Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

Helen turned. “Excuse me. Can you control your children? I’m trying to eat.”

The mother stood. She was enormously pregnant and red-faced from the sun. She had to steady herself on the chair. “Don’t tell me how to raise my kids.”

I sank back into my seat. I expected Helen to escalate the hostilities, but instead she looked stung. “Sorry,” she said. She fumbled for her drink.

The woman sat down again, one hand on her belly. She seemed dissatisfied, like she’d wanted a fight. She ended up doing what Helen had asked. “You two!” she barked. “Sit the fuck down and eat!”

The kids stopped. Like their mother, they had red, sun-cooked faces. I leaned in close to Helen and murmured, “God. They’re so burned.”

Helen shrugged.

The kids pulled themselves into their chairs. The girl, maybe four, held her fork in her fist and stabbed it downward at her food. The boy stuck his hand experimentally into his macaroni. I felt the same way as their mother: sunstroked, ready for a fight. The height of the inland summer in Ontario, while just as hot, was very different. It made you apathetic and slothful, overwhelmed by the flat, endless sky. You wanted to lie down in a dark room. This Southern heat roiled the blood. Distorted by the light, everyone looked like an enemy. I could see why the crime rate went up with the temperature.

“I would be a great mother,” I said.

Helen bumped her glass into her front teeth and then looked down at it in confusion. “I wouldn’t,” she said, not rising to the bait.

Helen and I spent the afternoon popping into free museums and government buildings. Helen moved through each as though she were ticking it off a list in her head, so quickly that it was unclear why we’d come. We spent less than ten minutes inside the Library of Congress. We went from one end of the National Air and Space Museum to the other without going into any of the exhibition halls, as if the clusters of upright rockets and hanging planes were trees and jungle canopy to be slashed out of our way.

We stopped only at security checkpoints. Helen was well practiced. She knew which ones would ask you to surrender phones, which ones needed to search your shoes, which ones banned pens and paper. Like Mother, I saw our dead father everywhere. In the way the guards held their mouths in disgust, their bland, shaming voices: How dare you bring a water bottle? Did you think we wouldn’t know? That we can’t hear the vile thoughts in your head? The twisted happiness you squeeze out of dresses and dolls when you think you’re alone? We are watching you from the other side.

How Father would love the new America, its all-seeing, all-knowing eye.

In the evening, Helen and I walked for nearly an hour along a boulevard of baking concrete, looking for a bar. The sun was setting and we moved through visible clouds of insects, their buzzing drowned out by low-flying planes from Reagan National Airport.

We ended up at the W Hotel on Fifteenth Street. The lobby had black marble floors and dripped with crystal. A bouncer hovered by the elevator, roped off with red velvet. “Rooftop terrace,” Helen explained to me. “It would help if you were better-looking.”

The terrace was no cooler than the ground, made worse by the dense crowd of wet, steaming human meat. Helen ordered us both straight bourbons. I held the glass to my face as we leaned against the railing. The W Hotel was a squat building that managed to look out over all the other squat Romanesque buildings of the capital.

Helen pointed out a few landmarks in the distance and then said, “I love America. Land of new beginnings. It’s like LA and DC are on different planets. Canada is so much bigger but there’s nowhere to go.” We could see the roof of the White House. Black silhouettes of men with long-barreled guns paced in circles, aimless as the flies and mosquitoes.

“Bonnie said you liked LA.”

She held the drink to her mouth thoughtfully, statue-still. Her lower lip stuck to the glass.

“Why did you leave?” I pressed. I felt dizzy and argumentative. “That’s why I’m here. Mother wants to know — why you left LA and your six-figure salary. Why you called her. She thinks it’s because of a man.”

Helen laughed. “What, like I’m Adele?” She bent in half over the railing, staring affectionately down at the city.

“I quit both of my jobs to be here, you know.”

“Nobody asked you to do that.” Her limp hands almost spilled her drink. She recovered it and took a sip. “Do you think Father’s proud of me?” She turned, vindictive, channeling his ghost. “Do you think he’s proud of you?”

“Father’s dead.”

A blast of wind threw both of us back a step; it was followed by a sound like an angry bellow. The planter trees of the terrace flattened in one direction as a square, military-gray helicopter appeared above the trees of the White House lawn. It lurched as though being yanked upward on strings. Everyone rushed to the balcony, squashing Helen and me against the railings. People watched until the dot vanished among the clouds.

“Can he see us?” Helen asked. The president, Father, God.

We got into the car, and Helen drove back and forth across state lines until she found a gas station that sold beer. I let her drive, squinting red-eyed at the dark, complex interchanges. She seemed to be doing fine.

We went back to her townhouse to drink more. I sat down on the rug in her living room, and the rough weave scratched my mosquito bites raw. She cleared a space for herself on the couch, tossing lamps and boxes aside.

She came across a box that gave her pause. It was full of labeled cassette tapes, carefully organized by date into smaller boxes. Her fingers danced across the top of the tapes as she sucked at the beer bottle. “Guess,” she said.

“Guess what?” I said, itchy as hell.

“Why I left LA.”

“You got your heart broken,” I spat.

“Nope.”

“You got fired.”

“No, but you’re getting closer.”

“This is stupid.” I crawled across the rug and came to the canister of bug repellent she’d bought at the pharmacy. “God, why didn’t we use this?” I moaned.

“Let me show you something, little brother,” Helen said, plucking the canister from my hand. She took a lighter from her pocket. She sprayed a mist of repellent and then lit it. A fireball exploded between us.

For a moment, a moment shorter than a blink, I saw Helen through flames. And she saw me. She allowed her face to open up, to be vulnerable, sisterly, small. And I could imagine her crying on the phone now, crying to me just as easily as to our mother. “I done bad, Ma-ma. I done bad.”

All the tiny flames went out like a breath. Helen and I stayed kneeling on the rug across from each other. “I just wanted him to be normal,” she said. “Like I wanted you to be normal.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

She pulled out one of the tapes and the personal recorder that was in the box with them. She slid the cassette inside and pressed Play. Her own voice came from the speaker. “Case notes,” it said. “April twenty-sixth. Reis versus Reis .”

I sat back on my knees. In my earliest memory of Helen, Father had tasked her to divide up a small cupcake between the four of us. We were all shouting: Adele deserved the whole cupcake because she was the oldest. Bonnie deserved it because she was the youngest. I deserved it because I liked cupcakes the most. Helen ignored us all. Her concentrated face, tongue poking from between her lips, focused just on steadying the knife, on making two perfect cuts, in half and half again.

Initial consultation: A father seeks to win custody of his son. Good afternoon, Mr. Reis, Helen says. Marcus, he says. His voice is calm. He wears a gold necklace, gold rings, and a gold watch. (“Note,” the recording says. “Remind Marcus not to wear his jewelry to court.”)