For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  “How’s Mother?” I asked softly.

  Father’s frown deepened. “She’s learning to drive.”

  Back in Montreal, I got a letter from Ollie. A cursory mention of Jeanine and the baby, of being married by a municipal clerk, then eating Jell-O and drinking sweetened coffee in her parents’ backyard in Innisfil. Everyone had gotten drunk. Jeanine’s older sister slapped Ollie in the face and yanked down the paper lanterns that someone had put up in an attempt at decoration. I tried to picture Ollie writing a letter. Perhaps at night, in his father-in-law’s den, while Jeanine and the baby slept. But I couldn’t even put him at a desk, sitting down, with a pen in his hand. His letter didn’t ask any questions beyond I guess Montreal is pretty great, huh?

  He still worked in Fort Michel, driving out from Innisfil each morning. He manned the service desk at the garage near our old elementary school. The mechanics had been used to ringing up their own customers and were wary of Ollie. They couldn’t see why his job was necessary. I could imagine him there, wanting to tell the little boys on the way to school that these vicious, filthy days were the best they’d ever have.

  The night that I read it, Ollie’s letter sent me out into the street. I watched the end of an outdoor concert that had shut down avenue du Parc: an avant-garde jazz piece, a combination of wind chimes and slow picks at an electric guitar that silenced the street. The song was deeply unsettling. People stood with their arms crossed, mouths slightly open. I was too far back to see the musicians clearly. All six were dressed in black and barely moved as they played their instruments, appearing as thin stick figures from a distance.

  I went alone to a nightclub; I picked the one with no line outside and a sign advertising no cover charge. Inside, the walls were painted pink, with low sconces that threw vertical lines of light upward. A group of girls who looked too young to be there—maybe fourteen—danced on a platform with one skinny boy, shell-shocked at his luck. I liked the music. It jolted, waking you up. I found a spot to lean on the wall near two older men. They had matching salt-and-pepper beards, and both wore full white suits. They pointed out girls to each other, talking with their heads close.

  We watched the girls. Straps falling off their shoulders, their nascent breasts jiggling, short skirts riding up their thighs, spilling their sticky-colored drinks onto the boy in the middle, who didn’t seem to care. What would turn me into them? Could I peel it all off their faces and bodies with a paint trowel and spread it over my surface?

  Through the thudding beat, I could still hear the haunting, lonely jazz melody that had echoed down Parc. I left without dancing. Outside, I realized it was only a quarter to eleven. I bought a bottle of red wine at the corner dépanneur. I sucked it dry on the floor of my apartment, walls closing in, small as death. For this I had come.

  Spring came. Fallen petals blanketed cars and gathered in the gutters. A man sold bikes in the parking lot of the music department of the university—an old, cathedral-style building with Gothic railings and dormer windows and weeping limestone. The bikes were chained together against a rack. He looked like Chef for an instant, in that sea of steel and aluminum. He had veiny forearms streaked with black grease, an expression indicating he was content to wait.

  I had no real need for a bicycle—both my jobs so near to home and each other—but I imagined that my world would grow because I had one. That the person I had come to Montreal to be was just a little farther from the city center. I locked my bike to the front railing of my building, intending to go for a ride in the early morning before work.

  In the humid, fly-crusted dawn, I saw what had become of my bicycle. Any Montrealer would have told me I was a fool to leave my bike on the street, on that street, overnight. My first thought was that the front wheel had been stolen and could be replaced. Then I looked closer. The front of the bike had been cut off, around the wheel. They’d sliced right through the frame.

  I didn’t know much about bicycles, but I was sure there had to be an easier way to get the wheel off. A few cables to snip. I tried to imagine the time and tools involved in this task. A hacksaw and enormous patience. Just to be sure that the bike was truly mangled, truly unsalvageable.

  A thought appeared in my mind, unbidden, as a fully formed sentence: This is the most unhappy I have ever been.

