The Border of Paradise: A Novel (33 page)

“I think, buglet,” William says between songs, “that we’ve got a bit of a tuning problem. When did we last address your piano?” he asks, because we are the ones who tune the piano, we are the ones who were taught by our father to strike a tuning fork, to turn the tuning lever gently and slowly, to never settle for a cheap instrument, and besides, I have perfect pitch, which William does not.

“It’s sort of been a gradual problem,” I reply.

“I guess. Crept up. Well, we ought to do something about that,” he says, scraping the sides of his bowl, “before it gets any worse.”

When Ma comes into the living room and sits next to William, adjusting the neckline of her robe, William says to her, “Gillian’s piano is out of tune—we were just saying.”

“Well, then fix it. Easy enough.”

“We will. We can work on that tomorrow while you’re in town.”

While you’re in town.
A flash of bitterness crosses my eyes at the casual drop of news. I will be minded at home; William will be
busy minding. I see the K & Bee projected onto the white-and-black backdrop of keys, and the market’s gorgeous cacophony of tins and bags:
buy me, look at me.
I want to buy and I want to look at the tinned meat and the women with their long hair and long skirts. The boys with pale skin and sunny hair. And I have lost my dog, the dog who provided me with such electric joy over the last epoch of my brittle life. The feeling of bitterness—so closely linked anger and sadness—melts to ache. So we’ll have a few hours without Ma. He’ll want to pursue intimacy. An hour of sex, an hour tuning the piano. The word
tune.
The sound of the word
two
encased within the hard
d
. To tune the body. To make it accurate, strip it down to its essential nature.

I saw Sarah in the morning. I did. I saw her at dawn. Was it my imagination, or did she already look thinner? I did not feed her because I knew that Ma was watching. If Ma wasn’t actually in the hall, gazing out at me, she was staring from a crack in her bedroom door. She would know what I had done. As she said to William, she knows more than either of us does; she always knows everything.

“It is time to clean the kitchen,” Ma says. “Come.”

My brother stands, holding his bowl and spoon. He smiles at me.

“I’ll be there in a second,” I say.

Ma goes into the hall, her sturdy yet slender body dragging the too-long robe behind her, and William, not knowing yet whether to follow, stands in the living room entranceway. “What are you doing?”

I answer, “A consultation.”

I go to the bookshelf. William begins to hum—the “Adagio Cantabile” from
Pathétique,
his particular sign of pleasure. I take out the
OED
volume that houses the word
tune. Tundra, tundrite. Tune.
Common meanings: “sound or tone.” Here it is. A former meaning: “to close, shut; to fence or enclose.”

“What were you looking for?” he asks as I put the book away.

I tell him nothing. I believe in the predictive nature of language.

Sarah is noticeably thinner through the window. She comes still to the house and paces the porch, whining, and will sometimes sound a bark. She is wondering why I won’t come to say hello and to feed her.

Days and nights slither by and Sarah still comes with hope.

She comes and comes, and I know the
guai baobao
is more faithful than I will ever be.

One night I lie in bed for a few minutes, listening to William’s steady breathing, and then I move his arm without waking him. I slip off the bed. I move into the kitchen.

It’s dark. Everything smells like dank and wet wood and is cold to touch. The bells are strung across the tops of the doors and along the windows, an eternal celebration. I sit in the middle of the kitchen, on the floor, and I try to summon my courage; I could walk out that door. I could make the bells ring. I could run faster than either of them—I could run like a deer-girl, a cervine escape artist. Around the house, down the road, down the mountain, down the hills, both deft and light of foot, faster than a car, faster than anything. I don’t know how to drive or write a check, but I do know how to run—always have. I practically sprinted out of the womb—I was eager to get into the world. I could find refuge at St. Joseph’s Church, where the men brought us during the fire, where it is the job of the holy to take in the helpless. I could find a tendril of bravery inside myself to breathe upon, to make into a blazing flame. It is difficult to be a girl because girls have wills, but no control. It is difficult to be a girl because girls are full of wondering, and then they want to go out wandering. The question is not
Will I get away?
but
Is it really so bad?
If I start to feel foolish on the floor, with my legs folded in front of me, maybe it is better if I slink back to my room like a shy thing, climb back into bed, feel the sourness in my belly turn hard onto itself, become a better version of myself, feel more kindness, show more love.

