The Border of Paradise: A Novel (28 page)

Soon the Buick clings to the mountain wall, and Gillian and I are in the backseat. I droop my arm over Gillian such that her left shoulder is in my armpit and observe with her our usual, once-monthly route to town, which is presently curling its way down Sycamore
Road. We pass the Pine Ridge Trailer Park, its sign demarcated by a sloppily painted green triangle with a brown line attached to its base. The trailers gleam with great humped backs. A long-legged mutt is tied to a leaning pole. “Look at the pup,” Gillian says. “Do you like it?”

“I do.”

The mutt barks soundlessly as we pass. Gillian takes her hand and crosses her chest with it, wrapping her fingers around my yellow arm, adolescent forehead smudging glass. Gillian, the budding amateur anthropologist, the cataloger, observes the movie theater, the diner shaped like an Airstream trailer that promises to make you
LICK THAT GREASY SPOON AND LIKE IT
. I have never been inside of a movie theater or an Airstream trailer; these are merely glimpsed references. I happily smell her scooped collarbone. This is the third trip in the two weeks since Ma’s return, and the thought of town keeps Gillian glad.

Polk Valley is a place of brambly woods and mine shafts, tucked like a finger between the Sierras and the Yuba River of Nevada County, California. What I know of it as a town comes entirely from our monthly errand-runs and the gray pages of a hardbound telephone directory, kept in a kitchen drawer with receipts and a corkscrew. The population of Polk Valley in 1972 is 2,100. The average temperature is 84.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and 32.1 degrees in the winter. Twenty churches. One public library. We are not to be confused with the neighboring state of Nevada, though we are close to Lake Tahoe, which is sliced in two by the state border and also the largest alpine lake in North America. Other towns in Nevada County include Shyville, Lockstep, and Killington, as well as the apocalyptic duo of Devil’s Thumb and World’s End. During the Gold Rush, Polk Valley was the largest source of gold in the country—hence the town’s historically-minded fascination with the Old West. So I’ve read.

This fifteen-minute drive is almost all that we know of the world, though I do remember long drives from home to the city. On those drives, through the sun-streaked windows, I saw the landscape of groves and orchards, hand-painted signs in dripping red that David read aloud to us kids in the backseat, not because we couldn’t read, both of us being taught to read at a young age, but because David loved the sound of EGGS ASPARAGUS and CANDY NUTS PEACHES. FRESH STRAWBERRIES FRESH
PICKED DAILY amid alfalfa bales. “Doughnuts and liquors,” he said as we passed a storefront with a neon doughnut and a martini glass. Once he was driving us home from Mrs. Kucharski’s in a thunderstorm and said, “Don’t worry about the fireflies. They’ll just pull out their umbrellas.” Another time he explained to Gillian and me what trains were as we stopped at the tracks, bewildered as a locomotive brought its long string of cars across our road and made mechanical, and somehow also animal, sounds.

“Where do they go?” Gillian had asked.

“Other places,” David said. “Places we don’t go, kiddo.”

He had a rhyme that we chanted on the way to lessons:

Highway and right on Cedar Street,

Right on Elm three miles to meet

A mighty oak, and left you’ll see

Samson Drive, 1-9-8-3.

Dry grass flat to the blue-and-white Sierras. Black cows grazing under trees, coats glossy as oil; granite quarries gray against the orange earth. “Amador County Fair, well, that sounds fun, doesn’t it?… Jack Dunn Water Well Drilling, Pine Grove Stage Stop, Sierra Baptist Church, Four-Square Gospel Church of the Healing Word.” Gillian never talked much on those drives because of her motion sickness, but she loved it, she told me later, she loved all of it, just as she melts at that dog and those trailers and, now, the National Auto Gas Station at the outermost corner of Main Street, the slender, stick-straight road flanked by nineteenth-century storefronts and signs. Ma parks behind the K & Bee Grocery, slipping the Buick between a white truck and a low orange car. From the window we can see families, townsfolk, clean-cut, the kind of people David once explained as retirees out looking for a little plot of bramble to turn into a lawn. An old man in a plaid shirt shuffles down the sidewalk with a walker, the brim of his hat shielding his leathery face. Little girls run and give chase, shrieking, as a woman hollers behind them.

Gillian jitters in front of us, taking quick, clipped steps around the side of K & Bee to the entrance, passing a woman and her
little boy in dungarees. We must not ever touch in public; this is a rule that underscores our difference in this world, as well as what makes us special. The K & Bee logo, painted on a hanging awning sign, is of a big red
K
alongside a big-eyed bee. We know that it’s a male bee because he is wearing overalls, and his path of flight, indicated by a dotted line, swirls around the backbone of the
K.
K & Bee and the Apothecary Rx have become the only establishments in our regular rotation since David died, the remnants of a circle that’s fragmented over the years. These are the essentials of our lives: food and cheap toilet paper, new toothbrushes when the bristles have half fallen out. And unlike home, these things change, are mutable; brands add MORE CLEANING POWER! or become HEALTHY! HEARTY! GOOD FOR YOU! Gillian was, at thirteen, devastated when K & Bee stopped carrying Apple of My Pie fruit pies, which caused me to question her maturity but, in retrospect, seems to speak to some extended need of hers for consistency in all things she loves, even sickly sweet, rectangular fruit pies.

