A Bowl of Lukewarm Rice

When Gu Qing woke, there was no fire in the stove. She had finished a tray of flower centers the night before and remembered her grandmother still sitting by the lamp picking out the threads of the wrong color. She had assumed the old woman would get up first as usual. She put on her coat and went into the kitchen. The pot lid was cold. Half a radish lay partly cut on the board, with the back of the knife weighing down a strip of cloth.

Shen Su sat on the edge of the bed rubbing her eye. The right eyelid was swollen all around, yet she was still clutching the cloth, as though she'd forgotten to put it down halfway through rubbing. Gu Qing snatched it and took it to the window for a look. On the cloth lay an extremely fine broken needle. Her grandmother said, “I found it last night. It wasn't on the quilt. Don't look so frightened.”

Gu Qing gave no answer. She took the needle tray, the spools of thread, and the small scissors and put them all on top of the tall cupboard. Shen Su reached to take them, but Gu Qing moved them out of reach. She got another basket of coarse stems and set it beside the bed. “Just work on these for the next few days. Leave the fine needles alone. I'll make the meals. You sit.”

She had lit the fire herself, but the porridge was so thick the ladle stood upright. Her grandmother told her to add half a dipper of hot water. Worried the old woman was standing in a draft, she was too busy ushering her back into the room. By the time she looked at the pot again, the bottom had burned. She scraped off the black layer and brought over two bowls. She salted her own but wouldn't let her grandmother salt hers, saying swollen eyes called for plainer food. Shen Su took a taste, said nothing about how it was, and set her bowl by the window to cool.

After seeing to breakfast, Gu Qing went to buy some rough paper. She passed the little apothecary’s and brought back a packet of herbs for an eyewash. All they’d said at the shop was to avoid staying up late doing fine work close to the eyes and to come back if the redness and pain persisted. At home, though, she made it sound as if Grandmother couldn’t do needlework ever again. Grandmother asked who had said that. Gu Qing named the shop, set the packet on the table, and hurried off to count yesterday’s petals.

“Do you want me to go ask that man what he said word for word before you'll let me work?” Shen Su said.

Gu Qing steadied her hold on the basin of paste. “I'm just worried you'll tire yourself out.”

She said it very softly, but there was a fire inside her. In three days she was supposed to have all the base materials ready for the first batch of flowers, and Xiaoman would only come for half a day. If her grandmother had hurt her eye, Gu Qing would have to wash it with medicine, heat the water, and mind the door, every bit of it. She was afraid the eye really was damaged, and afraid that every day from now on would be cut into still smaller pieces. As soon as the thought surfaced, she lowered her head. She had pressed a white mark into the petal in her hand.

On the twenty-seventh, Auntie Chen came to take Shen Su to see an old acquaintance in the south of town. The old woman already had her old padded jacket on with the one Gu Qing had bought her and altered at the collar over it, and carried two packets of roasted beans. Gu Qing blocked the door and said there'd been a frost the night before. It was three li to the south of town, and her knee would be hurting again by the time she got back. Auntie Chen said she'd hired the neighbor's little donkey cart. The three of them could split the fare and ride the whole way without walking outside.

Gu Qing persisted. “Go when your eyes are better. Auntie Chen, don’t humor her.”

Auntie Chen's eyebrows shifted a little, but she let the remark pass. Shen Su set the roasted beans just inside the threshold and asked, “When does the cart leave?”

“In about half a quarter of an hour. I’ll wait at the mouth of the lane.” Auntie Chen went out.

Gu Qing breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the matter had passed. Her grandmother walked past her into the room, emptied the little cloth pouch she usually kept her needles in, and put in an unlined garment and a pair of soft-soled shoes. Then she took her purse from beside her pillow. When Gu Qing saw her roll up even her washcloth, several sheets of paper slipped from her hand.

“I'm going to stay at Qingniang's for two nights,” Shen Su said. “She has an empty bed. I can go see people and come back to sleep there without racing the dark.”

“You're staying away from home over a little thing like this?”

Her grandmother took a moment to answer. She couldn't squat, so she sat on a stool to put on her shoes. It took two tries to get her right foot in. Gu Qing couldn't help bending down and reaching over, but the old woman drew her foot back half an inch. “Wait a moment. I can put it on.” Gu Qing stayed half crouched and watched her slowly pull up the heel of her shoe. Suddenly this room she had lived in for so many years felt too narrow to hold even her.

Shen Su fastened her collar before she spoke. “This goes beyond that. If you're worried about my eyes, the needle can go away for now. When it comes to where I go, who I go with, or how many nights I stay, ask me first.”

“And you still have to go see the lotuses? You won't sleep well on the boat, you won't have hot water in a strange place, and that knee of yours—”

She'd only meant to name one thing she was worried about, but once out of her mouth it became another door. Shen Su looked up at her. Gu Qing went ahead and said they would skip it this year and talk about it next spring, once business had steadied and her grandmother's health was better. She'd already gathered plenty of reasons for saying it. The quilt, the planks on the boat, falling ill on the road, going hungry with the shop shut. Every one of them was real.

After listening, her grandmother picked up the packet of roasted beans again: “I haven't even said I must go this year. You've already decided for me that I won't.”

