For Today I Am a Boy (21 page)

Mother and I packed up all of my sisters' and my belongings; our father's things were already gone, down to the last sock. She threw open the windows, letting out the stirred dust and the smell of molding clothes.

Mother was like a different person. Silent except in rage all our lives, she'd blossomed at the mouth. She couldn't stop talking. Anecdotes about our childhoods burst out of her, grown strange or impossible from too much time in the dark of her closed throat: Adele taught herself to read. I brought a family of rats home in my backpack. Helen bit a wasp right out of the air and chewed it before it could sting.

“When we brought Helen home from the hospital,” she said as we dragged garbage bags full of clothes and toys and books to the door, “she slept through the first night without crying. And the next, and the next, and almost every one after that.
Geng sei-a,
I kept checking to make sure she hadn't stopped breathing.

“At her vaccinations, she didn't cry when we handed her to the doctor. She watched the needle going into her fat little arm, then she turned to the wall. No tears. We thought maybe she was . . . what's the word? Broken-headed. Broken in the head.”

I opened up the chest of drawers in the room that had belonged to Adele and Helen, then Helen and Bonnie, then just Bonnie. No one had touched it since Bonnie had moved out. “This too?”

“Everything,” Mother said. She continued her story. “And Helen didn't talk. She didn't talk until she was three years old, when she said a complete sentence. ‘Can I have a cookie?' Can you believe that, Peter? ‘Can I have a cookie.' No jibber-jabber, no
mama, dada,
like the rest of you. I guess she just didn't feel like talking. Ha!”

I had to stop and stare. The
Ha!
threw me so completely, my mother laughing at her own joke. My mother laughing.

There were pictures of people I didn't know all over the house. Most of the photos were old—black-and-white, or the red sun and washed-out grays of the '60s and '70s—but one stood out as recent. My mother, as she looked now, stood with a young woman at a crowded picnic in the park. I picked it up as a way of changing the subject. “Who is this?”

“Oh, I met her at the Chinese Association.” Mother's gaze held steady. “She's like the daughter I never had.”

I put down the picture, turning my back. Mother's hair was thinning in a way that left visible strips of scalp, and her nails and skin were becoming that same fragile, rosy ivory.

 

Mother wrote down the address of the Salvation Army store in Barrie, Ontario. They were expecting me. I loaded all the bags and boxes into the van.

While I didn't believe in the devil literally, as Claire did, I did feel as though this temptation was somehow the result of a greater force. That the universe had conspired to send me down the bumpy local roads with a van full of women's clothes, shoes, and accessories. The teenage wardrobes of the women I had most idolized.

This was my chance, I thought, to prove my strength. I pictured each step in turn: Giving a firm handshake to the volunteers at the Barrie Salvation Army, helping them unload. One of the bags rips and a particularly coveted item peeks through the corner. Adele's prom dress, say, with its short flare and underlayers of tulle. And I just ignore it. I pictured the drive back to Montreal. The empty van like an empty mind, a clear and guiltless heart. I couldn't wait to tell Claire that I'd fought the devil and won. I could see her excited face. I could see us taking our clothes off and going to bed together.

I only realized where I was when I was already on the 401, halfway to Montreal.

 

The dress, with its tiny waist and stiff, sweetheart neckline—creating cleavage where there was none—zipped smoothly up my back. The silver high heels fit; the clasp on the silver pendant still worked.

Among the toys, I found a baby doll that I'd forgotten about. The body was filled with absorbent polymer beads. When you poured warm water into the hole in her back, she felt soft and responsive.

I propped her up in my lap and read to her from our old books. Another doll leaned against my side. I squeezed her hand, and a recording in her chest said, “Mom-my.” The Zen static was completely gone; everything came crawling from the shadows, rejoicing in the light.

 

Claire might have forgiven me. I was sure Pathway had a ritual for it—I saw us sitting in Claire's kitchen and shredding the clothes with fabric shears, purposely nicking the skin between my fingers, dark drops of blood ruining the white collar on one of Helen's blouses. The dolls pulled apart, their dismembered bodies in sealed bags. She would have prayed for me, both of us down on our knees and our hands thrown up in the air: forgive us, Lord, our weakness.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't let her take it away.

