For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  Shauna’s legs trembled and then buckled. She hit the ground on her knees. Her skirt pooled protectively over her thighs. Better to be one of us, better to be standing on this side than kneeling and weeping in the gravel while they leer, that was all my father wanted from me, to be one of them, to be a king.

  But I belonged in her place, holding something so stunning they’d steal for it, they’d stare into its hot center even as it blinded them.

  We took a long time walking home, not talking. The streetlights were already on. We passed through the undeveloped area between the school and our houses. The corner store, a garage, a laundromat, a stretch of empty lots. We lingered for a while over a dead rat, steamrolled flat by tire treads. The tail was the most recognizable part.

  We came to my house first. I stayed on our gravel driveway and watched them walk away. The road rose uphill and then went down, creating the illusion that the boys disappeared into the horizon faster than they should.

  I pushed open the front door. My father was sitting at the kitchen table. Mother sat on the floor by our shoes. My sisters were nowhere to be seen. They knew. Shauna’s parents must have called.

  Mother picked me up by my armpits. She could barely lift me; my head hovered above hers, my feet dragged on the ground. She held me at arm’s length like a bag of garbage. She carried me into their bedroom and dropped me hard into a chair.

  Father came in behind us. He leaned on the wall by the door. Mother opened her mouth and a long stream of invective came out in a language I barely recognized, a language of hard, short sounds, a language of pain. My father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. She wasn’t supposed to speak to us in Cantonese. Our English would come out wrong, he’d insisted. Like theirs.

  Deprived of that weapon, she used the only other one she had: she slapped me in the face. For a moment, no one moved, as if the sound of her palm cracking against my cheek needed time to echo. Mother walked out. The door hung open.

  I met my father’s gaze. He stayed leaning on the wall across from me, his expression inscrutable. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened up. He was smiling. He didn’t speak for a long time, just smiled. I felt his approval like a warm glow.

  He said, “Bonnie is moving into Helen’s room. You get your own room, son.”

  My father loved me.

  2

  Eighteen

  “I LOVE AN EIGHTEEN NIGHT,” Adele sang over Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night,” dancing with her hands alternating over her head like pistons. For the summer after she turned eighteen, we replaced any two-syllable word in songs on the radio with eighteen. Bon Jovi was livin’ on an eighteen. Janet Jackson told eighteen boys that they don’t mean a thing. Adele skipped through the house singing, “Bam-ba, eighteen! Bam-ba, eighteen!”

  I was eight years old, the summer before Shauna and Roger and being marooned in my own bedroom. Adele would be leaving soon. Helen had been waiting seventeen years for her own room, and she would lose it within a few months. It wouldn’t surprise her; nothing did.

  Bonnie and I imitated Adele’s steps in our white socks and plastic slippers. Adele drew circles in the air with her hips while Bonnie snapped just off the beat, marked by jolts of electric guitar. Adele and I leaned in toward each other, mouths moving in unison. “Yeah, I love an eighteen night.”

  Helen sat at her desk, hunched so far over that her shoulders rose above her neck. She’d signed herself up for an SAT prep course that was run out of the high school, otherwise dormant for the summer. I danced over to her chair and asked if I could help her study. Rather than answer, she handed me one of her vocabulary lists. I couldn’t pronounce the first word. “That’s what I thought,” she said. She went back to her practice set of math problems. We sang straight into her addled brain: B can clean the house in half the time it takes A. If they cleaned it together in three hours, how many hours would it take for A to clean the house all by himself? Eighteen hours.

  Bonnie slipped and fell onto the gray carpeting. Adele grabbed her chubby hands and pulled her upright. “Well, I love an eighteen night.” She spun Bonnie around. I took weaving jazz steps backward.

  Helen leaned on her elbows, resting an index finger in each ear. In a class of seventy-two students, forty-one students are taking French, twenty-two are taking German, and nine are taking both French and German. How many students are not enrolled in either course? Eighteen students.

