For Today I Am a Boy (22 page)

“I see. And what's her visa status there? Does she have a green card?”

“Yes. I think so. Yes.” The poster on the wall behind the border agent had three smiling young white people with their arms crossed, standing in front of an American flag. We are the face of the United States of America, it said. We welcome you to our country.

“You coming from China, ma'am?”

Mother glanced at her Canadian passport. The agent flipped it absent-mindedly between his middle and index fingers. “No. I'm Canadian. I've lived there for more than forty years.”

The agent started typing something swiftly into his terminal. The old keyboard clacked as it sprang back against his fingers. “Forty years is a long time to keep that accent. May I see your return ticket to Canada,
ma'am?
”

“I don't have one.” He stopped typing. “My daughter is going to buy me a plane ticket home.”

“How long are you staying?”

“Until she feels better.”

“Is she sick?”

“She's . . .” My mother strained after the word. Her accent had gotten worse since he had mentioned it. “She's . . . sad.”

“Uh-huh.” His victorious, almost private smile seemed familiar to Mother. “I'm going to have to deny you entry, ma'am.”

“Why?”

A few windows over, an agent screamed, “I don't speak any fucking Italian!”

Sosa's eyes flitted left and then returned to Mother, unaffected. “Because you don't have a return ticket or an expected date of return. That counts as trying to immigrate without a visa.” The agent spoke in a calm voice, one you could use to hypnotize an animal. Mother couldn't account for the rage that was building up inside of her.

“Isn't anyone going to do anything about that?” she said.

“About what?”

She gestured toward the agent who had screamed. “What she just said to those poor people.”

He continued typing. “Would you like to file a complaint?”

“Yes!”

“You'll have to go to the Canadian consulate and provide an incident report. About something someone said to someone else.” He stood up. “Now, I'm going to tell your bus driver that we're detaining you. Do you have a cell phone?”

The voice, the smile. It was my father. Mother saw him standing there now, in this agent's uniform, one hand on his pistol, running her life with a light touch, being so goddamned
reasonable,
never raising his voice or his hand. She wouldn't let another one tell her what to do. Another one of these men who make all the decisions, strip you of autonomy and disguise it as kindness.

“I don't want to live in your stupid country,” she said, her accent worse than ever. “I have a house in Canada. I have children there. But one of my stupid children chose to move down there and she needs me!”

Still smiling. This, too, was familiar: hearing herself scream at a brick wall. “Are you yelling at me, ma'am?” he asked. As though it were a legitimate question and not a trick you use to patronize children.

“No.”

“Put your bag up here, please.”

He unzipped her small suitcase slowly, as you might undo a lover's coat. The way Father drew out a punishment. He picked through her underwear piece by piece, with the long line of her fellow passengers behind her. He went through her pockets. He held the clouded sandwich bag with her toothbrush inside up to the light. Everyone was watching them now. She heard someone ask, “What's happening?”

“May I see your arms?” he asked loudly.

Uncomprehending, she held out her arms.

“Roll up your sleeves past the elbow.”

“Why?”

“Please do as I asked, ma'am.”

Mother started to tremble. She had loved my father once. Loved his quiet authority, his impeccably shined shoes, the way he would order for her at restaurants and guide her by the small of her back. She had pitied other women her own age, with their husbands who drank, who were needy as babies and violent as teenage boys. She'd married a leader, a king. When he died, she'd felt abandoned, overwhelmed by the smallest choices.

One morning, she found herself staring at the carpet in the living room. How she hated it. The white that had turned to sooty gray almost immediately, stained by four drooling children and four careless teenagers, how much of her life had been spent vacuuming and scrubbing this ugly, impractical thing. She saw it gone. She touched her hair, still kept girlishly long, as Father had liked it, even though it was too thin and brittle to wind into a bun anymore. She saw it gone. An exposed neck, exposed floors, everything lean and light. She could eat whatever she wanted, go wherever she wanted, call old friends. She didn't need to ask permission and try to work out his web of leading, trapping questions.

