Her daughter was sour-faced and withdrawn but a very good cook. On weekends, with a certain grudging pride, Mrs. Ives taught Annie some of the essential tasks of cooking. She showed her how to make béchamel sauce, to mince onions, to make white and brown stock. She said, “Everyone wants to get away with everything. You can’t be a real cook if you cheat. One thing, I never cheated in the kitchen. My mother used to say, if you have a button missing from a blouse, if you use a safety pin where a catch ought to be, you might as well give up. It’s not an easy law to follow.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen, one finger raised. Annie had the impression she was describing the movements of the planets.

Mrs. Ives and her mother were, they informed Annie, “progressives.” Sometimes in the evening if Annie wandered into their part of the house, she would find the two women brooding over the past, speaking in low voices about the outrages man perpetrated on man—and woman. Especially on woman. “If I had left my husband,” Mrs. Ives explained, “he would have gotten the children. I’m reasonably sure of that, even though he ran off with a very disgusting girl who thinks she has a stained-glass window between her legs instead of what we are all required to pretend we don’t have. It’s all very disgusting.”

Her children, a boy and a girl of twelve and fourteen, had a strange glacial quality unlike any Annie had encountered in a child. They frequently reported that dogs were mating on the street. Once the boy told his grandmother that he was convinced his civics teacher was going through menopause. The grandmother told Annie that American children were infantilized—“their youth is prolonged into middle age. After living in China for so many years, my daughter and I do not intend for this to happen to Mai and Pavel.” The two women never raised their voices to the children. If Pavel made what the old woman or her daughter deemed a childish request, they said as much in reasonable modulated tones. “That is childish, Pavel. If you would give it a moment’s thought, you would see that the results of such an action would make you feel like a fool. The world is full of fools. Make sure you are not numbered among them.”

They spoke in the same tone about minorities in the United States. The people who oppressed them were fools; the police were fools, especially the Red Squad; the Depression was a result of the mismanagement of fools.

The house breathed a cold mild poison. Yet Annie did not find herself uncomfortable with the two women. She simply talked less than was her natural tendency. All in all, they were kind to her in their peculiar icy way.