For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  I touched my lips to hers, found her skin warm and dry. She was the second person I had ever kissed. It wasn’t bad. All things are possible.

  Before me, Claire had dated a man she met at Pathway. After several tries, they successfully made love once. At a meeting, he confessed that he’d spent the whole time reliving the details of a homosexual encounter “just to get through it.” The counselor asked Claire if she’d done the same. “No,” she said.

  Claire remembered turning her head while they were in bed and seeing his knuckles whitened from squeezing the pillow underneath her. She hadn’t thought about much of anything. She had watched him—going through his frantic, stuttering motions and hawing like a donkey—in the same state of meditative peace that she evoked in me now. She didn’t associate it at all with her previous liaisons with women, where she’d been possessed, where some malevolent force had caused her to pull at her own hair and scream frightfully, had given her hallucinations of falling and knots untying and angels descending. A man thrusting inside her had felt good, like voting or getting your teeth cleaned.

  That’s how sex is supposed to feel for a woman, Claire explained. Like civic pride, like virtue, like doing one’s duty.

  With me, she went slower. Firm, close-mouthed kisses, caresses on the inner forearms. On a long, contented afternoon of small touches, we lay on her bed together, fully clothed. She was on her back and I was on my stomach, stroking her hair. “We could get married,” she said. “Someday.”

  I pulled apart two of her tight, frizzy curls. She closed her eyes, smiling. “We both want children. We’d be amicable roommates. It’s more than most people have.”

  “I want that,” I said. “More than what I want.”

  She nodded. She always knew what I meant. “We could fill this house with children,” she murmured. I moved closer and kissed her. Her body tensed and she recoiled, then she obediently tilted up her face.

  We fell asleep. When I woke, it was dark; she had turned onto her side and I had spooned against her back in my sleep. The thing was hard between us. I tried not to move, tried to pack down my disgust into something smaller and denser, into something small enough to swallow, something I could make disappear.

  Dating Claire was like learning to meditate. Discipline consumed my life. All the clamor inside was silenced, replaced with static, white noise.

  Claire’s pastor told her she was neglecting her ministry, so we went to the Village on east Sainte-Catherine to hand out flyers for Pathway. Rainbow flags hung from every other balcony, rainbow stickers in the shop windows. Claire said one of the principles of Pathway was “reject temptation and accept the Lord.” She said, “You need to approach the devil to defeat him.”

  We stood on the sidewalk between two bar patios. Claire thrust flyers into the hands of two girls walking together. “Do you want to know the path to happiness?” she asked. “The path to love?”

  “I know the path to love, honey,” the girl said, still heading for the bar. “It’s right through those doors.” She and her friend laughed.

  I didn’t say anything as I handed out the flyers. Most people took them. I watched some get thrown away at the first trash can. One man, younger than me, read it through and tucked it into his back pocket. Someone threw a beer at us. We jumped back and the plastic cup just splashed our feet.

  A woman approached us. My first thought was that she was unusually tall. She wore a striped blue sundress and opaque tan nylons with white pumps. Her crooked, once-broken nose called up a strange memory: little boys beating each other on the playground.

  She faced us directly, her hands on her hips. “I think you two better get out of here,” she said.

  “This is a public sidewalk,” Claire said.

  “Yes, but you’re harassing my customers.” Her voice was throaty, awkward. False. “You can go on handing out your hateful little flyers across the street.”

  “God loves you,” Claire said. “Even when you do what is unnatural. Even when you disobey Him. He’s always waiting for you.”

  “I can call you in for loitering.” Thick-limbed, thick-shouldered. Square jaw smothered in orange-toned foundation, fake eyelashes in the daytime. Still somehow convincing. I felt a sinking sensation, like the sidewalk had gone soft under my feet. The white static in my brain crackled back into images. It’s easy to have a phobia of water if you always stay inland, avoid the shimmering, inviting, treacherous depths.

