The Border of Paradise: A Novel (22 page)

Now when I enter the children’s room, and they are lying in their beds on opposite sides early in the morning, with the curtains drawn and their faces barely showing, I can hear their breaths in tandem, the sound of one sound. William can’t sleep when his feet are showing; he must always have them covered. Gillian’s developing breasts form small hills beneath her sheet. Here is
her hair that I brush one hundred times every morning. I adhere to the sound of their sleep not just because I know they are alive when I hear their inhalations and exhalations, but because in sleep they are simply there.

After the incident with the orange I told David that I wanted to learn things. When he asked me what I meant, I said, “Well, you never taught me to drive.”

“What else?” he asked. His mind would wander off at times, but sometimes he seemed to be present, and when he was present, he was less upset. We were in the bathtub. At that time he refused to bathe unless I was in the bathtub with him. I think he was afraid of the water. I always got in with him, and I washed his hair in the manner that I washed, say, Gillian’s. In the bathtub I couldn’t help but look at David’s body. He was never in the mood for sex anymore; yet while the two of us were in the bathtub, naked and wet, I felt myself stirring and unable to help myself. I still lusted after him, can you imagine? If I forgot that he in fact looked awful and I didn’t see his bones rising through his skin and his wasted and soft muscles. And I was no longer conscious of his hand, which he kept wrapped in bandages most of the time now. He was making small gestures toward sanity. He tried; he really did make efforts. I still loved him.

“Mostly I need to learn how to drive, so that I can go into town. I also need to be able to get money if I need it,” I said. “Right now I need to ask money from you when I need it.”

He was quiet. He stirred the water with his good hand; the other hand was draped outside of the bathtub, where I couldn’t see it.

I knew that this was tricky. By asking him these things, I was letting him know that I no longer felt safe having him in charge. I was telling him that he was troubled and that I knew it. I may have even been hinting at the worst. If he said no, I had little recourse. I’d have to accept it or force it, and I doubted I would be able to do the latter.

He said, “You think I’m not going to keep you safe.”

When he said this, I wanted to take it all back.

“I want to have skills,” I said.

David sighed. He was behind me in the tub and his legs were on either side of me. He took his good hand and put it on my pale knee, which was sticking out of the water. I had paid so much attention to his bad hand for all of those years that I had forgotten what nice hands he really had. He had long, thin fingers, not knobby; the back of the good hand was smooth, with blue veins below the surface. There were hairs, but not many. They were hands that knew pianos and the skins of animals and a body. My body.

“You’re a good wife,” he said. “But you know what this means, don’t you?”

“I’m not giving you permission,” I said.

“I don’t need your permission.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll teach you anything you want to know,” he said.

“Promise me,” I said, and that was all—because I couldn’t bring myself to finish, because I knew he wouldn’t answer.

He took the Buick around the side, on the dirt and gravel, and I followed on foot. He nosed past the house to the field out back, knocking over a garbage can in the process and spraying trash over the dirt, and when he got out of the car he gestured at the driver’s seat. “Here you go,” he said. “Just sit right here.” I went to him, and I wrapped my arms around him without rising on my toes. “What?” He said this softly. He kissed the top of my head, patting my sides with his hands.

In the passenger seat he drank an icy bottle of Coca-Cola. He spoke calmly about the ignition, which I used to bring the car to a rumble. He informed me about the gearshift. “Shift slow,” he advised.

I stuttered the Buick around the field, rocking across its bumps and molehills, pressing the weight of the vehicle into the frosted grass, making maps of where I’d been. And even though I would call his mother later that day, and Mrs. Nowak would beg me to help David with so much force that I would have my husband sent to Wellbrook the day after that, which seemed like a sign of hope; even despite this, I could see the end already as clearly as I could see the far trees beneath the sky, with white above and white below. David slurped at the soda with his lips hooked over
the glass mouth, and then he kept the empty bottle between his thin legs. I stopped the car occasionally, trying to park, and then, after releasing the parking brake, I would turn the ignition again.

“Ease into it,” he said.

PART III

WILLIAM AND GILLIAN

THE ARRANGEMENT

WILLIAM (1972)

O
ur father was in Wellbrook Mental Hospital from 1962 to 1963, and he made a few shorter visits after that. As I recall, Wellbrook had a brick facade crawling with patches of psoriatic ivy, wooden white front doors, and, over the entrance, an enormous half-moon of a stained-glass window that read HYGIENE OF THE MIND in black across an autumnal mosaic. This is where the doctors attempted to scrub my daddy’s psyche clean, and this is where he lived for seven months, upstairs, off of one hallway-spoke from the nurses’ fishbowl station. Every room had a sad little bed screwed to the floor, green-gray walls, and a wardrobe, which is where Gillian hid the first time we heard the too-close sound of screaming. Back then, I put on a brave face while Ma coaxed her out.

