For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  The men cheered, raised their glasses. One said something Adele couldn’t catch over the music. “What did he say?” she asked August.

  August and the man laughed meanly. “He said that you are very beautiful,” August said, winking at his new friend.

  (It wasn’t the wedding I was happy about. Ironically, being married to August meant I could finally leave him, she wrote, much later. I don’t think that’s how she felt at the time. She married the man she loved. She and Cherry had new titles—wife and mistress—and while Cherry’s was more exciting, hers had its own sweetness. Her body was now his home.)

  August chastised Cherry for getting fat. After August and Adele had come home married, Cherry had continued to spend her days lolling on the sofas, only now she ate. She ate tiny oranges, almonds, chocolates, olives, slices of cheese—a steady stream of small indulgences rather than meals. She wouldn’t eat Adele’s mushy curries and soups. When she got up to find more treats, Cherry would graze through the house like a large, unhurried animal.

  August’s criticism came charged. He found her more erotic than ever. A stream of abuse accompanied their lovemaking and could be heard throughout the house. He called her a fat, ugly sow as he squeezed her expanding breasts with glee.

  Willowy, gamine Adele, the dark and classic beauty, to be seen and not touched—she sensed that something else was happening, that the raging, barefoot, feminine fire in the next room was bigger than chocolates and almonds. She was the first to say it out loud, although it was obvious by then. Cherry wore leggings and August’s shirts over her bulk. Adele said, “I think you’re pregnant.”

  (I asked Adele endless questions about Cherry’s pregnancy. I wanted the most intimate details. Adele’s responses were scientific and tinged with disgust; I focused on the ones that surprised me. That her hair abruptly went curly. That she sweated so much she darkened the upholstery. That her pasty skin became mottled and brown over the cheekbones and elbows.)

  August called a house meeting. House meetings happened from time to time and usually concerned a minor theft. The results were always the same. The known-but-unnamed thief was blamed for breaking the familial trust of the house, and the victim was blamed for leaving anything of value unsupervised.

  This meeting concerned Cherry, who now resembled a ship at dock when she wedged herself onto the sofa. August claimed that because of the nature of the house, no one could be sure who the father was or whether or not he still lived there. Therefore, the baby should be the house’s responsibility. Cherry, docile as a drugged kitten, did receive other lovers from time to time, but the odds were still a thousand to one in August’s favor.

  Everyone agreed, to preserve the image of the house as a mythic, orgiastic place: the baby had grown from a house full of love, not from any one man and woman. August drew up a schedule. House residents—mostly women—signed up for days and times. By vote, they decided on Skye for a boy and Hanah for a girl. After being jabbed by August, people threw crumpled bills into a shoebox to pay for a bassinet and diapers. It was important, August noted, that Cherry not get overburdened. It’s not her baby. It’s our baby.

  August and Cherry planned a home birth in the bathtub. There would be dozens of familiar hands on her belly, easing the child into the world. What actually happened: Women clustered in the doorway, left, and came back. Their hands went nowhere near Cherry. A sudden rush of blood caught everyone off-guard. “Is that normal?” someone asked, backing away from the door. When Cherry’s placid mewling turned into savage shrieks, someone ducked into the kitchen and called for an ambulance.

  Cherry and Hanah returned a few days later. Cherry moved from the living room to a bedroom with a door. Hanah floated through the rotation on the schedule for a few weeks. (A wrinkly, cone-headed monster, Adele wrote.)

  August—who worked at a bookstore that clandestinely sold hash—liked to greet the baby when he came home from work. He picked her up under the arms and danced around the room. He blew raspberries on her belly until she made a toothless, wide-mouthed expression; August insisted that she was practicing how to smile. Then he passed her off to the person whose turn it was to care for her. He was not officially on the roster.

