For Today I Am a Boy (13 page)

Chef stood over me. “Wong. Jesus. How long have you been in there?”

I blinked up at him. My arms and legs felt stiff as he pried them apart. I stumbled out into the cooler with his arm around me. As I woke more fully, I leaned on him harder, letting myself enjoy the firmness of his body, his smell of smoke and cooking meat and burned hair and spices and something more delicious besides. My body checked itself, decided it was fine. Numbness opened into uncomfortable heat. I buried my face in Chef's armpit, trying to go limp, to seem as pathetic as possible. My eyes watered from the strong light. I let the tears flow. He moved me into the kitchen, then bellowed down the line, “Who did this?” All the kitchen noises, crude jokes and clanging dishware, stopped.

Chef gingerly released himself from my grip, held me up by the shoulders. “Wong? Do you know who locked you in there?”

I considered what Simon could do to me. Fort Michel wasn't large enough to hide if someone was looking. I saw him cornering me in an alleyway between shuttered businesses, behind the Luther or the laundromat. I looked up. Chef's eyes, brown irises made warmer with rage, made me invincible. I saw my future there. I would leave with Ollie; I'd live a life as rich and exotic as Chef's, and Simon would stay here forever. “Simon.”

Everyone turned to look. Simon Hymen, forever a virgin, voice so high the girls won't screw him. He looked convincingly astonished. “I didn't. I don't know what he's talking about.” Still in the blast line of the Chef's rage, he tried a different tack. “It was just a joke.”

I clutched at the Chef again, hugging his torso as though I'd collapse. He touched my cold cheek. “You're fired,” he said to Simon.

Simon stared, uncomprehending.

“You're fired! Get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Simon's mouth opened. His eyebrows knit slowly in confusion as he tried to figure out what had just happened. He looked to me. I smiled. I smiled with only my cold-cracked lips, so that it could have been a grimace of shock and hurt. I smiled so that only Simon saw.

 

The next morning in the shower, I had to shave. I'd put it off as long as possible. My father would mock the results—a notched-out teenage mustache, tufts of hair permanently under my lower lip and nostrils.

I watched the water bouncing off the blades. I considered. I stepped out of the stream of the shower, toward the back of the tub. I sprayed more shaving cream into my hands and spread it over my legs. Just running my palms up my legs and smoothing down the foam felt good. The razor felt even better as it slid up my shinbone. Clumps of hair washed away. I kept going. Stripping free the contours of my knee, then the scanter hair of my thighs. Water struck the skin with a new intensity.

I went over each leg twice, redoing missed spots, more fastidious than I'd ever been with my face. I shaved the invisible, downy hair off my buttocks. The water went cold and I let it. When I stepped out, I couldn't believe how sensitive my bare legs were; the towel felt too rough but raised goose bumps of pleasure.

I put on my bathrobe, made of slate-blue terrycloth, inherited from my father. Our bathroom had a narrow full-length mirror hanging on the back of the door that I always had to avoid. I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. Those legs! Coming out of the bottom of my bathrobe, a little pale, but so slim, so shapely. Legs made for high heels. Legs made for short skirts. Legs made to be seen.

My robe became a silk kimono, black with a red sash, tied loosely. I pulled it slowly up, clutching what I needed to at the front, lifting it high.
Round as peaches,
Chef said, squeezing each one, testing for ripeness.

 

That night, Ollie drove up to my house. He sat in his truck on the street with the engine off. Eventually I went outside.

I had to knock on the driver's-side window before he noticed me. Even then he seemed to stare right through me, to the street. I knocked again and motioned for him to roll down the window. “Ollie, what are you doing here? I have work tonight.”

“Get in for a sec.”

I climbed in. “I only have a minute.”

He nodded. He didn't seem to see anything around him. The cab of the truck was strewn with garbage, as it often was—food containers, condom wrappers, empty bottles. A wad of bubblegum was stuck to the dashboard on the passenger side. “Jeanine is pregnant,” he said, almost to himself. “We're going to get married.”