Though I have never prayed in earnest before—not when my father was so sick—so, so, so sick—and I have never thought of God as a constant presence in my life, and though I’ve always wanted to believe in the existence of God, instead of in the existence of nothing, I mouth,
Please, let me love. Please.
I go to the refrigerator. I open it as silently as I can. I take a plate from the dish rack, and I say,
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
I gather a bone and some withered vegetables.
I almost drop the plate because I’m so tired, but I don’t drop it and I close the refrigerator door. In my head I say the Our Father again. I unlatch the locks on the front door. I open the front door in increments, so slowly that I’ve breathed a hundred breaths before there’s enough space for me to shimmer through. The bells are silent and hang across the room, hang across the right side.

In the morning William lies half naked in bed—his slumber the result of orgasm’s peculiarly soporific effect on him—and I am reorganizing the furniture in our room, because sex has the opposite effect on me, and makes it both hard to fall asleep and jittery in conscious life so that I must do something with my hands. I should be playing the piano, but Ma isn’t awake, isn’t wandering around the house or sitting at the kitchen table with her tea, and I don’t feel like playing for no one. Perhaps this is what amplifies the jitters today: unfamiliarity. The house is the whole world; one thing out of place sets everything else off its axis. I thought I heard Sarah barking in my dreams, but I haven’t gone to see her yet. Instead I am arranging several mason jars along the lip of the wide windowsill, which I’ve filled with various things: creatures’ teeth, bleached white bones, pearl buttons. I am waiting for the familiar sounds; I am waiting for Ma’s footsteps. I’m a good girl, and Ma will know this soon enough, and she will treat me as she treats William if I do the right things. She will be glad to know that William is asleep and that I am being good. And maybe she’ll buy something for me after all, despite the fact that I didn’t win the game—maybe a little sweet treat, or something new to play with.

Instead I hear a yell, or perhaps a cry of anger. I take my hand off the last jar and go into the hallway. Light from the half-open front door tumbles into the house, and I see Ma standing to face Sarah, who is at her plate of food, my miracle born from prayer.

But at once each second pulls my nerves along a crescendo. Ma curses Sarah with a line of Taiwanese. She bends to take the plate of food and Sarah leaps at her, and there is a clatter and a scream, a half-birthed scream that barely escapes her throat and is suffocated before she screams again, more loudly this time, and then there is no screaming because Sarah’s jaws are clamped around
her neck and she falls. I watch this with hot terror leaching from my bones as Ma’s blood comes now in great gushing gouts. It’s the screaming that wakes William; it is what drags William out of sleep, along with the sound of horrible thrashing, the sound of something banging into floorboards again and again, and gurgling, too. And when Ma emits her thin, watery scream again, William jerks to sitting and scrambles off the bed in his underwear, his thin figure suddenly shot through and wild with electricity, and I, too, am shot through with it to see him leap off the bed and onto the floor, where he runs out the bedroom door and we both stand in the hallway listening. William is too far away to watch, but I am still near the half-open door. William moves toward it.

“No,” I yell. “She’s going to attack you, too. Stop!”

And I slam the door shut. In doing so I am committing the greatest act of treason I can think of, but whatever is happening out there is not safe, and—dare I even think this—it may even be Fate. By listening to Ma’s death and staring at William in the way that I do I am possessed, possessed with the deaths of all the firstborn sons in Egypt, from the firstborn son of the Pharaoh, who sits on the throne; to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill; and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. I feel my body stiffening, and then I begin to shudder uncontrollably.
Please
mark lamb’s blood on the doorposts of every door. Dear children, death children, please mark lamb’s blood on the doorposts, and I will keep you safe. Here is the knife with which to slice open the throat of the lamb. Dear children: weep not at the death of the adorable lamb. What otherwise? Suffer the destroyer to come into your houses and smite you.

