Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

Later, when the sun begins to set, she frowns. “Do you smell that?” Gillian asks. I don’t smell anything. “On the wind,” she says, and the balloons rise again.

The next morning the sky is slate gray and tinted orange. In the kitchen after both turns at the piano, eating toast and eggs with soy sauce, Gillian points to the corner of the window, in the direction of the woods. The forest sprawls backward, sloping up to the horizon and spitting smoke. She says, opening the window, “That doesn’t look good.”

“Ma knows.”

“Glad to hear you’re so concerned for our safety.”

“I can’t imagine a fire reaching us, sweetheart.”

She sighs. “The sky looks awful.”

“She’ll get us out if we have to leave. The Buick can outrun a distant fire.”

“Distant. Really? You say that’s distant? Ugh, that smell, ” and she bangs shut the window.

I pass in and out of the room, flip through books, carve notches of baleen into a soap-whale. An hour passes. The slate gray reconfigures into floating ash like snow, tingeing the grass like an old photograph. Ought we to be worried? In our life I’ve never had to evacuate, though David instilled in me the ground rules of home protection: stack wood away from the house; maintain an irrigated greenbelt; reduce the density of the surrounding forest; mow the grasses and mow the weeds. After all, our property is so flammable, and it is in hot, dry August that the burning bush ignites. But we believe in our imperviousness, and in our invincibility.

At around three o’clock Gillian comes to our room, anxious again. I sigh. She raises her eyebrows, exaggerating her plea to self-mockery and back again to sincerity. “Come on,” she says. I put my knife down and go with her to Ma’s room.

“Is everything okay with the fire?” Gillian asks.

“It’s fine.” Ma is sitting on the bed cross-legged and sorting through a hatbox of photographs. Her kimono pools around her. Gillian’s eyes go to the box and to the scattering of snapshots on the blanket, which is a shock because we don’t look at photographs of our former lives. There are no photographs in the greater house except for the ones on the altar, which are all of David, and meant for the purposes of prayer. This particular hatbox, though usually hidden on the top shelf of Ma’s closet, is not unknown to us kids, who poke and prod Ma’s bedroom in her weekly absences; but this is the first time that Ma has acknowledged its existence, let alone exposed its contents to us.

“The fire is far away. It’s not a threat,” Ma says. “Here, look at these photos with me. You too, ge . Sometimes it’s quite nice to look at old photographs.”

I move to the bed next to Gillian, and Ma pushes the box aside to make room. “Look,” Ma says, removing a photograph, “this one is of the three of you at the river. You all look so happy. I bought you that swimsuit from a garage sale for two cents. It was such a bargain. It still is a bargain.”

Gillian’s mouth is thin again, but she takes the photograph and examines it. I know this photograph without looking — Gillian in a striped swimsuit, too young to swim, still just a baby. Her fat legs glow in the water with an ethereal light. Ma sighs. “Ah, look at this one. Daddy and I in Kaohsiung. I was eighteen in this picture. Wasn’t I pretty?”

In this photograph Ma is wearing a full striped skirt and a prim blouse, sitting on David’s lap. Her long hair is carefully molded into curls. They’re frozen in laughter somewhere indoors in front of a dingy wall; a neon sign reading TSINGTAO shines above their heads. They appear shockingly young. I can’t imagine them like this, cannot animate them in my mind into walking, talking creatures with wants and hopes; I look and look at David’s face, trying to find death in it.

“Before we got married,” Ma explains.

I know that Gillian means to speak further about the fire, but here is an opportunity. Ma never talks about her life with David before I was born, and especially not about life in Taiwan. We vaguely know that Ma was born with a different name before she became Daisy Nowak, and that her hometown and birthplace, Kaohsiung, was in Taiwan, which is an island that we have located in our atlas, but that’s the full set. Gillian once asked, as a child, how our parents had met, and Ma had interrupted David by saying, “It’s not your business.” None of it was our business: how our parents met, how they fell in love, anything about Ma’s family (did Ma grow up with parents, or did she hatch, fully formed and adult?), how Ma and David came to live in our woods. Gillian has been dying to know these things. She’s always shown more interest in the hatbox than I have.

“What’s Tsingtao?” Gillian asks.

“Alcohol. Your father used to drink it.”

“Daddy was in Kaohsiung?”

“Yes. He was the only white man who wasn’t a sailor. It was impossible to know that he had so much money — he looked like all the rest of them, all the rest of the men in their uniforms. I thought he was old because of his hair, but it was really very blond. White blond. I’d never seen hair like that before.”

Gillian asks, reflexively touching her own hair, “Where did you meet?”

“I want you two to remember that with your father gone, we are all we have in this world,” Ma says. She slides the photograph to the bottom of the box.

“Who’s this?” Gillian has grown bold. She holds a photograph of a girl with a strange-looking arm and a grim expression. I barely glimpse it before Ma snatches the photo and puts it in the box. She tops it with its lid and says, “Didn’t you say you were interested in coming with me into town?” Calm as calm can be, and her calm absorbs us and we are calm; we absorb her beliefs when she elides the (unimportant, nonthreatening) fire to stimulate our interest in going into town, which doesn’t take any convincing for Gillian, of course, at all, or even me, whose pit of stomach leaps to hear the word, and I know that Gillian will uncover the hatbox later, to examine the photographs for clues.

Soon the Buick clings to the mountain wall, and Gillian and I are in the backseat. I droop my arm over Gillian such that her left shoulder is in my armpit and observe with her our usual, once-monthly route to town, which is presently curling its way down Sycamore Road. We pass the Pine Ridge Trailer Park, its sign demarcated by a sloppily painted green triangle with a brown line attached to its base. The trailers gleam with great humped backs. A long-legged mutt is tied to a leaning pole. “Look at the pup,” Gillian says. “Do you like it?”

“I do.”

The mutt barks soundlessly as we pass. Gillian takes her hand and crosses her chest with it, wrapping her fingers around my yellow arm, adolescent forehead smudging glass. Gillian, the budding amateur anthropologist, the cataloger, observes the movie theater, the diner shaped like an Airstream trailer that promises to make you LICK THAT GREASY SPOON AND LIKE IT. I have never been inside of a movie theater or an Airstream trailer; these are merely glimpsed references. I happily smell her scooped collarbone. This is the third trip in the two weeks since Ma’s return, and the thought of town keeps Gillian glad.

Polk Valley is a place of brambly woods and mine shafts, tucked like a finger between the Sierras and the Yuba River of Nevada County, California. What I know of it as a town comes entirely from our monthly errand-runs and the gray pages of a hardbound telephone directory, kept in a kitchen drawer with receipts and a corkscrew. The population of Polk Valley in 1972 is 2,100. The average temperature is 84.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and 32.1 degrees in the winter. Twenty churches. One public library. We are not to be confused with the neighboring state of Nevada, though we are close to Lake Tahoe, which is sliced in two by the state border and also the largest alpine lake in North America. Other towns in Nevada County include Shyville, Lockstep, and Killington, as well as the apocalyptic duo of Devil’s Thumb and World’s End. During the Gold Rush, Polk Valley was the largest source of gold in the country — hence the town’s historically-minded fascination with the Old West. So I’ve read.