“She’s old,” Madame Wu said. “What am I going to do with her?”
“Willow is thirty-nine. She has three sons. They stayed with her previous owner. His wife wanted sons and this one gave them. Willow may not be much to look at,” Baba said practically, “but she could serve as a concubine if you need one. I can guarantee she will produce grandsons for you.”
“For twenty geese?”
My father nodded.
The matchmaker grinned. She would make a good profit from this.
Willow crawled across the floor and put her forehead on Madame Wu’s lily feet.
“I’ll accept your offer on one condition,” Madame Wu said. “I want you to answer a question. Why didn’t you give your daughter a ghost marriage before this? One girl died because of your refusal to entertain my offers. Now the life of one who carries my grandson is threatened. This was something easy to mend. A ghost marriage is common. It alleviates so much trouble—”
“But it wouldn’t help my heart,” Baba confessed. “I couldn’t let go of ( 2 3 7 )
Peony. All this time I’ve longed for her company. By keeping the tablet in the Chen Family Villa, I felt I was still connected to her.”
But I was never here with him!
My father’s eyes clouded. “All these years, I hoped to feel her presence, but I never did. When you sent the matchmaker today, I decided it was finally time to let my daughter go. Peony was meant to be with your boy.
And now . . . It’s strange, but I feel her with me at last.”
Madame Wu sniffed dismissively. “You needed to do the right thing for your daughter, but you didn’t. Twenty-three years is a long time, Master Chen, a very long time.”
With that, she stood and swayed out of the room. I stayed behind so I could prepare myself.
g h o st marri ag e s are not as ornate, complicated, or time-consuming as a wedding when both parties are living. Baba arranged for the transfer of goods, money, and food for my dowry. Madame Wu reciprocated with everything that had been agreed upon for my bride-price. I brushed my hair and pinned it up and straightened my old and tattered clothes. I wanted to wrap my feet in clean bindings, but I hadn’t had new ones since I’d left the Viewing Terrace. I was as ready as I could be.
The only real challenge was that my ancestor tablet needed to be found. Without it, the stand-in bride couldn’t be made and I couldn’t be married. But my tablet had been hidden away for so long that no one remembered what had happened to it. In fact, only one person knew where it was: Shao, the longtime amah and wet nurse to my family. Naturally, she was no longer a wet nurse; she was barely even an amah. She’d lost all her teeth, most of her hair, and a good part of her memory. She was too old to sell and too cheap to let retire. She was useless in locating my tablet.
“That ugly thing was thrown out years ago,” she said. An hour later, she changed her mind. “It’s in the ancestral hall next to her mother’s tablet.” Two hours after that, a different memory surfaced. “I put it under the plum tree just like in The Peony Pavilion. That’s where Peony would have wanted to be.” Three days later, after various servants, Bao, and even my father had begged, ordered, and demanded that Shao tell them where she’d hidden the tablet, she cried like the scared and frail old woman she was. “I don’t know where it is,” she warbled querulously. “Why do you keep asking about that ugly thing anyway?”
( 2 3 8 )
If she couldn’t recollect where she’d hidden my tablet, she certainly wouldn’t recall that she’d caused it not to be dotted. I’d come so far. I couldn’t let everything fail because one old woman couldn’t remember that she’d once hidden an ugly thing in a storage room on a high shelf behind a jar of pickled turnips.
I went to Shao’s room. It was the middle of the afternoon and she was asleep. I stood next to her bed, staring down at her. I reached out to shake her awake, but my arms refused to touch her. Even now, when I was so close to having my ghostliness resolved, I couldn’t do anything to help get my tablet dotted. I tried and tried, but I was powerless.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Let us do it,” a voice said.
I turned to see my mother and my grandmother.
“You came!” I exclaimed. “But how?”
“You are the flesh of my inmost heart,” Mama answered. “How could I watch my daughter’s wedding from afar?”
“We asked the netherworld bureaucrats and received one time return-to-earth permits,” Grandmother explained.
More pearls filled my heart.
We waited for Shao to wake up. Then my grandmother and mother got on either side of her, held her by the elbows, and guided her through the compound to the storage room, where Shao found the ancestor tablet.
Mama and Grandmother let go of her and stepped away. The old woman brushed it off. Although her eyesight was bad, I felt sure she would notice my missing dot and take the tablet straight to my father. When that didn’t happen, I looked at Mama and Grandmother.
“Help me make her see it,” I begged.
“We can’t,” Mama said regretfully. “We’re only allowed to do so much.”
Shao took the tablet to my old room. In the middle of the floor lay a dummy made from straw, paper, wood, and cloth that the servants had as-sembled to represent me at my wedding. It rested on its back with its stomach exposed. Willow painted two crude eyes, a nose, and lips on a piece of paper and fastened it to the bride’s face with rice paste. Shao got on her knees and stuffed my ancestor tablet inside the dummy so quickly that Willow didn’t have a chance to see it. My old servant threaded a needle and sewed the stomach shut. When she was done, she went to a trunk and opened it. Inside lay my wedding costume. It should have been thrown out with all my other belongings.
( 2 3 9 )
“You kept my wedding clothes?” I asked my mother.
“Of course I did. I had to believe things would be set right again some-day.”
“And we brought some gifts too,” Grandmother added.
She reached into her gown and pulled out clean bindings and new shoes. Mama opened a satchel and brought out a skirt and tunic. The spirit clothes were beautiful, and as they dressed me, the servants mirrored our actions, placing the dummy in an underskirt followed by the red silk skirt with the tiny pleats stitched in the pattern of flowers, clouds, and interlocking good-luck symbols. They slipped on the tunic and closed all the braided frogs. They wrapped the muslin-covered straw feet in long binding cloths, tightening and tightening them until the feet were small enough to fit into my red wedding slippers. Then they propped the dummy against the wall, settled the headdress on its head, and covered the grotesque face with the red opaque veil. If my ancestor tablet had been dotted, I would have been able to inhabit the stand-in fully.
The servants left. I knelt by the dummy. I fingered the silk and touched the gold leaves on the headdress. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I was so close to righting my path, but with my tablet undotted, the ceremony would be meaningless.
“I know everything now,” Mama said, “and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was too brokenhearted to dot your tablet. I’m sorry I let Shao take it from me.
I’m sorry I never asked your father about it. I thought he’d taken your tablet with him—”
“He didn’t take it—”
“He didn’t tell me, I didn’t ask, and you didn’t tell me when I died. I found out when I reached the Viewing Terrace. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know how. You were confused. And it was Shao who—”
“You can’t blame her,” Mama said, waving away the idea as though it were insignificant. “Your father and I felt so guilty about your death that we abandoned our responsibilities. Your baba blamed himself for your lovesickness and your death. If he hadn’t planted the idea of lovesickness in your mind with all his talk about Xiaoqing and Liniang . . . if he hadn’t encouraged you to read, to think, to write—”