Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I traced the line of pigment down her abdomen — from having Dave. It was fucking beautiful, that border. It put her on one side as a mother and me on the other.

“Oh, you’re so gentle, my poor little boy. Probably never seen a woman, right? Not supposed to look at women? Got beaten for it? Don’t worry, little Peter Huang, little Huang, little wang, Margie will show you what to do.”

Where was she getting this? Who had led her to expect these things? When did I tell her my full name? Peter should have protested, punched her on behalf of Asian men everywhere. But I was — I was — drunk. The name that had never fit slipped completely out of my grasp.

Margie pushed me down. She pulled my shirt over my head, unbuckled my pants, pulled them down with my underpants, tossed it all aside. I did nothing to help or resist. “Oh!” she said, delighted. “You’re hairless, like a little boy. So pretty and delicate. Just like I hoped.” She took the thing in her hands, cupped it like a caught butterfly. “And your cock is so cute.”

“Don’t call it that,” I said.

“Cute?”

“No. The other thing.”

“What? Cock?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want me to call it?”

“Don’t call it anything,” I said.

My only other memory of that night: Margie lying on top of me, both of us facing up, her weight nearly crushing me. I shut my eyes to the overhead light. I ran my hands over her body, spending a long time on her breasts, lifting them, tweaking the nipples, pretending they were mine. Then even longer between her legs, both hands tracing the folds, the stiff hair, the slick walls. From this angle, it was perfect, it was just where it was supposed to be. It was between my legs. I rubbed her and could almost feel it myself.

She felt me against her back and remarked, “Ah, so it does get hard! What else does it do? Does it fuck?”

“No,” I said, irritated at being interrupted, “it doesn’t do that.”

I went to Margie’s house every night after work. I sat in her bathtub with its jet streams while she knelt against the edge and washed the fish smell and bits of food out of my long black hair. She let me rest my wet body on her sheets as she plucked the hair from my stomach and chest. The first time was a long, exquisitely painful process, each pinch of the tweezers a kind of release. At the end, Margie squirted lotion onto her hands. She cooed as she rubbed her hands together and then slid them across my torso, telling me how smooth and soft and pale I was.

Then the games began. She liked to pamper me and then beat me with her hands or a crop. She liked to sit on my face, not requiring me to do much — it was the idea of suffocating me that appealed to her. She made me wear a brocade hat with a braid built into it from a novelty store; she made me fake an accent, a cruel mimicry of my father. I spoke in random, halting, lisping sentences, swapping l ’s and r ’s. She wasn’t offended that the thing didn’t respond to her overtures; she seemed to like sucking on it flaccid, liked it small, batted at it like a toy. I had to look away. She knew the only thing I liked — that position where our bodies lined up, became indistinguishable to my hands. She dangled the possibility of it in front of me and I would do anything.

The best thing, though it happened only once, was when she forced me to wear her panties and stockings. We were in her bathroom. I was careful not to ruin it by seeming too eager, my eyes cast downward as she rolled the nylons up my legs, clipped them to a garter belt.

She sat me down on the closed toilet seat, across from her queenly bathtub centerpiece. I watched her red-painted fingernails spider across the wall and flick on the vanity lights that bordered the mirror. She applied the plum lipstick first, making a shape wider than my lips, like a clown mouth. But with odd care, deliberate motions. She lined my eyes heavily inside the rims. I could feel the point of the pencil against my eyeball.

She peered close, stroke for stroke and impersonal, as though she saw only a canvas. She left the liner pencil rolling sideways on the counter. My chin pinched between her fingers, she turned my face back and forth in the light, examining it. She looked satisfied.

I took the pencil and touched her cheek to keep her still. She let me draw a quick, thick mustache under her nose, silly and Chaplinesque.

She motioned for me to stand. As soon as I did, she shoved me down to kneeling, facing away from her. Our eyes met in the mirror. She took off the violet feather boa that had hung over her bare breasts and coiled it around my neck. The same color as the lipstick. She pulled the ends of the boa tight. Choked me from behind. Knees on the bathroom tile in front of the mirror, so I could watch my own blissful face white out slowly, glowing like an angel’s, until I passed out.

At the height of our affair, Margie sent me to the twenty-four-hour grocery store at three in the morning to buy more lotion. She wouldn’t let me clean the kiss-shaped lipstick stains from my face. I had a vivid half-moon bite mark visible above the collar of my T-shirt.

I stumbled through the narrow aisle drunk on pleasure and lack of sleep. As I rounded a corner, I saw Bonnie, dressed in a silver sheath dress and heels, her eyelids painted. She was peering into the frozen-foods case with her arms full of chips and instant-noodle packages.

“Hi,” I called.

She blinked at me, equally dazed. “Hi.” Her hair had grown into something like a pixie cut; I realized how much time must have passed since I’d seen her.

“Just came from a bar?”

“Stayed until closing time, when the lights went on. Everyone looked awful.” Bonnie stared at my neck. She raised her hand as if to touch the spot where Margie had bitten me. Only one tooth had broken the skin. Margie had pressed a cold cloth to my neck, lifting it at intervals to check to see if the bleeding had stopped, while we watched TV, my head curled into her shoulder. “How have you been? I haven’t heard from you since the party.”

I could only smile.

Bonnie put her hand down. “You look happy,” she said. She didn’t mean healthy.

Mother called me on a Monday night, a rare evening that I was home. She might have called a dozen times before; I would have missed them all. As soon as I answered, without saying hello, she said, “Does Bonnie really not have a phone?”

I barely thought of Bonnie. “I don’t know.”

After a pause, Mother said, “I want to see her. I’m coming tomorrow.”

Mother left home at six in the morning and drove the five hours to Montreal, alone. Bonnie eluded her completely. I got the restaurant to give me a two-hour, unpaid lunch. When I realized Father wasn’t with her, I took her to a dim sum place inside a mall in Chinatown.

The entrance was at the top of a tall, curving staircase with a plastic chandelier that threw pink and green splinters of light. A small crowd waited for tables dusted with sparkles. My mother was wearing a blouse that had once belonged to Bonnie and a skirt that had been Helen’s.

Mother went to the hostess behind the podium to get a number. A flash of pleasure passed over her face as she spoke the few words in Cantonese, then again when our number was called. “ Sei-sup-yut. Forty-one.”

We were seated far from the main path of the carts. We watched the food from a distance and had little to say to each other. After a long silence, my mother said, “Is Bonnie a whore?”

“What?”

“A prostitute. Does she sell herself to men?”

“No,” I said.

“What does she do here, then? How does she make a living?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her much.” I started playing idly with my teacup, spinning it on its bottom rim. My mother took the teacup out of my hand and put it back on the table. I could hear the women pushing the carts shouting the names of their dishes, could smell the breading and garlic, feel the wet heat, but they never seemed to come any closer.