She kept her eyes lowered as she rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. The agent examined the crooks of her elbows. She wanted to grab his pistol. No more. No more.

When he was done, Sosa leaned back in his chair and yawned, cracking his knuckles over his head. “Okay. Follow me. We'll get you printed and photographed, and we'll run you through the FBI database. Should only take a few hours. Thank you for being so cooperative.”

Eventually two agents, one of them Sosa, accompanied Mother back to the Canadian side, where she could wait for the first morning bus. It was dark and moonless, any starlight drowned out by the overhead lights of the wide asphalt road. The two guards walked a few meters behind her and Sosa shouted directions. “Turn left here. Keep going straight.”

She wondered why they didn't walk ahead and lead, or walk at her sides, and then remembered Sosa's hand on his gun. They were behind her in case she ran. They were behind her so they could shoot. The older you get, the more every trauma is the same trauma.

 

Helen said, “Go to the consulate. I'm a lawyer. I'll talk to someone who knows about this kind of stuff.” Helen said, “I bought you a plane ticket, round-trip this time. They're nicer at the airport.”

Mother said, “‘Fucking Italian.'”

I used the plane ticket.

 

I arrived in DC on a Saturday in August. I was acting as my mother's spy, as the last child to whom she had access, so I could find out why the only good one, the only one of us with money and success, was so sad. “It was a boyfriend,” Mother theorized. “I bet he promised to marry her and she waited and waited. Forty years old and still single, tsk-tsk.”

Helen picked me up at the airport in a violet-gray Audi that looked brand-new. Rather than come to the gate, she waited leaning on her car in the passenger-loading area, daring someone to tell her she couldn't park there.

As soon as I stepped out of the air-conditioned airport, my shirt wilted and stuck to my chest. Mosquitoes swarmed my legs. Washington felt like the drained, paved swampland it was.

“Beautiful car,” I remarked.

“It was a gift from my firm in LA,” she said. She was wearing a wool pencil skirt and a long-sleeved shirt and hadn't broken a sweat. She was even thinner than I remembered. Her ropy calves looked squeezed dry, like she had no water left to give.

“They must have really liked you,” I said. She skimmed through her cell phone as I put my suitcase in the back unassisted.

We settled into the immaculate leather interior of the car. The air conditioning came on so strong it knocked me back in my seat. “Can I turn it down?”

“Knock yourself out,” she said. I reached across. The knob was right beside the steering wheel. I noticed how pale my skin looked next to hers, with its mottled California brown.

I watched the highway and then the city streets. Memorials and government buildings seemed at war with the sky. Police cars were everywhere, sometimes four on one corner. Helen didn't seem to want to talk, so I didn't bother her.

We pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. The car had turned rapidly into a freezer, and I welcomed the soupy heat outside. Helen didn't seem bothered by either. I trailed behind her as she bought a gigantic bottle of bourbon in the liquor store. The bourbon jug was made of cheap plastic and was the size of a large gas canister, with the same kind of built-in handle. Helen carried it to the register, holding it loosely by the handle with her bony fingers, as though it were weightless. As we waited in line, she idly plucked a can of insect repellent from between the chips and condoms in the impulse-purchase display.

The silence started to make me uncomfortable as we took off again in Helen's car. “Where are we going?”

“My townhouse. Then lunch. Then I'll show you around the capital.” Helen made the whole thing sound nonnegotiable, more like a prison orientation than a vacation. I decided our mother must have exaggerated when she told me about the late-night phone call. I couldn't imagine Helen's brusque voice breaking, wailing, the
Ma-ma,
any of it. I planned to tell Mother that Helen was fine. She was the same as ever.

The front door of Helen's townhouse locked from the inside and the outside with a key. She locked us in. I put my bag down by the door because that seemed as good a place as any. Her unpacked boxes blocked the windows. A mattress leaned against an empty bookshelf. I wondered where she'd been sleeping.

“Where's the bathroom?”

Helen pointed as she disappeared down a hallway. I went in and threw cold water on my face and the insides of my arms. Her house was cool and dark, with stone tiles for flooring in every room. I opened the cabinet over the sink. Two neat rows of prescription pill bottles were inside. They varied in size and color, a rainbow of translucent plastic. The overall effect was cheery and efficient, like a well-run dispensary.

