For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  “I don’t know. It sounds wrong.”

  “Well, the only thing that sounds right to Dave is Margie.” Another crack. I was looking at her hands while I chopped, watching her thumbs ripping open the shells, breaking their backs. I felt a sting and dropped the knife on the cutting board.

  “Oh shit,” I said. I had glanced my knuckles with the knife, shearing off a thin layer of skin. My eyes welled up.

  Margie grabbed a paper towel and wrapped it around my hand. It was hardly bleeding, but it stung. “Are you crying? Oh Lord. You pathetic little girl.” She pulled me violently into her arms. I clutched my cut hand with my good hand behind her back. She pushed the back of my head to mash my face into the crook of her neck. “There, there, pretty darling,” she said.

  I wanted overwhelmingly for her to kiss me. I had been looking for Chef everywhere. His gruff masculinity and crude hands. How had I found him in a woman in her fifties, wearing silk trousers and dark lipstick, whose neck smelled like the spray of fake roses?

  Bonnie told me later, when it was too late, to stay away from Margie. That she was insane, cruel, bigoted, twisted. “And old,” Bonnie added at the end, as though that were the worst part, the part that she found the most bewildering.

  Margie had brought most of the alcohol at the party, perhaps two dozen bottles, and everyone toasted her with glasses filled with her wine. The salad was unpopular. I took a big bowl when it became clear no one else was interested and sat munching on it slowly in a corner. I sat on the floor. Many people did.

  Margie came and sat beside me, folding her legs carefully. She held a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses, crossed at the stems, in the other. “I notice you’re not drinking,” she said, pouring.

  “Not much of a drinker,” I said.

  “That’s rather rude,” she said, “considering my generosity.”

  “It must have been very expensive,” I agreed.

  “Money doesn’t mean much to me,” she said. She handed me the glass. “Are you looking at my bracelet?”

  I hadn’t been. It was a diamond tennis bracelet, whiter than white. “Very nice,” I said.

  “Try it on,” she said. She unsnapped the clasp and then yanked my arm straight. She slid on the bracelet. It was cold. Her skin hadn’t warmed it.

  We both admired how it looked on my thin wrist. The bold piece of jewelry went well with the arm I had waxed clean with a drugstore kit. Margie stared me up and down, her top teeth exposed in a sneer. Blunted, penetrating. Women did not look at men this way. Grown men looked at young girls this way, sometimes, men who could take and possess from a distance.

  I went to unclasp the bracelet and Margie reached to stop me. “Keep it,” she said. I smiled unsteadily at her, feigning protest. But I wanted the bracelet.

  “I’ve always wanted a little China boy,” she said. “I’ve never had one before.”

  I opened my mouth, trying to find a sentence, something I had been taught to say. The stranger offers you candy and you say no. The anthem begins and you rise from your seat. The fire alarm rings and you file quietly with the others outside. Someone calls you little China boy and you rage, you lecture, you gook, you chink, you traitor. I wanted the way she looked at me, into me, pushed inside of me. I wanted the bracelet. I said nothing. I drank.

  Bonnie said she’d looked for me when the party was thinning, and Dave told her I had left with Margie. I remembered getting into the cab and out of it, not the ride in between. I remembered sitting at the foot of Margie’s bed, swaying, my spine softened to a reed by alcohol. I watched her take off all her clothes. I had lived my life in children’s beds. Her sturdy, king-size bed felt palatial.

  Still completely dressed, I rested my head against her belly as she stood in front of me. I kissed her navel—a round, surprised mouth—with a joking smack, the way you’d kiss a baby’s stomach. My navel was an indented line, as though I had been stabbed in the stomach with a boning knife. Bonnie has an outie, I thought, the tied end of a balloon. Even my thoughts slurred, sloshing left and right through my mind.

  The idea that I was supposed to pleasure Margie hadn’t really taken root. I squeezed one of her breasts experimentally. It didn’t feel the way I had expected it to—I was surprised that the skin gave so much, that it changed shape in my hand. I thought breasts would be harder and more resilient, with just the suggestion of softness underneath, like a tomato. I pushed one to the side and watched it spring back.

