For Today I Am a Boy (6 page)

The doorbell rang. My mother jumped as though slapped awake. She went to open the door. “Yes?”

Bonnie climbed over me to see who it was, and I followed. We strained to see past our mother.

The woman at the door was pale and thin and seemed to quiver at the edges, like she was made of water. She had limp red hair. Her freckles were a handful of sand tossed in her face. “Hi,” she said. “I'm Lisa Becker. I live down the block.”

My mother stayed mostly behind the door. “Did you just move in?”

“No, we've lived here for a few years.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, I, uh . . .” Mrs. Becker seemed to have forgotten why she had come. She glanced around for an explanation. Her gaze landed on the plastic box in her hands. “Oh, right. I heard you had a little boy and girl. I had some toys we don't need, so I thought I'd give them to you.” She opened the container: a rag doll and some toy cars.

“My son is fourteen and my daughter is thirteen. But thank you.” My mother started to close the door. Something in Mrs. Becker's face stopped her. “How old are your children?”

“I don't have any children.” She moved her head and hands constantly, like a bird, and it made it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. “I had a miscarriage a few years ago and my mother had already bought me the toys. You know—whether it was a boy or girl, we'd be ready.” She closed the container. “I guess they would have been more useful to you back then.”

I couldn't see my mother's face, but I could feel the distaste radiating off her back. What kind of woman talks about miscarriages at a stranger's front door? “Thank you for the offer, Mrs. Becker.”

If my mother breathed out too hard, Mrs. Becker would blow away like a plastic bag. “No problem, Mrs. Huang.” She started down the front steps. She was wearing white sneakers, the same discount-store brand as my mother.

“How did she know our name?” Bonnie asked.

“Who cares,” Mother said, going back to the sink.

 

Bonnie was born fourteen months after me, more like a twin than a younger sister. When she was twelve and I was thirteen, she stole a pair of earrings from a friend's house. She walked into the jewelry store of the nearest mall and tried to sell them. The clerk called the cops. Bonnie told them she had taken it from her own mother's jewelry box. The cop called our house.

I was home. I hated answering the phone, so I stood by the machine and listened to the long, grave message. The moment he hung up my hand shot out and hit the Delete button.

Bonnie was delivered home. She didn't learn any of the things the cops had intended to teach her. She learned to go to pawnshops downtown, wear heels, not look twelve.

 

When Bonnie was five and I was six, we popped out of our shared gray bathwater and went into the kitchen. It was exam season, when Adele claimed to be studying at the library in the afternoons and Helen actually was. Our mother, hiding from us in the bedroom, had left dinner to simmer. Bonnie wet her hands in the beet juices on the cutting board and convinced me to do the same. She reached back and squeezed her own buttocks, leaving a pink imprint of cupping hands. I grabbed the sides of her face. Magenta tribal paint. She pushed back on my shoulders, giggling.

Key in the lock. Our father walked in the front door and our mother walked out of her bedroom to greet him. The beet soup started to boil. We were covered in each other's red fingerprints, smudged meaningless. Our hands were puckered from the bath, and the sunken stains highlighted the creases. “What are you doing?” Mother asked.

Bonnie and I looked at each other, puzzled. It had made sense a moment before.

My father took off his shoes, leaning his hand against the wall. He announced to no one in particular that a boy and a girl were too old to bathe together at our age. He disappeared into their room.

My mother snapped back to life. She dragged us by the arms to the bathroom. Bonnie sat on the closed toilet seat, swinging her legs and examining her rosy blotches, while I sat in the tub and my mother scrubbed me with the back of a sponge. My mother concentrated on each stain, scraping the rough side against my skin until I cried, rubbing and rubbing as though she could erase us both.

 

My mother worked part-time as a telemarketer. She came home later on Thursdays. My father thought it would be good for her to get out of the house and talk to people. People in far-off cities, mostly in America, screamed abuse in varying accents, their voices slightly hollow from the distance. As though cursing her from the bottom of a tin can.