  One day, Adele returned from the Turkish market with powdered formula for Hanah and fresh vegetables for Cherry. She checked the schedule taped by the front door: a woman named Gudrun was supposed to be watching Hanah, but no one had seen Gudrun for weeks. Adele checked Cherry’s room; the girl was in a dead midafternoon sleep. The birth, according to the one woman who accompanied Cherry to the hospital, had been as swift and routine as one would expect from a seventeen-year-old in her prime. Yet Cherry had come home limping and miserable. She moaned in her sleep and whimpered as she plodded to the bathroom at night.

  Adele found the baby alone in the connected garage. She lay on her back on a blanket once used to cover a car that had since gone missing, happily sucking on a paintbrush. Someone must have carried her there—she wasn’t crawling yet—so the garage walls would insulate the house from her cries. Adele picked up Hanah and brought her inside. She moved the bassinet into her room.

  “She’s your daughter,” Adele said.

  “She is everyone’s daughter,” August said.

  “Bullshit,” Adele said.

  The baby had August’s silver-blue eyes when she was born, but they darkened toward Cherry’s dull brown over time. In the end, Hanah’s eyes were more striking than those of either of her parents, an unusual gunmetal gray. She stared at Adele in wide-eyed silence and Adele realized, not without sadness, that she was falling in love again. Not as an immediate, maternal rush; Hanah won her over by degrees, through small offerings. By learning to kick, by clutching Adele’s long hair like it was the overhead railing of a subway car as they walked around the house, by crying when she was handed to anyone else.

  Hanah’s strange eyes and round face meant she could pass for half Asian. An old woman in a kaleidoscope-patterned headscarf stopped Adele on the street to tell her how beautiful they were. She grabbed on to Adele’s arm with both hands. “Schönen Mutter und Tochter!” she said, as though begging.

  (That’s great news about Helen, Adele wrote when I told her Helen had gotten into UCLA Law. Congratulate her for me.)

  The illegal club where they’d gone after Adele and August’s marriage ceremony turned into a legal club, and then a furniture store. Hanah grew six teeth and could eat the same boiled vegetable mush as everyone else, if Adele blew on it first and spooned it into her mouth.

  Cherry recovered. She vanished one night and returned around dawn high as a kite, singing loudly on the front steps. She couldn’t figure out how to open the unlocked door. She spent the rest of the day in bed with August and a hairy Bulgarian boy who had just moved in and who loved August’s body with jovial, manly aggression.

  Adele rolled Hanah to the park in a stroller from the flea market. It didn’t fold or have a protective roof, as all the new ones did—it might even have been intended for a doll. They both wore straw sun hats—Hanah’s had a chin strap—and cotton dresses in pale rose. They were a vision.

  She put Hanah in a swing and pushed her listlessly. She was thinking of the Bulgarian, his enthusiasm and his great big arms, fleshy as dough. When they’d met, he’d shaken her hand so hard she thought he’d dislocate her shoulder.

  A small boy and his sister kicked a soccer ball back and forth nearby while their mother watched. The mother came to chat with Adele. “What an adorable baby,” she said. “Is she yours?”

  “No, I’m the nanny.” Adele wasn’t sure why she’d said that or why it had come out caustic as lye.

  “Really? I’m looking for a nanny.” The woman looked a bit old to have such young children, and she was wearing a royal-blue suit with gold buttons in a park in the middle of the day. She was dressed like a small, newly prosperous nation’s head of state. “A live-in nanny. How long are you with your current family?”

  “Actually,” Adele said,
thinking of Cherry’s renewed sexual energy, “they won’t need me much longer.”

  Hanah seemed bewildered but not displeased by the ride. She stuck her fingers in the holes of the swing’s chain, and the wind lifted her wisp of hair. She had no idea what was coming.

  On her last day, Adele dressed Hanah in a tiny sweater and pinafore, the first clothes Hanah had ever worn that were not from the flea market. She tied her hair into pigtails with velvet ribbons. She cleaned out Hanah’s nose and trimmed her fingernails.

  Adele strapped Hanah into the brand-new bouncy chair she’d bought with August’s hash money. It was expensive; it lit up and played music when Hanah bashed the plastic buttons with her fists. She carried the chair to Cherry’s room. “Cherry,” she announced, “I’m leaving. You have to watch Hanah.”