  I traced the line of pigment down her abdomen—from having Dave. It was fucking beautiful, that border. It put her on one side as a mother and me on the other.

  “Oh, you’re so gentle, my poor little boy. Probably never seen a woman, right? Not supposed to look at women? Got beaten for it? Don’t worry, little Peter Huang, little Huang, little wang, Margie will show you what to do.”

  Where was she getting this? Who had led her to expect these things? When did I tell her my full name? Peter should have protested, punched her on behalf of Asian men everywhere. But I was—I was—drunk. The name that had never fit slipped completely out of my grasp.

  Margie pushed me down. She pulled my shirt over my head, unbuckled my pants, pulled them down with my underpants, tossed it all aside. I did nothing to help or resist. “Oh!” she said, delighted. “You’re hairless, like a little boy. So pretty and delicate. Just like I hoped.” She took the thing in her hands, cupped it like a caught butterfly. “And your cock is so cute.”

  “Don’t call it that,” I said.

  “Cute?”

  “No. The other thing.”

  “What? Cock?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want me to call it?”

  “Don’t call it anything,” I said.

  My only other memory of that night: Margie lying on top of me, both of us facing up, her weight nearly crushing me. I shut my eyes to the overhead light. I ran my hands over her body, spending a long time on her breasts, lifting them, tweaking the nipples, pretending they were mine. Then even longer between her legs, both hands tracing the folds, the stiff hair, the slick walls. From this angle, it was perfect, it was just where it was supposed to be. It was between my legs. I rubbed her and could almost feel it myself.

  She felt me against her back and remarked, “Ah, so it does get hard! What else does it do? Does it fuck?”

  “No,” I said, irritated at being interrupted, “it doesn’t do that.”

  I went to Margie’s house every night after work. I sat in her bathtub with its jet streams while she knelt against the edge and washed the fish smell and bits of food out of my long black hair. She let me rest my wet body on her sheets as she plucked the hair from my stomach and chest. The first time was a long, exquisitely painful process, each pinch of the tweezers a kind of release. At the end, Margie squirted lotion onto her hands. She cooed as she rubbed her hands together and then slid them across my torso, telling me how smooth and soft and pale I was.

  Then the games began. She liked to pamper me and then beat me with her hands or a crop. She liked to sit on my face, not requiring me to do much—it was the idea of suffocating me that appealed to her. She made me wear a brocade hat with a braid built into it from a novelty store; she made me fake an accent, a cruel mimicry of my father. I spoke in random, halting, lisping sentences, swapping l’s and r’s. She wasn’t offended that the thing didn’t respond to her overtures; she seemed to like sucking on it flaccid, liked it small, batted at it like a toy. I had to look away. She knew the only thing I liked—that position where our bodies lined up, became indistinguishable to my hands. She dangled the possibility of it in front of me and I would do anything.

  The best thing, though it happened only once, was when she forced me to wear her panties and stockings. We were in her bathroom. I was careful not to ruin it by seeming too eager, my eyes cast downward as she rolled the nylons up my legs, clipped them to a garter belt.

  She sat me down on the closed toilet seat, across from her queenly bathtub center
piece. I watched her red-painted fingernails spider across the wall and flick on the vanity lights that bordered the mirror. She applied the plum lipstick first, making a shape wider than my lips, like a clown mouth. But with odd care, deliberate motions. She lined my eyes heavily inside the rims. I could feel the point of the pencil against my eyeball.

  She peered close, stroke for stroke and impersonal, as though she saw only a canvas. She left the liner pencil rolling sideways on the counter. My chin pinched between her fingers, she turned my face back and forth in the light, examining it. She looked satisfied.

  I took the pencil and touched her cheek to keep her still. She let me draw a quick, thick mustache under her nose, silly and Chaplinesque.