  As the guitar began to wail on its own, Bonnie and I stopped trying to mimic Adele’s long-limbed grace. We jumped up and down, shook our arms free like monkeys. Adele, her small butt still swaying back and forth, picked up one of Helen’s markers and blacked out two of the digits in the year on the calendar: 1987 became 18.

  “I need that,” Helen said. Adele tossed the marker in Helen’s general direction. The three of us joined hands and danced in a circle through the end of the song. Helen groped for the marker on the floor.

  She went back to filling in the bubbles. Sarah is twice as old as John. Six years ago, Sarah was four times as old as John. How old is Sarah? Sarah is eighteen. Helen’s own numbers: the lesser seventeen, the imperfect 150 on her PSATs.

  When the envelopes came, I knew what they meant. Businesslike, Adele’s typed name visible in the clear plastic windows. Crests with Latin words in tight circles, silhouetted birds.

  The letters arrived within a few days of one another and were stacked on the hall table with the junk mail no one had thrown away yet. I caught Helen flipping through them. She was irritated that they went unopened, that Adele didn’t care which ones were small and white and cursory and which ones were thick and yellow and welcoming.

  After Helen left, I wrapped them all up in a grocery-store flyer—Save eighteen cents per pound on roasted ham—and shoved them through the swinging lid of the kitchen trash. I thought of it as a portal. Things went in and were never seen again.

  They were back on the hall table within a few hours, still wrapped in the flyer. The ghost of eighteen dug them out from the bin. A streak of coffee grinds over a university logo, the hall reeking of eggs and orange peels. The smell caught Adele’s attention.

  All summer long, Helen volunteered for one thing after another, so she could put the activities on her college applications. Adele took me with her when she visited Helen at the local nursing home. The first floor looked like a hospital—white reflecting on white, a long corridor of doors with numbered boxes and clipboards, a strip of wooden paneling running along each wall. The linoleum smelled freshly bleached. Unlike in a hospital, there was no one around. No one greeted us or asked us what we were doing there. A cart of medical supplies was abandoned at an angle in the hallway.

  We got into the elevator and went up to the fourth floor, where Helen worked. The silence persisted. On this floor, many of the doors were closed. I stuck my head into an open door as we walked by and saw a man lying face-down in bed with a bathrobe bunched up around his hips. His bare buttocks looked like empty sacks sliding off his spine. Adele shut his door for him.

  We found Helen in the lounge. She was spoon-feeding a woman fortified pudding, a beige substance that looked like it had come from a caulking gun. The woman tried to say something. “Just eat,” Helen interrupted, shoving the spoon into her mouth.

  I flopped down into an armchair. The remote control for the shelf television was attached to the armrest by a cord. I turned on the TV. It was muted. Hitting the mute button didn’t do anything. I turned to channel 18.

  The woman reminded me of a snowman, a human shape drawn broad and round, sinking deep into her wheelchair. The hard egg of her belly was pinned under a seat belt. She shoved the spoon away. “Where are my real shoes?” Her feet were elevated on the footrest of her chair, in soft-looking leather moccasins.

  The spoon knocked against the woman’s teeth. “Eat,” Helen repeated.

  The woman turned to Adele. “Do you know where my shoes are?”

  Adele perked up. “Nope.” Her voice bright, singsong. S
he got to her knees and pretended to look under the sofa. “Not here.” She opened the fridge. “Not here either.”

  The woman nodded solemnly. “Try the cabinets.”

  Adele walked around, loudly opening and closing all the cupboard doors. “Is it in this one? Nope. This one?”

  The woman tapped her chin. “Maybe someone hid them.”

  “Maybe,” Adele agreed.

  “She can’t wear shoes because her feet are too swollen,” Helen said. “Don’t turn her against the nurses and the volunteers by telling her we steal her shoes.”

  “But you do,” I said.

  The woman looked at me. She smiled. “Hello, Alfie.”

  I didn’t know what to do. “Hi,” I said.

  She gestured for me to come closer. Adele nudged my back, so I got out of the chair and stepped forward. The woman’s lips had sores in different states of healing, dry and wet. “How’s school, Alfie?”

