The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

dowry of sixteen satin slippers, four for each season, and had embroidered their toes with peonies for spring, lotus flowers for summer, chrysanthemums for autumn, and plum blossoms for winter. She had made the red sleeping shoes that would contrast so startlingly with her white legs that they would tempt the most surly husband into bed. Advised that for the first eleven nights as a bride she should surreptitiously slip her tiny feet into her husband’s big boots, May hoped by this ruse to gain power over him. She was prepared for a future as a dutiful wife to the rich silk dealer selected for her.
    A diviner was summoned to examine the prospective match by studying the Eight Characters. His blind eyes, lacking both pupils and tear ducts, shone; they spilled over down his cheeks. Sitting across the table, unaccountably May found she wanted to press her thumbs into them. “Auspicious,” the diviner pronounced. “It could not be more so.” He pulled himself to his feet, catching hold of the wall-hanging with fingers still greasy from the offerings he had gobbled.
    As he left, May told herself how lucky she was. She was thinking of her cousin, married off to a hunchbacked tin peddler. Among May’s suitors, the silk dealer was certainly the most handsome and polite. Twice he had sent his manservant with gifts: ten expensive bolts in ten jewel-like colors, along with a seamstress to sew the goods into gowns, a pair of jade bracelets, two gold hairpins, a butchered pig, and a chest filled with tea and spices and wine.
    O N THE MORNING of the wedding, fixed upon the first day of the second month, a large marriage sedan with red silk curtains came to collect May, dressed for the ceremony, from her home. The sedan was not accompanied, as May and her mother and grandmother expected, by a blue chair bearing the groom, but came instead with a note explaining that the silk dealer’s presence had been required that morning to avert a business emergency. The wedding would nonetheless take place at the divined hour, and May’s future husband awaited his bride eagerly.
    May read the missive, shrugged. As there was no one before whom to wail and carry on, lamenting separation from her mother and grandmother, she got into the fancy red chair quietly. She had not closed her eyes the previous night, and during the rocking ride from one town to the next she fell asleep and dreamed what seemed a not unpropitious dream of lanterns. She woke only slightly perturbed by the fact that the dream lanterns had been decorated with symbols she could not read.
    The sedan had stopped moving; she parted the curtains to discover herself parked before the closed main portals of a large and prosperous looking household. Over the lintel hung varnished plaques painted with gold announcements—past honors awarded the silk merchant’s family by the emperor. “Highly favored … lavishly bestowed …” and so forth. Between gate and gutter were stacked May’s few trunks and furnishings, which had been picked up from her grandmother’s home the previous day.
    She yawned. “Are we early?” she asked one of the men who had carried the sedan. “Why are the doors closed?” But the man didn’t answer. Beyond the walls she could see the roofs of west and east wings, each enclosing a separate courtyard. May sat back against the cushions in her itching, cumbersome skirts. Her ornate hair combs, of red enamel the same shade as that of her dress, bit into her scalp. It couldn’t be that she’d come on the wrong day—after all, it was the silk dealer’s servants who had come to fetch her.
    An hour passed, then another. She was hungry, thirsty and needed to relieve her bladder. But now the sedan was surrounded by meddlesome neighbors, eager to inspect its occupant, who sat, still unreceived, in the street.
    “You’d better go home,” an old woman said, pulling the curtains wide open with the hooked end of her furled black umbrella, and May agreed.
    But