  She motioned for me to stand. As soon as I did, she shoved me down to kneeling, facing away from her. Our eyes met in the mirror. She took off the violet feather boa that had hung over her bare breasts and coiled it around my neck. The same color as the lipstick. She pulled the ends of the boa tight. Choked me from behind. Knees on the bathroom tile in front of the mirror, so I could watch my own blissful face white out slowly, glowing like an angel’s, until I passed out.

  At the height of our affair, Margie sent me to the twenty-four-hour grocery store at three in the morning to buy more lotion. She wouldn’t let me clean the kiss-shaped lipstick stains from my face. I had a vivid half-moon bite mark visible above the collar of my T-shirt.

  I stumbled through the narrow aisle drunk on pleasure and lack of sleep. As I rounded a corner, I saw Bonnie, dressed in a silver sheath dress and heels, her eyelids painted. She was peering into the frozen-foods case with her arms full of chips and instant-noodle packages.

  “Hi,” I called.

  She blinked at me, equally dazed. “Hi.” Her hair had grown into something like a pixie cut; I realized how much time must have passed since I’d seen her.

  “Just came from a bar?”

  “Stayed until closing time, when the lights went on. Everyone looked awful.” Bonnie stared at my neck. She raised her hand as if to touch the spot where Margie had bitten me. Only one tooth had broken the skin. Margie had pressed a cold cloth to my neck, lifting it at intervals to check to see if the bleeding had stopped, while we watched TV, my head curled into her shoulder. “How have you been? I haven’t heard from you since the party.”

  I could only smile.

  Bonnie put her hand down. “You look happy,” she said. She didn’t mean healthy.

  Mother called me on a Monday night, a rare evening that I was home. She might have called a dozen times before; I would have missed them all. As soon as I answered, without saying hello, she said, “Does Bonnie really not have a phone?”

  I barely thought of Bonnie. “I don’t know.”

  After a pause, Mother said, “I want to see her. I’m coming tomorrow.”

  Mother left home at six in the morning and drove the five hours to Montreal, alone. Bonnie eluded her completely. I got the restaurant to give me a two-hour, unpaid lunch. When I realized Father wasn’t with her, I took her to a dim sum place inside a mall in Chinatown.

  The entrance was at the top of a tall, curving staircase with a plastic chandelier that threw pink and green splinters of light. A small crowd waited for tables dusted with sparkles. My mother was wearing a blouse that had once belonged to Bonnie and a skirt that had been Helen’s.

  Mother went to the hostess behind the podium to get a number. A flash of pleasure passed over her face as she spoke the few words in Cantonese, then again when our number was called. “Sei-sup-yut. Forty-one.”

  We were seated far from the main path of the carts. We watched the food from a distance and had little to say to each other. After a long silence, my mother said, “Is Bonnie a whore?”

  “What?”

  “A prostitute. Does she sell herself to men?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What does she do here, then? How does she make a living?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her much.” I started playing idly with my teacup, spinning it on its bottom rim. My mother took the teacup out of my hand and put it back on the table. I could hear the women pushing the carts shouting the names of their dishes, could smell the breading and garlic, feel the wet heat, but they never seemed to come any closer.

  Mother tried again. “So! Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes.” We both seemed surprised by my response.

  “Is she Chinese?”

  “No.”

  Her gaze fixed on the ponytail tossed over my shoulder. “Your father will be pleased,” she said. All around us, the cart-pushers continued to call out, trailing the sounds and smells of what my mother had lost. This was supposed to mean something to her, the idea of a girlfriend. The conversation between them after Adele and Helen were born, the need to try again for a son—my father must have told her about this day, when I would have a girlfriend, and then I would have a wife, then a son, and we would be a real family, an endless line.

  She stared at my ponytail, at another of her strange, disappointing children. She remembered holding newborn Adele, searching her blank heart for the joy she’d been promised. She imagined me offering her a male grandchild, a baby clothed in her married name, another greedy mouth. She didn’t care. Mother, a pilgrim who walked a thousand miles only to find the sacred grove was just a clump of trees.

  Bonnie called from someone else’s phone, someone who was doing something in the background that made her giggle and gasp. She said, “I finally caught you. You’re never home. Want to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” I told her that I had to work. “The next day?” I had work then too. “What, do you work seven days a week?” Yes. “Days and nights?”