Gillian drowses to the rightmost aisle and snakes her way through. I am at her side. Ma allows us this as she follows behind with a small and clattering cart. In the canned-food aisle Gillian’s fingers, outstretched, brush against tins of corned beef and sardines. I follow and watch as she pauses to examine this thing or that, expecting to hear her marvel, but today she doesn’t say much, just looks and touches, and my heart swells at how I can love a girl so easily pleased on a monthly basis by three sorts of corn niblets and an equal variety of peas, this being so different from the brittle housewives moving in buttoned dresses, bare-legged for summer, hands holding shopping lists of scrawl, and thrusting objects into their carts with native finality; women toward whom I have fascination but no attraction. We look at bloody meat chilled in cases and racks of bottled Coca-Cola, Friskies Dog Food Meals, soup cans and signs. Ma asks for her standard three pounds of ground beef at the meat counter, and while she waits Gillian walks around the corner to examine a display of root beer (BE THE KING OF YOUR CASTLE WITH OLD CASTLE!). I follow. When a stock boy in an apron appears from behind us, pushing a tall thing of red crates, muttering, “‘Scuse me, ‘scuse me,” I move closer to Gillian without thinking, pulling her to me as we squeeze against the root beer display. Immediately my body awakens.

The stock boy—one we’ve never seen before, with spots on his face and orange hair—turns to look at Gillian, his eyes subtly roving over her from head to sandal-shod foot as I attempt to conceal myself. But he couldn’t care less about me or my engorgement. He smiles. He carefully dissects her parts, as though he can’t decide which way to mount her first, and then he considers her legs, twisted slightly inward at the knees, with calves pulled down to delicate ankles (not seeing the scars from scrapping in the brush with me), the swollen small breasts, her pinkish-white face.

“Good afternoon,” he says. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

Gillian replies, slowly, “We don’t come often.” And then she stops. Speaking to strangers is not a thing we do.

“Pity,” he says. “I just moved here for the summer to be with my cousin. Make some money before I go back to Killington. You ever been to Killington?”

“How nice for you,” I say. “Good-bye.”

He laughs. “Aw, what—you two sweethearts?” The stock boy has righted his dolly and is leaning against it now, making him the same height as Gillian. From here I can smell his nauseating perfume, and I can only imagine what sort of filthy smells he would emit otherwise. I want to say,
Yes, we’re sweethearts, and I knew her last night, you moron,
but I am suddenly very aware of Ma’s ominous presence. She appears with the package of meat and cart, watching. What could Gillian possibly be thinking at this moment? Gillian and I are usually ignored, nonentities; we don’t make eye contact. But she is now half smiling at him with a kind of stunned—or is it starstruck?—look. My belly roils. If I’m unaware of what conventional female beauty is, I’m still more dubious in regards to what arouses my sister, and it could be this stock boy covered in blotches.

I could grab her arm and say that there’s something urgent that needs attending to, though if she’s enjoying this encounter, I’m not inclined to anger her. The truth is that if her interaction goes much further, these happy jaunts will undoubtedly be put on pause for a month, or maybe more, which is not devastating to me, certainly, as I imagine myself with her sans distraction, but Gillian cares greatly about going into town. And I want her to be happy. So I say, “
Mei
…” in the quietest voice that I can muster, and when her eyes turn to meet mine, I mumble something about
our mother needing help with a bag of Friskies. Then I hear the cart again, and Ma steps toward us.

Ma says to the stock boy, “Go away, please.”

His lips part slightly. His brow knits, and Gillian snaps out of her daze. She smiles at him. “Time to go,” she says. He says goodbye and blinks one eye, as though he’s got something caught in it. Reflexively, I try to do the same and find I cannot. Ma doesn’t say anything. We continue to walk, and behind us the cart begins, again, to rattle and squeak. Whether we’ve passed muster with Ma I’m not sure, but I am sure that we will be heading home more quickly than usual now, and when we get home, I will get Gillian into our bed, because I am still aroused, perhaps more now than I was before we spurned the red-haired kid—aroused, perhaps, as a result of triumph. Then again, I’m not entirely victorious, though I will be soon enough when I get the stock boy out of her head and mine.

We walk. I see Gillian stop to pinch a cellophane-wrapped loaf of white bread, hard.

“You know not to speak to strangers,” Ma says quietly.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” Gillian says. She is standing next to the ice-cream case, a sheet of cloudy glass behind her. Ma pretends not to hear. “I didn’t
say
anything to him,” she says again, and Ma pushes the cart to the frozen vegetables.

We begin to put our groceries on the checkout counter, and the cashier looks up at us. The two women exchange pleasantries while the cashier calculates a total cost, and with her head down in concentration, she says, “Terrible about the fire, isn’t it?”

Ma takes out her wallet and prepares to write a check. She has a photograph of our family in the window where a driver’s license ought to go, turned with the back facing out so that it just says: KODAK KODAK KODAK.

“I hope you folks stay safe. A fire like that…” The cashier shakes her head, and not one of us looks at one another, or says anything in reply.

At the car Ma settles into the driver’s seat and switches on the ignition. I am standing next to my sister and can barely hear the car stereo, which emits a solemn voice and not the usual swell
of classical radio. A man is announcing a “fast-moving forest fire.” I’m carrying a bag of groceries alongside the Buick. Gillian’s hands rest on the cart’s scarlet push-handle. The announcer drones on: all residents of the wooded northeast corner of Nevada County are to evacuate to the community center at St. Joseph’s Church in downtown Polk Valley, immediately. (Gillian says, in Mandarin, “That’s us.”) All residents who have no mode of transport are to call such-and-such a number for assistance. This is a mandatory evacuation due to a fast-moving forest fire. All residents of the northeast—

Ma turns off the radio. The Buick is parked on the outside edge of the small parking lot, facing a row of scrubby bushes. Both of her hands rest on the steering wheel at the eleven and one o’clock positions, and the three of us look to the gray-yellow sky.