For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  I let the mailman into the building and opened the door when he knocked. My breath and body stank; my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. I’d been staring so long at the TV that spots in the air clouded my vision. The mailman said, “Bonjour.” From my stony expression, he switched to English. “Uh, package for you.”

  I took it and shut the door. The box was stamped all over, had been opened and then resealed with tape somewhere along the way. I cut it open on the kitchen counter. Inside, I found a tied plastic bag and a photograph.

  The roll of film must have sat, shelved, for a long time before it was developed. The photo had yellow starbursts from light leaks in three of the corners. It was a picture of Adele, a glamorous, posed photo with her head tilted back. She looked about nineteen or twenty and wore a cheongsam patterned with red and orange flowers, like the ones in the picture of our grandmothers. Her hair was a single shape that cut in a straight line down to her waist, like black, lacquered wood.

  I untied the plastic bag and lifted the wig out slowly. It was surprisingly heavy, not as long or as shiny as Adele’s hair, but styled the same way, all one length. I went to the bathroom holding the wig at a distance with both hands.

  It scratched as I slid it on. It felt like hay. I still looked like Peter—in the narrow strip between the wings of hair, I could see the spotty five-o’clock shadow on my jaw, the Adam’s apple popping from my thin neck. Peter in a bad wig, a witch costume. I turned to the three-quarter profile pose Adele held in the photo. I tilted back my head like her, making the hair seem longer, making it fall away from my face. I tried to smile like her: mysterious, sexy, the arch of an eyebrow disappearing into a dark, flowing river of hair.

  I used my hands to hold the hair up in a ponytail, then shook the ponytail so a few strands scattered loose around my face. I pouted. I let it down again, turned around, and glanced over my shoulder so I could see my reflection only in the periphery of my vision. The hair stretched down my narrow back. It was better than my hair had been at its longest, in a way I could not describe. Earrings, I thought. Earrings and plucked eyebrows and bold lipstick, done in sincerity, not Margie’s caricature. That’s all it would take.

  I stared into my eyes, pleased that I had the same eyes as Adele: brown in the sunlight, black in the dying incandescent bulb of my bathroom. We all had the same eyes. Helen, Bonnie. My father.

  Father. I wondered about his father, the mine explosion. I supposed his eyes were the same color. And his father’s father’s, these purebred men.

  I felt my father staring through my eyes, the grotesque image in the mirror, the halfsie freak. The grandfather I hadn’t known, the great-grandfather, all watching as my father strove not to shame them, every day until he died. All of them watching me now.

  I remembered visiting Helen when she’d volunteered at the nursing home in high school. Helen had done all kinds of things she wasn’t qualified for. She’d mopped up the liquids that seeped out of the dying. I’d watched her chase a man wandering the hallway in nothing but an open-back gown. His broad white behind had been as huge and disconcerting as an owl’s eyes lit up by headlights.

  I went back to the main room. I dumped the wig into the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. I crammed it down with one of my platform sandals, running the tap. The shoe exploded into chunks of cork as it hit the blades. Stringy wet hair poked up from the drain as if I had tried to dispose of a human head.

  The sink made the agonized sound of metal lodging in rubber. It stopped dead. I flicked the switch on and off and it stayed stuck. Later, when the landlord used a crowbar to dig out the remains and tried to get the wheelhouse moving again, I stayed in the bathroom with the door closed. I wanted to die like my father. Wearing crisp, new pajamas and issuing orders. Honored more than loved. A man.

  8

  Pathway to Glory

  FATHER TOOK US to church just once. In Fort Michel, the one Catholic church, the one Baptist church, and the one Unitarian church were lined up along one street. The street had a real name on its city sign, but everyone called it God’s Highway. Behind the churches was a grassy rain ditch and a fence, and behind that, the real highway—the 400—went roaring by our town.

