The Border of Paradise: A Novel (24 page)

“He liked to watch you play. He got a kick out of your ragtime. When he was feeling superb he’d ask you to play ‘Down Yonder,’ and he and Ma would dance around the living room like goofballs, swinging their arms. I don’t know if you remember that.”

“Nope.”

“You were pretty young. It was worse when he came into our room in the middle of the night and dragged you out of bed, totally out of his mind. You’d cry…”

Her hands lift. Silence. The appendages move to her lap, one crossed over the other, before the top one begins to worry it-self—the thumb scratching the index finger. A spot blooms pink on white.

“He’d insist you play ‘Down Yonder’ or ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ at three in the morning. You don’t remember this? I guess you were four.”

“No.”

“Babbling. Pretty much incoherent at a mile a minute.”

“Stop.”

“I’d try to get him to leave you alone, but what could I do, really? Who knows where Ma was. I remember going into the living room with the both of you. I think I was wearing footies. You’d cry and play, and then he’d ask you to play it again and again, until you and I were both crying, more out of fear of him than sleepiness or sleeplessness, I think.”

“I don’t remember this.”

“To this day, it gives me the chills.”

“So you choose to bring this up now,” Gillian says, still rubbing, maybe bleeding soon.

“I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t know why you brought it up right now. You’d think you would have said something sooner.”

“I guess it was sitting here and seeing you play,” I say. “I never meant to tell you.”

She says, “It’s a horrible story.

“I’m sorry.”

Later Gillian sits out on the porch in her bare feet, leaving the light off to discourage moths and mosquitoes. While I stand behind the closed screen door I see her back, illuminated from the hall light, the ichthyian swell of the vertebrae at her neck, and, just beyond her and the porch steps, a clump of nearly invisible boulders. I open the door and walk toward her. The ninety-degree day has descended into the thirties, and when I sit next to her on the steps I’m shivering as much as from the chill as I am from proximity. At this close range I can see her face; my eyes adjust. I fondly observe that tiny freckle above the right corner of her lip.

We barely move, careful not to disturb the encroaching perimeter of potted cacti. I ask her, carefully, if she’s thinking about David. She shrugs. Then I ask if she’s thinking about our honeymoon week. Emboldened, my hand moves to her exposed thigh. Immediately she flinches, almost imperceptibly, surprised. I withdraw, apologizing. “No,” she says, and then she grabs my hand and plants it on her knee, which is cold, colder than I’d expected—cold as a river-wet rock. We sit in silence.

“At least I made him happy. Didn’t I?”

“Of course you did.”

“I’m nervous,
ge.
Are you nervous? Do you have a case of the nerves?”

“Of course.”

“But are you very nervous?”

“It’s a big thing, what we’re doing, small duck.”

“I’m very nervous,” she says, and swats at her arm. She says we ought to go inside. I squeeze her knee. For a few seconds, I hold on tight.

Morning. In the kitchen she’s standing at the counter and sink in a sleeveless red dress. The window on the far wall is open and a
bright breeze filters through the yellow curtains, letting the light cut across the table to the floor.

“Why’d you stop playing?” she asks. She looks up. “It was an excellent background for omelet-making.”

“I thought I’d come help,” I say.

“Chop, then,” she says, “and I’ll put something on the turntable.”

Ma has left us with a week’s worth of groceries, including two tomatoes the color of poppies, ham from the deli that’s swaddled in paper and sweating, six eggs, a hunk of yellow cheddar. I assist as Gillian rubs her long fingers across the tomatoes, as though screwing open a jar, in the faucet’s stream, and passes them to me. We two are extra careful with knives, forcing whoever is in the role of assistant to slowly slice. Gillian wipes her hands on her dress and crosses the room to operate the record player. Soon the opening notes of the
Hammerklavier
spin and crackle. The hem of Gillian’s dress reaches midthigh, exposing the delicate line of vastus lateralis, which appears and disappears as she backs away from the side table and raises herself on tiptoe. She has always had strong legs, which I suppose is from a lifetime of running barefoot, though at the moment her feet are abnormally clean. “Pay attention,” she scolds, “you’ll lose a finger.” Next I peel back the ham’s paper and withdraw four slices.
Chop-chop.
Beat the eggs. She takes the bowl from me and pours the milky-yellow liquid into the pan, surrounding the omelet’s insides. We form one omelet, then a second.

Moments later I see a wadded thread hanging off the back of her dress, swinging against her skin. With trembling fingers I try to snap it off. She shrieks as I touch her, a plated omelet in her hands. “That’s
cold
!” she cries, jerking away.

