For Today I Am a Boy (15 page)

I found Bonnie right away. She wore a black lace full-length bodysuit that went from ankle to wrist to a turtleneck collar, the lace only slightly thicker over her breasts and crotch. She hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. “Peter! I'm so glad you're here. Isn't this a great space?”

In addition to the one brick wall, there were ceilings that were cavernously high and floors made of scratched, stained hardwood. The living room was huge, crammed with people of a wide range of ages. A toddler sat on her father's shoulders, higher than the crowd, staring with naked curiosity.

“It is.” I meant it. “I brought beer.”

“Great! Put it in the kitchen!” She returned to the conversation she'd been having and then, noticing that I hadn't moved, added, “It's over there.”

The kitchen was relatively empty, only one woman inside, her back to the archway that I walked through. The noise seemed to fall away into a flat hum. Her hands were busy; I assumed she was making a drink. In the narrow passageway, I couldn't get past her to the fridge. “Pardon me. Can I just—get in here . . .”

She didn't move.

I flattened myself against the cabinets and slid by. The acidic smell of rotten garlic—in my line of work, I could identify the scents of specific foods rotting—emerged as I opened the fridge door and put the beer inside. I glanced over. The woman was peeling apples. “Oh,” I said, with relief, “you're cooking.”

“Yes.”

“Can I help?” I didn't know what to do at a party. I knew how to peel apples.

She took so long to reply that I searched her face. She was older than I had thought from her high-pitched voice, her singsong
yes
that had seemed teenage in its disdain. Deep lines followed the shape of her mouth down to the loose skin of her neck. Her hair was bleached white and cut short, flat to her head, her bangs slicing a severe diagonal across her face.

“Absolutely,” she said finally. “Take an apple.”

I went through all the drawers until I found another usable peeler in the mishmash of tools and rust. I kept coming across utensils mangled beyond recognition. The kitchen had a hanging, charred smell—burned popcorn, dirty stove elements, the ruined bottoms of pots and pans.

We stood peeling in silence. Press of the peeler on my thumb, smooth run of green skin. “I'm Peter,” I said, feeling like I had to say something.

She put down her half-naked apple and faced me, slamming her hand on the cabinet behind my head, all in one swift motion. I realized she was taller than me. The details of her face flooded my field of vision. Her eyebrows were plucked into straight lines that slanted down toward her nose with no arch, and she had light crow's-feet, like dough imprinted by a fork. Flecked granite eyes. I could feel her breath as her nostrils flared.

“God, you're pretty,” she said.

I jolted. The thing twitched. I felt like she had said a word that only I knew, that I had made up. Her eyes flicked down, staring at my mouth. I looked at hers. Thin lips coated in a dark plum. Pretty!

Someone entered the kitchen, singing to himself. It was the man who had greeted me at the door, his tie now undone and hanging over his neck, one end in each hand. He walked to the syncopated rhythm of his song, his left and right steps distinct from each other. “Hey, Margie! Hey, Bonnie's brother. How goes the salad?” He didn't seem to find anything unusual about the position we were in.

Margie relaxed, picked up her apple and peeler again. “Hi, Dave. Still working on the dressing.”

I went back to my apple as well. I pressed down hard to stop the shaking.

The door greeter patted his naked belly in an exaggerated way. “Well, hurry up. Lots of hungry people out there!” He lumbered back into the living room.

We finished our apples. She handed hers to me and told me to mince them both, then started pouring juice and oil into a blender.

“What are we making?” I asked, rooting through the cupboards for a cutting board.

She started the blender and talked loudly over the noise. “Salad. Nuts and dried berries and spinach. That's all Dave eats.”

“Do you live here?”

“No. Dave does.” She stuck her hands in an open bag of pistachios on the counter. “He's my son.”

“Oh.” She glanced sideways at me. I hadn't meant to sound so surprised. “Why does he call you Margie, then?”

She shrugged. One of the pistachios opened with a gunshot crack. “What do you call your mother?”

“Mother.”

“Why? Why not Mom?”

“I don't know. It sounds wrong.”