  I was five years old. I remember being dragged out of bed in the dark without explanation. My mother buttoned my shirt and tied a tie around my neck without turning on the lights. The tie hung almost to my knees. I batted it back and forth between my legs in the car. I liked how the black fabric shimmered when we passed a streetlight. Adele sat in the front seat, and Bonnie was strapped into a booster seat beside me. Helen and Mother walked there, heels in hand, like girls creeping back from the bars at dawn.

  Father chose First Baptist—not that there was a Second or Third Baptist—because he preferred its down-home wooden exterior to the faux medieval stone and stained glass of the Sacred Heart. The storefront Unitarian church of Fort Michel, which could easily have been a 7–Eleven from a distance, wasn’t a contender. First Baptist had the peaked roof and squat shape of most of the older houses in town. The cross sat at the apex of the roof without a spire, unassuming as a weathervane. It was the very picture of normality.

  I don’t remember much of the actual service. Hard pews, strangers in dour clothing, singing and standing and clapping. The pulpit was dead center with what I thought was a small, octagonal swimming pool off to the side. After a time, the preacher started pointing into the congregation. I hadn’t been listening and I jumped in my seat. You, he said. And you. And you! Mother dutifully filled out one of the cards for new parishioners that were with the Bibles in the back of the pew in front of us and left the card in the collection plate as it came around.

  A woman called the house the next morning and spoke to my mother. What good timing, she said. The church picnic is this Saturday! Surely you’ll come?

  A teenage girl called that evening and asked for Adele. You and your sister should come to youth group on Friday!

  A man called the day after and asked for Father. Adult Bible study is a great way to network.

  We went to the church picnic. Mother brought some horrific combination of marshmallows, potatoes, and mayonnaise in a casserole dish. It turned out not to be a matter of good timing at all—there was a picnic every three weeks. Some kids whom Bonnie knew from preschool seized on her. Adele vanished toward the rain ditch with the teenagers, one of whom had a guitar. The same woman who’d called my mother ambushed her to ask what was in her delightful potato salad. Father went to chat with the pastor. Helen and I sat on the grass in a corner. I ripped out blades of grass and tied the ends together.

  The next morning, we got up early; Mother tied on my tie, Adele buckled Bonnie’s dress shoes, everything the same as the week before. We stood in a line in the hallway, alert as soldiers, waiting for my father to be ready. He came out in his pajamas. “Go back to sleep,” he said.

  Just as he didn’t discuss why we’d gone, he didn’t discuss why we didn’t go back. It seemed like the kind of ritual he’d enjoy: getting dressed up, shaking hands with less attractive versions of June and Ward Cleaver, drinking sour coffee and eating stale muffins. Was there anything more white-bread? Bonnie made a wry guess when I asked her about it many years later: “He didn’t want there to be a higher authority than himself.”

  But I remembered watching my father and the pastor at the picnic. The pastor put his hand on my father’s back. He pointed vigorously at the sky. I saw his lips form the word heaven. Or maybe, I thought later, heathen. Father looked up. Maybe Mother was right—death was special. And my father, the vainglorious, covetous adulterer, would be with his father, and his father’s father. No one would tell him otherwise.

  In 1881, Mark Twain gave a speech at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. He commented that you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting a church window in this city. I heard this story from the Japanese-speaking sushi chef, who directed it at his crew of Arabic-speaking underlings. He used English only to quote people and he attr
ibuted just about everything to Mark Twain, so I had no reason to believe Twain had really spoken these words. “It’s like what Mark Twain said: ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.’”

  But no matter its source, it was true. On rue Prince-Arthur, near where I lived, a large church had been converted into loft apartments. Laundry was slung over once-sacred wrought iron. I passed several churches on my way to the grocery store: Notre-Dame de la Salette, St. John’s Lutheran, Pathway to Glory, and the Chinese Baptist. I’d stopped to read the sign for services in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. I sometimes saw the youth-fellowship group leaving, kids in their early teens getting picked up by their parents or walking to the Métro together. Their hair fell along a range of bleached colors. From watching Bonnie’s hair under a transparent shower cap, I knew exactly how it worked. Black hair turns brown, then red, then brass, then a canary yellow that could only charitably be called blond.

