The Border of Paradise: A Novel (32 page)

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.

Ma holds the blindfold to my face, blue spilling over my eyes like water, and as soon as the cool silk touches my forehead I snatch it without thinking and I shove her with even less thought. Ma slaps me hard and I ball the scarf up in my hand, but I don’t cry and there is no such thing as pain.

William says, “Gillian,” and I wait to be struck again.

“I’m sorry that I hit you,” Ma says. She touches my stinging cheek. “Come here,
xiao baobao
,” she says, and wraps her arms around me. “I only wanted you and your brother to be closer. It was a game that a friend of mine played with her brother when she was younger, before I knew her. She was his
tongyangxi.
Come on,
ge
,” she says, “give your sister a hug. Show her that you love her.”

He does. I feel like a crazy person.

“Let’s try this again. I will blindfold you. Yes?”

I nod. She wraps the scarf around my eyes and ties it. She takes my hand—her hand is soft, fleshy, and warm—and walks
me into the kitchen. The scent of oil, herbs, salt. The warmth of the stove. I feel the dirt beneath my feet, crumbs underneath the pads of my heels, the cold sun hitting my knees. She takes my shoulders and turns me around and around. For a while I can maintain a sense of where I am. But she keeps turning, and I keep turning, and I lose my bearings; I can no longer be sure where the sun is, and probably the feeling of its light was imagined in the first place.

I hear William sit behind me. “Yes. I see it,” he says. “You can do this, sweetheart. Keep your hands behind your back so that you don’t touch anything. I’ll tell you when to reach your hand out. You’ll do it slowly, so that you don’t touch the wrong thing. I’ll direct you with utter specificity. All right. So take a step forward. This is going to be very simple, sweetheart. Go slowly. Take another step.”

I move. I shuffle as he guides me—first forward, then to the right.

“Okay, love,” he says, “now this is the tricky part. Slowly take your hand—I suppose your right hand—and lift it about a foot, maybe shoulder height. No, lower a bit. Keep your hand close to your body—I don’t want you to touch anything you shouldn’t. A little bit lower. All right. Now, move it slowly forward. Keep your hand flat… don’t move your hand up or down. Oh—it’s hard for me to—it’s hard for me to direct you from here; it’s hard to see where—well, where your hand is in relation to the money…”

“No standing up,” Ma instructs.

William says, “All right. Well, let me think about this. It’s hard to do it from this angle, but I think you need to move your hand an inch to the right. Then slowly down. You should be touching the money then.”

I move my hand an inch to the right. I move my hand down, but my fingers touch a smooth and metallic surface. Strategically I slide my hand a millimeter to the right, and this is when I feel the familiar sensation of clothlike paper beneath my pinky.

“I have it,” I say. “Look, I have it, I have it.” I’m surprised by how relieved I am.

Someone comes up behind me. I can smell Ma’s perfume: jasmine and jonquil. She removes my blindfold and says, “You didn’t win.” She takes the money from me, and I’m standing in front of the counter, facing the traitorous bread box.

“We’ll play again next week,” Ma says. “Maybe you’ll do better then.”

I say nothing. I am ready to walk out of the room when Ma says, as if it is an afterthought, “And you are no longer allowed to feed that dog from our refrigerator. We only have so much food every week, and to watch you take good food and give it to an animal is ridiculous.”

“It’s not so much food,” I say, but I know this isn’t the problem. We could have an infinite supply of loaves and fishes, and Ma would still not want me to feed a distraction. The dog is an outsider as much as are the outsiders who shuffle and shove and grunt in town; the dog does not belong in the orderly paradise of our home, or with the trinity of Ma and William and me.

My eyes burn. I walk out of the room, half thinking she’ll grab me, but I walk past her and neither she nor William touch any part of me; I go out the front door, where Sarah, who was curled up on the porch, suddenly leaps up to greet me, and I kneel to bury my face in the fur at her neck where the rope is loosely tied, inhaling the scent of her. She is wild with excitement, enormous, rising up to put her paws on my thighs. She licks my cheek. I startle and gasp and then I laugh, without thinking, at this pup who has come for me, and then I untie her from the post. I kiss her on the head; I tell her to go.

