liz Taylor has.”

 

Mei-Wan was buttoning her raincoat, her eyes focused on the porch’s wooden slats. “Then they decided after they cut me open that I didn’t need them after all.” Margarite pointed to the ridge of hip bone that jutted out on the right side of her body. “Right here’s where they wired one bone to the other. Just ordinary wire. They showed it to me when it was all over. I told them I felt like a turkey with that wire holding me together.” She chuckled and paused to see if Mei-Wan would get the joke.

 

“Thanksgiving turkey?” the girl asked.

 

“Yes,” Margarite exclaimed. “They’re holding me together with wire, just like the legs on a Thanksgiving turkey.”

 

After Mei-Wan left the porch, Margarite went to the window to watch the girl plod up the wooden steps to her apartment. She was inside a little more than a minute when her husband’s little Toyota car pulled in the driveway. The driver’s side door opened and Houng Lee stepped out, small and neat in black pants and a bright blue jacket. He opened the trunk and removed a leather briefcase and red and white umbrella. He went up the stairs with his dark head bobbing. The door was opened for him. A few minutes later he emerged with the dog, a gray terrier, on a leather leash.

 

Margarite sighed and moved away from the window, heading toward the kitchen. “Home all day and the girl doesn’t take time to walk the dog,” she said aloud, talking to her house. When no one was around she had to talk to the house or she would go out of her mind. She wasn’t the type to sit around having silent thoughts. If Mei-Wan wasn’t a Chinese, Margarite would have wanted her company as much as possible.

 

In the kitchen, she gathered ingredients for the baked squash casserole she wanted to make for dinner. There was the buttercup squash, round and dark green, a box of brown sugar, butter, pecans, and the secret ingredient: corn meal. For the main dish she’d have the ham she purchased that morning at IGA. The meat man was someone she didn’t recognize and he had cheated by cutting her too much fat and bone. Everyone was always cheating everyone these days. “People cheating their own mothers,” she mumbled, opening the freezer door. The ham was froze up against a Styrofoam sheet and Margarite had to run it under hot water to get it off. The phone rang just as she was getting it loose. “Get that,” she said to the house. She had no intention of answering. The only ones who called her were telemarketers for the long-distance phone companies and the newspaper.

 

Once the casserole and ham were in the oven, she went back to folding the laundry. The phone rang again and she ignored it. Daylight faded and she flicked on a lamp, taking time to gaze out the window over at the Chinese couple’s apartment. Their flowered curtains were closed and the dog was sleeping on the porch. The apartment window was dark as if they weren’t at home.

 

“Car’s in the driveway,” Margarite said, returning to her chair and finding a towel to fold. She’d once worked at a hotel laundry and liked folding towels more than clothes. She had fond memories of standing over a bin of clean white towels that said “Bridgewater Hotel” on the side. Her job had been to wash and fold them. Another woman did the sheets, but was paid more. That had all been in the year after she thought she was going to leave Stuart to his own rotten self. But then he died of pancreas cancer and Margarite inherited everything — stroke of luck it was. Every pinched penny, every inch of the house, every weed in the backyard garden. So she’d come back and lived without having to ever work again. Ten years it had been now, and she was going on as strong as Stuart’s stocks and bank account. Their daughter, Linda, was married and living in California.

 

“Ten years,” Margarite said. The phone rang and she picked it up.

 

“Hmmm,” she said, rather than “Hello.” Anyone who cared would know she answered the phone this way to put off telemarketers.

 

“Hello,” said the voice. It was Mei-Wan. “I come visit now?”

 

The girl was just here and wanted to come again. Margarite found something strange in that. “Who is this?” she asked loudly.

 

“Mei-Wan,” said the voice, picking up confidence in speaking her own name. “Can I come please?”

 

“Lord have mercy,” Margarite said. “You were just over here, Girl. It’s enough to make an old lady tired.”

