For Today I Am a Boy (7 page)

“My bus was never late,” he said. “I was home every day at seven forty. On the dot.”

He told me that Mrs. Becker liked to eat sour candies crusted with sugar by pressing them to the top of her mouth. She didn't like pain in general, he said drunkenly, least of all in bed—just that, crystals cutting in and wearing away her soft palate, often doing it until she bled. He could taste it when he kissed her. “Like sucking on pennies,” he said.

 

Another Thursday. I walked home from school, anticipating an empty house. As I rounded the corner, I saw Mrs. Becker standing in her yard and watching the sprinkler spit its twitching lines like it needed supervision. Sprinklers were an odd sight in our neighborhood of scraggly trees and poisoned soil. She spotted me as I tried to run past. “Hello there!”

“Hi.”

She held out her hand. I shook it. Her white glove was dry and cool. “I'm Mrs. Becker. You live in the house at the end of the road, right?”

“Yes.” In full sunlight, she looked even paler. The light shone through her skin to the blue veins along her forehead.

“What's your name?”

“Peter.”

“It's nice to meet you, Peter. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“What does your mother like?” Mrs. Becker clasped her hands together in a position of prayer. “I feel terrible about the other day. I'd like to get her a gift.” I didn't understand what she felt terrible about; my mother was the one who'd been rude. “Flowers? Does she like flowers? Apricot cake? I make a great apricot cake.”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“I'll bring by an apricot cake.”

The sprinkler hit her feet and ankles each time it went around, wetting her shoes and the hem of her dress. She didn't seem to notice.

“Okay, sure. Thanks, Mrs. Becker.”

“Your mother seems like such a nice lady. I want us to be friends. Does she like to go to the movies? Play cards?” Her smile looked unstable. The structure of her face couldn't sustain the weight.

“She likes to play mahjong,” I said.

“I'm afraid I don't know that one.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Becker, but I have to go.”

“Oh! Sure. Is she waiting for you?” She looked in the direction of our house as if expecting to see my mother standing there.

“No, but . . .” I searched for something to say. “It's my turn to clean the house.”

“Do you need any help? I have an hour or two. I could come over and help you.”

I balked. “No, thank you.”

“I'm sorry. That was inappropriate of me. I'm so sorry.”

“I've gotta go,” I repeated. I ran down the street.

Inside our dim house, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust to the light. Standing in the kitchen, I took off my pants, underwear, and shirt and pulled my scrunched socks up to my knees. I took out the apron, put one loop around my head and another around my waist, the pinched sateen catching on my sparse body hair. It felt like a second skin—a better one.

I turned on the television, knowing there would be three episodes of Giovetta in a row. A jaunty trumpet played the theme song over close-ups of gourmet dishes, intercut with Giovetta dancing. She only swayed her hips and snapped her fingers, her huge body pushing the borders of our nine-inch TV. I imitated her movements, sliding on my socks. At the end, with the show title under her round face, she bit an empty fork while staring right into the camera. She was pleasure incarnate.

I continued to dance to her voice as though it were music, coming thick through the layers of fat over her throat. “Mmm,” she said. “If only you could smell this. Truly incredible.” I shimmied through the house, picking things up off the floor.

As I entered the living room, I caught a flash of white in my peripheral vision. I instinctively turned my bare back and buttocks away. Mrs. Becker was standing in our yard, staring through the window as frankly as a ghost.

I screeched and ran. I could hear her voice, muffled but penetrating the glass. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry!”

I hid in another room for almost two hours, stayed until I had to go back out to the kitchen to get my clothes before everyone else came home. It was dark by then. There was no sign of anyone outside.

 

Mrs. Becker followed Bonnie and a boy home from school. He was one of the boys she went to the bar with on Thursdays, gangly with a splatter pattern of acne across his chin, but—Bonnie explained—he had dark eyes and was good at pool. They went into the woods behind the supermarket. He sat down on a flat rock and she got down on her knees. The hard soil scraped her bare-skinned legs as she bobbed her head up and down.

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “But never with a guy my own age.”