William and I stare at each other as the world pulls itself away. This is the moment when one of us could exit this house and do something. We could potentially shift the course of our mother’s destiny. I challenge him with my eyes to do it, to walk past me and open the door and make his bid as savior, but in my look I’m now stronger than I’ve ever been before because I am a part of something bigger than myself. I am the whole world stuffed into one girl’s body. I have oceans for blood and skies for eyes.

He does nothing. Neither of us do anything. After many minutes the timbre of the air has changed. William is crying hysterically and I’ve never seen him this upset—certainly not when our
father stabbed himself in the stomach and bled out in a motel room, nor when Ma came back from Sacramento with bloodshot eyes and told us that it was over; but right now this is over, too—it is over. Of this, I am certain.

MISSIVES

WILLIAM (1972)

D
ear Gillian,

I don’t know where you are presently. I realize that if you never return that this letter will have been written in vain. I have no one to talk to if I don’t have you, and so this letter will serve a function, whether you come through that door or not. (Will you come through the front door or the back? Will you climb through the window? The world is full of interminable mysteries, small duck, and we both know that many of the world’s mysteries are foggier to us than they are to most.) If you disappear, I don’t know what I’ll do.

First of all, despite our fight, I will say that I am not “angry” at you with regards to Ma’s death. (Do you think that the dog—I apologize for using the word cur, and I was angry—is coming back, do you think? I refuse to speak its name because I am being superstitious. I know you think me ridiculous but, I think, it is better to be protected than not.) I cannot be angry when you thought that you were doing the right thing by keeping me from seeing the scene. And I especially cannot be angry when you love me, and I love you.

Still, I might add that you did not have to bury Ma, and though I insisted on doing it myself, the fact that I did adds an extra burden to me that I deem unfair, if it is not ultimately terrible of me to say so. Her face was ravaged. Our mother had become, for the most part, a nightmare. Her eyes, fortunately, were for the most part untouched, but I couldn’t get them to close. I put my fingers to her eyelids and brought them down, but they would not stay down, and I buried her with a wound for a face—Gillian, I won’t say anything more about it, but it seems appropriate that some of it be mentioned, if only so I am not
the only victim here. If that dog digs up her body—well. Let’s not venture there. I do not know where you are and this makes me more nervous than you can possibly know, kitten. When you disappear like this I don’t know if you’ll ever come back. I’m not an idiot; I know that your life, and especially your life as of late, has been less than satisfactory to you, no matter what you say. When you try to be kind, I mean, I can sense it. But I am older than you and wiser than you, and I’m afraid that you are vulnerable to mistakes and misconceptions.

Last night’s fight upset me a great deal. We have both been upset. The echo of David’s loss is still familiar to me. To have Ma gone so suddenly has been, I might say, worse for us than that one. I have thought at times that we will not be able to continue, or that I will awaken to find myself in Heaven with all of us there, because it seems so unfathomable that life should stumble on.

But if I didn’t know any better (and I do, remember, I do) I would say that you were glad… and I can barely bring myself to write that word,
glad,
but I won’t scratch it out. That’s why I shoved you the way that I did, with that force. It was the phrase “act of God” that did it. I was out of my mind to hear it, as much as you were out of your mind to say it.

It killed me, sweetheart, to see the bruises! To know that I could hurt you in any way is deeply troubling to me. That is not the brother I am and it is not the husband that I want to be.

And so could I be surprised, really, when I opened my eyes this morning and, after reaching out, found that you were missing? Despite my bad act, don’t you think that you’re being a little—no, more than a little—cruel?

It has been a week since I buried Ma, and still I find myself thinking of her decay more than of our survival. We will survive, somehow. We will keep the house. What kind of rejection are you plotting, when you say that you’re, as you put it, “unsure” of our position now? Whatever you might say, I fear that it cannot be borne.

I love you, and no one else will ever love you as much as I do—because no one else will ever know you, or our differences from others, as deeply. Don’t be foolish. Don’t forget.

W.

