Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“What does that mean?” Gillian asked.

“Well,” Ma said, “it has to do with the fact that someday you will be happy together, so happy together, for the rest of your lives.”

In Taiwan, where Ma had come from, this would mean that Gillian and I would be married, but we were in America now and therefore would not be married, though we would be in a very special relationship when the time came.

“You love each other now as brother and sister,” she said, “so think of this as an even more special love, a love that will bind the two of you together forever, the kind of love that Ma and Daddy have.” (I did not know what this meant, nor did I ask. I assumed it had something to do with the way they touched each other, which was simultaneously fascinating and disgusting.) We were not, under any circumstances, to mention this to Daddy, or something terrible would happen to us. She would send us away, perhaps to hospitals of our own, and we’d never see either Ma or Daddy again. Continuing, she explained that we could not comprehend the complexities of why such secrecy was so important just yet, because we were children. We were too young to understand, but we would understand later, when we were older. Daddy might have to stay in Wellbrook for a very long time.

“How long?” Gillian wanted to know.

Ma shrugged.

“Will it be much longer?” Gillian asked.

“I don’t know,” Ma said, “but I can’t get him out right now.” She picked up the burning cigarette and ashed it in a coffee mug with a big orange flower printed on the side. The coffee mug was half-full of cold coffee and a bluebottle fly, floating.

We’d barely been exposed to the world, and post-Wellbrook, as David put us through our academic paces, beginning with the Bible, I wondered if we were meant for a fate such as Abraham and Sarah. Still, David and Ma remained mum about Gillian as my tongyangxi. Soon it began to seem as though Ma had never said anything about it at all, as if it were a hallucination I’d caught from some other crazy within the Wellbrook walls.

He died just when things seemed like they were getting better. He was eating at the table with us, and letting Gillian in the shed with him when he worked on skinning and stuffing his animals. He was even playing with us again.

“Fish verbs,” he said one morning, coming into the kitchen.

I looked up. “Flounder,” I said.

Gillian said, “Char.”

He grinned and gave us each a quarter from his mysterious pockets. I thought of my father as an unpredictable and skittish animal. I thought of David as a year of storms and blizzards stuffed into one man.

I knew what was going on as soon as the phone rang that day, sounding like a scream, because we never received calls, and the phone was only for emergencies.

Everyone was raving mad for an intolerable duration, especially Ma and Gillian. I’m not saying that I was immune to the effects of my father’s death, but it was true that I was never his favorite, and I mostly felt merely tolerated by him. If I think about it too much — which I have, over the years — I could also say that I was scared of him. Mostly I worried about Gillian, who was his beloved, and who was too small to be confronted by something so big. When David died Gillian cried under her bed until she couldn’t move, and as she lay there I walked up to the bed. Then I squeezed myself under the bed with her, and we held hands while she cried and cried, and I thought, How could you do this to her? to a ghost.

Ma was angry. She was quiet and she was angry. Her gestures were sharp. Every drawer was closed with too much force. I thought she would take the doors off their hinges. She shouted, “Fuck!” when she dropped a pepper or a fork, but for the most part, she let her actions shriek for her.

Let me try again; honesty is not my strong suit. He didn’t love me as much as he loved Gillian, but his death also meant that I wouldn’t have the chance to prove myself to him, which was my goal until the moment the phone rang. My father was the smartest man in the world. His sickness betrayed us, and then he betrayed us. That’s all. Death makes for incoherent fools.

It wasn’t a time to talk about romantic sibling arrangements. I’m not saying that we ever really got over his death, but his death was the event that set things in motion, and when all the hullabaloo had come and gone, approximately five or six months after that terrible July, the idea of having a tongyangxi for a sister came up again, and actually came up very quickly.

By then I knew that what Ma meant was sex. This was the thing that had bonded my mother and my father. This was the adult thing that held their relationship together. The idea confused me, as my own body had barely begun to change. I was masturbating, but did so to ghostly images of women from diagrams. I had little sense of what stimuli aroused me; all I knew was that some low brain function commanded me to touch my body, and I lacked the will to ignore the command of ambiguous desire. Sex, though, was frightening. Why? When? How?

“How will we know when that is?” I asked.

“Her body will change,” Ma said, “and she’ll become a woman.”

I was thirteen. Gillian was eleven. She was a girl all over, flat and gangly. I felt myself becoming older, growing beneath my skin, and therefore more responsible for her than ever.

By fourteen, I began to see my sister differently. I can’t say whether Gillian is conventionally attractive. She is four inches taller than myself, a perfect five-foot-nine. Her skin is the color of cream in the winter and a burnished gold in the summer. She doesn’t burn or peel. She has slender arms and long legs, taut and brave with muscle. She occasionally wears Ma’s jasmine perfume. She has a broad mouth that smiles easily, even when she’s in pain, and a loud, honking laugh.

As for the ineffable claim of beauty, I have no concept of what Helen of Troy looked like. What made her beautiful? What singular or combinatory fact? Though I dreamed of it, I’d seen Gillian’s pubescent, unclothed body only once. I was fourteen and in my first mad flush of a crush, and I accidentally-on-purpose walked in on Gillian in the bath. Imagine Gillian’s exposed expression when she caught me gaping.

A number of other memories, originally innocent, have taken on the tinge of sex. When I was six years old, we had a large sandbox in the shape of a turtle out back. I’m pretty sure David purchased it in one of his bouts of paternal largesse. Not to say that he was stingy, but he needed to feel a true need for almost anything he bought for us. I don’t know what possessed him to buy the turtle, which was an eyesore, but it brought Gillian and me much pleasure for exactly two years, until one of us forgot to replace the shell and it became, in the rain, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Gillian and I leaned over the turtle’s shell-less, vulnerable back and watched the threadlike larvae wriggle in the wet sand. David disposed of the turtle’s guts, but when summer arrived, mosquitoes clouded the air and welted the hell out of Gillian, whose blood was sweet (“Probably type B,” Ma said) — our parents and I remained relatively unharmed — and David covered her with a thick layer of calamine lotion. For the rest of the summer Gillian remained pale pink and quarantined. In my memory she is wearing nothing but her underwear. I still remember the way her scratches made bloody marks across her flat, pale chest.