I decide to change the subject to a topic that concerns us both. “Sometimes a husband and wife need help with bedroom affairs.”
But I’m too clumsy, too abrupt. Meiling shakes her shoulders, as if brushing off cherry blossom petals falling in spring. After a moment, she says, “Kailoo and I enjoy bedroom affairs. That’s not our problem. I sip this, he sips that, but we can’t make one baby.”
I reach across the table to take her hand. “I wonder if I could help.”
She stares at me, her expression impenetrable.
“What are you thinking?” I ask. “Why won’t you let me doctor you? Is it that I’m a woman? That I’m still too young?”
She swats away those ideas, but in that gesture—knowing her so well—I understand that she’s keeping something from me.
“Is Doctor Wong giving you formulas to take?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I’m hurt straight through to my marrow. Trying to cover my feelings, I ask, “What has he prescribed?”
Meiling waves a hand. “I don’t want to worry you with that.” Then, “Truly, I don’t need assistance, but I know a woman who does.”
“I only treat people in my family—”
“Other women need help too.”
“I would have to ask Maoren’s permission to visit another elite household, but he’s in Nanjing,” I say.
“The person I’m thinking of is not from an elite family.” When I shake my head, Meiling says, “Your mother-in-law won’t find out.” After a pause, she adds, “Please, Yunxian. Would you let a woman suffer just because she doesn’t live within the walls of your husband’s home?”
“Bring her here the next time I visit—”
“That won’t do. We need to go to her.” Before I can argue, she’s on her feet, opening cupboards and pulling out clothes. “You can’t walk the streets looking like that. You’ll need to change.”
“Absolutely not!” I exclaim, but after her rejection of my help, I feel I have to do this to show I love her still. Against all the wisdom I’ve acquired in life, I find myself slipping off my gown and pulling on the indigo cotton trousers and jacket Meiling gives me. The pants are longer than those she’s wearing, so they cover my white, withered calves.
Three problems remain: the carefully applied makeup that marks me as a wife from an elite family, my hair piled atop my head and decorated with jade and gold ornaments, and my feet. Meiling uses a cloth to wipe away the cream, powder, rouge, and lip paint from my face. “I don’t want to take apart your hair, because we won’t have time to put it back together before you go home,” she says, and then wraps a hand-dyed scarf over my bun and the adornments and ties the cloth at the back of my neck. We stand together to peer into a mirror. These simple changes make us look like sisters, but it also strikes me how only a layer of paint and a hairstyle can separate women by class. And our feet.
“Sit down,” Meiling orders. I do as I’m told, while she rummages through more drawers and cupboards. She comes to me with clean rags and a pair of boots. She stuffs cloth into the toe of one of the boots. I slide my silk slipper inside. She prods the toe with her thumb, looks up at me, and says, “There’s still too much room.” I remove my foot, and she adds more rags. This time the boot fits. We go through the process for my other foot. I sit with my heels resting on the floor, my toes pointed toward the ceiling. My feet look disturbingly large.
“Try standing,” Meiling says. “Take a few steps.”
I wobble as I rise, and panic sweeps through me. “We shouldn’t do this. If someone finds out—”
“No one will find out.”
She holds my elbow as we go downstairs and slip out the back door into an alley. The boots, which seem huge and as heavy as anchors, make walking awkward. I lift each foot high and then deliberately set it down. Meiling naturally walks faster than I ever could, and she pulls me along at a quicker pace than is comfortable. We turn a corner and enter a busy pathway that edges a canal. We pass shops where customers bargain and negotiate. At an open-air teahouse, I see two men arguing about philosophy. Meiling puts an arm around my waist, hugging me close. She holds her other arm in front of her, washing it from left to right and back again, clearing people coming our direction from getting too close or bumping into us.
“Let’s go back,” I mumble. “This is a mistake.”
She ignores me. “I told you that Kailoo and I are going to build a house. We’ve already visited a brickyard to place our order. There’s a woman—”
“A working woman?”
“I’m a working woman,” she replies impatiently. “Poppy, your cook, and all the other servants and concubines in your household are working women.”
She’s right, but that doesn’t make what we’re doing any less serious. If I’m caught…
It feels like we walk forever, but the wide bottoms of Meiling’s boots support me quite well. We make another turn and veer away from the canal. What I see is much as Meiling described to me when we were girls. The colors are vibrant. Shops display their wares: bolts of silk and brocade piled high, fruit gleaming from baskets, and meat—red, sweating, attracting flies. It all manages to be beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. Storefronts gradually turn into rows of homes built side by side, with no space between them. Then the structures change again to factories that make baskets and other products, and process and spin silk. I jump when I hear a hard thwack from a blacksmith’s stall, and the sound of grain being ground grates at my nerves.
We reach a gate, Meiling pulls the bell, and an old woman opens the door. She brightens when she sees Meiling. “Young Midwife! Welcome!”
“It’s good to see you, Oriole. I’ve brought someone who might be able to help you.”
The woman gestures for us to enter. It’s beyond my comprehension that I could find myself in a brickyard. Oriole takes us to a shady spot under an overhang and motions for us to sit on some overturned crates. She pours tea, backs away as a servant might, and then stands with her head lowered and her hands folded.
“Please sit,” Meiling says.
When Oriole hesitates, I add, “I can’t examine you if you’re over there.”
She pulls up another crate and joins us. As Meiling engages Oriole in conversation, I take the opportunity to begin the Four Examinations. Looking: not surprisingly, her skin is leathery from spending her days under the sun in this courtyard, where she is also in constant contact with arid heat from the kiln. Despite this, I detect paleness lurking just under her skin. Her hands are rough, worn, and knobbed at the joints. She’s thin in an unbecoming way. Instead of taking years off her life, as if she had the trim figure of a girl about to marry, her body looks as though it’s consuming itself, wasting to dried flesh on bones. Most shocking, she wears straw sandals, revealing feet browned not just from the sun but from the dirt and dust of this place. Her toenails are long and dirty. Thick calluses edge her big toes and her heels. The sight is so unsettling that I shift my vision back to the woman’s face. I take Oriole to be in her sixth decade of life. Smelling: she has the same aroma about her as my bearers do on a day such as this. It’s the odor of hard work and garlic. Now for asking:
“What is your age?”
“I am thirty-eight,” Oriole answers.
Grandmother and Grandfather taught me early on never to reveal my surprise when a patient discloses something disturbing.
“So you still get your monthly moon water?”
Oriole glances at Meiling, questioningly.
“The problem is not that she gets it,” Meiling explains. “It’s that it never stops.”
“When and how did that start?” I ask.
“Once when I had my monthly moon water, my husband spent the day in town and I had to carry all the bricks myself. My labors didn’t end until long after darkness fell. I had nonstop flooding for three months. This turned into nonstop dribbling for three years.”
Three years?
My next question is an obvious one. “Has medicine helped?”
Oriole shakes her head, and Meiling chimes in. “How can medicine work if she hasn’t been given a proper diagnosis?”
“Oriole, you are alone here today,” I comment, hoping this might bring forth more information.
“My husband is often away,” she says. “He sees to the delivery of our bricks. He likes to visit taverns too. And other places…” Her face turns a deep vermilion. Does she flush from embarrassment that her husband visits women who sell their bodies or from resentment and anger? “When he’s away,” she continues with emotion in her voice, “I’m left to carry and stack the bricks and tiles we make. Many nights I sleep alone.”
I nod sympathetically. I too spend many nights alone in my marriage bed.