 

Margarite pictured Mei-Wan standing, with her confused look, in her dark kitchen of the little apartment. “Wait until tomorrow,” Margarite said, sharpening her vowels in case the girl couldn’t understand. “Tomorrow you can come again.” With that, she hung up her phone and rubbed her ear where the receiver had been. She stood and looked out the window at the darkened apartment. The dog was still out.

 

Margarite’s hip began to ache. That was Stuart from the grave. His ghost gave her that ache. This was why she had the surgery — to get him out of her. “Being married to someone is like,” she paused, listening to her ham casserole sizzle in the oven. “It’s like having two skins. No, that’s not it. I don’t know what it’s like. Can’t explain it.” She stood up from her chair and pulled out a towel from the basket. This one was ruby-red, part of a gift set sent by Linda last Christmas. Maybe she would teach Mei-Wan to fold towels, to cook turkeys, to do accounting. That would be the nice thing to do. The Christian thing. One thing she couldn’t do was teach the girl how to get the ghost out. She’d yet to learn that herself.

 

The next day was Margarite’s monthly visit to the doctor; as usual, she stopped by the public library on her way home. When she returned, she found Mei-Wan leaning against the front pillar. “Goodness, Child,” Margarite said, rushing up the steps, patting her pockets for her key chain. “You’ve been out here waiting for me?”

 

“You said I come today.”

 

“Yes.” Margarite said, inserting her key into the door. The cool air inside the house lilted out with a smell so comfortable and familiar that Margarite wanted to take an afternoon nap in it, maybe dream about times long gone, or more specifically, the long stretch of time that she and Stuart had lived here together. A time when she had been young and her body had been more a mystery to her than the hulking, hurting mass of flesh and rubbery bone it had become — a big old suitcase to carry with her everywhere. “Yes, I did say that,” she waved the girl in, removed her key from the door and replaced it in her pocket. “But so soon?” She was carrying her white canvas tote bag filled of books from the library. On this trip she had chosen books only from the health section, including two cookbooks. She heaved the tote bag into the closet.

 

“My husband say I can come here all I want,” Mei-Wan said.

 

Margarite was shocked. “Well, he did, did he?” Then she didn’t know what to say, so “I’ll be,” was all she could manage. She knew she should be angry, or insulted, but she was only tired. Her joints always ached when she came back from a doctor’s appointment, but she knew it was only pain she herself had created in order to have something to talk to the doctor about. In her mind she called them “hunger pains” even though they had nothing to do with food. She only wished they would go away when she got home. “Well, you might as well sit down,” she said to the girl. “Sit in your pink chair and I’ll fix us something to eat.”

 

In the kitchen, she decided to make tuna fish. Her new electric can opener whirred and spun a neat circle cut. She had every new appliance a person could own, including a juice machine, a yogurt maker, and a food dehydrator. She had to spend all her money on something. There was no one to leave it to other than Linda, who wouldn’t make good use of it. Margarite had considered her daughter a spendthrift ever since that time, years ago, when Linda had spend several thousand dollars to take a cruise to the Bahamas. Stuart would have agreed with her on that one. He was miserly. Or he had been.

 

The day he died, she had been working at the hotel laundry, folding sheets into squares. Nobody had known where to find her, so she hadn’t learned about the heart attack until she was back at her room. She was living in the hotel for free as part of her salary, and she enjoyed only having to pick up after herself in one little room. She liked the smell of new carpet and cheap soap.

 

On this day, she only had time to change into her evening clothes when the phone rang. It was Stuart’s boss, Ed Drew. She heard four words: heart attack hospital dying before she dropped the phone and ran down the hall, clutching her own heart for fear her soul would jump outside it, trying to find Stuart wherever he was going to exist next. Margarite knew from church that it was impossible to die, but — in truth — she didn’t believe in death or in heaven. In her opinion, life was hell and everyone was living it over and over, like a movie rerun.

 

She added more mayonnaise to the tuna and portioned four slices of bread from the loaf of whole wheat, wondering as she spread the tuna why Mei-Wan was coming over so much. There were two plates in the dish drainer, washed from yesterday’s lunch. From the cupboard she removed two glasses and went to the icebox for the tea she had made last night. Here she was wasting good tea on this girl, and not getting much in return.