  “Mondays I only work days. Tuesdays I only work nights.”

  “Jesus. Why do you do that to yourself?”

  “I need the money.”

  “For what?”

  My rent was paid after only a few days of work. I ate most of my meals at the restaurants. I had no debt. I had endless energy, even—or especially—once I started seeing Margie. I kept thinking that this was only the prelude, that my body was a starter home. I would need money when I decided to start my real life. “The future,” I said.

  A man’s distant voice. Bonnie let out a satisfied groan, like a splinter had been pulled out of her thumb. “Whatever,” she said, returning to our conversation. “Then let’s have breakfast on Tuesday, when you only work nights.”

  When I didn’t reply right away, she added, “I miss you.” She yelped. “Stop that!” she called, her mouth farther from the receiver, her hand perhaps covering it. “You still there?”

  The diner advertised its $1.99 breakfast special in paint on the window, orange letters with green outlines and a sharp-edged explosion around it. Wow! it said. The flat-roofed building also housed a tire store and an entrance to the Métro station. A bell over the door rang as I walked in.

  Bonnie sat at a four-top with Margie and her son, Dave. Between them, cups of oily coffee and a crusty ketchup bottle and a saltshaker with a dead bug inside; the only other customer ate alone at the counter. A saxophone version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played at low volume. The free chair scraped loudly across the floor as I pulled it out and sat down next to Dave.

  “Hi, Peter,” Bonnie said. “I thought it’d be fun if we all had breakfast together. Hope you don’t mind.” She wore a child’s sweatshirt with the neckline cut out so that the sweatshirt slid over her narrow shoulders. Her eyes blazed, tense in their sockets.

  I nodded. I tried to catch Margie’s eye. She stared stonily into the distance. I had never seen her in full daylight, without makeup. The colors of her skin and eyes and hair were dulled, and her expensive clothes—a cream-colored satin blouse with a bow tied at the neck, more tailored slacks—seemed sad and out of place. I wanted her to sit in my lap and let me reach under her clothes, to feel the body I coveted, envied, knew better than my own.

  “We were just talking about Dave’s b
irthday party last year. Margie took him and a bunch of friends on a cruise. For Dave’s twenty-fifth birthday.” Older than you, Bonnie meant, her voice cheery.

  “It was awesome,” Dave said.

  “What did you do for your birthday, Bonnie? I’m sorry I missed it. When you were in California. With Helen.” Helen who judged you, I meant, as you’re judging me.

  “Nothing special,” Bonnie hedged, keeping the conversation on her track. She put her hand on Dave’s arm. “Tell Peter about Akhil.”

  “Oh, yeah. This is hilarious. Margie fucked a maintenance guy on the cruise and got him fired. It was, like, in the boiler room or something. Whatever that’s called on a ship. And they got caught by—what are they called? One of the sailor dudes? The important ones? Sorry, I’m not very good at telling stories. But it was fucking hilarious.”

  Bonnie gave a fake, sparkling laugh. Excited, like it was all a game, she squeezed Dave’s arm again. “Tell him about the rainbow.”

  “Oh, yeah. We used to joke that Margie was aiming for a rainbow. ’Cause she always fucked a guy of a new color, yeah? Like Akhil was the Indian band of the rainbow. Bonus points if they don’t speak English.”

  Bonnie kept flicking her eyes sideways to Margie—who cradled her coffee cup vacantly, as though there were nothing strange in a son talking about his mother this way, in front of his mother’s new lover—and then back to me. I’m sure Bonnie’s imagined scenes were dead-on. The humiliation, the racial stereotypes so old or specific I had never encountered them before. Bonnie thought she was saving me. But Margie had saved me. This was the only way I could do it. This was the closest I could get.

  “How far into the rainbow are you?” Bonnie asked Margie. Dave laughed earnestly, like he couldn’t feel the shift in the air.

  “Just a joke,” Margie said, her words slow and stiff.