Off the clothesline and down into the flowerpots, weighing down orchids with its thumb-size abdomen. It made Amy think of fat women she had washed in nursing school. A panniculus might hang to the thighs; you lifted it on the back of your hand and wrist, swabbed carefully because of yeasts. In this country the patient’s family gave the baths, women carrying basin and washcloth from home. And here you wouldn’t see a swag of fat on a patient. As if it were new itself, this was a country of young, slim people. Amy sat on the amah’s terrace at the back of the house, letting her hair dry in the sun. Skylab. It was on every page of the newspaper. Skylab was going to fall on Asia. Next door the shirts on the line began to jig as the amah snatched them, with an unsmiling glance at Amy. She was a Malay girl, not an Indian like most of the amahs in this circle of houses built for foreigners, and wore the snowy headscarf. She was known to have gone down on her knees, after the Australian couple stir-fried pork on her day off, to wash everything with red mud as the Koran decreed—cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, the blackened little gas stove these houses all had.
