Kim Fu - For Today I Am 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.

“My bus was never late,” he said. “I was home every day at seven forty. On the dot.”

He told me that Mrs. Becker liked to eat sour candies crusted with sugar by pressing them to the top of her mouth. She didn’t like pain in general, he said drunkenly, least of all in bed — just that, crystals cutting in and wearing away her soft palate, often doing it until she bled. He could taste it when he kissed her. “Like sucking on pennies,” he said.

Another Thursday. I walked home from school, anticipating an empty house. As I rounded the corner, I saw Mrs. Becker standing in her yard and watching the sprinkler spit its twitching lines like it needed supervision. Sprinklers were an odd sight in our neighborhood of scraggly trees and poisoned soil. She spotted me as I tried to run past. “Hello there!”

“Hi.”

She held out her hand. I shook it. Her white glove was dry and cool. “I’m Mrs. Becker. You live in the house at the end of the road, right?”

“Yes.” In full sunlight, she looked even paler. The light shone through her skin to the blue veins along her forehead.

“What’s your name?”

“Peter.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Peter. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“What does your mother like?” Mrs. Becker clasped her hands together in a position of prayer. “I feel terrible about the other day. I’d like to get her a gift.” I didn’t understand what she felt terrible about; my mother was the one who’d been rude. “Flowers? Does she like flowers? Apricot cake? I make a great apricot cake.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I’ll bring by an apricot cake.”

The sprinkler hit her feet and ankles each time it went around, wetting her shoes and the hem of her dress. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Okay, sure. Thanks, Mrs. Becker.”

“Your mother seems like such a nice lady. I want us to be friends. Does she like to go to the movies? Play cards?” Her smile looked unstable. The structure of her face couldn’t sustain the weight.

“She likes to play mahjong,” I said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know that one.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Becker, but I have to go.”

“Oh! Sure. Is she waiting for you?” She looked in the direction of our house as if expecting to see my mother standing there.

“No, but…” I searched for something to say. “It’s my turn to clean the house.”

“Do you need any help? I have an hour or two. I could come over and help you.”

I balked. “No, thank you.”

“I’m sorry. That was inappropriate of me. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve gotta go,” I repeated. I ran down the street.

Inside our dim house, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust to the light. Standing in the kitchen, I took off my pants, underwear, and shirt and pulled my scrunched socks up to my knees. I took out the apron, put one loop around my head and another around my waist, the pinched sateen catching on my sparse body hair. It felt like a second skin — a better one.

I turned on the television, knowing there would be three episodes of Giovetta in a row. A jaunty trumpet played the theme song over close-ups of gourmet dishes, intercut with Giovetta dancing. She only swayed her hips and snapped her fingers, her huge body pushing the borders of our nine-inch TV. I imitated her movements, sliding on my socks. At the end, with the show title under her round face, she bit an empty fork while staring right into the camera. She was pleasure incarnate.

I continued to dance to her voice as though it were music, coming thick through the layers of fat over her throat. “Mmm,” she said. “If only you could smell this. Truly incredible.” I shimmied through the house, picking things up off the floor.

As I entered the living room, I caught a flash of white in my peripheral vision. I instinctively turned my bare back and buttocks away. Mrs. Becker was standing in our yard, staring through the window as frankly as a ghost.

I screeched and ran. I could hear her voice, muffled but penetrating the glass. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

I hid in another room for almost two hours, stayed until I had to go back out to the kitchen to get my clothes before everyone else came home. It was dark by then. There was no sign of anyone outside.

Mrs. Becker followed Bonnie and a boy home from school. He was one of the boys she went to the bar with on Thursdays, gangly with a splatter pattern of acne across his chin, but — Bonnie explained — he had dark eyes and was good at pool. They went into the woods behind the supermarket. He sat down on a flat rock and she got down on her knees. The hard soil scraped her bare-skinned legs as she bobbed her head up and down.

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “But never with a guy my own age.”

The boy loved this answer, Bonnie told me. He idolized older boys, and putting his cock in Bonnie’s mouth made him one of them. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them. “Shit,” he said.