  My hair grew to my shoulders, had to be tied back at work. I bought a pair of women’s shoes. I’d spent an hour circling the block of rue Sainte-Catherine that contained the shoe store, sweating into my wool coat and willing myself onward. When I went in, I picked up the shoes I had been looking at and announced in an awful, loud, artificial voice, “I’d like to buy these for my girlfriend!”

  They were platform sandals, straw-colored with a four-inch wedge and a strap that wrapped around the ankle. Every day, I came home, took off my kitchen shoes and socks, and put on the sandals. I wore them whenever I was in my apartment. As I made meals, washed the floor on my knees. At first I loved looking down at my still meticulously hairless legs—all the muscles extended and activated by the shoes, which tilted at the same sharp angle as a Barbie doll’s feet—and then it was routine, it was the first mouthful after numbing starvation, the one that gives your stomach a voice. Painfully not enough. And I still could not pin down what would be enough, other than resetting time, going back to before my birth, before my conception, and finding a way to choose.

  The man who sold me the bicycle gave me his number. He looked me dead in the eye. “I do repairs, tune-ups. Or if you know anybody else who needs a bike.”

  I couldn’t work out the steps in between. Seduction. Disguises. I could imagine the endpoint. The lifted kimono, the thing tucked away, heels on, my hair long across my shoulders. I could even decorate the scene: my apartment punctuated by candles, a dress hanging on the bathroom door, disarming flowery scents, throw pillows and tassels. My apartment all my own.

  But suppose that wasn’t the endpoint. Suppose he turned out to be like Simon. A moment of confusion, a stray hand. The bike mechanic, strong hands like Chef, forcing me by the shoulder to roll over. Simon’s high voice like a power drill through the bones of my inner ear: Wants to be a woman that bad—I’d fucking help him out.

  I tried to hang myself. That was something I told people later in life—I tried to hang myself when I was nineteen—when I was trying to explain how I’d felt. That there could be misery in families where no one drank, no one hit anyone, no one had a diagnosed mental illness, where there was nothing so recognizable and lurid as murder or incest. I could tell them about the burned apron, about swallowing that hot shard of a thing I had loved. It often made people laugh. There was no clean word to use, like alcoholic. That’s what most of my friends were, later on: alcoholics born of alcoholics, abusers born of abusers.

  But even that story, the hanging, is not strictly true. I got a book from the library on knots. It turned out to be extremely difficult to tie a hangman’s knot in a wide, knit scarf, but I managed. I tied the other end to some exposed piping near the ceiling of my apartment. I put the loop around my neck. I stood on a chair.

  If I had jumped, one of two things would have happened: the scarf would have torn, or I would have ripped the water pipe out of the wall and sprayed sewage all over my ascetically white furniture. I didn’t jump. I kept my hands inside the loose loop of the noose, between my neck and the rope. I leaned forward until I felt pressure, strain in the rope, the scarf straightening sharply, like a schoolboy who’s been cracked with a ruler.

  I realized that no one was going to stop me. No one would even know. Servers and cooks at both restaurants regularly just stopped showing up for work and were promptly replaced. The kind thing, I thought, would be to do it near the end of the month, so that the landlord would come for the rent soon after and find me before the smell became a problem.

  Considerate and well-behaved to the end. I got down off the chair. I left the scarf there, swinging from the momentum.

  There was a deep-down, physical ache. T
he opposite of a phantom limb: pain because that thing, that thing I loathed, was always there. I had to use it and look at it every day. But more than that, pain because I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be noticed, in a way that both men and cooks were not. The hostesses at the Japanese restaurant wore makeup that made their eyes cartoonishly large and dresses in oriental prints that were slit to the upper thigh. They were required to wear their hair in high, old-fashioned buns. They were art. They were there to be looked at and admired and worshipped. I was there to serve a purpose, to make things. A workhorse. A man.

  One year, and then Bonnie came.

