For Today I Am a Boy (17 page)

We lay in her bed, on top of the covers, far from each other. Like regretful lovers. Space enough between us for another person. I had cried myself inside out. We listened to the bickering from next door. The woman did most of the talking, too shrill for us to make out any words. The man kept saying, “Easy, easy,” as though his girlfriend were a horse.

I turned onto my side. “Has this ever happened to you?”

Bonnie was silent. And I felt a terrible, unexpected pride. A kind of sisterhood. A womanly rite of passage. What happens when you paint your eyes large, proffer glimpses of thigh: the assault the world thinks you deserve.

“Tell me about Helen's house,” I said.

Bonnie stared into the middle distance as she spoke, at the space between her face and the ceiling, as though she saw something there. “It's big. Bigger than Mom and Dad's house. She has a wooden deck with a wooden roof made of slats, so you can see the sky through the gaps. There's a garden box, though it was empty while I was there. And a barbecue, but Helen never used that either. A real backyard, not like that crappy little strip we had.”

“Is she still mad at you?” I asked.

Bonnie didn't answer, a way of answering. “Helen is a lot older than me. Us.”

“Someday she won't be.”

Bonnie smiled at that. I looked at the same spot, the same speck of dust, where her eyes were focused. We looked at it together. It was Helen's deck. A hot day in California, sun breaking through the slats. Helen stands over the barbecue, cloaked in hickory smoke. Tomato plants in the garden box, some of the fruits a shy, blushing orange, some of them explosively red. Adele plucks one and slices it into a salad. Bonnie hands me a drink in a glass overwhelmed by limes. Mother, hero, friend.

7

F
OR MOST MEN
, I suppose, it can be slow agony. They watch their tonsured crowns grow or their peaks recede as if they were watching the tide go out and never return. My fanatical avoidance of mirrors allowed me to tie my ponytail lower and lower on my head without dwelling on it too much. I thought I was too young; it came on sudden and swift.

I caught the bus home to Fort Michel before dawn on a winter morning. I tried to sleep leaning on the window. There was nothing outside but pitch-black scrub and highway ditches filled with melting snow. The window reflected back the palest parts of my face, the whites of my eyes and the socket bones, while the dark centers were replaced with the blackness outside. The top of my head shone as though polished.

I was no longer balding. It would have been vain to keep using the word. I was bald.

The bus station in Fort Michel was in the middle of a row of Victorian houses on small lots. It had one counter, one bench of beige leather seats, and a vending machine that looked gap-toothed from empty slots. Slush and gravel had been dragged across the linoleum floor by passengers' boots. I sat down before I remembered that no one was coming to pick me up.

Though it was eleven on a weekday, the streets were empty. The garage where Ollie worked was closed. New gas pumps sat out front. I peered through its window with my hand over my eyes. The waiting area for customers looked just like the bus station, down to the connected beige seats.

My mother answered the door wearing a bathrobe and a pearl necklace. On the shelf by the front door were three ivory statuettes I had never seen before. One was fat, bald, and cheery, like a laughing Buddha, leaning on a staff. The other two were old men with crowns and long beards.

Mother caught me staring at them. “Household gods. They're good luck,” she said. “Don't tell your father.” I realized Father must not leave the house anymore.

She opened their bedroom door and motioned for me to go in ahead of her. My father was sitting upright in bed with his back against the headboard and his hands in his lap. He wore crisp, brand-new pajamas. My mother had just combed his hair the way he used to do it for work, leaving the comb marks. But she'd used water instead of gel, and it softened as it dried.

“Hello, Peter.”

“Hello, Father.” I came close to the edge of the bed. “What did the doctor say?”

My parents looked at each other. I lowered my head to retract my question, to find a pose of respect and shame. My father lifted his hand and signaled that Mother should leave. I stared at the bedspread. The half-open blinds left a barcode of shadows on my father's legs. I could tell, even through the blanket, that his calves were thin as broomsticks.

“Do you know what kills Chinese men, Peter?”

I shook my head.

“Tuberculosis and suicide.”

