The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls

their names, Yin was dark and passive and female, and Yang was a lighter, more aggressive male. They played well together, balanced as they were, and for a time Bess imagined having little Yin and Yang babies, but then Yang escaped the cage one afternoon and was brought back by the neighbor’s cat, a prize dropped on the front stoop. Yin wasn’t herself after Yang’s death. She shed most of her fur and wouldn’t eat. Two weeks later, she, too, took her last breath. Bess felt guilty naming them Yin and Yang, as if the labels themselves dictated Yin’s fate. Maybe Yin could have survived had she been called Wonder Woman, or Cher, or Mother Teresa.
    She would write in her paper that the symbiotic relationship between yin and yang manifests itself in several ways, the artistic (choreographed and beautiful) aspects balancing out the martial (physical and more violent) aspects to create a true martial art. Karate depends on a healthy balance between offensiveness and defensiveness, physical strength and mental acuity, competitiveness and camaraderie, patience and determination, an awareness of details (heel down, elbows in, wrist straight, thumb tucked) and a sense of the fluidity of moving through a whole routine. “We are, each of us, teacher and student always,” her instructor had said.
    But then in her paper she is also supposed to write about how this particular philosophy—this balance—applies to her life outside of class, and here she is stumped. Like many of her fellow folklorists, she is often in awe of the genuine, unassuming, talented craftspeople and folk musicians she meets through her work. She has spent her career increasing, or in some cases creating audiences for them, but is that a fair exchange for all they’ve taught her? She finished graduate school with a near-perfect GPA and yet what does she know of the world?
    And what of a balance in her personal life? Do the things she enjoys doing compensate for the things she doesn’t enjoy doing, or hates doing, or fears doing, like, say, dating? This week, the answer is a no-brainer. In this first week of her thirty-sixth year she feels like a big yin-yang failure.
    She crosses into Maryland where the large houses on hills sit atop hoop skirts of perfectly mowed lawns. She is headed to Rockville where her grandparents—Millie and Irv—moved more than twenty years ago. Over the decades they’d migrated steadily northward and westward through the district, up from their first years of marriage in the 1940s at Q and Sixteenth Streets, to Cleveland Park where they adopted and raised Bess’s mother in the ’50s and ’60s, and on into Bethesda when Bess’s mother moved in with Bess’s dad on Capitol Hill at the start of the 1970s. In the ’80s, when Bess was in her early teens and living with her mom back in Bethesda, her grandparents made their final move farther out to the Maryland suburbs.
    This was a common route for Jews in Washington, D.C., the first of whom migrated from Baltimore in the mid-1800s. Irv claimed that his great-great-great-grandfather was among those who fled persecution in Germany and came to the New World, to Baltimore, in 1848—the year a sawmill worker discovered gold and sparked a mass exodus to the west, also the year they broke ground in the District of Columbia to build the Washington Monument. “ Nu? ” he’d say. “My ancestors come and suddenly they either run for the hills or build a big schmeckle .” Bess tried but failed to verify his assertion. Still, she liked his stories.
    “My family was in the dress business,” Irv had told her. “Why? Probably my great-grandfather liked to know what touched his hands would also touch the naked bodies of the dames in town. But that’s it. End of story.”
    “What’s with you, no story,” Millie chimed in. “Always with the no story, he’s got nothing to say your grandfather, you believe that one? Don’t listen to him.” She looked like she was about to tell a