She enters the house from the front with her short hair live and wispy around her face, her arms hugging a full paper bag to her
chest. I recognize the brown bag when I see its logo: she left, she went to the K & Bee, but she has returned. Her presence in the doorway, and then in the hall, reminds me of lucid dreams I’ve had in which I reenter my body after going to the stars—the tumbling, and then relief and resettling into the self.

“You had me worried,” I say. And, embarrassed by the break in my voice, I add: “You and I, we need to set some rules, Gillian—we need to set some rules.”

“You,” she says calmly, “are not any sort of parental figure to me.” And she slips off her shoes, which forces me to look at her long white feet. She has painted her toenails pink with polish gotten, no doubt, from Ma’s bedroom, whereas I don’t dare enter that tomb. I do not recall seeing Gillian’s toenails painted prior to this moment, and how was I to know that she was even interested in this, this minor thing, this feminine superficiality of painting one’s toenails, if not for my pleasure? She begins to walk, slightly waddling, to the kitchen. The house is so empty with only us in it. She is too strong to be really waddling under the weight of the bag, although she must have been walking for hours to get from town to our home, and this bag can’t have been light. I realize that she must be waddling because the soles of her feet are blistered.

“And you got food, I see,” I say, following her into the kitchen.

“Someone had to do it.”

“You could have gotten lost.”

“I knew the route, shockingly enough, because I pay attention to things.”

“Still. Something could have happened to you. Muggers. Rapists. Murderers. You know this.”

“I knew the route,” she says, “better than you do, I’m sure of it. And I brought a knife.” The bag is on the floor now. She sits in her favorite kitchen chair and pulls the knife out of her dress pocket, waving it at me—the sight of it makes my stomach curdle—before placing it on the table. “But by golly, am I exhausted—be a darling and unpack the groceries for me.”

“You’re avoiding the subject.”

“So how was your morning,” she says.

“For example.”

“Please unpack the groceries.”

I hate this frivolity. Gillian has
changed.
Or perhaps she’s anguished, the sort of anguish that can’t look itself in the face. We’ve
both cried since the death. I’d say that Gillian cried more hysterically than I did, and though it was no show, its abbreviated nature strikes me as bizarre; she walked around with swollen eyes for days, and then suddenly her grief was over before it had barely begun. She asked, “How are we going to get to town? How do we drive? Who’s going to gas up the Buick? How are we going to get food?” “Let’s just mourn, all right?” I replied, feeling lost. Again I reference last night’s fight. I’d accused her of horrible things, hurling accusations at her and that mutt. She’d bristled and screamed. We are both a mess. It’s true, though, that she’s gone to some trouble to get these groceries, which we did need. The refrigerator was empty save for an apple and a chunk of hardening cheddar; I think bitterly, momentarily, of all the food she gave to that bitch. I sit on the floor, the way that Ma used to after a day of shopping, and lift things out of the bag. We are in a strange limbo with regards to Ma’s death. Even I, the one who buried her, can’t believe that she’s underground. I know this because Gillian pointed it out last night, during our fight—the fight partially regarding the issue of practicalities, because I seem to have no interest in practicalities. I am sure that we are both in some form of denial, with Gillian’s denial being more severe than mine. She did kill her, after all, though I’d never say this gruesome fact aloud. I danced around it and her immature obsession with that damn mutt last night, even in my anger. I have no idea how this denial came to be; our mother was here, ever present, and then she was not here, and is completely gone. If I imagine David, he seems so far away as to only exist in myth, while Ma’s death is so fresh that it seems she’s only gone to Sacramento, and left us to our own devices for a second honeymoon, a sweet caress. If only I hadn’t tried to close her eyes! Even then, it seems that she is only momentarily absent. I cannot reconcile the face in my memory with the wet wound that tries to shove its way in.

“How are we going to get money?” Gillian had asked. “How are we supposed to live? Are we getting jobs, William? Do you want me to, hmm, work? Oldest profession in the book? Because I know it so well by now…”

“That’s not funny.”

“You have no sense of humor. I’d forgotten,” she’d said, turned cruel.

