Then the TV showed both Mattie and the interview man talking without sound, and another man’s voice told us that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had returned two illegal aliens, a woman and her son, to their native El Salvador last week, and that Mattie “claimed” they had been taken into custody when they stepped off the plane in San Salvador and later were found dead in a ditch. I didn’t like this man’s tone. I had no idea how Mattie would know such things, but if she said it was so, it was.

But it was all garbled anyhow. Mrs. Parsons had been talking the whole time about not being able to sit in a certain type of chair or her back would go out, and then Lou Ann flew in the back door and called out, “Damn it, they’re not home. Oh.”

Mrs. Parsons made a little sniffing sound. “We’re here, if you want to know.”

“What program did you want to see?” Edna asked. “I hope we haven’t spoiled it by coming late?”

“That was it, we just saw it,” I said, though it seemed ridiculous. Thirty seconds and it was all over. “She’s a friend of ours,” I explained.

“All I could make out was some kind of trouble with illegal aliens and dope peddlers,” said Mrs. Parsons. “Dear, I need a pillow for the small of my back or I won’t be able to get out of bed tomorrow. Your cat has just made dirt in the other room.”

I went for a cushion and Lou Ann rushed to put the cat out. Estevan and Esperanza, I realized, had been sitting together on the ottoman the whole time, more or less on the fringe of all the commotion. I said, “I’d like you to meet my friends…”

“Steven,” Estevan said, “and this is my wife, Hope.” This was a new one on me.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Edna said.

Mrs. Parsons said, “And is this naked creature one of theirs? She looks like a little wild Indian.” She was talking about Turtle, who was not naked, although she didn’t exactly have a shirt on.

“We have no children,” Estevan said. Esperanza looked as though she had been slapped across the face.

“She’s mine,” I said. “And she is a little wild Indian, as a matter of fact. Why don’t we start dinner?” I picked up Turtle and stalked off into the kitchen, leaving Lou Ann to fend for herself. Why she would call this old pruneface a nice lady was beyond my mental powers. I did the last-minute cooking, which the recipe said you were supposed to do “at the table in a sizzling wok before the admiring guests.” A sizzling wok, my hind foot. Who did they think read those magazines?

A minute later Esperanza came into the kitchen and quietly helped set the table. I touched her arm. “I’m sorry,” I said.

It wasn’t until everyone came in and sat down to dinner that I really had a chance to look these women over. The fact that they couldn’t possibly have had time to dress up for dinner made their outfits seem to tell everything. (Though of course Mrs. Parsons would have had time to powder her nose and reach for the little white hat.) Edna even had red bobby pins in her hair, two over each ear. I couldn’t imagine where you would buy such items, a drugstore I suppose. I liked thinking about Edna finding them there on the rack, along with the purple barrettes and Oreo-cookie hair clips, and saying, “Why, look, Virgie Mae, red bobby pins! That’s my color.” Virgie Mae would be the type to sail past the douche aisle with her nose in the air and lecture the boy at the register for selling condoms.

Estevan produced a package, which turned out to be chopsticks. There were twenty or so of them wrapped together in crackly cellophane with black Chinese letters down one side. “A gift for the dishwasher,” he said, handing each of us a pair of sticks. “You use them once, then throw them away.” I couldn’t think how he knew we were going to have Chinese food, but then I remembered running into him a day or two ago in the Lee Sing Market, where we’d discussed a product called “wood ears.” The recipe called for them, but I had my principles.

“The dishwasher thanks you,” I said. I noticed Lou Ann whisking a pair out of Dwayne Ray’s reach, and could hear the words “put his eyes out” as plainly as if she’d said them aloud. Dwayne Ray started squalling, and Lou Ann excused herself to go put him to bed.

“What is it, eating sticks?” Edna ran her fingers along the thin shafts. “It sounds like a great adventure, but I’ll just stick to what I know, if you don’t mind. Thank you all the same.” I noticed that Edna ate very slowly, with gradual, exact movements of her fork. Mrs. Parsons said she wasn’t game for such foolishness either.

“I never said it was foolishness,” Edna said.

The rest of us gave it a try, spearing pieces of chicken and looping green-pepper rings and chasing the rice around our plates. Even Esperanza tried. Estevan said we were being too aggressive.

“They are held this way.” He demonstrated, holding them like pencils in one hand and clicking the ends together. I loved his way of saying, “It is” and “They are.”

Turtle was watching me, imitating. “Don’t look at me, I’m not the expert.” I pointed at Estevan.

Lou Ann came back to the table. “Where’d you learn how to do that?” she asked Estevan.

“Ah,” he said, “this is why I like chopsticks: I work in a Chinese restaurant. I am the dishwasher.”

“I didn’t know that. How long have you worked there?” I asked, realizing that I had no business thinking I knew everything about Estevan. His whole life, really, was a mystery to me.

“One month,” he said. “I work with a very kind family who speak only Chinese. Only the five-year-old daughter speaks English. The father has her explain to me what I must do. Fortunately, she is very patient.”

Mrs. Parsons muttered that she thought this was a disgrace. “Before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America.”

“Virgie, mind your manners,” Edna said.

“Well, it’s the truth. They ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs.”

“Virgie,” Edna said.

I felt like I’d sat on a bee. If Mama hadn’t brought me up to do better, I think I would have told that old snake to put down her fork and get her backside out the door. I wanted to scream at her: This man you are looking at is an English teacher. He did not come here so he could wash egg foo yung off plates and take orders from a five-year-old.

But Estevan didn’t seem perturbed, and I realized he must hear this kind of thing every day of his life. I wondered how he could stay so calm. I would have murdered somebody by now, I thought, would have put a chopstick to one of the many deadly uses that only Lou Ann could imagine for it.

“Can I get anybody anything?” Lou Ann asked.

“We’re fine,” Edna said, obviously accustomed to being Virgie Mae’s public-relations department. “You children have made a delightful meal.”

Esperanza pointed at Turtle. It was the first time I ever saw her smile, and I was struck with what a lovely woman she was when you really connected. Then the smile left her again.

Turtle, wielding a chopstick in each hand, had managed to pick up a chunk of pineapple. Little by little she moved it upward toward her wide-open mouth, but the sticks were longer than her arms. The pineapple hung in the air over her head and then fell behind her onto the floor. We laughed and cheered her on, but Turtle was so startled she cried. I picked her up and held her on my lap.

“Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild Indian story about heaven and hell.” Mrs. Parsons made a prudish face, and Estevan went on. “If you go to visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and jabbering,” he looked extra hard at Mrs. Parsons, “but they cannot get a bite of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?”