Blue Boy (6 page)

There must be at least twenty issues in the stack, and the two of us devour their contents the way the greedy twits devour candy in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. This action is a mélange of shiny paper and glistening body parts. It is, literally, a dazzling experience. The tits abound like fruits on a tree, connected by a series of sleek, branch-like appendages, the sap-like stretch of a chiseled belly. Cody and I sit on opposite ends of the bed, parallel to the headboard. He lies across the pillows from left to right, while I lie across the foot of the bed from right to left. We are not all that aware of each other; our minds are no longer in Cody’s bedroom but, rather, in the flesh before us. The intrigue of a tit is like a miniature fog, a sensual mist, and when there is an innumerable quantity of tit before you, you are lost in the murkiness.

Most of the time, we see only the naked bodies on the page, forgetting all else. But then, as if our bodies have conditioned themselves to have the same sexual rhythm, we rock ourselves back and forth, pushing the weight onto our chests as we make room for our boners.

I have to say this: at this point, I don’t really know how sex works. I know that it’s the joining of the penis and the vagina (to speak scientifically, which, it seems, is the way to express one’s sexual thoughts with the least amount of censure). But I’m not really sure how sex
works
. Sex, for me, is looking at tits and the finely pruned hedges below them. Looking at these magazines, in fact, is as aesthetic a process as anything else in my life. But, all too unfortunately, it is only visual. These women are not in front of me, caressing me or letting me smell their perfume. They are contained to the page, as static as a comic strip. And what is worse: they afford me a look at their bodies but do not engage in action.

I blame this on
Playboy
. If only it gave me some sort of sex visual. It doesn’t show people Doing It. This rankles me, and I tell Cody this, snapping him out of his carnal reverie.

“Well, duh.
Playboy
doesn’t show people doing it.
Penthouse
does that.”

“Why don’t you buy
Penthouse
, then?”

“Because my dad doesn’t have a subscription to
Penthouse
. Only to
Playboy
. My mom likes the articles in
Playboy
, so she lets him buy it. They’ve got hund’erds of ’em.”

I pick myself up from the bed, disgusted both by my lack of coital knowledge and by the mental picture of Mr. and Mrs. Ulrich “reading”
Playboy
together. Taking into account Mrs. Ulrich’s sagging chest, perhaps I should revise my thoughts about tits. Not
all
of them are inviting.

Krishna is the god of love. He must know all the ins and outs of lovemaking. Of girlfriends. Of
sex
.

To that end, I have decided to buy a copy of
Penthouse
.

I need to know how people Do It, but I can’t ask Cody. The last thing I want to do is give him another opportunity to show me how much I don’t know.

I know that I should be working on my act for the talent show, but the tits have grabbed hold of me. I plumb my brain to figure out where I have seen copies of
Penthouse
. I can think of two places—mall bookstores and Dairy Market, the local chain of convenience stores. Dairy Market is out of the question; anytime I’m in there, my parents are with me, my dad buying gas or my mother picking up milk so that she can make homemade yogurt. I decide, then, to start with the mall bookstores, considering that my mother spends at least three nights a week “getting some exercise” at the mall, and I’ll be able to move freely while she does so. I have used this method before when buying dolls, which I have purchased in the past by emptying out the contents of my piggy bank. I wanted to ask my mother for the money to buy them, but I knew that even she would not allow me to buy such girly toys. I have been able to hide my purchases from her by making sure she focuses on
her
shopping,
her
shopping bags, and when I get home, I hide my dolls in a toy suitcase beneath my bed. Now, with the magazine, it is time for me to up the ante. And I have my opportunity soon enough.

On Wednesday night, while my father is hard at work in his office, my mom grabs the keys and her purse and takes me to the mall in the minivan.

“
Beta
, vhat has been bothering you?” she asks. I am still healing from the Sarah and Melissa incident—literally—but I don’t want to tell my mother what has happened. More embarrassing than making a fool out of yourself in front of your schoolmates is making a fool out of yourself in front of your parents.

“What do you mean?” I say. “Everything’s fine.”

“
Beta
, I know you better than anyvone. I know something is vrong.”

As we drive the rest of the way to the mall, I think about my mother’s comment.
I know you better than anyone
. It’s probably true; she is my mother, after all. And yet I don’t feel that this should be the case. There are so many people my age at school, and I spend so much of my time there, and yet I have not found anyone who truly knows me. And, really, my mother doesn’t know me, either. She certainly has no clue that the reason why I hop out of the car with a bouncy step is because I am looking for a more edifying level of smut.

When we get to the mall, I spend a few weary minutes in my mother’s company, sighing my boredom as loudly as possible while she sifts through piles of pastel-colored blouses and skirts that are pleated like lampshades. She moves to one of those circular steel clothes racks, the kind with a hollowed-out center that I sometimes like to hide in while my mother shops. My frame is so tiny that I can pretend they are miniature houses, a rainbow of fabric forming their walls.

My mother picks clothes depending on what they cost, not necessarily on what they look like. It’s a trick in her mind. She tells herself that if something is on sale, she is saving money—even if she ends up buying ten of the same thing. Like many women, shoes are her favorite purchase, and she will come into the house after a day of shopping with literally ten pairs contained in two white plastic bags, the corners of the shoeboxes pressing against the sides like chicks trying to burst out of their eggs. Today, she has decided she needs a new blouse—or four—to go with the pink pumps she bought last week. As she swishes through the blouses, I envision an entire stack of them on her bed, my mother having snipped off all of their tags and folded them into neat squares that she can put in her closet.

Her arms now full, she looks up, contemplating where a dressing room might be. This is my opportunity to desert her.