  Helen held the woman’s chin firmly between her two fingers and turned her head. “You need to eat, Mrs. Harrison. It’s important.”

  “School is fine,” I said.

  Mrs. Harrison grabbed the spoon from Helen and wagged it at me. “Would you like some pudding, Alfie?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Alfie’s dead, Mrs. Harrison,” Helen said.

  “No, he isn’t,” she said. “He’s right here. What are you, blind?”

  Helen knelt down between me and Mrs. Harrison. “What did Alfie look like?”

  She seemed confused. Her eyes dimmed as she glanced between us. Adele couldn’t stand it. “Of course this is Alfie,” she exclaimed, putting her hands on my shoulders. “He came just to see you.”

  Mrs. Harrison looked more foggy-eyed than ever, but she relaxed again. “That’s nice,” she said. She tucked her blanket around herself.

  Helen stood up. She pulled Adele over by the arm. “What are you doing?”

  Mrs. Harrison and I continued to smile dumbly at each other. “What harm does it do?” Adele asked. “It makes her happy.”

  “It’s a lie.”

  Mrs. Harrison patted the back of my hand. Adele said, “So? Why tell her if she’s just going to forget? Why make her relive Alfie’s death over and over again?”

  “Because those are her real memories.” Helen wiped her hands on her uniform smock. “You disrespect her dead son by encouraging her to forget him. What he looked like. How he died.”

  Adele continued to smile gently. “Why not just let her be happy?”

  Mrs. Harrison picked the pudding container up off the table. She held it out to me. “You need to eat, Alfie,” she mimicked. “It’s important.” Mrs. Harrison and I both glanced sideways at Helen, and we laughed together.

  Helen plucked the pudding out of her hand. To me and Adele, she said, “I think you should go now.”

  Helen once told me that her favorite volunteer job had been picking up trash by the highway, because it gave her time to think. Even though she once had to scoop up human feces in between the discarded cans and waist-high dandelions. I asked her how she knew it wasn’t left by a dog, or a coyote, or a bear. “The size and the shape,” she said.

  Our mother told the four of us to go see a movie, which meant she was sick of us. Helen mouthed SAT words as we walked: abasement, harangue, obdurate. We passed the laundromat, the forever-unsold lot. There were two theaters in town. We went to the one that was closing down, that showed only old movies. The Luther’s marquee announced that for its final week, it was showing Sabrina, from 1954. Neon light blazed in the middle of a sunny afternoon, red and blue flourishes down the Luther’s vertical sign.

  Adele paid for our tickets. The man in the ticket booth looked at Adele with the eyes of a child who is hungry but no longer expects to be fed. As she took the tickets and change, she rested her fingers in his palm for a long moment. He shuddered from his sneakers to the tips of his long white hair.

  I looked back at him as we passed under the red curtain. He was old, but he probably smelled like popcorn all the time, buttery and warm. “The ticket guy likes you,” I said. “Maybe you should stay and date him.”

  “Maybe,” Adele said. Helen snorted.

  We let the afternoon pass in an air-conditioned haze. The movie was a modern Cinderella story: The unnoticed chauffeur’s daughter falls in love with one of the sons of the main house, played by William Holden. She goes to Paris a girl and comes back a woman, finally attracting his attention. Humphrey Bogart plays Holden’s older brother; he tries to discourage their romance by pretending to be in love with her too. Every frame was like a photograph, champagne and ball gowns in black and white. I watched Adele as much as I watched the screen, the scene changes playing out as light and dark on her face. She had her hands pressed to her mouth in delight. I thought she looked just like Audrey Hepburn—the gamine smile, the swan-necked beauty.

  As we left the theater, I noticed that the bakery next door had a bank-foreclosure notice in the window. The whole town was shutting down because Adele was leaving. At least the Luther exited with class, running up an electric bill of daytime neon.

  Time felt loose. We meandered in the opposite direction of home and came to the new bridge. It led to a housing development whose funders had run out of money while it was still concrete foundations in a pit. Helen had begun to speak out loud. “Ensconce, lachrymose, crepuscular.” She looked at me meaningfully. Now that she wanted me to ask her what the words meant, I’d lost interest. Her gaze drifted southward, past the river. Toward her future in the States.