I inhaled the stale smell of the dirty truck. I shut my eyes. All around us, Fort Michel came home from work, sat down to supper, watched the daylight vanish behind the low bumps that were the closest we had to mountains, to texture in the landscape. Turned on their TVs, raised a hand to their children, raised them to leave each other naked in a field or leave a snaking trail of blood from the locker room to the front door. Ollie and I were seventeen. Still believing that life was different in cities where the condos had been built, the pits had been filled, the buildings were tall—where you weren't assaulted on all sides by failure and empty sky.

Ollie's voice and posture were leaden. “There're three girls in our year who are pregnant. None of them will ever leave Fort Michel. Nobody ever leaves Fort Michel.”

His brother, my sisters. We were supposed to follow them. Ollie finally turned to me. I was going to be late for work, for Quebec farmlands, European lovers. Ollie waited. I said what needed to be said. What everyone would say, as useless as consolations to the grieving: “It's the right thing to do.”

I left Ollie behind. His truck was still parked against the curb when I got to the front door. I went to my bedroom to change. I still hadn't heard his engine starting up.

I put on my uniform, and the pants chafed wonderfully on my legs. I would go alone to Montreal. I buttoned my chef's jacket with the buttons to the right. Maybe Chef wouldn't notice. Maybe he could make that mistake with me.

6

F
ATHER DROVE ME
to Montreal with Mother in the back seat. I sat in the front, a suitcase in my lap and a hundred dollars in my wallet, at the start of a grim experiment. Bonnie was on a plane to Los Angeles, to get her diploma at an “alternative” school that Helen had found. “Helen will straighten her out,” Mother had said.

“What do you think you'll find there?” Mother said now. I turned in my seat. She had overtightened the seat belt and was struggling to loosen it; she looked strangled. “Your French is garbage. You'll be a second-class citizen. Believe me, I know something about that.” Father flinched each time she spoke, unaccustomed to the sound of her voice.

Miles of scrub rolled past, sprouted grass and grubby trees like those I'd seen all my life. I wondered when we'd cross the line, when the signs would change language and beautiful things would start to grow. Mother leaned forward to address Father. “Where are we going to leave him? Just dump him in the middle of the street with nowhere to live?”

Father didn't answer, so I didn't either. “Your hair is getting long,” he said instead. “You should cut it before you start looking for work.”

“Hmm,” I said.

We settled into a long silence. Mother stared out her window. The highway curved to follow the train tracks. Sprawling strip malls, RV parks, flat-roofed chicken restaurants, gravel roads that vanished into the flat horizon: the ugliness persisted even deep into Quebec. Bonnie, at that moment, was flying for the first time—her hand pressed to the frosty plastic window, the Nevada desert red as the fires of hell.

“I want to drive,” Mother said suddenly. The quiet persisted. She corrected herself: “I want to learn to drive.”

Father continued to squint out at the horizon, the midday sun looming overhead. His hand slipped from the wheel but he regained his grip before the car could drift.

 

Father stopped at the end of a pedestrian strip in downtown Montreal, where the asphalt intersected with the cobblestones. People and patio tables filled the corridor from end to end. Strings of light connected the buildings, forming a makeshift roof. It seemed like every window had an
À Louer
or an
Aide Demandé
sign, all of them calling to me.

Father pulled up the parking brake with a squeak that made my stomach clench. If I stayed in my seat, they'd drive me home again. Father turned off the car.

I got out slowly, suitcase in hand. Mother's eyes were distant; she was retreating into herself. As soon as I shut the car door, Father restarted the engine. He rolled down the window. Glaring sunlight made the car's interior seem dark by comparison, and his face floated in the shadows. “Give it a year,” he said. He pulled away without closing the window. My mother was still in the back seat.

 

I turned at a corner, off the cobblestones. The street sign was bent, and another sign with a double-headed arrow indicated that the traffic changed direction in the middle. An old man sat on the steps of a building painted a bright, uniform blue. He gestured me over, suitcase and all. “You're looking for an apartment.”

I nodded. “I have an apartment,” he said. He stood, turned, and walked inside without saying anything more. Not knowing what else to do, I followed.

