For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  Bonnie and I looked at each other, puzzled. It had made sense a moment before.

  My father took off his shoes, leaning his hand against the wall. He announced to no one in particular that a boy and a girl were too old to bathe together at our age. He disappeared into their room.

  My mother snapped back to life. She dragged us by the arms to the bathroom. Bonnie sat on the closed toilet seat, swinging her legs and examining her rosy blotches, while I sat in the tub and my mother scrubbed me with the back of a sponge. My mother concentrated on each stain, scraping the rough side against my skin until I cried, rubbing and rubbing as though she could erase us both.

  My mother worked part-time as a telemarketer. She came home later on Thursdays. My father thought it would be good for her to get out of the house and talk to people. People in far-off cities, mostly in America, screamed abuse in varying accents, their voices slightly hollow from the distance. As though cursing her from the bottom of a tin can.

  On Thursdays, Bonnie and her friends went to a pool hall on the other side of town that didn’t card. They drank coolers in glass bottles, mostly sugar and dye.

  One night, Bonnie came home running. I watched her through the window over the kitchen sink, running in zigzags down the long driveway as though someone were chasing her. She’s drunk, I thought, or she thinks she is.

  I went to meet her at the door. She burst in and kissed me just to the side of my mouth. My face felt tight where she left a glazed mark. I licked it and it tasted like candy. “Mom is behind me,” she said.

  Our mother had gotten onto the same bus. She had sat down near the front immediately and didn’t see Bonnie at the back. Bonnie looked out the bus’s window when Mother got on: they were stopped at the Chinese Association, a brick building covered in tangled graffiti, mostly black, like a ball of steel wool. “The Chinese Assoc,” Bonnie said to me, pronouncing it “a-sock” because that’s what was on the building; the rest of the gold-painted letters had fallen off and never been replaced.

  Bonnie had slunk off the bus one stop early and bolted home through unfenced yards. She told me this once we had moved to the bathroom, where she could brush her teeth, both of us listening for the door. “The call center is nowhere near there,” I said.

  Bonnie bared her foamy teeth. “I guess she doesn’t work on Thursdays.” She bent over the sink and spat. “What did you make for dinner? It smells great.”

  “Pasta,” I said.

  “What’s in it? In case they ask again.”

  “Ground beef, cream, chicken stock, peas.”

  We went out into the kitchen. Mother was already hanging up her coat, having slipped into the house without a sound. “Hi, Mom,” Bonnie said.

  “Hi. Thank you for making dinner, Bonnie.”

  “No problem.”

  “Your father will be late today,” Mother said. “So we can go ahead and eat without him.”

  I was disappointed. I got a secondhand thrill when my father praised Bonnie for her cooking, slapped her hard on the shoulder. No one had explicitly forbidden me to cook, but my father, just once, had reached out an arm to stop me when I went to help my mother with the dishes. “Women’s work,” he said.

  We sat at the kitchen table and Mother served Bonnie and me. Bonnie ate like a hearty drunk. I watched my mother wander back behind the counter, slowly constructing her own bowl. Forgetting we were there, a distant look on her face, she took a mahjong tile out of her pocket and brought it to her mouth. I could just hear the sound of her teeth on the plastic, as though testing whether or not it was real.

  Years later, after my mother died, I went to see the Chinese Association building again. The c in Assoc had fallen off, and the remaining o had been spray-painted over as a joke. I wondered why the letters fell from right to left. Some workman on a ladder, putting in the studs, losing faith as he went. The longer he worked, the looser the letters became: tight A, then s, then another s, then o, then what was the point, what was the point of this language, while people yelled at him from below: You interrupted my dinner, you woke my baby, how did you get my number, this number is supposed to be off your fucking lists, you people are the scum of the earth, how do you sleep at night? The workman had mounted Chinese first and it stuck.