  Bonnie stood in my doorway with a freshly razed head and a duffle bag slung across her body. The front door of my building was propped open for the summer and coated in flies. She held her arms out for a hug. I stared at her. She dropped her arms and pushed past me, into my apartment, her chandelier earrings and the coin tassels of her skirt jingling.

  She threw down her bag and went straight to the fridge, bent her knees to rummage. “You have any beer?”

  I closed the door and leaned back against it. There wasn’t anywhere else for me to stand. The apartment felt even smaller with someone else there. “No.”

  She found a takeout box, opened it, and sniffed at it. “Oh, this is good. Where’s it from?”

  “The shish taouk around the corner.” Her skirt went down to her ankles, several layers of fabric in hot colors, red over orange over yellow. She wore a white wifebeater with no bra, the material so thin that even the areolae of her dark nipples were visible. Lines of red and gold glitter were streaked across her chest and cheeks. “What are you doing here, Bonnie? Does Helen know you’re here?”

  Bonnie started shoveling the rice and kebab into her mouth with her bare hands. “Oh yeah, sure. She thought it was a great idea. She helped me pack and find an apartment and everything.”

  I crossed my arms across my chest. “So you’re not living with me.” I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or disappointed.

  “Nah. I think I’ve learned not to shack up with family.” She politely made no mention of the fact that two people could barely stand in my apartment, let alone sleep. Closing the empty takeout box and tossing it on top of the fridge, she added, “Aren’t you going to ask where I got the money?”

  “Should I?”

  “Helen would. She asked me all the time. God forbid I try to pull my own weight.” Bonnie put one hand on her hip, dropping all her weight onto one side in exaggerated exasperation. The muscles in her face tightened and hardened as she scowled. It was startling; she really did look like Helen. She made her voice hoarse and judgmental. “‘Where did you get that? Have you been stealing? Selling drugs? Turning tricks?’”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t specify which; maybe all of the above. She relaxed into herself again. Her cheeks were plump and flush. Her shoulders and arms were more muscular than I remembered.

  “You look happy,” I said. I meant to say healthy.

  “As a horse,” she said, as though she’d heard healthy. Her imitation of Helen had made me feel slightly giddy and superior, like we were speaking in a secret language in a crowd. “LA agreed with me.”

  “I hope Montreal does too.”

  Bonnie laughed and took a step toward me. We were almost nose to nose. “That’s what I love about you, Peter. No questions, no complaints. Everything is just fine by you.” She put her hand against my forehead, as though checking for a fever. Her skin was cool.

  “That’s not true,” I murmured, pressing into her touch like a cat.

  Bonnie had a housewarming party a week later. I brought a six-pack of fancy beer as a gift, chosen because the girl in the label art reminded me of Bonnie. It was a raspberry beer in opaque glass bottles, the last of the summer stock. The girl had flowers for hair, the flowers’ vines creeping down her neck.

  Bonnie lived in a shared eight-bedroom apartment in the lower Plateau—essentially a house built atop a coffee shop. As I came up the outside steps, the front door was thrown open by a man in a tie, sweatpants, and no shirt.

  “Hey!” he cried, as though I were a long-lost friend. “Here for the party?”

  I stopped walking, though I was still a few steps down. I had to look up at him. “Yes. I’m Bonnie’s brother.” I held the beer up over my head like an offering.

  “Cool. Get in here.”

  Inside, I went up a second staircase, lined by one brick wall. Photos of people I didn’t recognize were mounted onto the brick, in mismatching frames that climbed with the stairs. Near the top was a decorative white frame that I had seen sold in dollar stores around Mother’s Day. You were supposed to put a picture of your mother inside; there was raised black lettering underneath that read MOTHER * HERO * FRIEND. Instead of a photo of Mother, there was a picture of Helen, Adele, and me, lined up left to right, taken when Helen and Adele were teenagers and I was an alarmed-looking child clutching Adele’s hand. I couldn’t believe Bonnie would put up something so personal so quickly.

