For Today I Am a Boy (3 page)

Bonnie pounded on the door, angry at being excluded. The sound was distant and unimportant. Adele whispered close to my ear, “You can be pretty. You can be pretty.”

 

Roger wasn't at school on his birthday. He'd been talking for weeks about the party he was going to have. There'd be horses, he said, and arcade machines, and BB guns. He mimed popping off a shotgun on his shoulder, then watching an invisible bird tumbling from a tree.

As we left school that day, Roger was standing by the front door. Ollie and Lester walked together. I chased behind. They stopped abruptly and I crashed into their backs.

“Hi, losers,” Roger said. The scar on his nose was more noticeable than usual, throbbing over the spot where the bridge curved away from straight.

“Happy birthday,” Lester said. Ollie smiled without opening his mouth.

We waited for the front of the school to empty. Kids rushed past us. I saw Bonnie heading for the bus home. She looked just like me from behind: a helmet of black hair, a pair of Helen's old overalls. I watched a version of myself stay with the crowd, get on the bus, go home. Home to my sisters.

“Where were you today?” Ollie asked.

“Pa took me to a baseball game,” Roger said. He looked us up and down, searching for something.

“What baseball game?” Ollie challenged.

“Blue Jays. Out in Toronto.”

“Then how come you're back already?” Lester asked.

I'd believed in Roger's birthday party.

“Yeah,” Ollie said. “When did this game end, so you could be back by three o'clock?”

“Morning game,” Roger said, vaguely. “You losers bring me presents?”

I said, “I got you something. It's at home. I was going to bring it to your party.”

Roger sucked on his teeth, drawing his cheeks in. He addressed Lester and Ollie. “What about you two?”

Lester shrugged. Ollie brought something out of his bag: a gift wrapped in brown paper and kitchen string. Roger grabbed it out of his hands and tore a hole in the paper.

I saw the glint of metal. I couldn't read the expression on Roger's face as he stared at the half-opened present. “You're a dick,” he said.

“What?” Ollie said, the words coming out the side of his shut mouth.

Roger ripped the paper off entirely. “This is your old lunchbox. I
seen
it.”

Ollie's face twitched. Maybe a smile.

Roger kicked at the scraps of brown paper. They drifted up and down daintily, as though mocking him. “Fuck you guys.” He squinted, his cheeks squishing upward. Astonished, I wondered if he was going to cry. His eyes opened. His hands closed slowly around the collar of Ollie's shirt. As Ollie's breath caught, I could see him remembering how big Roger was.

Lester pushed them apart. “Cut it out. Someone's coming.”

A small figure skipped toward us. As she came closer, I recognized her—a girl from my class, Shauna. Her desk was in front of mine, and I found it soothing to look at her. Her blond hair was always parted neatly in the center, clipped in barrettes that stayed in place all day. The glassy blue eyes of a doll. She looked like the child of the Mommy I'd wanted to be, the one receiving the plate of pancakes, the one in white socks and patent-leather Mary Janes that never left muddy footprints behind.

She seemed oblivious to us as she tried to go past and into the building. She wore a yellow skirt that bounced as she walked, short over her shapeless legs. Roger let go of Ollie, who started to cough. He reached out and grabbed Shauna by the arm. “Where are you going?”

“I forgot my pencil case.” Roger's fingers sank into her chubby arm. “Let go. You're hurting me.” The last part came out as a whine.

“Roger,” Lester said. “Come on, man. Let's go to the corner store. We'll buy you a Coke or something.”

“Shut up,” Roger said, deadpan. He stayed focused on Shauna. “It's my birthday today. Did you know that?”

“What?” Shauna tried to struggle free. “Let me go!”

“Wish me a happy birthday first.”

“Fine. Happy birthday. Let go!”

The possibility of letting go, of ending it there, rose and died in Roger's eyes. “Come with us,” he said.

