Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

As the guitar began to wail on its own, Bonnie and I stopped trying to mimic Adele’s long-limbed grace. We jumped up and down, shook our arms free like monkeys. Adele, her small butt still swaying back and forth, picked up one of Helen’s markers and blacked out two of the digits in the year on the calendar: 1987 became 18.

“I need that,” Helen said. Adele tossed the marker in Helen’s general direction. The three of us joined hands and danced in a circle through the end of the song. Helen groped for the marker on the floor.

She went back to filling in the bubbles. Sarah is twice as old as John. Six years ago, Sarah was four times as old as John. How old is Sarah? Sarah is eighteen. Helen’s own numbers: the lesser seventeen, the imperfect 150 on her PSATs.

When the envelopes came, I knew what they meant. Businesslike, Adele’s typed name visible in the clear plastic windows. Crests with Latin words in tight circles, silhouetted birds.

The letters arrived within a few days of one another and were stacked on the hall table with the junk mail no one had thrown away yet. I caught Helen flipping through them. She was irritated that they went unopened, that Adele didn’t care which ones were small and white and cursory and which ones were thick and yellow and welcoming.

After Helen left, I wrapped them all up in a grocery-store flyer— Save eighteen cents per pound on roasted ham —and shoved them through the swinging lid of the kitchen trash. I thought of it as a portal. Things went in and were never seen again.

They were back on the hall table within a few hours, still wrapped in the flyer. The ghost of eighteen dug them out from the bin. A streak of coffee grinds over a university logo, the hall reeking of eggs and orange peels. The smell caught Adele’s attention.

All summer long, Helen volunteered for one thing after another, so she could put the activities on her college applications. Adele took me with her when she visited Helen at the local nursing home. The first floor looked like a hospital — white reflecting on white, a long corridor of doors with numbered boxes and clipboards, a strip of wooden paneling running along each wall. The linoleum smelled freshly bleached. Unlike in a hospital, there was no one around. No one greeted us or asked us what we were doing there. A cart of medical supplies was abandoned at an angle in the hallway.

We got into the elevator and went up to the fourth floor, where Helen worked. The silence persisted. On this floor, many of the doors were closed. I stuck my head into an open door as we walked by and saw a man lying face-down in bed with a bathrobe bunched up around his hips. His bare buttocks looked like empty sacks sliding off his spine. Adele shut his door for him.

We found Helen in the lounge. She was spoon-feeding a woman fortified pudding, a beige substance that looked like it had come from a caulking gun. The woman tried to say something. “Just eat,” Helen interrupted, shoving the spoon into her mouth.

I flopped down into an armchair. The remote control for the shelf television was attached to the armrest by a cord. I turned on the TV. It was muted. Hitting the mute button didn’t do anything. I turned to channel 18.

The woman reminded me of a snowman, a human shape drawn broad and round, sinking deep into her wheelchair. The hard egg of her belly was pinned under a seat belt. She shoved the spoon away. “Where are my real shoes?” Her feet were elevated on the footrest of her chair, in soft-looking leather moccasins.

The spoon knocked against the woman’s teeth. “Eat,” Helen repeated.

The woman turned to Adele. “Do you know where my shoes are?”

Adele perked up. “Nope.” Her voice bright, singsong. She got to her knees and pretended to look under the sofa. “Not here.” She opened the fridge. “Not here either.”

The woman nodded solemnly. “Try the cabinets.”

Adele walked around, loudly opening and closing all the cupboard doors. “Is it in this one? Nope. This one?”

The woman tapped her chin. “Maybe someone hid them.”

“Maybe,” Adele agreed.

“She can’t wear shoes because her feet are too swollen,” Helen said. “Don’t turn her against the nurses and the volunteers by telling her we steal her shoes.”

“But you do,” I said.

The woman looked at me. She smiled. “Hello, Alfie.”

I didn’t know what to do. “Hi,” I said.

She gestured for me to come closer. Adele nudged my back, so I got out of the chair and stepped forward. The woman’s lips had sores in different states of healing, dry and wet. “How’s school, Alfie?”

Helen held the woman’s chin firmly between her two fingers and turned her head. “You need to eat, Mrs. Harrison. It’s important.”

“School is fine,” I said.

Mrs. Harrison grabbed the spoon from Helen and wagged it at me. “Would you like some pudding, Alfie?”

“No, thank you.”

“Alfie’s dead, Mrs. Harrison,” Helen said.

“No, he isn’t,” she said. “He’s right here. What are you, blind?”

Helen knelt down between me and Mrs. Harrison. “What did Alfie look like?”

She seemed confused. Her eyes dimmed as she glanced between us. Adele couldn’t stand it. “Of course this is Alfie,” she exclaimed, putting her hands on my shoulders. “He came just to see you.”

Mrs. Harrison looked more foggy-eyed than ever, but she relaxed again. “That’s nice,” she said. She tucked her blanket around herself.

Helen stood up. She pulled Adele over by the arm. “What are you doing?”

Mrs. Harrison and I continued to smile dumbly at each other. “What harm does it do?” Adele asked. “It makes her happy.”

“It’s a lie.”

Mrs. Harrison patted the back of my hand. Adele said, “So? Why tell her if she’s just going to forget? Why make her relive Alfie’s death over and over again?”

“Because those are her real memories.” Helen wiped her hands on her uniform smock. “You disrespect her dead son by encouraging her to forget him. What he looked like. How he died.”

Adele continued to smile gently. “Why not just let her be happy?”

Mrs. Harrison picked the pudding container up off the table. She held it out to me. “You need to eat, Alfie,” she mimicked. “It’s important.” Mrs. Harrison and I both glanced sideways at Helen, and we laughed together.

Helen plucked the pudding out of her hand. To me and Adele, she said, “I think you should go now.”

Helen once told me that her favorite volunteer job had been picking up trash by the highway, because it gave her time to think. Even though she once had to scoop up human feces in between the discarded cans and waist-high dandelions. I asked her how she knew it wasn’t left by a dog, or a coyote, or a bear. “The size and the shape,” she said.

Our mother told the four of us to go see a movie, which meant she was sick of us. Helen mouthed SAT words as we walked: abasement, harangue, obdurate. We passed the laundromat, the forever-unsold lot. There were two theaters in town. We went to the one that was closing down, that showed only old movies. The Luther’s marquee announced that for its final week, it was showing Sabrina, from 1954. Neon light blazed in the middle of a sunny afternoon, red and blue flourishes down the Luther’s vertical sign.

Adele paid for our tickets. The man in the ticket booth looked at Adele with the eyes of a child who is hungry but no longer expects to be fed. As she took the tickets and change, she rested her fingers in his palm for a long moment. He shuddered from his sneakers to the tips of his long white hair.

I looked back at him as we passed under the red curtain. He was old, but he probably smelled like popcorn all the time, buttery and warm. “The ticket guy likes you,” I said. “Maybe you should stay and date him.”