The People Who Look at Flowers

When Sister Ji came to help look through the old silk, she recognized the gray piece beneath the smoky purple at a glance. She pinched the edge and held the cloth under the window. It was called Moonwater, she said, a gray with too even a dye. Customers nowadays found it plain, though it went well with dark red. Shen Su was sitting beside them shelling beans. At the name her fingers paused, then went on dropping beans into the bowl.

Gu Qing asked if they had both seen the fabric before. Sister Ji said they had each bought a piece years ago, meaning to make a set of spring flowers. The Gu family’s piece had ended up at the bottom of a chest, while hers had sold. Gu Qing asked Grandmother why she had never sold it. Shen Su said they had never finished. Sister Ji looked up. This time she let the remark stand and gave a little laugh. “What you never finished, was it the flowers, or settling whose names went on that line?”

The room went quiet, and the last bean in the bowl rolled to the edge of the table. Gu Qing stopped it with her finger. She suddenly recognized the words she hadn't heard in the eleventh month, when she'd taken the old pattern to ask Sister Ji about it. She looked straight at her grandmother, without casting about for someone to speak in her defense, and waited for her to answer. The wind gave the bamboo blind at the window a little knock. The old woman reached out to steady it, then drew back her hand.

“The two of us tried out the design together,” Shen Su said. “She thinned the edges first, then I changed how we rolled them. Back then, mine was the name people knew. I said I’d bring her in once the flowers were selling steadily. Then they started selling steadily, and I still took my time.”

Sister Ji looked down and picked a stray thread off the silk. She said she'd been in her early twenties then and Shen Su around forty, and she'd wanted more than to have her name on something. She was about to start a family and wanted to take some of the flower work home. Several times she'd brought half-finished samples, and each time Shen Su had picked them apart, saying she'd keep them once they were fixed. Later, a customer wore one of the unaltered flowers out of the shop, and Shen Su was the first to get angry, afraid people would think she couldn't manage the people who worked for her.

Sister Ji said it had taken her time to get the hang of buying her own materials. At first she had misjudged a batch of silk and lost half a winter's savings making it good. Shen Su had brought her a basket of provisions with enough money at the bottom to get her through the immediate trouble, all the while saying she should not have been so quick to pick out stock herself. Sister Ji accepted the money and later repaid it in full, but for a long time she did not want to talk about anything else she had learned. Gu Qing pictured the basket and could practically hear the tone her grandmother used in advising her now. The help in her hands was real, and so was the way her words made you draw in your shoulders.

“If I'd stopped coming round back then, I wouldn't be sitting here all these years later,” Sister Ji said. “But my sitting here doesn't make what you said right.” Shen Su nodded as she listened. She made no attempt to set the money she'd given against those words. She tried twice to pinch a bean out of a crack in the table, and Sister Ji flicked it into her palm with a fingertip. The two went on shelling it as usual. Gu Qing saw that they could still shell a bowl of beans together, without falling into each other's arms in tears or wiping away the past with a single stroke. She swallowed what she'd meant to say to make peace and went to add water to the pot.

The tips of Gu Qing’s ears grew hot as she listened. She raised a hand as though she could feel the petal she had altered for Xiaoman. She wanted to say in her grandmother’s defense that the family had been struggling in those days. Then she thought that even if her grandmother had gone to Yao’s shop and pleaded that being young was hard, all thirty-six stems would still have cracked. She smoothed out the moon-water silk and let the others speak.

Shen Su admitted that she had even gone to the customer and said that flower was still a trial piece, leaving Sister Ji to smooth things over with smiles over and over. Here her voice slowed, as if she were walking down that old street again. Sister Ji said the customer still liked that flower and refused to give it back. She was so afraid the two women would quarrel if they met again that whenever she wore it, she took a detour. Sister Ji laughed first, and Shen Su laughed too. When she stopped, the creases around her mouth were a little deeper.

They'd kept seeing each other after that day. Sister Ji eventually went into selling materials, choosing colors and judging silk for herself, and after a while she made a steadier living than she had with flowers. She still had dealings with Shen Su. She'd helped when the old woman needed it, and the Gu family had pitched in when the Jis moved their shop. Only with that old curled-edge pattern did Shen Su still call it hers as a matter of habit, and Sister Ji had no wish to fight over it every time. After all those years, a little notch remained in the paper template, and Gu Qing had always assumed it had simply worn through with use.

“Where did you go wrong with the scissors to make that notch?” she asked.

Sister Ji said she had cut the notch by accident at first. Later, after many tries, she found that leaving that little gap kept it from stiffening when rolled up, so she had kept it. Shen Su nodded. Sister Ji took the original pattern Gu Qing had returned earlier from the cloth bag she carried and spread it flat in front of them. Shen Su pointed to another curve she had added later: “I changed this part.” She did not give away all the credit, and Sister Ji did not ask her to. Their fingertips had both rested on the paper before Gu Qing could truly see that the two cuts had come from different hands.

