Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

We walk farther into the long meadow, and all around us there is nothing except for a tree here and a tree there, twisting trees that have lived longer than either of us and will outlast us, too. I watch my dog’s shoulders pump up and down, alternating, and after a spell of whirling thoughts — the rules, Ma’s rules, the rules for me and about me — I have a wild hair about going into the woods or to the river. Why? This is the sort of thing that Ma fears: the lure of the hook and reel. I can’t tell William; he’ll go to Ma. William loves me but his loyalty is not to me. His heart belongs to me but his blood and bones belong to our mother.

“We should head back,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I want to keep going.” I’m close to tears but I bite them back. I hate crying in front of William; I know it makes him sad, and I hate to look weak. I’m overcome with a sadness violent as downpour, am soaking with it. I touch the back of my neck, and for a moment I’m surprised by the lack of hair. Then I remember.

“Oh, honey,” William says. “You look miserable.”

I turn away. “Leave me alone—”

“I can’t, honey, I can’t. I’m supposed to be with you. I told Ma I would.”

“Just for a second,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere,” and then a sob slips through my lips so that I’m choking on it; a sob is an act of violence that the body self-inflicts. I can’t go anywhere. I stand and feel my body grieving without my permission to do so.

William, thank God, watches me cry without trying to put his arms around me or kiss my neck or any such thing. Sarah, who had momentarily wandered away on her rope, comes back to me in silence.

This time I don’t argue when William says that it’s probably time to go back. We walk back through the long meadow. I see the house, and William slips his hand in mine. “Wait. Look at me,” he says. I look at him. He wipes my eyes before we go inside, wipes the tears off my face, removes the evidence, says, “Honey, chickadee, it’s okay.”

These are the new rules: I’m not allowed to leave the house without Ma, William, or, preferably, both. I am not allowed to go into town. Therefore, William is not allowed to go into town, because I am not allowed to stay at home alone. Now we are having family meetings every day. In these family meetings, we talk about things that are unifying us and things that are dividing us. We are striving for things that unify us (naturally). Things that divide us must be eliminated. At this family meeting is where the rules are defined. We sit at the kitchen table. William has arranged his face in a semblance of nonchalance, picking at the table with his thumbnail. There exists an interminably mythical story about my father buying this table and having to enlarge the doors to get it in. It’s one of my favorite stories about him because it seems so outlandish, and makes my father seem grand in a manner that has nothing to do with madness. One of Ma’s ideas is to string bells along the top of the front and back doors, and the windows, too. She disapproves of Sarah—“the dog”—and wants me to reconsider caring for her, to which I respond by casting my eyes to my hands and refusing to look up. The night of the day that the bells are strung I wake up after some hours and it’s like I never went to sleep. William has one arm flung over me, and it rises up and down like a boat on the sea.

Running away is the thought that’s been whispering in my head since Ma pinned me to the bed, and it will not go away.

In my dream the river is crowded with naked ivory bodies. They glide through the water and swim froglike, with their arms and legs sweeping outward and then retreating back to the sources of themselves — the bodies swim on and on, and they never stop or decrease in number. All of them are the same, androgynous, having not-quite-wide hips and no signs of budding or budded breasts, being not broad-shouldered and neatly bald. Odder still, I realize, is the fact that they never come up for air, but keep swimming; the river is teeming with them like ants on sugar. I call to them, as though we could communicate— Where are you going? — but none of them reply; still they do not come up for air, still they move with fluent urgency. And slowly the water darkens, as though a shadow has come overhead — the sky is cloudless and merrily blue — now wine-red water, darker still, now terrible blood. The stench is appalling and I clap my hand over my face, but the reek of filthy blood is not as appalling as the white bodies, which now thrash and buck and cause me to realize now that they have no faces, the fronts of their heads are as smooth as the scar on my lower back: a childhood incident. The bodies are trying to get out of the blood but cannot, and yet more bodies arrive until the inhuman bodies are crammed together, arms flailing, legs kicking, a Gordian knot of limbs, and I watch them die, their perfect white bodies now saturated in the coeur -color of my heart, suffocating, drowning, and yet I feel nothing.

We are in Ma’s room and the shades are pulled shut, and the lamp is on although it’s morning, suffusing the room with orange. “ Xiao mei, I feel,” she says, her pale face shining, “that as your brother’s tongyangxi, you do not fully understand the essence of the situation. The clear purpose of this life is that you and your brother will be, when I am gone, all that is truly meaningful in the world for each other. Therefore, you must learn to rely on him.”

She is standing and holding a marbled aqua silk scarf, which dangles like a half-flopped fish in her hand. William and I sit on the bed side by side, our hands not touching, our hands resting on our knees. She has her back against the armoire, and the mirror reflects us. My hair surprises me. I see that I’ve dropped weight, evidenced by my emerging cheekbones and the scoop of my collar, and I look ugly to myself; I remind myself of the way Sarah looked when I first found her, starving, with ribs showing, and lost. I can feel and see William’s tension from where I sit — he is still and stiff, the good child, but nervous, perhaps, on my behalf in anticipation of whatever is to come.

Ma says, “We are going to play a game. I will blindfold Gillian. I have placed a ten-dollar bill somewhere in the kitchen. It is lying in plain sight, and yet Gillian won’t be able to see it. William, you will sit in a chair and direct Gillian by speaking to her. You can’t tell her where she is in the kitchen. You can’t describe to her the surroundings — you understand? But you can tell her how to move in the room. If she puts her hands on anything that is not the ten-dollar bill, she doesn’t get the money. If she puts her hands on the ten-dollar bill, I will buy her something that she asks for, within reason, when I next go into town. See. It’s very simple, and there is a reward — not just the money, but a way to show that you are connected.”

Ma moves toward me with the scarf-turned-blindfold. An easy game — child’s play, of course. But why not put the blindfold on William to show him that he needs to rely on me as well? If I succeed, there’s a ten-dollar bill that can buy me a treat, and I could use a treat — I am subsumed by ennui and there is that idea of beginning taxidermy, for which I could use supplies. But something whispers inside of me: this is not what I want, and I don’t like the tone of her voice, which bubbles with danger, and swells with impending punishment. I envision a burner left on on the stove, broken glass on the table, my hands cut to shreds as I pathetically attempt to grab for cash.