Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

My mother takes a step farther into the hallway and closer to the bare, hanging bulb, kicking off her shoes and nudging them toward the wall, which is already crowded with shoes and sandals.

Gillian retreats down the hall to the kitchen, and I follow Ma into her room, left exactly as before except for the removal of a few spritzes of perfume, where I place the suitcase flat on her bed and wait for the inevitable interrogation. After David died the master bedroom became a shrine to his death, not in framed and nostalgia-soaked photographs, or trinkets from their fourteen-year marriage, but in absolute ascesis. The scroll ink paintings of chickens and other fat and feathered friends, the landscape oil paintings, blobbed and scraped — wall decorations, in general, gone. So when I say that I sit on the bed without the engraved wooden headboard, which I enjoyed tracing with my thumb as a small and less desirous boy, I mean that I am sitting in a very nearly empty room (bed, vanity table, dresser — all mahogany), on a bed with one pinned bedsheet and one flowered comforter that is the cheeriest thing in the room, waiting for How was the initiation, the coming together? How are you and your sister doing , ge? Or maybe she won’t ask at all. Maybe she’ll let me tell her first, or maybe she’ll merely watch for touches or looks. She seems tired and slightly stooped. Ma sits next to me, pulling a matchbook and cigarette pack out of her skirt pocket, and lights a cigarette.

“How was the city?” I ask, moving behind her to rub her shoulders. Her head lolls to one side. She moans. I ask her about the city every time she goes into Sacramento to buy tofu and other things that she can’t get in Polk Valley. Every time, I expect and receive the same answer.

“Oh,” she finally says, exhaling, “it’s never any good, really. Thank you — that feels wonderful. William, you can’t get much done in the city that you can’t get done in town, and you can’t get much done in town that’s better than being at home. And how was it, being here for the week? I hope I left enough food?”

“We ate well. Things were fine.”

Inhale. Exhale. “What about you and Gillian, then? I expect you bonded?” (I have translated what she actually said to the silly word bonded, as though the physical act stuck us two like glue. As it happens, her tone was equally blasé.)

“We did.”

“Good. That’s enough, thank you.” I shift beside her and she smiles, brightening, and pats me on the arm. “You’ll be sharing a bedroom from now on. It will probably be Gillian’s because of the size, and we can use your room for the altar. Move some things around. It’s so good to see you”—and here she embraces me tightly, even with the burning cigarette in her left hand—“and to see your sister looking so well. I really missed the two of you. And I won’t be doing that again, I promise. All right. Let’s go have some tea, hao ba ?”

In the kitchen, Gillian is sitting at the table, stripping strings from pea pods. The strings go on the table; the pea pods she drops into a bright blue bowl. “Ma,” she says, “how was the city?”

“Well, I had a terrible time sleeping in my hotel,” Ma says. “Sirens kept me up all night long. I’m lucky a bullet didn’t come through the window while I was lying in my bed.”

“How horrible.”

“There’s something about being away that pretty much steals everything good from your memory. I’d almost forgotten how quiet it is here.” Ma crosses the room to sit. I wonder if she’ll mention the bedrooms or if I will have to reveal our new situation to Gillian, who has her eyes half shut under Ma’s touch, a pea pod in her right hand. It does make me nervous when Ma goes into town. Our lessons with Mrs. Kucharski ended when she, shortly after David’s death, fell down what Ma explained was an “elevator shaft”—a terrible accident and a nightmare of bad machinery that we had not and would never experience, thank God! — plunging her into darkness and leaving her body crumpled and broken below.

When the teakettle shrieks Gillian opens her eyes, drops the pod into the bowl, and, with great reluctance, moves toward the stove, which she does by uncoiling her legs and stretching them in the direction of where she means to go. Minutes later we all have tea in small white cups with small white handles. Gillian is sitting across from Ma and me now, with her brow furrowed adorably as she cups the tea in her hands. A greasy strand of hair has fallen across her right eye, and I can see from a distance that her glasses are smudged as usual, but it only endears her to me.

“Ma says that I’m to move into your room,” I say.

“I see.” Her thumb rubs the circumference of the white cup, back and forth, eyes fixed on the wooden table.

After tea I go to the sink with my cup. Gillian comes up behind me to do the same. I am very aware of Ma watching as my hand alights on Gillian’s shoulder.

“So we’ll start moving things,” Gillian says. “My room is a mess, though. Might not get it all done tonight,” and then she pecks me on the cheek.

Before we move Gillian asks Ma if they may speak in private. They go into the master bedroom, closing the door behind them, and I go to the bathroom, where I stare into the small toothpaste-speckled mirror. I already look steady to myself, a young man ready to take on the responsibilities of having a tongyangxi. Still, looking at myself in the mirror compounds a niggling anxiety: that Gillian mightn’t be attracted to me at all, and that this face and body are nothing arousing to her.

In the fluorescent bathroom light I straighten my shoulders. I brush my bangs from my face.

Hold steady, Captain, I tell myself, hold steady.

We start moving things that evening. Gillian shoves her rickety wardrobe to make room for mine; she pushes her trunk of dead, wild things against the far wall and beneath the windows. We talk a little, but not much. “Is this okay?” I ask occasionally, not wanting to invade, though that’s exactly what I’m doing as I cram my postcards in the blank spaces between hers, forming a mosaic; take up space in her bed and on her bear rug; and I’ll have her body, too. No — not just her body, but her soul, which is a slippery thing by comparison. When I lift a slip to toss it into the wardrobe, she says, almost plaintively, “Please don’t hurl my things, William,” and, as if I won’t notice, rearranges my drawing of a dandelion such that it’s below her meadow Polaroid. At one point she disappears into the bathroom and reemerges with her face wet, her nose rabbit-pink. But then again, she does smile at me all night, and when I smile back at her I feel the connection solid between us. Ma fries up slices of tofu with soy sauce. We eat, Ma beams, and it’s all extremely pleasant. After we’ve played a nocturne together (Ma falling asleep, one arm dangling off the sofa), I wash up while Gillian dresses in a new, flimsy night-thing, probably brand new from Sacramento, and I ready myself for bed.

On this night, I am more prepared for the event of her body, though its power over me remains the same. It’s not her breasts, though I do enjoy them, which are fist-small and firm, with large pink nipples. I favor the crook of her elbow, where I drag the smooth part of my fingernails. Though her breasts are not my greatest pleasure, I do like the space between them where her bone presses against the skin; but I like the white marks more, I like the way they ripple crooked in the dim light; I like her belly, soft and slightly round, with a smattering of blond hairs leading from navel to groin. But most of all, it’s the smell of her that kills me; the top of her head smells like oil and lemony shampoo. Tonight, I pull her to her feet. I kneel and she stands silently as I tunnel up under her filmy skirts. I press my nose against her cotton panties, which are adorned with bows and polka dots the color of red, yellow, and orange button candies. I yank them down.