Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“What is that?” I ask, putting my finger on one of her jagged penciled lines.

Gillian raises her lashes. “Not sure. That dirty bit in the corner, I think. Or the broken branch. Too dark to be the spiderweb.”

“We ought to dust before Ma comes back.”

“ You can dust before Ma comes back,” she says. She hates to dust. Never does it, saying it makes her sneeze. She prefers to mop, sweep, do the dishes, scrub our tub with her rump in the air.

I say, “Speaking of which, small duck.” No sign of recognition from her side of the table as she continues to drag pencil across paper. I reach out and cover her drawing hand with mine. The skin between her knuckles is unbearably soft. “Speaking of Ma coming back. What, exactly, did she tell you this week was for? Gillian? Look at me,” I say. “What did she tell you before she left?”

“She told me that I was to love you,” Gillian says. Without removing her pencil hand, she flutters her fingers beneath mine. How her body betrays her; David’s did the same.

I say, “Ma said that?”

She nods. Her eyes return to the shadow paper. “She said I was ready to be a proper tongyangxi ,” she says. “That she met David when she was only a little bit older than I am now. She says that she had you when she was twenty.”

The light tumbles across the large wooden table and onto our hands. I squeeze hers. “And?” I ask.

“I dunno,” she says, shrugging. “I suppose it will happen at some point.”

“What point will that be?”

“When I feel like it,” she says, freeing herself from my grasp. What makes her so afraid? In our lives I’ve never known her to be afraid of anything.

I lean forward, focusing on the obligation. I tell her that Ma expects us to perform certain physical acts by the end of the week. I don’t concentrate on myself and my wants, but on the task at hand.

She says, “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“She’ll want to know what we’ve done when she gets back.”

“We could lie.”

“She always knows when we’re lying. Are you afraid of me? Is it the physical part that scares you? It’s when I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I continue, “that we’re at our most separate. That terrifies me. It terrifies me to think that you’re hiding things from me, especially when it comes to this one very important thing.”

Gillian stops moving her pencil. She’s listening.

“It’s a very important thing, Gillian, not just because our parents told us so, but for other reasons. Deep reasons. Matters of the spirit. Have you thought of those reasons? Have you thought of the possibility that we are meant for each other not only because of what we are, but also because we are absolutely, completely compatible? You are smarter than those idiots out there, you know — precocious, gifted at the piano — even David couldn’t speak Mandarin. I do. But, as David did for Ma, do you know — have you discerned that I love you like they do in books?”

She sighs and finally puts down her pencil. “I’m sorry I’ve been so awful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to do it, and I will. Really. You’ve been nothing but grand to me. Nothing but patient.” And she kisses me on the cheek.

I will admit that a darker thought crosses my mind. As Gillian goes to her King James on the sixth day, I go to my Ars Amatoria, where Ovid speaks of the female as necessitating a firm hand:

What wise man would not mingle kisses with coaxing words of endearment? Should she not surrender willingly, then take what is not given.

And:

He who seizes kisses, if he does not seize all the rest, will deserve also to lose that which has already been yielded.

I could force myself upon her. I imagine myself a different William, a meaner, less loving young man, seizing her roughly as I pull her dress up, and she will, without entirely meaning to (or maybe she will mean to), extend her arms over her head so as to facilitate the revelation of her body — I would mash my mouth against hers, and run my hand up her thigh, between her legs… Could I do it? But I want the romance, and I want the tenderness. I want to wrap her in my arms. If I take Gillian’s maidenhood from her, and if I’ve done so with even a hint of reluctance on her part, there will be no joy in it. And how could I ever induce joylessness upon my sister when I love her, and when I want both of us to be happy?

I am tired the night before Ma comes home. All day and night I’ve been wearing headphones, drowning out the sound of Gillian moving through the house, drowning out the sound of her at her piano, her tinkling vibrations. This keeps me close to the rolltop desk near the corner of my room, and I rest my forehead on the tabletop. Periodically I shift in order to replay Wagner ( wie sie fassen, wie sie lassen ). One day left. My eardrums throb. I remove my headphones and stand. I walk around the room in bare feet, twitching my head from side to side. A selection from the bookshelf: three Latin dictionaries and a book of verbs, the Oresteia. The rest of the books are in a shelf in the living room.

I take out my small pink French dictionary and open it in the lamplight to a random page.

endolori

endommager

endormi

endormir

Translation:

painful

damage

asleep

put to sleep

There’s an old snapshot of myself at the river, taken by David, I think, and curled at the corners. The photograph is stuck to the wall with a loop of tape. A yellow-toed dirty sock, dirty trousers, flowered bedsheet; a window above and parallel to my bed, suggesting the possibility of rolling out in my sleep; a box of large knives from David’s collection, which I occasionally and idly sharpen. David used to demonstrate the sharpness of his knives by shaving the hairs off his forearm. I don’t.

The knives are, of course, a morbid reminder. Some sort of authority at the Motel Ponderosa where David stabbed himself to death took the knife that killed him, but the others remind me of better, though still bloody, times. For example, Gillian and I watching him unzip the belly of a deer behind the house, flies swirling around the carcass… But thinking of David’s death puts me in an even more dangerous mood. I return to the desk, where the record has stopped circling. I gather some things, go to the bed, and begin to carve a whale from a bar of soap with a paring knife. The door opens. She comes in, bare feet creaking on the floorboards, and her hands are on my every nerve. The curtains are open. I am working by moonlight and Gillian smacks her gum behind me. Her mere appearance in my room feels like a victory, though I’m careful not to look in her direction.

She sits down next to me. The mattress sinks. Gillian smells sweetly of jasmine and jonquil. Must have snatched some perfume from Ma’s room.

I peel a long shaving from the whale’s belly. She puts her hand on my knife-hand and gently pushes it down. Immediately my prick responds to her touch. Not necessarily to the skin on skin. To the gentleness of her movements. The knife and the whale fall to the floor with a clatter, and I am weak-limbed and silly. She asks, “Can I kiss you?” I nod. She leans forward and puts her hot mouth on mine. The lenses of her glasses press against my eye sockets. I can feel her nostrils exhale as she pauses there, our lips frozen together, and then she moves backward, forming a gap of steaming air, before gently leaning forward again. A small hand makes its way to my lap, where it rests on my clothed hipbone, and I grow still more aroused to the point of discomfort.