Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

This meeting concerned Cherry, who now resembled a ship at dock when she wedged herself onto the sofa. August claimed that because of the nature of the house, no one could be sure who the father was or whether or not he still lived there. Therefore, the baby should be the house’s responsibility. Cherry, docile as a drugged kitten, did receive other lovers from time to time, but the odds were still a thousand to one in August’s favor.

Everyone agreed, to preserve the image of the house as a mythic, orgiastic place: the baby had grown from a house full of love, not from any one man and woman. August drew up a schedule. House residents — mostly women — signed up for days and times. By vote, they decided on Skye for a boy and Hanah for a girl. After being jabbed by August, people threw crumpled bills into a shoebox to pay for a bassinet and diapers. It was important, August noted, that Cherry not get overburdened. It’s not her baby. It’s our baby.

August and Cherry planned a home birth in the bathtub. There would be dozens of familiar hands on her belly, easing the child into the world. What actually happened: Women clustered in the doorway, left, and came back. Their hands went nowhere near Cherry. A sudden rush of blood caught everyone off-guard. “Is that normal?” someone asked, backing away from the door. When Cherry’s placid mewling turned into savage shrieks, someone ducked into the kitchen and called for an ambulance.

Cherry and Hanah returned a few days later. Cherry moved from the living room to a bedroom with a door. Hanah floated through the rotation on the schedule for a few weeks. ( A wrinkly, cone-headed monster, Adele wrote.)

August — who worked at a bookstore that clandestinely sold hash — liked to greet the baby when he came home from work. He picked her up under the arms and danced around the room. He blew raspberries on her belly until she made a toothless, wide-mouthed expression; August insisted that she was practicing how to smile. Then he passed her off to the person whose turn it was to care for her. He was not officially on the roster.

One day, Adele returned from the Turkish market with powdered formula for Hanah and fresh vegetables for Cherry. She checked the schedule taped by the front door: a woman named Gudrun was supposed to be watching Hanah, but no one had seen Gudrun for weeks. Adele checked Cherry’s room; the girl was in a dead midafternoon sleep. The birth, according to the one woman who accompanied Cherry to the hospital, had been as swift and routine as one would expect from a seventeen-year-old in her prime. Yet Cherry had come home limping and miserable. She moaned in her sleep and whimpered as she plodded to the bathroom at night.

Adele found the baby alone in the connected garage. She lay on her back on a blanket once used to cover a car that had since gone missing, happily sucking on a paintbrush. Someone must have carried her there — she wasn’t crawling yet — so the garage walls would insulate the house from her cries. Adele picked up Hanah and brought her inside. She moved the bassinet into her room.

“She’s your daughter,” Adele said.

“She is everyone’s daughter,” August said.

“Bullshit,” Adele said.

The baby had August’s silver-blue eyes when she was born, but they darkened toward Cherry’s dull brown over time. In the end, Hanah’s eyes were more striking than those of either of her parents, an unusual gunmetal gray. She stared at Adele in wide-eyed silence and Adele realized, not without sadness, that she was falling in love again. Not as an immediate, maternal rush; Hanah won her over by degrees, through small offerings. By learning to kick, by clutching Adele’s long hair like it was the overhead railing of a subway car as they walked around the house, by crying when she was handed to anyone else.

Hanah’s strange eyes and round face meant she could pass for half Asian. An old woman in a kaleidoscope-patterned headscarf stopped Adele on the street to tell her how beautiful they were. She grabbed on to Adele’s arm with both hands. “ Schönen Mutter und Tochter! ” she said, as though begging.

( That’s great news about Helen, Adele wrote when I told her Helen had gotten into UCLA Law. Congratulate her for me. )

The illegal club where they’d gone after Adele and August’s marriage ceremony turned into a legal club, and then a furniture store. Hanah grew six teeth and could eat the same boiled vegetable mush as everyone else, if Adele blew on it first and spooned it into her mouth.

Cherry recovered. She vanished one night and returned around dawn high as a kite, singing loudly on the front steps. She couldn’t figure out how to open the unlocked door. She spent the rest of the day in bed with August and a hairy Bulgarian boy who had just moved in and who loved August’s body with jovial, manly aggression.

Adele rolled Hanah to the park in a stroller from the flea market. It didn’t fold or have a protective roof, as all the new ones did — it might even have been intended for a doll. They both wore straw sun hats — Hanah’s had a chin strap — and cotton dresses in pale rose. They were a vision.

She put Hanah in a swing and pushed her listlessly. She was thinking of the Bulgarian, his enthusiasm and his great big arms, fleshy as dough. When they’d met, he’d shaken her hand so hard she thought he’d dislocate her shoulder.

A small boy and his sister kicked a soccer ball back and forth nearby while their mother watched. The mother came to chat with Adele. “What an adorable baby,” she said. “Is she yours?”

“No, I’m the nanny.” Adele wasn’t sure why she’d said that or why it had come out caustic as lye.

“Really? I’m looking for a nanny.” The woman looked a bit old to have such young children, and she was wearing a royal-blue suit with gold buttons in a park in the middle of the day. She was dressed like a small, newly prosperous nation’s head of state. “A live-in nanny. How long are you with your current family?”

“Actually,” Adele said, thinking of Cherry’s renewed sexual energy, “they won’t need me much longer.”

Hanah seemed bewildered but not displeased by the ride. She stuck her fingers in the holes of the swing’s chain, and the wind lifted her wisp of hair. She had no idea what was coming.

On her last day, Adele dressed Hanah in a tiny sweater and pinafore, the first clothes Hanah had ever worn that were not from the flea market. She tied her hair into pigtails with velvet ribbons. She cleaned out Hanah’s nose and trimmed her fingernails.

Adele strapped Hanah into the brand-new bouncy chair she’d bought with August’s hash money. It was expensive; it lit up and played music when Hanah bashed the plastic buttons with her fists. She carried the chair to Cherry’s room. “Cherry,” she announced, “I’m leaving. You have to watch Hanah.”

Cherry, who assumed Adele was going to the store, looked up from her magazine only briefly. “Get some gum and chocolate milk.”

As Adele shut the bedroom door, she saw Cherry bouncing the chair with her toe. Hanah clapped and giggled. That was good enough.

(An epilogue: I’m no good with children, Peter. I don’t care about educating them or disciplining them. I just want them to like me. It’s easier to clean up after them than to force them to do it. I make them chocolate-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and eat the veggies their mother left. I know that they’re manipulative little monsters, but I love them so. )

FROM MY DOORSTEP, I WATCHED the football team run laps around the neighborhood, their legs pumping in matching gray shorts and blue singlets, their breath visible in the cold hours between dawn and school. The coach chased after them in an open-chassis Jeep, screaming with his head out the window. His jowls flapped and exposed his teeth; he looked like a dog on a car ride. He had a face of burst capillaries and said “faggot” every time he exhaled. His wide arms and neck were sunburned even in winter, his nose bulbous and pockmarked as a tumor.