 

“Got us some good iced tea,” she said, entering the living room, or the parlor, whichever it was called. There had been endless discussions about the topic at church.

 

Mei-Wan was wearing a white dress belted with something that looked like the strap of a Mexican purse. She was wearing open-toed sandals, the same dingy white pair she always wore, with sheer hose.

 

“You know one thing,” Margarite said, handing her the plate and glass, “when I was a girl about your age there were lots of rules.”

 

Mei-Wan nodded politely and sipped her tea.

 

“There were rules for dating, rules for going out to movies, or parades, or what have you. Rules for how you should dress on those occasions.” At this point, Margarite stopped and took a bite from her sandwich. The salty taste of tuna brought a warm rush to her face. She’d heard that lots of people lost their taste as they grew older, but hers had improved.

 

“Rules about what was in good taste and what wasn’t,” she chewed and swallowed. “I imagine back in China you all have rules for that sort of thing.”

 

Mei-Wan didn’t understand that she was being asked a question. She was picking at her sandwich, examining the insides as if tuna salad was nothing she’d ever seen before.

 

“You don’t like pickles?” Margarite asked. “I always put pickles in the tuna. Some people like it, others don’t. Do you all have pickles in China?” Talking to the girl the past few weeks, Margarite had learned a great deal about China, and it wasn’t what she thought it would be. Even though she’d never given China all that much thought, she’d somehow pictured it as a big field of rice pickers, with a rock garden or two thrown in.

 

“Pickles,” Mei-Wan said. “Yes, pickles.” There seemed to be more that should have been added to this, but, once again, her vocabulary was coming up short.

“Seems like your husband Mr. Lee ought to be good at English,” Margarite commented, “and would teach it to you.”

 

Mei-Wan had nothing to say.

 

“Do you and him talk a lot?” Margarite asked. “Stuart and I didn’t talk as much as we should have. It wasn’t my fault, though.” She sensed that Mei-Wan was listening harder than usual. “I should have known when I met him that he wasn’t a big talker, or that he wasn’t one to have conversations. He only spoke if he had something to say. For him, talking wasn’t important.” Margarite nodded.

 

Mei-Wan did not respond, but took a gingerly bite from her sandwich.

 

“When will you all be going back to China?” Margarite asked. Her own sandwich was on the plate, only halfway gone. She was suddenly without an appetite, but the tea was good, sweet and fragrant in her mouth. Mei-Wan was drinking hers too, and Margarite remembered the expression “all the tea in China,” as something to say when you wouldn’t do something for even a large reward.

 

“When will we go to China?” Mei-Wan asked. Her little black eyebrows raised up in alarm. “We live here now.”

 

“You mean, you’re never going back to China?” Not for all the tea in China? It was now a singsong in the back of her mind. We wouldn’t go back to China for all the tea in China.

 

“We live here. In the U-S-A,” Mei-Wan spit out the initials, her eyes opening wider.

 

“Well, OK, then, I don’t know why I was thinking that you all were not going to be here for long.” Margarite stood up to carry her plate to the kitchen.

 

“I stay right here,” Mei-Wan said. She tapped her foot on the floor; the echo from the sandal’s thin sole echoed against the walls.

 

“Yes, Ma’am,” Margarite said. Then it dawned on her. “You mean, you’ll stay here, right here?”

 

“Right here.” Mei-Wan’s eyes were glossy, and then a big tear flopped onto her cheek. “My husband say I don’t come back.” Then she was sobbing silently, still sitting straight up as ever, her little hands clutching both sides of the arm chair.

 

“He said what?”

 

“He say not to come back. Again. Go away forever.” Mei-Wan’s nose was running. She lifted the hem of her skirt and wiped it clean.

 

“Well, what on Earth has gotten into him? What’s the cause of all this?” Margarite asked.

