For Today I Am a Boy (19 page)

Helen and I took our time. I untied my boots. Helen unzipped hers. We kept our coats on. We came into the kitchen and stood together before the table of photographs—dozens of unsmiling faces; faint, implacable reflections of ourselves. Mother stepped back.

“Bow,” she said.

I lowered my head. I glanced sideways at Helen. Her back stayed straight.

“Bow to your ancestors,” Mother repeated.

Helen started pulling the flowers out of her hair. “This is ridiculous. Father wouldn't have wanted this.”

“Bow!”

“No.”

Mother grabbed the back of Helen's neck and yanked downward. Helen fell into a bow, catching herself just before she toppled forward. She snapped upright. She took a step backward and massaged her neck as if to make sure it was still there. They stared at each other.

I hadn't seen Helen in a long time. She looked the way my mother did in my memories, the image I held of her when I was away. My mother looked like a stranger, leathery and wasted, face tightened around her mouth.

“Death is special,” Mother said. “Your father understood that.”

Helen unpinned the ribbon and let it fall out of her hand. It fluttered softly to the ground. “We're supposed to be honoring
him,
” she said. “Not you.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Mother . . . ,” I began.

“Get out of my house. Both of you. I gave up everything for you. He made me give up everything
for you,
you ungrateful, useless children. You garbage. You faggots and whores.”

Helen walked out, picking up her boots as she went, stepping onto the frozen front steps in just her socks. I turned to Mother, pleading with my eyes. She went back to the bedroom. Helen left the front door open. Winter blew in. I followed her out.

 

Helen drove me in her rental car back to Toronto, where I could take a shorter bus trip to Montreal. “I'll change my flight once I get to the airport” was about the only thing she said.

As Toronto started to grow along the highway, the CN Tower like a hypodermic needle breaking the skin of the sky, I said, “Dad knew. About me.”

Helen looked over her shoulder as she went to change lanes. “Knew what?”

I stared at the back of my sister's head. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun with gray streaks.

“Nothing,” I said.

Helen went back to Los Angeles, and we went back to not speaking.

 

When I got home, I pulled down the curtain over my one window. I put on the television. I had rescued it from the curb at the beginning of winter. After about eight hours passed, I called in sick to the café. After another six hours, I called in sick to the Japanese restaurant. I dozed. I called in sick to the café again; that time I talked to Buddy, who insinuated between sniffling inhales that I would be easy to replace. I hung up on him.

I lay on my side and watched TV. Late at night, there was a string of old sitcom reruns. It was just what I wanted. I wanted to see those actors when they were young.

 

The morning of the second day, my buzzer rang. I answered it without thinking. “
Livraison,
” the voice said.

I let the mailman into the building and opened the door when he knocked. My breath and body stank; my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. I'd been staring so long at the TV that spots in the air clouded my vision. The mailman said, “
Bonjour.
” From my stony expression, he switched to English. “Uh, package for you.”

I took it and shut the door. The box was stamped all over, had been opened and then resealed with tape somewhere along the way. I cut it open on the kitchen counter. Inside, I found a tied plastic bag and a photograph.

The roll of film must have sat, shelved, for a long time before it was developed. The photo had yellow starbursts from light leaks in three of the corners. It was a picture of Adele, a glamorous, posed photo with her head tilted back. She looked about nineteen or twenty and wore a cheongsam patterned with red and orange flowers, like the ones in the picture of our grandmothers. Her hair was a single shape that cut in a straight line down to her waist, like black, lacquered wood.

I untied the plastic bag and lifted the wig out slowly. It was surprisingly heavy, not as long or as shiny as Adele's hair, but styled the same way, all one length. I went to the bathroom holding the wig at a distance with both hands.