Even now, my father seemed robust and ageless, like he could crush me with his fists at will. His hair had gone white as rapidly as my hair had fallen out; there were no transitional salt-and-pepper years. “Do you know what kills Chinese women, Peter?”

I waited.

“Chinese men.”

I looked up. It sounded simultaneously like a joke and a threat.

“They carry China in their hearts and their lungs and eventually it kills them all. My father, on the other hand, died like a real man. A Western man. In a mine explosion.”

 

In sixth grade, we had to make a family tree. Our teacher handed each of us a worksheet of empty boxes connected by lines. Your own name went in the middle. The kids around me started filling in the boxes immediately.

I didn't even know my parents' first names.

The sound of scratching pencils made me self-conscious. The teacher tapped me with her pen and told me to stop dawdling.

You would think that my father's rigorous scrubbing of heritage and the unavoidable fact of race in central Ontario would have made me more curious, but it hadn't. The other children, who knew the names of their aunts and uncles and cousins, hadn't been curious either. The information had been forced upon them at weddings and funerals and on Sundays at their grandparents' homes. Children of the wrong age they'd been forced to play with. Houseguests who'd overstayed their welcome. Crude calculations of wealth: who would die, how much they would leave and to whom.

I made it up. I invented whole families. I gave my grandfather my own Chinese name, Juan Chaun. Everyone else got arbitrary Western names—Bob and Mary and Sue. China was known then as conformist, polluted, censorious. I thought for the first time about my parents' childhoods. I imagined their schools had been vast and orderly, straight lines of genderless children in black shorts and white shirts, eating government lunches of rice and choy under a foul, snot-colored sky. I imagined they escaped together by sea. For Canada! For the cold, clean, empty wilderness. But I didn't ask. None of us asked.

 

Died in a mine explosion, Father said, like a point of pride. “That was forty years ago,” he said. He paused, and then he said it again. “He died forty years ago. Still, I'm careful, every day, not to shame him. Not to do anything that would make him ashamed. I know he's watching.”

Father's eyes were alight, glowing like coals. It might have been fever. “I want to tell you that I'm proud of you. I've known men like you. Men with . . . weaknesses.” I closed my eyes. His voice grew stronger in the darkness. “They were weaker than you. They always gave in, and let it destroy them. I want to thank you,” he said, “for not shaming me.”

I opened my eyes. He was reaching out as though he wanted to hold my hand. I let his clawed hand rest in mine. I remembered, as I held my breath, how disgusted my father got when he saw me cry.
You cry more than your sisters,
he'd said, and it was true.

We released our hands. He settled back into the blankets. “You don't have to visit me again until I die,” he said. There was no malice or irony in his voice. He meant it. “Just know that I will be watching you from the other side.”

 

It was only around four o'clock when I got back to Montreal. I went to the club on south Saint-Laurent where Bonnie worked. On the sign above the door, neon hands touched neon breasts in two-state animation.

Past the first door, there was a buffer hallway and then a second door, as in a photographic darkroom, to ensure that no daylight got inside. A sign under a UV light reminded patrons that there was no cover before 11:00
P.M.
but you had to buy a new drink every twenty minutes.

In the perpetual midnight, a few guys sat far away from one another. A handful were scattered along the bar that surrounded three sides of the stage, and another sat in one of the stained, upholstered armchairs at the back. Bonnie sat in the far corner, eating a meatball sub. She paused to wipe off orange grease that had dripped all over her hands, up to the wrists. Her feet were up on a second chair in front of her. I went to join her.

“Doesn't it ruin the magic if customers see you wolfing down a sandwich?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to show me the balled mulch of bread and beef and sauce inside. “I don't go on for an hour.”

As a kid, Bonnie had always been plain and pug-nosed, but she was so popular and beloved then that I hadn't really noticed. The first time I saw her dance, the first time I tried to see her as the audience might—men who had come just to look at her, who had never and would never hear her speak—I realized that she was ugly. Her nostrils pointed outward instead of down, her eyes were tiny, deep-set beads, and her forehead and lips were flat and wide. Her face looked like it was being pressed against an invisible pane of glass. But I saw the appeal: she was the only Asian dancer, and she had hard, ice-cream-scoop tits on the frame of a little girl.