  Claire tugged me by the sleeve to the corner of the intersection. Passing cars roared in my ears. She stroked my hand sympathetically as we waited for the light to change. “The devil conjured that demon just for you,” she said.

  I’d left Mother alone after Father died. When I thought of her, I imagined all but one of the chairs against the wall, Mother sitting alone at the kitchen table and mourning—her dead husband, and her children who had run to every corner of the earth.

  Mother answered the phone in Cantonese. “Wai?”

  “Mother?”

  “Peter? What do you want? I’m busy.”

  I wanted her to meet Claire. I wanted to marry Claire, wanted the train of her wedding dress to trail behind us like a white flag of surrender, erasing faggots and whores. I’d thought Mother would be overjoyed to hear from me. Her voice was brisk and unfamiliar.

  After a moment of dead air, Mother made an impatient noise. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “How have you been?”

  “Fine, fine. Are you coming home?”

  “I can come visit.”

  “Good!” I could hear the TV in the background on Mother’s end: someone cried out in high-pitched, whiny Cantonese, “Aiyee!” Canned laughter. “Can you bring a big car?”

  I rented a van and drove it to Fort Michel on my next day off. The outside of the house was in need of repairs—the gutter had come loose, the paint on the sidings was chipped—but the inside was spotless and bare. She’d had the carpets ripped out and replaced by laminate, fake wood that broadcasted its fakeness: even, glossy, no knots. The new table in the kitchen sat only two.

  Mother and I packed up all of my sisters’ and my belongings; our father’s things were already gone, down to the last sock. She threw open the windows, letting out the stirred dust and the smell of molding clothes.

  Mother was like a different person. Silent except in rage all our lives, she’d blossomed at the mouth. She couldn’t stop talking. Anecdotes about our childhoods burst out of her, grown strange or impossible from too much time in the dark of her closed throat: Adele taught herself to read. I brought a family of rats home in my backpack. Helen bit a wasp right out of the air and chewed it before it could sting.

  “When we brought Helen home from the hospital,” she said as we dragged garbage bags full of clothes and toys and books to the door, “she slept through the first night without crying. And the next, and the next, and almost every one after that. Geng sei-a, I kept checking to make sure she hadn’t stopped breathing.

  “At her vaccinations, she didn’t cry when we handed her to the doctor. She watched the needle going into her fat little arm, then she turned to the wall. No tears. We thought maybe she was . . . what’s the word? Broken-headed. Broken in the head.”

  I opened up the chest of drawers in the room that had belonged to Adele and Helen, then Helen and Bonnie, then just Bonnie. No one had touched it since Bonnie had moved out. “This too?”

  “Everything,” Mother said. She continued her story. “And Helen didn’t talk. She didn’t talk until she was three years old, when she said a complete sentence. ‘Can I have a cookie?’ Can you believe that, Peter? ‘Can I have a cookie.’ No jibber-jabber, no mama, dada, like the rest of you. I guess she just didn’t feel like talking. Ha!”

  I had to stop and stare. The Ha! threw me so completely, my mother laughing at her own joke. My mother laughing.

  There were pictures of people I didn’t know all over the house. Most of the photos were old—black-and-white, or the
red sun and washed-out grays of the ’60s and ’70s—but one stood out as recent. My mother, as she looked now, stood with a young woman at a crowded picnic in the park. I picked it up as a way of changing the subject. “Who is this?”

  “Oh, I met her at the Chinese Association.” Mother’s gaze held steady. “She’s like the daughter I never had.”

  I put down the picture, turning my back. Mother’s hair was thinning in a way that left visible strips of scalp, and her nails and skin were becoming that same fragile, rosy ivory.

  Mother wrote down the address of the Salvation Army store in Barrie, Ontario. They were expecting me. I loaded all the bags and boxes into the van.

  While I didn’t believe in the devil literally, as Claire did, I did feel as though this temptation was somehow the result of a greater force. That the universe had conspired to send me down the bumpy local roads with a van full of women’s clothes, shoes, and accessories. The teenage wardrobes of the women I had most idolized.

