How Much for One Spray?

At year's end a small covered space opened up again in the West Market. The shoe seller was closing up to go back to his village and was willing to let someone take the remaining days. When Gu Qing passed, there was the blue curtain she had once thought of every day, yet she didn't stop. The flowers in her basket were already bundled for Yao's shop, Xiaoman was waiting for her to come home and count them, and between her and this patch of ground with an old brick weighing down one corner lay the East Market's eight stems, the eighteen stems, and another order still to go into the books.

She walked two steps past the stall, then suddenly turned back to ask what half a day would cost. The shoe seller said half a day still took up a day’s spot. Six cash, however long she stayed. Gu Qing weighed the flower basket in her hand. Without chalking the six cash up as a loss straightaway, she took out a few red plum blossoms and camellias she had kept for herself and laid them out beneath the curtain. She was selling for herself and had no samples waiting for approval. She only wanted to sit for half a day and see what people who came to buy her flowers actually wanted.

The first customers still came for the cheapest little flowers. A young woman who carried water for a living handled one for a long time and asked if Gu Qing could take a little less. Gu Qing said the price was already written down and startled herself at how much she sounded like Yao Liao. The woman drew back her hand without arguing and turned away to buy a foot of red cord. Gu Qing wanted to call her back, but two more people had come up to ask which flowers would be least likely to get crushed when worn. She got busy, and the moment to speak passed.

In half a day she sold five sprays and had forty more cash in her hand. Even after the stall fee, it was more than the flower shop paid for the same number. But when she went to the cooking shed for a little hot water, she had to ask the comb seller next door to mind her basket, then take a turn watching the other woman’s stall when she returned. A customer came to buy in that interval, and the cheapest spray already had a crease where someone had knocked it. Gu Qing could hardly tell the comb seller she had done a poor job looking after it. She had to straighten it herself. Little things like this used to happen every day, yet lately, waiting at home for orders, she seemed to have forgotten them.

A neatly dressed customer stopped in front of her cloth, praised how lifelike the centers of the camellias were, and asked which shop they came from. Gu Qing said she made them herself. The customer then asked if she had a regular storefront. She gestured toward the borrowed blue curtain behind her, then pulled up in the middle of her answer and said she lived in West Gate Lane and supplied Liaohua Ji in the East Market. Only when the customer heard the shop's name did their expression relax. They bought one stem and left. Gu Qing held the eight wen in her hand, pleased, yet reluctant to look at the hand that had just pointed out her shopfront.

When she got home, Xiaoman had already sorted the flowers for delivery. It had taken a quarter of an hour longer than the half day they had agreed on. Gu Qing was busy counting the money she'd just earned and didn't notice at first. Her grandmother brought a bowl of hot water from the stove and told her to wash her hands first so she wouldn't get market dust on the new silk. Gu Qing answered and asked whether Xiaoman could come in for a while tomorrow too. Xiaoman said she was going home to steam cakes for New Year's Eve. In past years she had been among those who stayed behind at the dyehouse, and this year it was finally her turn to rest.

Gu Qing nodded and said the day after tomorrow, then. Xiaoman smiled a little and asked if that was not New Year’s Day. Only then did Gu Qing realize she was reckoning her days entirely by how many flowers she had to make. She hurried to say she had only been asking and would never insist she come. Xiaoman pressed the old hairpin more firmly into her hair and said someone at home meant to cook her a meal, and she could hardly make them warm it over and over every time. Gu Qing raised no objection, though she suddenly had no idea which day could possibly hold all the sprays she had counted on making.

That afternoon she went to Yao's shop to deliver the flowers. Some of the three women who made flowers there had already packed their bundles, and Yao Liao herself was the one left at the counter. She handed two camellia stems back to Gu Qing, saying the petals had been bound so tightly in transit that the edges would no longer open. If a customer wore one out for the New Year, there was no telling what shape it would be in the next day. Gu Qing turned the stems over. She first thought of the wrapping Xiaoman had done, then saw the loop of binding thread she herself had put on last. She couldn't tell right away where the pressure had first fallen.

Yao Liao did not hold back the rest. She took the sound ones at the original price and would look at the damaged ones again after they had been reworked. Gu Qing asked whether this year’s wholesale price was still only six wen. Yao Liao said that if she set up her own stall, whatever she could sell them for was hers to keep. In the shop, though, the sale itself was only one part of what they had to account for. She didn’t bring up the three women’s wages again to defend herself. She just took a rent slip for the last third of the month from the drawer, tucked it under the stack of flower boxes she had just taken in, and turned to straighten the flowers that had gone askew at the corner of the counter.

Gu Qing helped straighten a box of flowers. Both women knew the work by touch, and for a while they left the price alone. Yao Liao suddenly asked how many days her new helper would take off for the holiday. Gu Qing said they had yet to decide. Yao Liao glanced at her and said that in her first year of hiring help, she too had thought it a shame to miss out on all those New Year customers. Then one year, a worker's son first called out for his mother during the first lunar month while she was away. The woman came back to the shop and never said a word. Ever since, on New Year's Day, Yao Liao had been wary of deciding for others what they could spare.

When Gu Qing heard that small story, she thought at first that even a shopkeeper could say such a thing. Then she worried that Yao Liao was taking the opportunity to persuade her to supply fewer flowers. She found two possible motives for the remark and in doing so never let it quite settle at her own table. When she got home, she handed the two returned stems to Xiaoman and said the bases needed to be wound tighter. This lot wouldn't count as new work yet. Xiaoman took them and asked whether the stems were loose or the flowers had been crushed. Gu Qing said it was both. They should fix them and send them back. The customer wasn't going to sort it out for them.