When I came out, Helen was drinking bourbon on ice in the kitchen. I asked, “Is it safe to drink that with your medication?”

She scowled. It was the expression I remembered best and, oddly, made her look young. “Snooping for Mother already, are we?” She took out a second glass and pressed a button on the fridge for ice. “I'm not on medication anymore, if you must know. Do you want one?” she asked, although she was already pouring the bourbon.

“Sure, I guess.”

She handed me the glass. “We used to drink bourbon every afternoon at my firm.”

“When you were on medication.”

“Yes. If you must know.” Helen didn't seem to be drinking quickly, but her glass was already empty. She poured herself another, knocking the cap to the floor in the process. It rolled under the fridge and she made no move to retrieve it.

The bourbon tasted as you'd expect bulk bourbon to taste—cloying and medicinal as cough syrup. “What were you taking?”

She looked me up and down, sizing me up. “Antidepressants and antianxiety meds,” she said finally. “I couldn't find any that didn't interfere with work.”

“But you brought them all to Washington with you.”

“Teaching doesn't require the same mental acuity,” she said crisply. “I'm going to try them all again.” With her free hand, she pressed her fingernail into a mosquito bite on the arm that held her glass.

“Do you have a doctor?”

“Not here, no. I don't need one.” She lifted her nail without looking at it, freeing a small bubble of blood in the center of a pressed line.

“Is that why you left? The job was too stressful?”

Helen slammed down her glass, suddenly out of patience. “I left because LA is a hellhole. People wash up on the beach like garbage.” She started pouring a third bourbon, and the motion of her arm caused the blood to streak. The ice in her glass hadn't melted. “Are we done with the interrogation? You want lunch?”

 

We sat on the patio of an Italian restaurant on the same block as her townhouse. It was part of a chain, decorated in an American's idea of Italy, with mass-produced paintings of vines and olive trees lining the walls. Helen looked out of place in her leaden work clothes; all the other women were wearing halter minidresses, hot pants, sarongs. My shorts and polo were soaked through with sweat. Imagine, I thought, wearing just breezy hollows and bare skin like the women were, all those smooth round stretches glowing in the sun.

Helen had three gin and tonics with her spaghetti, which she'd sent back the first time for being overcooked. Helen had held up one noodle on her fork and waved it in front of the waitress, making it sway soddenly as she explained the term
al dente.
“‘To the tooth,'” she'd translated. “As in, gives some resistance to the tooth.”

The woman behind Helen had three children. The oldest played on a handheld game with the volume turned up high. The younger two, a boy and a girl, ran around the table in circles, giggling and poking each other. They bumped against Helen's chair and used it to swing around their own table faster, their small hands brushing against her legs.

Helen turned. “Excuse me. Can you control your children? I'm trying to eat.”

The mother stood. She was enormously pregnant and red-faced from the sun. She had to steady herself on the chair. “Don't tell me how to raise my kids.”

I sank back into my seat. I expected Helen to escalate the hostilities, but instead she looked stung. “Sorry,” she said. She fumbled for her drink.

The woman sat down again, one hand on her belly. She seemed dissatisfied, like she'd wanted a fight. She ended up doing what Helen had asked. “You two!” she barked. “Sit the fuck down and eat!”

The kids stopped. Like their mother, they had red, sun-cooked faces. I leaned in close to Helen and murmured, “God. They're so burned.”

Helen shrugged.

The kids pulled themselves into their chairs. The girl, maybe four, held her fork in her fist and stabbed it downward at her food. The boy stuck his hand experimentally into his macaroni. I felt the same way as their mother: sunstroked, ready for a fight. The height of the inland summer in Ontario, while just as hot, was very different. It made you apathetic and slothful, overwhelmed by the flat, endless sky. You wanted to lie down in a dark room. This Southern heat roiled the blood. Distorted by the light, everyone looked like an enemy. I could see why the crime rate went up with the temperature.