On Thursdays, Bonnie and her friends went to a pool hall on the other side of town that didn't card. They drank coolers in glass bottles, mostly sugar and dye.

One night, Bonnie came home running. I watched her through the window over the kitchen sink, running in zigzags down the long driveway as though someone were chasing her.
She's drunk,
I thought,
or she thinks she is.

I went to meet her at the door. She burst in and kissed me just to the side of my mouth. My face felt tight where she left a glazed mark. I licked it and it tasted like candy. “Mom is behind me,” she said.

Our mother had gotten onto the same bus. She had sat down near the front immediately and didn't see Bonnie at the back. Bonnie looked out the bus's window when Mother got on: they were stopped at the Chinese Association, a brick building covered in tangled graffiti, mostly black, like a ball of steel wool. “The Chinese Assoc,” Bonnie said to me, pronouncing it “a-sock” because that's what was on the building; the rest of the gold-painted letters had fallen off and never been replaced.

Bonnie had slunk off the bus one stop early and bolted home through unfenced yards. She told me this once we had moved to the bathroom, where she could brush her teeth, both of us listening for the door. “The call center is nowhere near there,” I said.

Bonnie bared her foamy teeth. “I guess she doesn't work on Thursdays.” She bent over the sink and spat. “What did you make for dinner? It smells great.”

“Pasta,” I said.

“What's in it? In case they ask again.”

“Ground beef, cream, chicken stock, peas.”

We went out into the kitchen. Mother was already hanging up her coat, having slipped into the house without a sound. “Hi, Mom,” Bonnie said.

“Hi. Thank you for making dinner, Bonnie.”

“No problem.”

“Your father will be late today,” Mother said. “So we can go ahead and eat without him.”

I was disappointed. I got a secondhand thrill when my father praised Bonnie for her cooking, slapped her hard on the shoulder. No one had explicitly forbidden me to cook, but my father, just once, had reached out an arm to stop me when I went to help my mother with the dishes. “Women's work,” he said.

We sat at the kitchen table and Mother served Bonnie and me. Bonnie ate like a hearty drunk. I watched my mother wander back behind the counter, slowly constructing her own bowl. Forgetting we were there, a distant look on her face, she took a mahjong tile out of her pocket and brought it to her mouth. I could just hear the sound of her teeth on the plastic, as though testing whether or not it was real.

Years later, after my mother died, I went to see the Chinese Association building again. The
c
in
Assoc
had fallen off, and the remaining
o
had been spray-painted over as a joke. I wondered why the letters fell from right to left. Some workman on a ladder, putting in the studs, losing faith as he went. The longer he worked, the looser the letters became: tight
A,
then
s,
then another
s,
then
o,
then what was the point, what was the point of this language, while people yelled at him from below:
You interrupted my dinner
,
you woke my baby, how did you get my number, this number is supposed to be off your fucking lists, you people are the scum of the earth, how do you sleep at night?
The workman had mounted
Chinese
first and it stuck.

 

In the rare solitude of Thursdays, I cleaned the house. I wore a full-length apron that my father had bought for my mother and that she had never used. It was made of cheap-looking acrylic with machine lace for the trim, the color of a pearl. Naked except for the apron, I pushed the vacuum across the floor, scrubbed the bathroom on my knees.

As I made dinner, I watched a cooking show on the portable black-and-white television, another gift in which my mother had no interest. I had lost most of the feeling in my fingertips from constant burning. I dipped my little finger in sauces while they were still in the pan to taste them, making a seductive face at the TV screen, imitating the show's host: an older Italian woman, fifty and sumptuous as an overstuffed sofa. She hacked lamb shanks with a cleaver while wearing a brief slip dress. She pouted and I pouted. “Half the flavor is in the presentation,” we said in unison.

Before anyone came home, I folded and put away the apron, first pausing to hold it to my face. It was starting to get the rubbery smell of my own body.

 

When my parents first came to Fort Michel, Father did the books at an import-export store near the Chinese Association. He entered receipts for rugs and furniture in English and Chinese into a ledger. His desk was inside a metal cage with the safe and the register. Adele told me about the Chinese couple who owned the store. They affected a goofy, stumbling servility for their white customers, grabbing their hands and bowing deeply with every sale. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Then they'd head into the back to write it up, muttering to my father, “
Sei-gwai-lo.
Idiots.”