 

“The dog. He say I walk the dog.” Mei-Wan sniffed. “I say, it his dog to walk.”

 

“Lord have mercy,” Margarite said. She might have gotten for a box of tissue, or a warm rag but her bones were dead tired. “Well, I reckon you can stay here for a while.” She flopped back in her chair and suppressed a sigh. “But he’ll get over it in time enough. Once he gets to realizing that he’ll be cooking his own dinner and eating it alone, and sleeping alone, the dog walking won’t seem like such a big deal after all. Why, give him a few weeks and he’ll be begging and scraping for you just like he was a dog himself.” Margarite nodded, sure she was speaking the truth. “That’s just the way it happened to me,” she went on. “I left my husband high and dry and went off to live on my own. Now, he didn’t tell me to leave like yours did. I did this of my own accord. The hotel was hiring maids, and I applied. They gave me a room to live in, and some tickets for meals. I had everything all worked out. Then Stuart died of some heart problem and I had to come back here.”

 

Mei-Wan was done crying. The blotches on her cheeks and neck had cleared up and her nose was dry. She looked prettier than Margarite had ever seen her.

 

“Just think of this as a turning point in your life,” Margarite told the girl. In her mind she was already thinking of how she’d clean out the spare room and get the bed ready. They’d have to clear out the old dresser Margarite had put in there the time she’d taken up refinishing of furniture. She’d not even started on it except to lift the corners to slide newspaper beneath. “There’s an old dresser in the bedroom we’ll have to move,” she said.

 

They were silent for a second because they both heard Huong Lee coming home. The tires of his Toyota crunched against the driveway gravel. The engine fluttered quiet, and the door was opened and closed. Footsteps were heard against the wooden stairs. The dog barked a single, perplexed bark, as if asking “where were you?”

 

Mei-Wan’s slitted eyelids pulled open wider in the middle. “I get my clothes,” she said.

 

“Why not wait until later?” Margarite asked. “Wait until he goes out. Then you won’t have to talk to him.”

 

“No,” Mei-Wan said. She jumped to her feet. The hem of her white dress dropped to her knees, skimming her calves. “I go now. Right now.”

 

“If you go now you’ll have to confront him,” Margarite said. But the girl was heading for the door, which she pulled open in a uncharacteristic swoop of grace. Margarite willed her bones from their aching and rose up from her seat, following the girl onto the porch, watching her as she stepped over the lawn sprinkler, which was off, and as she circled around the Toyota and came to a dead stop at the foot of the stairs. Huong Lee appeared in his blue jacket, an empty leash in hand, leaving the door open behind him. Margarite could only imagine the flies they would have now.

 

No words were spoken as Mei-Wan climbed up the stairs. Her sandals hit the wood with little clomps like pony hooves. Huong Le was watching. The dog wagged his tail and leaned forward on his chain, sniffing her ankles when she reached the top. The couple was eye to eye, with the dog between them, a sight that lent itself to easy fantasies in Margarite’s mind.

 

In the first fantasy, they would embrace, forgive each other, hook the dog to the leash, and go off for a nice walk. In the second fantasy, Huong Lee slapped Mei-Wan clear across the face, resulting in Margarite having to go to the girl’s rescue. The third fantasy is what actually happened. Mei-Wan circled around her husband without a word, entered the opened apartment door, and closed it behind her. Huong Lee bent over, hooked the dog to the leash and bobbed down the stairs, nodding to Margarite as he passed.

 

“You should be nicer to your wife, Mr. Lee,” she called out, holding tight to the stair railing. “You’ll be sorry when she’s gone.” But the little man kept on walking down the street.

 

Back inside, Margarite opened the door to the spare bedroom and took stock. She had butterflies in her stomach just thinking of all that needed to be done. Maybe there was a God after all. He was keeping her here for good reasons. She could cook and take care of Mei-Wan for as long as she needed. She could help save a marriage, teach a young person what love was about. It was about yanking one another around until something gave in, it was about seeing yourself for real and letting yourself change. It was about rust in the water.