“We were saved by my mother’s sister,” Snow Flower said. “After you and I became laotong, she arranged a so-so match for my elder sister. She does not come here anymore. Later my aunt sent my elder brother to apprentice in Shangjiangxu. Today my younger brother works in the fields for your husband’s family. My younger sister died, as you know—”
But I didn’t care about people I had never met and had only heard lies about. “What happened to you?”
“My aunt changed my future with scissors, cloth, and alum. My father objected, but you know Auntie Wang. Who’s going to say no to her once she’s made a decision?”
“Auntie Wang?” My mind reeled. “You mean our Auntie Wang, the matchmaker?”
“She is my mother’s sister.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples. The very first day I met Snow Flower and we went to the Temple of Gupo, she had addressed the matchmaker as Auntie. I thought she’d done this out of courtesy and respect, and from then on I’d also used the honorific when I spoke to Madame Wang. I felt stupid and foolish.
“You never told me,” I said.
“About Auntie Wang? That was the one thing I thought you knew.”
The one thing I thought you knew. I tried to absorb those words.
“Auntie Wang saw right through my father,” Snow Flower went on. “She understood he was weak. She looked at me too. She read in my face that I did not like to obey, that I didn’t pay attention, that I was hopeless in the arts of home care, but that my mother could teach me embroidery, how to dress, how to act in front of a man, our secret writing. Auntie is only a woman, but as a matchmaker she is also business-minded. She saw where things were headed for our family and for me. She began looking for a laotong match, hoping it would send a good message through the countryside that I was educated, loyal, obedient—”
“And marriageable,” I concluded. This was true for me as well.
“She searched the county, traveling far outside her usual matchmaking territory until she heard about you from the diviner. Once she met you, she decided to hitch my fate to yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
Snow Flower smiled ruefully. “You were headed up and I was going down. When you and I first met, I didn’t know anything. I was supposed to learn from you.”
“But you’re the one who taught me. Your embroidery has always been better than mine. And you knew the secret writing so well. You trained me to live in a home with a high threshold—”
“And you taught me how to haul water, wash clothes, cook, and clean the house. I have tried to teach my mother, but she sees things only as they were.”
I had sensed already that Snow Flower’s mother held on to a past that no longer existed, but having just heard Snow Flower tell her family story, I think my laotong also saw things through the happy veil of memory. Knowing her for all those years, I knew she believed in the idea that the women’s inner realm should be beautiful and without worry. Perhaps she thought things would somehow go back to the way they once were.
“From you I learned what I needed to know for my new life,” Snow Flower said, “except that I have never been able to clean as well as you.”
True, she had never been good at it. I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realized it was easier for her mind to glide through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.
“But your house is much larger and harder to clean than mine, and you were just a girl in your hair-pinning years,” I argued stupidly, trying to make her feel better. “You had—”
“A mother who could not help me, a father who was an opium addict, and brothers and sisters who left one by one.”
“But you’re marrying—”
Suddenly I recalled that last day when Madame Gao had come into the upstairs chamber and I witnessed her final argument with Madame Wang. What had she said about Snow Flower’s betrothal? I tried to remember what I knew about the arrangement, but Snow Flower rarely if ever talked about her future husband; she rarely if ever showed us any of her bride-price gifts. We had seen bits and pieces of cotton and silk that she was working on, true, but she always said these were everyday projects like shoes for herself. Nothing fancy.
A frightening thought began to formulate in my mind. Snow Flower had to be marrying out into a very low family. The question was, just how low?
Snow Flower seemed to read my thoughts. “Auntie did the best she could for me. I’m not marrying a farmer.”
That hurt a little, since my father was a farmer.
“He’s a merchant then?” A merchant would have a dishonorable profession, but he might be able to restore some of Snow Flower’s lost circumstances.
“I will be marrying out to nearby Jintian Village, just as Auntie Wang said, but my husband’s family”—again she hesitated—”they are butchers.”
Waaa! This was the worst marriage possible! Snow Flower’s new husband would have some money, but what he did was unclean and disgusting. In my mind I replayed everything from the last month as we’d prepared for my wedding. In particular I recalled how Madame Wang had stayed at Snow Flower’s side, offering comfort, quietly cajoling. Then I remembered the matchmaker telling “The Tale of Wife Wang.” With deep shame I saw that the story had not been meant for me at all but for Snow Flower.
I didn’t know what to say. I had heard the truth in snippets, ever since I was nine, but had chosen not to believe or acknowledge it. Now I thought, Isn’t it my duty to make my laotong happy? Make her forget these troubles? Make her believe that everything will be fine?
I put my arms around her. “At least you will never go hungry,” I said, although I turned out to be wrong about that. “There are worse things that can happen to a woman,” I said, but I couldn’t think what they could be.
She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed. A moment later, she roughly pushed me away. Her eyes were wet with tears, but I saw not sadness in them but wild ferocity.
“Don’t pity me! I don’t want it!”
Pity had not entered my mind. I felt sick with confusion and sadness. Her letter to me had ruined my enjoyment of my wedding. Her not showing up for the reading of my third-day wedding books had deeply wounded me. And now this. Under all my turmoil simmered the feeling that Snow Flower had betrayed me. For all our nights together, why hadn’t she told me the truth? Was it that she honestly didn’t believe what her fate was to be? That because in her mind she was always flying away, she thought this would happen in real life too? Did she truly believe that our feet would leave the ground and our hearts would actually soar with the birds? Or was she just trying to save face by keeping her many secrets, believing this day would never come?
Maybe I should have been angry at Snow Flower for lying to me, but that’s not what I felt. I had believed I had been plucked for a special future, which made me too self-centered to see what was directly in front of me. Wasn’t it my lack as a friend—as a laotong—that had prevented me from asking Snow Flower the right questions about her past and her future?
I was only seventeen. I had spent the last ten years almost entirely in the upstairs chamber surrounded by women who saw a specific future for me. The same could be said for the men downstairs. But when I thought about all of them—Mama, Aunt, Baba, Uncle, Madame Gao, Madame Wang, even Snow Flower—the only one I could really blame was my mother. Madame Wang may have duped her in the beginning, but she had eventually learned the truth and decided not to tell me. How I felt about my mother twisted and warped with the realization that her occasional signs of affection, which I now saw as part of her greater lies of omission, had simply been a way to keep me on course to the good marriage that would benefit my entire natal family.