The naked beat of the music stopped long enough for a radio-announcer voice to say, “Coming to the stage . . . say hello to Brand-eeee!”

The girl stepped out from between the curtains wearing a translucent blue baby-doll slip over a matching blue bra and thong. She took off all three items of clothing right away, without ceremony, as though undressing for bed. She walked the perimeter of the stage. She took big, deliberate steps in her see-through plastic heels.

“Are you even allowed to eat in here?” I asked.

Bonnie licked her fingers as she stuffed the napkins and wrapper back in the bag they'd come from. She gestured at a sign over the bar with a picture of scrambled eggs. “On weekends, there's a breakfast buffet. To encourage guys to stay all night.”

Onstage, Brandy went down to her knees and leaned back so her vulva was directly in the beam of the footlights. The outer lips were wavy around the round, silver stud that pierced the hood of her clit.

“Oh shit,” Bonnie said, noticing a greasy spot on her white T-shirt. She held the fabric toward her and squinted at it in the dark.

The girl onstage put her hand over her mound, the index and middle finger spread in a V, catching the piercing between them. Her hand flitted left and right. I'd tried to masturbate the same way: the
thing
held between my two longest fingers, wagging it side to side, my head turned away, my other hand pressed so hard into the edge of my desk that it left a red, imprinted slice. It worked for a while. I had to end clutching the thing in a fist, feeling its whole, disgusting, senseless mass.

“I have to go get ready,” Bonnie said. “Want to come backstage with me?”

“Won't that make the other dancers uncomfortable?”

“There's no one else back there at this time of day.”

Backstage
was actually the women's washroom. There weren't enough female customers for that to be a problem, except in September, when co-ed groups of freshmen came in squealing and laughing before falling into a silent stupor. At night, girls in matching sets of lingerie would sit on the sinks to smoke and gossip. They peed with the stall doors hanging open, rolls of fat and track scars from needles all exposed in the regular lights.

Now it was empty. A pair of beige underwear was wadded up in a pair of shoes, and an overturned bottle of glue was stuck to the floor where it had landed. “You hear from Helen lately?” I asked.

Bonnie opened a locker. The waxy, nutty smell of dirty hair poured out. The lockers weren't attached to the wall and were severely dented; they'd clearly come from somewhere else. “She sent a card for my birthday. Just a signature. You?”

“Never,” I said.

Bonnie pulled out two wigs. “You hear from Adele?”

The letters from Adele had petered out after I moved to Montreal. We sent unlabeled photographs instead, a few per year. Hers stopped being of churches and Reichstag buildings—or of the often cute, often severe-looking children who were in her charge as she went from job to job as a nanny—and started to be of her empty breakfast plate, the broken spine of a book she was reading, a shape that may have been a man's back. At first I sent her pictures of the lit cross on the mountain, the steps of my apartment building, the Old Port, the café and the Japanese restaurant where I worked. Then they were of my salt-eaten boots, a kettle I'd found on the street, an old sweater of hers that I still wore to bed. I started carrying a pocket point-and-shoot with me all the time, just in case.

“She sent a picture of a cat. I assume it's hers. You?” I said.

“Never,” Bonnie said. Her body went still for just a moment. I could see her snuffing out the sadness before she even felt it, like a match that lights, flickers, and dies in the wind before it has a chance to flare. I wanted to tell her that these allegiances weren't intentional—Bonnie had a second mother in Helen, who clung to her failure to reform Bonnie in LA, and Adele and I had our cryptic, epistolary relationship—but I didn't have the words to abridge our whole lives. Bonnie held out her hands with a wig balanced on each. “Okay. Pick one.”

Her left hand wore a metallic blue bob with straight-cut bangs. Neon pink curls flowed off her right. “They're both very pretty,” I said. Reverence had crept into my voice.

“Some help you are.” She put on the pink wig. She tucked her pixie-cut black hair underneath at the edges, and then tossed her head back and shook out the curls.