For Today I Am a Boy (18 page)

“I'm losing my hair,” I blurted out. “Not losing. Lost.”

Bonnie turned to the unmounted, full-length mirror that leaned against the lockers. “Have you checked the couch cushions?” She adjusted the wig. “I still don't know.” She came up behind me and plopped the blue wig onto my head, tugging it into position.

“What are you doing?”

She twisted me by the shoulders so we both faced the mirror. “Let's get a side-by-side comparison.”

We stared at our reflections for what seemed like a long time. Bonnie didn't rush me. The bangs hung in my eyes and added a blue glimmer to the top of my field of vision. When I moved my head, everything sparkled.

“Can I take a picture of us?” I asked.

 

I arrived at the café just before six the next morning. The opening server, Marisa, stood shivering on the front step in a red miniskirt and red leather jacket. No hat or scarf. I stepped past her glare, picked up the newspapers, and unlocked the door.

Marisa and I didn't speak to each other for the first hour. The sun rose in the tall café windows as I painted long, tight curves of diluted bleach on the floor with a mop. Most days I liked mopping—the full muscular motions, pushing the bucket on its wheels in backward donkey kicks of my heel. One corner to another.

Marisa leaned on the counter, squashing her breasts in their low-cut sweater, ate a day-old pastry, and sucked down some coffee. The servers chose the music, and Marisa always chose something slow and depressing, to suit her scowling and slouching. If I looked like her, I would stand with my back straight and my chest thrust out, smiling with my white teeth and puffy lips. Male customers flirted with her with varying degrees of desperation. They promised her the world; they trembled and sweated. And Marisa just sighed. “Pathetic,” she'd say.

That morning, the boss rolled in on his Rollerblades at seven, the same time as the first customer. He usually didn't come in until ten or eleven, if at all. Buddy muttered “Fuck, fuck, fuck” under his breath, his eyes bugged out, fried: he was coming down from something. He sat at the bar and yelled in my direction, taking off his skates.

“I bladed all the way from Laval,” he said. I had no concept of how long it would take to Rollerblade from Laval to downtown Montreal before dawn with your drugged heart racing at highway speeds. “The health inspector is coming in today.”

“Shit,” Marisa said, sidling up next to Buddy with a cup of coffee. “Man or woman?”

“Woman. They're always the worst. Peter!”

“Yeah, Buddy?”

“Don't lay out the inserts today. Keep them all in the fridge. Or, uh, in a carboy full of ice. But change the ice. All the time. No, keep them in the fridge. No—fuck. I don't know. Just don't leave them out like usual. And whatever she says, no matter how fucking crazy or impossible, you just say, ‘
Oui, madame. Oui, madame,
' and
nothing else.
Got it?”

The customer stayed by the front door, quietly removing his gloves and tucking them in his pocket. Marisa ignored him and remained where she was. “Yeah, Peter,” she said. “Don't fuck it up.”

“Pretty girls shouldn't talk that way,” Buddy said, squeezing Marisa on the side of the stomach. He reached down and pulled something out of his bag. “Oh, and wear this.” It landed by my feet in the open kitchen. A hairnet and a black cloth hat.

“But I don't have any hair.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“But I can't get hair in the food when I don't have anything. See?” I ran my hand over my head. “Smooth. Smooth as an egg.”

“Still have to wear them. And if she asks, pretend you do every day.”

The hairnet scratched at my scalp, sunburned in the piercing blue-skied winter. Once I had secured the little hat on top, Marisa said, “You should wear it every day, Peter. It's a good look for you.”

The customer coughed but didn't speak, and neither did I.

 

I left that afternoon with the health inspector's voice ringing in my ears. She'd called me into the walk-in cooler to point out a dripping box of meat above a shelf of vegetables. She waved a thermometer in my face to show how warm it was near the door. We climbed into the attic storage. She was a fast-talking, diminutive woman who could stand up straight under the low ceiling. When she saw the dead weevils in the sack of grain, I thought she was going to hit me.
Oui, madame. Oui, madame.