  In the rare solitude of Thursdays, I cleaned the house. I wore a full-length apron that my father had bought for my mother and that she had never used. It was made of cheap-looking acrylic with machine lace for the trim, the color of a pearl. Naked except for the apron, I pushed the vacuum across the floor, scrubbed the bathroom on my knees.

  As I made dinner, I watched a cooking show on the portable black-and-white television, another gift in which my mother had no interest. I had lost most of the feeling in my fingertips from constant burning. I dipped my little finger in sauces while they were still in the pan to taste them, making a seductive face at the TV screen, imitating the show’s host: an older Italian woman, fifty and sumptuous as an overstuffed sofa. She hacked lamb shanks with a cleaver while wearing a brief slip dress. She pouted and I pouted. “Half the flavor is in the presentation,” we said in unison.

  Before anyone came home, I folded and put away the apron, first pausing to hold it to my face. It was starting to get the rubbery smell of my own body.

  When my parents first came to Fort Michel, Father did the books at an import-export store near the Chinese Association. He entered receipts for rugs and furniture in English and Chinese into a ledger. His desk was inside a metal cage with the safe and the register. Adele told me about the Chinese couple who owned the store. They affected a goofy, stumbling servility for their white customers, grabbing their hands and bowing deeply with every sale. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Then they’d head into the back to write it up, muttering to my father, “Sei-gwai-lo. Idiots.”

  He managed a McDonald’s off the highway for a while after that. Helen remembered the smell when he came home, the distinct beef-tallow perfume they sprayed onto the french fries. He wore a jacket and tie every day, and our mother spent her nights scrubbing stains out of the wool. He managed a gas station. He managed a sporting-goods store. He liked to be in charge of people. He liked the respect demanded by manager; he would accept any pay but no other title. Father never stayed at one job for long. He always felt he wasn’t climbing fast enough.

  Eventually he was hired by the Passport Canada office near us, part of a federal visible-minorities program. Nothing could be more antithetical to the way my father saw himself. Under the Languages Spoken sign, they added a slate: Cantonese. The rare Chinese customers always ended up at his window. Father forced them to speak English. He was patient but unrelenting.

  There were only three offices with doors behind the service windows, and within two years, one of them was my father’s. Being a civil servant fit his white-collar idea of prosperity. Everyone dressed the way he always had—jackets, ties, shined shoes. No burgers. But their pale faces in the fluorescence reminded him how he’d gotten there, by being visible. He comforted himself with pictures of his two eldest daughters, away at university. Adele would be an invisible doctor and Helen would be an invisible lawyer. He’d laid it out for them, and they had expressed no resistance. Bonnie and I had much simpler orders. Be a little girl forever, be a boy.

  My father called to say he was working late again. My mother said, “Mmm-hmm,” and hung up. We ate my canned-tuna casserole. I thought about roasted lamb with rosemary.

  Mother read the paper while she ate. Bonnie and I played hangman on the comics page. She wrote out a long string of spaces, her lips dark and ragged at the edges.

  “A,” I said. “D.”

  Her six-word phrase turned out to be Made out with old bar guy.

  When it was my turn, I drew thirteen lines, four words. A question mark at the end. What was it like?

  The phone rang again and Bonnie ran to answer it. I gave him my number, she mouthed at me over her shoulder.

  Are you insane? I mouthed back, and she g
rinned.

  When she came back, her face was unreadable. She sat down in a slow, brittle way, holding her knees tightly together, like someone under the table was trying to look up her skirt. “Was it him?” I whispered.

  “Who was it?” my mother asked.

  Bonnie took so long to answer that my mother put down the paper. She looked tiny holding it, the newspaper almost longer than her body. Bonnie started piercing food with her fork. The largest chunk of tuna on her plate, a piece of pasta, a pea on each tine. “It was Dad’s office,” she said. “He left his wallet.”

  “Oh,” Mother replied, opening the paper again. “Tell him when he gets home.”