  Cherry, who assumed Adele was going to the store, looked up from her magazine only briefly. “Get some gum and chocolate milk.”

  As Adele shut the bedroom door, she saw Cherry bouncing the chair with her toe. Hanah clapped and giggled. That was good enough.

  (An epilogue: I’m no good with children, Peter. I don’t care about educating them or disciplining them. I just want them to like me. It’s easier to clean up after them than to force them to do it. I make them chocolate-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and eat the veggies their mother left. I know that they’re manipulative little monsters, but I love them so.)

  5

  The Secret World of Men

  FROM MY DOORSTEP, I WATCHED the football team run laps around the neighborhood, their legs pumping in matching gray shorts and blue singlets, their breath visible in the cold hours between dawn and school. The coach chased after them in an open-chassis Jeep, screaming with his head out the window. His jowls flapped and exposed his teeth; he looked like a dog on a car ride. He had a face of burst capillaries and said “faggot” every time he exhaled. His wide arms and neck were sunburned even in winter, his nose bulbous and pockmarked as a tumor.

  Ollie was noticeably the smallest on the team. The punter, compact and lithe as a featherweight boxer. He stared straight ahead as they ran past. I wondered if he remembered me and our days under Roger. If he remembered throwing stones and pissing in a bottle. After elementary school, he tried to get people to call him Oliver, but Ollie was ingrained in his face. When you looked at him, that’s all you saw.

  My father stood on the step and watched with me. It was the fall of my senior year. He held a mug of coffee, looking as slick as he did in the mornings—the comb marks in his gelled hair like rows in a cornfield, shirt and jacket freshly pressed. His very presence was an accusation, but a mild one; we’d both accepted certain limitations of mine by that point. I was not going to join the football team, and it was enough that I should admire them.

  The Jeep vanished down Brock Road, toward the high school named after the street, for the team’s final laps around the parking lot. My father left his mug on the step for Mother to pick up. We walked to his car.

  Father drove me the short distance to school. He saw me looking back at the house, where Mother would be waking Bonnie by ripping the blanket from the bed. She wouldn’t comment on Bonnie still being dressed from the night before or on the imprint of makeup and sparkles on her pillow. She wouldn’t respond to Bonnie screaming to be left alone. She would throw open the windows and draw in the sound of the neighbor’s weed whacker, start up the vacuum and the rickety washing machine. Bonnie would slam the front door when she left, cursing and still pulling on her jacket.

  “That’s how women are together,” Father said. Compared to the peace of these drives: down our road, past the houses’ end, the empty pits, the failed condo development. A faded billboard showed the space-age skyline it was meant to have, uneven blocks of steel and glass, swooping neon. I noticed something had changed. There was a new sidewalk in front of the dead section, freshly poured and smoothed.

  We stopped at the edge of the school parking lot. Father put out his hand to keep me from getting out of the car and gestured forward with his chin.

  The football players were finishing their run, trickling into formation around the Jeep. One of the first boys to arrive veered sharply to vomit in the bushes. The next boy fell where he stood, down on his back between cars. Father nodded thoughtfully, as though the whole thing were a show for his consideration.

  The coach jumped down from the Jeep, his stream of insults dissolving into nonsense: You goddamn motherfucking weakling slaggerwit pansyfucker pantser twats! Ollie jogged up last. He’d taken the final lap—without the Jeep after them—at an easy pace and didn’t even look winded. He was the only one standing up straight.

  “You used to be friends with that one,” Father said. I shrugged and reached for the door handle. He stuck his hand out again, level with the seat belt. Something bad was going to happen. I wanted to run from it; he wanted to stay and watch.

  The coach pointed at Ollie and started to imitate him, taking high, mincing steps on his toes, like a baby deer startled out of the bushes. He flapped his wrists limply and hissed into Ollie’s face. Ollie drew back and punched the coach in the stomach. He didn’t even need to look to hit the wide target.

  The coach doubled over. When he straightened up, his face was even pinker than before, his eyes tiny dots of fury.