  God had never had a role in my life. If I thought about Him at all, I imagined Him as a small figure, something that could fit in your pocket or perch on your shoulder. A cheerleader for good, a kindly kindergarten teacher. The Chinese Baptist church called to me. I imagined its congregants could replace my father. I imagined they’d understand why I was ashamed. They’d understand guilt and silence. They’d use the same careful, euphemistic language that Father had—I was a man with weaknesses—and they’d guide me in the right direction without making me confess aloud. I assumed all kinds of things just because the people going in and out were Chinese. Because they looked like me.

  And maybe that is what would’ve happened if I’d gone. Instead, one morning, I saw a poster taped to the side of a bus shelter.

  Are you seeking a better life?

  Are you troubled by your own thoughts and desires?

  Has modern decadence left you feeling empty and guilty?

  You can change. We can help.

  PATHWAY TO GLORY

  I’d seen the Pathway to Glory sign pointing down the external stairway of a brick building on rue Jeanne-Mance. I stood staring at this poster, reading the words over and over again. The cold morning bit through my spring jacket.

  “Hits home, doesn’t it?”

  Only when she spoke did I realize that a woman had been sitting on the bench inside the shelter. Her cheeks and nose were red, like she’d been sitting there a long, long while. Her frizzy blond hair was dense as a topiary sculpture. “Hi. I’m Claire.”

  I shook her offered hand. “Peter.” She held just my fingers, no higher than the knuckles, a ladylike gesture that I wanted to imitate.

  “You should come to a meeting,” she said.

  “A meeting?”

  “At Pathway.”

  Her face was sweetly plump; there were a few rolls over the waistband of her dress under her open coat. “Do you just sit by this poster all day?” I asked.

  “Not every day,” she said with a gruff laugh. “It’s part of my ministry. I just came back from their residential camp, Pathway to Love. It was my second time there. I recommend it.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not very religious.”

  She took out a card to give me. “Why don’t you have coffee with me? Maybe I can convince you.”

  I felt drawn to Claire immediately. The way she forced a smile was both endearing and familiar. Her black coat had powdery gray patches from dust or flour. Was she flirting? I took her card. “Maybe,” I said.

  When I went in to work that morning, Buddy was there, asking a table of girls how their service had been, calling for free Irish coffees from the bar. The café had survived its follow-up inspection; even coked up, Buddy had a certain charm. He came to collect the coffees personally.

  “Buddy,” I said.

  His eyes stayed on the girls, a saucer balanced in each hand. “Hmm?”

  I hesitated. I wanted to know how Buddy saw me, how Claire might have seen me. I deepened my voice. “Could you set me up with someone?”

  “Like, a date?”

  “Yes. With a woman,” I added.

  Buddy looked me up and down. His laugh was sudden and pointed. “I don’t know anybody for you, man.”

  On our first date, I met Claire at a dessert shop on Saint-Denis. Claire got there first. She ordered us both coffee and a pot of chocolate fondue with bananas and strawberries. She poured five sugar packets into her mug. As we talked, she waved for coffee after coffee for us until I felt like my eyelids had been peeled back and pinned to my head.

  Pathway to Love, the residential camp, was held on a small island where the church-owned boat was the only way on or off. “I learned that my disturbing desires were caused by a poor relationship with my mother and poor relationships with women in general,” Claire said in the flat, arrhythmic voice that children use to recite poetry.

  “I heard God twice.” Claire speared a banana slice. “He spoke directly to me. Once during directed prayer, and once during the ice baths.”

  Claire described the baths—steel tubs left over from when the camp was a care facility. One of the camp leaders had helped her into the tub, naked, shoving her feet through the layers of melting ice into the cold water below. The leader put glossy, torn magazine pages into the bath, a mix of decades-old pornography and modern fashion magazines. A woman in a leopard-print bikini looking over her shoulder, showing a cheeky smile and just the side of her high, pointed breast. Two women in long T-shirts and no underwear, kissing—one woman’s T-shirt was pulled up around her waist, and the other woman had slipped a finger inside her. Claire remembered the silky, natural pink of her nails, the color of the underside of an oyster shell.