  Bonnie dropped her arms down over the railing of the bridge. Cars rumbled behind us, a few at a time. They weren’t in a hurry either. “How do they build bridges?” Bonnie asked. She pushed her toe against a large bolt jutting up through the metal.

  I remembered the hollow frame being lowered on a hook. “Cranes,” I said.

  “Like the bird?” Bonnie traced a split in the concrete with her foot.

  “Sort of,” Adele said. “They’re a lot like birds. They dip their beaks, pick up parts of the bridge, and raise them up high.”

  Bonnie nodded. Giant white cranes with ink-stained wingtips and red crowns built the world, steel crossbeams balanced on their stick legs. She traced the groove in the concrete again. “And what are these lines for?”

  “I don’t know,” Adele said.

  Helen had walked ahead a few steps, her back to us. “Those are expansion joints,” she said. The wind carried the words back to Bonnie.

  “What does that mean?”

  “So that the bridge doesn’t break when it expands and contracts with the temperature.”

  Bonnie stared down at her feet in horror. “What?” I asked.

  “Heat makes it expand, cold makes it contract,” Helen finished. Her hands were in her pockets and she leaned back on her heels.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Bonnie climbed up the railing, trying to get her feet off the bridge that might collapse at any moment. Adele went to hold her safe. “Concrete’s like people,” she explained. “When it’s hot, each little bit of concrete tries to get away from every other little bit. Like how it sucks to share a bed with someone in the summer. When it’s cold . . .”—Adele squeezed Bonnie hard until she had to giggle—“they snuggle together close. Like you two, always climbing into my bed in the winter and sticking your cold feet on my back.”

  “That’s not it at all,” Helen said, still facing away from us. “The kinetic energy increases as you heat something, so the particles vibrate at higher amplitudes, increasing their average distance from one another.”

  Adele tickled Bonnie, who hooted and arched backward over the railing, almost falling. “That’s what I just said.”

  Helen turned around. Her chin-length hair tangled in her face from the hot wind. Her shoulders broadened. Expanding. “That is not what you just said.” She gestured at Bonnie and me. “They believe whatever bullshit you say, you know. They’re going to think concrete has feelings.” />
  “Of course not,” Bonnie protested. She slid to the ground, toed the bridge sympathetically. “It just doesn’t like to be cold.”

  In August, the flies and bees came in from the lakes, swarmed like a fog through town. The four of us sat on the two-meter strip of grass behind the house, the bit of lawn that was ours in front of the sparse trees that belonged to no one. It was the last summer that we would all be together.

  Bonnie poured orange soda on her hand and held it out, watched in fascination as the flies swarmed the back of her knuckles, tasting it with their feet. The heat forced Helen to study by osmosis. She pressed the cool cover of her SAT prep manual to her forehead. The glossy cardboard soaked up her sweat, and the knowledge flowed into her bloodstream. She pictured the problem in her head: a sheet of paper folded in half and then in half again, the constellation of holes and half-holes. Four holes in seemingly random places, one half-hole like a bite mark along the edge. How many holes will there be when the paper is unfolded? Eighteen holes.

  Adele, in a white bikini, rested on her stomach on a towel. She dealt in small joys: bringing Alfie to life, letting the ticket-taker at the Luther touch her hand. Wearing a bikini on our lawn where boys could slow down their cars and gawk, too stunned to honk.

  I drew on her back in black Sharpie. I was drawing angel wings, feather by feather. She let me wear one of her old bikini tops, as long as I wore a boy T-shirt over the top. I felt the warm sunshine through my T-shirt, and I hoped I was getting a tan around the halter straps of the bikini. I held my elbows in tight as I stroked her back with the felt pen. It squished the flat skin over my sternum into ridges that were not completely unlike Adele’s shelf of cleavage.

  “That tickles.” Adele yawned.

  The SAT manual blocked Helen’s face completely. It looked like it had replaced her head. “All the toxins in the ink are seeping into your skin,” she said, muffled.