 

One morning, Claire visited the café wearing a long, shapeless dress that appeared to be made out of burlap and that had sweat stains under the arms. It was an odd look, even for her. Marisa brought Claire her latte and chocolate croissant; she wore a black acrylic halter top and denim cutoffs at seven in the morning. Claire cracked her jaw to stuff the croissant inside.

I took a break and sat down with her. Her eyes were bloodshot and she slumped forward against the table as she ate. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, I just need my coffee.” An avalanche of sugar. She peered at me over the rim of her cup. “I've decided to give up pants.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Modesty,” Claire said. Marisa was taking up her usual pose, bent over the counter, making her ragged shorts ride up her thighs. Sin on legs. She caught Claire's gaze and nodded at her, flashing a quick grin. In all my years at the café, I'd never seen Marisa smile. She sighed and rolled her eyes at every customer, like the requests were endlessly taxing.

“Why now?” I asked. Claire wasn't smiling back at Marisa. I couldn't imagine two people less alike than Marisa and Claire.

“Penance,” she said distractedly.

These single-word answers made me nervous. “For what?”

“Everything.” She looked at me like she'd just realized I was there. She reached out and touched my cheek. “You're so handsome, Peter.”

I had a strange thought. “Do you know Marisa?”

Claire pulled back her hand. “Who?”

“The waitress.”

Claire looked to the side, smiling with just her mouth, like she couldn't believe I would ask such an absurd question. “I do know her, yes.”

“From where?”

She rubbed her chin, still looking sideways. “Some den of perversion.”

Pathway talk. “A nightclub? A bar?” I asked. Almost unconsciously, Claire bit the knuckle of her index finger. I said, “A lesbian bar.” I could see the skin caught between her top and bottom front teeth. “Have you slept with her?”

Claire's hand dropped from her mouth and smacked the table. “It's not sex. Women can't have sex with each other. But it is . . . unclean.” She finally looked straight at me. “It was a long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

“Since Marisa? Years and years. Years and years ago.”

Claire looked exhausted that morning. Claire worked for Pathway. “How long since you've—how long since any woman?” She shook her head. I asked again. “Claire, how long?”

“Yesterday,” she said.

I stared at her. Claire looked a little embarrassed, a little agitated, but at the same time, I saw that this was how it had always been and how it would always be, and that she was just upset at getting caught. I thought of us proselytizing in the village. Had she come back that night as her other self? Her selves farther and farther apart, one in a sack dress eating cookies with me on the couch, converting sinners on the street, testifying at Pathway, and the other—what was she like? “I don't believe this,” I said.

Claire took my hand. She spoke quickly. “I want us to go to the camp together. Pathway to Love. I wanted to ask you to do this for a long time, but I was afraid. We'll go together and make our vows to each other and it will be the end of all our wretchedness.” She squeezed my fingers. “They can help us.”

She waited for my confession. What was I doing yesterday? Wearing Adele's bikini, lounging beneath the heat of an imagined sun and the gaze of an imagined crowd, as I had seen her do in reality so many times. I would not give Claire that. “You cheated on me,” I said.

Claire looked surprised. “I know,” she said cautiously. Then something clicked, and she plunged into it. “I know! I'm weak. I'm disgusting. Disgusting!” She beat her hand on the table again, this time with a rhythm, lining up with her chant: “Disgusting! Disgusting! Disgusting!”

I became aware of the people at nearby tables. Claire was putting on a show. She collapsed forward with her head on her arms. After a moment of stunned silence all around us, she lifted her head slightly, one eye open, like a child peeking to see if she's been caught. Her one eye stared straight at me, as if to say,
And you?

I wanted to dive in and denounce myself. I saw the cycle ahead of us, of Pathway meetings and alter egos, of sins and forgiveness, false promises. Sucking other people in. Telling them they could change. Angry tears started to well in my eyes. I heard Father, I heard Claire: You can change!