I had the night off from the Japanese restaurant. I took my latest roll of film to get printed at the one-hour lab. I sat sucking on a soda on the curb outside while I waited, rubbing and rubbing my head, feeling its raindrop shape and unfamiliar lumps.

I took the pictures home. As soon as I was inside, I flipped straight to the end. One of the last pictures on the roll was of two girls standing shoulder to shoulder, taken in a mirror. The flash whites out their faces. Their reflections are softened by grease and dents, and the tilted glass makes both of them look taller and leaner. They have solid, brightly colored hair. The one in the pink wig has her arm around the one in the blue, and their heads lean together. Their bodies are straight lines, feminine but fashionably athletic, petite.

I went into the bathroom, which housed the only mirror, on the medicine cabinet above the sink. I would brush my teeth walking around the apartment to avoid it.

I pulled the chain on the bare bulb, setting it swinging, causing the light to bounce around the room, hide and reveal. I tilted my head down so I could see the whole thing, whole continents of skin flashing when the light swung by.

I got a black Sharpie from the main room, the kind I had used to draw on Adele's back as a kid. Without looking, I wrote
HELP ME
across the back of my head. I held the camera behind me to take a picture.

 

Marisa and a counter girl whose name I couldn't remember worked with me in the tiny corridor that constituted both the kitchen and the espresso bar. We had to slide around one another during the lunch rush. We held things above one another's heads and sucked in our stomachs. Then Marisa turned suddenly from the milk shake machine. We collided. She dropped the shake in her hand, and the parfait glass shattered. Glass and a thick puddle covered the floor from end to end.

“Oh, fuck you, Peter!” Marisa said.

“Fuck you,” I mumbled, already getting a mop from the supply closet. The closet doubled as Buddy's office; he was sitting on a box of syrup pumps, talking frantically into his cell phone. “
Oui, oui. Merci beaucoup. Pas aujourd'hui, si possible.
” I shut the door behind me.

“Six burgers!” the other girl shouted, even though she was right next to us.

I would have to cook the burgers one by one in a pan on an electric hot plate. I leaned the mop against my side of the counter and bent down to pick the big pieces of glass out of the mess. “Who comes to a coffee shop for burgers?” I said.

“They're on the menu,” the girl said. She sounded hurt, as though I had insulted her personally.

Marisa tried to get past with a tray full of water glasses. She let out a shriek of frustration. “Get this mop out of here!”

“Just step over it!” I yelled.

“There's no room for it in here!”

“Are you going to start on those burgers?” the girl asked.

Buddy burst out of the supply closet. He ran up to the counter. “The health inspector is coming back this afternoon for our follow-up. They're going to let us off the hook if we've got our shit together this time. Ice! Hairnets!” He looked down. The vanilla milk shake had started to turn gray as it mixed with the dirt on the floor and the bottoms of our shoes. “What the fuck is this?”

We ignored him. I dumped the glass I was holding into one of the dish carboys and washed my hands. I put the first burger in a pan and laid out six plates with six open buns.

Marisa came back from delivering the waters. “You're taking up the whole counter!”

“How else am I supposed to do it?”

“Hairnet!” Buddy repeated.

“In a second!”

“Peter,” the other girl said, “you have a phone call.”

I hadn't even heard it ring. I ran along the line of buns, throwing down tomato slices. “Must be a mistake. Nobody has this number.”

The girl spoke into the phone. The customer she should have been helping let out a dramatic sigh. She held her hand over the mouthpiece and shouted at me, “It's your mom!”

I grabbed the wireless phone from her and tucked it between my ear and shoulder, still moving along the line. Lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. “Mother?” I said.

“Peter.”

Pause.

“When?” I asked.

“This morning.”

“Helen?”

“I called her. She booked a flight.”

“I'll tell Bonnie and Adele.”

“No. Your father didn't want them there.”

Pause.

“Okay,” I said.

“When can you come home?”

“I can leave now—”

“Do you have work tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“When is your next day off?”

“Monday.”

“Come then.”

“I will.”

Pause.

“I love you,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “See you Monday.”