The boy loved this answer, Bonnie told me. He idolized older boys, and putting his cock in Bonnie's mouth made him one of them. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone's watching us.”

Bonnie stood up. A flag of red hair disappeared along the path.

 

Bonnie decided that if Mrs. Becker was going to spy on us, we might as well spy on her too. We watched Mrs. Becker leave her house at four in the afternoon, get in the car, and drive away. Bonnie, who by then had all kinds of skills, jimmied open the Beckers' living-room window, which faced their backyard and away from the road.

The house was laid out the same way as ours—three bedrooms, one floor—which gave us the eerie feeling of being in a parallel universe. Our mother favored spareness and unpainted wood; the Beckers liked animal ornaments and cartoon vegetables on the curtains. Bonnie flipped through the mail on their kitchen counter, took a bar of chocolate from the cupboard, peeked in the fridge. I went straight for the bedrooms.

The first bedroom I went into had pastel-blue wallpaper bordered with ducklings and furniture under plastic sheeting. I lifted the plastic off a chair. When I dropped it again, the chair started to rock back and forth. The other furniture turned out to be a crib and a changing table.

I passed Bonnie in the bathroom, spraying perfume on her wrist and then smelling it. The bed in the master bedroom had a pink duvet and pink chiffon curtains between the posts. Except for its size, it looked like the bed of a very young girl, not a middle-aged couple.

I sat on the bed and sank in deeply, the mattress sloping sharply down toward me. I picked up the photo of them on the nightstand. It had to be fairly recent, as Mrs. Becker looked the same as she did now. She was looking at the photographer, smiling in her unsteady way. Her husband, older than her with tufts of white hair only by his temples, seemed to be tenderly admiring her ear.

Bonnie walked in. She went to the armoire and opened a few drawers before finding the one she wanted. She pulled out a pink nightgown and slipped it over her head, on top of her clothes. The neckline cut so deep, it sat lower than Bonnie's chest, and it had transparent sleeves cuffed in fur. Bonnie posed in the vanity mirror. “Yowza, Mrs. Becker.”

She pulled out something that looked like strips of elastic with clasps on the ends. Neither of us knew what it was, so she put it back. Then she rooted around in the nightstand drawer—Bonnie knew where to find the best stuff.

“Jackpot!” She waved around a leather-bound notebook. Seeing my face, she added, “When notebooks are kept in the bedroom, they're always good.” She took a sleeping mask off the nightstand and put it on, snapping the elastic under her hair, blinding herself. She flopped backward onto the bed, still wearing Mrs. Becker's perfume and lingerie, and threw me the notebook. “Read it to me, Peter.”

One page had the corner folded over, so I turned to that. I cleared my voice theatrically.

“‘September nineteenth. Dr. Shultz says that I was never pregnant. He says I made the whole thing up. He says the night I spent bleeding in the bathroom was just a nightmare.'” I stopped. I looked at Bonnie, who continued to lie stiffly under her mask.

“‘I remember holding the baby in my hand. A complete child. Eyelashes, toenails, knuckles. But the size of a pear. A perfect miniature child. Hard as plastic. It came out of me while I cupped my hand to catch it. A nightmare, he says. That's not what it would look like, he says.'” I skimmed the rest of the page in silence.

“Why did you stop? Keep going.” Bonnie didn't move.

“I don't think we should be reading this.”

“We already broke into her house, Peter. This is no time to develop a conscience.”

“‘I told him about the positive test. He said I should have come in to have it confirmed. He thinks I misread the test. He showed me a picture of my insides. He poked the picture with his finger and said there had never been anything there. He poked it and poked it. Each time, he got louder. I could feel him poking me on the inside.'” Bonnie looked like a different person on the bed, her eyes and their sockets hidden, her wrists poking out of pink fur.

“‘Darren has agreed to tell people I miscarried. He says we shouldn't have told so many people about the pregnancy in the first place.'” My voice got higher as I read, started to flutter like Mrs. Becker's. “‘But it doesn't matter whether it happened or not. I remember it. I am entitled to my memories. I had a baby and it died.'”