I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. “You are disgusting,” I said.

Claire clutched my arm as I passed. I jerked free and left her alone at her table.

 

Months later, walking home in the pit of another winter, I passed the basement steps leading down to Pathway. Singing came from below. One woman's voice rose high and clear above the others, tremulous, on the verge of tears. The conviction of someone who has heard the voice of God.

In my memory, I tried to change the look on Claire's face as I pulled away from her in the café, tried to make it calculating and cold. Tried to make her into someone who lied to me and the world for the sake of the church that paid her, who said,
See, I did it. You can too!
Who understood that we were both frauds, who was even happy to be free of me. I needed it to be that way, so I could forget her, so I could go on thinking of myself as a victim of the world.

I stopped and listened to her sing—Claire, or someone like her. I remembered the tightness of her grip on my arm, and in the well of her wide, pleading eyes, I saw the girl who had gone to Pathway the first time, who feared a hell of fire more than a hell of ice, who meant it every time she prayed for forgiveness. Maybe she saw me as I had seen her. Maybe she believed that she was weak and I had overcome.

9

H
ELEN MOVED ABRUPTLY
from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, to teach law at George Washington University. A few days later, she called my mother at four in the morning. Helen, who had built an impressive career from being articulate as a poet and immovable as stone, slurred into the mouthpiece, “I done bad,
Ma-ma.
I done bad.”

Mother waited until Helen had cried herself out. “I'm coming to visit you,” she said.

Helen sobered immediately. “No. No need to do that. I'm fine.”

“Ha! Fine! You book the ticket. I'm doing nothing out here. So good to be old! I can come visit you whenever.”

Helen, sitting on the floor between unpacked boxes in her new apartment, crossed her splayed legs. She dignified her posture as though being watched. I could imagine all of this, even the monstrous shadows of unarranged furniture, a pile of lamps on a couch like severed heads. Her voice became measured, business as usual. “I'm just having a bad day,” she said. “Sorry to alarm you. A visit would be nice, but I'm very busy getting set up here.” She had expected a silent, furious auditor, an abstract
ma-ma
—the way our mother used to be. She would've been as surprised as I was by the
Ha!

“Busy? How much stuff could you have, what do you have to do? Just a young single girl.”

Helen, forty years old, didn't comment on that.

“You wake me up crying and expect me not to visit? My favorite child? Ha!”

Helen resisted the urge to say
That's news to me.
Her instinct to bargain kicked in. “I'll buy you a bus ticket,” she said, thinking she could wear my mother down.

“Great!” Mother said. “I want to go next week.”

Who is this woman,
Helen thought.

 

The bus pulled up to the border crossing just north of Buffalo, New York, shortly after midnight. It had weaved all afternoon through Ontario, and as the lights went on, a babel of tired voices tittered in German, French, Italian, Farsi, and Mandarin. The mix of languages reminded Mother of an orchestra tuning up. They passed from the overwarm bus to the overwarm Customs building with only a brief reprieve of cool night in between.

My mother wore sneakers and black dress pants that she had hemmed too short. Hers was the only bus being processed, and there were nearly as many agents as passengers. A middle-aged couple stood in line in front of my mother. They were huddled and stooped as though they were much older. The woman spoke frantically in Italian to her husband, gripping her headscarf, and the man shushed her with a backward motion of his hand.

My mother was called up. The agent at the counter was a young man with a military haircut and muscular shoulders, though his gut pushed his belt down to his hips. His last name was sewn into his vest: Sosa. Like the baseball player, Mother thought. He swung his chair sideways, away from her, as he squinted at her passport photo. “So where you going?”

“Washington, DC.”

“Uh-huh. And what's there?”

“My daughter.”

He glanced at my mother then. An image flashed through Mother's mind, an image from when she was in primary school. The students had to stand at attention whenever they were asked a question. She remembered how, after you'd given the answer but before the teacher began her ritual of humiliation, before the ruler came down on your knuckles, you just knew, from the quality of the silence, what was coming.