  Our father came home three hours later. I listened to him and my mother in the bathroom at the same time. The toilet flushed. The sink ran. He didn’t shower. They moved into the bedroom, and the lights went out. Neither of them spoke loudly enough to be heard.

  I tried to imagine my father’s mistress. The culmination of his immigrant fantasy, blond as Marilyn Monroe, breasts like party balloons, a loudmouthed vixen fattened on abundant grain and milk in the great fields of America. Or maybe, the way sex squeezes irony out of us, she was a Chinese seamstress, almond eyes squinting more and more, her vision vanishing at the point of her needle. Maybe my father wanted to push his tongue against the sounds of the old language; maybe she was silent and docile, scrawny from the voyage, still wearing a stash of incongruous peasant clothes that looked like linen pajamas. My mother before my father had begun his project of westernization, my father the conqueror.

  Years later, visiting home, I went to see the bar where Bonnie had given her number to old men. It was open at ten in the morning, dank and empty. I saw Mrs. Becker’s husband sleeping on his arms in a booth. The bartender didn’t seem to care. I sat at Mr. Becker’s table and we talked about his wife. I knew she’d died in an accident soon after we met her and that Mr. Becker was the one who had found her. Neither my mother nor the kids at school could elaborate any further—an accident, a tragic accident on our street.

  “My bus was never late,” he said. “I was home every day at seven forty. On the dot.”

  He told me that Mrs. Becker liked to eat sour candies crusted with sugar by pressing them to the top of her mouth. She didn’t like pain in general, he said drunkenly, least of all in bed—just that, crystals cutting in and wearing away her soft palate, often doing it until she bled. He could taste it when he kissed her. “Like sucking on pennies,” he said.

  Another Thursday. I walked home from school, anticipating an empty house. As I rounded the corner, I saw Mrs. Becker standing in her yard and watching the sprinkler spit its twitching lines like it needed supervision. Sprinklers were an odd sight in our neighborhood of scraggly trees and poisoned soil. She spotted me as I tried to run past. “Hello there!”

  “Hi.”

  She held out her hand. I shook it. Her white glove was dry and cool. “I’m Mrs. Becker. You live in the house at the end of the road, right?”

  “Yes.” In full sunlight, she looked even paler. The light shone through her skin to the blue veins along her forehead.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Peter.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Peter. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “What does your mother like?” Mrs. Becker clasped her hands together in a position of prayer. “I feel terrible about the other day. I’d like to get her a gift.” I didn’t understand what she felt terrible about; my mother was the one who’d been rude. “Flowers? Does she like flowers? Apricot cake? I make a great apricot cake.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I’ll bring by an apricot cake.”

  The sprinkler hit her feet and ankles each time it went around, wetting her shoes and the hem of her dress. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “Okay, sure. Thanks, Mrs. Becker.”

  “Your mother seems like such a nice lady. I want us to be friends. Does she like to go to the movies? Play cards?” Her smile looked unstable. The structure of her face couldn’t sustain the weight.

  “She likes to play mahjong,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know that one.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Becker, but I have to go.”

  “Oh! Sure. Is she waiting for you?” She looked in the direction of our house as if expecting to see my mother standing there.

  “No, but . . .” I searched for something to say. “It’s my turn to clean the house.”

  “Do you need any help? I have an hour or two. I could come over and help you.”

  I balked. “No, thank you.”

  “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate of me. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” I repeated. I ran down the street.

  Inside our dim house, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust to the light. Standing in the kitchen, I took off my pants, underwear, and shirt and pulled my scrunched socks up to my knees. I took out the apron, put one loop around my head and another around my waist, the pinched sateen catching on my sparse body hair. It felt like a second skin—a better one.

  I turned on the television, knowing there would be three episodes of Giovetta in a row. A jaunty trumpet played the theme song over close-ups of gourmet dishes, intercut with Giovetta dancing. She only swayed her hips and snapped her fingers, her huge body pushing the borders of our nine-inch TV. I imitated her movements, sliding on my socks. At the end, with the show title under her round face, she bit an empty fork while staring right into the camera. She was pleasure incarnate.