It scratched as I slid it on. It felt like hay. I still looked like Peter—in the narrow strip between the wings of hair, I could see the spotty five-o'clock shadow on my jaw, the Adam's apple popping from my thin neck. Peter in a bad wig, a witch costume. I turned to the three-quarter profile pose Adele held in the photo. I tilted back my head like her, making the hair seem longer, making it fall away from my face. I tried to smile like her: mysterious, sexy, the arch of an eyebrow disappearing into a dark, flowing river of hair.

I used my hands to hold the hair up in a ponytail, then shook the ponytail so a few strands scattered loose around my face. I pouted. I let it down again, turned around, and glanced over my shoulder so I could see my reflection only in the periphery of my vision. The hair stretched down my narrow back. It was better than my hair had been at its longest, in a way I could not describe.
Earrings,
I thought. Earrings and plucked eyebrows and bold lipstick, done in sincerity, not Margie's caricature. That's all it would take.

I stared into my eyes, pleased that I had the same eyes as Adele: brown in the sunlight, black in the dying incandescent bulb of my bathroom. We all had the same eyes. Helen, Bonnie. My father.

Father. I wondered about his father, the mine explosion. I supposed his eyes were the same color. And his father's father's, these purebred men.

I felt my father staring through my eyes, the grotesque image in the mirror, the halfsie freak. The grandfather I hadn't known, the great-grandfather, all watching as my father strove not to shame them, every day until he died. All of them watching me now.

I remembered visiting Helen when she'd volunteered at the nursing home in high school. Helen had done all kinds of things she wasn't qualified for. She'd mopped up the liquids that seeped out of the dying. I'd watched her chase a man wandering the hallway in nothing but an open-back gown. His broad white behind had been as huge and disconcerting as an owl's eyes lit up by headlights.

I went back to the main room. I dumped the wig into the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. I crammed it down with one of my platform sandals, running the tap. The shoe exploded into chunks of cork as it hit the blades. Stringy wet hair poked up from the drain as if I had tried to dispose of a human head.

The sink made the agonized sound of metal lodging in rubber. It stopped dead. I flicked the switch on and off and it stayed stuck. Later, when the landlord used a crowbar to dig out the remains and tried to get the wheelhouse moving again, I stayed in the bathroom with the door closed. I wanted to die like my father. Wearing crisp, new pajamas and issuing orders. Honored more than loved. A man.

8

F
ATHER TOOK US
to church just once. In Fort Michel, the one Catholic church, the one Baptist church, and the one Unitarian church were lined up along one street. The street had a real name on its city sign, but everyone called it God's Highway. Behind the churches was a grassy rain ditch and a fence, and behind that, the real highway—the 400—went roaring by our town.

I was five years old. I remember being dragged out of bed in the dark without explanation. My mother buttoned my shirt and tied a tie around my neck without turning on the lights. The tie hung almost to my knees. I batted it back and forth between my legs in the car. I liked how the black fabric shimmered when we passed a streetlight. Adele sat in the front seat, and Bonnie was strapped into a booster seat beside me. Helen and Mother walked there, heels in hand, like girls creeping back from the bars at dawn.

Father chose First Baptist—not that there was a Second or Third Baptist—because he preferred its down-home wooden exterior to the faux medieval stone and stained glass of the Sacred Heart. The storefront Unitarian church of Fort Michel, which could easily have been a 7–Eleven from a distance, wasn't a contender. First Baptist had the peaked roof and squat shape of most of the older houses in town. The cross sat at the apex of the roof without a spire, unassuming as a weathervane. It was the very picture of normality.

I don't remember much of the actual service. Hard pews, strangers in dour clothing, singing and standing and clapping. The pulpit was dead center with what I thought was a small, octagonal swimming pool off to the side. After a time, the preacher started pointing into the congregation. I hadn't been listening and I jumped in my seat.
You,
he said.
And you. And you!
Mother dutifully filled out one of the cards for new parishioners that were with the Bibles in the back of the pew in front of us and left the card in the collection plate as it came around.