We sit at the wide wooden table. Two kids, two omelets. Gillian cuts her omelet with a fork, spears it, and then moves head and hand toward each other for feeding. Her glasses are hazy with grease.

“
Mei
, your glasses are filthy,” I say.

“Oh? I suppose they are.”

My enigmatic sister, at once crude and delicate, has betrayed only the mildest flirtations since Ma departed.

“I’ll clean them for you. Here, hand them over.”

Gillian pauses, fork in one hand, glasses in the other. She hands the golden spectacles to me, revealing her naked, open face. I
take the glasses and I walk to the sink and turn on the water. I rinse them in the manner of Gillian rubbing a ripe tomato.

All at once I hear a clatter, and then her arms are wrapping around my waist, a cue taken from the days of David and Ma. When I turn, Gillian’s mouth is on mine. She kisses me—I think I hear the sound of sucking and smacking—and then she sinks her head into the space between my head and shoulder, emitting a whimper, snatching her glasses from my limp hand. Her height creates an awkward stooping effect, but I am lost in the hard swell of my groin, the scalp-tingle, and trying to recall what her mouth reminds me of.

“So there’s
that
,” she says, putting her glasses back on. I move my hand up to her breast, feeling the ghost-sensation of her nipple before she whirls around and returns to the kitchen table.

I laugh, a bit crazily. “It was… amazing,” I say.

She eats. I pour myself a second cup of coffee and drink it at the counter, invigorating my senses and burning my tongue in the process. So it will be this simple, this wonderful, this
easy.

“Save your flattery, and finish your food,” she says.

“Of course, of course…” I reply, and return to the table, vibrating with excitement.

“Kisses for fishes,” Gillian says. She brings her plate to the sink to rinse.

“Hugs for bugs.”

“Are you finished? I’ll wash your plate,” she says. “Or you can come wash these dishes, and I’ll eat the breakfast that you abandoned in order to kiss me.
Hao ba? Okay?
”

Though I abandoned my omelet to clean her glasses, and she was the one to deliver the smooch, I don’t argue. I eat the omelet. She washes my plate, kicking her legs from side to side to the music.

I want to kiss. She wants to read. I ask if I can read in bed beside her, and she is amenable to this. Gillian’s room is slightly larger than mine even though our beds are the same size, which grants her more space—a bearskin rug, one of David’s creations, spreads out like a blot of ink; her wardrobe of delicate dresses and lingerie stands in the northeast corner, with clothing leaking onto the floor toward an open trunk filled with taxidermied
animals, including a snarling bobcat. Gillian lies faceup on her mattress amid a nest of gauzy gray sheets. She is reading the Bible. (My grandfather’s feminine inscription, in sepia ink:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. —Peter J. Nowak, 1949.
) I settle next to her. She moves to turn a page. Her arm touches mine, and I grow warm all over. I turn to kiss her gentle elbow. She laughs and returns to reading.

“Do you remember,” she asks, “that this was one of the first things Dad had us read after he got out of Wellbrook? When we really started to learn? I was fascinated with any part that had to do with animals—Jonah’s fish, fowls, swine. You were obsessed with the Crucifixion. I think that says a lot about us, don’t you?”

“Mmm,” I mutter, stroking her hair. “You know, I’ve loved you for years.”

She says, “I love you, too.”

I move my face so close to hers that I can smell, faintly, the sweet scent of food emanating from her mouth before she turns away. The book swings to the bed. “Agh,” she says, sitting up, the sheets falling all at once from her body, “
please
let me read for a bit. There’s this passage that I’ve had on the brain all morning—‘before Abraham was, I am’—and it’s driving me nuts to not be able to get it down—”

“Of course,” I say, “go ahead, read.” And I settle back down, inches away.

A few minutes later, in the middle of our silence, she says, “Bunchability. A bouquet of tissue flowers.”

“Good one, fishlet.”

“Thank you.”

The fourth day. I sidle to my piano, and in a booming forte, I start Mozart’s Fantasy and Fugue in C Major, K. 394. As predicted, Gillian appears in the entryway a page in, itching at the insides of her elbows with both hands as she watches—Gillian, my Constanze! But though I’m sure that she understands my desirous cipher, she doesn’t touch or so much as move toward me, and
before the fugue is over, she turns and returns to her room without saying a word:
she
is the cipher.

Later she outlines the shapes of shadows onto a sheet on the kitchen table, drawing new lines every time the shadows change. Every so often she nudges the bridge of her glasses with two fingers. Adorable! Despite growing up together, there’s still a sour mystery there, a tangle of thoughts and wants that keeps her separate from myself. In the last few days it seems that the natural wall between us, splitting two souls into two bodies, has become harder to see over.