 

After I had calmed down enough to leave the closet, Helen reminded me that our father wanted to see me. I headed out of my sisters' bedroom and went down the short hallway like I was on a death march. My mother, who was nothing like the mommies in the magazines, was washing down the kitchen table. My mother, more like a wind than a person: visible only in her aftermath, the cleanliness and destruction she left behind, forgettable until a tornado blew off the roof. She motioned me silently toward their bedroom door.

I went into their room. My father stood by the window in the dark. The house was shaped so that the light from the kitchen window came through their bedroom window. My father's white shirt glowed, revealing the muscles of his back. For the first time, I thought about what his body might look like. Did he have square pectorals like Bruce Lee, divided abs, all those sharp, frightening angles?

“Come with me,” he said. He walked toward their connected bathroom, and I crept after him. My eyes were starting to adjust. He pushed a stool against the sink. I hopped on the stool without being told. We stood side by side in the dark, facing the mirror.

I heard the light switch snap. In the flood of light, my father's face was momentarily washed out, drained of its tawny color, his burnished tan. My own face was softened, blurred at the edges where I couldn't focus my eyes. In the mirror, a white man and a girl.

Then—pupils contracted—just us again.

“Today's special, for father and son. You learn to shave,” my father said. He winced at the sound of his own voice, mouthed the words a second time. Nobody heard his accent more acutely than he did. “I'm going to teach you how to shave.”

I ran my hand over my smooth chin, a wordless reminder that I was six years old. “Do what I do,” he said. He mixed the shaving cream in a cracked wooden bowl. I looked around their bathroom. There was a curious lack of feminine things, the oils and creams and powders of the bathroom I shared with my sisters. No evidence of my mother.

Father lathered up his face and neck and I did the same. He handed me a disposable plastic razor. It was easier to look at his reflection in the mirror than at him, like seeing the sun through a pinhole projector. I followed his example, clearing away the foam from my hairless face in strips. “Did your mother ever tell you your Chinese name?” he asked.

I didn't want to get my mother in trouble, but I was more afraid of lying. I nodded. I couldn't remember the actual syllables she had whispered. I remembered they rhymed. “Powerful king,” I said. We rinsed off our razors in a second bowl of water.

“Adele's Chinese name is her middle name. It will make her life hard when she's a doctor.” He paused. I didn't know Adele wanted to be a doctor. “Maybe she will change it.”

He ran the blade over his Adam's apple. “We waited a long time for you. In a family, the man is the king. Without you, I die—no king.”

I slid the razor over my flat throat. It caught on the skin. “
Hah.
” A line of blood appeared.

My father glanced over, unalarmed. He ripped off a piece of toilet paper. He held the back of my neck and pressed hard with his other hand to stop the bleeding; it felt like being strangled. “It's okay. Just part of being a man.” I stared up at his face, my head hanging back like a dancer's in a dip, this strange embrace. “Women bleed much more.”

 

The space under the Big Steps was closed off on one side. There was only one way in or out. Cracks of light came through the bleachers, throwing the shadows of a prison window.

Roger dragged Shauna there by the arm. Our feet crunched on the gravel. We herded her toward the back of the hollow, blocking the entrance with our bodies. The momentum felt unstoppable. Lester's elbow dug into my side as he tried to get closer, just as it had at Ollie and Roger's grass fight. His expression was the same: manic, nauseated.

Shauna had lost a barrette somewhere along the way. Her mother would ask about that, I thought. Her socks were stained by the pale dust under the gravel. She cried. Not like I cried, not the way I heaved and sobbed into Adele's chest in a closet. Soundless tears, as though crying were impolite.

“Lift up your skirt,” Roger said.

She blinked. I could smell Ollie's sour breath. It came out in short, excited bursts. She raised the hem of her skirt by the corners, not quickly, not slowly. With a knowing I hadn't expected. Like she'd done this before.

Roger's eyes fixed to the spot. “Peter, pull down her underwear.”

I looked into Shauna's eyes. My hands on her small hipbones. I tried to tell her that I was sorry. That we were both victims. I wanted her to see who I really was. The one who took a stone in the back. The one who combed his sisters' hair. In her eyes, I could see only the reflections of four attackers, four boys in that dead, marble blue, like you could see the sky right through her.

