“The mountains changed him. They changed all of us. Don’t you see that?”
“How often?” I pressed.
“I fail my husband in many ways—”
In other words, it happened more often than she cared to admit.
“I want you to come and live with me,” I said.
“Desertion is the worst thing a woman can do,” she responded. “You know that.”
I did. For a woman it was an offense punishable by death by her husband’s hand.
“Besides,” Snow Flower went on, “I would never leave my children. My son needs protection.”
“But to protect him with your own body?” I asked.
What response could she give?
I look back now and see with the clarity of eighty years that I showed far too much impatience with Snow Flower’s despondency. In the past, whenever I had been unsure of how to react to my laotong‘s unhappiness I had pressured her to follow the rules and traditions of the inner realm as a way of combating the bad things that happened in her life. This time I went further by launching a campaign for her to take control of her rooster husband, believing that as a woman born under the sign of the horse she could use her willfulness to change the situation. With only a useless daughter and an unloved first son, she should try to get pregnant again. She needed to pray more, eat the proper foods, and ask the herbalist for tonics—all to guarantee a son. If she presented her husband with what he wanted, he would remember her worth. But this was not all. . . .
By the time the Ghost Festival arrived on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, I had peppered Snow Flower with many questions that she should have understood were suggestions for her to improve the overall situation. Why couldn’t she try to be a better wife? Why couldn’t she make her husband happy in the ways I knew she could? Why didn’t she pinch her cheeks to bring back the color? Why didn’t she eat more so she would have more energy? Why couldn’t she go home right now and kowtow to her mother-in-law, make her meals, sew for her, sing to her, do what she had to do to make that old woman happy in her old age? Why didn’t she try harder to make things right? I thought I was giving practical advice, but I had nothing like Snow Flower’s worries and concerns. Still, I was Lady Lu and I thought I was right.
So when I ran out of things Snow Flower could do in her home, I questioned her about her time spent in mine. Wasn’t she happy to be with me? Didn’t she like the silk clothes I gave her? Didn’t she present the gifts the Lu family sent to her husband for our continued gratitude with enough deference that he would be pleased with her? Didn’t she appreciate that I had hired a man to teach reading and writing to boys her son’s age in Jintian? Didn’t she see that by making our daughters laotong we would be changing Spring Moon’s fate, much as mine had been changed?
If she truly loved me, why couldn’t she do as I had done—wrap herself in the conventions that protected women—to make her bad situation better? To all these queries she just sighed or nodded. Her reaction made me even more impatient. I stepped up my questions and well-considered reasons, until she surrendered, promising to do as I’d instructed. But she didn’t, and the next time my frustration with her was even more pointed. I didn’t understand that the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit. I was stubborn enough to believe I could fix a horse that had gone lame.
MY LIFE CHANGED forever on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month of the sixth year of Xianfeng’s reign. Mid-Autumn Festival had arrived. A few days remained before our daughters’ footbinding began. This year, Snow Flower and her children were to visit us for the holiday, but they were not who came to my threshold. It was Lotus, one of the women who’d lived under our tree in the mountains. I invited her to have tea with me in the upstairs chamber.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I am in Tongkou to visit my natal family.”
“A family likes to welcome home a married-out daughter,” I replied, with the customary nicety. “I’m sure they will be happy to see you.”
“And I to see them,” she said, as she reached into the basket of moon cakes that hung on her arm. “Our friend has asked me to give you something.” She pulled out a long slender package, wrapped in a fragment of celadon-colored silk I had recently given Snow Flower. Lotus handed it to me, wished me good fortune, and swayed down the alley and around the corner.
I knew from the shape what I was holding, but I couldn’t fathom why Snow Flower hadn’t come and had sent the fan instead. I took the bundle upstairs and waited until my sisters-in-law set out together to drop off moon cakes to our friends in the village. I sent my daughter with them, saying she should enjoy these last few days outside while she could. Once they left, I sat in my chair by the lattice window. Hazy light filtered through the latticework, casting a design of leaves and vines across my worktable. I stared at the package for a long time. How did I know to be afraid? Finally, I peeled back one edge, then another, of the green silk until our fan was fully exposed. I picked it up. Then I slowly clicked open one fold after another. Next to the charcoal-ink characters we had written the night before we came down from the mountains I saw a new column of characters.
I have too many troubles, Snow Flower had written. Her calligraphy had always been finer than mine, the legs of her mosquito lines so thin and delicate that the ends wisped into nothing. I cannot be what you wish. You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me as I am. Write to me, not to console me as you have been doing, but to remember our happy girl-days together. And that was it.
I felt like a sword had thrust into my body. My stomach leaped at the surprise of it, then contracted into an uneasy ball. Love? Was she really talking about love with sworn sisters in our secret fan? I read the lines again, puzzled and confused. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me. But Snow Flower and I were laotong, which was a marriage of emotions strong enough to cross over great distances and long separations. Our bond was supposed to be more important than marriage to a man. We had pledged to be true and faithful until death parted us. That she seemed to be abandoning our promises in favor of a new relationship with sworn sisters hurt beyond reason. That she was suggesting that somehow we could still be friends literally took my breath away. To me, what she had written was ten thousand times worse than if my husband had walked in and announced he’d just taken his first concubine. And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been given the opportunity to join a post-marriage sisterhood myself. My mother-in-law had pushed me very hard in that direction, but I had schemed and plotted to keep Snow Flower in my life. Now she was tossing me aside? It seemed that Snow Flower—this woman for whom I had deep-heart love, whom I treasured, and to whom I’d committed myself for life—did not care for me in the same way.
Just when I thought my devastation could go no deeper, I realized that the three sworn sisters she had written about had to be the ones from her village whom we’d met in the mountains. In my mind, I replayed everything that had happened last winter. Had they been conspiring to steal her away from me from that first night with their singing? Had she been attracted to them, like a husband to new concubines who are younger, prettier, and more adoring than a loyal wife? Were the beds of those women warmer, their bodies firmer, their stories fresher? Did she look at their faces and see no expectations and no responsibilities?