Xiaoman lowered her head and unpicked the thread. At last she saw that the outermost binding was too tight. It had been added when the whole bundle of flowers was tied together; she had not put it there. She pointed it out to Gu Qing, but Gu Qing was just leaving to help her grandmother lift a pot and replied that she would look in a moment. After they moved the pot, they examined it together. Gu Qing still said that if the inner knot at the base had lain flatter, the outside might not have been crushed so badly. The moment she finished speaking, Xiaoman's hands stopped. Only after a long pause did she begin unpicking again.

When it came time to settle up that day, Gu Qing first put down four copper coins for the new work, then took out two more and said in a low voice, “I tied the outer wrap this time. These are for reworking it.” Xiaoman put the two coins away separately and said nothing about the earlier two that had been withheld on the fifteenth of the twelfth month, when Gu Qing had forgotten to show her the inner knot. She handed back both corrected flowers and asked whether, if she came on the third day of the new year, they would start a fresh count for the new work. Gu Qing said yes and added that once orders were steady and there were more than these few pieces to do, it would be easier to talk about wages. Xiaoman said she had better go home and steam the cakes. Her family was waiting. She still gathered up all the bits of thread on the table before leaving, giving Gu Qing no reason to call her petty or careless in her work.

She had picked out the jacket on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth. Several were hanging in the clothing shop. One was soft and another was thick, with a band of dark trim around the collar that made it look smarter on display. She knew her grandmother spent a lot of time sitting and had meant to choose the softer one. Then the clerk said how fine the thick one would look when worn out, and her hand paused on the trim. As she paid, she thought that when her grandmother visited the neighbors, it would be good for them to see that her granddaughter earned something from making flowers.

When the clerk asked for the size, she held up the old padded jacket she had brought and looked only at the shoulders and the length of the back, without another look at the collar. Her grandmother had unpicked and altered the collar of the old jacket herself, lowering it a little from its original height. Gu Qing rolled the old jacket up again. A patch showed on the inside, and she quickly covered it with the outer layer, as though one glimpse of that worn color might make someone think less of the new jacket too.

On her way home she passed the bridgehead. The Zhou family's umbrella workshop was already half shut, and Lu Ying was carrying a pot of freshly reheated rice inside, telling Zhou Jiping to leave that lopsided bird alone and eat first. Gu Qing heard the soft scrape of a wing against the door. She kept going, only hugging the jacket a little tighter. She pictured her grandmother putting it on so brightly and vividly that there was hardly room for the collar to fit badly.

On New Year's Eve, Gu Qing gave her grandmother a new padded cotton jacket. It had cost little, but the collar was wider than on her old one. Shen Su tried it on and said it would catch at her chin when she sat down to work. Gu Qing hurried to turn it over for her and asked if the color was too dark. Her grandmother said she liked the color and would have to alter the collar. Gu Qing felt a little let down. When she bought it, she had imagined her grandmother being pleased the moment she saw it, and now here was another job to do. Only when her grandmother fetched a needle to unpick the collar herself did Gu Qing take it from her and say they could alter it at their leisure. There was no hurry to wear it for anyone to see.

They ate a modest meal. Firecrackers went off now and then outside, and someone from the Wen household was still keeping watch at the unfinished south gate. Xu Tan sent over a plate of honey-preserved fruit, and Gu Qing sent back a packet of cakes she had steamed herself. The two households could talk over the wall without having to shout all the way to the mouth of the lane as before, though the plum scent was already fainter than at the start of the month. Grandmother asked whether they would visit relatives in the morning. Gu Qing said they would rest first. She had thought a day when no one was pressing her for flowers would feel easy, but once she lay down she kept wondering which box she might have left improperly closed.

On the first day of the new year, Xiaoman didn’t come, just as expected. The little stool stood empty, and Gu Qing kept having to reach out one more time herself. She didn’t work a full day. She just finished off the bases of two flower stems she’d reworked, and in the afternoon, when she finished altering her grandmother’s collar, she discovered that inside the old collar there was another row of stitches that had once been taken out and sewn back in. Shen Su said someone else had worn that cloth before, and it was every bit as warm. Gu Qing tucked the line of stitching out of sight, no longer in a hurry to make everything look as pristine as if it had just been made for the first time.

The return cart arrived on the third. Luo Yi sent the remaining hundred and sixty-eight cash and two little slips of scented paper she had tried. She wrote no long praise, simply that all eighteen sprays were there, six blossoms could be taken off, and even from a distance they were recognizable on the display table. Gu Qing tipped the coins into a bowl and heard them ring out. Suddenly she wanted the whole alley to hear. She picked up a spare blue sample, put it beside Grandmother, and asked over and over whether it looked pretty. Before Grandmother could finish answering, Gu Qing was laughing too hard to stop.

Xiaoman arrived in the middle of the laughter. Gu Qing showed her the word Luo Yi had sent and pointed to the part about the six detachable blossoms. It was a good thing, she said, that Xiaoman had reminded her to leave them free instead of sewing them fast. Xiaoman smiled too and reached to push the bowl farther in, afraid one bump would send everything to the ground. For a moment it was like the day they had carried the wet cloth over the bridge together. They had something in their hands to be happy about, and neither was the first to weigh it down with another set of figures.

But when it came time to divide the new work, Gu Qing once again scheduled trays for Xiaoman in the days after New Year. Xiaoman looked at the schedule and said she had only agreed to come for half a day on the third. She still had to go back to the dye shop in the afternoon. Gu Qing looked up and said, hadn’t they agreed there would be more work from then on? As soon as she said it, the happiness that had been in the room a moment before seemed to slide softly off the rim of a bowl. Xiaoman let it go. She just gathered her three sets of materials, sat back down on the little stool, and lowered her head to do the work they’d already agreed on for today.