Joan Danchek was not some kind of flake. She wasn’t even an activist, although she did her share of community service. Two-term president of the PTA at the elementary school and secretary of Home and School at the junior high, she also served on two volunteer boards — Public Library and Friends of Art — and had coached fifth-grade soccer. In her only brush with the issues of her day, she had collected signatures for the local Save-the-Earth consortium in their campaign to mandate recycling in her subdivision, and later had her kitchen remodeled to accommodate the large bins for sorting plastic, paper, metal, and glass.

She had stopped at Kmart with the girls to pick up a roll of film on the way home from school, when she spotted the dress on a sale rack. Joan was not in the habit of buying her clothes at Kmart, but this was a light, loose, V-necked, double-breasted jumper in the kind of cotton plaid she used to wear in grade school. There was only one left. She checked the label. One hundred percent cotton, it said. Machine wash cold, line dry. One size fits all. Made in Bangladesh. Joan called to Kate, who was showing Lita how to juggle little boxes of panty hose.

“Look at this, Kate.” Joan held up the dress for Kate to see.

“Mom, we didn’t come here to go shopping.”

“But it’s only $9.99!” Joan said. “You can hardly go wrong for $9.99.”

She’d felt it again, more subtle this time but still distinct, a vibration, an electric tingle, as if a current moved from the dress into her skin and through it, into the muscle, and deeper, all the way to the bone, where it lodged, a dull ache.

In the fitting room, with Kate scrunched in the corner reading a magazine and Lita hopping on one foot just outside the curtain, Joan lilted her arms over her head and entered the dress from Bangladesh like a diver parting water. The fabric fell, soft and cool, over her shoulders. It skimmed her bare arms, skimmed her hips, and came to rest, the hem brushing her calves. She smoothed the skirt — it was very fine, lightweight cotton, almost translucent. Joan did a fair amount of sewing herself, when she wasn’t typing up minutes or managing library book sales. The dresses she made for her daughters were, she’d always thought, a kind of vicarious caress, a way of holding the girls, if not in her arms then at least in what her hands had made — and she always paid attention to details of construction, admiring things like double rows of topstitching and lined pockets. The dress from Bangladesh had both. Joan pictured a brown-skinned woman in a sari, her bare feet rocking the treadle of an ancient sewing machine, her shoulders hunched over the work, nimble fingers smoothing a seam, or holding the plaid straight and steady under the needle. Did women wear saris in Bangladesh? Joan wondered as she slipped her hands into the nicely lined pockets on the front of the skirt.

She withdrew them at once, as if she’d been stung.

She had felt something. Inside the pockets.

Cautiously, with the very tips of her thumb and forefinger, Joan pulled the pockets away from the skirt and peered inside, half-expecting a scorpion or a tarantula or whatever ghastly vermin might make its way around the world in the pocket of a plaid dress from Bangladesh. There was nothing, not even lint. She rubbed her palms against her thighs —and stopped. She’d felt it again, more subtle this time but still distinct, a vibration, an electric tingle, as if a current moved from the dress into her skin and through it, into the muscle, and deeper, all the way to the bone, where it lodged, a dull ache. She frowned, rubbing her thigh, but the ache remained.