When the door closed, Gu Qing did not go after her. She picked the sheets up from the floor one by one, stacked them neatly, and knocked the edges against the corner of the worktable three times. The edges were square, but they still didn’t look square to her, so she knocked them again. Only when she could no longer hear the wheels at the mouth of the lane did she remember that Grandmother had forgotten her knee pads. She ran outside. A yellow dog was sniffing at a puddle of melted frost in the lane, and the donkey cart had long since turned the corner.

She thought of taking them over at once, then thought she'd only give Auntie Chen something to laugh at. The knee warmers stayed on the worktable, squeezed in with two trays that needed pasting. Xiaoman came by at noon, saw Gu Qing adding water to a pot of cold porridge, and asked whether she should bring her two hot cakes. Gu Qing shook her head, then called her back and took out four wen. “Two. Don't tell anyone.” Xiaoman acted as if she hadn't heard the last part and only asked whether she wanted scallions.

She worked through the coarse stems faster than usual that day because no one urged her to get up and eat, and no one asked whether there was hot water. When she straightened her back after dark, the space behind her felt cold and empty. The pot of porridge had been reheated twice and was still unfinished. Her grandmother’s little bowl sat upside down on the table, its chipped rim turned inward. She reached out and turned the chip toward herself, then turned it back.

The next day she took the knee wrap to Auntie Chen's after all. The door was half open and someone inside was laughing. Shen Su sat in the bright doorway, finishing the edge of a cloth pillow with coarse thread. The osmanthus cakes her old acquaintance from the south of town had brought were at her side, and crumbs clung to her clothes. She wasn't making flowers for the Gu household, and being away from home hadn't cost her any sleep. Gu Qing stopped outside the door. The haggard look she'd spent half the day hoping to see was nowhere in evidence, and she felt a disappointment she couldn't put into words.

Shen Su saw the knee wrap and waved her in to sit down. Gu Qing said she still had work at home and would not sit. Auntie Chen held out a bowl of hot soup. At the smell of radish, Gu Qing’s stomach suddenly turned sour, and she realized she had once again eaten only half a cold cake that morning. She took the soup and sat beside the threshold. Auntie Chen was unpicking a sheet that had worn through in the wash. Without urging them to make up, she asked Gu Qing to hold the other end.

They stretched the edge of the cloth taut between them, and Shen Su cut down the middle. One strip was for patching the bedding, the other for Auntie Chen to wrap the cloth she'd newly starched. Gu Qing pulled too hard and the old cloth tore a little. All three of them stopped. She was the first to speak. “I didn't see how thin it was there.” Shen Su turned the tear to the inside and found another piece of thread, without telling Gu Qing she'd always been like this.

Before going home, Gu Qing asked what time her grandmother would be back the next day so she could make dinner. Shen Su said it would be in the afternoon, and she might stop in to see Sister Ji first, so Gu Qing could go ahead and eat lunch. Gu Qing agreed. She got as far as the mouth of the lane before doubling back to put the knee wrap at the foot of the bed. She still wanted to tell her grandmother to mind how long she sat, but what came out was, “Is it warm enough here at night?” Her grandmother pointed to the corner of the quilt, where a little tuft of newly added cotton batting showed.

Between those two nights, Gu Qing did something else she didn’t usually do. After heating the water for washing, she carried the bucket to the well. Seeing half a window reflected in the water, she remembered that Grandmother often saved the last of the warm water for her to wash the dried paste off her fingers. She used to think the basin was in the way and move it behind the door, where the water would be cold by the time she finished working. She set the basin back on the inner side of the well platform, then thought this felt like waiting for someone to come home and give her credit for it. So she washed her hands herself.

A scrap of red floated to the surface. Of the eighty stems she had to deliver by the eighth, more than half were still just stems and sorted petals. She took her grandmother’s share of the work out of the reckoning, thinking it was only a few trays of flower centers. When she worked out the hours again, she found how much unremarked work had been tucked between two meals. She drew horizontal lines in charcoal on a scrap of paper and stopped at the fourth. Even when her grandmother was younger she’d had only two hands. She couldn’t always conjure an extra day for her.

That evening Auntie Chen’s little granddaughter came to borrow the bamboo clip and brought half a piece of cake from Shen Su while she was at it. The cake was wrapped in a clean piece of old patterned paper, with two sour plums tucked inside. The child said Granny Shen had found the cake too sweet and told her to bring it over, and had bought sour plums for herself. Gu Qing felt the two hard pits and remembered how she’d always bought the old woman soft cakes, afraid that anything sour would hurt her teeth, and hardly ever asked what flavor she wanted. She ate the half piece of cake in two sittings and saved one plum to suck on when she grew drowsy making flowers. The sourness shot right up between her brows. She scrunched up her face, then finally laughed, with no one in the room to see.

At the end of the first month, her grandmother came home. The redness in her eyelid had eased a little. She still kept away from fine needles at close quarters, and in the mornings she would sit awhile before getting up to move about. Gu Qing took the needle case down from the high cupboard and put it on a shelf Shen Su could reach, away from the lamp. Neither of them mentioned lotus blossoms, and the petals on the table still needed finishing in a hurry. But on the evening of the second day of the second month, when Shen Su said she wanted noodles, Gu Qing didn't decide on porridge for her. She cracked an egg into the pot and gave them half each. She let the noodles boil a little longer, so they were softer than usual when she lifted them out.