The fact that he was there drove Ma crazy. “I don’t know what they can do for him,” she’d say to us in Mandarin, “and they’re talking about
shocking
his brain.” (Gillian and I conversed almost exclusively in Mandarin or Taiwanese with Ma, especially in public, but we are primarily English speakers when together, as we were with David.) Ma was in denial, but Gillian and I knew plenty of the devilry that our father had pulled in his throes, including the incident with the spiders and the one with the orange, and we didn’t understand how she seemed so capable of ignoring them, let alone appealing to have him released. The doctors said that he was sick, and didn’t everyone want the best for him? Of course they did. Of course we did, if we were sensible.
There was nothing Ma could do but smoke her skinny cigarettes with a moony face and pace around the house and cook more food than we could possibly eat, all in an effort to distract herself from the fact that David had, more than once, wandered in the woods in his underwear all night, and on one occasion returned claiming to have seen Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior cooking hot dogs by His very own holy fire pit, and what is there to say to that?

There was one particular Friday visit. Gillian had prepared a song-and-dance routine. Ma did her hair in French braids—Gillian, for as long as she’s been old enough to have long hair, has had her hair in all manner of configurations—and that day her twin tails were tied with red velvet ribbons, secured by elastics beneath awkward bows. She wore a red-and-white dress with a collar and cuffs, and the skirt of her dress flared out like a bloody swan’s tail as she twirled to the Buick.

I wore a button-down shirt and trousers, though I had a morbid and aesthetic distaste for buttons. Ma told me that David liked to see me in a button-down shirt; he’d left a life of East Coast privilege, but signifiers of that privilege lingered, and in his lucid spells, my father even wanted me to wear collar stays. So I dressed ten times my age to go see my father, who was too out of his mind to care about what I was wearing. I could’ve doffed a top hat or donned a trash bag for all he cared, but I still ironed my own shirts, and I got every last wrinkle out. I also tied my own ties. So we were a sartorially excellent threesome standing in a row in front of the first-floor nurses’ counter: two handmade dresses and a small, neatly knotted tie in a place none of us wanted to be in.

“David Nowak,” Ma said, and took out her purse, preparing to show her identification. Beside me, Gillian hopped on one leg. But before Ma could say or do anything more, the woman behind the counter told Ma, apologetically, that David Nowak would be having no visitors that day.

It was rare that I saw Ma encounter conflict with a stranger. Strangers were dangerous, she’d always said; they didn’t understand us. So I nervously watched as she drew herself up before this woman like some puffed-up bird.

“No visitors?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“But I am his wife. I brought our children to see him.”

The woman sighed. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a good day for a visit, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel… comfortable discussing such matters, under these circumstances.” She looked down at Gillian and me. Then she crooked her finger toward herself and cupped her hand to the side of her mouth, and Ma leaned in, reluctantly, to listen.

The day that we were turned away from Wellbrook was the day Ma assembled us in the master bedroom. She’d been tense the whole drive home, chain-smoking and periodically rolling down the window to throw her cigarette butts out before rolling the window back up again, clouding the Buick interior with suffocating smoke, and neither Gillian nor I said a word or coughed for fear of blowing her up. At home, in that sparse room of theirs, she told us that Daddy was very sick, and that Daddy would want her to tell us that she and Daddy had big plans for us. She told us that Gillian was my
tongyangxi.

“What does that mean?” Gillian asked.

“Well,” Ma said, “it has to do with the fact that someday you will be happy together, so happy together, for the rest of your lives.”

In Taiwan, where Ma had come from, this would mean that Gillian and I would be married, but we were in America now and therefore would not be married, though we would be in a very special relationship when the time came.

“You love each other now as brother and sister,” she said, “so think of this as an even more special love, a love that will bind the two of you together forever, the kind of love that Ma and Daddy have.” (I did not know what this meant, nor did I ask. I assumed it had something to do with the way they touched each other, which was simultaneously fascinating and disgusting.) We were not, under any circumstances, to mention this to Daddy, or something terrible would happen to us. She would send us away, perhaps to hospitals of our own, and we’d never see either Ma or Daddy again. Continuing, she explained that we could not comprehend the complexities of why such secrecy was so important just yet, because we were children. We were too young to understand, but we would understand later, when we were older. Daddy might have to stay in Wellbrook for a very long time.

“How long?” Gillian wanted to know.

Ma shrugged.

“Will it be much longer?” Gillian asked.

“I don’t know,” Ma said, “but I can’t get him out right now.” She picked up the burning cigarette and ashed it in a coffee mug with a big orange flower printed on the side. The coffee mug was half-full of cold coffee and a bluebottle fly, floating.

We’d barely been exposed to the world, and post-Wellbrook, as David put us through our academic paces, beginning with the Bible, I wondered if we were meant for a fate such as Abraham and Sarah. Still, David and Ma remained mum about Gillian as my
tongyangxi.
Soon it began to seem as though Ma had never said anything about it at all, as if it were a hallucination I’d caught from some other crazy within the Wellbrook walls.