  This was my chance, I thought, to prove my strength. I pictured each step in turn: Giving a firm handshake to the volunteers at the Barrie Salvation Army, helping them unload. One of the bags rips and a particularly coveted item peeks through the corner. Adele’s prom dress, say, with its short flare and underlayers of tulle. And I just ignore it. I pictured the drive back to Montreal. The empty van like an empty mind, a clear and guiltless heart. I couldn’t wait to tell Claire that I’d fought the devil and won. I could see her excited face. I could see us taking our clothes off and going to bed together.

  I only realized where I was when I was already on the 401, halfway to Montreal.

  The dress, with its tiny waist and stiff, sweetheart neckline—creating cleavage where there was none—zipped smoothly up my back. The silver high heels fit; the clasp on the silver pendant still worked.

  Among the toys, I found a baby doll that I’d forgotten about. The body was filled with absorbent polymer beads. When you poured warm water into the hole in her back, she felt soft and responsive.

  I propped her up in my lap and read to her from our old books. Another doll leaned against my side. I squeezed her hand, and a recording in her chest said, “Mom-my.” The Zen static was completely gone; everything came crawling from the shadows, rejoicing in the light.

  Claire might have forgiven me. I was sure Pathway had a ritual for it—I saw us sitting in Claire’s kitchen and shredding the clothes with fabric shears, purposely nicking the skin between my fingers, dark drops of blood ruining the white collar on one of Helen’s blouses. The dolls pulled apart, their dismembered bodies in sealed bags. She would have prayed for me, both of us down on our knees and our hands thrown up in the air: forgive us, Lord, our weakness.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let her take it away.

  One morning, Claire visited the café wearing a long, shapeless dress that appeared to be made out of burlap and that had sweat stains under the arms. It was an odd look, even for her. Marisa brought Claire her latte and chocolate croissant; she wore a black acrylic halter top and denim cutoffs at seven in the morning. Claire cracked her jaw to stuff the croissant inside.

  I took a break and sat down with her. Her eyes were bloodshot and she slumped forward against the table as she ate. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I just need my coffee.” An avalanche of sugar. She peered at me over the rim of her cup. “I’ve decided to give up pants.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Modesty,” Claire said. Marisa was taking up her usual pose, bent over the counter, making her ragged shorts ride up her thighs. Sin on legs. She caught Claire’s gaze and nodded at her, flashing a quick grin. In all my years at the café, I’d never seen Marisa smile. She sighed and rolled her eyes at every customer, like the requests were endlessly taxing.

  “Why now?” I asked. Claire wasn’t smiling back at Marisa. I couldn’t imagine two people less alike than Marisa and Claire.

  “Penance,” she said distractedly.

  These single-word answers made me nervous. “For what?”

  “Everything.” She looked at me like she’d just realized I was there. She reached out and touched my cheek. “You’re so handsome, Peter.”

  I had a strange thought. “Do you know Marisa?”

  Claire pulled back her hand. “Who?”

  “The waitress.”

  Claire looked to the side, smiling with just her mouth, like she couldn’t believe I would ask such an absurd question. “I do know her, yes.”

  “From where?”

  She rubbed her chin, still looking sideways. “Some den of perversion.”

  Pathway talk. “A nightclub? A bar?” I asked. Almost unconsciously, Claire bit the knuckle of her index finger. I said, “A lesbian bar.” I could see the skin caught between her top and bottom front teeth. “Have you slept with her?”

  Claire’s hand dropped from her mouth and smacked the table. “It’s not sex. Women can’t have sex with each other. But it is . . . unclean.” She finally looked straight at me. “It was a long time ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Since Marisa? Years and years. Years and years ago.”

  Claire looked exhausted that morning. Claire worked for Pathway. “How long since you’ve—how long since any woman?” She shook her head. I asked again. “Claire, how long?”