My eyes focused on the top edge of the page so that my legs and the floor were a blur. “I don't want to read any more,” I said.

The whole room smelled like Mrs. Becker's perfume, a generic berry scent. “Okay,” Bonnie replied. She took off the mask and the nightgown. “I think I'm going to try and catch my friends at the bar. Wanna come?”

Our eyes met: two animals waking up in a cage for the first time. I wanted to go home and bask in Giovetta's voice. With the blinds closed. “No, thanks.” We put everything back. Bonnie returned the chocolate. We left through the window. Back then, the afternoons were long and forgiving.

 

A week later, my mother gambled secretly in loud Cantonese. A mahjong Thursday. Bonnie let boys and men buy her drinks, elevating her plainness with jokes. When I got home, I unlocked the front door with one hand and unbuttoned my jeans with the other.

“Peter.”

My father sat on the living-room couch, his hands on his thighs. The television was off; the radio was off; no book, no magazine, no newspaper.

I stayed where I was. He walked past me and opened the cabinet above the stove. He took out the apron. It had none of its shine in his large hands. Instead, it looked like a skinned animal. I knew better than to speak.

“Follow me,” he said. We walked out onto our driveway. I still hadn't buttoned up my pants. The flaps folded open like a book.

He held the apron out at arm's length. With his free hand, he took a lighter out of his pocket. A high-pitched cry came from somewhere. My throat.

A flick of the flint and our pupils reflected orange. It burned as only acrylic does, pockets of petroleum and air self-starting, self-perpetuating, a noxious and invasive smell. He dropped it on the gravel and it curled in the flames, twisting inward as though alive.

We watched it burn out. I wondered if Mrs. Becker was watching, if she had caught the signal, the pyre light, from our yard. How else could my father have known everything, if not from Mrs. Becker? A neighbor, a woman who was merely convenient. Not Marilyn Monroe, not a fresh arrival, just a jittery nobody, the human equivalent of onionskin paper.

The ashes were hard and heavy, unmoved by the wind. My father picked a chip, about the size of a small pebble, out of the pile. He pressed it into my hands.

“Swallow it,” he said.

It was warm, like a dark rock in the sun.

Bonnie appeared at the end of the driveway. My eyes were wide with warning—a caught animal signaling to new prey. My father put his hand on my shoulder to stop me from moving. We waited through Bonnie's long, slow march.

She stopped and stood before him expectantly. He put his thumb and index finger on her chin, holding her face still, and leaned in. He inhaled so hard I could see his face flex with the effort. I wondered which smell was the strongest: sweet rum, the smoke of a bar, the sweat of other men on the girl he still owned?

 

It was decided that my mother would quit her job in order to properly control her children. We listened to my father's calm voice from the hallway. “And,” he said to her, “you haven't been depositing your entire paycheck. Where's the money?” My mother's response was too quiet to hear. We wanted her to call him out, but she didn't, and we were too afraid. My father stole all our secrets and kept his own.

As an adult, I learned that few people had affairs as I imagined them. Passing bodies sometimes collided, random and blameless as atoms, then returned to their original course. People developed second relationships as sexless and mundane as their first. Partners were willingly blind. None of the things I attached to the word
mistress
existed. But in those days, I hated them all: my father, my mother, Mrs. Becker, and even goofy, unknown Mr. Becker, the adoring fool in the photograph. Where was he? Where was Mr. Becker when my father clutched a fistful of red hair and she pretended it didn't hurt, pretended to like pain?

 

My mother found an apricot cake on our front steps that Saturday morning. She flipped it upside down over the trash and then handed me the pan. “Go return this,” she said flatly.

Mrs. Becker was on her lawn again. She wore khaki shorts and a big hat. “Hello, Peter!”

“Hi. Thanks for the cake.”

“You're welcome! Did you eat all of it already?”

“We put it on a plate.”

“Was it too dry? I was worried it was a little dry.” Even in the shadow of her hat, she had to squint at me; I was still standing at a distance and clutching the cake pan.