 

Adele had gone on vacation somewhere. The pictures she sent were inscrutable: blue curtains over a train window, a photo someone had taken of her as a blurry wisp on a beach. Wherever she'd gone, the wind was strong and the sand was white. Enclosed with the pictures was a thin glass vial with a plain silver top filled with seawater. She'd attached a white label that said
The Mediterranean
in her tender cursive.

I told Bonnie that our father was dead and that Mother didn't want to see her or Adele. We walked down to the Old Port together, looking for a place where you could reach the water. We poured out the vial. It vanished right away, indistinguishable from the St. Lawrence River. Bonnie knelt and refilled the vial. She gave it to me. I had that same Sharpie in my pocket. She stopped me before I could cross out
The Mediterranean
and write
The Atlantic.

“It's all one ocean,” she said. I passed her the pen and the vial. She wrote
COME HOME
in big, shaky, childish letters.
We even have the same handwriting,
I thought, remembering how
HELP ME
had come out in the photograph.

I sent everything to Adele's address in Berlin: the cry for help from the back of my head, the vial of the St. Lawrence, two of her younger siblings in stripper wigs. I imagined her, still in some warm, sunny place, slowly pouring out the bottle onto a hot rock. The briny water forms shapes that quiver but retain their surface tension. It spells out a message.
COME HOME
.

 

On the bus to Fort Michel that Monday, the driver turned off the overhead lights to let the early-morning passengers sleep. There were no reflections in the windows.

The woman in front of me tilted her seat back as far as it would go, nearly touching my knees. She slept for the first couple of hours with her baby on her chest, her arms locked around it even in her sleep, like a bird's talons.

The baby started to cry. It was a plaintive sound, like whimpering, searching for something lost. The woman undid a panel on her shirt and slipped out one of her large breasts. She was pale enough to catch the little light from the oncoming traffic. Her wide hips and buttocks squished by the seat armrests, she shifted around, trying to find a comfortable angle. Her nipple brushed the baby's cheek. Still the baby's face groped, nosing, a blind mole.

I watched her feed.

 

There was no funeral. Helen, Mother, and I watched as two men broke through the frost with jackhammers. The backhoe driver got upset that we were standing there in the cold with our red noses dripping. He shouted for us to come back later, after the hole was finished. Helen went over to talk to him. She wore a black pantsuit and a wool coat. Mother wore a white long-sleeved dress under her parka. The skirt trailed in the mud. It could have been a wedding dress. She had pinned a loop of black ribbon to each of our breasts and tucked white chrysanthemum blossoms into Helen's hair.

The jackhammers vibrated on the frozen ground. It seemed loud and industrial, the cart beeping as it backed up to the grave, machines of all kinds churning; I had always thought of the Fort Michel Cemetery as a solemn, silent place, but every death turned it into a construction site.

Helen came back, her high-heeled boots crunching in the old, thin layer of snow. “They'll let us stay.” No one refused Helen anything.

When we got home, Mother went straight to the bedroom. The skirt of her dress left a thin trail of dirt on the linoleum and the gray carpet. Helen and I waited by the door without taking our shoes off. The household gods had been moved to the kitchen table.

Mother came out holding a bunch of porcelain picture frames, her hands awkwardly full. She set them down on the table with the gods. She took a moment to arrange them. When she moved away, I saw that most of them were black-and-white pictures of people I had never seen before. The largest one was a family portrait. An old man with small, round glasses sat on a stool in the center. On each side of him was a woman, both women younger than him, each with big, circular curls pinned to her head, each wearing a high-necked cheongsam, each with one hand on his shoulder. Only their faces differed. About a dozen children were lined up in front of them. One girl, in overalls, had my mother's features, even the same face-length haircut she had now, as an adult.

Here was the family I had invented. Our unknown aunts and uncles. Our grandfather with two wives, who would not have fit into the boxes on a worksheet. Mother added a photo of our father to the table, a recent picture in a cheaper frame than the others. She stepped back to examine her arrangement. Without looking at us, she said, “Come here.”