“Well, the only thing that sounds right to Dave is Margie.” Another crack. I was looking at her hands while I chopped, watching her thumbs ripping open the shells, breaking their backs. I felt a sting and dropped the knife on the cutting board.

“Oh shit,” I said. I had glanced my knuckles with the knife, shearing off a thin layer of skin. My eyes welled up.

Margie grabbed a paper towel and wrapped it around my hand. It was hardly bleeding, but it stung. “Are you crying? Oh Lord. You pathetic little girl.” She pulled me violently into her arms. I clutched my cut hand with my good hand behind her back. She pushed the back of my head to mash my face into the crook of her neck. “There, there, pretty darling,” she said.

I wanted overwhelmingly for her to kiss me. I had been looking for Chef everywhere. His gruff masculinity and crude hands. How had I found him in a woman in her fifties, wearing silk trousers and dark lipstick, whose neck smelled like the spray of fake roses?

 

Bonnie told me later, when it was too late, to stay away from Margie. That she was insane, cruel, bigoted, twisted. “And
old,
” Bonnie added at the end, as though that were the worst part, the part that she found the most bewildering.

 

Margie had brought most of the alcohol at the party, perhaps two dozen bottles, and everyone toasted her with glasses filled with her wine. The salad was unpopular. I took a big bowl when it became clear no one else was interested and sat munching on it slowly in a corner. I sat on the floor. Many people did.

Margie came and sat beside me, folding her legs carefully. She held a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses, crossed at the stems, in the other. “I notice you're not drinking,” she said, pouring.

“Not much of a drinker,” I said.

“That's rather rude,” she said, “considering my generosity.”

“It must have been very expensive,” I agreed.

“Money doesn't mean much to me,” she said. She handed me the glass. “Are you looking at my bracelet?”

I hadn't been. It was a diamond tennis bracelet, whiter than white. “Very nice,” I said.

“Try it on,” she said. She unsnapped the clasp and then yanked my arm straight. She slid on the bracelet. It was cold. Her skin hadn't warmed it.

We both admired how it looked on my thin wrist. The bold piece of jewelry went well with the arm I had waxed clean with a drugstore kit. Margie stared me up and down, her top teeth exposed in a sneer. Blunted, penetrating. Women did not look at men this way. Grown men looked at young girls this way, sometimes, men who could take and possess from a distance.

I went to unclasp the bracelet and Margie reached to stop me. “Keep it,” she said. I smiled unsteadily at her, feigning protest. But I wanted the bracelet.

“I've always wanted a little China boy,” she said. “I've never had one before.”

I opened my mouth, trying to find a sentence, something I had been taught to say. The stranger offers you candy and you say no. The anthem begins and you rise from your seat. The fire alarm rings and you file quietly with the others outside. Someone calls you little China boy and you rage, you lecture, you gook, you chink, you traitor. I wanted the way she looked at me, into me, pushed inside of me. I wanted the bracelet. I said nothing. I drank.

 

Bonnie said she'd looked for me when the party was thinning, and Dave told her I had left with Margie. I remembered getting into the cab and out of it, not the ride in between. I remembered sitting at the foot of Margie's bed, swaying, my spine softened to a reed by alcohol. I watched her take off all her clothes. I had lived my life in children's beds. Her sturdy, king-size bed felt palatial.

Still completely dressed, I rested my head against her belly as she stood in front of me. I kissed her navel—a round, surprised mouth—with a joking smack, the way you'd kiss a baby's stomach. My navel was an indented line, as though I had been stabbed in the stomach with a boning knife.
Bonnie has an outie,
I thought,
the tied end of a balloon.
Even my thoughts slurred, sloshing left and right through my mind.

The idea that I was supposed to pleasure Margie hadn't really taken root. I squeezed one of her breasts experimentally. It didn't feel the way I had expected it to—I was surprised that the skin gave so much, that it changed shape in my hand. I thought breasts would be harder and more resilient, with just the suggestion of softness underneath, like a tomato. I pushed one to the side and watched it spring back.

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.