  Ollie’s teammates said they’d throw him a goodbye party on the field that night. “We’ll get the beer,” they said. “We’ll get the girls.” When he arrived, they were standing around the goalpost, directly in the beam of the security light that hung off the gutter of the school. He recognized the way they stood in a half circle, heads close together. Ollie and I used to form part of that same half circle, back when we ganged up on smaller kids. He saw that there was no beer, no girls. Still he didn’t run.

  The quarterback—also smaller than the other boys, speedy, though not as small as Ollie—demanded Ollie’s team jacket. Ollie handed it over without complaint. They asked for his shirt, and he gave them that too, feeling like there was something karmic about this turn of events, some kind of justice. “Now your pants,” the QB said. His larger teammates loomed like mountains.

  Ollie shook his head. Someone grabbed his arms and held them behind his back. Another boy lunged at his ankles, underestimating Ollie because of his size and earning a swift kick to the jaw. It took four of them to get Ollie’s shoes, pants, and boxers off while he fought savagely. His elbow broke someone’s nose. He sank his teeth into a linebacker’s arm and had to be dragged off him, leaving scraped skin rolling up like cigarette paper.

  Two boys dropped him hard onto the ground, naked. Stars behind his eyelids blurred into actual stars as he opened his eyes. He could hear his pulse sloshing in his skull. He weighed his options. There weren’t many. The moment to charge after them and try to get his clothes back was rapidly passing. He flattened his hands and tried to push himself up, and various scrapes and bruises made themselves known. He let himself lie in the wet grass a little longer. His teammates weren’t laughing—they were running silently through the weeds, like predators. He heard car doors slamming and then the sound of an engine turning over.

  The smell of manure, of cut grass. All the fat on his body was freezing to the touch, his cock shrunken to an acorn. He sensed he would be colder when he stood. He accepted the only thing there was to do. He rose to his feet and began the walk home.

  He followed the road from school, careful of his bare feet. After a few blocks, a cop car pulled up behind him, flashing its blue and red lights. Someone must have called in to report a teenage boy wandering naked through town. It would have been too much of a coincidence for the cop car to just show up there at this time of night.

  He refused to press charges or name names. His teammates would do him the same favor when he cornered the quarterback in the locker room after hours, made him raise his foot onto the bench, and then slashed the tendon at the back of his ankle with a switchblade.

  On the new sidewalk, I lined up with all of the unemploy
ed youth of Fort Michel. White tents shielded the line from the spitting rain. Ollie’s story was being passed around, abridged to nudity and blood. In spite of the weather, the air was festive.

  We stood in the shadow of the new restaurant. It was alone on the dead strip, surrounded by abandoned construction sites and untended grass fields, as out of place as a crashed UFO. It was a promise, an act of faith: people started to believe the condo development would be resurrected, the sidewalk would widen into a boulevard, a modern city would grow from chainlink fences and dust. It was the kind of restaurant that had never existed in Fort Michel, and, after it failed, never would again. We would forever return to to-the-point diners with names like Billy’s.

  We were divided into Floor and Kitchen applicants, pretty girls in Sunday dresses splitting off from gruff-looking older men in sturdy shoes. I nervously turned over years of PBS cooking shows in my head. I was the youngest and the least white.

  At the front of the line, I was ushered into a tent with a flap that closed. A man in an unbuttoned chef’s jacket sat at a table, puffing on a cigarette. The smoke filled the small tent and clouded around him. I sat across from him. He wore a black undershirt beneath the chef’s jacket, and an elaborate tattoo filled his chest above its neckline. I found myself staring at it. Two mangled birds carrying an empty circle between their beaks. The birds’ tails were on fire, and they were twisted as though in great pain.

  “Up here, Ling Ling.”

  I met his gaze. “My name is Peter,” I said dumbly.

  “Peter what?” He had his feet against one leg of the table and pushed against it to make the chair sway back and forth. He made me feel insignificant. An insect he was too lazy to squash. “Can I guess? Wing? Wang? Wong?”