The Border of Paradise: A Novel (10 page)

As I searched for something more to say, or waited for Mrs. Nowak to say something in reply, we both heard the piano intoning its solid, clean sound. In Taiwan only people who were both wealthy and of high class owned a piano, and my mother was one but not the other. I stopped chopping onions so that I could catch the melody, which drifted like a kite on a soft wind.

Mrs. Nowak sighed. She said, “You can always tell who’s playing by the way they touch the keys.” She leaned against the counter with her eyes closed, listening. “If you’re really going to be his wife, you need to take care of him. Promise me that.”

“Yes,” I said, and I meant it.

That was the last time I saw David’s mother. It was one day, that July day in that brown stone house, when I cooked with her and made a promise that I couldn’t keep. I tried to send her some of his ashes, but they were returned to me. Apparently she had moved away from New York after David left Wellbrook, because mothers know their sons; he said something once about her being from the middle of America, and I assume that is where she went in the end, like an animal crawling into a hole to die. He called it the “heart’s land.” It sounded like a safe place to me.

Fatty had come to look for a job. She wanted to work for the Golden Lotus, and when she approached me at recruitment hours, where I sat at my usual shaved ice stand, I laughed upon seeing her plump body and misshapen arm cloaked in a buttoned
blue dress. She had no redeeming physical features—not a prim, aquiline nose in the middle of that doughy face, nor a clear complexion to make up for the abundance of her body. She was simply not pretty, and also simply fat.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

A thinly lipsticked smile. “No.”

“I seek out girls for the Golden Lotus, not pigs for the slaughter.” I waved my hand at her. “Leave me alone.”

She seated herself across from me, bringing with her the odor of a sweaty body mixed with cheap Western perfume. Who knew where she had gotten those few precious sprays? She said, “You’re Jia-Hui Chen, the mama-san’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

Fatty was looking quite comfortable. Despite myself, I was intrigued by the lump beneath the upper sleeve of her dress.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” I asked her.

“I broke it,” she said. “It didn’t heal correctly.”

“There are doctors who can set bones, you know.”

“You’re right,” she replied, and smiled again. “I want to work at your mother’s bar.”

“Ah, that again.”

“I’m a virgin.”

“Many girls are virgins. And many of those girls don’t look like a sow in a dress.”

Did she flinch? Do I imagine it, now?

She said, “I am the
tongyangxi
to my brother. My parents bought me when I was a little girl, when both my brother and I were too young to understand marriage. My parents had
expectations.
But my brother didn’t want to marry me, in the end, when I turned out fat.”

The tradition of raising girls as
tongyangxi,
the sisterly wives to their adoptive brothers, was already taking on an old-fashioned flavor at this time. But there were still families, even in a major city such as Kaohsiung, who sought out impoverished young girls for marriage to their sons.

Fatty continued: “My father broke my arm. I was not taken to a doctor, and then my family kicked me out. I need to make money, and my arm prevents me from doing manual labor. I can’t find work as a maid, I can’t work in a field or farm, I am good for nothing. But I am sure, Jia-Hui, that I have more personality
than any of the girls in your bar. I’ll entertain the men who come while the other girls offer their bodies. I can live from nearly nothing. I request only shelter and food.”

“My mother,” I said, “will never allow it.”

“Ask her.”

“She’ll beat me for even suggesting it the second she sees you. I’m sorry. If you were less fat, there is a chance that—” and I wanted to say,
she could overlook your arm,
but there was suddenly something so tragic about it that I couldn’t speak the words.

“I know I’m fat,” she said. “I can’t help it.” She looked right at me. “They told me not to eat rice. So I didn’t. Then they said, ‘No meat, only vegetables; I did that. I did lose some weight, but not enough for my brother. Then they said, ‘You can’t eat anything at all,’ and it made no difference even though I was starving. So if you say no, I’ll leave you alone. I have enough experience with eating bitterness.”

“No,” I said. But she didn’t move. And then I said, “Wait.”

It wasn’t that I never heard tragic stories in my line of work. It wasn’t that this girl had been beaten or starved. I saw plenty of that. I met girls who were raped by their fathers and their brothers and their uncles and gangs of men who tore their bodies open. I met girls who had scars up and down their backs from bamboo cane lashings. So you become accustomed to this kind of thing. I couldn’t hire them all. What ghost then possessed me to give Fatty my day’s pocket money, and to ask her to come see me the next day at the same stand at ten
A
.
M
.? For a long time I believed that it was temporary madness. Now I think that it was when she said about her fatness, “I can’t help it.” It was the helplessness being voiced in combination with her certainty that she had other things to offer besides her helplessness, her fatness, her arm. She also looked me in the eyes, which almost no one did, and I admired that.