A woman called the house the next morning and spoke to my mother. What good timing, she said. The church picnic is this Saturday! Surely you'll come?

A teenage girl called that evening and asked for Adele. You and your sister should come to youth group on Friday!

A man called the day after and asked for Father. Adult Bible study is a great way to network.

We went to the church picnic. Mother brought some horrific combination of marshmallows, potatoes, and mayonnaise in a casserole dish. It turned out not to be a matter of good timing at all—there was a picnic every three weeks. Some kids whom Bonnie knew from preschool seized on her. Adele vanished toward the rain ditch with the teenagers, one of whom had a guitar. The same woman who'd called my mother ambushed her to ask what was in her
delightful
potato salad. Father went to chat with the pastor. Helen and I sat on the grass in a corner. I ripped out blades of grass and tied the ends together.

The next morning, we got up early; Mother tied on my tie, Adele buckled Bonnie's dress shoes, everything the same as the week before. We stood in a line in the hallway, alert as soldiers, waiting for my father to be ready. He came out in his pajamas. “Go back to sleep,” he said.

Just as he didn't discuss why we'd gone, he didn't discuss why we didn't go back. It seemed like the kind of ritual he'd enjoy: getting dressed up, shaking hands with less attractive versions of June and Ward Cleaver, drinking sour coffee and eating stale muffins. Was there anything more white-bread? Bonnie made a wry guess when I asked her about it many years later: “He didn't want there to be a higher authority than himself.”

But I remembered watching my father and the pastor at the picnic. The pastor put his hand on my father's back. He pointed vigorously at the sky. I saw his lips form the word
heaven.
Or maybe, I thought later,
heathen.
Father looked up. Maybe Mother was right—death was special. And my father, the vainglorious, covetous adulterer, would be with his father, and his father's father. No one would tell him otherwise.

 

In 1881, Mark Twain gave a speech at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. He commented that you couldn't throw a brick without hitting a church window in this city. I heard this story from the Japanese-speaking sushi chef, who directed it at his crew of Arabic-speaking underlings. He used English only to quote people and he attributed just about everything to Mark Twain, so I had no reason to believe Twain had really spoken these words. “It's like what Mark Twain said: ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.'”

But no matter its source, it was true. On rue Prince-Arthur, near where I lived, a large church had been converted into loft apartments. Laundry was slung over once-sacred wrought iron. I passed several churches on my way to the grocery store: Notre-Dame de la Salette, St. John's Lutheran, Pathway to Glory, and the Chinese Baptist. I'd stopped to read the sign for services in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. I sometimes saw the youth-fellowship group leaving, kids in their early teens getting picked up by their parents or walking to the Métro together. Their hair fell along a range of bleached colors. From watching Bonnie's hair under a transparent shower cap, I knew exactly how it worked. Black hair turns brown, then red, then brass, then a canary yellow that could only charitably be called blond.

God had never had a role in my life. If I thought about Him at all, I imagined Him as a small figure, something that could fit in your pocket or perch on your shoulder. A cheerleader for good, a kindly kindergarten teacher. The Chinese Baptist church called to me. I imagined its congregants could replace my father. I imagined they'd understand why I was ashamed. They'd understand guilt and silence. They'd use the same careful, euphemistic language that Father had—I was a man with
weaknesses
—and they'd guide me in the right direction without making me confess aloud. I assumed all kinds of things just because the people going in and out were Chinese. Because they looked like me.

And maybe that is what would've happened if I'd gone. Instead, one morning, I saw a poster taped to the side of a bus shelter.

 

Are you seeking a better life?

Are you troubled by your own thoughts and desires?

Has modern decadence left you feeling empty and guilty?

You can change. We can help.

 

PATHWAY TO GLORY

 

I'd seen the Pathway to Glory sign pointing down the external stairway of a brick building on rue Jeanne-Mance. I stood staring at this poster, reading the words over and over again. The cold morning bit through my spring jacket.