There. Shauna's ankles bound together. A bald, pink wound.

Shauna's legs trembled and then buckled. She hit the ground on her knees. Her skirt pooled protectively over her thighs. Better to be one of us, better to be standing on this side than kneeling and weeping in the gravel while they leer, that was all my father wanted from me, to be one of them, to be a king.

But I belonged in her place, holding something so stunning they'd steal for it, they'd stare into its hot center even as it blinded them.

 

We took a long time walking home, not talking. The streetlights were already on. We passed through the undeveloped area between the school and our houses. The corner store, a garage, a laundromat, a stretch of empty lots. We lingered for a while over a dead rat, steamrolled flat by tire treads. The tail was the most recognizable part.

We came to my house first. I stayed on our gravel driveway and watched them walk away. The road rose uphill and then went down, creating the illusion that the boys disappeared into the horizon faster than they should.

I pushed open the front door. My father was sitting at the kitchen table. Mother sat on the floor by our shoes. My sisters were nowhere to be seen. They knew. Shauna's parents must have called.

Mother picked me up by my armpits. She could barely lift me; my head hovered above hers, my feet dragged on the ground. She held me at arm's length like a bag of garbage. She carried me into their bedroom and dropped me hard into a chair.

Father came in behind us. He leaned on the wall by the door. Mother opened her mouth and a long stream of invective came out in a language I barely recognized, a language of hard, short sounds, a language of pain. My father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. She wasn't supposed to speak to us in Cantonese. Our English would come out wrong, he'd insisted. Like theirs.

Deprived of that weapon, she used the only other one she had: she slapped me in the face. For a moment, no one moved, as if the sound of her palm cracking against my cheek needed time to echo. Mother walked out. The door hung open.

I met my father's gaze. He stayed leaning on the wall across from me, his expression inscrutable. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened up. He was smiling. He didn't speak for a long time, just smiled. I felt his approval like a warm glow.

He said, “Bonnie is moving into Helen's room. You get your own room, son.”

My father loved me.

2

“I
LOVE AN EIGHTEEN NIGHT
,” Adele sang over Eddie Rabbitt's “I Love a Rainy Night,” dancing with her hands alternating over her head like pistons. For the summer after she turned eighteen, we replaced any two-syllable word in songs on the radio with
eighteen.
Bon Jovi was livin' on an eighteen. Janet Jackson told eighteen boys that they don't mean a thing. Adele skipped through the house singing,
“Bam-ba, eighteen! Bam-ba, eighteen!”

I was eight years old, the summer before Shauna and Roger and being marooned in my own bedroom. Adele would be leaving soon. Helen had been waiting seventeen years for her own room, and she would lose it within a few months. It wouldn't surprise her; nothing did.

Bonnie and I imitated Adele's steps in our white socks and plastic slippers. Adele drew circles in the air with her hips while Bonnie snapped just off the beat, marked by jolts of electric guitar. Adele and I leaned in toward each other, mouths moving in unison. “Yeah, I love an
eighteen
night.”

Helen sat at her desk, hunched so far over that her shoulders rose above her neck. She'd signed herself up for an SAT prep course that was run out of the high school, otherwise dormant for the summer. I danced over to her chair and asked if I could help her study. Rather than answer, she handed me one of her vocabulary lists. I couldn't pronounce the first word. “That's what I thought,” she said. She went back to her practice set of math problems. We sang straight into her addled brain: B can clean the house in half the time it takes A. If they cleaned it together in three hours, how many hours would it take for A to clean the house all by himself? Eighteen hours.

Bonnie slipped and fell onto the gray carpeting. Adele grabbed her chubby hands and pulled her upright. “Well, I love an
eighteen
night.” She spun Bonnie around. I took weaving jazz steps backward.

Helen leaned on her elbows, resting an index finger in each ear. In a class of seventy-two students, forty-one students are taking French, twenty-two are taking German, and nine are taking both French and German. How many students are not enrolled in either course? Eighteen students.

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.