“Yes. She let it happen.” Valerie leaned forward, her chin in her hands.

“She was a failure,” I said.

“As what?”

“As a mother.”

“What else?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What else was she a failure at?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Wasn’t she a failure as a wife?”

“Oh.”

“Think about it.”

Why was everyone always telling me to think about things? “I guess so,” I said. “But why did she stay with him then?”

“Why do you think?”

“She thinks the ancestors will curse you if you get a divorce. She was afraid, I guess.”

I wrote out a check for five hundred dollars to my sister, put “Loan” in the memo section, and mailed it to Woodside Avenue, with MS. MARTHA WANG in block letters so Ma wouldn’t open the envelope. I didn’t know why I did it. It wasn’t like I owed her anything. But she was my sister, after all.

A few days later Marty called. She didn’t mention the money.

“I’m coming into the city tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s have lunch. My treat.”

“Where?”

“You live near Chinatown, don’t you?”

“Fine with me.”

“Good,” she said, sounding like a little kid. “We’ll have bao zi.”

I went down early so I could stop at Pearl Paint beforehand. Since I’d gotten back I’d been deliberately avoiding it, but Pearl was the best and cheapest in Manhattan for art supplies, so I guessed sooner was better than later. I was apprehensive. What if back in February they’d caught me on tape walking out of the store with a bulge in my parka, or worse, actually slipping the tubes of paint into my pocket? When it came right down to it, I didn’t have my sister’s nerve. I put on the largest sunglasses I owned and the red lipstick I’d bought for pool nights, tied my hair up in an uncharacteristically high pony-tail. We all have our ways of courting luck, although maybe this was more of a disguise.

I needed brushes, not beautiful calligraphy ones like my uncle and aunt had given me, but the cheapest kind of oil brushes, which I could abuse and leave paint on overnight. I was going through a sloppy stage, working until the small hours of the morning, when I was too exhausted to clean up. There were piles of red-stained rags all over my studio, and it seemed I could never get my hands completely clean. By then there was no doubt in my mind that what I was doing was calligraphy. Sometimes when I squinted my eyes I could make out familiar characters from Chinese class I thought I had forgotten. The stocky pitchfork strokes of the word for mountain, the delicate voluptuous curves of the word for heart.

Nothing happened at Pearl. I just walked in and up those precarious stairs like millions of others before me, chose my brushes, paid, and left. The saleswoman didn’t even meet my eyes. The whole time my pulse was rabbiting as crazily as it had the last time I’d been there. As soon as I got outside I felt my knees buckle, and I had to go into a coffee shop so I could sit down and have a cup of tea.

The block where my sister wanted us to meet had a string of those tiny jewelry stores that my parents used to hurry us by when, as kids, we would be caught by the displays of rings. Marty seemed paler than the last time I’d seen her. For once I was the tanner one. She was still wearing a bandage. Our arms are our weakness, I thought.

“You look very fifties,” my sister said. She peered down the block. “I think it’s the third store to the right, that one.”

“What are you up to?”

“The best prices in town,” Marty said. “I bet you didn’t know they’re pawnshops too.”

“No, I didn’t. What are you thinking of pawning?”

“What else? Jewelry.”

She had a little leather zippered bag, from which she withdrew her stash and placed it carefully, item by item, on the piece of black velvet the proprietor had laid over the counter. I noticed she was wearing the pink cameo ring. I hoped she wasn’t going to sell that.

The proprietor, a grouchy old man, was impassive, grunting every so often. “No good” is what he said to most of what she showed him. And they were beautiful things, some of them. An aquamarine ring in a white gold setting, an opera-length necklace of jade beads, a half dozen hammered silver cuffs. But the man looked unimpressed until she produced a pair of gold grape-size earrings in the shape of lovers’ knots, each trimmed with a tiny line of diamonds following the curves. He picked one up to peer at it through his loupe. “Cartier,” my sister said.

I could picture her strolling down Fifth Avenue with Dennis, both of them dressed in leather jackets and jeans. It would have been early in the relationship, maybe right after they’d moved in together. At the comer of Fifty-second he’d turn to her and say casually, “Sweetie, do you feel like stopping in here?” And so they’d push through those monstrously heavy doors with their entwined CC handles into the sepia interior, intimate and heavily carpeted, so unlike Tiffany’s with its light and sparkle.

The proprietor gave her $350 for the things he wanted. This seemed criminally low to me, and when we were out on the street again I told her: “You should have bargained him up.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about any of that stuff. I just want to make my first month’s rent and security, and this will do it, along with what you loaned me.”

“You already found a place?”

“Yeah. A share, on the Upper West Side.”

“Why didn’t you ask Ma for the money?”

Marty rolled her eyes. “She’s gotten it into her head that I’m staying in New Haven. She’d throw a fit if she knew I’d even been looking for an apartment.”

It occurred to me that my sister probably didn’t have very many close women friends. In fact maybe I was it.

I’d forgotten exactly where the bao zi shop was, and Marty didn’t have a clue, so we ended up going down a couple of wrong streets. Since it was Saturday there were lots of tourists mixed among the natives and as always I felt displaced, not being either. My sister made her way through the crowd confidently, somehow blending in, maybe because she was short. But I noticed that she distinctly favored her right arm, and I wondered how long it would take until she didn’t. Would it be until the bandage was off, or a week after that, a month, a year, or would it become a tic, a vulnerability, the way she’d edge her left shoulder forward as she walked?

When we finally found the place I was shocked to see that they had changed it all around, refurbished it. The old Formica counter and stools had been replaced by little cafe tables, and you ordered from a waitress instead of the cheerful baker behind the counter. But there were still those old glass cases by the door, all steamed up with warm pastries, and I recognized the baker as he emerged from the kitchen shouting orders at a boy pushing a cart full of trays.

Marty gave our order in the sketchy Mandarin she’d picked up in a semester at the University of Vermont. It always made me jealous that she had finished college and I hadn’t, that she was naturally more clever than me though she never studied. After the waitress had left, my sister opened up the zippered case and we inspected what the jeweler had rejected.

“You want any of this?”

“What about the cameo ring?”

“I like that, I’m not going to get rid of it. It was Nai-nai’s, you know. Ma gave it to me.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I deserve something from her, after all, she was always so hard on me.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I think she saw herself in me.”

“Oh, come on, Mar, you’re not a thing like her.”

“I look exactly like her.”

“You look a little like her.”

My sister pursed up her mouth and said in a high, choppy voice: “You girls should be proud, you have Han ancestors,” and the imitation was so perfect I had to laugh. She laid her left hand in front of her on the table, spreading her fingers out like a star, and we admired the precisely cut ivory silhouette on its dusty pink background. It was a Victorian lady’s profile with a small bun at the nape. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been commissioned especially for my grandmother. Sitting there with my sister, it was as if I could feel Nai-nai’s stern eye on us, her disapproval at Marty’s punk haircut. “That lipstick wrong color on you!” she’d say to me. “Not feminine enough.” My sister took out her Gauloises and offered me one. I shook my head. “I’m trying to quit.”