Nighttime. A sea of crickets warbles in the darkness. William is presumably in the bathroom when I enter our room with cold feet and cold hands. The sheets are bunched in a heap against the wall; I shut the door and climb under the covers, where my exhalations are. William and I used to play Caves of Adullam this way. There wasn’t much to the game besides being under the covers together, where we declared that we were hiding. A girl and a boy, sister and brother.

If I had a sister, what would she be like? Would we play Caves? Would she be as much of a hassle as me? It would just be the two of us. Two girls to play and not touch bodies except to cuddle, to braid hair, to kiss without next steps.

Sarah is gone. For a time she stayed, untied, hours spent lying on the porch. Her suppertime came and went with no supper to
show for it. I heard her paw at the door—Ma heard it, too, and grimaced, shaking her head. With the pawing came a soft whine. And then—I don’t know exactly when—she took off and left me here. In the cave I press my face into the mattress, but I can’t seem to cry. I worry that if I start to cry William will come in and notice, and then he’ll want to talk about it. He’ll want to comfort me when his comfort is the last thing I want.

I predict that he will come in to talk to me but he doesn’t. Even in the room, under the blankets, I hear him talking to Ma.

He says, “I don’t think it was right.”

He could be talking about the blindfold game, or perhaps he is talking about Sarah.

Ma replies, “I know more than either of you do.”

William: “She’s not a thing you can just play with!”

Ma: “Listen to yourself. Don’t let her bad influence get to you. You know better than that.”

William: “She loves me. I know she does. You don’t have to play these kinds of games with her. You upset her. Can’t you see that?”

Ma: “I love you both too much. That’s why I do what I do, and that’s why you rebel. You don’t completely understand love—neither of you do, but especially Gillian. My job is to make sure that both of you are full of the right kind of love. Until then, you’re vulnerable to bad things.”

William: “She loves the dog.”

There is a long pause. “I know she does. The dog will not be a problem for much longer.”

They must be in the kitchen. I don’t want to leave the cave, but it’s getting hard to breathe. When William comes into the room we do the following things: play a few games of Rime Riche, listen to Bach’s Partita no. 6 in E Minor while on our backs, hold each other, and then we take our clothes off.

In the morning I play “Dynamite Rag” and “The Louisiana Rag” over and over again with a soft sweater over my pink slip in acknowledgment of the fall, my bare feet tapping and occasionally soft-pedaling as William sits on the sofa with a bowl of oatmeal, his hair disheveled in a manner that I might consider wanton, but choose to see as an extension of his overburdened IQ. Because who
could care about one’s hair if one is busy, as he is, with taking on the task of learning all of Beethoven’s sonatas—the exception being the
Hammerklavier,
which he has not yet tackled, and is saving for when he is older and his fingers are wiser. Because he has his whole life to do so. On the other hand, I have no project. My project is to live until I die. Or maybe I can take up a hobby, like embroidery or crochet; more realistically, I’ve decided, I can take up my father’s old love of taxidermy, and add to my trunk of corpses. I think that I could be good at that. When I was small I watched him take apart animals and stitch them back up, and his taxidermy manuals and pamphlets—
Amazing New Methods for Mounting Decoy Owls, Nothing Spared—Boat-Caulking Cotton and Fine Bone Winding
—are still tucked into the bookcase. I could start with a rabbit’s foot, and work my way up to entire creatures. My musty museum in the making.

I don’t know why I continue to play the piano these days. Habit, I suppose. It brings me no pleasure. There’s no pleasure even though I’m good at it. I’m not like William, whose body seems to be wired for the pursuit of two things: myself and Beethoven. I think that after my father, and then Mrs. Kucharski, died, I really did stop caring about the piano. Over the last few days even the sound of it has begun to rub at my nerves, because the piano is coming out of tune, and I hear this new sound emerge like a hatchling; but I play it anyway with determination.