“They’re sikas,” she told Charlie when he came home.

He peered into one of them and frowned. “Look like plant hangers to me.”

Weeks passed. By now, Joan had owned the dress from Bangladesh for more than a month. When she wore it, she grew gaunt. She often had a haunted look, and she cooked strange things for supper from a book called Third World Recipes that she bought at the import store.

“Third World recipes?” said Charlie. “I thought the whole point was that they didn’t have any food.”

He and the girls dragged their forks through the caramel-colored paste on their plates for a long time one night before he finally said, “Look, Joan, I know I’m being ethnocentric and all that, but I really don’t think I can eat this.”

Joan was indignant. She had been pleased to find a dish that called for plenty of ginger root. “Why not?” she said. “It’s rice. You like rice.”

“Yeah,” said Kate, “but what’s this brown goo all over it?”

“That’s sauce,” Joan said. “Just regular ginger and cardamom sauce, that’s all.”

Some nights, they all went to bed hungry.

After Haeckel’s 1882 painting of a scene
on the Kelany-Ganga river in Ceylon
(Chromolithograph BY W. Koehler)
FROM Ernst Haeckel’s 1905 Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures)

At the library, where she would eventually be asked to relinquish her seat on the Board of Friends, Joan filled a whole notebook with facts about Bangladesh, and when she ran out of those, she started looking up other countries — Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Peru —whose names appeared on labels at the import store. The more she read about these places, the more thoughtless the people around her seemed. A mother in the park whose baby dozed in his upholstered stroller, shielded from sunlight and hunger, a pacifier lax in his mouth, seemed to her somehow worthy of reproach. There was another incident at the supermarket. Neither Joan nor the management could say exactly how it happened, and while there was at least one shopper who claimed to see the lady in the plaid dress ram her cart at full speed into the banana display, there were others who thought they saw her simply examining the fruit, like any other shopper, seconds before the crash. There was no question, the store manager said, of filing charges. The police officer was polite, even solicitous, although he did insist on calling Charlie instead of letting Joan drive home on her own. “It was an accident,” she said in the car.

“I can’t stop thinking of things,” she told her friend Mary when they met for Tuesday lunch at the All-American Deli. Joan ran her hand up and down the middle of her T-shirt, where the double row of buttons would be on the dress from Bangladesh.