As the oldest female in the house, I should have been doing most of the housework, but from the time I was a small girl I’d shown myself to be incapable of learning any domestic task Ma had tried to teach me. I burned myself whenever I tried to cook, and even after I’d swept the floor as well as I could, Ma had to do it again. Luckily, Pa was a great cook and we sometimes brought home leftovers from the restaurant. He didn’t seem to mind the way I was, although Uncle Henry and Aunt Monica often reprimanded him for spoiling me.

As the three of us sat around the fold-up table, I stirred my soup to cool it, first clockwise, then counter.

Pa shook his head. “Some say for good luck, you need to stir clockwise. Some say counterclockwise. But doing both at random is definitely wrong.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just had something on my mind. Pa, do you think someone could fill in for me tomorrow afternoon?”

He looked up, concerned. “Why? Are you sick?”

“Job interview.” I knew we needed every cent the two of us could bring in together. A wave of guilt washed over me at the thought of losing good money for this interview, when I wouldn’t be hired anyway. I started shaking my head. “I don’t need to—”

“No, no,” Pa said. “That’s good, very good. You deserve a better life. What is the company?”

Lisa and I exchanged glances. “Computers,” she said.

“They’re very well known,” I added. We both knew that Pa would worry if he knew it was a dance studio. Were they doing indecent forms of dance? Would men there want to corrupt his daughter? And so on.

“Ah, good,” Pa said. “I will go to restaurant and tell Mr. Hu today.”

—

An hour later, Pa left to do the shopping and chat with his friends in Gossip Park, our nickname for the large park in Chinatown. Lisa and I used the time to try to find something I could wear to the interview. We searched through all of the closets, and I thought it was a good thing Pa never threw anything away. In the end, buried in a garbage bag filled with clothing that had been given to us, we found a red dress. It was so long on me that I had to belt it around my hips to make it reach midcalf instead of my ankles.

My hair was not in the best shape. I’d recently allowed Mrs. Tam, who owned the beauty salon on our street, to have her way with it.

“I give you a big discount because we are neighbors,” she said. “I know how to make girls beautiful. Trust me.”

So despite the expense, I’d let Mrs. Tam do my hair instead of having Lisa chop it off the way she usually did. Mrs. Tam layered my hair in hopes of “bringing out its natural curl.” With my thick, coarse hair, I wound up with a big ball of frizz on my head, chunks sticking up all over the place. At that point, Mrs. Tam wanted to perm my hair to make it look better, but thankfully, I didn’t have the money for that.

“I found it!” Lisa pulled a long piece of red cloth out of an old suitcase. She came over to me and wound it all the way around my head, hiding most of the haircut.

Together, we looked at me in the mirror.

“Does the scarf match the dress?” I asked.

Lisa squinted. “Almost.”

“I guess it’s close enough.” The big, sacklike red dress covered my entire body and it seemed as if I was wearing a red turban on my head, with the ends of the scarf trailing down behind me like a tail. “Do you think it’s too much red?”

“No,” said Lisa loyally, “you look like a gypsy, Charlie.”

I gave her a quick hug. Then we stared down at my shoes. I was wearing my sturdy dishwasher shoes.

“They’ll be fine,” I said.

“I think you have to wear high heels,” she said. “Isn’t that what they dance in? It might make a better impression. And you have such pretty feet.”

“Smarty-pants,” I muttered as I got down on my hands and knees to search in the back of the closet again. Lisa knew my weaknesses. My feet, narrow and arched, were the one thing I’d inherited from Ma. Lisa used to call them “Cinderella feet” before I started wearing the sturdy shoes I needed at the restaurant.

I finally dug out the only pair of pumps I owned. The heels were scuffed and the black vinyl surface was peeling off at the toes to reveal light gray patches underneath.

“Wait.” Lisa rummaged through the kitchen drawer until she pulled out a black permanent marker.

I used a pair of scissors to cut off the bits that were sticking out. Then I started drawing on the shoes with the black marker, coloring in all of the gray and scuffed parts. When I was done, the shoes still appeared awful if you looked closely. The colored-in areas had a completely different texture from the rest of the material, but from a distance I thought they looked all right.

“They’re great now,” Lisa said.

“You’re just worried I’m going to chicken out,” I said.

“Are you?”

I glanced at the photo of Ma, posed in her one-legged stance, then I looked at the redness that was me in the mirror. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Two

I could already tell in the elevator that I was out of my league. The building was on the Upper East Side, a world away from downtown Chinatown. I squeezed myself into the corner, trying to avoid my blurred reflection on the metal walls. The man standing across from me had streaks of gray in his hair and the shiniest black shoes I’d ever seen. His pants had been perfectly pressed. I was dripping with sweat, but he seemed collected and fresh in his crisp shirt. I took a deep breath as the doors slid open. We stepped out of the elevator together and he allowed me to precede him down the carpeted hallway to the gilded double doors. Another blast of air-conditioning hit me as he held a door open for me. Some sort of fast classical music was playing.

“Oh, my dear Nina,” he said to the young woman sitting behind the reception desk. He had a hint of a Southern drawl. “Are they still torturing you like this?”

She looked up, one hand clutching her long brown hair, and blew out a sigh. “Hi, Keith, I can’t take this anymore. I just disconnected someone by accident again. Go on in, Simone’s already in the ballroom.”

The man named Keith laughed, then glanced at me. “Maybe she’ll rescue you.”

Nina looked at me as Keith stepped through another set of doors. Her features flowed into each other so smoothly that she seemed to have been carved from marble. “Are you here for the position?”

“Yes. I’m Charlie Wong.” How did they both know I wasn’t a dance student? I shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying not to look as nervous as I felt.

“I thought you’d be a guy.” She looked down to check her list. I couldn’t help staring at her a little when she couldn’t see. She was probably one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen and she was doing the job I wanted. Nina found my name, then gave me a quick genuine grin. “Glad you’re a girl, though. Just go through those doors into the ballroom, hang a left and the manager’s office is tucked in the corner,” she said, pointing. “And watch out, they’re doing quickstep.”

I had no idea what she was talking about but as soon as I stepped through the next set of glass doors, I shrank back as a dancing couple ran toward me at full speed. They pivoted gracefully out of the way, staying in place while they did a series of little synchronized kicks in time to the music, and then raced off again.

I realized I was standing on the edge of the main ballroom. It was the sort of room that felt as if chandeliers were hanging from the high ceilings, although there weren’t any. Perhaps it was the wood paneling, or the tasteful lighting. A few small tables were placed against the right wall and several couples sped across the room counterclockwise. Some were posing in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which covered every wall except for the one by the tables. In the distance, I could glimpse my reflection. I resembled a ball of red yarn.