After we left New York City, David wanted to show me America. With heaps of cash he bought a Buick, and we filled it up: spare change, aluminum foil gum wrappers smelling of wintergreen, empty bags of potato chips, our clothing thrown on the backseat, our sweat seeping into the fabric. I didn’t know a place could be
so big, or that one piece of land could be so different from one place to the next. It was mountains and jagged red holes in one place and flat as a steel plate in another. In Kaohsiung things were sea-foam green, and if they weren’t sea-foam green, they were gray-black sand, and if they weren’t gray-black sand, they were the color of banana leaves drying in the sun, or the wet crimson of a bar girl’s mouth. In America people were the color of milk and the inside of a split piece of wood, dark as char, smooth as caramel. From state to state there were more souvenirs than I could fit in the tote bag that we’d purchased for that very reason, each souvenir representing a state or monument we visited while I said, “Beautiful,” and I said this about everything with honesty.

My mouth hurt from speaking English. The muscles around my lips and my cheeks ached. In my dreams voices stretched into long, silly words that meant nothing, and I woke up saying “milk” or “glass” before tumbling back into the sleep of nonsense dreamers. Soon I vomited over and over at the side of the road while David reached over and rubbed my damp neck, and then I craved all kinds of things: hot buns filled with pork, cold and briny seaweed, red bean popsicles. The sudden craving was monstrous, like a thing already in my mouth that could not be tasted or swallowed and just between my frozen teeth with a jaw stuck open, and my longing for these foods was not a longing in my stomach but something jammed deep in my throat. I awoke in fancy motels with mouthfuls of blood, the insides of my cheeks chewed ragged and raw, and I spat and spat into porcelain basins while clutching my belly. I was inconsolable in the most beautiful of hotels and I sobbed on a ledge of the Grand Canyon, where I was sure that my longing would push me in. David said, over and over, “Oh, sweetheart.” He understood the vomiting as morning sickness and something that all women experienced in pregnancy. He understood the mood swings as common, and understandable for a biological process that would result in the production of a human being who was our baby and our joint accomplishment. He washed the blood out of my pillowcases. He stroked my hair, and I loved him. And yet I continued to vomit everything that I put into my mouth, my throat hot as my eyes watered and burst bloodshot, until finally I pushed away a basket of french fries that sat before me in a blue-and-white-checkered
diner, where the flies landed and rose, and I was resolute: I would not, and could not, eat those french fries, hamburgers, or bowls of chili any longer. If I continued, I would vomit until the baby, whom I suspected was a boy because of his sense of entitlement, dried up in my womb. But how could I explain this? Instead I said, “I am not hungry.” In fact, I was hungrier than I had ever been in Kaohsiung.

I drank milk. I could have cold milk from bottles through a straw like a child, and our baby would not force it back up. David bought a dairy crate and put it in the backseat. Every hour he reached behind his seat and handed me a sweaty bottle, from which I drank while watching the scenery. Still, I craved the taste of things I couldn’t have, including their delicate saltiness, the unique pillow of a
crushed flat between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and in my hunger and bloody craving the milk took a pink tinge to it, reminding me of the strawberry milkshakes I no longer wanted.

“You need to eat,” David said. He dragged me from diner to diner. All the names ran into one another. “You need meat. Vegetables.” I shook my head, starving, teeth itching.

We were at a truck stop near Eugene, Oregon, with lights that flickered like sleeping eyelids. I sat in front of a closed menu and a glass. I didn’t want milk. I was, in fact, tired of that clotted feeling on my tongue and the mucus it formed in the back of my throat. I was exhausted from not eating, and David seemed exhausted, too, as he blinked and blinked.

“Why don’t you take a look at the menu?” he said. He hadn’t asked me to look at a menu in days.

I opened it. I looked at the words. They were all the same words that I’d seen in every other diner in America. I closed it. David asked me what I wanted. The restaurant shimmered, felt dangerous. I said, “A hamburger.”

The hamburger came. It was the size of my hand, and the top had a crease like the inside bend of an elbow. Even thinking about it made my stomach lift. I looked at the limp pink tomato inside, the pale lettuce. I moved my hand from my lap as if to touch it, or to pick it up, and then, under no will of my own, the hand lifted and pushed the plate away. Whip-fast, David reached out and grabbed my wrist.
This is it,
I thought. I went limp with his hand wrapped around my wrist, which grabbed so tight and
held me for so long that I thought my fingers would go numb. David let go. Finally he said, wearily, “I don’t understand.”