Where did these hard edges come from? From my soft sister, the one who played jaunty songs for her Daddy.

“We can’t mourn forever,” she’d said. “And we can’t be trapped in this house forever.”

I have no interest in practicalities because Ma will rise out of her shallow grave and come back into the house. She will come out of her tomb and tell us what we are to do, because I have never known what to do, and for whatever morbid reason my sister seems to be more concerned with issues such as driving the Buick and achieving financial security than she is with explosive tragedy. Even the word
death
seems inadequate and overly soft. I remove a bag of red peppers, which are expensive. There’s a soft, wrapped thing that smells like fish, and when I read the scrawl it is fish, a lukewarm rainbow trout.

I say, “You bought fish.”

“We always eat fish. What’s wrong with fish?” Gillian runs her fingers through her hair, picking at her scalp with her fingernails. She finds some clogged pore or piece of dried skin and examines it at the tip of her finger before flicking it away, her long arm flying.

“You don’t know how to cook fish.”

Brown potatoes—we can always do with potatoes—and eggs. She has selected a few stalks of broccoli that look good and fresh, with cut white ends.

“Rules,” I say again.

“Don’t leave the house?”

“Without me. I’m not trapping you anywhere; I’m simply asking that I accompany you if you want to go into town. I have the right to leave the house as much as you do.”

“And the property?”

“The property is large. I don’t think it’s safe anymore.”

“Not since the man came, you mean.”

“That’s what I mean, and because Ma is gone.”

She lifts one foot into her lap and begins to rub it. Her fingers move carefully around the sore spots. In her loose dress I can barely see the shape of her body beneath, but it doesn’t matter because I know it, and it belongs to us; it is our shared property. I can see the blisters on her soles. Tentatively she presses her finger into one of them, and then releases the bubble. This blister belongs to us as well.

Milk, cans of mandarin oranges (a special treat), a smallish bag of rice.

“No rules,” she says without tone. “I’ll just break them. I’ll live how I want.”

“And how do you want?” I do not append an endearment.

“I’m still figuring that out.”

“Oh, come on.”

“All right. I want you to move out of my room. My great hope is that, before long, it will look like nothing ever changed. I think that the expression on your face is more than enough to let me know how you feel about that, but I want my own space again, and no one is alive to govern where I lay my head.”

“That makes absolutely no sense. Everything,” I say, “is completely arranged in the room as you like it. All of it is yours, your things are everywhere—there is
barely
anything in there that’s mine—”

“It’s not my room. It’s our room, where I am your
tongyangxi.
Which has been made completely clear to me over the last three months.”

“And so you’ll sleep in what was my room, and live in yours?” As the words roll out I realize that this is a fatuous question. Of course she will not. What this really means is the end of her body’s relationship with mine, which feels like a violation and a broken promise, both. “What you’re saying is that you’re ending things?” The question is not a question, and then I say, “This is massively wrong. No, you can’t do this.”

“Oh?”

“Yes! Our lives are written out in a certain way, and just because we’re alone now doesn’t mean that we’re free to do whatever we like. It’s not a matter of rules or an immature rebellion against rules. This is a commandment you’re violating.”

“But why the commandment? Why was it written out that way?”

“What kind of question is that—”

“A legitimate one—”

“I’ve explained this a million times!”

“It shouldn’t need explaining,” she says, and now she’s moved her body forward such that the force of her physical presence is turned at me. The honesty, the brutality, of her body kills me. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“The serpent’s got you,” I say.

“But I was already gotten.” And maybe there’s a bit of sadness
to her voice. It’s possible that there is sadness there, or perhaps it’s sadness that I want to hear.

I say, “I can’t stand it.”

“You’ll overcome it,” she says. But when my eyes blur, she comes over to me. She wraps her arms around my body, and the smell of her dusky body, unperfumed and sweaty, makes me choke. “Sorry,” she says. “That was mean.” She kisses me on the temple, on the cheek, on the corner of my mouth. Without thinking, I shift my face slightly such that my lips press against hers.