Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“What?”

“Someone’s watching us.”

Bonnie stood up. A flag of red hair disappeared along the path.

Bonnie decided that if Mrs. Becker was going to spy on us, we might as well spy on her too. We watched Mrs. Becker leave her house at four in the afternoon, get in the car, and drive away. Bonnie, who by then had all kinds of skills, jimmied open the Beckers’ living-room window, which faced their backyard and away from the road.

The house was laid out the same way as ours — three bedrooms, one floor — which gave us the eerie feeling of being in a parallel universe. Our mother favored spareness and unpainted wood; the Beckers liked animal ornaments and cartoon vegetables on the curtains. Bonnie flipped through the mail on their kitchen counter, took a bar of chocolate from the cupboard, peeked in the fridge. I went straight for the bedrooms.

The first bedroom I went into had pastel-blue wallpaper bordered with ducklings and furniture under plastic sheeting. I lifted the plastic off a chair. When I dropped it again, the chair started to rock back and forth. The other furniture turned out to be a crib and a changing table.

I passed Bonnie in the bathroom, spraying perfume on her wrist and then smelling it. The bed in the master bedroom had a pink duvet and pink chiffon curtains between the posts. Except for its size, it looked like the bed of a very young girl, not a middle-aged couple.

I sat on the bed and sank in deeply, the mattress sloping sharply down toward me. I picked up the photo of them on the nightstand. It had to be fairly recent, as Mrs. Becker looked the same as she did now. She was looking at the photographer, smiling in her unsteady way. Her husband, older than her with tufts of white hair only by his temples, seemed to be tenderly admiring her ear.

Bonnie walked in. She went to the armoire and opened a few drawers before finding the one she wanted. She pulled out a pink nightgown and slipped it over her head, on top of her clothes. The neckline cut so deep, it sat lower than Bonnie’s chest, and it had transparent sleeves cuffed in fur. Bonnie posed in the vanity mirror. “Yowza, Mrs. Becker.”

She pulled out something that looked like strips of elastic with clasps on the ends. Neither of us knew what it was, so she put it back. Then she rooted around in the nightstand drawer — Bonnie knew where to find the best stuff.

“Jackpot!” She waved around a leather-bound notebook. Seeing my face, she added, “When notebooks are kept in the bedroom, they’re always good.” She took a sleeping mask off the nightstand and put it on, snapping the elastic under her hair, blinding herself. She flopped backward onto the bed, still wearing Mrs. Becker’s perfume and lingerie, and threw me the notebook. “Read it to me, Peter.”

One page had the corner folded over, so I turned to that. I cleared my voice theatrically.

“‘September nineteenth. Dr. Shultz says that I was never pregnant. He says I made the whole thing up. He says the night I spent bleeding in the bathroom was just a nightmare.’” I stopped. I looked at Bonnie, who continued to lie stiffly under her mask.

“‘I remember holding the baby in my hand. A complete child. Eyelashes, toenails, knuckles. But the size of a pear. A perfect miniature child. Hard as plastic. It came out of me while I cupped my hand to catch it. A nightmare, he says. That’s not what it would look like, he says.’” I skimmed the rest of the page in silence.

“Why did you stop? Keep going.” Bonnie didn’t move.

“I don’t think we should be reading this.”

“We already broke into her house, Peter. This is no time to develop a conscience.”

“‘I told him about the positive test. He said I should have come in to have it confirmed. He thinks I misread the test. He showed me a picture of my insides. He poked the picture with his finger and said there had never been anything there. He poked it and poked it. Each time, he got louder. I could feel him poking me on the inside.’” Bonnie looked like a different person on the bed, her eyes and their sockets hidden, her wrists poking out of pink fur.

“‘Darren has agreed to tell people I miscarried. He says we shouldn’t have told so many people about the pregnancy in the first place.’” My voice got higher as I read, started to flutter like Mrs. Becker’s. “‘But it doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. I remember it. I am entitled to my memories. I had a baby and it died.’”

My eyes focused on the top edge of the page so that my legs and the floor were a blur. “I don’t want to read any more,” I said.

The whole room smelled like Mrs. Becker’s perfume, a generic berry scent. “Okay,” Bonnie replied. She took off the mask and the nightgown. “I think I’m going to try and catch my friends at the bar. Wanna come?”

Our eyes met: two animals waking up in a cage for the first time. I wanted to go home and bask in Giovetta’s voice. With the blinds closed. “No, thanks.” We put everything back. Bonnie returned the chocolate. We left through the window. Back then, the afternoons were long and forgiving.

A week later, my mother gambled secretly in loud Cantonese. A mahjong Thursday. Bonnie let boys and men buy her drinks, elevating her plainness with jokes. When I got home, I unlocked the front door with one hand and unbuttoned my jeans with the other.

“Peter.”

My father sat on the living-room couch, his hands on his thighs. The television was off; the radio was off; no book, no magazine, no newspaper.

I stayed where I was. He walked past me and opened the cabinet above the stove. He took out the apron. It had none of its shine in his large hands. Instead, it looked like a skinned animal. I knew better than to speak.

“Follow me,” he said. We walked out onto our driveway. I still hadn’t buttoned up my pants. The flaps folded open like a book.

He held the apron out at arm’s length. With his free hand, he took a lighter out of his pocket. A high-pitched cry came from somewhere. My throat.

A flick of the flint and our pupils reflected orange. It burned as only acrylic does, pockets of petroleum and air self-starting, self-perpetuating, a noxious and invasive smell. He dropped it on the gravel and it curled in the flames, twisting inward as though alive.

We watched it burn out. I wondered if Mrs. Becker was watching, if she had caught the signal, the pyre light, from our yard. How else could my father have known everything, if not from Mrs. Becker? A neighbor, a woman who was merely convenient. Not Marilyn Monroe, not a fresh arrival, just a jittery nobody, the human equivalent of onionskin paper.

The ashes were hard and heavy, unmoved by the wind. My father picked a chip, about the size of a small pebble, out of the pile. He pressed it into my hands.

“Swallow it,” he said.

It was warm, like a dark rock in the sun.

Bonnie appeared at the end of the driveway. My eyes were wide with warning — a caught animal signaling to new prey. My father put his hand on my shoulder to stop me from moving. We waited through Bonnie’s long, slow march.

She stopped and stood before him expectantly. He put his thumb and index finger on her chin, holding her face still, and leaned in. He inhaled so hard I could see his face flex with the effort. I wondered which smell was the strongest: sweet rum, the smoke of a bar, the sweat of other men on the girl he still owned?

It was decided that my mother would quit her job in order to properly control her children. We listened to my father’s calm voice from the hallway. “And,” he said to her, “you haven’t been depositing your entire paycheck. Where’s the money?” My mother’s response was too quiet to hear. We wanted her to call him out, but she didn’t, and we were too afraid. My father stole all our secrets and kept his own.