  The camp leader watched Claire from the corner. “Do you feel the Lord moving through you?” he asked.

  Claire’s skin stung. She felt like she was shrinking, like her arms were retracting into her shoulders and her legs into her hips, her head sinking into her neck like a turtle’s. The sensation was not unpleasant; her whole life she’d felt overly large, somehow more solid and obvious than everyone else.

  The stinging became real, fiery pain. Claire started to lift herself out of the tub. “No,” the leader said. “God means for you to feel that. Look at the pictures.”

  The paper was starting to dissolve. The women’s faces were coming apart, their spread legs, their arched backs. Only a few minutes had gone by. Her breathing quickened.

  “Call to God,” the leader said. His voice was soothing, faraway. “Ask Him for guidance. Can you feel Him? Can you see Him? Can you hear Him?” He asked the questions over and over again, in time with Claire’s chattering teeth. “Can you feel Him? Can you see Him? Can you hear Him?”

  Claire shut her eyes. She tilted her head back, submerging her hair and feeling a new jolt as the water touched her scalp. “I feel Him. I hear Him.” She said it first, and then she did, she heard the voice, clear as day.

  In the dessert shop, jittery with caffeine, I asked, “What did He say?”

  Claire looked radiant. “He forgave me. He forgave all my sins. He said there was a wonderful man out there waiting for me, and one day soon, He would bless our love.” She took my hand, stilled the shaking. “I know how you feel, Peter. You want one thing, but more than that, you want to want something else.”

  I could feel her bliss, her peace, through the warmth of her palm. “All things are possible in Christ,” she said.

  Claire lived in her late mother’s house. In the airy, ramshackle kitchen, we baked several cakes at once, using all of her pans: a Bundt cake, a loaf cake, a round cake, a square cake, a cheesecake in the springform. Once the last of them was in the oven, we started on a batch of butter cookies. Claire had trained as a baker but quit to devote herself to Pathway. She kept tall bulk bins of sugar and flour under the sink.

  We had our own, two-person version of Pathway. I told her about blissful dreams where I was a woman. Dreams where I would be running my hands down Margie’s thighs and suddenly I would be Margie, that body mine a
ll of the time. Dreams where I was a wife and mother in a shiny, prefab house. Dreams where I was a Jane Austen heroine, witty and demure in a hand-sewn housedress, fending off suitors. Dreams where I was an ancient queen or a supermodel, admired by all—antiquated, hyperfeminine fantasies. Dreams where I was penetrated by men. Dreams where the thing snapped off as easily and painlessly as a tree branch. I told her about Father. I had never spoken so candidly with anyone.

  We iced the cakes and decorated them with candy and fruits canned in syrup. “What you want and what your father wanted aren’t so different,” she said. “He wanted you to have a family. You want to have a family.”

  She told me about a recurring dream where she was at an orgy of women—every woman on earth was there, fields of pink and brown smoothing out toward the horizon. She told me about an ex-girlfriend. “A sinful, sinful woman,” Claire said dreamily.

  She led me into a small room off the kitchen. Intended as a pantry, it had walls with built-in shelves stocked floor to ceiling with animated Disney films on VHS. She picked a few—The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella—and we watched them on the couch. We ate all of the cookies and two whole cakes without noticing. The next cookie was in my hand before I had finished the last one so that there were no pauses in the pleasure.

  Once we were too full to move, as Cinderella ran from the ball, her dress unraveling into sparkles and rags, Claire pulled a blanket over our laps and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Doesn’t this feel nice?” she said. I felt starved for touch. I put my arm around her.

  Prince kissed princess. The music swelled in choral voices. Claire sat up and turned to face me. I touched her cheek. Her breath smelled of icing, and I wanted to kiss her. She looked proud. Could it be this easy?