He talked over his shoulder as he opened an inner door and looped around a staircase. He had olive skin and a vague, trilling accent, and he wore brown canvas shorts with no shirt. “I like Asians,” he said. “Quiet, pay on time.”

With that, he flung open an apartment door. It was small as a coffin and mostly obscured by the door. “Full kitchen, full bathroom,” he said, proudly. I stuck my head in: How was that possible? A bar fridge and a two-element stove took up most of main room, and an inner door revealed a bathroom where only the boniest legs could fit between the toilet and the bathtub; most people would have to balance their calves on the edge of the tub.

“Everybody wants to live alone for cheap, but there's nowhere else in the whole city, I swear to you. If you stay for one year, I give you the best price. One year! No bullshit!”

It sounded like a promise, an incantation: One year, no bullshit. What was space to me, with my silly little suitcase and hundred dollars? “I'll take it,” I said.

 

The year began: I found an apartment and two jobs in one day. I walked the street in my kitchen shoes, clutching resumés typed on my father's typewriter. Less than two blocks away, I walked into a café seeking an
aide-cuisinier.

The owner, potbellied and skittish, came out when the cashier called him. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Buddy. We sat under tall windows at a table that had yet to be cleared of cups and plates and balled-up napkins. He sniffed through his clogged nose every few seconds as he looked over my resumé, which boasted only my single job and my high-school diploma. “Come back on Wednesday and we'll try you out,” he said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“No, Wednesday. We're trying someone else out tomorrow.”

I went across the street to a Japanese restaurant with decorative steel doors. I interrupted the four Japanese cooks' pre-shift meal with a harsh wedge of sunlight; they'd been sitting in the dark. We had the same conversation I'd had with Buddy.

“Come back on Wednesday and we'll try you out.”

“I'm busy on Wednesday. Thursday?”

“Fine.”

One year. I took both jobs. The cooks at the Japanese restaurant spoke Arabic and Japanese and ignored me as much as possible in their two-story kitchen that reeked paradoxically of both fish and vinegar. One of the two
cuisiniers
at the café quit and I got his job, working alone in the tiny, open kitchen behind the counter while the cashiers tittered lazily in a gutter slur of French and English. They faced the customers and I faced the wall.

 

I had not planned for the loneliness of being an adult in a new city. My landlord invited me to sit on the steps with him and watch the “kids” go by—university students my age and older who lived in the surrounding walkups. Our building was full of older immigrants, bachelors and widowers who played Iranian radio at five in the morning or left the smell of pickled herring in the grease vents. I kept my place as neat and spare as a monk's quarters. My clothes were folded in a suitcase like those of an overly polite houseguest for months before I caved and bought a small chest of drawers.

The kids wore brand-new clothes, whites not yellowed and blacks not grayed, bold reds and blues. The human traffic was so dense at eight in the morning and three in the afternoon that for a while I assumed the university kept the rigid hours of an elementary school. The students sat on their balconies as though on display, playing guitar, drinking beer from bottles, eating fruit or cake. And they were beautiful—a cultivated beauty, beauty of stiff hair and finger waves, highlighted cheekbones.

I looked for Chef everywhere. The beautiful university boys on the steps were too young, too lean, too well groomed. Shirtless in the sunlight, they revealed gym muscles that lacked his brutality. Our one hug grew into a love affair in my mind. There were days when I felt that his story about the kimono had happened between us.

 

I visited home just once. Father picked me up from the bus station and shook my hand as though we had just met. I could hear his thoughts as he took me in: his approval at my torn, dirty fingernails and scars—a workingman's hands—and his displeasure that I still hadn't cut my hair. I stared back at him openly for the first time in my life. His hair had become a flatter, one-dimensional black, all traces of brown and gray dyed out.

The house smelled strange to me when we walked in, akin to the smell of my apartment building, its ethnic mishmash of cooking food and outdated colognes. I couldn't remember what the house had smelled like before.

Mother served us broiled pork chops and vegetable soup from a can. We sat in three chairs huddled around one end of the table. The spare chairs were stacked against the far wall. “Have you heard from Bonnie?” I asked.