Chinoisserie

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold- throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket, held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots. Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr, that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns. Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed, where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said, to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein: the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily. Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.