Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

As an adult, I learned that few people had affairs as I imagined them. Passing bodies sometimes collided, random and blameless as atoms, then returned to their original course. People developed second relationships as sexless and mundane as their first. Partners were willingly blind. None of the things I attached to the word mistress existed. But in those days, I hated them all: my father, my mother, Mrs. Becker, and even goofy, unknown Mr. Becker, the adoring fool in the photograph. Where was he? Where was Mr. Becker when my father clutched a fistful of red hair and she pretended it didn’t hurt, pretended to like pain?

My mother found an apricot cake on our front steps that Saturday morning. She flipped it upside down over the trash and then handed me the pan. “Go return this,” she said flatly.

Mrs. Becker was on her lawn again. She wore khaki shorts and a big hat. “Hello, Peter!”

“Hi. Thanks for the cake.”

“You’re welcome! Did you eat all of it already?”

“We put it on a plate.”

“Was it too dry? I was worried it was a little dry.” Even in the shadow of her hat, she had to squint at me; I was still standing at a distance and clutching the cake pan.

“I haven’t had any yet.”

“Oh. Let me know when you do. It might be too dry. Jam would help. I should have given you some jam to go with it.”

“It’s fine, Mrs. Becker.”

“Let me get you some jam.”

“No, I…”

“Come inside!” She turned and headed for the door. I had no choice.

I followed her into her kitchen and set down the pan. I felt uneasy that I had been there before. “Where’s Mr. Becker?” I asked.

“He works on Saturdays.” She dug out a jar of orange-tinted glass with a checked lid and a tied ribbon. “Here you go,” she said, beaming. “Homemade.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I tell you a secret, Peter?” In the dim kitchen, her hat shadowed her eyes. Her grinning mouth became her whole face. “I’m just so happy. I have to tell someone.”

I held the jar close, as though it could protect me.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. She tilted her head to the side. “Oh, I hope the baby has dark hair, like you and your sister.”

I dropped the jar. I wanted it to shatter, but it only made a dull clank and rolled away. “We’re not family.” That wasn’t what I meant to say. I meant to call her a bitch, a home wrecker, a slut. None of those words came.

Her smile remained. I still couldn’t see her eyes. “I didn’t say we were.”

I said, nonsensically, “Get out of my house.” Then I turned and ran from hers.

Mr. Becker sold insurance in a mall in another town. He took the six-thirty bus home and arrived at precisely seven forty each day. Mrs. Becker had dinner ready at precisely seven forty-five. The bus was never late.

One evening, not long after I left the jam on the floor, a van hit a pickup truck and spun out into the oncoming cars. Mr. Becker’s bus sat in traffic for an hour, behind another bus, behind a car, behind a wall of flares.

At seven thirty, Mrs. Becker went into the garage with an armful of sheets and towels. She rolled them up and stuffed them under the garage door. She got into the car they didn’t use — their insurance had lapsed — and turned on the engine, leaving the driver’s-side door hanging open.

“She wanted me to find her,” Mr. Becker said in the bar that morning, staring into the drink I’d bought him. “I would have come home in time on any other day. You see? It was an accident.”

I see her, sometimes, leaning back in her seat, clutching a pear-size baby in her hand, staring into its tiny, sloping eyes, its body hard as plastic, its crown of dark hair no larger than a fingerprint.

ADELE WASN’T TAKING her premed requirements. I listened from around the corner, where Bonnie and I always hid. Father was on the phone in the hallway, talking in his dangerously calm voice, soft as wet concrete. “Transcript,” he said.

Then: “Because I’m paying for it,” he said.

Adele sent her transcript by mail without comment. I thought this was characteristically elegant — a written, impersonal confession that conveyed no regret. She had transferred into the arts department and was majoring in German language and literature. Her grades were high. My father waved the transcript around the kitchen, snapping the wad of paper as it wrinkled around his thumb. “Why?” He turned to Bonnie and me, silent at the breakfast table. “Why?”

Mother busied herself peeling a pear. “A boy.”

And she was right. Adele sent us a picture. London, Ontario, where she went to school, was only a couple of hours away. She could easily have brought him home, just as easily as our parents could have gone to get her. They could have dragged her from her dorm room by her ankles, cut her hair, kept her in her room until she came around. I’m sure they talked about it. Instead, there was another flat, factual phone call. Was she going to go to med school? No. Then there would be no more money.

Bonnie and I managed to look at the picture before it was thrown away. His name was August and he was disappointingly unhandsome: he had blond, wilted hair and the overbite of a donkey. Large-bodied with sharp Nordic features. Yet he seduced my sister away from medicine and then away from the continent; she returned with him to Germany without finishing her degree.

Adele sent postcards addressed to Bonnie and me. We had to be quick and fish them out of the mail before our parents got to them. I couldn’t understand why she had gone to this place full of dead buildings and gray waters. Even the postcard pictures were taken on overcast days, as though the sun never shone there.

At first, Bonnie and I stayed up late dissecting the postcards, constructing a life for Adele. The morning she left premed biology and just couldn’t take it anymore — London, Ontario, like Fort Michel with a Costco and a Walmart. Maybe she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the Ontario Thames. We pictured her wasted and lovely with despair. Milky water closed over her head. Then blond, robust, life-loving August reached in and pulled her out. He laid her on the riverbank. He nursed her back to health. Through a fevered haze, she heard him speaking in German, telling her these small Canadian towns were killing her, she must go to Berlin to heal her soul.

Bonnie and I acted out this scene. She played August and I played Adele, throwing myself backward onto the bed with my hand over my eyes. I read aloud from the postcards in my best imitation of Adele’s voice, and Bonnie spoke in Germanic nonsense, hacking her k ’s and v ’s. Sometimes we had Adele save August’s life: He got lost, was unprepared for the harsh Canadian winter, the long roads to nowhere. He passed out in a snow-filled ditch, aching for the dense, crowded Old World, where the snow was kicked up by millions of feet, where you were never so alone. And then Adele appeared in a white fur-lined parka, his angel of mercy.

I woke from a recurring nightmare: I had grown an extra head. It craned its neck to look back at me. It had scraggly hair on its chin and neck. Extra arms popped out of my armpits; hideous growths and tumors appeared on my back and inner thighs, weeping pus. The thing between my legs grew. It grew. The second head crowed with laughter, its voice deepening away from Adele’s musical lilt with each laugh.

I sat up in bed and looked outside for the sound that had woken me. Bonnie was climbing out her window. She wore a denim miniskirt, and her thighs looked moon-white as she landed in a crouch in the front yard, testing the silence. Earlier that night, she hadn’t been in the mood to go through the postcards again. “She’s our sister, not a saint,” she’d said, irritated. “Who says it’s some big love story? Maybe he was just her ticket out. Maybe he just liked her tits.”