He managed a McDonald's off the highway for a while after that. Helen remembered the smell when he came home, the distinct beef-tallow perfume they sprayed onto the french fries. He wore a jacket and tie every day, and our mother spent her nights scrubbing stains out of the wool. He managed a gas station. He managed a sporting-goods store. He liked to be in charge of people. He liked the respect demanded by
manager;
he would accept any pay but no other title. Father never stayed at one job for long. He always felt he wasn't climbing fast enough.

Eventually he was hired by the Passport Canada office near us, part of a federal visible-minorities program. Nothing could be more antithetical to the way my father saw himself. Under the Languages Spoken sign, they added a slate: Cantonese. The rare Chinese customers always ended up at his window. Father forced them to speak English. He was patient but unrelenting.

There were only three offices with doors behind the service windows, and within two years, one of them was my father's. Being a civil servant fit his white-collar idea of prosperity. Everyone dressed the way he always had—jackets, ties, shined shoes. No burgers. But their pale faces in the fluorescence reminded him how he'd gotten there, by being
visible.
He comforted himself with pictures of his two eldest daughters, away at university. Adele would be an invisible doctor and Helen would be an invisible lawyer. He'd laid it out for them, and they had expressed no resistance. Bonnie and I had much simpler orders. Be a little girl forever, be a boy.

 

My father called to say he was working late again. My mother said, “Mmm-hmm,” and hung up. We ate my canned-tuna casserole. I thought about roasted lamb with rosemary.

Mother read the paper while she ate. Bonnie and I played hangman on the comics page. She wrote out a long string of spaces, her lips dark and ragged at the edges.

“A,”
I said.
“D.”

Her six-word phrase turned out to be
Made out with old bar guy.

When it was my turn, I drew thirteen lines, four words. A question mark at the end.
What was it like?

The phone rang again and Bonnie ran to answer it.
I gave him my number,
she mouthed at me over her shoulder.

Are you insane?
I mouthed back, and she grinned.

When she came back, her face was unreadable. She sat down in a slow, brittle way, holding her knees tightly together, like someone under the table was trying to look up her skirt. “Was it him?” I whispered.

“Who was it?” my mother asked.

Bonnie took so long to answer that my mother put down the paper. She looked tiny holding it, the newspaper almost longer than her body. Bonnie started piercing food with her fork. The largest chunk of tuna on her plate, a piece of pasta, a pea on each tine. “It was Dad's office,” she said. “He left his wallet.”

“Oh,” Mother replied, opening the paper again. “Tell him when he gets home.”

Our father came home three hours later. I listened to him and my mother in the bathroom at the same time. The toilet flushed. The sink ran. He didn't shower. They moved into the bedroom, and the lights went out. Neither of them spoke loudly enough to be heard.

I tried to imagine my father's mistress. The culmination of his immigrant fantasy, blond as Marilyn Monroe, breasts like party balloons, a loudmouthed vixen fattened on abundant grain and milk in the great fields of America. Or maybe, the way sex squeezes irony out of us, she was a Chinese seamstress, almond eyes squinting more and more, her vision vanishing at the point of her needle. Maybe my father wanted to push his tongue against the sounds of the old language; maybe she was silent and docile, scrawny from the voyage, still wearing a stash of incongruous peasant clothes that looked like linen pajamas. My mother before my father had begun his project of westernization, my father the conqueror.

 

Years later, visiting home, I went to see the bar where Bonnie had given her number to old men. It was open at ten in the morning, dank and empty. I saw Mrs. Becker's husband sleeping on his arms in a booth. The bartender didn't seem to care. I sat at Mr. Becker's table and we talked about his wife. I knew she'd died in an accident soon after we met her and that Mr. Becker was the one who had found her. Neither my mother nor the kids at school could elaborate any further—an accident, a tragic accident on our street.