Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

I paced my apartment. For the first time in a long time, it felt too small. I put on my sisters’ decades-old makeup. It was hard to get the color to transfer from the dried-out lipstick. I wiped it on over and over again, chafing my lips, willing it to work.

I pulled the white — everything was so fucking white —winter blanket off the bed and spread it out on the floor. I set out a toy tea set, also from my mother’s house, painted pink flowers and gold edging on plastic that looked like real china. I sat down with the dolls. Adele’s and Bonnie’s childhoods had been so far apart that the dolls represented different eras, forays in and out of realism. Helen had never played with dolls.

I lay down with my head on a cushion. It was my husband’s lap. His rough hand stroked my hair. The dolls — small children running barefoot through the grass, a game of chase and tackle.

There was a knock at the door. My hair dissolved and ran through his fingers like sand. The children died where they stood, stiffening into painted smiles and stickers for eyes. I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand and succeeded only in smearing the dry color onto my chin.

I threw open the door. Bonnie stood there wearing a camping backpack almost as tall as she was, her long hair in braids. I remembered when she’d first arrived in Montreal, fattened on Los Angeles, looking like a freshly shorn sheep.

“How did you get into the building?” I asked.

Bonnie held the straps of her backpack against her chest. “Is that Helen’s?”

I looked down at the dress I was wearing, an austere, long-hemmed thing that buttoned from top to bottom. “Probably.”

She looked past me to the dolls arranged on the blanket. “What are you doing?” She sounded genuinely perplexed. Her question exhausted me. I thought of the wig Adele had sent, of Helen’s terse conversation while I stood naked in the shower.

“How is it,” I said, “that you know me best and least of all?”

Bonnie shuffled uncomfortably. “Can I come in?”

I stepped aside. She sat down on the blanket next to the doll that said Mommy when squeezed. She flicked its pigtails with her finger. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going to Europe with some friends.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know.” She threw her hands up theatrically and smiled. “Forever! I’m retiring from stripping. Nobody wants to see my thirty-year-old tatas.”

Sitting among the dolls with her braided hair, Bonnie looked twelve. “Are you going to visit Adele?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We haven’t really decided where we’re going. We fly into Paris, and then we’ll just train around until we get bored.”

“I can give you her address.”

Bonnie stood up. She tugged at the collar of my dress, flattening it out properly. “I’ll see if I can work it into the trip.” Her face came so close that I was sure she could smell the fruit-skin smell of the expired lipstick. “I didn’t actually come to say goodbye. I came to ask you to come with us.”

I shook my head. It was just like Bonnie to invite me on an indefinite overseas trip on her way to the airport, giant backpack and all. “I just got a new job.”

“It’s just a job. You have nothing here.”

“There’s Mother.”

“Fuck Mother.” Bonnie kicked at the picnic. The empty teacups tipped over. The head popped off one of the dolls and rolled in a weighted half circle, like a bocce ball. “I know for a fact that you have a shit-ton of money in the bank, sitting around doing nothing.”

“Is that why you want me to come?”

“No! I think it could be fun.” Bonnie bent down and picked up the doll’s body and head. She examined the neck like she was trying to figure out how to reattach it. “We could…” She hesitated. I could see her weighing her words in her head. “We could tell people that you’re my sister.”

My mouth opened.

Bonnie stepped closer. “Paris,” she repeated, like she was casting a spell. “And maybe Adele.”

I saw it: Sabrina ’s Paris in 1950s black-and-white, the city that made her a woman. The Eiffel Tower as seen through her window, the shutters thrown open to the night. Two figures went running through my imagined streets, rain-soaked cobblestones lined by gaslights, girls in matching polka-dot dresses and gold earrings. This is my sister.

I looked again at Bonnie, teetering under the weight of her backpack, ready to uproot her life in an instant. She was leaving right now. There was no time to think. No time for the doubt that held me in place. I knew this, these dolls and dresses, this miserable little life.

I was saying no. I could hear my voice saying no and I could see Bonnie nodding sadly; I could see her putting the broken doll gingerly onto my bed, apologizing for knocking its head off. Or maybe for her hubris, or for not asking earlier. For not saying it sooner. For not saying it all along: Sister, my sister, I’ve always known.

I slogged through my next shift in a haze, my head full of Europe. Now that the opportunity was lost, my fantasies were free to break with reality. No awkward lies and costumes. Bonnie and I sprawled in matching white bikinis on a Mediterranean beach, our thirty-year-old tatas on display.

The bug-eyed waiter came to the window and said a customer wanted to talk to John. A girl came to the kitchen door and John rushed over.

The girl couldn’t disguise how good-looking she was, not with her severe haircut and round, unfashionable glasses, not with her oversize T-shirt and denim overalls. I was used to the waitresses who compensated for the high-collared uniforms with glittery eyelashes and torturous shoes, who were more young than attractive. This girl pushed her femininity away and it sprang back as though coiled.

“Hi, babe,” John said. They leaned toward each other without touching, like dogs straining against leashes. “What table are you at? What did you order?”

She pointed into the dining hall. “The fish stew. That’s your job, right?”

“Yep. I’ll make it special.”

They gazed at each other with some profound, unknowable intent. It was uncomfortable to look at — worse, somehow, than if they’d just started making out on the floor.

That past summer, at the café, someone had left the skins from the roasted hams in the metal garbage bin out back. They sat baking in the sun. When I lifted the lid off at the end of the day, a cloud of black flies poured out and engulfed my head. Their wings brushed my cheeks and hissed in my ears. I thought of a picture I’d seen of a calf dying from black-fly bites, its sores red and swollen. No one heard me screaming in the alley. That moment, flat on my back in the filth around the bin, and this moment, watching John watch his girlfriend back out the kitchen door, felt the same. Loneliness exploding out of nowhere in a screeching swarm, dark and dense enough to blot out the sun.

The other cooks stopped what they were doing to make fun of John as he made a heart out of chopped scallions to top the cream garnish of his girlfriend’s stew. The music playing in the kitchen was the pop hit of the season, sung by a group of boys who must have speaking voices like John: perky, irrepressible.

“What are you doing here so early?” John asked. It was a Friday morning. He stood yawning in his rumpled street clothes at the kitchen door, his blond hair sticking up at angles.

“I’m on the schedule for six.”

“Yeah, but nobody shows up for their six until six thirty, at the earliest. Jeez. What have you been doing?” He surveyed the kitchen. “You already set up your station? Oh man. Don’t let Chef find out about that. You’re ruining it for everybody. Sit down and let me make you some coffee.”