  I found Bonnie right away. She wore a black lace full-length bodysuit that went from ankle to wrist to a turtleneck collar, the lace only slightly thicker over her breasts and crotch. She hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. “Peter! I’m so glad you’re here. Isn’t this a great space?”

  In addition to the one brick wall, there were ceilings that were cavernously high and floors made of scratched, stained hardwood. The living room was huge, crammed with people of a wide range of ages. A toddler sat on her father’s shoulders, higher than the crowd, staring with naked curiosity.

  “It is.” I meant it. “I brought beer.”

  “Great! Put it in the kitchen!” She returned to the conversation she’d been having and then, noticing that I hadn’t moved, added, “It’s over there.”

  The kitchen was relatively empty, only one woman inside, her back to the archway that I walked through. The noise seemed to fall away into a flat hum. Her hands were busy; I assumed she was making a drink. In the narrow passageway, I couldn’t get past her to the fridge. “Pardon me. Can I just—get in here . . .”

  She didn’t move.

  I flattened myself against the cabinets and slid by. The acidic smell of rotten garlic—in my line of work, I could identify the scents of specific foods rotting—emerged as I opened the fridge door and put the beer inside. I glanced over. The woman was peeling apples. “Oh,” I said, with relief, “you’re cooking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I help?” I didn’t know what to do at a party. I knew how to peel apples.

  She took so long to reply that I searched her face. She was older than I had thought from her high-pitched voice, her singsong yes that had seemed teenage in its disdain. Deep lines followed the shape of her mouth down to the loose skin of her neck. Her hair was bleached white and cut short, flat to her head, her bangs slicing a severe diagonal across her face.

  “Absolutely,” she said finally. “Take an apple.”

  I went through all the drawers until I found another usable peeler in the mishmash of tools and rust. I kept coming across utensils mangled beyond recognition. The kitchen had a hanging, charred smell—burned popcorn, dirty stove elements, the ruined bottoms of pots and pans.

  We stood peeling in silence. Press of the peeler on my thumb, smooth run of green skin. “I’m Peter,” I said, feeling like I had to say something.

  She put down her half-naked apple and faced me, slamming her hand on the cabinet behind my head, all in one swift motion. I realized she was taller than me. The details of her face flooded my field of vision. Her eyebrows were plucked into straight lines that slanted down toward her nose with no arch, and she had light crow’s-feet, like dough imprinted by a fork. Flecked granite eyes. I could feel her breath as her nostrils flared.

  “God, you’re pretty,” she said.

  I jolted. The thing twitched. I felt like she had said a word that only I knew, that I had made up. Her eyes flicked down, staring at my mo
uth. I looked at hers. Thin lips coated in a dark plum. Pretty!

  Someone entered the kitchen, singing to himself. It was the man who had greeted me at the door, his tie now undone and hanging over his neck, one end in each hand. He walked to the syncopated rhythm of his song, his left and right steps distinct from each other. “Hey, Margie! Hey, Bonnie’s brother. How goes the salad?” He didn’t seem to find anything unusual about the position we were in.

  Margie relaxed, picked up her apple and peeler again. “Hi, Dave. Still working on the dressing.”

  I went back to my apple as well. I pressed down hard to stop the shaking.

  The door greeter patted his naked belly in an exaggerated way. “Well, hurry up. Lots of hungry people out there!” He lumbered back into the living room.

  We finished our apples. She handed hers to me and told me to mince them both, then started pouring juice and oil into a blender.

  “What are we making?” I asked, rooting through the cupboards for a cutting board.

  She started the blender and talked loudly over the noise. “Salad. Nuts and dried berries and spinach. That’s all Dave eats.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No. Dave does.” She stuck her hands in an open bag of pistachios on the counter. “He’s my son.”

  “Oh.” She glanced sideways at me. I hadn’t meant to sound so surprised. “Why does he call you Margie, then?”

  She shrugged. One of the pistachios opened with a gunshot crack. “What do you call your mother?”

  “Mother.”

  “Why? Why not Mom?”