Summary

The unnamed narrator discusses the way in which her mother tells her daughter’s story to other people. The narrator was forced to leave her marriage because of abuse despite her desire “to keep playing the role of the good Indian wife” (13). The narrator’s mother talks about her daughter’s feet and how “they were the feet of a slave” (14). The narrator’s father washes his daughter’s feet when his daughter returns, and the mother is haunted about what her daughter must have endured psychologically if even her feet were in such bad shape.

The narrator’s mother frequently talks about the need to relieve stress and how stress ruins a person’s immunity. The narrator has a lot of lice in her hair when she returns to her parents, and her husband had cut his wife’s hair. All...