I told her about the decorations, the late-night drinking, and the cooking. I smiled the whole while, still feeling as though I were going to be a guest and not just an observer.
“I’m happy. Can you understand that, Grandmother? When my poet is happy, I feel so—”
“Oh, Peony.” She shook her head, and her headdress tinkled as softly as whispering birds. She took my chin in her palm and turned my face away from the world of the living so she could look into my eyes. “You’re too young to have such heartbreak.”
I tried to pull away, irritated that she wanted to turn my happiness into something dark and unpleasant, but her fingers held me with surprising strength.
“Don’t look, child,” she cautioned.
With that warning, I yanked away from her. My eyes fell to the Wu family compound just as a palanquin draped in red silk and carried by four bearers stopped before the front gate. A servant opened the palanquin’s door. A perfectly bound foot in a red slipper emerged from the dark interior. Slowly a figure stepped out. It was a girl, dressed from head to toe in wedding red. Her head drooped from the weight of her headdress, which was encrusted with pearls, carnelian, jade, and other gems. A veil hid her face. A servant used a mirror to flash rays of light on the girl to ward off any malevolent influences that might have accompanied her.
I frantically tried to come up with an explanation other than what my eyes now told me and other than what my grandmother already seemed to understand.
“Ren’s brother must be marrying today,” I said.
( 1 4 2 )
“That boy is already married,” Grandmother responded softly. “His wife sent you your special edition of The Peony Pavilion. ”
“Then perhaps he’s taking a concubine—”
“He no longer lives in this house. He and his family have gone to Shanxi province, where he’s a magistrate. Only Madame Wu and her younger son live here now. And look, above the door someone has placed a fern.”
“Madame Wu put it there.”
“She’s trying to protect someone she loves very much.”
My body shook, not wanting to accept what Grandmother was trying to tell me.
“She’s protecting her son and his bride from you,” she said.
Tears poured from my eyes, fell down my cheeks, and dripped over the balustrade. Down below, on the north shore of West Lake, mists formed, partially obscuring the bridal party. I wiped my eyes, blinking back my emotions. Once again the sun broke through the mists and I clearly saw the palanquin and the girl who was taking my place. She stepped over the threshold. My mother-in-law led her through the first courtyard, and then the second. From here, Madame Wu escorted the girl into the bridal chamber. Soon the girl would be left in seclusion to calm her thoughts. To prepare her for what was coming, Madame Wu would do what many mothers-in-law do by giving the girl a book, a kind of confidential text that would outline the intimate demands of married life with a man she knew not at all. But all this should have been happening to me!
I’ll admit it. I wanted to kill that girl. I wanted to tear off her veil and see who would dare to replace me. I wanted her to see my ghostly face and then rip her eyes from their sockets. I thought of the story my mother used to tell me about the man who brought in a concubine, who’d laughed at the first wife behind her back and taunted her for how her appearance had changed over the years. The wife turned into a tiger and ate the concubine’s heart and innards, leaving behind her head and limbs for the husband to find. That’s what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t leave the Viewing Terrace.
“When we’re alive we believe many things that we only learn are wrong when we get here,” Grandmother said.
I didn’t absorb her words. I was completely transfixed by what I was seeing. It couldn’t be happening, yet it was.
“Peony!” Grandmother’s voice was sharp. “I can help you!”
( 1 4 3 )
“There is no help or hope for me,” I cried.
Grandmother laughed. The sound was so foreign that it jarred me from my tragic circumstances. I turned to her and her face practically danced with mirth and mischievousness. I had never seen that before, but I was too heartbroken to be hurt by that old woman’s amusement at my desperate circumstances.
“Listen to me,” she continued, seemingly oblivious to the torture I felt.
“You know I don’t believe in love.”
“I don’t want your bitterness,” I said.
“I’m not offering it. Instead, I’m saying that perhaps I was wrong. You love this man; I understand that now. And surely he must love you still or his mother wouldn’t be trying to protect that girl from you.” She glanced over the balustrade and smiled knowingly. “See that?”
I looked and saw Madame Wu present her future daughter-in-law with a hand mirror, which was a traditional gift given to a bride to protect her from troublesome spirits.
“Today when I saw what was happening,” Grandmother went on earnestly, “everything became clear. You must go back to your rightful place.”
“I don’t think I can,” I said, but inside my mind began to spin with the possibilities of how I would seek revenge on the girl dressed in red, sitting in seclusion, waiting to go to her husband.
“Think, child, think. You’re a hungry ghost. Now that you know what you are, you’re free to roam wherever you want.”
“But I’m stuck—”
“You can’t go forward and you can’t go back, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go down. You could have returned at any time, but I interceded with the judges. I selfishly wanted you to stay here with me.” She tossed her head defiantly. “With men there’s always a bureaucracy, and it’s no different here. I bribed them with some of the offerings I received at New Year.”
“Will I ever meet them? Will I ever have a chance to plead my case?”
“Only when your ancestor tablet is dotted. Otherwise”—she gestured below—“that’s where you belong.”
She was right . . . again. As a hungry ghost, I should have been roaming in the earthly realm these last seven years.
My mind at that moment was so twisted between my desire to harm the girl and the realization that I should have been roaming all this time that for a second I didn’t comprehend what she was saying. I took my eyes away from the girl in red and looked at Grandmother.
( 1 4 4 )
“Are you saying I could also get my tablet dotted?”
Grandmother leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “You should hope for that to happen, because then you’ll come back here and become an ancestor. But you won’t be able to make it happen. You’ll have a lot of tricks that you can use with people in the earthly realm to get them to do what you want them to do, but you will be powerless when it comes to your tablet. Remember all the ghost stories you heard as a little girl? There are a lot of different ways people become ghosts, but if all those creatures who didn’t have their tablets dotted could force humans to complete this task, there wouldn’t be very many ghost stories, would there?”
I nodded, taking it all in, thinking first I would ruin the wedding, then I would make Ren remember me, then I would make him to go my father’s house and dot my tablet, then we would have a ghost marriage, and then . . . I shook my head. Vengeance and confusion were so clouding my mind that I wasn’t thinking clearly. In reality, I’d heard a lot of ghost stories, as Grandmother said, and the happy endings only came when those creatures were wounded, maimed, and destroyed.
“Won’t it be dangerous?” I asked. “Mama used to tell me that she would cut any evil spirits that visited me with scissors and that if I wore charms I’d be safe when I walked in the garden. What about ferns and mirrors?”
Grandmother laughed once more, and it was no less extraordinary than the first time.