He died just when things seemed like they were getting better. He was eating at the table with us, and letting Gillian in the shed with him when he worked on skinning and stuffing his animals. He was even playing with us again.

“Fish verbs,” he said one morning, coming into the kitchen.

I looked up. “Flounder,” I said.

Gillian said, “Char.”

He grinned and gave us each a quarter from his mysterious pockets. I thought of my father as an unpredictable and skittish animal. I thought of David as a year of storms and blizzards stuffed into one man.

I knew what was going on as soon as the phone rang that day, sounding like a scream, because we never received calls, and the phone was only for emergencies.

Everyone was raving mad for an intolerable duration, especially Ma and Gillian. I’m not saying that I was immune to the effects of my father’s death, but it was true that I was never his favorite, and I mostly felt merely tolerated by him. If I think about it too much—which I have, over the years—I could also say that I was scared of him. Mostly I worried about Gillian, who was his
beloved, and who was too small to be confronted by something so big. When David died Gillian cried under her bed until she couldn’t move, and as she lay there I walked up to the bed. Then I squeezed myself under the bed with her, and we held hands while she cried and cried, and I thought,
How could you do this to her?
to a ghost.

Ma was angry. She was quiet and she was angry. Her gestures were sharp. Every drawer was closed with too much force. I thought she would take the doors off their hinges. She shouted, “Fuck!” when she dropped a pepper or a fork, but for the most part, she let her actions shriek for her.

Let me try again; honesty is not my strong suit. He didn’t love me as much as he loved Gillian, but his death also meant that I wouldn’t have the chance to prove myself to him, which was my goal until the moment the phone rang. My father was the smartest man in the world. His sickness betrayed us, and then he betrayed us. That’s all. Death makes for incoherent fools.

It wasn’t a time to talk about romantic sibling arrangements. I’m not saying that we ever really got over his death, but his death was the event that set things in motion, and when all the hullabaloo had come and gone, approximately five or six months after that terrible July, the idea of having a
tongyangxi
for a sister came up again, and actually came up very quickly.

By then I knew that what Ma meant was sex. This was the thing that had bonded my mother and my father. This was the adult thing that held their relationship together. The idea confused me, as my own body had barely begun to change. I was masturbating, but did so to ghostly images of women from diagrams. I had little sense of what stimuli aroused me; all I knew was that some low brain function commanded me to touch my body, and I lacked the will to ignore the command of ambiguous desire. Sex, though, was frightening. Why? When? How?

“How will we know when that is?” I asked.

“Her body will change,” Ma said, “and she’ll become a woman.”

I was thirteen. Gillian was eleven. She was a girl all over, flat and gangly. I felt myself becoming older, growing beneath my skin, and therefore more responsible for her than ever.

By fourteen, I began to see my sister differently. I can’t say whether Gillian is
conventionally
attractive. She is four inches taller than myself, a perfect five-foot-nine. Her skin is the color
of cream in the winter and a burnished gold in the summer. She doesn’t burn or peel. She has slender arms and long legs, taut and brave with muscle. She occasionally wears Ma’s jasmine perfume. She has a broad mouth that smiles easily, even when she’s in pain, and a loud, honking laugh.

As for the ineffable claim of beauty, I have no concept of what Helen of Troy looked like. What made her beautiful? What singular or combinatory fact? Though I dreamed of it, I’d seen Gillian’s pubescent, unclothed body only once. I was fourteen and in my first mad flush of a crush, and I accidentally-on-purpose walked in on Gillian in the bath. Imagine Gillian’s exposed expression when she caught me gaping.

A number of other memories, originally innocent, have taken on the tinge of sex. When I was six years old, we had a large sandbox in the shape of a turtle out back. I’m pretty sure David purchased it in one of his bouts of paternal largesse. Not to say that he was stingy, but he needed to feel a true
need
for almost anything he bought for us. I don’t know what possessed him to buy the turtle, which was an eyesore, but it brought Gillian and me much pleasure for exactly two years, until one of us forgot to replace the shell and it became, in the rain, a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Gillian and I leaned over the turtle’s shell-less, vulnerable back and watched the threadlike larvae wriggle in the wet sand. David disposed of the turtle’s guts, but when summer arrived, mosquitoes clouded the air and welted the hell out of Gillian, whose blood was sweet (“Probably type B,” Ma said)—our parents and I remained relatively unharmed—and David covered her with a thick layer of calamine lotion. For the rest of the summer Gillian remained pale pink and quarantined. In my memory she is wearing nothing but her underwear. I still remember the way her scratches made bloody marks across her flat, pale chest.

How about this: as an amateur apothecary at the age of eight, I convinced Gillian to pick flowers with me. I took a ceramic bowl from the kitchen and mashed the petals into water. Even now, walking past a rosebush, I’ll rub my fingers over a petal with my eyes closed. I do find that the feel of flowers is unbelievably erotic. Was that what did it? How did I fall for her so very completely and all at once, like diving off a cliff? Dear God, how will I approach her for that intimate act?