“Assia, my mother is just like that,” Sylvia says. “She’s been living through me for as long as I remember. She can’t leave me alone, and I can’t get far enough away. She really was a saint, scrimping and sacrificing so I could have everything, but she expects me to turn my life over to her in return. When Ted and I were on a camping trip across America—I was pregnant with Frieda, but I don’t think I knew it then—we saw catfish eating their live young at the edge of a lake, as they were being born. I thought, ‘Oh! Just like home. Thank god we’re moving back to England.’ And yet she’s my mother. My father’s dead; she’s what I’ve got.”

“I was only eighteen,” Assia says.

“I’m almost thirty and still I can’t get away. My mother’s coming this summer in fact—for a month. I’m sure I’ll be climbing the walls, but I’m desperate for the baby-minding—”

“I had to find another man,” Assia says.

“That was your second husband?”

“Yes, one of my college professors. Just like my father, he spirited me away to another country, England this time. But then I met David.”

“And that’s when you followed David to Mandalay?” Sylvia asks, crawling on her knees toward the last row of onions. “So why not now? Don’t you want children eventually?”

“What do you think,” Assia says, leaning from one elbow to the other, “do you think we’re always attracted to men like our fathers?”

“Ted is nothing like my father,” Sylvia scoffs, flexing a hand dismissively. “Ted is a force of nature. He may be strong like my father and brilliant, but he doesn’t question his virility, and neither do I.”

“Hmm,” Assia mulls, turning the onion thinnings in their basket, “perhaps that’s the answer to your question, and mine also.” She pauses in her response, her fingers working. “David is very dear. He’s ten years younger than me. You could say that we’ve been growing up together.”

Sylvia lifts the last of the tassellated thinnings in her dirty hand and shakes them, readying to toss them toward the basket, but she sees that Assia has arranged the onions carefully, all facing the same direction, the pale roots matted together like thread. “That’s so funny,” Sylvia says, looking into Assia’s face and smiling as she places the shoots into Assia’s gloved hand. “That’s just the sort of thing I do.”