  I continued to dance to her voice as though it were music, coming thick through the layers of fat over her throat. “Mmm,” she said. “If only you could smell this. Truly incredible.” I shimmied through the house, picking things up off the floor.

  As I entered the living room, I caught a flash of white in my peripheral vision. I instinctively turned my bare back and buttocks away. Mrs. Becker was standing in our yard, staring through the window as frankly as a ghost.

  I screeched and ran. I could hear her voice, muffled but penetrating the glass. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  I hid in another room for almost two hours, stayed until I had to go back out to the kitchen to get my clothes before everyone else came home. It was dark by then. There was no sign of anyone outside.

  Mrs. Becker followed Bonnie and a boy home from school. He was one of the boys she went to the bar with on Thursdays, gangly with a splatter pattern of acne across his chin, but—Bonnie explained—he had dark eyes and was good at pool. They went into the woods behind the supermarket. He sat down on a flat rock and she got down on her knees. The hard soil scraped her bare-skinned legs as she bobbed her head up and down.

  “Have you done this before?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she lied. “But never with a guy my own age.”

  The boy loved this answer, Bonnie told me. He idolized older boys, and putting his cock in Bonnie’s mouth made him one of them. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them. “Shit,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s watching us.”

  Bonnie stood up. A flag of red hair disappeared along the path.

  Bonnie decided that if Mrs. Becker was going to spy on us, we might as well spy on her too. We watched Mrs. Becker leave her house at four in the afternoon, get in the car, and drive away. Bonnie, who by then had all kinds of skills, jimmied open the Beckers’ living-room window, which faced their backyard and away from the road.

  The house was laid out the same way as ours—three bedrooms, one floor—which gave us the eerie feeling of being in a parallel universe. Our mother favored spareness and unpainted wood; the Beckers liked animal ornaments and cartoon vegetables on the curtains. Bonnie flipped through the mail on their kitchen counter, took a bar of chocolate from the cupboard, peeked in the fridge. I went straight for the bedrooms.

  The first bedroom I went into had pastel-blue wallpaper bordered with duckling
s and furniture under plastic sheeting. I lifted the plastic off a chair. When I dropped it again, the chair started to rock back and forth. The other furniture turned out to be a crib and a changing table.

  I passed Bonnie in the bathroom, spraying perfume on her wrist and then smelling it. The bed in the master bedroom had a pink duvet and pink chiffon curtains between the posts. Except for its size, it looked like the bed of a very young girl, not a middle-aged couple.

  I sat on the bed and sank in deeply, the mattress sloping sharply down toward me. I picked up the photo of them on the nightstand. It had to be fairly recent, as Mrs. Becker looked the same as she did now. She was looking at the photographer, smiling in her unsteady way. Her husband, older than her with tufts of white hair only by his temples, seemed to be tenderly admiring her ear.

  Bonnie walked in. She went to the armoire and opened a few drawers before finding the one she wanted. She pulled out a pink nightgown and slipped it over her head, on top of her clothes. The neckline cut so deep, it sat lower than Bonnie’s chest, and it had transparent sleeves cuffed in fur. Bonnie posed in the vanity mirror. “Yowza, Mrs. Becker.”

  She pulled out something that looked like strips of elastic with clasps on the ends. Neither of us knew what it was, so she put it back. Then she rooted around in the nightstand drawer—Bonnie knew where to find the best stuff.

  “Jackpot!” She waved around a leather-bound notebook. Seeing my face, she added, “When notebooks are kept in the bedroom, they’re always good.” She took a sleeping mask off the nightstand and put it on, snapping the elastic under her hair, blinding herself. She flopped backward onto the bed, still wearing Mrs. Becker’s perfume and lingerie, and threw me the notebook. “Read it to me, Peter.”

  One page had the corner folded over, so I turned to that. I cleared my voice theatrically.