Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

“What do you think you’ll find there?” Mother said now. I turned in my seat. She had overtightened the seat belt and was struggling to loosen it; she looked strangled. “Your French is garbage. You’ll be a second-class citizen. Believe me, I know something about that.” Father flinched each time she spoke, unaccustomed to the sound of her voice.

Miles of scrub rolled past, sprouted grass and grubby trees like those I’d seen all my life. I wondered when we’d cross the line, when the signs would change language and beautiful things would start to grow. Mother leaned forward to address Father. “Where are we going to leave him? Just dump him in the middle of the street with nowhere to live?”

Father didn’t answer, so I didn’t either. “Your hair is getting long,” he said instead. “You should cut it before you start looking for work.”

“Hmm,” I said.

We settled into a long silence. Mother stared out her window. The highway curved to follow the train tracks. Sprawling strip malls, RV parks, flat-roofed chicken restaurants, gravel roads that vanished into the flat horizon: the ugliness persisted even deep into Quebec. Bonnie, at that moment, was flying for the first time — her hand pressed to the frosty plastic window, the Nevada desert red as the fires of hell.

“I want to drive,” Mother said suddenly. The quiet persisted. She corrected herself: “I want to learn to drive.”

Father continued to squint out at the horizon, the midday sun looming overhead. His hand slipped from the wheel but he regained his grip before the car could drift.

Father stopped at the end of a pedestrian strip in downtown Montreal, where the asphalt intersected with the cobblestones. People and patio tables filled the corridor from end to end. Strings of light connected the buildings, forming a makeshift roof. It seemed like every window had an À Louer or an Aide Demandé sign, all of them calling to me.

Father pulled up the parking brake with a squeak that made my stomach clench. If I stayed in my seat, they’d drive me home again. Father turned off the car.

I got out slowly, suitcase in hand. Mother’s eyes were distant; she was retreating into herself. As soon as I shut the car door, Father restarted the engine. He rolled down the window. Glaring sunlight made the car’s interior seem dark by comparison, and his face floated in the shadows. “Give it a year,” he said. He pulled away without closing the window. My mother was still in the back seat.

I turned at a corner, off the cobblestones. The street sign was bent, and another sign with a double-headed arrow indicated that the traffic changed direction in the middle. An old man sat on the steps of a building painted a bright, uniform blue. He gestured me over, suitcase and all. “You’re looking for an apartment.”

I nodded. “I have an apartment,” he said. He stood, turned, and walked inside without saying anything more. Not knowing what else to do, I followed.

He talked over his shoulder as he opened an inner door and looped around a staircase. He had olive skin and a vague, trilling accent, and he wore brown canvas shorts with no shirt. “I like Asians,” he said. “Quiet, pay on time.”

With that, he flung open an apartment door. It was small as a coffin and mostly obscured by the door. “Full kitchen, full bathroom,” he said, proudly. I stuck my head in: How was that possible? A bar fridge and a two-element stove took up most of main room, and an inner door revealed a bathroom where only the boniest legs could fit between the toilet and the bathtub; most people would have to balance their calves on the edge of the tub.

“Everybody wants to live alone for cheap, but there’s nowhere else in the whole city, I swear to you. If you stay for one year, I give you the best price. One year! No bullshit!”

It sounded like a promise, an incantation: One year, no bullshit. What was space to me, with my silly little suitcase and hundred dollars? “I’ll take it,” I said.

The year began: I found an apartment and two jobs in one day. I walked the street in my kitchen shoes, clutching resumés typed on my father’s typewriter. Less than two blocks away, I walked into a café seeking an aide-cuisinier.

The owner, potbellied and skittish, came out when the cashier called him. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Buddy. We sat under tall windows at a table that had yet to be cleared of cups and plates and balled-up napkins. He sniffed through his clogged nose every few seconds as he looked over my resumé, which boasted only my single job and my high-school diploma. “Come back on Wednesday and we’ll try you out,” he said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“No, Wednesday. We’re trying someone else out tomorrow.”

I went across the street to a Japanese restaurant with decorative steel doors. I interrupted the four Japanese cooks’ pre-shift meal with a harsh wedge of sunlight; they’d been sitting in the dark. We had the same conversation I’d had with Buddy.

“Come back on Wednesday and we’ll try you out.”

“I’m busy on Wednesday. Thursday?”

“Fine.”

One year. I took both jobs. The cooks at the Japanese restaurant spoke Arabic and Japanese and ignored me as much as possible in their two-story kitchen that reeked paradoxically of both fish and vinegar. One of the two cuisiniers at the café quit and I got his job, working alone in the tiny, open kitchen behind the counter while the cashiers tittered lazily in a gutter slur of French and English. They faced the customers and I faced the wall.

I had not planned for the loneliness of being an adult in a new city. My landlord invited me to sit on the steps with him and watch the “kids” go by — university students my age and older who lived in the surrounding walkups. Our building was full of older immigrants, bachelors and widowers who played Iranian radio at five in the morning or left the smell of pickled herring in the grease vents. I kept my place as neat and spare as a monk’s quarters. My clothes were folded in a suitcase like those of an overly polite houseguest for months before I caved and bought a small chest of drawers.

The kids wore brand-new clothes, whites not yellowed and blacks not grayed, bold reds and blues. The human traffic was so dense at eight in the morning and three in the afternoon that for a while I assumed the university kept the rigid hours of an elementary school. The students sat on their balconies as though on display, playing guitar, drinking beer from bottles, eating fruit or cake. And they were beautiful — a cultivated beauty, beauty of stiff hair and finger waves, highlighted cheekbones.

I looked for Chef everywhere. The beautiful university boys on the steps were too young, too lean, too well groomed. Shirtless in the sunlight, they revealed gym muscles that lacked his brutality. Our one hug grew into a love affair in my mind. There were days when I felt that his story about the kimono had happened between us.

I visited home just once. Father picked me up from the bus station and shook my hand as though we had just met. I could hear his thoughts as he took me in: his approval at my torn, dirty fingernails and scars — a workingman’s hands — and his displeasure that I still hadn’t cut my hair. I stared back at him openly for the first time in my life. His hair had become a flatter, one-dimensional black, all traces of brown and gray dyed out.

The house smelled strange to me when we walked in, akin to the smell of my apartment building, its ethnic mishmash of cooking food and outdated colognes. I couldn’t remember what the house had smelled like before.

Mother served us broiled pork chops and vegetable soup from a can. We sat in three chairs huddled around one end of the table. The spare chairs were stacked against the far wall. “Have you heard from Bonnie?” I asked.