Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

The day that Ma drove to Sacramento she woke up early, wrote down her inn number, made us porridge, which we ate with fried eggs and pickles. She dressed in trousers and a white blouse. For most of the morning she checked her suitcase, but by eleven she was ready to go, and when Gillian and I stood in the hallway to send her off Ma told us the following: that we must be good while she’s away, meaning we mustn’t go into town by ourselves, and most important, she repeated that I must take care of my sister. We all knew what she meant most when she said we must be good, and the slight cut of her words when she said “take care, be safe,” switching to gently accented English, was there, too, though I didn’t turn to see Gillian’s face at that moment, when Ma reached down and picked up her suitcase. She then kissed and hugged us in turn before opening the door with her free hand. Ma and her plots for which my pulpy heart and I have no argument.

The door closed. Gillian and I looked at each other, our faces lost. Suddenly the door latched and locked with a rattling click, punctuating Ma’s absence and the onset of our honeymoon.

Gillian smiled. “So it begins,” she said, and I made a strangled laughing sound.

Two identical uprights stand back-to-back in the living room. I cannot let my little sister sit at her piano without sitting at mine and cranking out some sort of response. She never minds. She’ll tilt her head up and smile while delivering fifteen measures of bravura that make me all wet in the eyeballs. At times we duet this way. Her musical preferences, mostly ragtime, are different from my Sturm und Drang, but we grew up with the same teacher — one woman in Sacramento, a big-haired, petite chain-smoker named Mrs. Kucharski — so I do know her Scott Joplin as well as she knows my Beethoven, which is to say, beyond decently.

Mrs. Kucharski! It is hard for us to play anything without remembering her. Her metronome, which sat on the modest piano, also an upright, ticked back and forth with the click of her tongue at her teeth. She noticed that I liked Bach and Beethoven before I did, and unexpectedly gifted me with record albums to take home and play, which I did, mesmerized by sounds that were as inexplicable as Heaven.

While Gillian shuffles around in the kitchen, china and silverware clanking, I sit at my bench and plunk out a graceless version of the opening measures of Pathétique.

The sound summons her. Soon she appears with a bowl and spoon. “Ew,” she says. The spoon she sticks into her mouth and pulls back out with a pop. She breathes on it, then attempts to rest the spoon on the tip of her nose — an old trick of David’s. It clatters to the floor. She says, “Don’t know why it didn’t work.” Bends down to retrieve the spoon, drooping cloth, revealing the space between pale breasts. She rests her bowl of cornflakes atop my piano and lays her utensil beside it, finally settling beside me to reassert the confident opening notes. Her upper thigh is a millimeter from mine, downy and pale, unexposed to sun; her leg hair is the same color as the silky bun pulled loosely from her scalp. Strands leak around her ears. I want to put my palm on the top of her skull, cup it like a ball in my large hand. But I’m afraid. For years I’ve been afraid of touching her; I’ve longed for accidents of skin on skin, though what I truly want is to be able to draw a slit from sternum to pubic bone and hide inside her rib cage — the thought of which makes me both loathe my base self and flush with excitement all at once.

“You know,” I say brightly, for lack of something better to say, “David would lie underneath the piano while I played this. Do you remember?” She shakes her head. “I have a distinct memory of being, oh, six, seven or so, and him crawling underneath to lie on top of the pedals. I never asked him why he was doing it. I remember being afraid that I would accidentally kick him, though. There’s not much space under there, not even for a seven-year-old’s legs.”

She very nearly trips up on a tremolo, I can tell. Her hands spread across the keys. She reaches across my chest, the sleeve of her cotton nightgown brushing against my shirt, the imagined warmth of her arm seeping through the cloth. I consider stopping. It isn’t a good memory.

“He liked to watch you play. He got a kick out of your ragtime. When he was feeling superb he’d ask you to play ‘Down Yonder,’ and he and Ma would dance around the living room like goofballs, swinging their arms. I don’t know if you remember that.”

“Nope.”

“You were pretty young. It was worse when he came into our room in the middle of the night and dragged you out of bed, totally out of his mind. You’d cry…”

Her hands lift. Silence. The appendages move to her lap, one crossed over the other, before the top one begins to worry it-self — the thumb scratching the index finger. A spot blooms pink on white.

“He’d insist you play ‘Down Yonder’ or ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ at three in the morning. You don’t remember this? I guess you were four.”

“No.”

“Babbling. Pretty much incoherent at a mile a minute.”

“Stop.”

“I’d try to get him to leave you alone, but what could I do, really? Who knows where Ma was. I remember going into the living room with the both of you. I think I was wearing footies. You’d cry and play, and then he’d ask you to play it again and again, until you and I were both crying, more out of fear of him than sleepiness or sleeplessness, I think.”

“I don’t remember this.”

“To this day, it gives me the chills.”

“So you choose to bring this up now,” Gillian says, still rubbing, maybe bleeding soon.

“I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t know why you brought it up right now. You’d think you would have said something sooner.”

“I guess it was sitting here and seeing you play,” I say. “I never meant to tell you.”

She says, “It’s a horrible story.

“I’m sorry.”

Later Gillian sits out on the porch in her bare feet, leaving the light off to discourage moths and mosquitoes. While I stand behind the closed screen door I see her back, illuminated from the hall light, the ichthyian swell of the vertebrae at her neck, and, just beyond her and the porch steps, a clump of nearly invisible boulders. I open the door and walk toward her. The ninety-degree day has descended into the thirties, and when I sit next to her on the steps I’m shivering as much as from the chill as I am from proximity. At this close range I can see her face; my eyes adjust. I fondly observe that tiny freckle above the right corner of her lip.

We barely move, careful not to disturb the encroaching perimeter of potted cacti. I ask her, carefully, if she’s thinking about David. She shrugs. Then I ask if she’s thinking about our honeymoon week. Emboldened, my hand moves to her exposed thigh. Immediately she flinches, almost imperceptibly, surprised. I withdraw, apologizing. “No,” she says, and then she grabs my hand and plants it on her knee, which is cold, colder than I’d expected — cold as a river-wet rock. We sit in silence.

“At least I made him happy. Didn’t I?”

“Of course you did.”

“I’m nervous, ge. Are you nervous? Do you have a case of the nerves?”

“Of course.”

“But are you very nervous?”

“It’s a big thing, what we’re doing, small duck.”