Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

(William’s fingers are inside me and working with diligence; he never rotates his wrist.)

William brushed my hair when I was too small to remember, but he tells me that he did it and I believe him. He’s very fascinated by my hair. The way I know that William and I don’t see eye to eye is that natural quality of fascination, or non-fascination, with each other’s details.

(He sinks his face into my hair and inhales with fingers still moving. I try to relax. With his other hand he rubs the tips of my long curls between thumb and forefinger. Seconds later he grips the back of my skull and pulls my mouth to his. Our teeth click and I feel myself resisting the urge to pull back. He crooks his fingers into the gap beneath my shoulder blade like he wants to pry it off.)

What more is there? Stave off repulsion; replace with tenderness, longing, the ever-elusive love. We kiss and his eyes, close up, are inarguably beautiful — William’s eyelashes even longer and curlier than our father’s, and so muddy that I can barely distinguish the pupils. During our honeymoon week I often looked at his eyes and thought, These eyes are beautiful, and his hands are slender and strong; he has an open face. So I counted the qualities in him that I thought I could love. He can’t hide a feeling, for example, to save his life. So I loved his vulnerability.

(He removes his fingers from inside of me. I envision the river, which is my pathetic attempt to hasten wetness, which Ma explained to me is so important, but instead I spit in my hand and put it to myself, thinking momentarily that Vaseline would perhaps be a better solution, and I pull William’s chest to mine.)

He thinks he runs the show, but when I told him a month ago that I was afraid, his face shrank into itself. Really I hadn’t meant to hurt him. It was all of that desire, you know, spilling out of him and making him ugly. Really I had just meant for him to slow himself down, to let me find my own pace, because he didn’t understand that our future depended on a mutual understanding — and in those weeks between the end of sex and its reintroduction I saw him wither. I said to him over eggs, “When are you going to play today,” and he said, “My hands hurt.” When I looked at his hands the veins stood out like crippling wires, with his fingers splayed out and stiff. “My God,” I said.

I know all the places that will make him emit miniature moaning sounds. I’ve known since I was three the keys to press to form a dominant seventh. I coax his penis to me and he lets it happen, wiggling his hips as Sarah does: with eagerness. For a moment, as he props himself above me, I think I hear her whimper.

September. The leaves shaking themselves off the trees onto the floor of what’s left of the live wood. When I bring them back and scatter them onto the kitchen table, William tapes them to the windows, the way that he will tape up paper snowflakes when winter comes.

Sometimes I ask myself how William doesn’t get bored with the house. With doing the same things over and over again. So I think he’s as stupid as he is smart. The only really smart person I’ve ever known is our father, whose brain worked so hard that it killed him. But take this thing with Sarah, for example. William doesn’t seem interested in her at all. When I sit on the porch and play with her, I can tug on a sock between us for an hour. Everything seems so interesting and pleasurable and easy when it’s just us two, and William stays away, calling her “it.” He sits at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the mountains; he plays the same etudes and reads the same books. How can he not yearn for something different?

Sarah is my something different. But then again, what am I? I clip sweaters to the clothesline behind the house and she comes to lie in the grass beside my legs, a tall dog for a tall girl, and I feel William looking at me through the screen door. I don’t think he’s jealous of Sarah, though it would be easy enough. As the sun sets the night is ready to push down on my shoulders with both of its heavy hands, and I think, From now till we die our lives will be the same except for the patterns of weather and the gray growing in Ma’s hair, so it’s best to work at being happy with what we have.

I go inside, whispering good-byes to Sarah, and put raspberries on a plate and take a fork from the drawer. I sit at the table and look at the leaves stuck to the window with tape. William has left the atlas on the table, splayed open page-down. I eat the raspberries one by one until the plate becomes wet with red juice. Yes, it’s a good thing that I am a fool. If I weren’t a fool, I would be dead.

At dinner there’s a knock at the back door and everyone startles. We are so accustomed to being left alone that the idea of someone knocking at our door seems dreamlike and ludicrous. Sarah, though she is tied at the front porch, is barking like a scream. I look at William and then at Ma, who sets down her chopsticks and goes to the butcher block, where she pulls out a knife. She leans against the counter with the big knife in her hand, and no one makes a sound. After many minutes there is shuffling, and then more knocking at the back door. William moves to close the curtains. I see his hand pause before he can pull them shut. If he pulls them shut we might draw attention to ourselves. Any person at the back door won’t be able to see the curtains close if William closes them right now.

The three raps have come and gone. In the silence we’re unable to tell whether the source of the knocking is still standing at the door, and yet it seems likely that the source of the knocking has not left, because there has been no clear sound of footsteps away from the house. Two flies swirl around each other at the center of the table.

But I’m not scared. I feel calm. All I can think is Gabriel is at the door.

We sit for a long time. Then William gets up from the table and walks to the door, and I am surprised when he opens it. There’s no way that whoever it was can still be there, but on the back porch stands a man about the same height as William, with dark hair and dark eyebrows. He’s a pale man, but not of the same cream-and-flaxen complexion as I am, or of our father.

The man says, heaving his knapsack farther up his shoulder such that we can see it from inside, his voice loud enough to sound above the barking, “I’m sorry to bother you folks, but I lost my home in the fire, and I was wondering if you could spare some—”

“Go away!” William shouts, and slams the door, locking it, which we do not do, because no one ever comes to our property, and we do not understand how this man has appeared thusly.

William comes back to the table. When he puts his hands on the table I can see that they’re trembling. Ma still has her fingers wrapped around the large knife. Her wedding band glints thin like the edge of the blade.

“The dog,” I say, and stand to go to the front door, which someone must also lock.

“Sit down,” Ma says. “You just sit down. No one is going to any door. We are going to sit here, and if that man comes back, I am going to kill him.”

On the kitchen table is a bowl of apples sliced into wedges, three bowls of rice in various stages of emptiness, a pan-fried trout staring up with its marble eye. I want to sweep everything off the table and scream.

“Ma.”

“Gillian.”

“I’m worried about my dog.”

“Your dog is an animal. It’s not part of our family.”

“He could still be outside,” William says, “listening to us talk.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re saying,” I say. “But he could be hurting Sarah. She could already be hurt.”