Her family pried open the drawer of her dressing table one
gloomy afternoon. It was the end of summer when a weak
typhoon or a few days of rain might be expected, but once
autumn arrived in the sequence of time, it would be about time
to lay the year to rest. They passed the days as usual, like a paralytic
who, undergoing physical therapy on rehab equipment,
repeated the same exercises over and over again, until, after
some time, a skill burgeoned that enabled the patient to eliminate
all memories of the accident on the rails. Life looked propitious
because there was no cache of superfluous memories
stored away.
If no one mentioned her, she remained nearly forgotten by
her family. There was nothing unusual about this: even though they lived on different floors of the same apartment building,
they rarely ran into each other; if they needed to talk about
something, they usually spoke by phone. Her two brothers
occupied the right and left sides of the fifth floor, while she lived
alone in the attic suite, which was a later addition. They all
passed their days behind closed doors; the times they ran into
each other on the stairs, they would greet each other politely like
neighbors.
The situation had not developed this way without reason;
however, upon consideration, adapting to the present was more
important than tracing the causes. The three of them, brothers
and sister, were unanimous on this point. None of them could
say when this modern apartment, which was created from their
renovated ancient house, had become a public port, where each
moored his own ship and where each took care of his own destination.
She was the second of three children and the only
daughter in the family; they weren’t really fond of talking to
each other, and when they met they had nothing much to say, so
they might as well not see one another. Their anemic relationship
was more or less related to the distribution of profits after
selling the property “reserved for the landowner.”
For years, she lived alternately in her two brothers’ homes
to take care of their aged mother who had suffered a stroke. Her
brothers’ houses faced each other, but the bills were reckoned
fairly and clearly even by the two blood brothers. Last year their
old mother mustered her strength and persuaded her two sons
and two daughters-in-law to allocate a small sum for her daughter,
who was over forty and too old to marry and who had been
taking care of her for many a year. This matter, of course,
imposed difficulties on them, because when their father was still
alive they had already received the family property, which, according to the usual practice, the daughter was not entitled to
share, because, sooner or later, she would become an outsider.
Their mother certainly understood this perfectly justified rationale,
but age and illness had clouded her mind. At that time, the
two brothers were particularly close and everything could be settled
through discussion; they didn’t want to cough up any
money, nor did they want to be considered unfilial by their relatives
for defying their dying old mother. After weighing the situation,
they finally decided to add a suite on the top floor for her
to live in for as long as she pleased. That very day, the two
brothers specially dressed up and reported to their mother
regarding their openhanded decision with honeyed words that
could make the earth tremble and mountains sway.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she massaged her mother’s
back with an air of indifference; later she simply nestled in her
own bed where she read a magazine. The bell at the head of her
bed rang chaotically. A line ran from the bell to her mother’s
room—so that her mother could call her if she had to go to the
bathroom in the middle of the night—had accidentally been
touched by her brother. She reached out to muffle the ringing
bell. The room regained its peace and quiet. The two brothers
continued to discuss in detail the issue of the building materials
for adding the suite. She stopped reading and took a small mirror
from under her pillow and a lipstick from her pocket, which
she slowly turned with heart and soul, as if coaxing a butterfly
out of a greenhouse. And holding the small mirror with an
expression that could wake a cemetery, she applied the lipstick
to her lips and then smoothed her lips lightly twice. After that,
with the edge of the lipstick she traced the edges of her lips to
give them dimension. Dissatisfied, she took another lipstick to
intensify the color and luster of her lower lip, which looked like the play of light and shadow on a range of mountains. The pink
lipstick, which set off her pale and haggard face with a spring
charm, appeared as bright and beautiful as a wild peach blossom
struggling out of the ruins enveloped in dense fog and, oblivious
to the complexity of things, noisily recounted its desire.
The two brothers were stupefied. Regardless of how they
looked at the old-looking woman in pajamas, her hair tied up
high with a rubber band, she appeared an ugly outsider to their
eyes. Her red lips made them nervous. The older brother was
able to keep calm, and cautiously expressed the fulfillment of
their moral obligation in a heroic and stirring speech, while deep
in the bottom of his heart he was calculating to add the attic
room as soon as possible, so that once their mother passed away,
their sister could move to there, to the relief of them all.
Their mother, finally able to pluck a tiny fish from the fish
pond for her daughter, so to speak, now feeling comfortable and
at ease, saw that there was nothing to postpone her departure and
soon thereafter died from another stroke. The timing was perfect:
the attic suite was nearly finished, awaiting only the installation
of the electric lights.
As her two brothers and their families wept heart-broken
before their mother’s remains, she still wore the look of an outsider,
staring at the floorboard, as if to see into the depths of a
vast sea. The funeral ceremony was glorious and more lively
than a public market. Only after the funeral when they watched
the video did they discover that she held the bell from the head
of the bed, and that her lips were as bloody red as Siren’s.
After the funeral, she moved to the small attic suite.
People experienced in such matters remarked that it was her
fate and the purpose of her life was to repay her debt until the
death of her mother. As soon as the debt was repaid, she had no reason to remain in the world. The two brothers considered this
a wise remark that removed the awkwardness between the living
and the dead. They invited a high monk and Daoist priests to
the suite to chant scriptures to appease her soul, and at the same
time to drive out the evil and pray for the peace of the two families.
Although the sweltering heat made them uncomfortable,
they agreed in their hearts that her suicide indicated she had
done what was best for everyone.
If nobody mentioned her, she was nearly forgotten by her
family.
The suite could not just be left empty, so they tried to rent it
out to at least have some income; besides, whoever rented it
might be able to rid the place of the evil shadow. They decided
to arrange things a little bit and clean out anything that didn’t
belong there.
The dressing table was really ominous—it had belonged to
their mother first, then she took it. Now that the two women
were gone, they were afraid it would become a nest for the wild
ghosts. As they tried to move it away they found that one of the
drawers was locked.
The older brother, sweating profusely, tried to pry the drawer
open, but was unable to do so. Then in a fury he hit it with a
hammer, knocking off the face of the drawer, out of which noisily
spilled a whole bunch of things.
They were all lipsticks. He was frightened and felt weak as
if he were holding a drawer full of cockroaches that scuttled all
over. His turned pale
There were more than two hundred lipsticks in different
colors and different brands. It takes a woman, after all, to better
understand the seductive appeal of lipstick; his wife, like a child,
suddenly squatted on the floor and checked the life experience of each lipstick. Some had been used, some used only once.
She couldn’t help being obsessed with each one of them, turning
the lipstick up, trying the color on her back hand—they are powdery
orange, honey plum, wine red . . . each of the colors
seemed to speak a language of passion like charming lilies dancing
in the rainy outdoors, or chaste and gentle like the owner of
a boat sleeping under the moonlight. An expression wild with
joy appeared on her face; she took a peach red lipstick and facing
the mirror carefully applied it to her lips.
She turned around and, quite lovely, looked at her husband
with an ambiguous smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Her two trembling white arms were painted with more than two
hundred colored stripes which, like countless soft and wet
tongues, recited their mockery for the world, without the least
emotion.
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