  “Yesterday,” she said.

  I stared at her. Claire looked a little embarrassed, a little agitated, but at the same time, I saw that this was how it had always been and how it would always be, and that she was just upset at getting caught. I thought of us proselytizing in the village. Had she come back that night as her other self? Her selves farther and farther apart, one in a sack dress eating cookies with me on the couch, converting sinners on the street, testifying at Pathway, and the other—what was she like? “I don’t believe this,” I said.

  Claire took my hand. She spoke quickly. “I want us to go to the camp together. Pathway to Love. I wanted to ask you to do this for a long time, but I was afraid. We’ll go together and make our vows to each other and it will be the end of all our wretchedness.” She squeezed my fingers. “They can help us.”

  She waited for my confession. What was I doing yesterday? Wearing Adele’s bikini, lounging beneath the heat of an imagined sun and the gaze of an imagined crowd, as I had seen her do in reality so many times. I would not give Claire that. “You cheated on me,” I said.

  Claire looked surprised. “I know,” she said cautiously. Then something clicked, and she plunged into it. “I know! I’m weak. I’m disgusting. Disgusting!” She beat her hand on the table again, this time with a rhythm, lining up with her chant: “Disgusting! Disgusting! Disgusting!”

  I became aware of the people at nearby tables. Claire was putting on a show. She collapsed forward with her head on her arms. After a moment of stunned silence all around us, she lifted her head slightly, one eye open, like a child peeking to see if she’s been caught. Her one eye stared straight at me, as if to say, And you?

  I wanted to dive in and denounce myself. I saw the cycle ahead of us, of Pathway meetings and alter egos, of sins and forgiveness, false promises. Sucking other people in. Telling them they could change. Angry tears started to well in my eyes. I heard Father, I heard Claire: You can change!

  I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. “You are disgusting,” I said.

  Claire clutched my arm as I passed. I jerked free and left her alone at her table.

  Months later, walking home in the pit of another winter, I passed the basement steps leading down to Pathway. Singing came from below. One woman’s voice rose high and clear above the others, tremulous, on the verge of tears. The conviction of someone who has heard the voice of God.

  In my memory, I tried to change the look on Claire’s face as I pulled away from her in the café, tried to make it calculating and cold. Tried to make her into someone who lied to me and the world for the sake of the church that paid her, who said, See, I did it. You can too! Who
understood that we were both frauds, who was even happy to be free of me. I needed it to be that way, so I could forget her, so I could go on thinking of myself as a victim of the world.

  I stopped and listened to her sing—Claire, or someone like her. I remembered the tightness of her grip on my arm, and in the well of her wide, pleading eyes, I saw the girl who had gone to Pathway the first time, who feared a hell of fire more than a hell of ice, who meant it every time she prayed for forgiveness. Maybe she saw me as I had seen her. Maybe she believed that she was weak and I had overcome.

  9

  Geography

  HELEN MOVED ABRUPTLY from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, to teach law at George Washington University. A few days later, she called my mother at four in the morning. Helen, who had built an impressive career from being articulate as a poet and immovable as stone, slurred into the mouthpiece, “I done bad, Ma-ma. I done bad.”

  Mother waited until Helen had cried herself out. “I’m coming to visit you,” she said.

  Helen sobered immediately. “No. No need to do that. I’m fine.”

  “Ha! Fine! You book the ticket. I’m doing nothing out here. So good to be old! I can come visit you whenever.”

  Helen, sitting on the floor between unpacked boxes in her new apartment, crossed her splayed legs. She dignified her posture as though being watched. I could imagine all of this, even the monstrous shadows of unarranged furniture, a pile of lamps on a couch like severed heads. Her voice became measured, business as usual. “I’m just having a bad day,” she said. “Sorry to alarm you. A visit would be nice, but I’m very busy getting set up here.” She had expected a silent, furious auditor, an abstract ma-ma—the way our mother used to be. She would’ve been as surprised as I was by the Ha!