Malika came up to the whiteboard before class, a pair of earrings in her hand, blue, with bitty rhinestones. For me, ooh. “Put one on,” I said, lending her my ear. She fumbled with my hair, tried, tried more. “I can’t,” she said.

So I stuck them in my bag and took them home.

Where I discovered they weren’t the clasp kind.

“I don’t have pierced ears,” I said to Malika, next day. Pierced. Perhaps I wrote it on the board. Every interaction in a class like this—English for immigrants—is a game. You’re endeavoring to communicate without making things complicated. If that isn’t a trick I don’t know what is. Teacher and student, you’re trying to bore down to the word’s core, spark understanding, connect. It’s intimate, intense.

“Why?” asked Malika. “Why?” Every female in her culture, she wanted me to know, down to the babies, had earrings. Ear holes. She maybe didn’t say holes.

How to respond?

Oh, well, I grew up Mennonite. Say that?

Say I kind of have a Mennonite predisposition? That, instead?

Quote for this stunning woman in lipstick and hijab the verses? Women adorn yourselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array? Try that?

There’s so much you can’t say in broken English.

Not that I looked much like a Mennonite by the time I reached adulthood, but when the season for marriage came, when I told my boyfriend yes, I said I didn’t want rings. He didn’t, either. Lots of Mennonites were getting wedding rings, and mainly, we didn’t feel like going along with the crowd. Be ye not conformed to the world, so we had it just a little twisted around.

As far as we could tell, rings didn’t keep people monogamous, and what else, really, was the point?

Indeed, it’s not the diamond, and the gold bands, that stay people who promise. Who’ve managed, by hook or crook, to stick through thick and thin, through daisies and muck and the dry, shuddering weeds.

Is there anything at all I could’ve told Malika?

Maybe. It would’ve taken a while.

Earrings, or anyway, big ones, would just weigh down my earlobes, make them droop worse. My mother liked to say old women wear jewelry to compensate for their wrinkles, and I can’t quite shake her words.

She also said rich people wear white underwear. I pined for showy things, glamorous, but how was ostentation classy? The Rockefellers have shabby carpets, she’d say. People like them have no need to prove anything.

Snooty plain. That’s what we were.

I still have Malika’s baubles. I tried to give them to Youngest Grandgirl but she said she can poke only real gold through her ears, that alloys and fake metals can cause the holes to get sore and infected. She didn’t use quite those words.

I’ve spoken about my jewelry collection, that small evidence of defiance. I now possess a bracelet, too, the cuff kind. At the counter at Grift & Sift, multicolored, beaded, the coils wide and curvy and interlaced, it rose up to greet me. But the end wires are jaggy. They dig a tiny bit into my skin. And the bulk of the thing feels encumbering, as I’m the type of person who flails around a lot.

I was keeping the bracelet on the sink windowsill, alongside my 15-cent ring I’ve never mentioned, especially beautiful, I think, because the skin of paint on the gem part has rubbed off, making it more pearly and oyster like. Also it’s large enough to ogle. But some weeks ago my husband accidentally sucked the ring up the sweeper hose. It happened when I wasn’t at home, when he was banging the attachment around with his usual zeal, going after the dust and cobwebs. When he told me, I said we could maybe recover it. Next time he emptied the canister in the basement—our house has a central vacuum system—we could sift through for the ring.

Gewgaws, earthly spoils, aren’t what he notices or cares about. Besides the crud on the window ledge, he sees, beyond, the poor birds diving toward the glass, and farther beyond, his creeper vines moored in real dirt, not the kind you sweep up, and his wild poke and coralberries and elderberries, and his witch hazel bush, and his trees.

My ring didn’t matter, except to me.

On a not so chilly day I trod with him across the field, over to the far edge, and there amid the tall, trembling husks of bluestem grass, he slowly spilled the canister lint, every glob of stuff that had gone battered up the hose. The clumps and trails of offal, the pieces of bugs. The crumbs, the tired shreds, the shedded dregs. He patted and felt, patted and felt at the fluff, soft like bunny fur, and I tried to help, but the wind was too undecided, it blew this way and that, and I had to keep switching places, go from hugging his one shoulder and then the other, to dodge the sooty gray puffs drifting upwards.

I don’t mean hugging. Hovering. I was hovering.

Puzzle pieces, we found, tangled up with the floaty clots of dirt. An occasional sucked-up Kleenex. Straight pins. Nondescript what-all-else. And near the very bottom, poking from the fuzz, my most precious piece of gaud.

And Jesus said, Again the kingdom of heaven is like unto a desperate woman seeking goodly treasure, who, when she finds her pearl of great price, clutches it to her and goes away rejoicing. Again she hides it on her windowsill, where thieves will never look, nor break in and steal.