Gu Qing laid a fresh sheet of paper over the pattern and suggested asking Elder Ding to write both their names on it another day. Shen Su said she could write 沈, the character for Shen, and Sister Ji said she could manage 纪, the character for Ji. There was no need to make another trip over so small a thing. They each took a charcoal pencil and wrote in a corner. The last stroke of Shen Su’s 沈 stretched too far, while Sister Ji’s 纪 was squeezed into a little knot. Gu Qing was content with how they looked. When she folded the paper, she took care to leave that corner on top.

Lunch was running late and the beans still hadn't gone into the pot. Sister Ji said she had meant to go back and mind the shop, but she might as well wait for a bowl. If she lost any business, she would collect from Shen Su. The old woman muttered that some friend she was, always remembering what to charge, but counted a few coins out of her own purse and sent Gu Qing to buy a little meat. Gu Qing took them without saying the meal should be her treat. She watched Sister Ji sit by the door with her legs stretched out, sorting through silk, as if there had always been a stool here that was hers to sit on.

After lunch, Sister Ji brought up how Shen Su had talked in her youth about going south to see the lotuses, and asked whether it was really settled. The old woman said they would leave on the twelfth day of the fifth month. The final payment for the boat was still due. Sister Ji said they had once talked about going together. Later she herself had gone to a nearby water town first, and when she came back and talked about it for half a day, all Shen Su had said was, what was so good about seeing that much water? Gu Qing turned her head in surprise. At last Shen Su could no longer keep a straight face. “She talked about it every day when she came back. I hadn't gone, and I was sick of hearing it.”

“Didn't you say you were afraid I'd show off?” Sister Ji said with a laugh.

Shen Su gave a little snort, with some embarrassment in her smile. Gu Qing remembered how her grandmother had pretended to know all about Heze at the Wens’ New Year meal, and how annoyed she herself had been at the sight of the blue flower on the gray hat. She had always thought of her grandmother’s unfulfilled wishes as pure sorrow, the result of giving way to others. Only now did she see the stubbornness that kept her from admitting she had never seen the lotuses, and the spite that made it hurt a little less if she made light of a friend’s happiness.

She could have said her grandmother had once been just like her. But as the words reached her lips, she saw Shen Su asking Sister Ji which waterside village was a shorter journey, and did not pull the woman back into her own story. This time the old woman listened very carefully. Even after hearing it was only a shallow pond, she asked whether tree shadows lay beside the water and whether all the flowers turned one way when the wind rose. Sister Ji said she could not remember; she remembered only the mud on her soles that day, which took half the evening to wash off.

Gu Qing laughed out loud. Shen Su laughed too and said that in that case they ought to go and see the place where the mud stuck so thickly to your shoes. Sister Ji put away her estimate for the old silk and looked back at her old friend before leaving to ask if she should bring some thread in a new color. The old woman wanted a pale gray-green, nothing bright. Even if she didn’t get to see the lotus leaves, she could wind a few bare stems first. And Sister Ji wasn’t to come back and laugh at her for complaining about too much water again.

On the evening of the eighteenth, Shen Su took out her small scissors and cut a lotus petal. Her eyesight was poor and the broad outline she drew first went a little crooked, so she asked Gu Qing to darken the line. Gu Qing meant to add three layers, using their usual elaborate method for lifelike flowers. The old woman stopped her. She would stick to the broad shape, she said. Anything finer and she couldn't see it. Gu Qing picked up two petals to compare them. The simpler one had a steadiness to it, as though silk could just be silk and had no reason to hide where it came from.

They began with no certainty that the lotus would sell as a new design. Shen Su cut just five petals and tried layering them, using a little tangle of old knotted thread for the center. Gu Qing thought the curve at the tips was still too stiff and said they could change it once they saw a real lotus. The old woman agreed and kept this one by her bed, separate from the boxed flowers waiting to go out. She wound a strip left over from cutting the Moonwater silk around the stem. There was a hint of blue in the gray.

When Sister Ji came again on the twentieth, Gu Qing deliberately showed her the three blue buns so her grandmother wouldn't have the joke to herself. Sister Ji gave them each a squeeze and said the third could pass for a piece of fruit, while the first looked as though it had been tied in a fit of temper. Shen Su rocked with laughter. Gu Qing felt less ashamed this time and took the first one for another look. She really had been angry when she'd made it. The spoiled flower had stayed just as it was, and in her hands it had turned out more useful than if she'd simply destroyed it.

She asked her grandmother if she would still call the patterns her own from now on. Shen Su gave no outright promise. She only said to remind her when she got it wrong. Her tongue was used to saying it that way and would take time to learn. Gu Qing felt a little disappointed at first, then saw the old woman put the templates they had newly labeled together at the top, with the old ones underneath and the corner bearing the names facing out. Her hands had moved half an inch ahead of her words.

At dusk on the twenty-first, Gu Qing finished the first batch of apricot-colored sash flowers, checked the fastenings and edges, and sealed them in a little box with ten compartments. Shen Su sat beside her wrapping her own thick stems and suddenly asked whether she should wear the gray lotus to Heze. Gu Qing said perhaps not just yet. What if the real flowers laughed at them? The old woman gave it some serious thought and said that in that case they would have to let the flowers see what they could do. Gu Qing agreed to pack it for her in a shallow box. They could take it out if they could, and leave it where they were staying if it might get crushed. There was no need to decide in advance that this gray lotus, which had yet to see a real one, had no right to go out.