Lisa See - Peony in Love

corn and ashes used to bring down Yi’s fever? Ze could have been in any or all of those places and I wouldn’t have known, because I hadn’t been looking for her.

Ze took advantage of my distraction by swooping down and sitting on Yi’s chest.

“Remember when you did this to me?” she screeched.

“No!” I screamed. I reached down, grabbed Ze, and pulled her back into the air.

Willow dropped the broom and covered her ears. Ren swirled and caught Ze’s leg with the sword. Spirit blood splattered the room.

“Ren loved you,” Ze reproached me. “The two of you never met and yet he loved you.”

Should I tell her the truth of that? Would it matter now?

“You were always in his mind,” she went on mercilessly. “You were the dream of what could have been. So I had to be you. I remembered hearing about your lovesickness and how you turned away food—”

“But I shouldn’t have stopped eating! That was a terrible mistake.”

But even as I spoke, a memory of a completely different sort came to my mind. I’d always dismissed Doctor Zhao as stupid, but he had it right all along. Ze was jealous. He should have forced her to eat the jealousy-curing soup. And then I recalled a line from the opera: Only women who are spiteful are jealous; only those who are jealous are spiteful.

“I remember,” Ze went on. “I remember it all. You taught me what the consequences of not eating would be. So I wasted away to become you—”

“But why?”

“He was mine !” She broke away from me, sank her black nails into the rafter, and hung there like a disgusting creature. She was a disgusting creature. “I saw him first!”

Ren dropped to his knees next to Yi’s bed. He held her hand and wept.

Soon she would be flying across the sky. At last, I fully understood my mother’s sacrifice for my father. I would do anything to save the daughter of my heart.

“Don’t punish this insignificant wife,” I said. “Punish me.”

I edged toward Ze, hoping she would forget about Yi and come after me. She loosened her grip on the rafter and breathed a noxious cloud of filth in my face.

“How best to do it?” In her voice I heard the little girl who was so selfish—no, insecure, I realized now, when it was too late—that she couldn’t let anyone else speak for fear it would take attention away from her.

( 2 6 6 )

“I’m sorry I forgot to let you eat,” I tried again, hopelessly, helplessly.

“You aren’t hearing what I’m saying. You didn’t kill me,” she gloated.

“You didn’t crush me. You didn’t steal my breath. I stopped eating, and for once I had total control over my destiny. I wanted to starve that thing you put in my belly.”

I recoiled from the shock of her words. “You killed your baby?” When a satisfied smile came over her face, I said, “But he did nothing to you.”

“I went to the Blood-Gathering Lake for what I did,” she admitted,

“but it was worth it. I hated you and told you what would hurt you the most. You believed it and look what you’ve become. Weak! Human!”

“I didn’t kill you?”

She tried to laugh again at my ignorance, but sadness poured from her mouth. “You didn’t kill me. You didn’t know how.”

Years of sorrow, guilt, and regret rolled off me, fell away, and disappeared into the cold air around us.

“I was never afraid of you,” she went on, seemingly oblivious to how unburdened and light I suddenly was. “It was the memory of you. You were a ghost in my husband’s heart.”

From the first time I’d seen Ze, a part of me had felt sorry for her. She had everything and nothing. Her emptiness had left her unable to feel anything good—from her husband, her father, her mother, or me.

“But you’ve been a ghost in his heart too.” Again I edged forward. If she hated me so much, she’d come for me eventually. “He couldn’t abandon either of us, because he loved us both. His love for Yi is just a continuation of that. See how he stares at her. He’s imagining how I must have looked all alone with my lovesickness and remembering how you looked when you were dying.”

But Ze wasn’t interested in reason, and she certainly didn’t care for what she could see with her own eyes if she’d chosen to look. Both of us had been doomed because we’d been born girls. We’d both struggled on the precipice between being worthless or valuable as a commodity. We were both pathetic creatures. I hadn’t killed Ze—the relief of that!—and I didn’t believe she truly wanted to kill Yi.

“Look at him, Ze. Do you really want to hurt him again?”

Her shoulders slumped. “I let our husband take credit for what we did with The Peony Pavilion, ” she admitted, “because I wanted him to love me.”

“He did love you. You should have seen the way he mourned.”

But she wasn’t listening to me. “I thought I could beat you in death.

My husband and our new sister-wife made offerings to me, but you know ( 2 6 7 )

this family has always been insignificant.” I waited, knowing the word she would use next. “Mediocre. Fortunately, I had my father to buy me out of the Blood-Gathering Lake, but once I was free, what did I find?” She pulled at her hair. “A new wife!”

“And look what she did for you—for both of us. She heard our words.

You were in the margins of The Peony Pavilion as much as I was. And you helped Yi with part two. Don’t deny it.” I moved closer to Ze. “Our sister-wife helped Ren to see he could love us all—differently but completely.

Our project is going to be published. Isn’t it a miracle? We’re all going to be remembered and honored.”

As Ze’s tears began to flow, the ugliness of years spent in the Blood-Gathering Lake washed away, as did her anger, bitterness, spite, and selfishness. Those emotions—so persistent and strong—had followed her into death. They’d covered her terrible unhappiness. Now defeat, sadness, and loneliness oozed out of her like worms from the ground after a spring rain until Ze’s true essence—the pretty girl who inhabited her dreams and longed to be loved—appeared. She was not a demon or a ghost at all. She was at once a brokenhearted ancestor and, at last, a true lovesick maiden.

I called on the inner strength of my mother and grandmother, reached out, and put my arm around Ze. I didn’t let her argue. I just pulled her with me, skirting around Willow’s sweeping, avoiding the mirrors, and slipping past the sieve. Ze and I went outside, and then I released her. She floated above me for a few seconds; then she turned her face skyward and slowly disappeared.

I went back inside and watched with great joy as Yi’s lungs emptied of fluids, she gasped for breath, and Ren sobbed in gratitude.

( 2 6 8 )

Shimmering

T H E T H R E E W I V E S ’ C O M M E N TA RY was p u b l i s h e d at t h e end of winter in the thirty-second year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign in what would have been my forty-fifth year in the earthly realm. It was an immediate and enormous success. To my amaze-ment and unabashed delight, my name—and those of my sister-wives—

became known across the country. Collectors like my father sought out my book as something unique and special. Libraries purchased it for their shelves. It went into elite homes, where women read it again and again.

They cried at my loneliness and my insights. They wept over their own lost, burned, or forgotten words. They sighed for the things they wished they’d written, about spring love and autumn regrets.