“
Beta
, I am going to go try these—”

“Can I go to the bookstore?”

“Of course,
beta
.” My mother never objects to my frequent book buying; she figures that I am educating myself and that I could always be wasting my money on rubbish like candy and Hot Wheels toy cars. “Vhat book are you buying?”

“Um, a magazine. A poetry magazine…”

“Poetry! My little Zafir,” she says, referring to an Urdu poet whom she quotes when sewing extra fabric onto her sari petticoats to accommodate her older, plumper flesh. “Here’s ten dollars,” she says, handing me a bill. “Just don’t go to the Gap.”

My mom has always had a crude vengeance against the Gap—mainly because she loves shopping there and sees it as her greatest weakness. Every time we pass the store in the mall, she gets a glassy look in her eyes. She practically presses her nose to the store’s window and breathes a snowflake of condensation onto the glass, like she’s a bicultural Little Match Girl. Usually she’ll slip me a ten-dollar bill and tell me to go buy something, and by the time she finds me dawdling dangerously near a stack of hot pink Mattel boxes in a toy store, her purse is noticeably larger, a new scarf or mitten set or even a sweater stuffed into it in hasty concealment. Even though she starts wearing the said accoutrements—little threads hanging from where she’s ripped off the Gap labels—she continues to use the Gap as her proverbial scapegoat: “Every night, the Doyles’ daughter—
vroom
on her car, like she owns the neighborhood, vearing her Gap nonsense.”

Tonight in the mall, her fear about the Gap seems like the only worry on her mind. She’s totally in the dark as to why I’m leaving her. “Okay, I’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes,” I say, turning on my right heel and dashing out of the store, an ineffectual admonition of “Don’t run!” coming out of my mom’s mouth as I round the curve.

The mall is always full of people: the skater posse that hangs out in the food court and drinks Coke after Coke and sometimes pours in a capful of their careless parents’ Captain Morgan to spice it up; the myriad cliques of Rave-hairsprayed rich chicks giggling over boys who may or may not be at the mall; single mothers carrying their babies along with their canvas tote bags; janitors mopping a patch of floor where a milkshake or an enormous Cinnabon splattered against the checkered marble floor; thirtysomething schoolteachers who turn their gazes to the floor in the hopes of avoiding eye contact with their students. Although there are all these social groups, and as much as they might have in common with each other, as much as they talk about each other and watch each other, they do not coexist boisterously on weeknights. No, on weeknights, the mall is like one big therapist’s couch, and the people who frequent it during these evenings are searching for a form of comfort they lack at home. Like tits, for example.

I espy the bookstore across a panorama of gurgling fountains, kiosks selling fanny packs, earrings, and poorly made watches, and a gaggle of black girls playing Skip-It, a game in which they scuttle a plastic ball attached to a plastic string around one foot like a pedestrian form of hula hoop. I walk through this bazaar and am just about to enter the bookstore when I realize something. The store has structured itself so as to deter any smut searchers. The magazines are all at its entrance, arranged like an arsenal on one wall-hugging rack. (No pun intended.) The grandiose presentation, and the proximity to the mall thoroughfare, transform the entrance of this meager chain bookstore into a proscenium and me into the spotlit star of a peep show.

I lean against a pillar, pretending that I’m waiting for someone. Every now and then, I sneak a glance at the rack, trying to locate the
Penthouse
stash. And then I spot it—in the farthest corner, level with the head of the cashier, who stands on a pedestal. One reach of my tiny hand to savor the delectable treats above, and I can see his hand grabbing mine and chopping it off. Or worse, he would tell my mother. He would drag me to the mall security office and tell the police I’m a pervert (or, as I once heard my father calls a sex offender he saw on the news, “a prevert”), then send an intercom announcement all over the mall, the calumny echoing off the marble floors and into every crevice of every dressing room, where my mother, blouse tangled up like a turban around her torso, hears the words, “PAGING MISSUS SHAW…SHAW-WHAT?…SHAW. WE HAVE YER PERVERT SON…WHASSYER NAME AGAIN, SON? KEE-WHAT? KEITH. KEITH SHAW.”

Were Krishna’s amorous pursuits so depraved? How can I expect to be a paragon of godly behavior when I’m curving around a pillar in the mall to find a bounty of bosoms? Part of me wants to run away from this mall and all the way to our temple, where I can kneel on the floor and curl myself back into a ball, begging God’s forgiveness. But another part of me wants to live bravely and learn as much as I can about the body and its pleasures. What to do? I can either slither in there and risk total derision and desolation but have an idea of what happens in flagrante delicto, or I can wait out here, lead a perfectly happy existence and be a kid, putting off sexual complications until later.

I think the choice is clear: Tits tits tits.

I wait until the cashier has left his post and then make my way through mallgoers and a few potted plants to enter the store again. From what I can see, there are only a few people in the store. As I pick up a copy of
Disney Adventures
magazine and pretend to scan its cartoon contents, I realize that the people in here—the guy in the gray blazer reading Robert Fulghum at the front table display, the curly-haired woman cracking the spine of an unbought Danielle Steel paperback, the high schooler flipping through a Superman comic in his puffy Starter jacket—have an air of secrecy, privacy, stealth. Reading, it would seem, is a forbidden act in this town.

I sneak a glance back at the cashier’s post and see it is still vacant. I put the
Disney Adventures
down and slide over to the cozy corner of the rack, where the pouting lips, blond hair, and barely clad bust of a minx ooze under the
Penthouse
title. I am just about to reach up and snatch one of the copies away when I hear two deep voices approaching. I turn away and grab up the
Disney Adventures
again.